I’ve been a bit slack about open threads lately, but I’ll start again with weekend reflections, which makes space for longer than usual comments on any topic. Side discussions to sandpits, please.
Dunning-Kruger goes Catallactic
I’ve long had the suspicion that the Catallaxy blog is an experimental test of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The clearest examples have been Sinclair Davidson’s posts on the question of “no significant warming since 199x”, where it seems as if he is angling to get the most super-confident commentator to reveal the fact that they have no clue what statistical significance means, while being sure that they can do climate science better than those who have spent decades studying the subject.
Now, with this post by well known hip-hop artist Samuel J, the hypothesis is beyond doubt. The post itself is about as extreme an example of Dunning-Kruger as could be imagined, but clearly Sam is just daring the commentary team to outdo him. With the exception of a handful of killjoys who take the post seriously and point out how silly it is, they deliver.
Hat Tip: Harry Clarke, who scratches his head in amazement, here.
Ten years after
Ten years ago, plus or minus a few days[1], I wrote my first ever blog post. There weren’t many blogs around then, and very few of those that were around have lasted long enough to celebrate a tenth birthday. In fact, I’m not sure if anyone on my original blogroll is still around (feel free to write and tell me that you’ve been blogging since 1992, and I’ve overlooked you).
Here’s my early reaction:
My blog is just about a week old, and I haven’t found the Internet this exciting since I discovered Usenet in the early 90s. Even setting up my website five years ago was not as good. Despite wildly varying ideological views, I’ve had a friendly welcome from bloggers across the board, and I’m already getting links and referrals (My return links will be up soon, I promise). It really seems as if blogs might deliver on the original promise of the Web – certainly the technology seems ideally suited for individuals and small groups, with no obvious way of scaling it up to corporate level. No doubt I’ll get jaded and disillusioned one day, but I hope it will be a long way in the future.
Camaraderie across ideological boundaries didn’t survive long. It was killed off mainly by the debate over the Iraq war. And, eventually, the corporates found a way to get in on the act, through Facebook, Twitter and media websites. although the content is still overwhelmingly supplied by individual users, rather than paid professionals. I’ve adapted to the new reality by putting posts on high-traffic media sites, but crossposting here.
Inevitably, I’m not as excited as I was in the bright dawn of blogging, and the most optimistic hopes for the medium have not been fulfilled but after ten years I’m still not jaded or badly disillusioned. For that, I have to thank my readers, especially my commenters, as well as the many fellow bloggers who’ve given me help and encouragement along the way.
Update Another ten-year veteran, Ken Parish, who dates his startup to April or May of 2002. Ken’s post reminds me that I forgot to thank various people who have helped me with hosting the site, including our current host, Jacques Chester and, way back when, Rob Corr. Thanks so much to Jacques, Rob and the various commercial and open source services I’ve sued at different times.
fn1. A series of blog moves and crash recoveries have scrambled the archives, so that I can no longer determin an exact starting date.
The Financial Guns of August
That’s the title of my latest piece in Foreign Policy, about the seemingly inevitable collapse of the eurozone
Is working harder and longer really worth it?
That’s the title of my latest post at The Drum (over the fold). It’s the latest round in my long dispute with the Productivity Commission on this issue, which flared up most recently here.
This is not an issue on which I’ve been impressed with the performance of either the PC or other economists who’ve weighed in to this debate (mostly associated with the business sector). As I point out below, my analysis is mainstream textbook orthodoxy, and led me to predict the productivity “slowdown” at a time when the PC and the others were proclaiming a miracle. But my arguments get even less attention now than they did fifteen years ago, when the PC was at least willing to reply.
High-cost basin plan water is bad for all
That’s the title of my latest piece, at ABC Environment. It’s over the fold
Murray-Darling plan: a disastrous process, a sliver of hope
That’s the headline on my Crikey article on the revised Proposed Basin Plan for the Murray Darling Basin. It’s over the fold.
Converts, conversely
Back in 2005, I wrote about the common experience of dealing with “ people who’ve shifted, politically, from positions well to my left to positions well to my right” (taking as an example, Nick Cohen). Paul Norton, about the same time, wrote along similar lines.
At the time, I mentioned that there weren’t many examples of people going in the opposite direction[1]. But as a commenter points out following this Ryan Cooper link to my last post on the collapse of the rightwing parallel universe, there are now lots of prominent US examples: David Frum, David Stockman, Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bartlett and just now Michael Fumento. I’m quite surprised by Fumento, who has always appeared to me as a stereotypical culture warrior.
Of course, there isn’t an exact symmetry here, essentially arising from the fact that, whereas most of the L-R conversions happened at a time when the left as a whole was conceding a lot of intellectual and political ground to the right, the current situation is one where the US conservative movement and their international offshoots have moved sharply to the right and remain politically potent. So, it’s much more plausible for those making the R-L shift to claim “I didn’t abandon the conservative movement, it abandoned me”.
Still, never having had such a conversion experience I find it fascinating to observe. Particularly striking is the fact that a sharp change in position doesn’t much change the confidence with which views are expressed. Someone who was cautious and sceptical before a change in view will remain so afterwards. More strikingly, converts who held their old views with absolute confidence, will be equally confident of their rightness in abandoning those views.
fn1. Some earlier examples that occur to me now (all US) are David Brock, Michael Lind and Kevin Phillips. No tendency of this kind is evident in Australia as yet – I’d be interested in views from other countries.
The green fields of nuclear power (updated)
Despite Fukushima and the failure of the US “nuclear renaissance”, nuclear power still has plenty of fans in Australia. A question which opponents routinely ask is “where are the nuclear power plants going to go?”.
That’s obviously a difficult question, but there’s a subtly different, and even nastier, question behind it, namely “How should we decide where a nuclear power plant should go”. There are obviously all kinds of issues to be resolved. For example, should it be on the coast, and therefore potentially vulnerable to a tsunami? Should it be near or far from population centres?
If we in Australia made a decision to go for nuclear power, then decided to answer all these questions from scratch, it would take years, maybe a decade or more before we even picked a site (look how long we took over the much easier question of a site for the national capital). And, until we answered the siting question, any estimate of the costs of nuclear power would be a stab in the dark anyway. A plant located in the centre of the Nullarbor would be about as safe as you could get, but hopelessly uneconomic.
So, the obvious answer is; Look at what other developed countries have done when faced with the same problem. But it turns out there is a small difficulty. The answer, according to the US, Britain and every other developed country I’ve looked at, is “put your plant next to an existing one, so there won’t be any more trouble than you already have”.
Of course, it’s logically impossible that they always worked that way. But, as far as I can tell, the last time a new site was picked for a nuclear power plant in a developed country was in the 1970s, before Three Mile Island, let alone Chernobyl and Fukushima. Even supposing that experience were relevant, it’s lost in the mists of time – the decisionmakers involved are long since gone, and any records they left are probably buried in the archives.*
So, unless we can solve a problem that every other developed country in the world has chosen to duck for 30-odd years, we will never even get to the starting gate with nuclear power.
*Update It turns out to be fairly easy to retrieve material from the National Archives, for example, on the proposal, made in the late 60s and abandoned in the early 70s, to build a nuclear power station at Jervis Bay. Thanks to commenter Andrew for picking me up on this.
*Further update Contrary to the claim in the post, a Finnish company has announced a proposed site for a new reactor, though it is not clear that any proper approval process has been undertaken. I doubt that Finnish administrative processes will translate easily to Australia, but it looks like a counterexample to my claim.
Greece’s Uncertain Fate
That’s the title of my latest piece in The National Interest.Teaser follows
Although much remains uncertain about future developments in Greece and beyond, one thing can be predicted with certainty: no Greek government will voluntarily abandon the euro. The only parties favoring such a move are the (old-style Stalinist) Communist Party of Greece and the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, neither of which has any chance of being part of a government. It is almost equally certain that no Greek government will take any further steps to implement the austerity measures previously agreed with the “Troika” of the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund.
New elections to be held on June 17 are most likely to produce substantial gains for the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) at the expense of both the traditional governing party of the Left, PASOK, and the rejectionists of the Communist Party. Syriza advocates rejection of the current austerity package but is equally opposed to withdrawal from the euro. Given large enough gains, Syriza could potentially put together a government with support, or at least tolerance, from PASOK and the conservative but anti-austerity Independent Greek Party.
But the election outcome may be indecisive, perhaps leading to a government of national unity. Such a government would have little power to do anything decisive one way or the other.
The least likely outcome is a swing back to the traditional parties, with PASOK and its conservative counterpart the New Democracy Party gaining enough seats to form a coalition government. Even such a coalition would be unlikely to have the political will to enforce further austerity measures. On the other hand, it would certainly not abandon the euro.
John Quiggin 