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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What I'm reading

John Quiggin1 Comment

The Small House at Allington

by Trollope. I’ve always found this the least satisfying of the Barsetshire novels, defying the conventions of the “happy-ending” romantic novel, but without the Romantic desperation of, say, the Brontes. When her fiancee, Adolphus Crosbie dumps her, as a result of the discovery that her expected inheritance will not be forthcoming, the heroine, Lily Dale, does not, as would be expected in a romantic novel, accept the man who truly loves her, but abandons all hope of marriage. But the introduction to the Folio edition, by Margaret Markwick, supplies the missing motivation, arguing that the real meaning of the text is that Lily had a full sexual relationship with Crosbie, regarding herself as his wife from the moment of their engagement. Hence, in line with romantic convention, she can never marry again.

Of course, Trollope couldn’t say this explicitly, or even in a generally-accepted code, but Markwick suggests that at least some of his Victorian readers would have got the point. By contrast, we expect, nowadays, to have such things spelt out for us.

What I'm reading

John Quiggin1 Comment

The Small House at Allington

by Trollope. I’ve always found this the least satisfying of the Barsetshire novels, defying the conventions of the “happy-ending” romantic novel, but without the Romantic desperation of, say, the Brontes. When her fiancee, Adolphus Crosbie dumps her, as a result of the discovery that her expected inheritance will not be forthcoming, the heroine, Lily Dale, does not, as would be expected in a romantic novel, accept the man who truly loves her, but abandons all hope of marriage. But the introduction to the Folio edition, by Margaret Markwick, supplies the missing motivation, arguing that the real meaning of the text is that Lily had a full sexual relationship with Crosbie, regarding herself as his wife from the moment of their engagement. Hence, in line with romantic convention, she can never marry again.

Of course, Trollope couldn’t say this explicitly, or even in a generally-accepted code, but Markwick suggests that at least some of his Victorian readers would have got the point. By contrast, we expect, nowadays, to have such things spelt out for us.

The Voice of Yoof, Part 2

John Quiggin3 Comments

Optimization Prime is a new group blog. The pun in the title, presumably due to Justin Gundlach should be self-explanatory to members of Gen Y and their parents- the members of the group are all in the former category, I think. My biggest criticism is that comments don’t appear to have been implemented yet, though this should be easy in what looks like a Movable Type set.

Among some interesting posts, Maggie McConnell cites a report that Hallmark is developing a line of greeting cards for gay weddings. This raises a more general point about capitalism as a solvent of traditional social order, going back at least to Schumpeter, which I’ll try to develop some other time.

Computers and convergence

John Quiggin4 Comments

When I first studied economics ( a long, long time ago) the textbook explanation of why income differed between countries was based on capital. In the simplest version (for example, that of Harrod and Domar), rich countries had a bigger stock of capital than poor countries, and the problem was one of accumulating sufficient capital to catch up. In more sophisticated versions, rich countries had more modern capital stocks, and therefore benefited from embodied technological progress.

Even when I was a student, this kind of thinking was already being superseded by notions such as human capital theory [1]. Still, I’ve never seen a really convincing refutation. It strikes me that computers and the Internet provide one, at least as far as differences among developed countries are concerned.
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Reinventing the wheel in social network theory

John Quiggin10 Comments

I was thinking idly about Erdos numbers, and it suddenly struck me that I could easily prove the necessity of a couple of ‘stylised facts'[1] about the associated networks. It’s well-known that the collaboration network for mathematicians contains one big component, traditionally derived by starting with Pal Erdos. The same is true of the network generated by sexual relationships. Although there is no generally agreed starting point here, it is a sobering thought that a relatively short chain would almost certainly connect most of us with both George Bush and Saddam Hussein.
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Zarqawi again

John Quiggin5 Comments

The report that abu Musab al-Zarqawi personally committed the brutal murder of Nicholas Berg raises a number of thoughts for me. The murder and the knowledge of its videotape were bad enough (I’ve seen the still photos published in the papers, but have not looked for the video or for photos showing the actual murder). Giving the murderer a name seems to make things even worse, though it’s hard to say why this should be. There are, though, some important issues that need to be raised.
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Children are the future*

John Quiggin19 Comments

Turning from the short-term politics of the budget, what does it do for Australia’s long-run future? At least one commentator has raised this question, and I’ve been asked in other contexts, so it’s probably time to organise my thoughts.

Most of the discussion of long-term issues has been framed by the Treasury Reports on Intergenerational Equity, which have not been very satisfactory. They’ve done their analysis primarily in terms of the “aging of the population”, which leads to a focus on retirement incomes and nursing homes. The retirement income problem is much overblown, as many analysts have pointed out. Health care is an issue but, as I’ll argue in a later post, thinking about it in terms of an aging population is highly misleading.

More importantly, this way of looking at the problem leads Treasury to ignore education almost entirely[1]. After all, if you’re thinking in terms of an aging population, it’s natural to ignore kids. But in reality the demographic change we’re looking at includes not only an increase in the length of lifetime but an extension of the initial period in which education is the main activity. Statistics on “working-age population” typically look at people aged 15-65. But in the current economy, the age at which people typically begin their first “real” job (as opposed to part-time jobs in conjunction with school or uni) is now in the early 20s. A substantial increase in education, along with a need for steadily higher standards, is going to cost a lot of money.
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Too clever by half ?

John Quiggin15 Comments

That’s my view of Costello in general[1]. And I think it may be true of the election budget he brought down on Tuesday night. The tight targeting of large lumps of cash was fairly transparent, and made it easy for Labor to get coverage for the converse observation, that lots of people, and crucial government services got nothing. The Courier-Mail is about as negative as I’ve ever seen in the immediate wake of a budget, running photo stories on a low-income student who gets nothing, and a mother-of-two who says the whole thing is a “vote-buying exercise”. The Oz has a series of negative stories.

Howard actually gets a better run in the Fairfax press, with both the SMH and the Fin running on a blunder made by Latham, who mistakenly said he wouldn’t benefit from the Budget (as a high-income earner he gets a tax cut). But this is the kind of story, beloved by journalists, that leaves the general public cold. The only time this kind of thing has any impact is when the person concerned is already on the ropes.

It’s now up to Latham to make a convincing response. He doesn’t need to present an alternative Budget but he does not some concrete alternatives. A good starting point would be promising to wind back the tax cuts for the top 20 per cent of income-earners, in order to fund an across-the-board reduction. I’m pleased to see that this is still on the table.

Update

Latham’s reply seems to me to have hit most of the right points.

More significantly, perhaps the Channel 9 news ran a story on Labor’s promise to fund pneumococcal vaccine, which had the government playing catch-up. This news story isn’t nearly as damaging as the version I saw on TV. but the government is faced with a nasty choice here. I can’t recall an instance where a Budget decision has been changed, during Budget week and in response to Opposition pressure, but that’s what looks like happening. The fact that Costello rolled Abbott (who lobbied for the vaccine funding) in the Budget process only makes the whole thing more piquant.

fn1. I’m sure quite a few people would have the same view of me. But if it takes one to know one, this only strengthens my assessment of Costello.