What I’ve been reading

John Quiggin5 Comments

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi.

I’ve been reading the Hugo nominees for best novel, and this was the last one. The blurb states “

Though a lot of SF writers are more or less efficiently continuing the tradition of Robert A. Heinlein, Scalzi’s astonishingly proficient first novel reads like an original work by the late grand master

Since my taste runs more to Bill, the Galactic Hero, I’m not exactly the target market. On the other hand, having read Starman Jones to the point where I could recite the text when I was 14, I’m not totally ignorant of Heinlein either.

In terms of the standard features, Scalzi doesn’t do a bad job. We get the recruiting office, a pretty good drill sergeant from Hell, the usual battle scenes and the inculcation of a military ethos, along with a recognition that “War is Hell”. Heinlein fans will love all this. And there’s the twist in the title. The colonial defence forces only recruit 75-year olds, for reasons that are explained a few chapters into the book. {The later appearance of the Ghost Brigades (I’ll avoid a spoiler on this), seems to me to undermine the rationale, but maybe this will be explained in the subsequent eponymous book.}

Where the book fails, in my view, is as hard science fiction. As you’d expect from the genre the underlying view is what might be called interstellar realism; the galaxy is a tough place and there are a lot of species out there eager to seize our planets and eat us. But Scalzi gives no answer to the Fermi problem: how come the neighbours haven’t already dropped in for dinner, instead of waiting for us to go out to meet them. And even when the book is set, Earth is mysteriously immune from external attack, despite the absence of any of the defence forces that are needed everywhere else.

Then there’s Earth itself. The book is set at least a couple of hundred years after Earth has developed an interstellar space drive, but apart from that it could be set in 1990 (in fact, apart from a passing reference to an office computer, it could be set in the 1950s). The hero is a retired advertising agent, and his companions have similarly 20th century jobs. He produces a driving license as ID, signs up in a strip mall and takes a plane to the spaceport.

I know you’re supposed to suspend disbelief, but all this goes beyond my capacity, I’m afraid.

Weekend reflections

John Quiggin13 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.

This is getting to be a habit

John Quiggin74 Comments

As with the Lib-Nat merger in Queensland, I was just working on my analysis of the Snowy Hydro privatisation when the news came through that the deal is off. A few observations:

First, this episode confirms that privatisation is political poison in Australia, as is shown both by opinion poll evidence (links to come on this) and by election results in NSW, Tasmania and elsewhere. The more experience people have with privatisation, the less they like it. When you have the National Party celebrating a victory for people power, the point is pretty obvious.

Second, while the promoters of privatisation have criticised opponents as emotive, the case in favor of privatisation was made up in equal parts of emotive appeals to ideology and economic illiteracy. Ideologically, privatisation was assumed by its advocates to be a Good Thing, with no attempt to identify, let alone quantify, any concrete benefits in the case of Snowy Hydro. Economically, this was (I hope) the last outing of the idea that selling income-generating assets “frees up” or “unlocks” cash that can then be spent on schools, hospitals and so on. If the asset is sold for an amount equal to the risk-adjusted present value of expected future earnings, there is no change in the government’s fiscal position. In practice, higher risk premiums in the public sector and the absurd restrictions on ownership that are usually part of deals like this means that the government ends up worse off, not better off.

Coming to the arguments against, the “iconic” argument is indeed emotive, but not necessarily the worse for that. If it’s paying its way, why shouldn’t we keep ownership of an asset like the Snowy in the hands of the public sector that created it?

In any case, there were substantive arguments against privatisation that weren’t effectively answered. We’re in the middle of trying to sort out what to do with the water in the Snowy-Murray system, and not making a really good job of it. The last thing we need is to have a private company (probably with foreign owners who can appeal to the protection of the US-Australia FTA) with large, but still poorly-specified, entitlements to use the water or receive compensation for changes in use.

Finally, there are some big losers from the cancellation of this deal, namely the banks and financial institutions that would have had a cut of it. To that group can be added the politicians involved, whose prospects of highly-paid post-political jobs in those same banks have just taken a nosedive.

Jilted!

John Quiggin22 Comments

I’ve been meaning to post on the merger between the National and Liberal parties in Queensland, pointing out that it makes no sense to have two separate parties in permanent coalition, and expressing a bit of surprise that the local parties got their act together so quickly. Now, however, it’s all off.

This is amazing good luck for the Beattie government, which has made more than its share of mis-steps lately, although I think the main thrust of policies, raising services to a level comparable with other states, and pushing the “Smart State” slogan as a counterweight to the notorious anti-intellectualism of the Joh era (and for that matter, the Nicklin and Gair eras before that – it was a Labor government that cut the number of school years in Queensland, a decision that has only just been reversed), has been sensible.

Whatever the government’s problems, it’s hard to see Queensland voters going for a National-led coalition again> I’ll repeat what I said in 2004

In the case of Queensland, Labor has an advantage that does not seem to have been remarked on. The only plausible alternative government is a Liberal-led coalition, but for historical reasons, this isn’t on offer. In fact there are only three Liberals in Parliament and of these only one is running for re-election. Instead the Opposition is in effect the National Party (there are also the remnants of One Nation and assorted independents). Even though the Nationals have held office for most of the past fifty years, I don’t think we’ll ever see another National Party premier.

Assuming no merger, I thought in 2004 that it would

take three more elections for Labor to lose. The Liberals need one to become a credible party rather than a trivial joke, a second to become the leading opposition party, and a third to beat Labor.

Having won a few more seats, and with Labor looking ragged, you could just about have said that the first of these stages had been passed, until the fiasco of the last few days.

Gourlay and Tunstall on dryland salinity

John Quiggin30 Comments

The Sunday program on salinity, as it related to irrigation and the Murray-Darling, was pretty old stuff; pointscoring about some silly past statements (such as the NFF/ACF proposal to spend $65 billion) combined with a Pollyanna view of the current situation, familiar in general tone to anyone who’s followed climate change denialism.

What was interesting and new to me was the claim, put forward by Rob Gourlay and Brian Tunstall that the standard model of dryland salinity, based on rising water tables, is wrong and that the real cause is poor soil quality. The show also featured a farmer who claimed to solve salinity problems by defying the advice of the experts. This reminded me of a much older challenger to standard hydrology, Harry Whittington and his interceptor banks, which I discussed briefly here

I haven’t worked on dryland salinity for a few years now, but I’ve followed the issue reasonably closely, particularly through the work of Dave Pannell at University of Western Australia, who’s one of Australia’s leading agricultural economists. Unlike me, Dave’s a bit of an enviro-sceptic* (he’s written favorably about Lomborg, for example), but no-one I know is better informed on dryland salinity. So I was interested to see his reaction to all this. Suffice it to say he’s unimpressed A quick summary

that the rising groundwater theory of salinity is wrong, and should be replaced by a theory based on soil health) is problematic, to say the least. Channel 9 interviewed almost all of the small band of scientists (the “soil-health teamâ€?) who have for some years been pushing this line, but not a single person who would be qualified to present the counter view. Now Australia is a big place, and there may well be different mechanisms in operation in different places. But for the soil-health team to claim that the rising groundwater theory is universally wrong is quite outrageous. …

The proponents of the alternative theory need to subject their ideas to the standard method of quality assurance in science, by publishing their evidence in a peer-reviewed journal. They have not yet done that.

*Not perfectly phrased. Dave takes a properly sceptical attitude to the evidence on salinity and other environmental issues he’s worked on, as all good scientists should do. At times, though, I think he’s too kind to people like Lomborg, who claim to be sceptics but are promoting a viewpoint that’s just as credulous as that of the environmental alarmists like the Club of Rome, but in the opposite direction.
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Yogyakarta earthquake appeal

John Quiggin3 Comments

I’ve been asked to post this appeal for help with the Yogyakarta earthquake from a group of international students* located in Java and therefore in a position to provide immediate assistance, which they are currently doing at their own expense.

* The writer of the letter is a friend of one of my postdoctoral fellows, Nanni Concu, so there’s no need to worry about the bona fides of the appeal.
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Bris Science tonight

John Quiggin2 Comments

BrisScience: THE UNIVERSE FROM BEGINNING TO END – Brian Schmidt

*********** We believe the Universe began in a Big Bang, and is expanding around us. How Big and Old is the Universe? What is in the Universe, and how will it End? Brian will describe how we have used exploding stars, known as supernovae, to track the expansion of the Universe back some 10 Billion years into the past to answer these and other questions.
***********

Brian Schmidt, an astronomer and Federation Fellow from the Mount Stromlo Observatory at the Australian National University, uses distant supernovae to study the Universe. He led a group that discovered that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate – a discovery that was named Science Magazine’s Breakthrough of the Year in 1998.

DATE: Monday, May 29

TIME: 6:30pm to 7:30pm (doors open at 6:00pm); complimentary wine, soft drinks, and nibblies follow

VENUE: Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts (420 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley; see http://www.jwcoca.qld.gov.au for a map; parking is available on Berwick St next door)
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