In my last post on the American Enterprise Institute, I lumped Charles Murray in with James Glassman, Karl Zinsmeister and Lynne Cheney, as someone who had contributed to the loss of the AEI’s reputation for scholarship (John Lott, the main subject of the post is in a class of his own). Regular reader Jack Strocchi objected, and I thought that this would be a good time to set out my views on Murray, and more particularly on The Bell Curve with Richard Herrnstein, which is, I think, his most significant work.

The Bell Curve got a thorough hammering on statistical grounds when it came out (this Heckman review is one of the more favorable but is still pretty damning. But the thing that most annoyed me when I read it was their discussion of the Flynn effect, namely that average scores on IQ tests have risen steadily over time, by amounts sufficient to wipe out the differences between racial groups on which Murray and Herrnstein rely. As Thomas Sowell points out in this review (reproduced by Brad de Long), it’s hard to see how any claim that differences in IQ test scores observed in Western societies are mostly due to genetic factors can stand up in the face of this observation. But Murray and Herrnstein slide straight past it, saying that they are concerned with contemporary inequality not with time trends. This is about as reasonable as a “nurturist” deciding to ignore twin studies on the grounds that most people aren’t twins.

Update Marginal revolution and Aranda Blog have more on the Flynn effect. And Brad de Long says “pretty damning” is too kind a description of Heckman’s review. He prefers “the impeccably right-wing Jim Heckman flayed Murry and Herrnstein alive and hung their skins on his office door”.
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The tireless Tim Lambert exposes yet more sociopathic behavior from pro-gun economist John Lott. This time it’s yet another sock puppet who, among other things gives Lott’s books glowing reviews on Amazon. (I won’t document Lott’s long rap sheet on this kind of thing, but Tim’s blog has all the details).

Various people have been asking how Lott manages to keep his job at the American Enterprise Institute. Given that this outfit now houses Karl Zinsmeister, James Glassman, Charles Murray, Lynne Cheney and others, I think the more relevant question is how the few remaining legitimate scholars left over from the days when AEI was a reputable, if conservative, institution can justify their continuing ties.

But it is interesting to ask why so few individual conservatives and libertarians have dumped Lott. Michelle Malkin did so at the time of the Mary Rosh expose (and copped a nasty review from one of Lott’s sock puppets as a result), and of course the expose itself was due to the work of Julian Sanchez.

But Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, who led the charge against Lott’s liberal counterpart Bellisles, is still saying “all this is way too complex for me” (check the comments thread here at Calpundit, and his attitude appears to be far more representative.

Update The Glenn Reynolds comment was too good to be true, and was someone taking the mickey (see comment by Tim L). Still, it’s a pretty fair summary of Reynolds’ position.

Comment on the Russian election outcome has been almost universally negative. This is not surprising when you look at the winners – a government party whose only platform is to support Putin and an opposition party deliberately confected by Putin’s cronies to ensure a tame parliament.

You get a rather different perspective if you look at the main losers – the Communists, Zhirinovsky’s bizarrely misnamed Liberal Democrats and two parties owned by kleptocrats – Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces*. All of them are discredited, and there is no prospect of a serious opposition emerging until they are gone.

It’s certainly true that the next Parliament won’t represent any sort of check on Putin and that this isn’t good for democracy, but the situation is not obviously worse, in this respect, than say, Britain under Thatcher. Of course, Putin could use the situation to entrench a dictatorship. It seems more likely though, that he will rig the situation further to his advantage, but not so much so as to be able to resist a popular and coherent opposition when it finally emerges. Again, the parallel with Thatcher is apposite.

* The Union of Right Forces is openly pro-kleptocrat, and is run by the architect of kleptocracy Anatoly Chubais . Yabloko and its leader Gregory Yavlinsky are more appealing but the party is deeply in hock to leading kleptocrat Khodorkovsky, who recently ran afoul of Putin. (spelling/transliteration corrections welcome).

One of the reasons privatisation has pretty much halted in the English-speaking countries is that obvious failures have become more common as governments have moved on to the harder cases. In the UK, the last three big privatisations were the breakup and sale of British Rail under the Tories and the part privatisation of air traffic control and the London Underground by the Blair government (more particularly Chancellor Gordon Brown).

The rail breakup/privatisation is universally recognised as a disaster and is being gradually reversed. Now the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee has reported that the air traffic control privatisation should never have happened. Looking at the troubles of the Underground, it’s a safe bet that similar findings will be made when this deal is reviewed.

One of the Grand Young Men of Australian blogging, Gareth Parker has announced that he is going over to other side with the offer of a cadetship from the West Australian. Well done!

Under the rules that seem to have evolved, it’s OK for columnists (like me) to have blogs, but not for real journalists, so it looks as if Gareth’s blog “My Two Cents” is no more. It was one I enjoyed a lot, and was an important part of my corner of the blogworld, particularly back in the early days (2002, that is).

Another loss is Stewart Kelly who has apparently succumbed to the ailment all bloggers fear most, getting a life.

Meanwhile there are more arrivals than I can keep up with, so I’ll defer introductions until I get time for an update of the blogroll – soon I hope.

Regular reader James Farrell has asked me to launch a competition with an appealing prize. He says

John, can I have your permission to hold a competition?*

I was just recruited to give a ninety-minute talk in Krakow in January on the Australian Economy.

What the hell am I going to say?

The question: what are the five most important and/or interesting things about the Australian economy from a Polish point of view? Keep it very brief: I don’t need you to write the lecture for me.

I should stress that I’m not getting paid for the talk, apart from an airfare from Budapest.

The prize is a bottle of whatever fancy Polish grog someone recommends to me. I’ll send it to you when I get back.

Entries close Friday noon. So as not to disadvantage the earlier respondents, I place no limit on the number of entries per person. But a later entry would need to be sufficiently differentiated from an earlier one by another competitor to beat it.

A ninety-minute talk! Those Poles must really have some Sitzfleisch.

Via NZPundit via Professor Bunyip via Technorati, I’ve tracked down the study by the New Zealand Land Transport Safety Authority (PDF file) which formed the basis of the estimate that higher speed limits in the US cost 1900 lives.

The study looks at states which had a highway limit of 65mph (about 110 km/h) in 1995, at which time this was the maximum allowed under the National Maximum Speed Limit. The NMSL was repealed in December 1995 and a lot of states increased the limit to 70 or 75. Over the next few years, fatality rates rose, on average, in the states that raised their limits and fell in the states that did not. The LTSA uses a statistical model to check that this wasn’t merely a random fluctuation and to correct for the most important possible source of spurious correlation, an increase in vehicle miles travelled. They find that the increase in fatalities was statistically significant – given that their estimates imply a loss of 1900 lives, it was obviously significant in the ordinary usage of the term.

NZPundit admits to a bit of confusion about the paper and in particular, the divergence between statistical estimates and predictions. To clarify this point, the estimates are those based on the actual outcomes observed in the states in question. The predictions are derived from previous studies that estimated the impact of a given increase in average speeds, and are higher than those obtained here. The suggested explanation is that, since lots of people were speeding anyway, an increase in speed limits does not translate to an equal increase in average speeds, though average speeds do increase.

Supermodel Linda Evangelista is reported to have said that “she wouldn’t get out of bed for less than 10,000 pounds”. I have a similar view regarding possible budgetary savings – if it’s less than $10 million, I’ll leave it to the Department of Finance to chase (of course, I’d probably have a different attitude if economists were paid on a commission basis).

Given my attention threshold, I was pretty impressed to read in my morning AFR that “Travelling ex-pollies cost Australia half a billion”. That looked like some money worth grabbing in my next budget review. Sad to say, it was all a subeditor’s error – the actual cost is half a million. Not only that, but the Internet edition fixed it before I could post a link.

The conference on Public-Private Partnerships I attended today gave me lots of food for thought. Perhaps most interesting was the fact that nearly all the speakers noted that the era of privatisation has passed (at least in the English-speaking countries). I’ve been pointing this out for some years now, but I missed the point when it passed from iconoclastic provocation to conventional wisdom.

It’s time, once again, for your chance to comment on any topic that takes your fancy (civilised discussion, and no coarse language, please).

My suggested discussion starter: which political party will be the next to change leaders? (I’m taking the Democrats to have changed already)