Another guest post, this time from Don Harding, who’s looking again at the apparent conflict between betting odds on a Labor win and those in individual seats.
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Guest post from Adrian Pagan
Last week the Prime Minister is reported to have said that economist Richard Blandy had estimated Labor’s plan to abolish Work Choices would destroy between 200,000 and 400,000 jobs. This claim has provoked a response from Australia’s (and one of the world’s) leading econometrician, Adrian Pagan. My one line summary: Blandy has derived this estimate by comparing levels, but has ignored the pre-existing upward trend in employment.
The full piece is over the fold – if there are any opinion editors among my readers, this would make a great contribution for the final week of the campaign.
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What if they gave a culture war and nobody came?
It’s now looking just about as certain as any electoral outcome can be that the Howard government will be defeated, and that the Federal Liberal party will join its state and territory counterparts in opposition, possibly for several terms to come[1]. Given that the economy is doing well, and that the Australian electorate is not obviously in a state of leftwing ferment, this (still putative) outcome needs some explanation.
One striking fact, despite having received an overwhelming mandate in 1996 for a policy of making Australia “relaxed and comfortable”, the Howard government, and, even more, their supporters, see themselves as being engaged in a “culture war”. An even more striking fact is that the other side in this culture war has been just about invisible, particularly in political debate. It’s hard to see either Kevin Rudd or his smooth and scrubbed counterparts at the state level as engaged in a struggle to undermine traditional Australian culture. Even the Greens, led by Bob Brown, don’t fit the bill. And this is consistent with my day-to-day experience. Maybe UQ is riddled with extreme cultural leftists, but if so, I don’t get invited to their parties.
Yet opinion columns, talk radio and the rightwing blogosphere are dominated by diatribes against what appears, in their telling, as an amorphous mass of political correctness, environmentalism, radical feminism and general hostility to ordinary Australians and their values, which supposedly dominates not only the Labor party but all of our major cultural institutions including universities, the legal system, the ABC and even, in many accounts, the commercial mass media in which these bloviators are writing.
The pursuit of the culture war is, in my judgement, one of the main reasons that the conservative parties have become increasingly unelectable.
Gary Kamiya on civilised discussion
For a long time, I’ve insisted on civilised discussion on this blog, to the point of banning coarse language, not because I don’t allow such words to pass my own lips but because I think it tends to encourage flaming and other such behavior. I may not have done a perfect job, particularly as I tend not to follow the kind of long-running interchange between two or three commenters where flames emerge, but I hope the place is a bit less offputting in this respect than a lot of other blogs. It’s nice to get some reinforcement in this view and here is a piece from Gary Kamiya at Salon.
Too much information
I installed Mac OS X Leopard on my laptop a couple of weeks ago, and tried out the spiffy new Time Machine feature which does differential backups to a hard drive. On the first run, of course, it had to back up the whole machine and I was a bit startled to see that it was copying over a million files. Of course, lots of those are system and applications files, but my documents folder, which is mostly stuff I’ve created myself, has over 250 000 files. And today I got a message from Eudora telling me (not for the first time) that my Inbox could only hold 32000 messages.
I can remember when I knew, by name, every file on the computer, and what it did. It was not that hard with a machine (128k Mac) that ran off a couple of 400k floppy disks.
Me too, too
I just got the edited highlights of Howard’s policy launch, but the commentary confirmed my impression that the main initiatives (tax-favoured savings accounts for homebuyers, rebates for parents of school students, money for childcare centres) were ripoffs of policies announced by Rudd earlier in the campaign. This kind of “me too, too, only more so” approach seems to be tactically and politically silly for a lot of reasons.
Arbitrage lost
I’ve mentioned before that the fact that most bookies have Labor odds-on to win, while the Liberals are favoured in about half the individual seat markets (they were ahead in a majority until recently) seemed to create arbitrage opportunities. A nice piece by Tim Colebatch resolves the apparent paradox to my satisfaction at any rate.
The paradox is explained by the fact that of the 29 seats in which the odds are closest, the bookies have the Coalition as favourite in 23 and Labor in just six. The law of probabilities suggests that if Labor gets anything like the vote being recorded in the polls, it will win a lot more than six of those seats.
The only blemish in this explanation is that there’s no need to refer to the Labor vote in the polls. Given 29 seats that are nearly even-money, it’s reasonable to expect Labor to pick up at least 10, just on the basis of the betting odds.
Going to the more general question of prediction, 2007 has been a win for the polls in their contest with pundits and punters as to who provides the best prediction of election outcomes. Labor jumped to a winning lead in the polls as soon as Rudd replaced Beazley and has held that lead, with only marginal erosion ever since. The pundits and the betting markets have gradually come into line, but it’s hard to believe that they would have done so in the absence of the information provided by the polls.
Of course, it’s still possible that Howard will come back, as he has done in the past, but that will just prove all predictions wrong.
Monday message board
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
The greatest of crimes (reposted from 2004)
Another Remembrance (or Armistice) Day and we are still at war. I posted this in 2004, and have nothing to add or change
November 11 marks the armistice that was supposed to bring an end to the Great War in 1918. In fact, it was little more than a temporary and partial truce in a war that has continued, in one form or another, until the present. Hitler’s War and the various Cold War conflicts were direct continuations of the first Great War, and we are even now dealing with the consequences of the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot agreement.
The Great War was at the root of most of the catastrophes that befell the human race in the 20th century. Communism, Nazism and various forms of virulent nationalism all derived their justification from the ten million dead of 1914-18. Even the apparently hopeful projects that emerged from the war, from the League of Nations to the creation of new states like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia ended in failure or worse. And along with war, conquest and famine came the pestilence of the Spanish Flu, which killed many more millions[1].
And yet this catastrophe was brought about under the leadership of politicians remarkable for their ordinariness. Nothing about Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Bethmann Holllweg or the other leaders on both sides marks them out for the company of Attila or Tamerlane or Stalin. How could men like these continue grinding their populations through years of pointless slaughter, and what led people to follow them? In retrospect, it is surely clear that both sides would have been better if peace had been made on the basis of any of the proposals put up in 1917 on the general basis of of “no annexations or indemnities”. The same was true, in reality, at any time from the outbreak of war in 1914 until the final collapse of the Central Powers, and even then the terms of 1917 would have been better for all than those of Versailles.We should think about this every time we are called to war with sweet-sounding slogans.
War is among the greatest of crimes. It may be the lesser evil on rare occasions, but it is always a crime. On Remembrance Day and always, this is what we should remember.
fn1. It’s not clear whether the War exacerbated the pandemic, for example through massive movements of people and widespread privation. But it seems right to consider them together when we remember the War.
Poor Americans?
As I mentioned a few days ago, using current market exchange rates, Australia now has a higher income per person than the US. Matthew Turner observed the UK passing the US a few months ago and estimated several years ago that the critical value for the Eurozone is around $1.46, which was reached in the last couple of days. I haven’t checked on the GDP comparison, but the yen and franc are also rising
Of course, it would be silly to use these numbers to support a claim that Americans are, on average, worse off than people in other developed countries. The Purchasing Power Parity indexes produced by the International Comparisons Project of the World Bank provide a much better (though far from exact) basis for comparisons of this kind. But, for the many advocates of free markets who’ve used the economic performance of the US as the basis for their case, there’s a big rhetorical problem here. You can, I suppose, argue along the lines “The market values the output of the average American less than that of the average European (or Australian) but analyses prepared by international bureaucrats show that Americans are actually better off, and therefore we should prefer the market to the state”, but it’s not a position I’d want to defend.
John Quiggin 