Is Poverty Obsolete ?

John Quiggin11 Comments

I’ve been reading Clive Hamilton’s Growth Fetish on which quite a few bloggers have already commented. I agree with some of the points Clive makes and disagree, sometimes strongly, with others. I may do a full length review some time, but for the moment I’ll post a bit at a time.

I’ll start with a point of disagreement. Clive dismisses traditional social democratic concerns with absolute deprivation as being relevant, at most, to those in the bottom 10 per cent of the income distribution.

Taking food as the most basic necessity and the US as the developed country where social democracy has lost most ground, I looked for stats and found this briefing by the US Department of Agriculture. The key finding:

89.3 percent of U.S. households were food secure throughout calendar year 2001. “Food secure” means they had access, at all times, to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. The rest (10.7 percent) were food insecure at least some time during the year, meaning that they did not always have access to enough food for active, healthy lives for all household members. In 3.3 percent of all households, one or more household members were hungry at least some time during the year. The remaining 7.4 percent obtained enough food to avoid hunger using a variety of coping strategies such as eating less-varied diets, participating in Federal food assistance programs, or getting emergency food from community food pantries.

The figure is close enough to Clive’s 10 per cent, but this is a one-year snapshot. Since people move into and out of poverty, it’s clear that the proportion of Americans who have problems feeding their families at some time in a given period of say, five years, is well above 10 per cent. And this is using a very tight definition of deprivation at a time when the US economy, though past the absolute peak in 2000, was still doing very well by the standards of the last two decades. I’d say that the traditional social democratic concern with poverty is not yet obsolete.

Resurrection of Troppo Armadillo

John Quiggin6 Comments

By force of circumstance, Ken Parish has moved yet again. This time he’s sharing digs with Scott Wickstein at Ubersportingpundit. Ken already has his first post up, about being given (undesired) ringside tickets at a divorce. The archives are still lost behind the cyberfuddle permissions shield, but we can hope that they are not permanently bloggered.

I was feeling pretty disheartened about the prospect of a blogworld without Ken and his co-bloggers, so I’m very grateful to Scott for his rescue effort. Please update your links, bookmarks etc. With amazing efficiency (for me), I’ve already fixed my blogroll.

BTW, as Gianna mentioned in a recent comments thread, Scott has joined the self-revelatory trend and posted a picture. Not what I expected either.

Grand theft auto (repost)

John Quiggin6 Comments

Preface to repost A commentator on my previous post accused me of being anti-fun. I’m reposting this to show I’m pro-fun, as long as other people’s fun doesn’t threaten to kill me.

Original post 11/11/02

Tim Blair, as usual, defends his right to play with dangerous toys, like guns and fast cars, devoting a comprehensive fisking to a piece by Hugh McKay about speeding. I didn’t find McKay’s article that interesting when I first read it, but judging by Tim’s response, it hit the target.

On libertarian grounds, I’ve been planning to suggest some sort of theme park, analogous to smoking rooms and safe injecting rooms, where lovers of guns and dangerous driving could act out their Grand Theft Auto fantasies without endangering the rest of us.

But I was wondering – where could such a park be located? Then it struck me that large parts of the US are like that already, except for all the ordinary decent people trying to live there. I don’t suppose it would be too hard to persuade most of the population of, say, South-East Washington DC, to move somewhere nicer, leaving the gangsters and drug dealers behind. The park would be there, ready-made, for Tim and friends to enjoy.

The economic viability of the park would be greatly supplemented by reality TV. I, for one, would happily sign up for pay-TV just to watch this.

Update I missed it, but Tim has indeed blogged again on this very topic, with the headline Government good. Drivers bad Certainly if the drivers I encounter on a daily basis are a fair sample, the second part of Tim’s headline rings true

Leadfoot Doyle rides again

John Quiggin26 Comments

Fresh from his flogging at the last state election, when he advocated legalising speeding (he called it a ‘tolerance zone’), Victorian Opposition Leader Robert ‘Leadfoot’ Doyle is back at it again, complaining that there are too many speed cameras collecting too much in fine revenue. The fact that Victoria’s road toll is falling substantially (according to the same report “The state’s road toll was 160 yesterday, compared with 185 at the same time last year”) is of no concern to Doyle.

Until now, Victorian politics has been characterised by a bipartisan commitment to road safety which has been reflected in a stunning decline in road deaths. Since 1970, when seat belt laws were introduced (over the objections of people like Doyle),

road deaths in Victoria have been lowered from a peak of 1,061 to 378 last year, despite an increase of 140% in registered vehicles and 41% in population. The Victorian fatality rate in 1970 of 8.1 deaths per 10,000 registered vehicles was one of the worst among motorised countries, while the 1997 rate of 1.2 was one of the lowest.

By contrast, in the US, where people like Doyle have been successful in resisting strong road safety laws and effective enforcement, road deaths are rising.

Doyle is a disgrace. He has no place in Australian politics.

Repost: Putting the "Urban Heat Islands" issue to bed

John Quiggin22 Comments

Preface on reposting policy I and others have been discussing concerns about the ephemerality of blogging. Given that blogs are a searchable database, there’s no real reason why people should look only at the current pages. But in my experience, comment threads tend to die off after a few days. However, Aaron Oakley has just put in a comment on a post from December 2002, and this gives me a chance to announce my new policy. If anyone comments on a post that has been archived (more than 10 days) I will do my best to repost it and thereby reopen the debate.

Preface to the repost Now here’s the reposted piece. I think the article quoted in the paper refutes Aaron in advance, but just to be clear I’ll restate my point. I agree with Aaron that urban heat islands are real even in small towns (in fact, I’m glad to see Aaron endorsing the reality of human-induced climate change). I also agree that estimates of climate change need to be checked using only rural stations. But, as the cited article says this has already been done, and it makes no significant difference to estimates of global warming. Note that Aaron himself recommended this article.

Reposted article begins
Bizarre Science points to this study confirming the IPCC contention that Urban Heat Islands, while a real phenomenon, are not important in assessing estimates of the rate of global warming C.J.G. (Jon) Morris of the School of Earth Sciences, The University of Melbourne, reports

Whilst climatologists now think that the warming in the temperature record from some small urban areas is partly the result of the UHI, this is not evidence that Australia’s climate has remained unchanged rather than warmed over the past 100 years. Average minimum temperatures from many stations over most of Australia have shown an increase of between 0.1 deg C and 0.3 deg C per decade since 1951. Whilst some temperature records from small towns do not represent the large scale climate, it is unlikely to have any major impact upon our estimates of temperature warming over Australia. This is because there are numerious other weather stations located in remote areas such as lighthouses and regions far removed from urban areas that still indicate a warming temperature trend.

Thanks for this useful link!

Update While I’m at it, I also appreciate this post, in which BS reader Reader George Bogg points out that, given the number of points in Alan McCallum’s scatterplot, the trend he finds is almost certainly statistically significant (thereby resolving the main remaining point of dispute). However, Bogg misses the point that this is a panel data set, consisting of observations from many different stations over time. An analysis taking this into account would yield a much stronger correlation. Of course, as Bogg points out the fact that the world is getting hotter doesn’t prove anything about the causes. But at least agreement on the facts is a start.

Monday Message Board

John Quiggin10 Comments

I’m running a bit late today. It’s past time to put up the Monday Message Board, where you can comment on any topic that takes your fancy. I note that Tim Dunlop is thinking of adopting this idea. Does anybody have any suggestions for other regular features they’d like to see?

As always, comment on any topic, civilised discussion, no coarse language

Some good news among the bad

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.!.

The news seems to be particularly bleak at present with continuing bushfires, impending war, the rail crash of a few days ago with nine people dead and now the loss of the Space Shuttle with all on board. As this list indicates, the news tends to made up mostly of the bad things that are happening at any given time, while good things tend not to be news.

Rereading the comments thread from this post on Australia and Indonesia three months ago, I was struck by the universally gloomy tone regarding the prospects for Indonesian democracy and the survival of Indonesia as a state.

Only three months later prospects seem a lot better. As Scott Wickstein has noted, the Indonesian police have confounded expectations with their success in catching not only those directly involved in the Bali bombing, but those further up the hierarchy (no-one convicted yet, but the evidence seems pretty damning).

In the process, the whole trend towards militant Islamism seems to have been halted. Not only has much of Abu Bashir’s JI network been arrested but the equally nasty Laskar Jihad group, responsible for thousands of deaths in communal rioting announced its disbandment shortly after Bali. Disappointingly, its leader was just acquitted on a charge of inciting religious violence but the disbandment seems to have been permanent.

Even more surprisingly, the cease-fire in Aceh seems to be holding for the most part, though there have been the inevitable incidents.

The economy is still in a mess, but the crisis period is past. An essential part of the transition to stable democracy is the recognition that the economy is going to be in a mess a good deal of the time and that neither generals nor revolutionaries are likely to fix it. It’s my optimistic impression that this fact is beginning to sink in with the Indonesian public and, equally importantly, with the military. Demonstrations against recent cuts in subsidies are, or at least should be, part of the democratic process.

In the end, it seems impossible to balance good and bad news. We must grieve for those who have lost loved ones in the latest tragedies without giving way to despair or giving up the hope of making things better.

PM=GG?

John Quiggin24 Comments

I kept away from the Hollingworth issue, but I enjoyed the Monday Message Board discussion on a possible replacement so much I started thinking a bit about it. The main argument against an elected President, as far as I can see, is that Australian democracy is built on the premise of Prime Ministerial dictatorship (similarly with discussions about ‘mandates’ and the Senate).

If you accept this argument, it seems that the best Governor-General is the one who does least, and therefore that the best option is to leave the position vacant, with a stand-in to do the necessary attendance at Parliamentary openings and so on.

An even better solution, and one which would surely appeal to John Howard, is for the PM to appoint himself as GG. This would resolve the 1975 problem once and for all, while making any challenge to the monarchy that much more difficult. There may be constitutional obstacles, but they’re not obvious to me. After all, the office of PM doesn’t appear in the Constitution, so it can’t be ruled out explicitly.

Update Glenn Milne gives a cogent exposition of the theory that the GG should be a clone of the PM.

The organ bank

John Quiggin17 Comments

I mentioned recently the gratuitously violent nature of lots of philosophical examples. Here’s another one quoted by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and also alluded to by Eric Tam in his criticism of one of my earlier posts

Another problem for utilitarianism is that it seems to overlook justice and rights. One common illustration is called Transplant. Imagine that each of five patients in a hospital will die without an organ transplant. The patient in Room 1 needs a heart, the patient in Room 2 needs a liver, the patient in Room 3 needs a kidney, and so on. The person in Room 6 is in the hospital for routine tests. Luckily (!), his tissue is compatible with the other five patients, and a specialist is available to transplant his organs into the other five. This operation would save their lives, while killing the “donor”. There is no other way to save any of the other five patients (Foot 1966, Thomson 1976; compare related cases in Carritt 1947 and McCloskey 1965).

We need to add that the organ recipients will emerge healthy, the source of the organs will remain secret, the doctor won’t be caught or punished for cutting up the “donor”, and the doctor knows all of this to a high degree of probability (despite the fact that many others will help in the operation). Still, with the right details filled in, it looks as if cutting up the “donor” will maximize utility, since five lives have more utility than one life. If so, then classical utilitarianism implies that it would not be morally wrong for the doctor to perform the transplant and even that it would be morally wrong for the doctor not to perform the transplant. Most people find this result abominable. They take this example to show how bad it can be when utilitarians overlook individual rights, such as the unwilling donor’s right to life.

I don’t know if it’s been pointed out before, but this example doesn’t work as claimed. The proposal of killing the test patient is dominated by the following alternative: With the agreement of the five needy recipients, draw lots. The unlucky one is cut up (but of course, they would have died anyway) and their healthy organs are transplanted into the others. The number of lives saved is the same as in the proposed case, no rights are violated, it’s a Pareto-improvement on the status quo ante and so on. We even save one transplant operation relative to the proposal.

Of course, you can impose some sort of ad hoc assumption to rule this out, but this just points up the other flaws of this example.
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Troppo Kaput ?

John Quiggin2 Comments

Along with the rest of infinitebabble, Troppo Armadillo has been inaccessible for a day or so. Hopefully, this is just a permissions error, but Ken is threatening that, if the data is lost, Troppo Armadillo will be gone for good.

I don’t know how seriously to take this – threats to swear off blogging, [and, even more so, promises to avoid particular topics] are far more common than actual departures, but I certainly hope it doesn’t come to pass.