What I'm reading and doing

John Quiggin7 Comments

I’ve spent most of the weekend at our annual karate training camp. As a result, I’m both stiff and bruised, but still, a good time was had by all. The camp was at Tallebudgera, one of the most pleasant places on the Gold Coast. We stayed at the Recreation Centre there, which has been extensively, and expensively, upgraded since last year. The 1950s bunkrooms are gone. The new ones are much brighter and airier, and include their own bathrooms as well as what appeared to be Internet ports, though I didn’t have any capacity to check on this. The other main essential has been dealt with, as the centre now has a cafe. The high point of the weekend, after some rugged training on the beach was to walk past a tree full of rainbow lorikeets – I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many so close.

Although most of the non-training time was spent sleeping, I managed to get a bit of reading done, finishing Gil Merom’s book on democracies and small wars (on which more soon), Tiffin and Gittins How Australia Compares and Stephen Bell’s The Money Mandarins

, certain to be the standard work on the Reserve Bank for years to come.

Fertility and partnering

John Quiggin43 Comments

There’s been a bit of discussion of fertility issues in comments threads. Rather than present a view of my own, which I’m still refining, I’ll point readers to a paper by coming out of the Monash Uni Centre for Population and Urban Research, and commissioned by the Australian Family Association[1]. Here’s the blurb. As I read it, the central theme is a causal chain from economic reform to less secure employment for men with low education to low rates of partnering to lower fertility. The paper gives some good evidence on the later links in the chain, while assuming the earler ones. I don’t have a problem with this, since I think it’s clear that there has been a general increase in economic insecurity, though it rises and falls over the economic cycle.

I’m less concerned than the authors, and some commentators on this blog, about declining aggregate fertility levels. But I think the study makes a strong case that economic insecurity is producing a society in which central life goals like having a family are out of reach for (or at least not attained by) an increasing proportion of the population.

fn1. The AFA is a socially conservative lobby group, which is very concerned about things like cloning and the “gay agenda”. As with all such groups, it’s necessary to apply an appropriate level of scepticism. But in my reading of the Monash study, I haven’t noticed any obvious signs that the research has been slanted to fit a particular agenda.

Responsibility, part2

John Quiggin1 Comment

In an earlier post , I suggested it was startling to find that the Daily Mirror has more stringent standards of personal responsibility than the Blair government in relation to the dissemination of falsehoods about the war in Iraq Looking at parallel cases in the US[1], Jack Shafer at Slate is surprised but in the opposite way, saying that until NYT editor Bill Keller publishes an apology for the bogus WMD reports published by Judith Miller

we’ll be occupying a bizarro world in which the secretary of state is more accountable than the New York Times.

Pardon my naive idealism, but isn’t the government in a democratic society supposed to more accountable than any newspaper. Still, it does seem rather alternate-universe that the Daily Mirror should be the only actor in this whole drama to uphold traditional standards of responsibility.
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Howard channels Whitlam

John Quiggin14 Comments

John Howard is a well-known admirer of Gough Whitlam,so it’s not surprising to see him returning to one of Gough’s favourite centralist themes

Mr Howard said this week that the federal system was being undermined by bickering between the states and Canberra.

He was angered by repeated claims by the states that they were being underfunded when they were receiving more money courtesy of the goods and services tax.

“I don’t think our present system, federal system, is working all that well,” he said.

“I think if we were starting a country all over again we’d have a national government and a whole series of regional governments – we wouldn’t have states if we were starting all over again; but we’re not, so that’s quite academic.”

Unfortunately, Gough and John are both wrong on this one. If we started completely from scratch, we might have some different state boundaries, or perhaps an extra state in North Queensland, but with these modest qualifications, the Australian states are natural political units. I’ll try and do a longer post on this.

That said, I’m glad to see that the government is once again floating the idea that the Commonwealth should take over the entire health system. If, in return, the Feds got out of the school sector, we’d have a much more manageable division of responsibilities. buy zyvox

Australia and Abu Ghraib

John Quiggin5 Comments

Although Australia, as part of the Coalition that invaded Iraq, has a general responsibility for the actions of the occupying forces, it’s been generally assumed that we don’t have any direct involvement with the Abu Ghraib prison/interrogation centre/torture chamber. So it’s disturbing, to put it mildly, to find that the front man for the Abu Ghraib operation appears to be Captain Mark Doggett, an Australian army officer and press officer for the Coalition forces.

Doggett is quoted here, for example, in a piece by Deroy Murdock in the National Review Online, the general tenor of which is that we need more and better torture if we’re going to win the war on terror. Doggett doesn’t say this, or anything like it, himself, but he clearly has the job of defending the operations of Abu Ghraib and minimising the crimes committed there, thereby providing ammunition for the likes of Murdock. As another example, he’s quoted here , defending a decision to exclude human rights groups from the first of the Abu Ghraib trial.

I’d like to know something about the conditions under which Doggett holds this job. To whom is he answerable? In particular, are his statements endorsed by the Australian government? If so, is not Australia just as responsible as the US for conditions at Abu Ghraib? If not, how does it come about that an Australian army officer is a spokesman for a foreign government? buy sinequan

Two envelopes

John Quiggin7 Comments

Via Juan at Philosophy617 (who doesn’t think much of the proffered solutions, and probably won’t like this one) I came back to this version of the two-envelope problem put forward by Brian over at Crooked Timber last year.

In this case, once you observe that Brian’s angel is giving you faulty theology, it’s easy to show that you should reject his[1] mathematics, and his offer. At the end of the problem, the angel says “It’s purgatory,” says the angel, “take all the time you want.” But the whole point of Purgatory is that it’s finite – you purge off your sins one at a time until they’re all paid off. Since we now have a finite problem, the solution is straightforward.
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The Shanahan spin

John Quiggin4 Comments

As Crikey points out, Dennis Shanahan does his best to find the good news in the Newspolls showing general public rejection of the Budget. I was particularly struck by this bit

After last year’s budget, which included a $5-a-week across-the-board tax cut, 15per cent of people said they would be personally better off and 32per cent said they would be worse off.

This year, almost twice as many people said they would be better off and only 22per cent said they believed they would be worse off.

This is all true. The only problem is that last year, Shanahan reported on the results of the same poll, and also found it to be good news for the government. How did he manage this, given the awful results? Simple. He reported that 53 per cent of voters thought the Budget would make them better off or no worse off .(emphasis added)

Can wars be won ?

John Quiggin19 Comments

I’m reading How Democracies Lose Small Wars by Gil Merom. The main thesis is that domestic unwillingness to countenance brutality has caused democracies to lose small wars against militarily inferior insurgent movements since 1945. To make the argument, it’s necessary to show that, when these pressures weren’t so severe, victory in war generally went to the stronger party.

Merom presents a number of examples including the Athenian destruction of Melos, Cromwell’s war in Ireland, the Roman suppression of the Jewish revolt, German operations in SW Africa, Saddam vs the Kurds and Shiites, China and Tibet, Indonesia and East Timor and the Germans and Japanese in World War II. Merom argues that, in all these cases, unscrupulous brutality proved successful.

Yet in every case cited by Merom, a long-term view yields the opposite outcome. The Athenians lost the war and their hegemonic power, as of course did the Germans and Japanese in World War II. Ireland, East Timor and Israel are independent states, identifying in each case with the side described by Merom as the losers – Tibet isn’t yet, but I’m happy to predict it will become so. And then, of course, there’s Saddam.
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