Ruddmania not spreading to bookstores

July 14, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

When I bought my copy of Nicholas Stuart’s Rudd: The Unauthorised Biography the day it came out the woman serving me in the bookshop said she was wondering how well it would sell. In Susan Wyndham’s Undercover column in the books section of this morning’s Sydney Morning Herald we have the answer: not very well.

In its first 10 days, according to Nielsen BookScan, it sold 572 copies. Its less critical rival biography by Robert Macklin had 504 sales. Once you take out friends and family of Rudd, friends and family of the biographers, people who think they might have been mentioned, Liberal politicians and staffers looking for dirt, and discount for those in the aforementioned groups who bought both books the number of members of the general public curious to know more about our likely next PM may be down into double figures, in the first week-and-a-half anyway.

Having read the Stuart book the book-buying public has probably made a sound judgment. Reading it cover to cover won’t change any perceptions a newspaper reader might have formed about Rudd over the last few years (indeed, it reads like a long newspaper article) and will add only slightly more detail. He is intelligent, hard-working, emotionally stable, politically moderate and very ambitious. He drives his staff hard, he loves his family.

Anyone running for PM is by definition somewhat unusual, but Rudd is on this account not a complex man – the pieces of his personality fit neatly together, without strong tensions between them. That may be something in his favour as the alternative Prime Minister, but it doesn’t help biographers craft an interesting story.

What is ‘unmet demand’ for university?

July 13, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

As well as taking issue with my analysis of the graduate labour market, Bob Birrell and his colleagues take issue, in their People and Place article, with the Universities Australia (formerly known as the AVCC) statistics on unmet demand.

The universities themselves, and the government, argue that unmet demand for university places is now minor – 13,200 was the estimate for 2007, a little more than a third of what it was three years ago. Birrell and his colleagues say that this seriously understates the true figure, because Universities Australia (UA) discounts aggregate unmet demand – the number of people who applied for a place but did not get one.

I don’t fully agree with the Birrell et al critique, but it raises important issues about how ‘unmet demand’ should be calculated. The UA methodology takes out those applicants who applied for only one or two courses, presumably on the argument that many of them could have secured a place had they been more flexible in what courses they were prepared to take. Of the remaining unsuccessful applicants, the UA then discounts the number again by the ‘state rejection factor’, ie given that a certain percentage of people who are offered a place turn it down, it is reasonable to assume that a similar percentage of unsucessful applicants would also have declined their offer had they received one. As Birrell et al point out, one likely reason for rejections is that applicants were not offered the place they wanted.

From the government/Universities Australia perspective, this discounting make sense – their object is to fill the places allocated by the government, not to meet student demand. Continue reading “What is ‘unmet demand’ for university?” →

How ’stressed’ are households with mortgages?

July 12, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 23 Comments

The Age this morning led with a story about record mortgage and rental ‘stress’:

THE number of Australians under financial stress from housing costs has soared to a historic high, with more than a million households now spending at least 30 per cent of their income on loan repayments or rent.

Adding fuel to a potentially explosive election issue, census figures show that the number of households officially declared under “mortgage stress” has almost doubled in five years — to 547,054. At the same time, the number of households above the “rental stress” threshold — spending more than 30 per cent of their income in rent — has climbed to 520,598. (emphasis added)

According to an ALP press release (seemingly the source of this story) that’s equivalent to 27% of households with mortgages.

It is of course unsuprising that high property prices are flowing through to people spending more of their income on housing. But ‘stress’ in this context is a subjective rather than objective indicator, so it is not clear that we can really say that spending 30% of income on mortgage or rent payments is an ‘official’ indicator of financial stress.

Other measures of financial stress, for example, come up with lower estimates of financial problems among households with mortgages. The 2006 General Social Survey found that 16.5% of households with mortgages had experienced a cash flow problem in the previous 12 months (defined as not being able to pay a bill on time), which was slightly lower than the national average.

So where does the 30% of income figure come from? Continue reading “How ’stressed’ are households with mortgages?” →

Are there too few university students? (Again)

July 11, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

In the latest issue of People and Place, as reported in this morning’s papers, Monash University academic Bob Birrell and his colleagues Daniel Edwards and Ian Dobson argue that there is a widening gap between the demand for and supply of university graduates.

In doing so, they disagree in part with the analysis in my paper (pdf) on graduate mismatch. One explanation they offer for the number of graduates in non-graduate jobs I explored and decided was probably not major – the possibility that it is driven by women framing work around family. Female overqualification (20%) is only slightly higher than male (18%), and there are other possible explanations such as the over-representation of women in Arts courses.

They do however raise one point that I should have explored more, which is what role migration of graduates has played in boosting numbers of university-qualified people in jobs that don’t require degrees. There is, as they say, a history of migrants having trouble finding jobs matching their formal education.

Nevertheless, I don’t think they deal with central argument: that there is no evidence anywhere in the labour market data of an aggregate shortage of graduates. In 2006, there were more than 500,000 graduates in jobs that don’t require degrees or unemployed. Continue reading “Are there too few university students? (Again)” →

Does capitalism make us happy?

July 10, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

‘. . . Somewhere between Plato and Prozac, happiness stopped being a lofty achievement and became an entitlement.’
Richard Schoch, The Secret of Happiness: Three thousand years of searching for the good life.

Has 200 years of liberal capitalism made us any happier?

That’s the question being asked in the 2007 Ross Parish Essay competition, open to people under 30. The deadline for entries is 17 September, with prize money and publication in Policy for the first and second prize winners.

Judging is so impartial that the joint winners a couple of years ago were members of the Greens and Opus Dei respectively.

The familist redistribution of time

July 9, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 114 Comments

Australia’s leading left-familist academics are at it again today, with a 39 point list of more taxes and regulations, which they call ‘Benchmarks: Work and Family Poilcies in Election 2007’, to enforce their view on family life on the rest of us.

I have criticised much of the underlying analysis in previous posts (eg here, here, and here).

While I have objected to the way familists want to redistribute money to people with children (or to people with children on behalf of children, as backroom girl would insist), I have not emphasised they way they propose to redistribute time.

Given that most taxpayers earn their income via personal labour, some redistribution of time is implicit in the tax system. To get a given amount of after-tax income, the higher the taxes levied to support families the more pre-tax income a worker has to earn, and that means longer hours. Most men prefer to work full-time anyway, so while familist policies appropriate the results of their labour, they probably don’t actually significantly increase male hours. Women, however, are often more sensistive to the financial rewards from working (hence the complaints in ‘Benchmarks’ about high EMTRs) and their part-time work is used to bring household income up to a desired level.

But also important is the redistribution of hours within the workplace. Continue reading “The familist redistribution of time” →

Could improved Youth Allowance undermine rural campuses?

July 5, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 41 Comments

An editorial in today’s Age follows on from yesterday’s story about would-be students from regional areas being more likely to defer their university studies to improve their Youth Allowance eligibility.

The editorial draws attention to both the claimed under-funding of regional campuses and the added costs faced by regional students when they have to move to study, calling for an inquiry but effectively suggesting both receive additional Commonwealth resources. Yet there are tensions between improving income support for rural students and helping rural campuses.

I don’t believe that there is any inherent reason why educational delivery costs should be higher in regional areas. The problem seems to be achieving economies of scale by spreading fixed costs over a large number of students. That’s been hard to do for several reasons: low initial population density in regional areas, weak school results limiting the pool of potential applicants, and the preference of many students for study in capital cities.

In Victoria, there is only one truly regional university, the University of Ballarat (though Deakin University has a substantial regional presence, and other universities have rural campuses). The Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre provides statistics for each university by the home region of applicants. 35% of applicants to Victorian universities from the Central Highland region where the University of Ballarat is located gave it as their first preference in 2005 for academic year 2006. So about two-thirds of potential local students actually want to go somewhere else – except for Swinburne, applications are spread fairly evenly across the other Victorian universities.
Continue reading “Could improved Youth Allowance undermine rural campuses?” →

Are fewer uni students getting Youth Allowance?

July 4, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 16 Comments

An article in this morning’s Age reports on research from the On Track survey of recent Victorian school leavers finding that:

Thirty-seven per cent of regional students told the survey for State Government initiative On Track they were waiting to qualify for an independent Youth Allowance before studying, compared with 15 per cent of city students. The easiest way to qualify is by earning about $18,000 over 18 months before starting.

For eighteen months now I have been curious about why university students seem to be starting at a later age, with this kind of playing the Youth Allowance system being high on the list of theories.

Unfortunately, there was no data released for 2005 on the ages of students ‘new to higher education’, so I had to use the commencing student data (which isn’t as good, because it includes people transferring from other courses). While the trend of an absolute enrolment decline in ‘young’ commencing students, which I define as those aged 16 to 18, stopped and their numbers started to climb again, they continued to decline as a proportion of all commencing students aged 16 to 21. If the 16 to 18 year olds had maintained their year 2000 market share of all commencing students 21 and under in 2005, there would have been about 6,600 more of them at university than in fact was the case. Continue reading “Are fewer uni students getting Youth Allowance?” →

University and Beyond survey

July 4, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

I don’t normally do announcement posts, but as someone who relies heavily on the survey research of others I thought I would give a plug to the University and Beyond survey. Open to all currently enrolled students, this is a description:

This survey will develop a greater understanding of students’ plans for “life after university”, of their perceptions about various aspects of university life, and of their expectations if they plan to enter the workforce. The results will provide valuable information to businesses and universities and will assist students to develop a realistic understanding of their post–university options and prospects.

It finishes on Friday 6 July.