Observations from Carlton's lone classical liberal
Crikey has started the most ideologically-eclectic blog to date, The Stump.
On the classical liberal side, it has Jason Soon, Charles Richardson and Chris Berg.
Also from somewhere right-of-centre is Counterpoint presenter Paul Comrie-Thomson.
On the left it has Guy Rundle, Phillip Adams and Andrew Bartlett.
The blogosphere (or at least my part of it) has been rather quiet the last few months, so perhaps putting this lot together will liven things up.
Of all the statistics produced by the ABS, GDP stirs the strangest reactions. In Fairfax papers over the weekend, Don Edgar tells us that:
Gross domestic product has failed as an indicator of either national progress or individual happiness.
That’s quite probably because it is not a measure of national progress or individual happiness. It measures the value of goods and services produced over a particular time period. Pointing out, as Edgar does, that ‘GDP goes up with increased spending on crime, natural disasters’ is true but a silly criticism. We would be better off if crime and natural disasters did not occur, but spending on them usually leaves us better off than we would be if we did nothing (the ‘gross’ is intended to explain that no account is taken of capital depreciation, or destruction in the case of crime and natural disasters).
GDP clearly cannot be taken as equivalent to national progress or individual happiness. But one reason that it is a very useful statistic is, as Will Wilkinson points out, that it correlates with other statistics that get closer to progress, such as levels of health and education. Continue reading “Defending GDP”
In the latest issue of the Monthly, Christine Wallace reviews Jacqueline Kent’s new biography of Julia Gillard.
Wallace has her own Gillard biography coming out next year, a fact she discloses in the Monthly review. This is the usual let-the-readers-decide solution to apparent conflicts of interest.
Kent doesn’t accept that disclosure is enough, and Kent’s publisher doesn’t buy the disclosure defence either:
While [Monthly editor Ben] Naparstek said Wallace had clearly identified herself as the author of a rival biography, Mr Ball [the Penguin publisher] said that was “like a mugger declaring his profession when you first meet”.
“It doesn’t explain away the absolute stink-to-high-heaven conflict of interest in getting one biographer to review another. What kind of intellectual contortion must he have gone through to come up with that?”
According to a report in this morning’s Australian,
AUSTRALIA’S academics are disillusioned by corporate management cultures at universities, threatening to drive many away from the profession and worsen a looming staff shortage as thousands of them approach retirement.
According to the survey on which the story is based (which I presume will appear here) 28% of Australian academics have taken concrete action to change jobs to an industry other than higher education.
What we don’t know is how many succeed. My calculations based on the ABS labour mobility survey suggest that education (which includes schools and vocational education) in 2007-08 had the lowest annual rate of labour loss of any Australian industry, coming fractionally below health on 3.5%.
While I doubt that corporate (sic) management culture has much to do with exit – since for all their complaints academics have less management direction than any industry I can think of – higher education is poorly placed to deal with its personnel issues. Continue reading “The real causes of academic staff problems”
Andrew Norton 