With some excellent help from Pat Kelly (aka theMacGuy pkelly@themacguy.com.au if you are in Canberra and have any Mac tech support needs) I’m back on air. Things may be a bit flaky for a while, but seminormal blogging should be restored soon.

Tony Blair likes to be thought of as a ‘moderniser’. So it’s startling to see that, on a basic constitutional issue, his position is identical to that held by Australian reactionaries in the 19th century, namely that the Upper House should be nominated and not elected. Athough there are some differences between Blair’s position and that of the Australian opponents of democracy, they are minor and not all in Blair’s favour.

To begin with, it’s fair to concede that, relative to the starting point of a largely hereditary Upper House, almost any change would be an improvement. Proposals for a hereditary peerage in Australia, mainly put forward by WC Wentworth were laughed out of existence as a bunyip aristocracy, but Wentworth’s fallback position under which members were appointed for life was successful. This is, as far as I can tell, exactly the model proposed by Tony Blair. Similar models were adopted in other states.

A notable difference between Blair and Wentworth is that Wentworth wanted to constrain the democratically elected lower house, which he feared might undertake radical action, whereas Blair wants to avoid any check on the power of the House of Commons. But given that most recent British governments have had the support of less than 40 per cent of the electorate and that Blair opposes any reform to the electoral system for the Commons, it seems likely that an elected Upper House would be more democratically representative than the Lower House. The differences between Wentworth and Blair are marginal, at best. Moreover, even if Wentworth’s proposals were stacked in favour of his own social class, the idea that government should be subject to checks and balances is a sound one.

In Australia, the struggle for democratic election of both Houses of Parliament commenced with self-government and has continued for 150 years. Queensland Labor took the direct route, packing the Upper House with an appointed ‘suicide squad’ who voted themselves out of existence, but this cleared the way to a series of Lower House gerrymanders introduced first by Labor and then adopted and extended by the conservatives.

In the other states, progress has been gradual and mixed, but the ultimate outcome seems likely to be the same everywhere – an Upper House elected by proportional representation, with a term twice that of the Lower House and no power to overturn the government by blocking money bills.

This is, in my view, an excellent compromise, giving a legislature that is at least partly independent of the executive while maintaining the principal that the executive is responsible to the legislature.

Of course, these merits are precisely why Blair doesn’t support democratic reform. He doesn’t want any parliamentary check on the power of the executive government – in practice the PM. If he were honest, he’d advocate abolition of the House of Lords and not reform. If he were really honest, he’d advocate an elective dictatorship.

Victoria suffered less road deaths in 2003 than in any year since 1949. Both NSW and Queensland also experienced a decline relative to 2002, though 2001 was better still, at least in NSW. In total, about 100 people are alive today who would have been dead if safety had not improved.

As is shown by the contrasting experience of the United States, where road deaths are rising, the long decline in the road toll is primarily due to tighter law enforcement with additional contributions from better roads and cars, and improvements in emergency treatment of people injured in crashes.

Of course, even in the face of decades of evidence, there are plenty who want to quibble.

Among my standard New Year resolutions for quite a few years has been to work on my weight training to the point where I can bench-press my own weight. When I moved to Brisbane, I decided to tackle this seriously by getting a home gym setup (it only costs the same as year’s membership in a commercial gym), and I’ve been working pretty steadily all year.

At the end of 2003, I’d reached my original goal – 72kg. Sad to say, however, a visit to the scales revealed that, in the years since I first made this resolution, the goalposts had shifted, and I am still quite a few kilos short of my objective. I suspect continuation of my original strategy will keep me in the position of Achilles chasing the tortoise, so this years resolution will have to include “get on your bike”.

However, although lycra-clad cyclists whizz past my door every morning, I find summer in Brisbane a bit hot for daytime cycling, so I may have to substitute swimming for the moment.

Alert readers will notice that I haven’t mentioned the D-word. I don’t plan to, either.

Looking around Ozplogistan, I have two contradictory impressions. On the one hand, the place is so busy and exciting that it’s impossible to keep up with everything that’s going on, let alone to keep the blogroll up to date. For example, I only just realised that I’d left out Tim Lambert and Chris Sheil.

On the other hand, I look around and wonder “where is everybody?”. In the last year or so, most of those I regarded at the time as constituting “my corner of the blogosphere” have moved on. Don Arthur was the first to give the game away, and despite some incisive comments here and there, he hasn’t been lured back. Jason Soon and Ken Parish have both taken a back seat in the collective blogs they founded – I still read both regularly, but with less occasion for cross-linking and debate. More recently, Gareth Parker and Scott Wickstein have taken indefinite breaks. Of my old inner circle, only Rob Corr and Tim Dunlop are still going strong (Rob Schaap continues his tradition of erratic, but often brilliant, blogging).

I guess this says something about the time and energy required for blogging. When big life events come along, or when you just get tired, blogging is an obvious candidate for cutbacks. It looks as though the average lifespan for a blog may turn out to be something like eighteen months (coincidentally or not, almost exactly the combined age of this blog and its predecessor).

However, I’m still having fun, and plan to keep on blogging. I’m still thinking about changes in the setup, maybe including a change of name, and I may make more contributions to group blogs, but the basic pattern isn’t going to change any time soon.

I realise I haven’t mentioned commenters yet, but you are a vital part of blogging for me, especially as the blogosphere becomes more diverse and diffuse. So thanks everyone for another great year of comments

Happy New Year (a day or two early) to everybody!

At this time of year, I tend to lose track of what day it is. But I belatedly realise it’s Monday and time for your comments on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please).

Elaine Showalter is, as far as I can tell, the US equivalent of Germaine Greer, so it would be foolish to take anything she says too seriously. Still, I was struck by this observation, in passing, in a piece claiming that the notion of “public intellectual” has passed its sell-by date (a typical metaphor for this shopaholic feminist)

Anybody can complain, blog and find fault; the real intellectual might try to solve problems.

Kevin Drum sees the deal with Qaddafi as a victory for the ‘Bush doctrine’, saying

there are downsides to the Bush Doctrine, lots of them, and that’s why I don’t support it. But there are also upsides, and Libya’s transformation appears to be one of them. Acknowledging that doesn’t make you soft on Bush, it just means you’re willing to acknowledge the obvious.

As I hinted a few days ago, I don’t see this at all.

The Qaddafi deal is a win for what might be called the Blair 2002 doctrine, namely that governments that hold WMDs and threaten the world should be forced to disarm, with the threat of invasion, and to submit to unrestricted inspection. As applied to Iraq, this produced UN resolution 1441 and Saddam’s capitulation, admitting the UN inspectors and declaring (truthfully as we now know) that he had destroyed all his weapons. According to the Blair 2002 doctrine, Saddam should then have received the same treatment as Qaddafi is getting now. The war, according to the Blair 2002 doctrine, was at best, an honest mistake.

The Bush doctrine, usually referred to in terms of pre-emptive action, is that governments hostile to the US should be overthrown. According to this doctrine, a deal that left Saddam in power, but contained, was never acceptable. (This point has been pushed harder since the failure to find WMDs.) But of course, this is precisely the deal that Qaddafi has been given.

It’s true that Bush briefly embraced the Blair 2002 doctrine. But this was a purely tactical move, based on the incorrect expectation that Saddam would supply a satisfactory pretext to secure UN support and cover Blair and the correct calculation that even a patently bogus pretext would be enough to drag Blair along in the end.

(A repost from my visit to Crooked Timber).

In a couple of recent posts, Matt Yglesias has raised the question of how consequentialists should handle “other-regarding” preferences. He gives two examples. The first is about the possible execution of Saddam Hussein

My own take on the punishment issue leads to a somewhat paradoxical result. … If Iraqis would feel better with him executed, then go for it…
I like to think of this as a wise and sophisticated point of view, but the trouble is that my preferences depend on other people’s preferences. As long as not very many people agree with me, that’s fine, but if some huge portion of the world were to decide I was right, then you’d wind up with an unfortunate self-reference paradox. Sadly, consequentialist attitudes tend to have these kind of results and I think that if I were smarter I would dedicate my life to resolving the problems.

The second is about the preferences of people who are repulsed by overtly gay behavior. Matt concludes that their preferencesmust be counted, although they should be argued against.

This is an issue of considerable practical interest to resource and environmental economists, because of the popularity of stated preference methods for evaluating public goods such as environmental preservation. I find these methods problematic and one big problem is the treatment of other-regarding preferences.

This is why I have an article on the topic in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, (PDF and algebra alert). Not, I imagine the kind of journal that philosophers like Matt read with any regularity
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Via David Appell, this statement from the American Geophysical Union confirming the reality of global warming. The statement says

that human activities — most notably the greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other industries — are warming Earth’s climate at a faster rate than ever.

A particularly noteworthy signatory is John Christy. director of the University of Alabama’s Earth Systems Science Center. While noting that he is

“still a strong critic of scientists who make catastrophic predictions of huge increases in global temperatures and tremendous rises in sea levels.

Christy says

It is scientifically inconceivable that after changing forests into cities, turning millions of acres into farmland, putting massive quantities of soot and dust into the atmosphere and sending quantities of greenhouse gases into the air, that the natural course of climate change hasn’t been increased in the past century.

Christy’s statement, the strongest I’ve seen from him, is significant because he’s been one of the handful of reputable scientists whose work (on satellite measurements of temperatures in the upper atmosphere) and public statements have tended to support the denialist position that is propagated by the legion of “junk science” sites in the blogosphere. Over time, corrections to interpretation of the satellite data have produced a rising trend, similar to that found in measurements of temperature on the ground, rather than the declining trend reported in Christy’s early work.

That leaves Richard Lindzen as, to the best of my knowledge, the only reputable climate scientist still willing to say that the reality of human-caused global warming hasn’t been proved beyond reasonable doubt, and even Lindzen has been pretty quiet lately.

Of course, that’s not a problem for the global warming denialists. They don’t need reputable climate scientists to create the appearance of disagreement; they’re happy to accept the claims of anyone with a PhD after their name, or even without, as long as it supports their position. Currently their leading authorities on the recent history of the global climate are two astrophysicists (Baliunas and Soon), an economist (McKitrick) and a retired mining executive (McIntyre), but they’re happy to rely on astrologers if they give the right answer.