Good news so far

John Quiggin8 Comments

Early exit polls are showing Kerry ahead in nearly all the swing states – I don’t know how much weight to place on this. Slate is releasing exit polls as they come to hand, and is rather hard to reach as a result. The major networks have agreed not to release exit polls until voting has finished.

A more solid positive indicator is very high turnout, particularly in Democratic precincts.

Good coverage is at myDD or you can tune into the NRO Corner to see what the Bush camp is making of all this.

Access to US sites with any data is getting steadily worse. So I’ll post these numbers leaked to Wonkette – usual caveats apply

FL: 52/48 – KERRY
OH: 52/47 – KERRY
MI: 51/48 – KERRY
PA: 58/42 – KERRY
IA: 50/48 – KERRY
WI: 53/47 – KERRY
MN: 57/42 – KERRY
NH: 58/41 – KERRY
ME: 55/44 – KERRY

NM: 49/49 – TIE

NV: 48/49 – BUSH
CO: 49/50 – BUSH
AR: 45/54 – BUSH
NC: 47/53 – BUSH

For those who haven’t been following obsessively, this means (with the usual kilo of salt) that Kerry is leading in all the main swing states, and some that were seen as leaning to Bush.

Update Rather belatedly, the betting markets are swinging heavily to Kerry – they’re also hard to reach. You can follow updates in this thread at Crooked Timber

A successful arbitrage

John Quiggin5 Comments

Having plunged a massive $25 in the office Calcutta[1] to buy Makybe Diva, I came out well ahead in the Emirates[2] Melbourne Cup this year. By my calculation, I’m now $20 ahead on a lifetime basis. A nice bottle of red should bring me back to par.

fn1. The pool was over $150, and the mare started about 5/1 so I could have made a neat $25 in arbitrage profits if I’d had time to run to the TAB. Since I didn’t, I stuck with my position and pocketed a neat $100.

fn2. I really can’t take this. The Fosters Melbourne Cup was a bit strange, but at least Fosters Lager is a quintessentially Melbourne product. What’s next? The McDonalds Anzac Day march?

Police and peacekeepers (crossposted at CT)

John Quiggin5 Comments

This post by Chris Bertram made a point that’s central to a post I’ve been planning for some time, so I may as well jump in and complete it. Talking about US airstrikes in Iraq, he writes

The risk of the operation is transferred by deliberate and systematic policy from soldiers to bystanders. Such a policy runs contrary to traditional views about who should bear the risk of operations: we can’t insulate civilians completely but where there’s a choice soldiers both in virtue of the role they occupy and the fact (here) that they are volunteers should take on more exposure in order to protect civilians. It is hard to escape the thought that were co-nationals of the people dropping the bombs the ones in the bystander position, different methods would be used.

An obvious comparison is with the police force. If any of us were involved in a confrontation between police officers and armed criminals, we would expect the police to risk their lives to save us[1]. A police force that viewed protecting the safety of its own members as the primary priority would not be very effective. A police force that was prepared to pursue criminals with deadly force, and treat deaths among the general public as “collateral damage” would be worse than useless. But that is, in essence, what has been given to the Iraqi people.

This raises, I think, a fairly general point in relation to the kind of liberal/humanitarian interventionism exemplified by Bosnia and Kosovo, and (from the viewpoint of some of its backers, particularly on the left) in Iraq. Unless the intervening powers have the willingness and capacity to provide peacekeepers who will operate as a police force, with the associated attitude that protection of the civilian population is the top priority, then intervention is bound to produce bad outcomes.
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Tomorrow’s race (crossposted at Crooked Timber)

John Quiggin6 Comments

As usual before the first Tuesday in November, Australians are closely studying the papers, trying to predict the winner in tomorrow’s race, and planning the well-lubricated parties that are essential as we wait for the results. A critical question here, and one that has been the subject of vigorous debate, is whether betting markets are efficient predictors. While some have argued strongly in favor of the markets recently, long-standing Australian tradition holds that they are utterly unreliable. There’s also a lot of debate about whether the whole turnout may be affected by the weather, and if so, in whose favour.

The level of interest is so high that the event is almost impossible to avoid. Even those who are completely apathetic have found it easier to pick an allegiance at random than to admit to not caring one way or the other.

Work will stop around the nation as we try to digest the results, and the champagne. Victorians, who take all matters of this kind more seriously than other Australians, will take the entire day off.

Update 2/11 A triumph for the betting markets, as the favorite Makybe Diva came home on the inside, the first mare to win two successive Cups. I managed a successful arbitrage on the office Calcutta buying the favorite for $25 in a pool of over $150, as opposed to market odds of 5/1 or less.

fn1. This is mainly intended as a mild leg-pull for the international audience at CT, but I thought I’d post it here as well.

Loot

John Quiggin2 Comments

With the recent emergence of stories about the looting of high explosives and pre-1991 chemical weapons from UN-secured sites, I’d like to remind everyon that this was not simply the result of negligence or inadequate numbers of troops. The Coalition forces explicitly encouraged looting. While the war was still continuing, I noted a report in The Times (4 April 2003), saying that the British were encouraging looters. The report said

The British view is that the sight of local youths dismantling the offices and barracks of a regime they used to fear shows they have confidence that Saddam Hussains henchmen will not be returning to these towns in southern Iraq.

One senior British officer said: We believe this sends a powerful message that the old guard is truly finished.

My London Times link is broken, but the report is reproduced, with attribution in the Daily TImes of Pakistan . As far as I know, there was no denial of this report at the time. Although the US forces aren’t mentioned in this report, it’s clear they were equally supportive of looting, if not more so.

As the various UN officials quoted in the story observe, once you’ve started encouraging looting, it’s going to be difficult to stop, especially in a situation where neither the troops nor their commanders had any idea about what was where. The one crucial site that was secured immediately was, of course, the Oil Ministry.

The polarized workforce

John Quiggin16 Comments

In broad terms, we know what the outcome of industrial relations reform will be. Although we haven’t had radical shifts in formal institutions, we’ve experienced a decisive shift of power to employers, and seen the results. The most obvious is polarization in working hours. There’s been a big increase in the proportion of people working more than 50 hours a week, and also a big increase in the proportion of part-time and casual workers. I think it’s self-evident that this is a bad thing, but I’ll spell out my reasons (probably over several posts).

I’ll start by observing that long hours suit some people, and so do part-time jobs. I suppose I would be the paradigm case of someone for whom long hours are not a problem. I have almost complete flexibility over the hours that I work, and almost complete autonomy over what I do from day to day, and the job is what I love doing, to the extent that there isn’t really a clear divide for me between working and not working (is writing this post at 7am work, or free time – I don’t really know). Part of the problem is that bosses’ jobs are mostly like mine – not quite as autonomous and flexible as mine perhaps, but with plenty of on-the-job rewards. As a result, bosses have always been more likely to work long hours than others. One problem with IR reform is that bosses get to impose their preferences on others, and those preferences are almost always for more effort, regardless of whether this is economically efficient or even in the long-term interest of the enterprise.

What I’m reading

John Quiggin6 Comments

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke.

This is a great first novel, set in England during the Napoleonic wars, but with an alternate history in which magic was practiced until the relatively recent past, and is, as the book opens, a respectable topic of theoretical study for the upper-middle classes. This cosy arrangement is upset by the arrival of first one, and then a second, real practical magician. The result is a mixture of fairy story, historical novel and academic tome (the footnotes alone are well worth the admission price) with a total effect that is entirely new. The main action, involving the eponymous magicians, is great fun, and the subplots, which have the sinister edge of all good fairy stories, are even better.

After looking at the reviews on Amazon, I think one thing is clear. If you loved the Harry Potter books, you probably won’t like Jonathan Strange. If like me, you found Harry a pleasant read, but want something more than a readable mass-market kids book then this might be the book for you. Where Harry is Billy Bunter + magic, this is something more like Jane Austen+magic.

You can get it from your local bookshop in both black-on-white and white-on-black versions. For those who like ordering from Amazon, here’s a link or click on the picture above. This is part of Amazon’s associate program, under which I get a miniscule cut, marking my first tentative venture into blog commercialisation. I believe some people have made enough out of this to afford to buy a book for themselves.

More generational garbage

John Quiggin14 Comments

Talking in terms of generations (Baby Boomers, X, Y and so forth) is so intellectually lazy that it seems to give practitioners a license to turn their brains off, and speak almost entirely at random. Still, even at its worst, there has normally been some sort of attempt to keep the dates straight. But how about this piece from Bernard Salt of KPMG? Focusing on Generation Y, born over the 15 years to 1991, Salt says Generation Y is too hip for the Boomer humor of “Hey Hey, it’s Saturday” and goes on to observe “Generation Y humour is best encapsulated in Seinfeld.”

So Generation Y is “encapsulated” by a show about neurotic, self-absorbed boomers[1] that started its run when they were still being born (1989), and showed its last episode at at time (1998) when lots of them were more interested in collecting Pokemon cards than in watching sitcoms.

I don’t know why Salt is bothering with poor old Ozzie Ostrich. On this dating system, he could identify the boomers with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, or for that matter with Lily Langtry and Lola Montez. Will no-one ever call a halt to this nonsense?

fn1.Seinfeld was born in 1954, three years after Daryl Somers