Month: October 2008

Social capital confusion

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

Commenter Jarryd saw Postmodern Conservatism in Australia authors Geoff Boucher and Matthew Sharpe give a presentation based on their book, and came away unimpressed:

From memory the section we read was exploring the damaging affect of post modern conservatism and the actions of “neoliberals” through a list of fairly irrelevant facts like decline in church attendance etc. Everyone in the room was fairly confused about just what the intention of the piece was.

Boucher and Sharpe’s argument is confused, but the intention is clear: to find any fact or argument that can be used to discredit ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘postmodern’ conservatism.

The point of mentioning declining church attendance, along with declining political party membership, lower levels of institutional trust, and rising divorce is to argue that there has been a decline in social capital, which Boucher and Sharpe hope to pin on ‘neoliberalism’.

In their discussion of social capital, they draw on Robert Putnam, and his book Bowling Alone. On p.169 our authors tell us that:

For Putnam, this [decline in social capital] cannot be solely attributed to the rise of neoliberalism since since 1973. [italics added]

Actually, Putnam thinks that hardly any of social capital’s decline is due to market economics. He dismisses its role in two pages of Bowling Alone (pp.282-83), conceding only a loss of civic leadership as small town businesses are replaced with giant corporations. His main objection is that America has been a market society for centuries, during which social capital has gone up and down. ‘A constant can’t explain a variable’, he says.
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The puzzle of high Victorian unmet demand for university places

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

In an article for yesterday’s Education Age, I had a go at explaining why the prospects of Victorian applicants for university are worse than those of applicants in other states.

The unmet demand statistics consistently show that it is higher in Victoria than elsewhere; using other data sources I found that this has been true since 1993 at least.

It will surprise none of my regular readers that the unmet demand culprit is the centralised system of distributing university places, which until fairly recently aimed at equalising higher education participation between the states, rather than meeting actual demand as revealed in applications to attend university. Though Victoria has not relative to its population been under-supplied with places compared to other states, because demand there is higher than the national average more of it is ‘unmet’.

But identifying the culprit still leaves a puzzle: why is demand higher in Victoria than elsewhere? The main reason seems to be that school retention is higher in Victoria than in other states. With a higher percentage of young people finishing Year 12 in Victoria than elsewhere, more people have the basic qualification needed for university entry.

A couple of people have asked me whether Victoria’s private schools might have something to do with the story. The ABS schools data suggest that indeed this could be the case.
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Will the Australian Spectator succeed?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

In the 1980s and early 1990s, I was a dedicated reader of the London Spectator, which has now launched an Australian version, the English magazine with a 12-page Australian supplement in the middle, edited by Oscar Humphries.

With a circulation of 77,000, according to The Australian‘s write-up of the magazine’s local launch, it sells many more copies than it used to. But the magazine seems to me to be much weaker than it was 20 years ago. A couple of regulars from that time are left – columnist Paul Johnson, and ‘high life’ columnist Taki – but the stars are long gone: writers such as Christopher Hitchens, who of course went on to much greater fame, Timothy Garton Ash who wrote superb articles from then communist central Europe, Jeffrey Bernard with his ‘low life’ column, Auberon Waugh with his weekly ‘Another Voice’ column (the latter two have since died), and many others. In more recent times Mark Steyn and Theodore Dalrymple made it worth reading occasionally, but Steyn has gone and Dalrymple appears infrequently.

It was always much lighter, more personal, and more opinionated than other news magazines, and still is – but this only works if the writers have the style, substance or humour to carry it off, and it is the lack of these that makes much of the current Spectator at best moderately interesting. Oscar Humphries is really only (slightly) famous for being his father’s son, so do we really care that he has a small art collection? But at least I know who Oscar Humphries is, which is at least the starting point for possibly being interested in what he has to say, if only in the hope that he tells us something interesting about his dad. Reading the magazine on a plane without Google I had no idea who the diarist Charles Waterstreet was, and even now that I do I don’t care that he had a mid-life crisis aged 12, or that he thinks that at 60th birthday parties the trouble is that there are too many candles and not enough cake.
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Lower HECS for law?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

The idea of the government forgoing HECS payments for graduates who do things it wants seems to be growing in popularity. Maths and science graduates who become teachers will have half their HECS repayments refunded. Then there was the 2020 Summit proposal for a community corps funded by discounting HECS repayments. And in The Australian this morning a Law Council suggestion that the federal government pay all or part of law graduates’ HECS debts in return for agreeing to work in regional centres.

What this means, in effect, is that the Law Council wants the federal government to subsidise legal services in regional areas. But it is hard to see why legal services should be subsidised on a regional/city basis, rather than as at present through legal aid on an assessment of the client’s financial situation.

I’d have thought that there is a fairly simple market solution to this problem: if there are too few lawyers in country towns, then the price of legal services in those places will rise and attract more lawyers to them.
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Postmodern conservatism?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 19 Comments

The Times Will Suit Them: Postmodern Conservatism in Australia, by youngish Deakin academics Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher, joins my pile of disappointing books about the Australian Right.

Its central fault is the usual one: an at best impressionistic understanding of its subject. It’s not quite Puseyesque in writing about a political movement seemingly without bothering to read anything its members had to say. But there isn’t very much direct quotation from Australian conservatives, and most of what is there is from John Howard. He’s certainly the most important conservative figure of the last 20 years, but hardly the only one. A few of the ‘Right’s culture warriors’ such as Andrew Bolt, Piers Ackerman and Janet Albrechtsen are mentioned in the introduction, but rarely appear again, and are never studied in any detail.

Writing about conservative movements is difficult. As I argued earlier in the year, conservatism is more whatever the people called conservatives happen to believe at a given time than a set list of key principles or ideas. Unlike American and British conservatives, Australian conservatives rarely help out with reflective pieces on their core beliefs (this excellent article by Owen Harries is a rare exception).

There is no substitute for a lot of reading and sorting, trying to work out the key themes and arguments, what is common enough to be classed as a core belief of Australian conservatives, and what is just the idiosyncrasy of one or a small number of people (this book does not discuss federalism, but I would put the Howard government’s centralism in the idiosyncrasy category, with negligible support among conservatives generally). It’s this research and analytical work that Boucher and Sharpe don’t seem to have done.

I can’t claim to have done a careful study either, though I’m sure I have read a lot more from conservative writers than Boucher and Sharpe, and I know a lot of conservatives personally. Some of Boucher and Sharpe’s assertions about what Australian conservatives believe don’t match my reading or conversations, which is why I would insist on a lengthy lists of citations before I would even grant them the starting points in their argument.

There is, for a example, a whole chapter called ‘culture wars and the new religiosity’. Certainly, many (though not all) conservatives are personally religious, and especially when they are Catholics this affects their views on issues like abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, and some forms of medical research. But is this right?:
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How successful is online dating?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

Over the last few years there has been a huge proliferation in online dating sites. RSVP, for example, advertises that it has 1.3 million singles to meet, with a thousand more joining every day. And the basic idea seems like a good one, using modern technology to greatly expand the pool of potential partners beyond the more limited range produced by normal social contexts.

If online dating was successful in leading to more permanent relationships, we might expect it to be showing in social statistics. Yesterday the ABS put out the latest marriage statistics. And indeed the number of marriages in 2007 was the highest since 1990. The biggest absolute increase in marriage since 2004 has been among men in the second half of their 30s, and the 2006 census confirms that the percentage of men in their 30s who are single had declined slightly since the 2001 census.

Social statistics on relationships that don’t involve legal ceremonies or cohabiting have always been weak, and this is a particular issue with judging the success of new dating technology where many relationships would be relatively recent, and not at the move-in or marriage stage. I can’t think of any comparable source of data from the past, but the latest HILDA statistical report confirms that many of the people classed as ‘unmarried’ in ABS surveys are part of non-cohabiting couple relationships. Of all such people, 24% are in couple relationships, with a bit over a third in the 18-34 age group.

The problem with analysing these trends is that because eventually most people get married anyway (last year, there were 33 men aged over 75 who married for the first time) it is hard to infer causes from surveys that don’t ask how couples met. A slight increase in marriage could be due to many other factors, including better economic conditions over the last few years. Perhaps the most we can say about online dating is that it is not obviously a poor substitute for the traditional methods.