Help me restock my library

John Quiggin

I have recently experienced a significant relaxation in my research budget constraint. To translate from economese, I have more money to spend (thanks, Brendan!), and one thing I plan to do is to add to my research library. As can be seen from my website my interests are very diverse and it’s not always easy to keep up. So I thought I’d ask for suggestions. They don’t have to be in economics. In fact recommendations for important books in other fields (particularly other social sciences) would be most welcome. But within economics, if there’s a really good book on endogenous growth theory and related topics, I’d be keen for a recommendation.

Although my budget constraint is not too tight at present, my time constraint is very tight, so reading has to provide consumption benefits as well as contributing to my work. Unless it’s absolutely essential, I’m not going to wade through anything that’s badly written, or printed in hard-to-read type on cheap paper.

One thing I’d particularly like to do is to update and extend my maths library, most of which dates back to my undergraduate days in the 1970s. Areas where I’d particularly like a good recommendation include number theory, differential geometry and algebraic topology. I’d also like suggestions for good books on analysis and general topology(currently I have Rudin Functional Analysis, Royden’s Real Analysis , Conway Functions of One Complex Variable Ash Real Analysis and Probability and Dugundji Topology, so I’m looking for something substantially new and improved). And if there are any hot new areas that have developed since the 1970s that I don’t know about, I’d like to find out.

Finally, of course, I’m always keen to have suggestions for new reading of any kind, even if it has no possible relevance to research. Hopefully readers of this blog will have an idea of what I might like.

News from the front

John Quiggin

There’s been lots of news from the Middle East recently, some good and some bad. The good news includes the withdrawal of US troops from Saudi Arabia and the presentation of the long-promised ‘roadmap’ for peace between the Palestinians and Israelis.

The bad news includes yet another incident of US troops firing on civilians. This is a reflection of a lack of capacity for peacekeeping rather than deliberate malice but incompetence in an occupying power that has waged a war of aggression is a crime in itself. Even in the postwar period, direct killings of civilians by the US are occurring at a rate that exceeds most estimates of the killings by Saddam’s dictatorship in the years leading up to the war (1-2000 per year under Saddam, or 20-40 per week as opposed to around 50 per week postwar). And the death rate due to the indirect effects of war (leftover munitions, banditry and looting, the destruction of hospitals, damage to water supply etc) are far worse.

How do we balance these things? If the long-term effect of the war is to bring peace, democracy and prosperity to the Middle East as a whole, then the present suffering will prove justified. But if the end result is an authoritarian government marginally better than Saddam’s and a continuation of the current stalemate in Israel-Palestine, the war will ultimately be judged as a crime in the same general category as other wars of aggression, notably those launched by Saddam himself.

The saying that ‘Success has a thousand parents and failure is an orphan’ is nowhere more true than when rules are broken in the hope that the ends will justify the means.

Exit

John Quiggin

I’ve been using Barnes & Noble’s online bookstore for a while, but now I’m going to switch to Amazon. The reason is simple and annoying. B&N have changed their search facility to give approximate matches. For example a search for “Quiggin” produces over 1000 matches, the top ones being books by/about Quinn, Quin-Harkin, Queen Noor and so on. “John Quiggin” works better, but I don’t always know the first names of authors whose books I want to buy. In any case, I don’t like being treated like a moron

You might think from typing “Quinzii” that you want Magill and Quinzii’s Theory of Incomplete Markets, but our computer says you probably meant Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, illustrated by Quentin Blake. Well, no, I already have that one, I really did mean Quinzii

I tried voice, writing a complaint the first time I ran into this, but I got no response and the system is still the same. so I’m opting for exit.

By contrast, Amazon gives a listing of exact matches and gives alternatives only if there aren’t any exact matches. This is the kind of treatment I prefer.

Happiness

John Quiggin2 Comments

One of the big questions in the debate over economic growth is whether it enhances human happiness. One of the sources of information commonly used in this debate is derived from answers to questions of the general form ‘On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you?’. This and similar questions have been asked in many countries and over a period of some decades. The ‘stylised facts’ (this is economists’ jargon for the generally accepted summary that characterised the data) are that at any given time and place, people with high incomes are, on average, happier than those with low incomes, but that there’s not much difference between poor countries and rich ones and no significant trend in happiness levels over time.

This evidence has been used to support two kinds of claims
(i) Growth in economic output has been offset by losses in other, equally important sources of happiness such as clean environments or social cohesion
(ii) People’s happiness is primarily determined by their relative position rather than by absolute levels of consumption

I don’t want to debate the merits of these claims right now, but to point out that data of the kind I’ve described is of no use in assessing them. Starting with the second claim, some sort of relative assessment is forced on respondents by the form of the question. The only sensible way to answer the question is to assign 10 to the happiest people you know or can imagine, and compare yourselves to them (the point at which you would consider yourself better off dead arguably provides a natural zero).

So, if I go from a place where everyone is gloomy and depressed to one where everyone is happy (and adjust so that I no longer think about the gloomy people I used to know) my stated score is likely to decline. This will be true even if I’m actually happier myself – apart from the fact that I’m altruistically happy that other people are happy, I just find that gloomy people get me down. That is, the form of the question makes it look as though people are concerned about their relative position, even if they’re not.

So, if the measure provided is inherently local and relative, it can’t be used for comparisons over time or between groups of people with different reference points.

Jason Soon recently cited a piece by Richard Layard in which he tried to bolster the status of claim (ii) by observing that the results of happiness surveys were consistent with ‘objective’ measures obtained by brain scans. This argument doesn’t work, at least in the absence of time-series measures of brain scans. All it shows is that self-reported assessments of happiness give a local and relative answer consistent with the local and relative answer given by brain scans.

What I'm reading*

John Quiggin

Functional analysis by Rudin. I needed to check something for work but then I saw that Rudin had a proof of the prime number theorem using Riemann’s zeta function. It’s one of the great ironies of mathematics that a simple statement about the integers is most naturally proved by applying abstract analytical techniques to a function of complex numbers, and I decided I had to see how it was done, which entailed working through the theory of Fourier transforms and distributions.

There are ‘elementary’ proofs, most notably by Pal Erdos, that only use ordinary number theory, but elementary does not mean ‘easy’ in this context. I plan to try and work through one of the elementary proofs some time.

This reminds me to mention that my Erdos number is 3 (via Peter Wakker and Peter Fishburn). At a stretch, this blog could be claimed as a collaborative work, in which case all my commentators would obtain an Erdos number of 4 – highly prized in some circles.

*Thanks to my travels, everything is running behind. So I’ve skipped this week’s Word for Wednesday, and put in last weeks Sunday feature instead

What I did in my holidays

John Quiggin

I spent much of last week in the Snowy Mountains with my family (the Powerbook came too, of course, so I kept up at least some blogging). It was the first time we’d been back since the devastating fires in January. Large areas are still closed off, and signs of fire are everywhere. Fire is a natural part of the lifecycle of a eucalypt forest, and signs of regeneration were already evident in many of the places we visited. But some of my favorite spots, such as the mountain ash forests around Round Mountain, are probably gone for good. This is the second fire in twenty years and it’s unlikely that new seed has been set. Even if they do come back, it will be decades before they regain anything like their former state.

As is inevitable with such a disaster, fingers have been pointed in all directions, notably at the National Parks and Wildlife Service for not burning off vigorously enough and at global warming for the extreme severity of the drought and hot weather conditions that led to the fire disaster. I’m keeping an open mind on the relationship between drought and global warming. Looking at the way the fire burnt through grassland as well as bush, I’m doubtful that any regime of controlled burning could have mitigated this fire much, unless it was so extreme as to fundamentally change the character of the Park.

ColLotteral damage

John Quiggin

Tim Lambert has produced yet more evidence of academic malfeasance by pro-gun economist John Lott. Kevin Drum at Calpundit has more. Since I was convinced long ago that Lott was discredited beyond any hope of redemption, the only point of remaining interest is the collateral damage being incurred by Lott’s allies and defenders.

Obviously, the once-respected American Enterprise Institute, which still employs Lott, is at the top of the list. Having had my own run-in with its current head Karl Zinsmeister, I agree with Brad de Long, whom I cited a while ago saying “Back in the late 1970s, the American Enterprise Institute ranked close to the Brookings Institution as a thinktank you could trust not to deliberately lie to you. Now it has fallen very deeply into the pit indeed”. No doubt some good work is still being done at AEI, but the AEI stamp now detracts from credibility rather than adding to it.

Another casualty is Lott’s Australian co-author, and gun rights advocate, John Whitley, who ended up with his name on an article that Lott himself refused to sign off on when the other party in a dispute pointed out a string of coding errors (Tim Lambert, linked above, has the details).

But the biggest not-so-innocent bystander to be hit by friendly fire is surely the king of the blogworld, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit. Having cut his blogging teeth on the Bellesiles scandal (the discrediting of a widely-acclaimed piece of research seen as favorable to gun control), and having ferociously attacked those on the anti-gun side who failed to dissociate themselves from Bellesiles, Reynolds has consistently given Lott the benefit of the doubt, and has even, in a dispute between Lott and respected economist Steve Levitt, been implicated in Lott’s slimy manoeuvres (again, see Tim Lambert for the complex and gory details). Clearly all that rhetoric about ‘fact-checking your ass’ only applies to those who come up with the wrong conclusions.

Update Jason Soon reports that Steve Levitt has just been awarded the John Bates Clark medal for the best US economist under 40 (Paul Krugman is a previous winner, and it’s often seen as a harbinger of a future Nobel). So I guess he won’t be too worried by anything Lott and Reynolds have to say about him. Tom Spencer has more.

Gross-out

John Quiggin2 Comments

Ken Parish has had a go at Clive Hamilton over an extract from his new book, Growth Fetish, published at Online Opinion. I think a lot of the debate is either at cross-purposes or misses crucial distinctions.

In essence, Clive restates a critique of growth, as measured by Gross National Product, that goes back to Galbraith’s Affluent Society. The link is sharpened by the fact that Clive, like Galbraith, refers to Gross National Product (GNP) rather than, as is more usual in Australia, Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Ken makes some good points but, in large measure, offers a restatement of the arguments that were put forward in rebuttal to Galbraith and, even more, to 1970s critics of growth like the Club of Rome.

On balance, I agree more with Ken than with Clive, so it’s only fair to begin with a point on which I agree with Clive.

GDP growth is a lousy measure of how well a country is doing, even if we are only interested in relatively narrow economic assessments of welfare, as opposed to social, cultural or spiritual issues. The name gives three reasons why Gross Domestic Product a bad measure of economic welfare.

It’s Gross because depreciation is not subtracted. If we are concerned with measuring economic welfare, even from a narrowly materialist viewpoint, the net measure is relevant and the gross measure is not.

It’s Domestic because it measures the amount produced in Australia, including that which accrues to foreign owners of capital and is paid out as interest or dividends. National Product which is the output accruing to Australian land, capital and labour is more relevant.

Finally, it’s Product, that is, a measure of output that takes no account of inputs. If we increase our product by working harder or longer hours (a point Ken notes), or by consuming more natural resources, we are not necessarily better off. What matters in the end is productivity, not product.

Why then do economists pay so much attention to GDP? The answer is that it’s useful primarily as a measure of economic activity, for short-run macroeconomic management. If GDP is declining, this is a good indication that the economy is in recession and that macro policy needs to be more stimulative. Taking account of things like depreciation, international income transfers and work intensity would reduce the precision of estimates of short-run growth because all things are hard to measure, and would make GDP less useful for its primary purpose. (Of course, this is a Keynesian view – national account statistics like GDP are essentially a product of the Keynesian revolution).

This is a big subject and I’ll try to post more on it as I get time.

The UN and WMDs

John Quiggin

As yet another WMD discovery fails to pan out, I’m puzzled by continued claims that the UN failed in its task by not approving the invasion. Whatever arguments Bush may have had for war, the only one he put up to the UNSC was based on WMDs. The evidence put up in support of his case was obviously dodgy at the time and has since proved to be completely spurious. Contrary to repeated claims, it’s now clear that the US has and had no reliable intelligence about the existence and location of WMDs. Some may perhaps exist, but it’s evident that all the claims made by Powell in his UN speech were false.

This leads to the question – why didn’t Bush put up the case for a war of liberation to the UN? There are some obvious difficulties like the attachment of the Chinese to the doctrine of non-interference, but I think the real problem comes when you think about what would be involved in presenting such a case ex ante. As I observed a couple of months ago on this point

A starting point would be an admission by the US government that it actively assisted or passively encouraged Saddam in the commission of his worst single crime – the war of aggression he launched against Iran, in which he made extensive use of chemical weapons. When Blair correctly says that Saddam’s wars have killed more people than were marching in London, he should be remined of this. I don’t say that the past crimes of the US government mean that it should not do anything about Saddam now, but an open declaration of the US role and an apology for US complicity are necessary if the moral case against Saddam is to have any standing.

The second requirement is for some sort of just basis for asserting that a particular leader is a criminal who deserves to be overthrown. We have such a basis in the International Criminal Court, in which Britain is a participant. Blair should demand that Saddam be tried before this court. Of course, a precondition is that the US should drop its own objections.

Third, there is the problem of equal justice.The moral case against Saddam is compromised by US complicity in the occupation of Palestine. If Bush were to demand acceptance by both sides in this dispute of a peace plan similar to that put up by Clinton and back his demand by a threat of sanctions and a willingness to enforce an agreed peace, the moral case against Saddam would be lot stronger.

Finally, there is the problem of multiple agendas. A moral case for war can be made only by forgoing all attempts at seeking strategic or economic side-benefits. Yet many (most) of the US commentators supporting war are pointing to such benefits as a primary or secondary motivation. A moral case would require a clear commitment not to use Iraqi oil to the benefit of the US, not to use Iraqi territory as a base for further military action, not to make side deals with countries like Turkey etc. So far none of this has been forthcoming.

Given that the UN was never presented with a case for a war of liberation, it’s hard to see how the failure to authorise one can be held against them.