This week’s $100 million lottery prize prompted ABC radio to ring me about the research finding that winning the lottery doesn’t make you happier. I declined the interview after discovering that I would be talking live to the nation’s insomniacs at 4.20am next Sunday morning (though did suggest a solution to this problem - find an overseas interviewee in a day time zone).

Though one early paper - which is cited in books on subjective well-being published up until a few years ago - did find some evidence for negative effects of lottery wins, it was never an especially strong finding. Winners in the sample experienced lesser ‘mundane’ pleasures than members of a control group, but their present ‘general happiness’ was higher. The authors of this paper also stressed that their survey was at a single point in time, and could not do genuine before and after tests of happiness changes.

This later paper by Andrew Oswald was able to use the British Household Panel Survey to do a genuine before and after examination of lottery winners. It found that
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I’d never seen any data on the deaths of international students while in Australia, so I was interested in this story in The Age this morning reporting 54 deaths in the year to November 2008 (though annoyed at the beat-up elements - claiming the information was ’suppressed’ by the coroner, when there is no evidence of anything other than reluctance to publish possibly unreliable data).

Obviously 54 deaths is 54 too many, but so far as I can work out this a death rate below that of the general population. Though there are statistical problems in working out the base population for overseas students (because the number of overseas students who will be in Australia at some time during a year will give a too-high number, due to short courses, mid-year starts and finishes etc), my estimate is that this gives a death rate of about .02%.

For a local comparison, I looked at deaths of 20-somethings in Australia. That works out at around .04% of the base population, or around double the death rate of overseas students. On the other hand, perhaps the relevant comparison group is Australian students - if we assume that the local death rate is increased by including the kinds of risk-taking and underlying illness that is under-represented in the student population. (The death rate of Australian students is not ’suppressed’, it is just not recorded.)

Indians appear to be over-represented among the deaths, so perhaps another comparison point is the death rate of young Indians of similar backgrounds in India. I would have thought that the risk of death from accidents or disease was much lower here.

For reasons I do not understand, a large proportion of the under-30 population believes that plurals are created by adding ’s. An error that was once restricted to Italian and Greek greengrocers (banana’s $1 a kilo etc) is now common. It is still relatively rare in professionally produced publications, but appears in an ABS release today.
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The Fairfax broadsheets this morning report on research by Anna Crabb (published in the Australian Journal of Political Science) showing that over the years 2000 to 2006 Australian politicians increasingly made reference to Christian themes, as measured by use of the terms Christ, church, faith, pray, Jesus, Bible, spiritual, God, and religion. In 2000, 9% of speeches by prominent federal politicians mentioned one of these terms, rising steadily to a peak of 24% in 2005, before dropping back down to 22% in 2006.

The empirical work is interesting, though it is difficult to sort out to what extent this represents shifting norms in political speech (as against a claimed norm of keeping religion and politics separate), and to what extent the issues of this time period gave greater cause to mention religion.

Clearly, the rise of any terrorist movement intent on mass murder would have been mentioned regularly by politicians, and that Islamist movements killed in the name of a religion gave religion in general a salience it would not otherwise have had. Indeed, were it not for terrorism-related mentions there would have been no clear trend in religious mentions over 2000-2003.
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The 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species, along with the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, has been getting plenty of attention. But there was another still-famous book published in 1859 that doesn’t seem to be getting anniversary celebrations - John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.

I try to rectify this in the current issue of Policy. At the end of my article, I try to explain why Mill, despite probably being the most read and cited liberal philosopher, has an uneasy place in the classical liberal canon, but still deserves to be there:
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Today John Quiggin published a post on ‘probity and economic liberalism’, arguments from which have also been appearing in the thread to this post of mine.

In response to the argument that economic liberalism reduces the scope for wrong-doing, Quiggin offers evidence which I think is in itself pretty much irrelevant: that various governments that introduced some liberal policies also had scandals. But as social scientists often point out, correlation is not causation. All governments eventually have scandals of some sort, and by Quiggin’s standard every ideology stands condemned.

The Latham argument I agreed with was that to the extent government either withdraws from activities or sets neutral rules of the game the scope for political favours is reduced. Because classical/neo-liberalism provides no ideological justification for industry policy and advocates cutting taxes over most forms of government spending it seems to me that it must, to the extent it is successful, have a prophylactic effect on political favours.
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Regular readers will know that I have a distinctive explanation of why public opinion has shifted since the mid-1990s to favour more taxing and spending. Most researchers in this field think it is an ideological shift towards government services, while I argue that it is linked to household finances. Under my theory, when economic times are good people tend towards spending more on everything, including those services they pay for via taxation. When economic times are not so good, people want to protect their household budgets, and opinion tends towards preferring lower taxation.*

According to my theory, in a mild recession we should be starting to see a shift in opinion back towards lower tax. One indicator of perceptions of household finances I used in my original research, Roy Morgan’s consumer confidence poll, shows that while confidence is rising again it is still well below its 2007 levels, when pro-tax opinion was high.

An Essential Research poll published on Pollytics blog earlier this week on whether tax increases to fund more spending have support appears consistent with that theory. Read the rest of this entry »

1. The Australian confirms my suspicion that the size of education as an export industry is inflated by including money earnt and spent in Australia by overseas students.

2. The bureaucrat formerly responsible for reporting Australia’s education statistics to the OECD confirms that Labor incorrectly claims that public spending on tertiary education fell under the Howard government.

I’m one of the few people who thinks that regulation of political donations already goes too far, at least for NGOs. But I think there is some common ground that nobody - whether donors or not - should get special treatment that would not be given to other persons or organisations with the same relevant characteristics.

However, differences arise on this issue because I, like Mark Latham, see the central problem as inappropriate levels of political discretion. If discretion exists, we can hardly blame constituents for trying to take advantage, or politicians hoping to win support from offering advantage. We cannot be surprised when people follow the incentives a system creates. To the extent that constituents attempt to win special favours by donations this is a symptom of a deficient system rather than the cause of a deficient system.

This is why I think that Joo-Cheong Tham, writing in The Age this morning, is mistaken in arguing that the fact that John Grant did not get special treatment does not make a significant difference to how we should assess the case. When Treasury can repeatedly raise a particular case (indeed, cases) with a company seeking financial guarantees from the Commonwealth and get nowhere it suggests that the policy integrity system is working. Read the rest of this entry »

I was responsible for the site breaking yesterday. Hopefully this doesn’t interfere with your quests to dig at the roots of happiness, education and politics.