Sometimes ideas can take circuitous routes into the mass media. Back in 2004, I posted on the mummy party/daddy party thesis about the different roles played by political parties, which I sourced to George Lakoff’s 1996 book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. In late November last year, Andrew Leigh mentioned the idea again, attributing it to my 2004 post. Andrew L’s post prompted Don Arthur to explain the idea further at Club Troppo. Don was the one holding the parcel when the music stopped for the last time, and on Monday got credit for it in the SMH:

One theory, proffered by the commentator Don Arthur, is that the left-right divisions of Australian politics have been replaced. Instead, voters see Labor as the caring and nurturing party, better suited to state issues such as health and education, while the Liberals are seen as the strict father, best put in charge of the nation’s finances and defence and border protection. If such a political climate change has occurred it will tilt the odds of federal success against Labor.

Don’s very good at tracing the sources of ideas, and he gave the history of the mummy party/daddy party thesis in his post. But those who clearly explain ideas can come to own them as much as the people who think of them in the first place.

It’s common enough in right-of-centre circles to laud the economic reforms of the 1980s. A new publication from the Institute of Public Affairs, Australia Since the 1980s, is in this tradition. Its opening paragraph tells us that it is

worthwhile revisiting the last great period of reform - the 1980s.

Certainly, there were some worthwhile reforms in the 1980s: the floating of the dollar, the opening up of the financial system, and the start of phased tariff cuts among them. Yet as with some other recent IPA excursions into history (here and here), this claim doesn’t quite stack up.

The 1990s, and especially their first half, have a better claim on being the last great period of reform: the end of the two airline policy, the end of the one phone company policy, improved competition policy (admittedly, a point of dispute among liberals), more phased tariff cuts, all the major privatisations, the most significant industrial relations changes, and many other less high-profile reforms. This Industry Commission publication gives a useful timeline from the 1970s to 1997.

So why do people keep talking about the 1980s as the period of reform? There are several possible explanations. It was certainly the start of a major period of reform, the unravelling of the ‘Australian Settlement’ that had governed economic policy since the first decade of the 20th century. And arguably it is a little artificial to distinguish between the two decades; the ‘1980s’ can be used figuratively to refer to later, related periods too (just as some of the important trends of the ‘1960s’ peaked in the first half of the 1970s).

But I think there could be other reasons relating to the culture of the right. The 1980s was the time when the right was on the intellectual offensive, and the left shell-shocked. In Australia, they simply weren’t used to the right having a specific programme of reform. In 1987, an edited collection from various Labor and left figures, The New Right’s Australian Fantasy, said on the back cover that its contributors ‘feel strongly about the need to safeguard what is best about this place.’ The left being reduced to a conservative argument like this was something few people would have predicted 15 years earlier, when the left’s time seem to have come. This first phase of economic reform, superbly recorded in Paul Kelly’s The End of Certainty, was as exciting for the right as it was depressing for the left.

Though the reform programme continued even more quickly in the 1990s, the political dynamic changed. The dreadful early 1990s recession gave the opponents of economic reform a plausible (if wrong) argument that the economic reform programme was a failure, and vocal opposition arose from conservatives as well as leftists. The Paul Keating Prime Ministership also divided the right. Many pro-economic reform cultural conservatives hated his non-economic agenda so much that they could barely give him credit for the good things he was doing. And then he defeated Liberal leader John Hewson and his radical reform agenda Fightback! in the 1993 election. The reform movement didn’t die with Fightback!, but it marked the end of manifesto politics. So while the 1990s were important years for economic reform, they didn’t feel as good as the 1980s had.

Surveys suggest that people tend to look back fondly on their years of early adulthood, and I think the same might be true of political movements as well. The future remains an exciting possibility, free of the messy realities of trying to make things work. This is why the free-market right views the ‘1980s’ with nostalgia. But we should not pretend that these memories are accurate history.

Earlier in the week, The Australian published a story about Harvard academic Robert Putnam’s research into ethnic diversity and trust. It reported that:

His extensive research found that the more diverse a community, the less likely were its inhabitants to trust anyone, from their next-door neighbour to their local government. People were even more wary of members of their own ethnic groups, as well as people from different backgrounds.

Now this in itself is hardly suprising. It is intuitively plausible, since the less you know or can infer about someone, and the less you are able to deliver social sanctions through social networks, the less rational it is to trust them. Andrew Leigh (who has worked with Putnam in the past) has already written a good study of it, reporting some international empirical work and adding Australian evidence. This story should just have been telling us that we were about to get some interesting extra detail. But instead it suggests that Putnam himself should be treated with some intellectual distrust.

The original Financial Times report said:

Professor Putnam told the Financial Times he had delayed publishing his research until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity, saying it

Listmania has spread to the Australian Literary Review, the new literary periodical being given away as an insert once a month in The Australian. They’ve given us the third list of top public intellectuals in the last couple of years, following on from the SMH list and the Education Age list.

The ALR list (also here, for when Rupert takes the original report into pay-to-view) and the SMH list used similar methodologies to make their selections, with the ALR asking 200 (unnamed) ’scholars’ for suggestions, and the SMH a wider but smaller (100) group of people with some connection to the intellectual world. Inevitably there are some choices (or rankings) that seem a bit odd: how can Marcia Langton rank above Geoffrey Blainey? But overall most of the people mentioned are credible candidates for a list of public intellectuals, and many names appear on all three lists.

Despite the diverse interests and views of the people who made it to these lists, one striking thing is that they are dominated by storytellers and moralists. They are people who tell stories about some aspect of Australian and sometimes international life or history (eg on the latest list Blainey, Inga Clendinnen, Helen Garner, Robert Hughes) and / or moralisers (eg Robert Manne, Peter Singer, Clive Hamilton, Tim Flannery, David Marr).

Social scientists, people who use statistics to explain and advise Australia, are conspicuously absent. There are no economists on the ALR list (Hamilton has an economics PhD, but that’s not the basis of his public prominence). Politicians are also rare: Bob Brown and Carmen Lawrence, moralists both, and Barry Jones, a classic case of a good memory being confused with intellectual talent. Just two people on this list have any power beyond their own words to shape the world around them: Noel Pearson and one of my bosses, Glyn Davis.

The shortage of people with real power is not so surprising. There is little time for reflective writing if you have pressing day-to-day responsibilities. It is the omission of social scientists that I am curious about. Though they probably have more influence on policy than most of the 40 people on this list, their work is not easily accessible to the general public, even when it appears, as it often does, in newspapers. The human brain is surprisingly bad at remembering numbers, and struggles to recall or even understand the analytical arguments that flow from them. Narrative is our more natural mode of understanding, and people respond better to thinkers who use it to convey their message. Similarly, right and wrong in the moral sense is something that people sense and respond to from a very early age, while right and wrong in a mathematical sense is hard to acquire and rarely provides conclusions that resonate. As Stalin is reported to have said, in one of his rare moments of insight, ‘one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic’.

For aspiring public intellectuals, there are clear messages in all this: go for stories over statistics, and anecdotes over analysis.

Tonight in Sydney Quadrant is celebrating its 50th birthday. In The Australian this morning, Owen Harries and Tom Switzer offer high praise. Noting the now ‘mainstream’ nature of conservative ideas, they say that we should thank Quadrant for its part in this change:

Quadrant is the most successful and influential magazine of ideas in Australia’s history.

In Crikey, Charles Richardson is more critical. After noting its golden days as an anti-communist journal, he says:

Since then, and especially since the fall of communism, Quadrant has struggled to retain relevance. Harries and Switzer acknowledge that it “has had its ups and downs”, and mention “clashes of personalities”. But they fail to appreciate the basic dilemma that publications like Quadrant face.

Anti-communism depended on an alliance between conservatives and liberals: although philosophical enemies, they recognised that they faced a common threat, and could unite on a common program of defending western democracy. The conservative side was always the more prominent at Quadrant, but most of the time they were too busy with communism to turn their fire on the liberals.

In the last twenty years, things have changed. Communism and old-style socialism have mostly disappeared, leaving conservatives and liberals to face each other in the trenches. Quadrant has continued to produce some work of high quality, but the sort of liberals who would once have seen it as an ally in the greater struggle are now its main target.

Harries and Switzer seem oblivious to this. They see themselves as promoting “conservative ideas and those of classical liberalism”, without realising how deep the contradiction is between them.

I’m inclined to agree that Quadrant’s golden years are behind it, though this is as much due to changed technology as changed intellectual circumstances. Blogs and essays on the internet can attract much wider audiences than a $7.50 monthly magazine printed on newsprint and with terrible covers, depriving Quadrant (and other little magazines) of both writers and readers. I don’t know of anyone under 30 who reads Quadrant , so demography is very much against it in the long term.

But I disagree with Charles on the liberalism and conservatism issue. The Harries and Switzer piece does blur them more than it should, and Charles correctly notes that there are tensions between the two ideologies. But this is an opportunity for Quadrant rather than a problem. There is no need for it to be a house journal for one view or the other, and in practice it is one of the few places where in-depth liberal and conservative views can both be read.

For many on the right, this debate is as much a working out of their own inner tensions as a clash between rival tribes. If anything challenges liberal anti-paternalist views it is remote Indigenous communities, on which Tony Abbott wrote in the September issue. John Stone offered a characteristically blunt assessment of what he calls the ‘Muslim problem’, which is posing the largest intellectual and practical challenges for liberal tolerance in decades. The magazine has published many conservative views on what’s happening to the universities, but also Max Corden’s excellent liberal critique of higher education policy.

I doubt Quadrant will celebrate its 100th, but there is still a role for it.

Update: For us over 30s (actually, it’s probably mid-30s - the dividing line is likely to between those whose political views were shaped by the Cold War, ie born in the early 1970s or before, and those whose political views were formed after the collapse of European communism that began in late 1989) the IPA is also holding a Quadrant turns 50 function, on 19 October. Ken Minogue, whose lucid and insightful essays once graced the pages of Quadrant and its now-defunct upmarket English equivalent, Encounter, will also be there.

Under the editorship of Chris Berg, the IPA Review is generally much improved. But its recent list of Australia’s 13 biggest mistakes contains some rather eccentric entries.

One of these is to put the publication of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty on the list. The entry doesn’t argue against On Liberty itself, but rather that its popularity rubbed of on some of Mill’s other books, which contained ideas supporting protectionism, which in turn contributed to the rise of tariffs in the new federation that began in 1901.

Generally, Mill was in favour of free trade. But the source of the trouble was this passage in his Principles of Political Economy:

The only case in which, on mere principles of political economy, protecting duties can be defensible, is when they are imposed temporarily (especially in a young and rising nation) in hopes of naturalizing a foreign industry, in itself perfectly suitable to the circumstances of the country.

Stuart Macintyre’s A Colonial Liberalism reports that:

Colonists invoked this section of the Principles so often and so liberally that Mill added a passage to the 1860s edition that carefully insulated his ‘infant industries’ argument from the protectionist heresy he saw flourishing in places like Victoria.

While Mill’s ideas were used - or misused - in the 19th century, it is a rather dubious move to blame a book that wasn’t even about trade policy for the trade policies that were implemented in Australia. Are we to believe that if On Liberty had never been published that Australia would have adopted free trade? The interests allied in favour of protectionism would have succeeded with or without whatever intellectual respectability this passage from Mill gave them, and indeed another of the IPA Review mistakes (the end of the Reid government in 1905) gives some of the blame to the Free Trade party itself.

Against this, too, we need to consider the good On Liberty has done and is doing. While Mill’s Principles of Political Economy are deservedly long forgotten, On Liberty’s ideas on free speech and individuality and his harm principle continue to be influential nearly 150 years after the book was published. I doubt there was a social liberalisation over the last century in which Mill’s arguments haven’t played a part. When I was assessing entries in a recent CIS essay competition Mill’s ideas kept coming up, and he’s there again in a robust defence of free speech that fellow blogger Steve Edwards has coming up in the next issue of Policy. It’s probably the only nineteenth century political work that’s still relevant to us today, and still a force for freedom.