Author: Andrew Norton

Improve my blog’s look

~ Andrew Norton ~ 13 Comments

My solo blog is one month old today. I’m reasonably happy with the way it’s going – I’ve enjoyed writing it, there have been some excellent comments, nobody has breached the comments policy (though one person came close), it has prompted some discussion at other blogs, and I have been able to use posts in the media. The daily page views could be higher – averaging 247 a day since I started, though the navel-gazing of the last few days seems to have produced a bit of a surge. But it’s early days yet, and with a Technorati rank of 173,201 I’m ahead of about 56.6 million of the other blogs they claim to be monitoring.

But one thing I don’t like is the look of the blog, which is boring, and the fact that I can’t get the comments sidebar to work. If anyone can recommend someone to redesign it for a reasonable price I’m interested in hearing suggestions. I can be contacted via andrew AT andrewnorton.info

Academic spin

~ Andrew Norton ~ 32 Comments

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

John Howard, conservative social democrat

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

This morning’s Australian reports on OECD figures showing that:

Over the past 10 years of John Howard’s Government, the personal income tax burden in Australia had risen from 11.7 per cent to 12.6 per cent of GDP.

It does note that these figures are for 2004, before the 2005 and 2006 tax cuts. These cuts should bring the percentage of GDP take back to around the earlier figure, though because of rising GDP spending per person will continue to grow.

Many people have criticised the Howard government’s taxing and spending record – Des Moore’s latest critique should be on the Policy website in the next few days. I’ve been writing another for the Summer issue, focusing on the expenditure side to see just what went wrong.

What’s particularly interesting is the biggest spending area, welfare payments. Though the long economic boom should, in theory, have lessened demands on the welfare system, in fact real per capita spending in the three years ending 30 June 2005 (the latest from the ABS) increased by more than in the last three years of the Keating Labor government.

Partly, this is due to the ageing of the population. We are supporting 20% more aged pension beneficiaries now than when Howard came to office. No government can do much about these trends in the short term (though there have been fiddling at the margins policies designed to encourage people to stay in work longer).

But what really struck me was that large amounts of money are being spent because the Prime Minister, despite being a hate-figure on the left, is actually something of a social democrat, albeit of a conservative kind.

Consider this statement, from a speech in 2000:

Our social cohesion, flowing directly from a quite unique form of egalitarianism, is arguably the crowning achievement of the Australian experience over the past century. Yet this cohesion will be tested if wealth and opportunity can

Am I Carltons lone libertarian?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 34 Comments

I’ve never won any competition I entered, but now it seems I have won a competition I did not know I was in: I have been named as one of Australia’s top libertarian identities. Don Arthur thinks that surely there must have been some mistake, citing these words I wrote last year explaining why I was not a libertarian:

Classical liberals are certainly at the libertarian end of the political spectrum. In practice, though, I am uncomfortable with the label. Libertarians tend to have a rights-based view of the world (in this they parallel modern left-liberals, though their lists of rights are different). Personally, I don’t find rights theories or, for that matter any foundationalist theory, convincing. So while I favour the institutions of classical liberalism – limited government, the rule of law, protection of personal freedoms, the market etc – I have an more intellectually eclectic set of justifications than a simple assertion of rights. In practice, this leads to more pragmatic political positions than libertarians.

For example, while maintaing due scepiticism I basically agree with the line that Gerard Henderson has been pushing (eg today???s SMH) that in times of threat the government can reduce some people???s civil liberties if a strong enough case can be made that they are a threat to Australia???s security. In the libertarian view, rights are rights, regardless of circumstances.

Jason Soon thinks that in this passage I am defining libertarianism too narrowly as a rights-based philosophy, when it could have utilitarian derivations as well:

On that reading, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman wouldn???t be classified as libertarians, nor would Friedman???s son, David Friedman who is fundamentally a utilitarian but has also written one of the most convincing books on anarcho-capitalism that I have ever read

John Humphreys agrees with Jason. He thinks that:

If somebody really wanted to make a distinction between ???classical liberal??? and ???libertarian??? it is probably fair to note that ???classical liberals??? are normally on the moderate corner of the libertarian circle (sic), but that doesn???t stop them from being libertarian.

If libertarianism and classical liberalism are not identical twins they are at least first cousins, which is why classical liberals can end up appearing like ‘moderate’ libertarians. Yet I still think that there are some distinctions that often if not always apply, and mean I am more comfortable self-describing as a ‘classical liberal’:

1) Underlying philosophy. Jason insists that libertarianism can rely on utilitarian as well as rights-based arguments. I think he is right that libertarians use utilitarian arguments, but I feel more to find stronger justifications than natural rights theories for the same freedoms as rights protect than as a real inquiry into what would maximise utility. Libertarians end up arguing against things like seat belt laws, random breath testing or gun control, which I think are tough arguments on utilitarian grounds alone. I think classical liberals tend to be more open to going where utilitarian arguments might take them, which is why I made the point about national security laws in the passage that Don quoted.

2) Style. Whether utilitarian or rights-based in their underlying philosophy, libertarians like deductive reasoning – applying clear principles to almost any set of facts. This is one reason, I think, that neo-classical economics and libertarianism often appeal to the same people. Deductive reasoning gives libertarianism a dogmatic character (the Randians tend to be insufferably dogmatic). Early classical liberals like Adam Smith preferred inductive reasoning; the pleasure in reading them (and talking with living classical liberals) is not just in having aspects of one’s worldview confirmed, it is in trying to find patterns and meaning in social and economic life. Where libertarians have solid principles, classical liberals have rules of thumb derived from experience: governments tend to mess things up, individuals are the best judges of their own interests, private property is essential to freedom and efficiency, etc.

3) Cultural attitudes. Libertarians tend to have a more anything goes attitude to culture than classical liberals. In this respect, classical liberals have things in common with conservatives, in believing that social order is desirable and that certain general cultural rules ought to be observed. Libertarians rush in to defend people’s freedom to say anything they like, no matter how racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. I’ll certainly argue against people who say such things being punished by law, but I don’t necessarily see anything wrong with them being ostracised for their actions. This is why I was not completely against ‘political correctness’. It is why I have a stricter comments policy than Catallaxy.

Political ideologies are very hard to pin down, and inevitably people will find exceptions – or even take exception – to my attempts to distinguish classical liberalism and libertarianism. But I have described the connotations attached to the two terms in my own mind at least. I have been called much worse things than a ‘libertarian’ – indeed, a radical libertarian once accused me of ’state worship’, which I found far more inaccurate and insulting. But given the choice, I prefer the label ‘classical liberal’.

What is sex vilification?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

Pru Goward, the (thankfully) retiring Sex Discrimination Commissioner, has suggested that something she calls ‘sex vilification’ be outlawed. She

believes Australia needs sex vilification legislation to curb the proliferation of degrading and offensive images of women in the media and on television. “The one thing that unites a broad spectrum of women, from the very conservative to the very radical, is that they all hate sexual vilification, whether it is in advertising, TV or in magazines and newspapers. “And they all want something done about it,” she said.

But I am not sure that these ‘degrading’ images ‘ constitute anything like the racial vilification to which she compares them. The Victorian legislation on the subject states:

(1) A person must not, on the ground of the race of another person or class of persons, engage in conduct that incites hatred against, serious contempt for, or revulsion or severe ridicule of, that other person or class of persons.

But do any images of women incite hatred, contempt, revulsion or severe ridicule of women in general (a ‘class of persons’)? I think that’s unlikely. There are so many different images of women, from real life as well as the media, that at most we might form an image of ‘that other person’ – but even then, we probably would not, because we know that she is just being paid to do whatever ‘degrading’ thing she is depicted as doing. And if it is degrading of ‘that other person’, who do we charge, given that the ‘degraded’ person was in all probability willingly involved? Shouldn’t she, rather than Ms Goward, be the judge of whether she has been degraded or not?

And what about men? ‘As a man’ (to paraphrase the feminists) it would never occur to me that depicting ‘degrading’ scenes of other men was degrading to men generally. Perhaps Mark Latham’s ‘metrosexual knobs and toss bags’ are more sensitive, though I doubt it. Or maybe Latham would face Ms Goward’s vilification tribunal for his remarks?

The idea of sex vilification becomes even less plausible when we look at the examples given in The Age’s editorial:

while it is illegal to refuse to employ a woman purely on the grounds she is “a dumb blonde”, it is perfectly legal to display a billboard with a blonde bursting out of a bikini (or, for that matter, a a man bulging out of a loincloth: vilification goes both ways).

But images like this are not designed to incite hatred, contempt, revulsion or severe ridicule. They are designed to incite lust, or perhaps simple appreciation of physical beauty. The Age‘s views are closer to the Taliban’s notion that men cannot control their sexual desires and women must therefore be covered from head-to-toe than those of a once ‘progressive’ newspaper.

Goward’s claim turns more on the fact that she personally – and other women she claims to speak for – finds some images of other women offensive. But even the overkill racial and religious vilification law doesn’t give us a right not be to offended. That falls into a different area of the law – old-fashioned censorship. And John Howard is accused of wanting to take us back to the 1950s…

A curriculum market

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

Julie Bishop’s speech on national curriculum is certainly attracting criticism, not just from Labor states protecting their power but also from former elite private school principal Judith Wheeldon, in today’s Weekend Australian .

The problem with this debate is that it is between two alternatives that are nearly as bad as each other: national centralised curriculum and state-based centralised curriculum. Each means (or would mean) that most parents have no effective choice and that the bureaucracies that create curriculum have weak incentives to be responsive to parents. Bishop complains that state curriculum setting has fallen into the hands of ‘ideologues’, but how much easier would that be if they only had to capture one bureaucracy rather than six, and disgruntled parents had to run a national rather than just a state campaign to protest?

The debate we should be having is not State versus Commonwealth curriculum, but centralised curriculum versus competitive curricula. Competitive curricula would bring us diversity as well as competition, reflecting the variety of student needs, aptitudes, and interests. We have the start of this in the International Baccalaureate program, already taught in a number of schools. It is too demanding for some students, but excellent for those planning to continue to university. This kind of innovation should be the model for the future.

Competitive curricula could get around the sole argument for national curriculum that has any merit, the difficulties faced by students moving interstate. Since there are clear economies of scale in creating curriculum materials, I expect that curriculum creators would sell their programs around the country, so families that move between states would be able to enrol their kids in a school teaching the same basic material as the school they left.

A market in curricula would fundamentally change the incentives facing curriculum creators. Parents could withdraw their kids from schools that offered dubious curriculum (because their children were semi-literate and numerate, because they were studying Big Brother instead of Shakespeare etc) without moving interstate. This would give schools an incentive to change curriculum providers, who would need to improve or go out of business.

There are three curriculum options – markets, federal, national. Julie Bishop is advocating the worst of the three, and the state governments the second worst. The best, alas, is not even on the table.

Our public moralists and storytellers

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

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.

Our broken university subsidy system

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

One of Brendan Nelson’s few achievements in higher education was to extend the FEE-HELP scheme, which offers income-contingent loans to full-fee paying higher education students of any education provider that meets objective criteria. This replaced the previous PELS scheme, which was available only to postgraduates, and only at public universities and a small number of private institutions that were favourites of the government.

So far more than 40 new institutions have been approved, and lending is increasing quickly from a small base. However, the private higher education industry still largely reflects its circumstances of the last few decades. Since it was difficult for private universities and private higher education providers to compete directly against the free or very cheap public universities, most of them are in niche areas that don’t interest public universities – religious training institutions or institutions with a religious perspective, specialised professional training institutions, natural medicine colleges, and sundry others.

There is an expectation around the sector that this won’t last. As fees have increased at public institutions the price gap has narrowed substantially, and with FEE-HELP students no longer need worry about having to pay up-front. There has been some streamlining of accreditation rules that should make it easier for foreign institutions to enter the Australian market, and we are already seeing some activity there. The conditions exist for public universities to face competition in their core teaching activities.

This has bastions of conservatism such as the National Tertiary Education Union worried. As reported in the SMH this morning:

The National Tertiary Education Union said universities would respond to the competition by slashing unprofitable courses and concentrate on those that made money through full-fee paying students. The University of Sydney had already done so by ending undergraduate nursing, said the union’s policy and research co-ordinator, Andrew Nette.

Public universities do rely on complex cross-subsidies from those disciplines and students that generate surpluses to those that do not. But the problem here is not competition, it is the absurd system of subsidy and price control.

In a well-designed system, the government would support those disciplines that the market would probably under-supply, such as nursing, where the costs of the course are high relative to the subsequent labour market returns. But because the subsidies provided by the Commonwealth are only marginally better than numbers picked out of the air, universities have trouble financing many of the courses subject to ‘market failure’ from government-authorised or supplied revenues.

To fix this ‘market failure’, universities have turned to…the market. They use the profits from full-fee students in courses leading to lucrative professions to support Commonwealth-supported students in other fields. Yet HECS students in those same disciplines do receive Commonwealth support. So the market pays for things the goverment should pay for, and the government pays for things the market should pay for.

It has dawned on both the Minister and her Shadow that something is deeply wrong here – though neither yet have credible alternatives. But at least they don’t think, like the NTEU, that the problem is competition.

What proportion of their education costs do uni students pay?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

In a speech she gave yesterday, Education Minister Julie Bishop says:

Today for every $1 a student contributes to their education, the Australian Government contributes $3. Students pay 25% of the cost of their fees, the taxpayer picks up 75%.

Her predecessor was fond of that argument too, but repetition does not make it right. Insofar as a defence can be made of it, in 2004 for every $1 HECS charged to Commonwealth-subsidised students about $3 was spent by the Commonwealth, but on all university activities, including research. Money spent on researchers who never step foot inside a classroom is not a contribution to a students’ education, which the Minister’s statement specifies: ‘their education’, ‘their fees’. A government that insists on unbundling university finances when it comes to student unions cannot rebundle to suit a different argument. Moreoever, student contributions were increased in 2005, which will alter the relativities.

Since the Commonwealth now specifies its exact contribution per student and the exact maximum fee payable it is possible to work out the student contribution as a percentage of the total. The lowest percentage – 27.8% for nursing – is higher than the typical percentage claimed by the Minister, and the highest – law at 83.85% – is more than three times as high.

Using data I collated from the funding ‘agreements’ signed between the universities and the Commonwealth, I have calculated the likely weighted average student contribution for 2005 and after enrolments, ie taking into account that some courses are taken by more students than others. This figure is 44%. (‘Likely’, in that I am assuming that the courses taken by 2005 and after students, who mostly pay a 25% premium, closely resemble those taken by pre-2005 students).

However, the government argues that there is doubtful debt associated with HECS lending. Once we adjust for that, the average student contribution comes down to about 38%.

So the government is still picking up most of the cost, but not as large a share as it claims.