Not sure you should be helping them, Michael

Saving Joe Hockey: the budget we should have had

I find myself agreeing with nearly all of this "free advice on the budget" column by Michael Pascoe, but hope he is not part of a successful rehabilitation of a government I want to see the back of...

Why he's not to be admired

As this story from Mediaite notes, Rupert Murdoch is sincerely for immigration reform in the US, and has just written an op-ed about it, but the people he is battling are Republicans devoted to his money making Fox News business.

This has long been the problem with Murdoch:  he makes money by the cynical method of running media outlets that run political views he doesn't even agree with.   He plays both sides of the street - another classic example is when he was (formerly) promoting climate change action (now, with the break up of his last marriage, he seems to have changed his mind) he was simultaneously happy for Fox News to run hard on climate change denialism.

If media magnates want to use their media to run political and social views that they believe, well, they are entitled to and you can at least respect their consistency.

But when you are reaping in your riches from a media network which has become so influential yet runs views you strongly disagree with - where's the honour in that? 

Rewriting the map

The New Map of the Middle East - Jeffrey Goldberg - The Atlantic

Goldberg looks back at his 2007 prescient article talking about how the Middle East may end up.

I was interested in how his views have changed on the original division:

In the article, I was very critical of the imperial hubris that motivated the Sykes-Picot division of the Middle East by the British and French. But I’ve warmed to the argument that the Sykes-Picot arrangement was, in one sense, inadvertently progressive. The makers of the modern Middle East roped together peoples of different ethnicities and faiths (or streams of the same faith) in what were meant to be modern, multicultural, and multi-confessional states. It is an understatement to say that the Middle East isn’t the sort of place where this kind of experiment has been shown to work. (I’m thinking of you, one-staters, by the way.) I don’t think it is worth American money, or certainly American lives, to keep Iraq a unitary state. It is, of course, important to invest in plans that forestall the creation of permanent jihadist safe havens, and about this the U.S. should bevigilant, more vigilant than it has been. But Westphalian obsessiveness—Iraq must stay together because it must stay together—just doesn’t seem wise.

In the same way, there was the same "inadvertantly progressive" justification involved in the Iraq invasion in 2003 - the view that removing a dictator who violently suppressed parts of the population would allow for democracy to flower, and that it was almost racist for opponents on the Left to argue that the people there were incapable of working out their differences peacefully.   From memory, that was pretty much the position that Christopher Hitchens promoted, and which I found somewhat persuasive at the time.   It would be interesting to know what his position is now.

That Indian problem, again

BBC News - Why do millions of Indians defecate in the open?

Yes, we seem to read about the dire lack of toilets in India a lot in the last couple of years (which reminds me, I wonder how the poo2loo campaign is going - looks like they have some cricketer on board now.)

But the thing I wanted to note about this BBC report was this interesting campaign slogan, which I gather is fairly unique in the history of politics:

Access to sanitation is a challenge that India's politicians want to tackle - both the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) promised to put an end to open defecation in their 2014 general election manifestos.

During his campaign, Narendra Modi, BJP's newly-elected prime minister, promised: "Toilets first, temples later".

Adam Creighton notes The Australian's beat up

This story's getting stale, but still, a few key features of the way some of our Tea Party Lite economists have conducted themselves need to be noted:

*   They set up a straw man to attack in the first place, carrying on (at first) as if it was self evidently "a disaster" if any short period after implementation showed a small uptick in consumption. 

Yet it was Sinclair Davidson himself who linked to a Harry Clarke/David Prentice paper that was out before plain packaging started that argued that PP may lead to people using cheaper brands, and that it was important for excise increases to offset this effect.

The ABS figures which indicate a slight increase for the first couple of quarters, then a large drop in the March 14 quarter, are entirely consistent with what Harry Clarke wrote in his paper.

Clarke and Prentice also noted (I'll paraphrase here) that the effect of PP may well be small (so you wouldn't necessarily expect to see a sudden drop in total smokers) and that it was probably going to work mainly on young people and their take up rate of smoking.   All of which indicates you would need to wait for a couple of years at least to see what effect it may have had.   (And even then, of course, there is little way of separating out the effects of the excise rise and the plain packaging.)

As with climate change denial, our Tea Party Lite economists rely on their readership not having understood the case in the first place.   

*  Adam Creighton in the Australian today argues about what ABS volume stats mean (and it is rather confusing, I concede.)   But whether he is right on that or not, here's where he ends up:

Despite evidence from both the tobacco industry and the ABS, the impact of plain packaging is yet to be determined after just 18 months. The measure may ultimately contribute to a real decline in smoking rates and cigarette sales.

So, what does Adam think of the headline on the front page of his paper which started all of this:

Labor's plain packaging fails as cigarette sales rise

But as Media Watch noted, this beat up of a headline ensured that Big Tobacco got big, useful headlines in England, where the policy is still under consideration.  If Creighton had any courage at all, he would specifically criticise his paper for its conduct, not just sneak this near the end of his column.

Go JQ

Treating Australians as parasitic 'leaners' is a grave mistake | John Quiggin | Comment is free | theguardian.com

A very good piece here by John Quiggin on the "class warfare" bulldust that Hockey is going on about, while at the same time doing a "moochers" lite analysis of "leaners and lifters". 


I also see that on a Fairfax online poll (yes, I know, not to be taken too seriously) asking if Abbott should call a double dissolution, 92% are saying "yes"!   I would bet that about 90% of that group is saying so because they reckon this government is so on the nose that they would clearly lose at a quick election.

Can Andrew Bolt and his readers genuinely be this dumb?

Unbelievably, Andrew Bolt has a post today  Fish killed by cold water the CSIRO said would be warm in which he calls a 2012 CSIRO prediction that Tasmanian waters would continue warming "a dud", because apparently a temporary wave of cold water is being blamed for a fish kill there.

Seriously, does Bolt think ocean water doesn't move around all the time, causing changes in ocean temperatures?   Doesn't he know that this is what an El Nino, for example, is all about?   Does he think a temporary incursion of cold water means a long term warming is not happening?
 
Does he think the CSIRO is making it up when it says Tasmanian waters have, on average, been warming rapidly (by global standards) over the last 50 years, as illustrated here?:

Does he think that fisherman are just pretending when they say warmer water fish have been moving into Tasmanian waters?

Andrew Bolt is embarrassing himself by displaying sheer, dumb, wilful ignorance.   That he has readers who don't give a second thought as to what he claims is perhaps the greater problem.

On a lighter, yet still depressing, note...

Here's a screen shot from The Guardian website "People" section this morning.   Has there ever been a sadder collection of stories for anyone interested in the current state of the entertainment industry?:

Possible explanations for The Australian's mental disturbance sought

Wow, just wow.

The Australian has deployed five six writers today to attack Media Watch for calling them wrong on their front page beat up last week about the alleged effect of tobacco plain packaging.

Merritt (Legal Affairs editor!), Ergas, Klan, Kerr, Creighton and Davidson.

They even re-print the latter's post from Catallaxy yesterday, including its criticism of Media Watch "cherry picking" which involves its own cherry picked quote to claim MW made a mistake with its use of 1.4% twice, as I pointed out yesterday.   (Amusingly, in the thread, my main Western Australian female fan, Philippa, mistakenly thinking that I was participating in the thread, actually linked to my post.  Yet no one from Catallaxy who read it noted back on the thread that I had identified a mistake.)

But the bigger point is this - there's something just clearly nuttily paranoid about how this paper conducts itself now, and wouldn't it be good to know where that is coming from?   If this newspaper was a friend, you'd be recommending it seek professional help; there's something clearly wrong going on in its head. 

It would also be good to know why it has decided to die in the ditch for Big Tobacco.

Damning figures on guns and kids

There are some spectacularly damning figures listed in this Slate article about how wrong it is for any American to think that having a gun in the household improves a kid's safety:

The United States accounts for nearly 75 percent of all children murdered in the developed world. Children between the ages of 5 and 14 in the United States are 17 times more likely to be murdered by firearms than children in other industrialized nations.

Children from states where firearms are prevalent suffer from significantly higher rates of homicide, even after accounting for poverty, education, and urbanization. A study focusing on youth in North Carolina found that most of these deaths were caused by legally purchased handguns. A recent meta-analysis revealed that easy access to firearms doubled the risk of homicide and tripled the risk for suicide among all household members. Family violence is also much more likely to be lethal in homes where a firearm is present, placing children especially in danger. Murder-suicides are another major risk to children and are most likely to be committed with a gun.

Crucially, these deaths are not offset by defensive gun use. As one study found, for every time a gun is used legally in self-defense at home, there are “four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.” A study of adolescents in California found that there were 13 times as many threatening as self-defensive uses of guns. Of the defensive encounters, many arose in confrontations that became hostile because of the presence of a firearm.

In the overall suicide rate, the United States ranks roughly in the middle of the pack among industrialized nations. However, we are the exception when it comes to suicides among children between the ages of 5 and 14, with an overall rate twice the average of other developed nations. This stark difference is driven almost exclusively by a firearm-related suicide rate that is 10 times the average of other industrialized nations.

And there is plenty more to appal the sensible reader.   Read the whole thing

Evolving from a "disaster" to "not very supportive"

I trust that people who have been reading Sinclair Davidson's series of articles on plain packaging for tobacco have noticed how he has changed his rhetoric over time?

First, March 27, noting that industry says it sold 0.3% more in the first twelve months:

What a policy disaster! The situation of the ground must be even worse.

 June 6, based on the same information:

For a policy that had the intent of reducing smoking rates, this is a disaster.

June 10, after thinking about it a bit more:

It is an open question as to whether existing smokers are smoking more, or if new smokers are taking up the habit.

Today:

A lot of very careful work needs to be done into the efficacy of the plain packaging policy – the early evidence isn’t very supportive of the policy.

And yet he complains when others (according to him) don't take him seriously enough at a forum discussion?

And how was this for a classic bit of arse covering by Judith Sloan after she wrote an Australian column which virtually repeated every argument Davidson had run up the flagpole:

Sinc, you are doing a great job on this.

But we should not forget that this is really an issue of principle rather than empirics.

Inspiring work, hey, by economists who shoot their mouths off first, and think harder later.

Update:

I also note that Sinclair Davidson's post of today tries on a "gotcha" that Media Watch quoted a 1.4% figure incorrectly for two different things.   He even quotes from the BT letter to show "what it actually says", but in doing so clips off the first reference to 1.4% in the letter.  Here's the full section, with 1.4%'s double appearance in bold:

 “From 2008 to 2012 smoking incidence, or the number of people smoking, was declining at an
average rate of -3.3 per cent a year. Since plain packaging was introduced, that decline rate
slowed to -1.4 per cent,” Mr McIntyre said.
“Over the five years in the lead-up to the introduction of plain packaging, total tobacco industry
volumes were declining at an average rate of -4.1 per cent.
“Subsequently, since plain packs were introduced on 1 December 2012, industry volumes have
actually grown for the first time in a long time to +0.3 per cent.
“Further, the number of cigarettes smoked on a daily basis declined at a rate of -1.9 per cent in the five years leading up to plain packaging, while it slowed to -1.4 per cent after green packs hit shelves.

 Oh dear, the letter is "not very supportive" of the attempted gotcha after all.

Now Davidson then goes on to criticise Media Watch for omitting the paragraph in the letter that argues, in spite of the percentages it just quotes:

“With growth in industry volumes, fewer people quitting and a jump in the amount of cheap illegal cigarettes on the streets, you could draw the conclusion that people are actually smoking more now than before plain packaging came into effect.”

Yes you could draw that conclusion - at least if you're an economist who brings no skepticism at all to tobacco industry spin and doesn't think about the letter as a whole.

Surely the actual problem here, for people other than Davidson and Sloan, is that the letter's conclusion makes little sense in light of its own quoted stats.   The number of smokers is reducing, the number of cigarettes per day smoked is reducing, but the industry is telling us that we can conclude people are smoking more now?   [They might have an argument there, somewhere, if they want to critique how the different sets of figures they quote are compiled, but they certainly don't make it.  The simple fact of the matter is that their claimed increase in sales volume, together with the alleged increase in black market sales, don't naturally gel with declines in the number of smokers and the number of cigarettes smoked per day.]

Here's the thing:  the industry wants to discredit plain packaging (absolute certainly on that point) and had an "obvious" way to do it - to offer cut price cigarettes and claim that any increase in sales volume over any short period shows the "failure" of the policy.  (They were likely assisted in this by the timing of the excise increase which may have led to some stockpiling before the price rise.)   But of course it is a self serving tactic, just like the IPA will campaign in the media by touring climate skeptics, and then quote any drop in polling for "public concern" about the issue to tell the government "see, this is not an important for the public, no need to deal with it." 

And above all of this is the clear fact that many proponents of plain packaging expected it to work long term by discouraging the young from starting, and assessing whether it is working that way or not would take some time to establish.  (Teenagers represent a small proportion of total smokers anyway - under 18 year old smokers now are well under 10% of the total*, and it's substantially more popular with girls at that age.  Somehow, I suspect that it is probably exactly that gender at that age that may be most put off by the de-glamourisation of cigarette packaging.)

Update: * not sure what the right figure is - the percentages in the link I was looking at was for percentage of under 18 teenagers who smoke - not what percentage of total smokers they represent.  That figure is proving hard to track down quickly.

Stuck on unpopular

I see from Newspoll that Abbott's "dissatisfied" polling went from 50% earlier in the year up to close to 60% with the budget, and has stayed there.

I suppose it is only 6 weeks or so since the budget, but it's nonetheless pleasing to see a flaky, windvane of a PM with a policy he is most committed to that is considered an eccentric dog by most in his own party; who takes advice from business ideologues who can't even believe in science and climate change; who is prepared to operate border control under a fake veil of "operational secrecy" so that the public doesn't even know if it should be concerned; whose government drifts into unnecessary terminology changes so as to score points from an Israeli PM who is a favourite of Fox News; and who introduced with no pre-election discussion a major change to tertiary education that has unseen equity consequences while his daughter got free education pretty much for being his daughter, is stuck on unpopular.

Marijuana and capitalism

I see that tonight's Foreign Correspondent is about how business is rubbing its hands with glee at the prospect of a legal marijuana market in much of the United States.  An article along similar lines from the US can be read here.

This does strike me as a very serious issue.  As that second article notes, there's little doubt that tobacco use in the 20th century took off as a result of both a more convenient product pushed along by the profit motive.

The inadequacies of an under regulated market with regards to marijuana in Colorado have already been displayed by the stupidity of selling things like candy bars full of multiple "doses" of THC, with next to no labelling of the danger of consuming too much too quickly.  Talk about your obvious danger with no care taken by the profit maker.

Now, I guess some may argue that, like alcohol, where profit pushes sales, marijuana with find its natural level of societal use.

But the legalisation advocates like to argue that the ubiquity of its use is one of the reasons for legalising it.   Hence you could argue that there is already is a "natural level" of use in society, and what you see by legalisation is permission to give capitalism its full force behind manipulating a market to increase it:  to redefine a new "natural level".   The example of tobacco shows, of course, that capitalism left alone can  take scant account of the interests of public health and productivity. 

I suppose you could argue that the State, if in future concerned about the increase in use, could seek to drive it down by increasing taxes, as they do with smoking and alcohol.   But the higher the taxes, the less likely you will ever actually remove the black market for the drug, which in this case is even easier to manufacture than either tobacco or alcohol. 

I therefore think there is every reason to be leery of legalisation because capitalism and its role in promoting markets makes for an uncomfortable mix when it comes to a "new" product it is not actually in our societal interest to see becoming too popular.

Saudi money causes problems, again

ISIS: The Saudis helped create a monster they can't control in Iraq.

If you were playing a world building game on your computer, about the last strategy you would want is to put a large amount of a very useful resource under the ground of a region made of sand with humans living there who (probably partly because of the harsh environment itself) think they hear God talking to them.

Yet that's what our God seems to have done, and world peace has been paying for it in one way or another for quite a time now.

Maybe this should be added to the atheist arguments against God - an all knowing being would not be so bad at game strategy.

Internal affairs

Health Check: the ins and outs of burping and farting

Well, I didn't realise there was a gas recycling system going on in such a large scale inside me:

Imagine how much space 25 litres of gas would occupy – about one third of the interior of a small car. That’s how much gas you produce every day in your intestines. So it’s little wonder that farting, bloating and burping are relatively common.

Much of this gas production is recycled – by re-absorption and use within the gut, particularly by the almost two kilograms of bacteria in your colon. Indeed, almost 22.5 litres is absorbed by the gut, used by gut bacteria or expires through the lungs.

I think that's a useful fact to drop into my script for episode 3 of the show about time travelling fecal transplanting doctors.  

Fermented fish from another part of the world

Korea’s Fish Special: A Delicate Mix of Outhouse and Ammonia - NYTimes.com

Well, it turns out that Scandinavia is not the only region that has developed a fondness of what many say is the most gut wrenchingly smelly and offensive food of all - fermented fish:

But fermented skate from this southern island tops them all. By far South Korea’s smelliest food, the fish, called hongeo, is described by lovers and detractors alike as releasing odors reminiscent of an outhouse. Served most often as chewy pink slabs of sashimi, hongeo is prized by enthusiasts for the ammonia fumes it releases, sometimes so strong they cause people’s mouths to peel.

“I used to think that people could not possibly eat this stuff unless they were crazy,” said Park Jae-hee, a 48-year-old marketing executive. “But like smelly blue cheese, it has no replacement once you fall in love with it.”

I'll pass, thanks.

Common sense not heard so often in the US

It's Really Hard to Be a Good Guy With a Gun

This article in Gawker makes much sense.   I find it incredible that over my life time, the US has moved more towards something resembling the Wild West, rather than away from it.  Like libertarians generally, gun loving NRA types live in a fantasy world and discount the common good.

And I would also note that while LDP eccentric Senator elect Australian David Leyonhjelm is doing media bits claiming that our drop in firearm deaths both before and after the gun buyback means that the buyback affected nothing, in the US the NRA and gun loving nutters continually draw a connection between concealed carry and a drop in crime.  It's OK to draw the connection sometimes then, is it?

Stern on the inadequacies of economic modelling of climate change

Climate change will ‘cost world far more than estimated’ - Climate Change - Environment - The Independent

Just as I suspected:

Lord Stern, who wrote a hugely influential review on the financial
implications of climate change in 2006, says the economic models that
have been used to calculate the fiscal fallout from climate change are
woefully inadequate and severely underestimate the scale of the threat....

Professor Stern and his colleague Dr Simon Dietz will today publish the
peer-reviewed findings of their research into climate change economic
modelling in the The Economic Journal.

Their review is highly critical of established economic models which,
among other things, fail to acknowledge the full breadth of climate
change’s likely impact on the economy and are predicated on assumptions
about global warming’s effect on output that are “without scientific
foundation”.

Professor Stern, whose earlier research said it is
far cheaper to tackle climate change now than in the future, added: “I
hope our paper will prompt ... economists to strive for much better
models [and] ... help policy-makers and the public recognise the
immensity of the potential risks of unmanaged climate change.”

What the heck, Andrew Robb?

Up on Business Insider:

Australia’s chief trade-deals negotiator has labeled the bid by President Barack Obama to cut U.S. power-plant emissions as lacking substance.

“There’s no action associated with it,” Trade Minister Andrew Robb said in a Sky News interview from Houston, Texas, where he was accompanying Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

Abbott, who is seeking to dismantle Australia’s carbon- price mechanism before it hosts Group of 20 leaders in November, isn’t supporting Obama’s bid to pressure India, China and other nations to help form a world-wide agreement to combat climate change. The president is seeking state-by-state limitations on carbon-dioxide emissions to limit the effects of man-made global warming, and earlier this month proposed cutting power-plant discharges, the nation’s largest source of the gas, by 30 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels.

“Despite the rhetoric you get over here and all the targets for 30 percent reductions and all this, it’s just rhetoric,” Robb said.

I'm sure that Obama appreciates the two faced aspect of the Ministry of the government he just hosted.

Or is there some misreporting, because that sounds an extraordinarily ill considered thing for Robb to say.

Rude economist

I see on the weekend Catallaxy that Sinclair Davidson grumbled about being ignored:

I actually did start listening to the forum just at the point that SD was making his points.   Unless my ears deceived me, there was one direct response to him by one of the other people on the forum.  It was respectful.  As indeed Jonathan Greene always is to him.

Mind you, his apparent feeling that he wasn't adequately responded to in the forum, by posting this at his blog before the show was even on the air, indicates that he probably did deserve to be ignored - that's what people who engage in pre-emptive hyperbole should expect.  

Sure, there can be humour in hyperbole; but we all know that when people use it too much, depending on which audience they are talking to (calling anyone even slightly Left "commies", or admitting a fondness for thinking in terms of "moochers"), people soon start to cotton on that there is something more going on underneath.

This change of language by people who are writers or guests on media outlets when they are talking on their own blogs has always annoyed me - as I wrote last year in a more general attack on Catallaxy:

I used to get really annoyed with Tim Dunlop when he was a paid blogger for News Ltd putting on the "voice of reason" approach in that forum, and then sneaking off to his own personal blog to make snarky, nasty and personal attacks on John Howard.

That applies as much to the Right as to the Left.