What I'm reading

John Quiggin

I’ve been reading lots of different things, but a couple of books illustrate the opposite ends of the spectrum of thought about the Internet and its possibilities.
Clifford Stoll’s 1995 Silicon Snake Oil was one of the first manifestations of neo-Luddism. An interesting example of a failed reductio ad absurdam is a critique of estimates of the growth rate of the Internet, where Stoll says

Just by counting network nodes, the Internet is now doubling in size every year. This growth rate can’t continue for long – at this rate, everyone on Earth will be connected by 2003. Impossible

Here we are in 2003, and while it’s not literally true that everyone on Earth is connected, it is true that almost everyone in the developed world has access to the Internet.
Stoll is similarly dismissive of prospects for a revival of public debate on the Internet, taking as his model the dying days of UseNet. He misses almost completely the impact of the Web. Of course, he does not anticipate blogging which, I think, has gone a long way towards fulfilling the early promise of the Internet. Imperfect as blogs are, they contain a lot of well-written and well-argued discussion of a wide range of issues that would have had very little chance of publication in the days before the Internet.

If Stoll was too pessimistic, this was nothing compared to the ludicrous overoptimism of the dotcom boom, chronicled in James Ledbetter’s Starving to Death on $200 Million a Year: The Short Absurd Life of the Industry Standard We have yet to see a really good book on this topic. (Thomas Frank’s One Market Under God, which I reviewed here is easily the best book on the 1990s boom as a whole, but is only peripherally concerned with the dotcoms.

Read Soon soon

John Quiggin

After a long period of relative quiescence, Jason Soon is back with a string of interesting and lengthy posts (made lengthier by the narrowness of his blogger template!). As he implies in one of them, his long-delayed adoption of a comments facility has been a major stimulus and has implied something of a change in blogstyle.

Worth reading

John Quiggin

Keneth Miles has returned from hiatus with a string of interesting posts. He’s particularly good on the science of global warming (I think I’ll just point to him from now on rather than chasing down the data myself).

I’ve added Keneth to the blogroll as an Ozplogger even though his title “The UnAustralian” indicates he clearly isn’t (he’s from those other nearby islands).

This is consistent with standard Australian practice of claiming for ourselves anything creditable done by a Kiwi who has even the most tenuous link to this country (see Jane Campion, Russell Crowe, Phar Lap etc etc).

Where are the women?

John Quiggin5 Comments

Kieran Healy and Brian Weatherson, among others, have been discussing the absence of women at the top levels of economics and analytic philosophy. For example, all the winners of the JB Clark Medal and the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences have been men.

Kieran is mainly concerned to dismiss the idea that this reflects some fundamental difference between men and women. He takes the hypothesis of discrimination within the occupational groups as the alternative, more or less by default.

I’d argue that the bulk of the explanation can be found in high school or earlier.
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Who will pay for rebuilding Iraq

John Quiggin1 Comment

One of the curious developments in the aftermath of the Iraq war has been the fight over who will get contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq. It?s curious because, so far at least, the only money that has been put up to fund this reconstruction is $US2.3 billion included in the Bush?s $US73 billion war appropriation. This is a fair sum of money, but scarcely the stuff of an international incident. It?s important, then, to consider how much Iraqi reconstruction is likely to cost and where the money is going to come from.
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Not a good start

John Quiggin7 Comments

No sooner had I made the move to my new home than the server for mentalspace and drivelwarehouse domains crashed, taking out a fair part of Ozplogistan. You can read the gory details here.

However, everything seems to be fixed now, and I plan to start working on improvements to this site. Suggestions gratefully accepted.

Update I’ve implemented a number of suggestions, including some changes in colour scheme and the addition of a photo. It’s newer (that is, older) than the one on the website, which I’ll update soon. More suggestions and criticism still very much welcome.

Old Mortality

John Quiggin

This NYT report gives ground for a pessimistic view about SARS, but has some credibility problems. It begins:

The death rate from SARS may be significantly higher than health officials had thought, up to 55 percent in people 60 and older, and up to 13.2 percent in younger people, the first major epidemiological study of the disease suggests.

Mortality rates are bound to change somewhat as an epidemic continues. But unless the numbers fall drastically, SARS would be among infectious diseases with the highest death rates. Until now, fatality rates reported by the World Health Organization had ranged from 2 percent, when the epidemic was first detected in March, to 7.2 percent.

The new findings come from a statistical analysis of 1,425 patients suspected of having SARS who were admitted to Hong Kong hospitals from Feb. 20 to April 15. Over all, their mortality rate was estimated to be as high as 19.9 percent. By contrast, the influenza pandemic of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people worldwide, had an estimated mortality rate, over all, of 1 percent or less.

Let’s look at the last number. If a disease that kills ten million people has a mortality rate of 1 per cent, the number infected is 1 billion. The report is inexact, but clearly implies that several times that many people were killed and that the mortality rate was below 1 per cent. The world population in 1920 was less than 2 billion.

Obviously something is wrong here. This doesn’t mean that the estimates quoted about SARS are wrong, but it would be useful to have a better baseline for comparison.