Format

John Quiggin9 Comments

I just upgraded WordPress and, as usual, I’m a bit slow about restoring my formatting. I’ll try to get the essentials like recent comments back soon. In the meantime, feel free to make suggestions.

Bookplug

John Quiggin16 Comments

My former ANU colleague and occasional co-author Bruce Chapman is well-known as the progenitor of the HECS scheme, and as a proponent of income-related loans more generally. He and I along with Arie Freiburg and David Tait worked on a proposal for income-related fines for criminal offences a while back.

Both schemes and others are discussed in Bruce’s new book, to be launched next week. It should be well worth reading.

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Weekend reflections

John Quiggin38 Comments

Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.

European Russia

John Quiggin4 Comments

My knowledge on this topic is limited, so perhaps others won’t be surprised as I was, by the information in this Washington Post story that Russia, as a member of the Council of Europe, is subject to the European Court of Justice Human Rights, and that

Russians now file more complaints with the court — 10,583 in 2005 — than people from any of the 46 countries that make up the Council of Europe, according to court statistics

Among other stats, the Court has issued 362 rulings on Russia, all but 10 going against the government.

This and other things point to the fact Russia’s primary strategic relationship nowadays is not with the US, where things are still viewed through the prism of residual Cold War rivalry, but with Europe. And this relationship is full of ambiguities, starting with the old question of whether Russia is part of Europe, part of Asia, or belongs in a special category of its own.

This is a big problem on both sides, but it’s hard to see any positive alternative to the logic of gradual integration implied by membership of a growing range of European institutions, and ultimately of the EU itself. Europe could try to draw permanent lines that excluded Russia (and maybe also Belarus), rather than deal with the problems of integration, but that seems unlikely, even with the recent backlash against expansion. More plausibly, Russia could turn in on itself, perhaps repudiating bothersome institutions like the Court of Human Rights. That would be bad for (nearly) all concerned, but clearly there are powerful forces in Russia pushing in that direction.

As I said, lots of people here understand more than me about all of this, so I’d be interested in comments, pointers to further reading and so on.

Less than zero

John Quiggin53 Comments

There’s been a bit of publicity about a recent study of the effects of the Australian gun buyback. The central finding of the authors was that, while gun homicides declined after the buyback this was merely a continuation of a pre-existing trend.

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I’m dubious about the whole approach. In the absence of a well-founded explanation for the trend, there’s no reason to treat maintenance of the trend, rather than the level, as the null hypothesis. The rate of gun homicides has clearly fallen (the authors find the same for suicides), so the data supports the policy, contrary to the claims.

And eyeballing the data, I’m doubtful that it’s even sufficient to establish the existence of a declining trend for the period up to and including 1996. It might be argued that the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 should be excluded and that a downward trend would then emerge, but, given that this was the even that precipitated the buyback, this seems like begging the question to me.

In any case, Andrew Leigh has the ultimate knockdown objection. If you look at the confidence intervals, the only way the gun buyback could have been shown to work, on the authors’ tests is if gun homicides fell below zero by 2004. Clearly, even if you buy the declining trend story, a linear trend is just wrong.

Mark Bahnisch has more, though quite a few commenters don’t seem to appreciate how conclusive Leigh’s refutation has been.

Anchoring

John Quiggin34 Comments

The Washington Post is having a good day. There’s a nice article by Shankar Vedantam linking the research of Kahneman and Tversky on anchoring heuristics to widespread unwillingness to believe estimates of 600 000 excess deaths arising from the Iraq war.

And the Post which has kowtowed to Bush ever since he got in, finally seems willing to call him on obvious lies. Here’s Peter Baker and Eugene Robinson.

No doubt the collapse of hope regarding Iraq has something to do with us. The US media has finally come face to face with the reality that all the alternatives now on offer are disastrous. Even the hawks have now recognised that the costs of the war have far outweighed any benefits that might be achieved. Unfortunately, this recognition has come a few years too late for the people of Iraq, but there’s at least time for US voters to cast their verdict in November.

What I’ve been reading

John Quiggin27 Comments

Old: Sense and Sensibility. Probably my favourite among Jane Austen’s novels. By the way, has anyone else noticed that while Austen’s heroines are interestingly different, all her books seem to feature the same two male characters – the attractive, but dishonest younger man (Willoughby, Wickham, William Elliot, Frank Churchill) and the seemingly reserved, but really passionate (and usually older) man (Darcy, Brandon, Knightley, Wentworth). I wonder if this is just a handy plot device or whether it reflects some event in Austen’s life, of which we know little.

New Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. A great story, and also interesting for the link between Anansi, the West African trickster-spider and Brer Rabbit, which is obvious enough once pointed out (there’s even a tar baby story) but was still new to me.