John Q

Recent opinion polls in Australia have shown overwhelming majorities in favour of devoting any additional resources to improvements in public services, particularly health and education, rather than to tax cuts. Discussing these results, Andrew Norton notes that some people may be “giving the socially acceptable answer, rather than what they really want” (see also here)[1]. I think he’s probably right, and I certainly hope so.

The reason I think Norton is probably right is that the majorities are so overwhelming (75-22 in this Nielsen poll and even more in others) that a fair number of people in the majority (people on above-average incomes with below-average needs for services) would almost certainly be worse off in a narrow personal sense. While some of these may be consistently altruistic, others may want to appear altruistic in a poll but might actually prefer the cash. Taking account of these responses would produce a less lopsided majority for services, but still a majority, as is shown by Labor’s electoral dominance at the state level.

The reason I hope he’s right is that it means that social democracy has won the public debate, at least for the moment. After all, if everyone believed that tax cuts would benefit, not merely a subset of high-income earners but the entire community, then the socially acceptable answer would be to support tax cuts. That certainly seemed to be the way things worked during the tax revolt of the 1970s and 1980s. At that time, opposing tax cuts was socially unacceptable. Well into the 1990s, anyone who advocate higher taxes was treated as a heretic (I should know!). Obviously, this has changed, though the political parties have been slower to catch up than the commentariat.

fn1. There are some other issues to do with “status quo bias”. People are more willing to express preferences for change in relation to the allocation of “extra” money than to support a change in the status quo, such as an increase in taxes to fund new services, or a reduction in services to fund tax cuts. But in the terminology of Kahneman and Tversky, this is essentially a quesiton of “framing”.

Paul Krugman has a piece on oil. This is as good a time as any to put up a long post I’ve been working on about oil and whether it’s finally going to run short, points on which I broadly agree with Krugman.

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Like Jon Mandle, I was repulsed by Garrett Hardin’s 1974 article Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor. The idea that large sections of humanity were doomed and should be abandoned forthwith was quite popular at the time. The Paddock brothers prominently advocated a policy of “triage”, cutting off aid immediately to countries like India which were, they argued, doomed to starvation in any case. Judging by this 1996 interview, Hardin (who died last year) didn’t change his views much over time.

Having reacted against this piece by Hardin, I was glad to discover that his more famous contribution to the environment debate, the Tragedy of the Commons was, in historical terms, a load of tripe.

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It is hard to overestimate the damage that has been done, not only to the US occupation of Iraq but to the cause of democracy and civilisation as a whole by the exposure of torture and sexual humilation of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, formerly used for the same purposes, though of course on a much more brutal and extensive scale, by Saddam Hussein[1]. If these pictures had been staged by the Al Qaeda propaganda department they could scarcely have been better selected to inflame Arab and Muslim opinion against the West, combining as they do the standard images of torture with scenes specially designed to show the determination of the West to humiliate Muslim men in every way possible.

Update 05/04. There is more on this, and on the symbolism of US occupiers living in Saddam’s palace over at Whiskey Bar, where Billmon notes a similar proposal by Hisham Melhem, a Lebanese journalist. See also Eccentricity

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It’s already 1 May in Australia, so I get to make what will no doubt be the first of many posts on the significance of the day.

First, and still the most important in the long historical view is the holiday (a public holiday here in Queensland) celebrating the achievements of the labour movement.

Second, there’s the admission of ten new members to the EU. As far as the historical significance of this event goes, I’m waiting to see whether Turkey is admitted to accession negotiations later in the year.

Thirdly, and of most immediate interest, the anniversary of Bush declaration of victory looks as good a time as any to date what seems increasingly certain to be a defeat [at least for the policies pursued for the past year, and for the objective of a stable, pro-American Iraq]. Of course, this judgement may turn out to be as premature as was Bush’s statement a year ago, but the decline in the US position has been almost as rapid as the collapse of Saddam’s regime, and the events of the last few days have seen the process accelerating.

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The Google IPO has now been announced, and there are some more figures to analyze. In addition, I wanted to talk a bit about the option, suggested by one of the commenters on Kevin Drum’s blog of arbitraging by short-selling overpriced dotcoms and buying those with more reasonable valuations. Finally, I wanted to look at what all this means for capital markets and therefore for capitalism.

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Like nearly everyone else, I’ve been deeply disappointed by David Brooks’ Op-ed columns in the NYT. But it’s not only out of a sense of fairness that I’m giving a favorable link to his latest – it’s not only good relative to the other stuff he’s written but better than most other commentary[1]. Referring to the debates over the Clarke and Woodward books, occurring at a time when Iraq looks like sliding into chaos, he says

This is like pausing during the second day of Gettysburg to debate the wisdom of the Missouri Compromise.

Right though this is, it’s obviously helpful to the Republicans, as is the observation that

many Americans have decided that it’s time to persevere and win.

But his final para raises the real issue

Over the next weeks, U.S. forces are going to jump from the fires of unilateralism to the frying pan of multilateralism. What’s going to happen when our generals want to take on some insurgents but Brahimi and the sovereign Iraqi appointees say no?   

Brooks might want to ponder the point that the Bush Administration appears to have no answer to the question he has posed here. They have set up rules that let them ignore the supposedly sovereign government they plan to establish, but it’s obvious that any such action will bring the whole structure crashing around their ears.

Update 29/4 Well, no-one at all in the comments thread agreed with me, but I haven’t seen anything to change my mind on the central point. Of course, the he said-she said stuff reported by Woodward and Clarke will be relevant to the election in November, but the “handover” in Iraq is due to take place at the end of June, and the crucial issues seem to me to have received no discussion at all in the (mainstream) media.

Can any readers point me to any prominent old-media commentator who has addressed the issue raised in Brooks’ final paragraph, and quoted by me? And if the whole thing falls in a heap, as looks increasingly likely, will anyone really care about the precise alignment within the Administration that got us to this point ?

fn1. Obligatory blogplugging: That’s old-media commentary, of course. This whole post is a subtle reminder that blogs, including this one, have already moved on from point-scoring and asked the questions that are now being raised by Brooks.

One of the most pleasant aspects of being a Research Fellow is guest lectures. I give guest lectures in a number of different courses, ranging over several faculties and sometimes different universities. This gives me all the things I like about teaching, including (since a change is as good as a holiday) generally attentive audiences, and a chance to present material that’s not the standard textbook, but not new or rigorous enough to justify an academic seminar. On the other hand, all the unpleasant stuff – booking rooms, litigious students complaining about their grades, administrators trying to promote customer-centric shareholder value in a dynamic enterprising university, and so on – is taken care of for me.

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According to this report, the widely-predicted Google IPO is likely to value the equity in Google at more than $20 billion – others suggest $25 billion. I immediately wondered whether Google was really worth $25 billion.

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The problem with, and the virtue of, referendums is that, in the absence of armed guards at the ballot box, you can never be sure of the result. The curious politics of the European Union are such that referendums are of particular importance. The big news at present relates to the twin referendums just held in Cyprus, on the UN plan for reunification, and the commitment by Tony Blair to hold a referendum on the EU ‘constitution’.

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A while ago, I made the observation that

since most libertarians envisage a minimal state with no real taxing powers but a continuing responsibility for defence, reliance on conscription would be almost inevitable. From the libertarian viewpoint, any form of taxation constitutes slavery[1], and fairness is not a proper concern of policy, so there can be no particular objection to the press gang as opposed to, say, voluntary recruitment financed by involuntary income taxes.

I was speaking in the context of the Aubrey-Maturin novels, set during the Napoleonic Wars, but the issue has come up again in relation to contemporary debates about the draft. Julian Sanchez has a very good discussion of the issues from a libertarian viewpoint, rejecting Nozick and arguing that rights over property are derivative of, and potentially far more qualified than, rights over one’s own labour.

My own view is broadly similar to Julian’s. Conscription may be justified in the kind of total war situation that also requires “conscription of wealth”, but not as a cheap way of filling the military.

fn1. Nozick is clear on this, and a lot of other libertarians say much the same thing, though usually more foggily. As noted below, however, it’s always a mistake to refer to “the” libertarian viewpoint.

I’m looking ahead to the June 30 “handover” of power in Iraq with increasing trepidation. As this NYT story indicates, the handover is shaping up to be a complete sham (more on this from Nathan Brown, guest commentator for Juan Cole). Anybody silly or corrupt enough to join the new “government” will be in the same position as the Iraq governments of the British Mandate/Treaty period, taking responsibility for policies dictated by a foreign occupying force, while having no effective power over anything that matters.

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It’s the fate of market innovators to be undercut by new entrants. As noted by Henry, Bill Tozier has hit on the idea of auctioning co-authorship rights, including the acquisition of an Erdös number of 5. As of this posting, the Ebay high bid stands at $US 31.

But Bill has apparently failed to learn the lessons of the dotcom era. The first is to patent everything. As far as I can tell, Bill has failed to file for a business methods patent on his idea, leaving it open to new entrants to imitate him, or even to patent the idea themselves.

The second is that the best way to undercut the competition is to give your product away. Following on this lesson, I’ve decided to set my co-authorship price (including *free* Erdös number of 4) at zero. That’s right, potential co-authors! Send your paper to me with a space for my name on the front page, after yours[1]. SEND NO MONEY! If I like it, I’ll insert my official stamp, and send it off to an appropriate journal. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this earlier!

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Following up the links on Eszter’s last post, I discovered that she shares with me an Erdos number of 3 (Eszter via Aronov and O’Rourke, mine via Fishburn and Wakker). This is pretty good for social science academics.

We thought this was worth a CT post, and came up with another issue. Although Movable Type and other systems encourage group blogging, they don’t, as far as I’m aware, allow for jointly authored posts. This is of particular interest since it’s at least arguable that a joint post would count as co-authorship for Erdos number purposes (this comes back to the question, frequently discussed on this blog, of whether and how blog contributions should be listed on vitas). But more generally, it would seem as if joint posts would be worthwhile for at least some purposes.

The Erdos number site asserts that numbers as high as 15 have been found, but that nearly everyone with a finite Erdos number is below 8. This seems about right, though mean, median and modal numbers must grow over time.