Request for help

John Quiggin5 Comments

For an academic, one of the great things about blogging is the help it provides on questions I would otherwise spend a lot of time trying to answer (I hope those readers who act as unpaid research assistants from time to time feel they are getting fair value from my efforts on the blog) .

I’m currently in need of some suggestions. I’ve posted a few excerpts of my chapter on economic policy under Howard (it’s for a book to be edited by Robert Manne), and I need to give some suggestions for further reading, accessible to that elusive character, the general intelligent reader. I’d say the readers of this blog come as close as anyone I’m likely to find in this respect. Any suggestions? Books would probably be preferred, but articles in easily accessible journals would also be OK.

Politic religion

John Quiggin10 Comments

Writing in Slate, blogger Mark Kleiman demolishes a report from the University of Pennsylvania claiming that faith-based programs reduce recidivism among prisoners. In essence, the report compared ‘graduates’ of the program with a control population, disregarding the larger group who failed to complete the program satisfactorily for various reasons. When the entire program group is compared to the control group they actually had slightly higher rates of recidivism (not a statistically or substantively significant difference though).

This is a striking outcome for a couple of reasons. First, as Kleiman notes,

You don’t have to believe in faith-healing to think that an intensive 16-month program, with post-release follow-up, run by deeply caring people might be the occasion for some inmates to turn their lives around.

Lots of programs of all kinds are strikingly successful when run, in pilot form, by deeply committed people with particular skills but fail when replicated on a larger scale.

In addition, though, you don’t have to believe in God to believe that faith-healing might work. There’s a long tradition, exemplified by Plato, Machiavelli and more recently by Leo Strauss in which religious or pseudo-religious belief is held to be good for the masses regardless of its truth or falsity. (I recollect the phrase “politic religion” in this context, but Google doesn’t show any links that would support this.)

While I would argue that the long-run effects of the kind deception recommended by Plato and Strauss are invariably pernicious, I would not have been surprised to find it effective in the short run. It’s easy to imagine that a promise of eternal salvation would help in supporting a desire to reform, particularly if you take the view that convicted criminals are typically not rational optimizers. So the results are something of a surprise to me.

UpdateThe Blog Geist being what it is, I am now noticing lots of references to the topic of politic/civic/pragmatic religion popping up. I liked this one from Stentor Danielson who argues that the social benefits of Jesus’ teaching do not depend on general belief that he actually existed.

In the comments thread, Mark Kleiman makes the intriguing claim that Plato’s advocacy of the “Noble Lie” was intended satirically. He says

After all, if you were going to tell fairy-tales hoping that they would be believed, you wouldn’t publish a document explaining that they were in fact fairy-tales.

My view is that Plato held an esoteric/exoteric distinction similar to that of Strauss and assumed that anyone literate enough to read his work was on the esoteric side of the divide.

OTOH, Kleiman’s argument points up how bad Plato’s political judgement was – the same is true of Machiavelli and Strauss. If you think lying and cheating in the service of good ends is desirable, the last thing you should do is say so.

Maybe there are some real philosophers reading this who would like to give a better-informed view on these topics.

I expected this, but not so soon

John Quiggin2 Comments

Via Keneth Miles (and a string of others, leading back to Bill Maher), this report says that anti-terrorism laws are already being used in ordinary criminal cases, with the theory that “drugs are chemical weapons” being used to indict someone accused of making methamphetamines on a charge of “manufacturing a nuclear or chemical weapon”.

The accused, facing 10 years to life, should count himself lucky. He could have been seized as an enemy combatant, held incommunicado and executed by a military tribunal. Of course, if this had happened, the Administration would not have had to tell anybody about it.

Error bars

John Quiggin4 Comments

This report in the Guardian cites leading leftwing thinktank the Institute of Public Policy Research as saying that, according to the latest research at the Hadley Centre for Climate Change, the likely change in temperature by 2100 (under business as usual) will be 8 degrees C, as against ‘consensus’ estimates ranging from 1 to 5 degrees C . The argument is apparently based on claims that CO2 stored in the soil will be released with rising temperatures, producing a positive feedback.

I haven’t followed this up, and it seems surprising that such an obvious mechanism should have been overlooked. So I’m not suggesting that this report should be regarded as reliable. Rather, I want to use this report to illustrate a point I’ve made previously.

A lot of critics of Kyoto argue that, since there’s a lot of uncertainty about the estimates produced by the Intergovernmental Panel and Climate Change and similar bodies, we should ‘wait and see’. These critics tend to pounce on any study that produces an estimate lower than the consensus range to bolster their case.

This neglects the fact that uncertainty goes both ways. There’s a nonzero probability that the rate of warming could be lower than the range suggested by the best available estimates, but it’s equally possible that the rate could be higher. The best available estimates suggest we should do something now (Kyoto) and prepare to do a lot more in the future unless we get a favorable surprise.

In the case of global warming uncertainty actually strengthens the case for action because the damage costs are convex. That is, an increase of 4 degrees will do more than twice as much damage than an increase of 2 degrees and an increase of 8 degrees (the IPPR estimate cited above) would be utterly catastrophic. So, the more uncertainty there is, the stronger the case for action.

When there’s a lot of uncertainty, the important thing is not so much immediate action to reduce emissions as the creation of institutions and mechanisms that will allow large reductions to be made in future. With all its imperfections, the Kyoto agreement is the only process that offers any possibility of progress in this respect.

Don't worry, be happy

John Quiggin20 Comments

I’m a worrier. I worry about the economy, global warming, cancer, even about whether life has any meaning. But now, thanks to the guys over at Troppo Armadillo*, most of my worries are over. Reading the ‘always excellent‘ Junk Science site run by Steven Milloy, I’ve learned that

How did I come to get the wrong idea on all these questions? Well, it turns out that the National Academy of Sciences, Environmental Protection Authority, Intergovenmental Panel on Climate Change, NASA and a host of individual scientists are engaged in a vast leftwing conspiracy to alarm and deceive us.

Only a handful of scientists have had the courage to resist this conspiracy. They can be recognised by the fact that they are typically affiliated with right-thinking think tanks like the Cato Institute (where Milloy works) and prefer to publish their work with Fox News (‘we report, you decide’), rather than in corrupt journals like Science and Nature, where ‘referees’ from the scientific establishment censor the truth. Fortunately, their work is now being recognised with generous grants from the tobacco, coal and oil industries.

The good news doesn’t stop there. According to this morning’s email, I am about to receive a substantial commission on a transaction involving Nigerian gold (as long as I can beat ASIC to the punch). And beautiful girls from all over the world are just waiting to meet me.

I’m glad I’ve stopped worrying. Now if I could only cure my addiction to irony …

* More exactly, to Geoff Honnor who provided the link to Milloy’s Junk Science site, and to Ken Parish who linked to the similarly-styled Bizarre Science site.

Boring disclaimer A link to a site doesn’t imply endorsement of everything that appears on that site.

Gulliver

John Quiggin11 Comments

Josef Joffe’s Bonython lecture, reprinted in full in the SMH represents the United States as Gulliver in Lilliput, a military, economic and cultural hyperpower of unprecedented dominance, but argues

Power exacts responsibility, and responsibility requires the transcendence of narrow self-interest. As long as the United States continues to provide such public goods [global order, a stable world trade system etc], envy and resentment will not escalate into fear and loathing that spawn hostile coalitions.

I don’t think the hyperpower premise stands up to scrutiny. In military terms, it’s certainly true that the US can defeat any likely non-nuclear adversary with ease, but the lesson of Afghanistan and Iraq is that defeating the opposing army is the easy bit. The US military is now stretched to, and arguably beyond, the limit, occupying a country that is, as we have been reminded so often, the size of California. It can’t or won’t muster the additional resources to stabilise Liberia (effectively a former US colony).

In economic terms, war and domestic profligacy have put the US in the classic imperial position – running an empire on borrowed money. It’s hard to put a precise time limit on current US fiscal policies, but it’s most unlikely they can be sustained for another decade.

Finally, there’s the issue of cultural ‘soft power’. I plan a big post on this Real Soon Now, but for the moment I’ll just observe that the most striking cultural trend of the past few years has been ‘reality’ TV. This phenomenon would be the epitome of the dominance of American low culture, if it weren’t for the fact that it was invented by the Japanese and modified for a broader market by the Europeans before reaching the English-speaking world.

A simple one

John Quiggin11 Comments

Among the questions raised on the Monday message board is one where the answer is, in the words of Ronald Reagan, simple but not easy. The correct way to deal with stamp duty on house purchases is to scrap and replace revenue by scrapping the land-tax exemption for owner-occupied housing.

The current system discriminates in favor of existing home-owners against homebuyers. But since the interests of existing home-owners represent the most sacred of Australian sacred cows, I can’t see this changing.

The housing bubble

John Quiggin15 Comments

Apparently, the housing affordability problem has been all the rage while I’ve been away. Coincidentally, I’ve been looking at the housing bubble as part of my study of economic policy under Howard. Your comments on this would be much appreciated. Here it is

More than any previous government, the Howard government has tied its economic and political fortunes to the performance of the housing market. Activity in the housing market boomed in the leadup to the GST, as builders and households sought to complete as much work as possible before GST became payable. This boom was, naturally enough, followed by a slump in the immediate aftermath of the introduction of the GST.

The government responded vigorously and effectively, doubling the grant to first homebuyers that had been introduced to offset the impact of the GST. The fact that this measure was available for a limited period fuelled a rush mentality which persisted even after the grant was reduced to its original level.

The homebuyers grant was followed in late1999 by a cut in capital gains taxes., which are now taxed at half the rate applicable to ordinary income. Although this measure gutted an important reform introduced by the Hawke-Keating government, it received the enthusiastic support of the Labor opposition.
Although this measure was meant to encourage participation in the so-called Înew economyâ represented by the then-booming NASDAQ stock market, it had barely taken effect when the dotcom bubble burst. Instead, it helped to inflate a bubble in investment properties, particularly unit developments marketed to small investors who could exploit the benefits of negative gearing (taking tax deductible losses from a rental property in the expectation of realising a concessionally-taxed capital gain).

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Slow blogging, part VI

John Quiggin

I’m only just getting around to catching up on what other bloggers have been doing in my absence, and I can report that everyone over at Catallaxy is in top form. My jet lag is such that I’m bound to mix up the contributors to this collective blog, but I’ll go ahead anyway.

I enjoyed Jason Soon’s debunking of ‘sceptics’ on the subjects of global warming and evolution. I must have missed the arrival of Sarah Strasser but she has an excellent account of recent developments in relation to technical devices used to back up ‘global zoning’ schemes of price discrimination. Andrew Norton has some acute cultural comment. You’ve probably all read this already but, if not, go to it.

Fannie and Freddie

John Quiggin1 Comment

This light-hearted piece by Daniel Akst from the NYT raises a lot of important points about prudential regulation, quangos and related issues.

For those not familiar with the cute nomenclature of US financial markets, Fannie (Mae) was a nickname for the “Federal National Mortgage Association”, but now appears to be its official business name. Freddie (Mac) was the Federal Mortgage Acceptance Corporation, or something like that. Both are stockholder owned corporations, established with a special government charter.

In other words, these are quangos in the original sense of “quasi-non-government organisations”,private business organisations, established with effective government backing, to perform what would normally be regarded as public functions.

Among the many problems with quangos, the one emphasised in this article is the implicit guarantee from governments to bail them out if they get into too much trouble. A very similar system applies to banks under the Australian system of prudential regulation. As I observed here

Most Australians would be even more surprised to discover that there is no public guarantee of bank deposits. Under current policies, the government does not guarantee deposits, but does nothing to dispel the general belief that such deposits are absolutely safe.

As Akst observes, this kind of implicit guarantee is the worst of all possible worlds. Governments should either
(i) withdraw the guarantee;
(ii) charge a commercially-sound fee, as in deposit insurance schemes; or
(iii) take ownership of the enterprise
Akst suggests taking Fannie and Freddie into public ownership, getting their books in order and then privatising them without the implicit guarantee. This is probably the best strategy in this case.