US vs EU, Round XXVIII

John Quiggin41 Comments

Fareed Zakaria has yet another piece on the inevitable decline of Europe. In it, he makes the claim

Talk to top-level scientists and educators about the future of scientific research and they will rarely even mention Europe. There are areas in which it is world class, but they are fewer than they once were. In the biomedical sciences, for example, Europe is not on the map.

High energy physics, anyone? Western European output of scientific papers surpassed that of the US about 10 years ago and the gap is still widening. The US is relatively stronger in biomedical research than in the physical sciences, but Europe has caught up there as well. The loss of the US lead in science is sufficiently widely-accepted that proposed responses made it into Bush’s State of the Union speech.
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Global warming and careerism

John Quiggin215 Comments

ABC Four Corners ran an interesting show last night on the anti-science interest groups who dominate the formulation and official discussion of policy on global warming in Australia. Transcript here, along with discussion from Tim Lambert and Larvatus Prodeo.

What particularly interested me was the number of scientists who had been pushed out of CSIRO, or had left of their own volition, after being tightly censored in what they could say about global warming, and the emissions reductions that would be needed to stabilise the climate (the latter point is particularly sensitive since any actual number implies a target and government policy is opposed to targets).

In particular, I was struck by the fact that global warming contrarians commonly explain the overwhelming support of climate scientists for the consensus view on anthropogenic global warming in terms of careerism. The contrarians say that if the scientists deviated from the dominant consensus, they would lose their jobs or their grant funding.

THe Four Corners report made it clear that, in Australia (as also in the US) the exact opposite is the truth. Speaking out in support of science on global warming is a very bad career move, at least for anyone employed by the government. In climate science, where the big organisations have been CSIRO and the Met Bureau, that constraint applies to most people working in the field.
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EFIC

John Quiggin4 Comments

The AWB wheat deals with Iraq also involved the Export Finance Insurance Corporation (EFIC) which, as the name implies, insures exporters like AWB when they sell goods on credit. I actually did some work on this fifteen years ago, and concluded that the operations of EFIC were likely to lead to cross-subsidisation of bad customers by good ones. Even then, Iraq was at the top of the list of bad customers. As Ken Davidson points out (via VVB), the involvement of EFIC in the deals also implies high-level involvement by government departments like Treasury and Finance that have so far not been mentioned.

Meanwhile, as the hearings roll on, it’s clear that the government knew nothing about the bribery in exactly the same way as Bill Clinton did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. Indeed, looking at the things they didn’t know, it’s testimony to their organisational ability that they could manage to know exactly what they needed not to know, without ever being told.

RSS

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Quite a few people have been having trouble with my RSS feed. I upgraded to WordPress 2.0.1 in the hope that this might improve things, but instead this managed to replace the main feed with the comment feed. Pushing my coding skills to the limit I managed to find and implement the necessary fix which also requires a rebuild of the permalink structure.

I’m hoping that the earlier problems may have been resolved in this process. Advice on this much appreciated.

Cuckoo

John Quiggin34 Comments

Last weekend my wife pointed out a channel-billed cuckoo chick being fed by its “adoptive” parents, two crows. Crows are fair-sized birds but the cuckoo was already bigger than either. I’d never seen this before except in books.

Call for help

John Quiggin2 Comments

John Humphreys is asking for some help for a Khmer friend and colleague whose family is having a rough time.

On a related note, while I was at AARES, I got talking about co-authors and it struck me that mine come from at least a dozen different countries. Going roughly from east to west they include NZ, Australia (obviously), Vietnam, Thailand, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Greece, Italy, France, Netherlands, Spain, England and the US. It’s certainly one of the great things about an academic life that this kind of contact is natural and taken for granted.