The fickle public on side again?

I've long thought it likely that public sentiment towards climate change varies with the weather, and as this poll was apparently taken recently, this may well explain the apparent increased public approval of carbon pricing and belief in climate change.

Certainly, in the last couple of months, the Australian public must be noticing the remarkable warmth for the time of year.

In Brisbane, where roses only lie dormant for a relatively short time anyway, they are really very confused about the warm autumn and winter.   But it's not only them - I'm sure lots of other plants are flowering when they wouldn't normally.  It is very noticeable.

But this poll was an on line one - which I never take all that seriously. 

Still any move in the public sentiment towards accepting reality and approving carbon pricing is welcome.

Poor misunderstood tobacco company

Is this the end of the tobacco war?

Peter Martin notes:

Added to the Health Department's website quietly last week amid debate over the effectiveness of plain packaging, the Treasury data shows 3.4 per cent fewer cigarettes were sold in 2013 than 2012. Plain packaging became mandatory on December 1, 2012.

The Treasury data is consistent with national accounts data that shows a decline of 0.9 per cent in the amount of tobacco and cigarettes sold between 2012 and 2013. The national accounts show a further slide of 7.6 per cent in the three months to March after the first of a number of big increases in tobacco excise announced late last year.

The Bureau of Statistics bases the national accounts measure on a survey of households, whereas the Treasury collects information on every stick and pouch of tobacco sold.

The Treasury data suggests that, adjusted for population growth of 1.7 per cent, the number of sticks sold per person slid about 5 per cent between 2012 and 2013.

Gee, no wonder Sinclair Davidson did some backtracking at Catallaxy when posting on the topic.  Will he still defend the "it's a disaster!" line he took at the first tobacco company suggestion that they were selling more?   (By the way, the three year anniversary of his "stagflation" warning is fast approaching.   I'm planning a party.)

And what will the economist wonder woman Judith Sloan say about it?  Attack the Treasury figures?  Who knows.  I see that Henry Ergas' Saturday position was that it "may" increase smoking:  I think of the three, it was probably Sloan who nailed her credibility highest to the mast on it clearly increasing tobacco consumption.

About the only tactic they have left to argue that smoking has not gone down is to say that illegal tobacco has replaced legal sales.   I think anyone sensible would allow that there may be some substitution going on, at least amongst well established smokers.   But I think it unlikely that new, teenage smokers would be seeking out the illegal product, and as such, the amount of substitution may well diminish within a relatively short time.

But the funniest thing in Martin's report is this comment at the end:

British American Tobacco spokesman Scott McIntyre said: "Smoking rates have been declining in Australia for a very very long time but since plain packaging the rate of decline has halved. That's what we are arguing." he said.

Have we all been misreading the tobacco companies?   I now understand their position to be that they would like the previous (alleged) higher rate of smoking decline to be reinstated by removing plain packaging.

They're a noble industry after all.   Or liars.  One or the other.

Don't mention the potty training

This article in the Atlantic on the (modern) history of potty training notes that Freud's elaborate theorising on the "anal phase" led to some fairly unusual wartime theories:

American anthropologists turned to potty training in the early 1940s, while studying what they believed to be the particular aggressiveness of Japanese soldiers. Could this aggression, asked noted scholars like Margaret Mead, be caused by premature toilet training? Anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer thought so. He argued (as it turns out, falsely) that Japanese parents potty train their babies earlier than Western parents do—and that this accounted for “the overwhelming brutality and sadism of the Japanese at war.” Gorer’s reasoning was that premature toilet training forced Japanese babies to control their sphincters before important muscular development had taken place. This caused intense rage, which the infants soon repressed. This repression, in turn, gave rise to severe and compulsive personalities.

Some of this psychoanalysis was done in the service of the American war effort. In the early 40’s, Geoffrey Gorer and some of his like-minded colleagues were hired as analysts by the U.S. Office of War Information’s Foreign Morale Analysis Division. There, they attempted to build basic personality profiles of foreign nation-states. (In a related project, Gorer linked infant swaddling in Russia to manic-depressive personality disorders.) Gorer’s research on Japan would expand, but he always insisted: “Early and severe toilet training is the most important single influence in the formation of the adult Japanese character.”

This raises the crucial question:  at what age would Hitler have been potty trained?

A Pope on my side

Pope Francis warns on 'evil' of drugs, opposes legalization | Reuters

Yay.

I was thinking while watching Four Corners last week (about the prostitution, drug use and poverty in Brazil in close proximity to the World Cup) that the drug dealers who trade with the poor in such countries are utterly despicable.   I wouldn't mind betting that this Pope's strong views on the matter are due to his familiarity with the society wide problems caused by illicit drug use in his home continent, particularly amongst the poor.  Popes from Europe would not have had the same exposure to the issue, and maybe that's why I cannot recall it being mentioned much by them.

Hot dongle

I bought a Google Chromecast yesterday.  I got it after being reminded by Download This Show (the enjoyable Radio National show on technology and the internet) that it had recently been released in Australia, and they seemed to like it quite a lot.

It is good, and promises to get better as more apps come out incorporating it.  (ABC's iView apparently is doing so.)

One thing I wasn't expecting was that my daughter's iPod would work with it straight away, leading to fights between us (me armed with the Samsung, she with the Pod) for control of the TV.

(By the way, the thing does get pretty warm to the touch after its been used for a while - hence "hot" in the title.  I was thinking of entitling this post "Been Playing with My Hot Dongle", but decided against it.)

Groucho does smoking

Henry Ergas confirms himself as a complete tosser in his Saturday column, which comprises part of The Australian's nutty jihad against people who doubt their position that plain packaging is a FAILURE and WRONG!

He deploys all the tactics we've seen before - the straw man about how plain packaging should have had an immediate drop in smokers, and that it would result in smokers moving to cheaper brands so why do it? - both of which I showed had already been considered by the likes of strongly anti-smoking economists such as Harry Clarke.

Ergas notes the difficulty of working out the effects of different measures taken over a same period - typically increases in excise happening along with increasing restrictions on advertising.  But then (of course) he's happy to cite tobacco industry econometrics study which "indicate" it's all in the excise, and attacks Labor for not doing "Regulation Impact Statement" before introducing the policy.   He thinks this:

Roxon’s failure to undertake a RIS means the Abbott government must complete a post-implementation review of the plain packaging legislation by December. It should seize that opportunity to carry out an independent, rigorous review of policies towards the tobacco industry. The unfortunate reality is that this area has become a policy trapdoor: once a policy is implemented, there is no way out, no matter how costly and ineffective it may be.

Yeah, well, we kind of like of that way, because tobacco has been losing big time, and who cares whether it's (say) 10% advertising restrictions and 90% excise, or vice versa, or any combination in between?   The combination of policies has clearly been working.   And doesn't common sense suggest you're never going to be able to completely be sure of the precise weighting of the different factors?

Sinclair Davidson has taken up a similar line - arguing that you must be able to a cost benefit analysis of tobacco policy.   Of course, this fits hand in glove with the line he and fellow climate change "skeptics" have long taken - you can wait to decide on reducing CO2 until you know exactly what the climate sensitivity figure is.  Both are disingenuous ways of arguing to do nothing (including, with climate change, up to the point where you can't do anything effective anyway),  because your ideological starting point is that you don't want businesses interfered with. 

Amusingly, Davidson has also been running the line that we are being just too mean to smokers and making them feel bad:

The anti-smoking lobby has done an magnificent job of stigmatising and denormalising smokers and smoking. 

Oh diddums. 

Back to Ergas:  what about this section (with my comments in brackets):

After all, that policy imposes significant costs. Consumers are harmed, as the quality of a product they value is forcibly degraded [only if you count an ugly packet as degrading what's inside it - a smoker can still buy a premium brand if they want to]; producers’ profits are reduced and their trademarks destroyed [oh boo hoo - the industry which sickens and kills a large proportion of its addicted customers is going to lose money - that's a feature, not a problem]; and if consumption rises as plain packaging causes prices to fall (relative to the levels they would otherwise have achieved), the community’s health suffers [we already thought about that - so we brought in excise increase too].

What's the bet that Ergas used to be a smoker, by the way?

Update:   incidentally, this "we are too mean to smokers now" palaver - the fact is that something 3/4 of smokers want to quit anyway.   Encouraging youth never to start is a good way to ensure they're not going to regret their addiction in the future - and  we can promise with pretty high certainty they will.

Factor that into your cost benefit analysis, can you?

Electric bicycles popular - in China

Yeah, so Harley-Davidson have a electric motorcycle out that may or may not go into production, by the sounds.  But in the story, I noticed this interesting point:

Purpose-built electric bicycles are becoming hugely popular. In China 25 million are sold each year, according to Prof Peter Wells, co-director of the automotive industry research group at Cardiff Business School.

By the way, just Googling around to see what's available in Australia in the way of scooters (it has occurred to me before that I could scooter to work from where I live for much of the year), I came across this pretty interesting looking design that is coming Australia's way soon.  Hey, it's a cheesy ad, but the machine itself looks pretty cool to me:

A mixed bag

Our Libertarian Age: Dogma of Democracy is a Dogma of Decline | New Republic

Some of the comments following this essay are pretty much in line with my take - worth reading, many parts are surely correct, but some parts seem dubious. 

Small government by whatever it takes

I sort of missed the evolution over time of Right wing think tank increasing support for strict compliance with constitutional provisions and getting all aroused by the prospect of increased State responsibilities and less Commonwealth involvement.  They're currently Hi 5-ing themselves over the High Court making Commonwealth funding to assist programs within States a trickier thing.

It seems its all to do with fairly fanciful ideas of competitive Federalism being obviously A Good Thing.   Also, they'll run with any idea as long as it means government being smaller, somewhere.

While I don't doubt that States sometimes come up with novel and better ways of doing things which are then followed by other States, you can't dismiss the "race to the bottom" effect of such competition either.   And certainly, for some workers (Defence Force in particular) the lack of certain standardised things between  States (like school curriculum) had long made movement around the country a disruptive pain.   Now the likes of Judith Sloan are all for differentiation between States' schools again, regardless of the effects on worker mobility which she presumably thinks is a good thing.

It's also far from obvious to me that IPA types get any increase in their much desired minimal government if the States get their responsibilities re-inflated.   After all, look at things like anti outlay bikie legislation:  what small government types probably consider the most illiberal laws in the country are from State parliaments.

I am of the view that you get more intelligent government the higher up the Federal chain you go; you may not think much of politicians at any level, but for the spectacularly ill qualified, eccentric and prone to corruption, look no further than your State governments.   For this reason alone, I have been generally happy with the greater role of the Feds in matters over the decades, and yet again find the Right wing ideologues wanting worse outcomes for the public simply due to their ideology.

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.