I told the witch doctor

John Quiggin8 Comments

From what I’ve seen, lie-detectors are little more than a 20th century version of methods known to witch-doctors since time immemorial. If the subject believes the witch-doctor has the power to detect lies, they will give themselves away with cues that can be picked up by an alert human or mechanical observer. So when Mike Scrafton volunteered to take a polygraph test to show that he was telling the truth and the PM was lying, I didn’t put too much weight on the results. (As a way of keeping the story alive, and dramatizing it for a big TV audience, it was great, though). I wasn’t too surprised when Howard dismissed it as a gimmick.

But following a letter in yesterday’s Fin, I’ve discovered that the Howard government actually takes lie detectors very seriously, and has been trying them out in ASIO .This is being done, at least in part,at the behest of the US

On June 25 [2002], the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, signed a new, legally binding, pact with the US to protect classified information. Although no details were spelled out in the pact, the US wants Australian officials who have access to highly classified US intelligence material to be subjected to the same polygraph tests that routinely apply to American officials.

Whatever the merits of integrated defence in general, in this case I think we’d be better off hiring some witch-doctors.

New on the website

John Quiggin2 Comments

I’ve been a bit slack about updating the website where I keep all my articles, working papers and so on. One reason is that I’ve been working on a new site for the research group I’ve been setting up as part of my Federation Fellowship (design and organisation suggestions most welcome).

In any case, I’ve just put up about six months’ worth of opinion pieces from the Fin, which you can read here Feel free to comment!

Sistani rules, OK ?

John Quiggin4 Comments

As the pointless bloodbath in Najaf drags on, Ayatollah Sistani has finally returned from hospital treatment in London, and looks likely to be the only person to come out of this disaster with any credit[1]. His march on Najaf will, it seems likely, allow Sadr and the American-Allawi forces to reach the kind of face-saving compromise that has been the only possible outcome all along, apart from the disastrous option of an assault on the shrine and the martyrdom of Sadr.

Update #1 27/8 I’ve come across a useful piece by a former Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, Larry Diamond, linked, with some interesting comments by Gary Farber Gives an account of the Coalition’s dealings with Sadr and other militias (minor snipe: Diamond uses “prevaricating” when he means “vacillating” to describe this).

Update #2 27/8 Like most people not actually on the scene who seek to be well-informed about Iraq, I’m indebted to Juan Cole for his informed comment and information on the situation. He’s just put up a post assessing the winners and losers from the Najaf situation which matches, almost point for point, what I posted yesterday. Of course, it carries a lot more weight coming from him than from me.
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McKitrick mucks it up

John Quiggin11 Comments

Late last year, the debate over climate change was stirred up when an environmental economist, Ross McKitrick and a mining executive, AndrewSteven McIntyre, published a piece claiming to refute climatological research crucial to the claim that the last few decades have seen unparalleled global warming (the ‘hockey-stick‘ paper of Mann, Bradley and Hughes). According to McKitrick and McIntyre, the work of Mann et al was riddled with errors, The paper was loudly publicised by the American Enterprise Institute (home of John Lott) and, as you would expect, Flack Central Station. Mann et al produced an immediate rebuttal, and despite many promises of a rejoinder, McKitrick and McIntyre have never responded on the substantive issues[1].

This would be par for the course, except that McKitrick somehow managed to attract the attention of Tim Lambert, famous for his demolition of Lott’s shonky research, which purported to show that guns reduce crime. The result: McKitrick’s work is even shoddier than Lott’s.

Update 27/8 I’ve had some run-ins with John Brignell of Number Watch, who generally takes a contrarian line on global warming and other environmental issues. So I emailed him pointing out this absurdity to see what would happen. I’m pleased and impressed to say he checked the numbers and posted a link almost immediately (scroll to bottom of page).
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The other deficit: Part II

John Quiggin28 Comments

In my previous post on US trade, I argued that if the current account deficit is to be stabilised at a sustainable level, the balance of trade on goods and services must return to surplus in the next decade or so. In this post, I’m going to ruIe out a soft option and argue that, while a smooth market-driven adjustment is not inconceivable, it’s unlikely.
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Deep pockets

John Quiggin2 Comments

I was checking my MT Activity logs, and was stunned to see how much comment spam I’m blocking with MT Blacklist. This got me thinking about spam in general, and led me to this article in the Kansas City Star which details the activity of a spammer selling various kinds of insurance. The money quote (literally) is

Completed forms, in turn, are sold to agents of legitimate companies, such as IndyMac Bank, ADT Security and MEGA Life and Health Insurance. The agents say they pay $3 to $7 for each referral. (emphasis added)

I can’t see anything legitimate about a company that employs criminal methods in its business, while pretending to be at arms length from the whole thing. It seems pretty clear that the way to make this kind of spam uneconomical is to make the employers of spammers liable for civil action. While I think estimates of $2000/employee, mentioned in the story, are over the top, the economic damage done by spammers is immense – more than enough to put firms like those mentioned[1] out of business if they were forced to bear their share of the bill.

Of course, this wouldn’t work so well against the purveyors of generic viagra, penis enlargement and so on, where the businesses are just as fly-by-night as the spammers. But every little helps.

UpdateCoincidentally, the NYT reports that dozens of spammers have been charged with a variety of offences

fn1. I’ve emailed one of them (IndyMac Bank) to see if they have a response to the KC Star story. If I get one, I’ll report it.

Bail for asylum-seekers

John Quiggin55 Comments

In response to previous posts on asylum seekers, various commenters have suggested that there is no alternative to our current brutal policies, including the detention of children. A striking feature of these comments is that they treat the problem as if it is utterly new and unprecedented. In fact, we have lots of experience in dealing with people subject to judicial processes (such as criminal trials) and also with unauthorised residents such as visa overstayers.

Looking first at what should be done when someone arrives in Australia without authorisation, and claims political asylum, I’d suggest the obvious model is that of bail for people accused of criminal trials. That is, asylum seekers should be allowed to remain at liberty unless it can be shown, on the balance of probabilities, that they are likely to abscond or that they represent a danger to the community/

The comments seem to take the view that this is unacceptable because, inevitably, some people will abscond. But they don’t, I assume, take the same view in relation to criminal offences. At this moment, there are thousands of people at large in Australia who have outstanding warrants for offences ranging from speeding to crimes of violence. These people represent a much greater threat to the community than do illegal immigrants. But no-one suggests that everyone charged with an offence should be locked up until they have been tried.

And even within the category of illegal immigrants, there are tens of thousands who have jumped the queue the easy way, by overstaying a tourist or student visa. Most, though not all, of these turn up in the end, but quite a few manage to squeeze into one of the legal categories, for example by marriage.

If you read the discussion of this issue from supporters of the government, the general impression is that even the slightest breach in our immigration policy would be a national catastrophe, and that to avoid such a catastrophe we are justified in the kind of extreme measures we have seen, things that would normally be rejected outright in a democratic society. This is simply untrue, as should be obvious when you consider comparable issues like bail or proceeding by summons for (alleged) criminals.

This is only part of the issue, the other part being our general policy on refugees, which I will discuss in a later post.

Karate in Brisbane

John Quiggin6 Comments

As the blog seems to have some new readers, I thought it a good time to point out yet again that if you’re in Brisbane or the Gold Coast, and want to study karate in a rigorous traditional style, you can’t do better than Seiyushin. Kancho Nagayama was the winner in the 1988 All Japan National OpenWeight Tournament, and is a great teacher. The group is friendly, and open to a wide range of ages and skill levels (roughly 5 to 50 at present), and welcoming to both men and women. Dojos are in St Lucia, Toowong and Southport.

One cheer for Costello

John Quiggin19 Comments

Peter Costello has obliquely answered the question I asked last week, in relation to the government’s brutal mistreatment of refugees in general and children in particular. He now looks forward to the end of child detention, which obviously presupposes the end of Howard’s Prime Ministership and the repudiation of his signature policy. As Tim Dunlop points out, this is a major (though unacknowledged) shift in Costello’s position. Whatever the motivation, it is welcome.

While I’m on the topic I’d like to express, yet again, my disgust at those who have endlessly parsed government lies about “children overboard” seeking to make them true by arguing that actions “morally equivalent” to throwing children overboard took place on occasions other than the one to which the lies refer. These people should never be allowed to forget that the policy these lies were used to defend is one of locking innocent children behind razor wire, in desert camps and remote islands, under inhuman conditions deliberately designed to discourage others. I can think of plenty of things to which this is morally equivalent, and they are all shameful.

Sesquicentenary

John Quiggin5 Comments

I got an article accepted in a journal today and, if my count is correct[1], it is number 150 for me. Since my first article was published in 1979, that’s an average rate of six a year, with a slowly increasing trend. It’s not a startling rate of output, given that I’ve held research-only jobs for most of those 25 years. Still, by the time you take acccount of rejections, resubmissions and so on, there’s a fair bit of work involved, and not that many people keep up the pace indefinitely.

Because I’ve been active for quite a while, and because my work doesn’t exactly fit the mainstream mould in either policy content or analytical style[2], I’ve accumulated a lot of rejection letters, more than anyone else I know of, in fact. My records aren’t good enough for a complete tally, but I’ve certainly had several hundred rejections – I once got three on one day. Some papers have been rejected half a dozen times or more before finding a home. This isn’t quite as bad as it sounds. Most high-grade journals in economics have rejection rates of 90 per cent or more, which implies the average paper must be rejected pretty often.

On a happier note, I’ve covered a lot of different topics and used a range of different approaches to economics, more than most of my colleagues. For example, I’m pretty sure I’m the only person who’s published in both the Journal of Mathematical Economics and the (institutionalist) Journal of Economic Issues

fn1. I publish a fair bit of policy stuff, and there’s sometimes a bit of doubt as to whether the resulting paper counts as “refereed”. I usually err on the side of caution, but there are always marginal cases.

fn2. A lot of the time, it’s not so much that I’m challenging mainstream orthodoxy in a broad sense as that I don’t like the established way of doing this in some particular subfield, such as principal-agent theory.