Catallaxy Files

Every now and then organisations get questions like, ‘How much ethic diversity is there in your organisation?’ or ‘How many foreign born staff do you have?’, or ‘What is the average age of your staff?’. These may well be interesting questions, but I often wonder why organisations would collect information like that. If we live in a world where discrimination on the basis of gender, age, ethnicity, religion etc. are all illegal its not clear what purpose any organisation would have in keeping information like that on file. I imagine the only purpose anyone would have for collecting information like that is for committing an offense. So why do it? On the other hand, I can understand why an organsation would collect information on the academic qualifications of its staff. So I wonder what Doug Cameron is up to? He wants to know from the Productivity Commission whether their staff attended public or private schools.

Senator CAMERON—You have provided the committee, on a question on notice, the qualifications of your staff. Thank you for that; it was quite comprehensive. I would like to take that to the next step. Could you now provide the committee with the mix of employees between public and private schools—not the tertiary institutions but the schools?

Mr Banks—Perhaps I could go back to the last meeting. I think you were concerned that the commission may have staff who were all cut from the same cloth, if I could put it that way, in terms of their economic qualifications. The information that we provided to this committee indicates quite a diversity of qualifications among our staff. In fact, it surprised me. For example, the first page of what we sent you indicates that we have staff with qualifications and degrees in public administration, social work, forest science, law, linguistics, urban geography, social sciences, development, environmental economics, psychology—

Senator CAMERON—That is all on the public record. I have a few things I need to go through. That is not what I am asking you at the moment. I am happy for you to come back to that some time later, but can I now move on to another issue, and that is your executive remuneration report.

Mr Banks—I am sorry, Senator. We probably should finish in relation to that. You were seeking further information beyond the tertiary qualifications of our staff.

Senator CAMERON—Yes.

Mr Banks—I guess I would make two points in relation to that. One is that we have provided this information, which took a while to get. I think it is good to have it, and we can see a public interest in having that. I guess there is a question of the utility of having more detailed information about the primary and secondary schooling of our staff, particularly in the context of a commission for which the responsibility lies at the level of statutory officers who are commissioners and not with the staff—as in, for example, executive remuneration, to which you are going to come in a moment.

Senator CAMERON—Are you telling me you will not provide it?

Mr Banks—All I am asking is what purpose that would serve.

Senator CAMERON—I am simply asking. What you have done is far more complex than what I am asking now—that is, to simply provide the break-up between public education and private education of your employees. I think that is a fair and reasonable question.

Senator Sherry—We will take it on notice.

This is simply extraordinary. Does the ALP support the right of parents to choose the school their children attend and the type of education they will receive? Will the executive simply stand by and watch their employees be attached by an out-of-control ALP senator? There are two points to consider. First the PC employees would have attended the school their parents chose for them. Second, as Andrew Norton tells us

One curious feature of Australian school education is that has a very large private sector, but few non-government schools are secular. The Independent Schools Association says that 84% of independent schools have a religious affiliation, but this overstates the size of the entirely secular non-government system open to parents wanting a ‘mainstream’ private education.

Cameron wants to engage is some pretty grubby class warfare, but this is a proxy religious test.

The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

I think Senator Sherry should answer the question on notice by simply saying ‘no’.

For the record, Senator Cameron is a fitter and machinist by profession, but the bio at the Parliament website does not say where he attended school.

The New Yorker has a feature article on Paul Krugman – a fine economist.

Krugman’s tribe was academic economists, and insofar as he paid any attention to people outside that tribe, his enemy was stupid pseudo-economists who didn’t understand what they were talking about but who, with attention-grabbing titles and simplistic ideas, persuaded lots of powerful people to listen to them. He called these types “policy entrepreneurs”—a term that, by differentiating them from the academic economists he respected, was meant to be horribly biting. He was driven mad by Lester Thurow and Robert Reich in particular, both of whom had written books touting a theory that he believed to be nonsense: that America was competing in a global marketplace with other countries in much the same way that corporations competed with one another. In fact, Krugman argued, in a series of contemptuous articles in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere, countries were not at all like corporations. While another country’s success might injure our pride, it would not likely injure our wallets. Quite the opposite: it would be more likely to provide us with a bigger market for our products and send our consumers cheaper, better-made goods to buy. A trade surplus might be a sign of weakness, a trade deficit a sign of strength. And, anyway, a nation’s standard of living was determined almost entirely by its productivity—trade was just not that important.

When Krugman first began writing articles for popular publications, in the mid-nineties, Bill Clinton was in office, and Krugman thought of the left and the right as more or less equal in power. Thus, there was no pressing need for him to take sides—he would shoot down idiocy wherever it presented itself, which was, in his opinion, all over the place. He thought of himself as a liberal, but he was a liberal economist, which wasn’t quite the same thing as a regular liberal. Until the late nineties, when he became absorbed by what was going wrong with Japan, he believed that monetary policy, rather than government spending, was all that was needed to avoid recessions: he agreed with Milton Friedman that if only the Fed had done its job better the Great Depression would never have happened. He thought that people who wanted to boycott Nike and other companies that ran sweatshops abroad were sentimental and stupid. Yes, of course, those foreign workers weren’t earning American wages and didn’t have American protections, but working in a sweatshop was still much better than their alternatives—that’s why they chose to work there. Moreover, sweatshops really weren’t the threat to American workers that the left claimed they were. “A back-of-the-envelope calculation . . . suggests that capital flows to the Third World since 1990 . . . have reduced real wages in the advanced world by about 0.15%,” he wrote in 1994. That was not nothing, but it certainly wasn’t anything to get paranoid about. The world needed more sweatshops, not fewer. Free trade was good for everyone. He felt that there was a market hatred on the left that was as dogmatic and irrational as government hatred on the right.

Read it all; it’s a sad story.

As Sinclair has posted below, our learned colleague Clive Hamilton has begun publishing a five part epic on the conspiracy of climate denialism.  Either Clive has started writing satire, or else he has no sense of irony.

Part 1 of this series was called “Bullying, lies and the rise of right-wing climate denial“. The article details the threats and personal abuse that have been made against journalists and scientists involved in the climate change debate.

I agree with Clive that there is no place in the current debate for threats of violence and harm against those with opposing views. Anyone on either side of the debate who is threatening violence is doing their cause a great deal of harm and threats of violence or repeated harassment should be referred to law enforcement for appropriate action.

However Clive also complains about the fact that scientists are receiving abusive emails such as these:

” One scientist was called a “Loudmouth, arrogant, conceited, ignorant wanker”.

The emails frequently accuse the scientists of being frauds who manipulate their research in order to receive funding, such as this one to Ben McNeil at the UNSW:

“It’s so obvious you are an activist going along with the climate change lie to protect your very lucrative employment contract.”

They often blame the recipients of being guilty of crimes, as in this one received by Professor David Karoly at the University of Melbourne:

“It is probably not to (sic) extreme to suggest that your actions (deceitful) were so criminal to be compared with Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. It is called treason and genocide.

“Oh, as a scientist, you have destroyed peoples trust in my profession. You are a criminal . Lest we forget.” (ABC 22/02/2010)

Now this isn’t particularly friendly and some of it may be unfair criticism, but when it comes to odious comparisons, this is a bit of a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

As commenters at the ABC site quickly pointed out, this complaint is coming from the same Clive who recently declared that ‘climate denialists’ were just a small step behind ‘holocaust denialists‘ on the scale of evil.  I’d also point out that this is the same Clive who likes to create straw men in order to smear his opponents in the internet filtering debate.

Clive needs to appreciate that not everyone who cares about the climate change debate is an academic. Not everyone has the time or skill to compose five part essays when they have something to say on the topic.

Due to a sense of frustration or lack of skill – people will sometimes resort to coarse language and insults. This behaviour isn’t to be encouraged and threats should be dealt with by the authorities. But given Clive’s previous form, this latest lengthy missive looks like simply adding more heat, rather than light, to the climate change debate.

Yesterday we were promised that we could discover who is behind the abusive email campaign that so troubles some climate change scientists and journalists. But it’s a bad soap opera – all in the antipicipation and nothing in the delivery.

Without access to ISP logs, it is difficult to trace the emails to a source. However, it is clear that hard-line denialists congregate electronically at a number of internet nodes where they engage in mutual reinforcement of their opinions and stoke the rage that lies behind them.

So he doesn’t know who it is, but he does know where they hang out.

In Australia, a handful of denialist websites stand out. They include the blog of Herald-Sun commentator Andrew Bolt, Bolt’s stable mate Tim Blair at the Daily Telegraph, the website operated by sceptic Joanne Nova (a pseudonym for Joanne Codling), and the community forum site operated by the Queensland farmers’ organisation Agmates. Denialists also flock to the e-journal Online Opinion.

Hamilton is clearly still pissed off with Graham Young and doesn’t provide a link to his site, so here it is.

What evidence does Hamilton have to support his claim that these individuals or their regulars are sending abusive emails to people?

On these sites discussion of the “global warming conspiracy” seamlessly segues into a hodge-podge of right-wing populist grievances and causes, including defending rural property rights, the martyrdom of farming hunger-striker Peter Spencer, the errors of the Club of Rome, blood on the hands of Rachel Carson for causing DDT to be banned, the evils of Al Gore, the plan by the United Nations to dominate the world, and the need to defend freedom and democracy from these threats.

Sounds like gulit by association. In the old country there was substantial abuse of the common law crime of ‘common purpose‘. The state didn’t have to prove that individuals had conspired together to commit a crime or that they even knew each other, the state only had to prove that individuals acted as if they had conspired to act in concert. This is what Hamilton is doing here – people who hold views that he doesn’t like must also be people who would send abusive emails.

Not content with ripping into blogs, it seems the whole of the Australian newspaper is to blame too.

In truth, the most influential source of misrepresentation and ridicule resides in the “heritage media” in the form of the Murdoch broadsheet, The Australian. I will consider its long-running war on science later, but here it is important to draw attention to its role in identifying hate figures for deniers and fueling their aggression.

A newspaper reporting news and opinion that deviates from the government’s official policy? Shocking. What a delicious irony that the government owned and funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation should publish that view.

So why would people do such a thing? Hamilton has a long section but I think I can summarise it into a few phrases. ‘Right-wing’, ‘populist’, ‘Christian’, ‘Tony Abbott supporters’ are to blame. I’m wondering if all four criteria must apply or just a subset? The most high profile populist Christian I know of is Kevin Rudd – he probaby hasn’t sent abusive emails to anyone. He bawls them out in person or he has people who do that. More seriously, this piece is just a crock.

The overall bottom line?

I am not suggesting that the individuals and organisations I have mentioned are responsible for organising the cyber-bullying attacks on scientists and others.

So what actually is he saying? Well he is saying he doesn’t like open debate. We know he doesn’t like democracy.

This is because the implications of 3C, let alone 4C or 5C, are so horrible that we look to any possible scenario to head it off, including the canvassing of “emergency” responses such as the suspension of democratic processes.

If only these ‘Right-wing’, ‘populist’, ‘Christian’, ‘Tony Abbott supporters’ would STFU and pay their taxes then Hamilton and his mates could get on with their social engineering projects in the peace and quiet and with the respect that they so deserve.

Tomorrow we get to read about the Exxon funded think-tanks. I suspect after that it’ll be about smoking. Apparently this crap will go on all week.