Even when he has a strong case, Mark Steyn can’t resist lying to make it look better. His piece in today’s Oz is a rehash of earlier criticism (his own and others) of those who are trying to blame the Bali bombings on some ‘root cause’ such as the Israel-Palestine dispute or support for war in Iraq. This is a pretty easy case to make – it’s done nicely by Alexander Downer in response to Archbishop Carnley (thanks to Ken Parish for this quote)
“If we don’t know who did it, then it’s pretty hard to know what their motives were and obviously if Archbishop Carnley’s Diocese has some information that can assist with the investigation then we would obviously appreciate that information.”
Of course, Steyn pushes the argument much further than it can run. It’s silly to present bin Laden as some sort of crusader (I use the term advisedly) for Palestine, but it’s equally silly to suggest, as Steyn does, that the support bin Laden has received is entirely the product of irrational hatred.
More importantly, Steyn throws in this aside: ‘But, if even this most elastic of root causes can be stretched halfway around the globe to a place conspicuously lacking Jews or Americans, then clearly it can apply to anyone or anything: my advice to Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness is to put down the Omagh bombing as an understandable reaction to decades of frustration at Washington’s indulgence of the Zionist oppression of the Palestinian people. ”
I assume Steyn is aware that the Omagh bombing was carried out by a group calling itself the Real IRA (its jailed members just confessed the crime and announced the dissolution of the group) seeking to derail the peace process in which Adams and McGuinness were taking part. However, given Steyn’s ignorance of basic historical facts, this may be an unsafe assumption. The same point could have been made without lying if Steyn had named the Real IRA instead of Adams and McGuinness, or if he had referred to a crime in which Adams and McGuinness were actually complicit, like the bombing of the Conservative Party conference in Brighton . But Steyn can’t resist a lie if he thinks he can get away with it.
This is as good a time as any to announce the results of my Steyn competition, in which I asked readers to nominate a Steyn column that didn’t contain either a gross error or an unattributed and/or distorted quotation. Of course, there were no entries, but Tim Dunlop wins an award for coining the term “Steynwalling” (Definition: A failure to respond to repeated demonstrations of error, especially by right-wing bloggers).
Just to finish with Steyn I decided to go back to the eponymous ‘Fisking’ that made Steyn’s name in blogging circles, in which he recounted the famous incident where Fisk was set upon by a mob of Afghan refugees. It was a pretty lame piece of abuse in general, but there was one memorable line I wanted to check on:

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter.

This seemed well above Steyn’s usual standard and, sure enough, it was. Oscar Wilde, referrring to Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop said “you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh” at the death of Little Nell. This quote is widely cited on the web (with attribution), but not, I think, so well known that Steyn could claim he didn’t need to acknowledge it.
Steyn’s plagiarism of Wilde gave rise to one final thought. If Oscar were going through his legal troubles today, who do you think would be at the head of the pack baying for his blood?
Update: Be sure to check the comments thread, especially Tim’s “acceptance speech”.

The Parish Pump has moved to this new site, abandoning Blogspot. In addition, Ken has abandoned Blogger for a manually coded weblog. I’ll watch this brave experiment with interest.

In a recent post, I mentioned Paul Krugman’s demolition of what I referred to as the “Instapundit factoid” that Sweden is poorer than Mississippi. Don Arthur gives some useful background to the dispute, but questions whether Krugman’s critique constitutes a demolition.
There are a couple of ways we might interpret the claim. The first is that there are relatively more poor people, relative to some objective poverty line, in Sweden than in Mississippi. This not true. In fact, as Krugman shows, it’s not even true when you compare the US as a whole with Sweden. There are a higher proportion of (absolutely and relatively) poor people in the US than in Sweden or other West European economies. This is not offset by ‘dynamism’ or ‘social mobility’. Poor people in the US are more likely to stay poor than poor people in European countries – this is why the notion of an ‘underclass’ originated in the US.

The second interpretation is that the ‘average’ Swede is poorer (or less rich) than the ‘average’ Mississippian or American. This raises two more definitional questions. What is ‘average’ and what does ‘poorer’ mean.

On the first point, virtually everyone who has studied the subject seriously agrees that the most useful notion of ‘average’ is the median, that is, the midpoint of the income distribution. Krugman uses this definition when he says ‘Sweden may have lower average income than the United States, that’s mainly because our rich are so much richer. The median Swedish family has a standard of living roughly comparable with that of the median U.S. family’ By contrast, Reynolds wrongly relies (implicitly rather than explicitly) on the assumption that the correct measure is the arithmetic mean.
To see the difference, suppose that Kerry Packer makes $1 billion (To simplify things suppose he makes the profit on overseas transactions and keeps the money there so no other Australians are affected). There are two possible ways you can look at this
(a) The average Australian is $50 better off
(b) This makes no difference to the average Australian
If you believe (b) you should go with Krugman and the median. If you believe (a) you should go with Reynolds and the mean. You might also start wondering why you are not producing a ton of wheat a year like the ‘average’ Australian household.

The other point raised by Krugman and others, but ignored as far as I can see by Reynolds, is that, on average, Americans work longer hours than Swedes (or anyone except people in quite poor countries). In economic terms, leisure is a good and there is no reason to ignore it in comparisons of wealth and poverty (I’ve published journal articles making just such comparisons between Australia and Japan).
The correct economic interpretation of the claim “the average Swede is poorer than the average Mississippian” is “The median person in Mississippi could work the same hours as the median person in Sweden and afford a higher standard of living” In fact, the reverse is true. As Krugman says, the average American is about as well off as the average Swede (the same goes for other West Europeans). Rich Americans are a lot richer than rich Europeans and poor Americans are a lot poorer.
Of course, in terms of the arithmetic mean, very rich people pull the average up a lot more than very poor people pull it down. But that just reinforces the point that the mean is not a useful measure of average wealth.
Update Rob Corr has a bit more on this

Tim Dunlop had already blogged this, but I just got the following email

“The Vice-Chancellor has asked for the following message to be drawn to the attention of all staff:

You may already have heard on the radio news of a fatal shooting incident at Monash University.

Two people have been shot dead and eight others injured in a shooting incident on the sixth floor of the Robert Menzies Building at Monash University earlier this morning. Two of the injured have been taken to the Alfred Hospital’s trauma unit.

A man has been arrested following the incident and the Homicide Squad is investigating.”

This kind of thing (not as bad as this) has happened at other universities. I don’t have anything much to say about it, but I feel that I should record it.

Update: This won’t be news for Australian readers, but I felt I should record it anyway. The gunman was stopped by the heroic action of an econometrics lecturer, Lee Gordon-Brown, who tackled him, with the assistance of three students, and was shot in the process. He’s currently in hospital. University lecturing is not normally a job that calls for heroism and I doubt that any of us could say for sure how we would react in such a situation, but Gordon-Brown is an inspiration to us all. There’s a full story here.

I was thinking about doing an economic analysis of reductions in oil consumption today and happened to receive the latest issue of Resources, a magazine put out by the US-based Resources For the Future institute, probably the leading advocate of market-based solutions to environmental problems. It included an article on the topic, Is Gasoline Undertaxed in the United States (Note: PDF file). The conclusion, not surprisingly is “Yes”, basically because of congestion, pollution and accident “externalities”. The author, Ian Parry, suggests an optimal tax of $1/gallon compared to the current tax of about 40 cents/gallon.
Assuming current demand is based on a ‘normal’ price of around $1.20/gallon, the implied price increase is 50 per cent. With a long-run elasticity of demand of 0.7, this implies that the long-run reduction in demand would be 35 per cent. The implication of Parry’s analysis is that the US, acting in its own self-interest, and regardless of foreign policy concerns, would be better off reducing gasoline consumption by 35 per cent. Broadly similar arguments apply to other transportation uses. Since transport accounts for about 60 per cent of total petroleum consumption, this implies a reduction in total oil consumption of 20 per cent, and a reduction in net imports of around 40 per cent or about 4 million barrels per day. This is more than the likely amount of additional production that would arise from overthrowing Saddam, even assuming an American occupation or an Iraqi puppet government acting in the interests of the US, as is explicit in the arguments of Steven den Beste and implicit in any oil-based scenario.
Rationing would achieve the same reduction in demand more rapidly, although less efficiently in an economic sense. If reducing reliance on Saudi oil is a strategic objective of the US of sufficient importance to justify war, then the US government is morally obliged to take whatever peaceful and unilateral action it can towards this goal before resorting to military means.

In the comments thread, Steven den Beste asserts that “Your entire idea is based on the fallacious assumption that the refining process can be adjusted to produce all outputs in whatever proportions are desired. That isn’t how it works. ”

Actually, the refining process can be adjusted, though not without limit, and, more importantly, there is trade in petroleum products as well as crude. The US uses more gasoline relative to other products than the fractionation process produces, and therefore trades other refined products for gasoline as well as importing crude. As this graph shows, transportation (mainly gasoline) is indeed the dominant use of petroleum in the US. In any case, I picked gasoline precisely because this is the petroleum product for which attempts to reduce consumption would be most politically unthinkable. If the US government could grasp this nettle, it would have no trouble in cutting back on other uses for oil.

The idea of a war based even partly on promoting a flow of Iraqi oil doesn’t stand up either economically or morally. A war with Iraq may be justified for a number of reasons, but oil isn’t one of them.

This NYT report is the clearest statement yet that the US has dropped its demand for regime change in Iraq
“All we are interested in is getting rid of those weapons of mass destruction,” Powell said. “We think the Iraqi people would be better off with a different leader, a different regime, but the principal offense here is the weapons of mass destruction, and that is what this resolution is working on.”
Obviously, the war faction is assuming and hoping that Saddam is going to obstruct the inspectors. One argument, put to me by Steven den Beste in email is that he has no choice, given that he actually has WMD programs going on. This, like much of the discussion about inspections, is refuted by the history of the first series of inspections following the Gulf War which found and destroyed Saddam’s nuclear weapons program, using calutrons to enrich the uranium. It’s clear that Saddam has the option either to destroy the weapons himself or to ‘fess up and let the UN destroy them, and unless he’s crazy, that’s what he will do. On the other hand, as another NYT report pointed out, Saddam’s fear of assassination means that he’s thoroughly isolated from the outside world, so he may well think he can get away with obstructing the inspections.

Bloggers as diverse as Ken Parish and Steven den Beste have argued that the real case for an invasion of Iraq is ‘about oil’ in the sense that it will provide a way of breaking the OPEC stranglehold on oil, and therefore allowing the US to deal with the real source of Islamist terrorism: Saudi Arabia. For those who support such a rationale, and regard the threat posed by Islamists as calling for American sacrifices comparable to those made in World War II (not to mention the thousands of Iraqi civilians and unwilling conscripts whose lives will be sacrificed as ‘collateral damage’) I have a proposal that is simple, cost-effective,unilateral, foolproof and unthinkable.

The proposal is petrol (gasoline) rationing. If the US reduced its consumption of oil (used primarily for gasoline) by half, it would reduce its import dependency to zero and Americans would still be able consume more, per person, than the rest of the OECD. OPEC would be out of business. The proposal is:

Simple:

Nothing could be simpler than this

Cost-effective:

In financial terms, the US would reduce its trade deficit. In economic terms, there would be a loss of consumer welfare, but it would be well under the 3 per cent of GDP that has been estimated as the cost of a serious war effort

Unilateral:

An invasion of Iraq requires the co-operation of at least some middle Eastern oil states and preferably Saudi Arabia itself. In addition, it requires at least passive consent from the Russians, who have apparently already secured guarantees that their oil interests won’t be affected. Rationing can be implemented without going near the UN or any foreign government.

Foolproof:

Unlike war, which is always chancy, rationing is something at which governments have always excelled. And if black marketeers managed to slip around the edges of the policy, even a 25 per cent reduction in US demand would push the Saudis into bankruptcy

Unthinkable:

Just think about it

Paul Krugman documents and analyzes the growth in inequality in the US, attributing it, rightly in my view, to changes in social attitudes and the distribution of political power rather than to underlying forces. In passing, he notes that median incomes in the US have risen by only 10 per cent in the past 20 years, and demolishes the Instapundit factoid claim that people are better off in Mississippi than in Sweden.
For those who prefer striking examples to statistics, check out the latest from Arianna Huffington

No more posting from me until Monday. I’ll be observing our national day of mourning of which the wattle above is the symbol.

In commenting on the Bali bombings, I’ve avoided linking to the writings of others, either bloggers or other commentators (with the exception of a brief response to one US-based critic of my comments). I didn’t want to have the difficult task of clarifying my own thoughts and emotions made more difficult by arguments with others.
But now that the immediate aftermath is behind us, I thought I’d record my views on the way in which bloggers and other dealt with these awful events. On the whole, I thought Australians responded pretty well – showing sympathy those injured and bereaved, grief for those lost, and anger at those who would do such a thing, but not giving way either to panic or to calls for indiscriminate revenge on Muslims or Indonesians in general.
Thus far, at least, our political leaders have responded both decently and sensibly. I was disappointed by reports that Bob Brown had said that the bombing was a result of our possible involvement in an attack on Iraq (and I said so in a comments thread somewhere) but as Don Arthur notes, these reports turned out to be false. And while I don’t suppose they are blind to the possibilities, neither Howard nor Crean has gone after political advantage as yet.
Nevertheless, some people, including deplorably, Archbishop Carnley, have tried to use the bombing to make a political point about Iraq. It will be a long time, if ever, before we know if the Australian position on Iraq played a role in the decisions of the terrorists about who should be targeted (I doubt it, but I have no more evidence than anyone else). But regardless of what we might or might not find out some time in the future, the important fact was that many Australians and others were murdered by evil criminals. Any attempt to exploit that for political purposes, especially in a way that might be seen to mitigate the guilt of the killers, is wrong and offensive.
Coming to the blogosphere, I’ll begin by agreeing with just about everybody else that Gareth Parker‘s contribution has been superb. Gareth’s conveyed all the emotions Australians have felt about this atrocity, while remaining reasonable and balanced in his determination that we should bring those responsible to justice.
The negatives are much harder to find. Fortunately, as far as I know, no Australian blogger has taken the line that ‘we are to blame for all this’. The main blogging fault has been on the other side, with people so eager to sniff out heresy that they were happy to make it up if they couldn’t find it. An example was James Morrow’s beat-up about the way the SMH rewrote the Reuters feed they got.
Tim Blair gave us a mixed bag – some great, impassioned and obviously sincere writing on the victims of the bombing mixed with a lot of petty point-scoring and heresy-hunting. His American audience loved it, but most of the Australian commentary I saw was more ambivalent and rightly so.
Between the extremes, the majority of bloggers struggled to come to terms with the bombing but managed to make valuable contributions in the end. I’d particularly mention Don Arthur, Bargarz, Tim Dunlop, Ken Parish and Scott Wickstein. I won’t say anything about my own contributions, but the comments thread on this blog has plenty of interesting ideas from among others, Jason Soon and Jack Strocchi. And there are lots of others I haven’t listed – readres could start by checking the links on the left .