What I’m reading, and more

John Quiggin25 Comments

I’ve been very slack about this regular feature, but I’m encouraged to persevere by the discovery that it really annoys a certain class of semi-literate blogger. This soi-disant (look it up, Richie), purveyor of right-wing rants links to me, objecting to ‘pretencious bloggers‘ who discuss what they’ve been reading, and asks:

How often would a blogger who goes to effort of providing his current reading material list a title like The Da Vinci Code?

If Richie knew how to use Google, he’d know the answer was Once – do you think I’m going to reread Dan Brown?

Anyway, what I’ve been reading this week is The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney. Mooney does a great job documenting the postmodernist and anti-science stance of US Republicans on issues like global warming and evolution, reproduced in Australia by commentators like Andrew Bolt.

Meanwhile, on the movie front, I finally hired Heathers which was great. My son and I also watched Team America which was fun, if crass – I guess it’s the kind of satire you can take either way.

US backdown on post-Kyoto agreement

John Quiggin16 Comments

Today’s papers report contradictory assessments of the latest climate talks in Montreal. The NY TImes reports that the US Administration has backed down on attempts to stop negotiations for the setting of new targets for the post-Kyoto period. The US was apparently left out on a limb by China and Australia, its main allies in attempts to stop any real action, neither of which were prepared to join the US and Saudi Arabia in walking out of the talks. The result is likely to be a slight softening of language in the final agreement, but determined attempts to sabotage the process have failed.

It’s noteworthy that, despite a lot of speculation that Tony Blair was preparing the ground for a capitulation to the Bush Administration, nothing of the kind actually happened, and the US stance was repeatedly and vigorously attacked by nearly all the participants in the conference, including British delegates.

On the other hand, Australia’s environment minister was reported in today’s SMH as saying that the Kyoto protocol was almost dead

A number of [countries] are saying ‘Look, we made a mistake. We don’t think that it’s worth opening up a new negotiation about a future commitment when the commitments we have today are looking so unreasonable’,

The only support I can find for Campbell’s statement in the NYT report is the observation that the agreement on negotations does not include a specific date for ending talks, reflecting the difficulties in meeting existing targets.

An alternative interpretation is that Campbell’s statement is designed to give him cover with the domestic anti-Kyoto lobby for his break with the US position at the talks, which undoubtedly contributed to the American backdown. If so, good for him – he’s been about as good a minister as possible, given the Howard government’s generally bad position.

Overall, the outcome of these talks was about the best that could be hoped for. Undoubtedly, the accumulation of evidence over the past couple of years, to the point where no-one who is both well-informed and honest can deny the reality of human-caused global warming, has contributed to this outcome, despite the obvious reluctance of governments everywhere to do anything painful.

Income and Consumption Inequality (crossposted at CT)

John Quiggin23 Comments

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to work out what’s been going on with income and consumption inequality in the United States. Partly that’s because the subject is of interest in itself and partly because social and economic developments in Australia often (not always) follow the lead of the US.

However, there seem to be lots of contradictions in the data, and between data and popular perceptions, for example regarding social mobility and consumption inequality. I’ve finally managed to sort out what seems (to me, at any rate) to be a coherent account of what’s going on. A list of the main points follows, with supporting links, some of which may require registration/subscription. I’ve tried to indicate which bits of the story reflect my judgements, and which are drawn from the literature.

Comments and criticism on this are most welcome.
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Jigalong

John Quiggin5 Comments

Last weekend, I went to a seminar organised by the Ngiya National Institute of Indigenous Law, Policy and Practice to discuss various issues relating to economic policy affecting indigenous communities. In doing some background research, one point (familiar to those who’ve followed the debate closely, but not to most others) cam through very clearly, particularly in this paper by John Taylor and Owen Stanley

Contrary to claims that the problems of indigenous communities have had buckets of money thrown at them with nothing to show for it, expenditure on services for indigenous communities is typically less (or no more than) what would be spent on comparable non-indigenous communities. In discussion over dinner, the case of Jigalong in WA was mentioned. This community has been trying for some time to set itself up a town council so that it can get funding comparable to nearby, mainly white, communities, notably Mt Newman. Today’s Oz has a prominent report on this.

A nice feature of the weekend was that quite a few participants turned out to be readers of this blog. Since my site counter broke a few months ago, I have no idea how many readers there are at present, but these days I seem to meet them wherever I go.

Contests and departures

John Quiggin5 Comments

It’s the time of year for blog contests, and the inevitable sore losers are a lot sorer given that one of the contests involved real money. Hosting service Smartyblog put up $10k, for a contest won by a site about Singing Bridges. Kinda strange, but that’s the magic of the internets. Not having got off onto my bottom to put in an entry*, I’m not going to second-guess the judges. Gianna shares the pain of her defeat here

While I’m at it, I should note the departure of Margo Kingston’s departure from Webdiary (apparently to continue as a group blog). Margo was one of the first mainstream journalists to realise the significance of blogging, but her efforts to make a living at it have not worked out.

More personally significant to me is the closure of Robert Corr’s Red Rag, as Rob is now “Another Suit on the Terraceâ„¢”. Insofar as this blog has a blogfather it’s Rob. Not only did his blog encourage me to start, but he provided support and hosting during my move away from the training wheels of Blogger. Good luck with your new career, Rob!

* Being officially ranked the best blog in Queensland, at least until next Australia Day, I can afford to be complacent.

HTML tags in comments

John Quiggin31 Comments

HTML tags haven’t been working in comments for a while. Prompted by Andrew Reynolds, I checked and found the problem was a plugin, which I’ve disabled. So you can all go back to including hyperlinks, as well as bold and italic tags. Just part of the friendly service.

I’ve also switched the RSS feed to provide the entire article rather than just the summary. Some people wanted this, and it seems like the way of the future, but feel free to discuss.

Another milestone

John Quiggin2 Comments

A big statistical milestone, and a well-earned standing ovation, for Lanard Copeland, who racked up his 10 000th point in the NBL in the course of a nailbiting 110-107 win for the Bullets over the Cairns Taipans. Most of those were scored in his long and illustrious career with the Melbourne Tigers, but he’s still averaging 10 points per game coming off the bench for Brisbane.

Thirty thousand comments

John Quiggin14 Comments

The 30 000th comment on this blog[1] has just been posted. I was going to award a prize but, rather embarrassingly, the comment was one of mine. So I’ll announce a shared award between comment #29999 (Andrew Bartlett) and #30001 (still working it out).

More seriously, thanks to everyone who’s helped to make the comments threads on this blog some of the best on the web.

fn1. That’s in the Movable Type and WordPress incarnations, not counting comments made in earlier systems such as Haloscan, and those lost in the great database disaster. of 2003. Including these lost contributions, the total number is probably close to 50 000. WordPress numbers comments at about 38500 suggesting a loss of 8000 or so in the database disaste.

The Gerard affair

John Quiggin30 Comments

I’m not a huge fan of political scandals, but I’ve seen enough of them unfold to have a pretty good feel for the process. The vast majority can be put into one of three categories: beatups, stonewallers and one-hit wonders.

Beatups are bogus scandals where claims that look damaging turn out to have an innocent explanation, or at least a plausible rationalisation. Mostly these do the government concerned no harm.

Stonewallers are cases where the government’s response is to brazen the whole thing out, on the principle “never apologise, never explain, never resign”. Some governments are more given to stonewalling than others, and (after a brief and costly period of upholding high standards) this has been the Howard government’s response in nearly all cases.

Finally, there are one-hit wonders. In these cases, the pressure is severe enough to force the resignation of the person most directly concerned, usually an expendable junior minister or public servant. Once the resignation has taken place, attempts to push the issue further, and look at the involvement of more senior figures go nowhere.
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