Five years ago, I wrote a paper (pdf) critiquing the idea that HECS contributed to childlessness among female graduates.

Though my conclusion of no effect was supported by an article in the Journal of Population Research last year, using the HILDA survey which has a question on student debt, one of my main theories as to why female graduates have a low average number of children continues to be largely overlooked - and surprisingly so, I think.

My theory turns on the admittedly (and this is why it is surprising) rather obvious point that, despite advances in reproductive medicine, babies are more likely to be born if there is a man in the house, and one likely to stick around long enough to help raise the child. I reported data based on the 1996 census showing that married women in the professional jobs that graduates normally aspire to actually had near-replacement fertility levels. It was the large number of unmarried and childless women pushing down the average.

Unfortunately the marriage factor has been a blind spot in subsequent research that I have seen on this topic. In the Journal of Population Research article they controlled for half a dozen variables, but not whether or not there was a potential father. My suggestion that perhaps one solution to low fertility among female graduates was improved education for boys, to improve the dating market for educated women, was reported as ‘perhaps tongue in cheek’.
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“It was smoke, not a fire. There’s a big difference,”

- NSW Railcorp spokesperson CieJai Leggett after an electrical fault in a train air conditioning unit caused 1500 people to be evacuated and one taken to hospital.

“What [CityRail] class as a fire and what we class as a fire seem to be two different things. You don’t have smoke without a fire.”

- NSW Fire Brigades spokesman, Craig Brierley.

SMH, 2 July 2008.

“… he was a good boy, he was a good man, everyone he knew loved him,”

- Rose Boulos, sister of murder victim Charlie Boulos, on her deceased brother.

Police said they had established Mr Boulos had been selling and using the drug ‘ice’.

The Age, 1 July 2008.

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”

- Humpty Dumpty

George Megalogenis was in an optimistic mood when he wrote this analysis piece on Newspoll’s carbon emissions trading scheme survey. According to George:

VOTERS want to be led on the issue of climate change, and if leadership means higher prices at the bowser, so be it. …

A strong majority of voters (61 per cent) say a carbon emissions trading scheme could help slow global warming. Almost as many again (56 per cent) are prepared to pay more for energy sources such as petrol, electricity and gas under an ETS.

But another poll, also reported today but in The Age, found that half the population had either never heard of emissions trading or did not know what it was. Only 7% claimed to know a lot about it. This did not, however, stop 72% of voters telling Essential Media Communications (a left-wing PR and polling firm) that they supported a carbon emissions trading scheme.
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The Liberal students/Young Liberals Make Education Fair campaign now has a Senate inquiry behind it. The inquiry’s terms of reference include looking into:

The current level of academic freedom in school and higher education, with particular reference to:

1. the level of intellectual diversity and the impact of ideological, political and cultural prejudice in the teaching of senior secondary education and of courses at Australian universities, …
2. the need for the teaching of senior secondary and university courses to reflect a plurality of views, be accurate, fair, balanced and in context; and
3. ways in which intellectual diversity and contestability of ideas may be promoted and protected, including the concept of a charter of academic freedoms.

Though there is precedent for the idea of academic freedom for students, I don’t think this is a useful concept, especially not for school students or undergraduates. Their main task is to master a body of knowledge, the content of which is to be determined by those with expertise in the field.

In many disciplines, there will be disputes among experts on some issues. As part of learning their subject, students should be made aware of these disputes and able to take a point of view, within the constraints of scholarly argument. But it is reasonable that students be held within established debates rather than able to claim ‘academic freedom’ to take an idiosyncratic perspective.
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The trouble with letting survey respondents select themselves is that the results can be very odd. How likely is it, for example, that even though the Muslim world does not have a single university in the world’s top 500, it nevertheless produces all ten of the world’s top ten public intellectuals, according to the latest Prospect public intellectuals poll?

I must confess to not even having heard of seven of the ten. And what has Tariq Ramadan done in the last three years to push him up from 58 to 8?

If we ignore the campaign to get Muslims to vote and delete the top ten, we have the same situation as in 2005 with Noam Chomsky, who apart from his loyal band of leftist followers is not taken seriously outside linguistics, as number one. Al Gore is number two, perhaps reflecting the fashionability of his issue.

Another problem is that the starting point is Prospect’s list, with half of the top 10 and 17 of the top 50 in 2008 seemingly not even worth considering in 2005.

There is no easy way to conduct polls like this, but perhaps voters having to write in names without a predetermined list would both include intellectuals Prospect missed, and minimise blog-driven campaigns for particular individuals.

Though this is a marketing gimmick for Prospect, even gimmicks need a certain level of credibility. A list of top universities that put, say, Cairo University above Princeton is not going to be taken seriously. Whatever the merits of Fethullah Gülen, he is not the world’s top public intellectual, and Prospect lacks an even semi-plausible public intellectual ranking.

The left used to portray John Howard as hostile to multiculturalism. But as Michael Gawenda points out in today’s Age, while Howard wasn’t so keen on multiculturalism of the subsidies for Bolivian folk dancing variety, he was quite happy with the implicit multiculturalism of religious schools. And conversely (though Gawenda does not say this), while the left liked the multiculturalism of ethnic differences, it was (and is) often quite hostile to religious belief, particularly when reinforced by religious schools.

And few religious beliefs get people more upset than creationism or intelligent design. Gawenda comments that:

Given that some faith-based schools in Australia — unlike schools in the US — teach creationism and the pseudo-science of Intelligent Design as legitimate alternatives to evolutionary theory, how many will mark the Darwin anniversaries [of Charles Darwin's birth and publication of his evolutionary theory], let alone celebrate them?

In all probability, a significant number won’t. For that John Howard can take some credit. What an irony, given that this was a PM determined to roll back multiculturalism.

But how much does it really matter what ordinary people think about where humans came from? Even most of us who would say we subscribe to Darwin’s theories would not be able to correctly answer even quite basic questions about the evolutionary sequence and how many years ago the the various stages of evolution occurred. I wandered through an exhibition on Darwin only a few weeks ago in Toronto, but I have forgotten already most of what I learnt there.
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Today the Democrat Senators gave their last speeches, bringing their party’s 31-year parliamentary history to an end. That makes me feel rather old, as I attended one of the first meetings that led to their creation after Don Chipp left the the Liberals in March 1977 (in the days when it was Malcolm Fraser being denounced for abandoning small-l liberalism).

The ‘Committee of Concerned Citizens’ organised a meeting on 9 May 1977 in the Melbourne Town Hall. There were 4,000 people there, including me and my Dad (I was 11), with many more turned away. According to John Warhurst’s book Keeping the Bastards Honest, at the end of the evening Chipp declared himself committed to a new party. I can’t quite remember what I thought of it all, though obviously I was not persuaded to take the micro-party route.

While they won seats up until the 2001 election, the Democrats never found a stable constituency among the ‘concerned’ middle class. The Australian Election Survey questions on which party respondents voted for at the most recent and at the previous election always showed a lot of churn among Democrat voters. People would vote for them, but vote for someone else next time. But until 2004, they always picked up enough of the stray disgruntled vote to win seats.

The 2007 AES suggests that the vast majority of defecting 2004 Democrat voters went to Labor and the Greens, confirming that the party that had been born centrist died leftist. With Labor and Liberal fighting over the middle ground, there was no electoral room for a centre party between them.

Despite their wacky policies on some issues (eg higher education) I’m sorry to see the Democrats go. Politics is less a choice between good and bad than between better and worse, and the Democrats are better than the Greens, Family First, or that no pokies guy from South Australia.

The Australian Democrats, RIP.

Apologies for the infrequent blogging of the past few weeks. I’ve been wandering North America - San Francisco, LA, Chicago (including a trip to the University of Chicago, where I certainly would not be the lone classical liberal), Toronto and Montreal - and decided to take a break from blogging, though I could not resist on a couple of occasions.

Of course I have come home to a mountain of work, leave from work being part holiday, part rescheduling. I will resume regular blogging shortly, but it will probably still be light for the next week or so.

In a blog post earlier this month, and in a subsequent Higher Education Supplement version of the post, I expressed doubt as to whether Raffles College of Design and Commerce, formerly known as KvB Institute of Technology, had current ‘central management and control’ in Australia. This was due to it now being owned by the Singapore-based Raffles Education Corporation. If it did not have this central management and control, amendments currently before the Parliament could lead to its students losing access to the FEE-HELP loan scheme.

The Higher Education Supplement and I have now received a letter from Professor Ron Newman, CEO and Chair of Raffles College of Design and Commerce, stating that it meets the requirements for FEE-HELP approval and therefore that they will be compliant with the new legal requirements.

Newman’s letter states that the members of the College’s Council all live in Australia, all but one of the eight members of the academic board live in Australia, three of the four company directors live in Australia, and it has a registered office in Sydney.

The issue here is what constitutes central management and control, but I agree that this sounds as close as is possible to central management and control being in Australia as is possible with 100% foreign ownership.

I’d note too that neither my post nor my article were intended to be criticisms of Raffles; only of the misguided policies of the former government that the current government was legislating to enforce.

Sydney slips in city rankings

The Age, 11 June 2008

Sydney nicer than the other lot

SMH, 11 June 2008

Believe it or not, companies pay for this rankings rubbish.

Update: Another day, another city ranking, with different results. And this one you can have for the price of a lifestyle magazine.