Month: November 2006

When should we listen to public opinion?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 19 Comments

All the survey research into what the public knows about politics and policy comes up with the same conclusion: very little. I added an Australian pebble to the mountain of international evidence back in April. Not only do people lack factual information, but they freely express ‘non-attitudes’, opinions they don’t really hold, just to answer pollsters’ questions (one way non-attitudes are detected is by asking the same question again with different wording; if the replies are inconsistent the respondent probably doesn’t have a clear position on the issue).

For a democracy, this research raises important questions. For a start, should we be guided by majority preferences if the majority clearly has no idea what it is talking about? One way that I think governments can be democratically responsive and still be guided by expert opinion is to pay far more attention to the general goals the public wants achieved and the problems it wants solved than to any of the public’s specific views about how to achieve those goals and solve those problems. Goals and problems place much lower cognitive demands on poll respondents and voters; you don’t need to know anything about economics to know that you would rather have more money, or that it is better if unemployment and inflation are low. You don’t need to know anything about teaching or medicine to know that good schools and hospitals are preferable to the alternatives.

This morning’s Age/ACNielsen poll on global warming highlights the issues. 91% of respondents think that global warming is a serious problem. 62% are not satisfied with the Howard government’s response to it. As a guard against non-attitudes, a recent Lowy Institute poll found only 7% of resondents thinking global warming was not a problem, and 68% agreeing that we should take significant steps to reduce it even if costs are significant, and an April Roy Morgan Poll found that just 12% thought that concerns about global warming were exaggerated and 71% thought that if we don’t act now it will be too late. With broadly similar results from three different sets of questions we can be confident that people believe that global warming is real, and that something should be done about it. This is the kind of poll result that governments need to take into account.
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Literary dating

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

In possibly the first ever book made of up of reprinted classified advertising, the London Review of Books is publishing a collection of its personals ads. Personals have long been a feature of The New York Review of Books, and over the last few months Australian Book Review has been trying to imitate the northern book magazines.

I can see why The New York Review of Books had such success with its personals classifieds. If books are your main interest in life, meeting possible partners can be hard. Not only is reading an inherently solitary activity, even reading the same book separately can be rare. Serious readers tend to take the bestseller lists as a guide to what not to read, on the grounds that what’s appealing to the masses can’t be much good. But this attitude sacrifices their opportunity to at least have something to talk about when they do meet other readers.

Personals columns in literary publications are an attempt to get around these problems. A friend of mine once considered putting an ad in The New York Review of Books even though he knew it sold few copies in Australia, because he thought it might help him find a girl with the right book collection. A NYRB ad would reach a small but well-targeted audience.

But as the examples from the London Review of Books James Button quotes in The Age this morning suggest, it’s not clear that its advertisers are always serious:

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Should politicians discuss Islam?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

It comes as no surprise that Malcolm Fraser is again criticising the Howard government. He wrote in The Age yesterday:

Today, for a variety of reasons, but not least because the Government has sought to set Muslims aside, discrimination and defamation against Muslims has been rising dramatically. Too many have taken the easy path and accepted the Government’s contentions that Muslims aren’t like us and therefore it doesn’t matter if discrimination occurs and if access to the law does not apply. We have forgotten that discrimination once it starts, spreads.

Fraser is so busy reading between the lines of what the PM says that he has forgotten to read what is actually on them. If you go to Howard’s website and do a search you can find his statements on the Sheik Hilali affair (and indeed on previous Sheik Hilali affairs), along with his statements on Islam in Australia. Howard’s views can be summarised as follows:

* it is important for Islamic Australians to be integrated into Australian society
* that integration is threatened by a minority of members of the Islamic community with repugnant beliefs and unacceptable behaviour (on the treatment of women, on terrorism)
* he stresses that these are minority views, but they colour general perceptions
* Australians should be tolerant of other religions (eg on women’s head covering, opposing violence, not the government’s job to decide who should head religious groups)
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John Howard, conservative social democrat #2

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

Last month I suggested that John Howard was a conservative social democrat, redistributing income as a conventional social democrat would, but giving it a conservative twist by targeting families.

An interesting presentation by Ann Harding of NATSEM at today’s Melbourne Institute/The Australian conference spells out the distributional consequences of all the extra spending.

For a single and childless person earning between $1,000 and $1,250 a week, changes in the tax and welfare systems since 1996-97 leave them 4% better off in real terms. But a couple with one earner and two children on the same income is 15% better off from tax and welfare changes, and a couple of two earners and two children is 19% better off.

These figures ignore changes in private income – they are the effects of changes in government policy alone. If increases in private earnings are included, a single adult is 15% better off and and a couple with children is 29% better off. This suggests that the market alone has not changed household relativities much, but government policy has had a big effect.

Harding also finds that when we look at equivalised household income (ie, allowing for the number of people in the household) over the last decade households in the top 20% of the income distribution have had % increases in their income that are slightly below the average, though still a good improvement – 24%. The biggest winners have been those in the middle two income deciles on 32% and 29%. Decile 2 did the worst, on 14%. Harding says this group contains a lot of old-age pensioners without private resources, so they have not directly benefited from the rise in market income or the added concessions for ‘self-funded’ retirees.

Overall, though, it supports my argument that while Howard only occasionally talks like a social democrat, he has consistently behaved like one.

Why are men more likely to be sacked than women?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

Last week’s labour mobility data showed that men are more likely to be sacked than women. Admittedly, with overall retrenchment rates so low, it is not a huge difference in absolute terms – 2.4% compared to 1.9%. But relatively, men are noticeably more vulnerable. I haven’t gone back to calculate the differences over all the years of the job mobility survey, but the same pattern was there in the first survey in 1972 (3%/2.1%) and in 1984 (4.9%/4%).

The Melbourne Institute report on the HILDA survey saw this result in their data too and tried to work out why. After controlling for various factors including educational attainment, industry, and being casual or part-time they found that, while the gap narrowed, being female still conferred an employment security advantage. Women’s greater job security was also reflected in their subjective perceptions of how safe their jobs were. So women’s rising employment share over time could go some small way to explaining the good results on job security that we currently see.

But it still doesn’t explain why women are less likely to be fired than men. The Melbourne Institute report speculates that perhaps women are less likely to cause trouble at work than men. My experience is generally the opposite – they seem more likely to fight among themselves – but since my uni days I’ve only had office jobs, and perhaps the social skills (or lack thereof) of blue collar males land them in trouble.

Another suggestion in the Melbourne Institute report is that employers, who tend to be male, feel less comfortable sacking women than men. Perhaps there is some residual code of the gentleman at play. Or perhaps they fear the waterworks that may follow the giving of notice.

Their third suggestion, and the one I found most convincing, is that because more men than woman are in the labour force there is a selection effect, so that males of limited competence are more likely to be in the workforce than similarly competence-deprived women. With a larger pool of men than women likely to be sacked for stuffing up, it follows that more of them will in fact be shown the door.

These are not mutually exclusive possibilities. I will be interested to hear if readers (including lurkers) have any other ideas.

Doubtful calculations of doubtful debt

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

The Department of Education’s annual report is out today, and with it more information on student loan doubtful debt. For 2005-06, they estimate that 19.3% of the debt is doubtful, down from the 20.6% estimate for 2004-05. It may not sound like a big change, but it is equivalent to more than $170 million.

I wish they would tell us more about how these figures are calculated. Since they started calculating the doubtful debt figure it has ranged from a low of 13.5% in 1996-97 to a high of 28.3% in 2003-04. All this suggests that there are going through some fairly major changes in actuarial assumptions, especially as the downward trend in estimates has occurred at the same time as the income threshold for making any repayment increased by more than $10,000, effectively excusing some lower-income people from their debt. My best guess for the cause is higher labour force participation rates, especially for women. But the variability suggests that all the estimates should be viewed sceptically.

Of course, if they took my advice and made more effort to collect from people living overseas and from deceased estates the financial position of the loans scheme would improve still further.