Your comment certainly fails the decent human test by its implications and doesnt really pass the sensible human test either. Somehow I find it easy to believe you have leftist tendencies.

And what, precisely, are these “decent human” and “sensible human” tests? And why do you find it so easy that someone who fails them should have leftist tendencies?

Your comment certainly fails the “decent human” test by it’s implications and doesn’t really pass the “sensible human” test either. Somehow I find it easy to believe you have leftist tendencies.

That at least presents a possible easier set of policy problems…

http://www.clubtroppo.com.au/2007/04/12/kill-the-poor/#comment-114623

Activists need to avoid falling into the same trap they did in the 1960s. In the US , activists like Michael Harrington were very effective at raising awareness of poverty and disadvantage. But when the Johnson administration decided to act by declaring ‘unconditional war on poverty’ it had little or no idea what to do.

The administration seized on a number of then fashionable approaches, many of which had little impact (although there were some successes). America’s neoconservative movement was born out of this debacle.

I don’t think that we should assume we know how to solve problems of social and economic disadvantage. The problem isn’t just a failure of political will.

It

But here is the paradox – what may be *really* construed as ‘denigrating the poor’ can in fact lead to more strongly left wing conclusions. For instance take the controversial Murray Bell Curve argument. If, contrary to those optimistic about ‘early childhood intervention’,there are genetic limits to some individuals’ ability to get by in society because of cognitive limitations that cannot be substantially lifted regardless, then no matter how many carrots and sticks you throw at them, they really cannot help themselves – in which case lifelong unconditional welfare may well be justified. if on the other hand people do respond to incentives, then if all the incentives are thrown at them with little change, whatever poverty that remains may be blameworthy.

And what

What is it with this scrutiny of an endnote by Peter Saunders in Policy?

This is fair question. Saunders is writing a piece of political commentary not an article for a scholarly journal.

The problem I have with Saunders’ remarks is this. Many family and community interventions aim to supplement rather than replace the support of families and communities. There is growing body of empirical evidence about their effectiveness. I don’t think it’s reasonable to dismiss them as ineffective without looking at the evidence from evaluations.

As Paul says, there are a lot of unrealistic expectations out there. For years people on the left argued that training was the best way to move people from welfare to work. But when the evidence from randomised control trials came in, this became a much difficult claim to support. I suspect that there are some early intervention programs that look good in theory but will turn out to be similarly disappointing.

I don’t have a problem with Saunders drawing on Robert Nisbet’s 1950s work on community. Nisbet’s work is interesting and provocative. Where Rudd argues that families and civil society need to be protected by the market, Nisbet would argue that they need to be protected from the state. But at the same time I’d like to see Saunders follow up the theory with an analysis of the empirical evidence.

Let’s not just quote our favourite political thinkers at each other — let’s look at the data.

And what’s any of this to do with ‘denigrating welfare recipients’? It’s just pointing out that people respond to incentives, and when you make it possible to do nothing lots of people will take that option. (Indeed, isn’t this the kind of argument the left likes? – that people are not intrinsically bad, but social structures send them down the wrong path?)

Are you saying that Saunders’ reference is acceptable?

I have no idea how many journals I have read – there have been many – and I don’t really see what bearing that has on Saunders’ dodgy referencing, other than to insult my intelligence.

As for ‘condemning the entire journal based on one nitpick’, the onus isn’t on me to trawl through every reference in every issue of Policy. The onus on them is to make sure they’re all right. Your defence is crazy, it’s like a paper that gets its facts wrong arguing that for the criticism to stick, you have to make sure every article gets its facts wrong.

Again: is the reference acceptable? The answer is clearly no.

You said: “It

The offending bit that Patrick quotes is an aside which is not even essential to the point of the argument so I see no reason why Saunders is obliged to write a mini-essay on that footnote.

Why condemn the entire journal based on one nitpick by Don and then claim it’s not a left/right thing? Feel free to submit an article yourself and see if you can get it published.

It’s called Policy because it’s a journal about public policy. If you choose to read more into it than that because of the name that’s your business. Personally I take everything I read with scepticism, whether it’s left or right, and whether it claims to be scholarly or not.

What is it with this scrutiny of an endnote by Peter Saunders in Policy?
As you well know CIS’ Policy is not meant to be a repository of its scholarship or its institutional views. It has published everyone from Mark Latham to me. I take the implicit view in my recent book review in Policy that global warming exists and something should be done about it. Does that mean the CIS has gone green?

Patrick – see above. When the CIS has a considered position it published them as monographs. Policy is indeed peer reviewed but everyone is welcome to submit articles to it, though you might be unlikely to be published if you are advocating Stalinist or Nazi views.

From the point of view of an academic who has worked in this area for a very long time, the number one problem in discussions is the belief on both extreme sides of politics that there is such a thing as an easy fix. The supposed right in my perception thinks that letting people swim without support is going to help them, whereas its quite likely that the weakest will drown or will become at least as costly in a non-welfare way (crime). The supposed left thinks there are such things as magical training programs, or early childhood interventions that are relatively cheap but will elevate the whole of the bottom to middle class respectability. Cloud cookoo land.

The second biggest problem is that all sides have a point. Its a damned hard problem where no group can claim to be fighting good versus evil: its hard to look at the exploding DSP numbers in Australia (close to 1 million now) and pretend all those on it are the people the program was meant for. Similarly for the half a million lone parents. Where were these in the 60s and 70s? Certainly not on welfare. Its tough not to blame the incentives in the welfare system for that development. Its hard not to see the obvious point that putting more money into helping families at the bottom increases the incentives to be at the bottom and that people will react to those incentives.
By the same token, its hard to pretend that you can just ask the millions at the bottom to all lift themselves by their bootstraps and accept to themselves and the community that they are society’s official losers. You have to be ignorant of human psychology to expect the poor are all going to accept low-paying low-status jobs when there are the much more economically rewarding opportunities of crime, prostitution, outright denial, and church/family welfare option to pursue. Also, if you dont have the talent/looks/intelligence/charm or whatever to sell on the formal market in order to lift yourself up to the middle ranges, should you then just admit defeat and die? Surely not, yet this is the logic of the let-them-swim bandwagon.
At the end of the day, society has to strike a balance between on the one hand not letting those at the bottom become too comfortable and let them drift towards having them despise the hand that feeds them by turning a ‘hand-out’ into ‘a right’, and on the other hand not to allow the bottom to become so destitute, resentful, and without hope that they no longer feel part of the same society. IMHO opinion, Australia at large thinks the current balance is about right and is not worth changing much, apart from the usual symbolic tinkering.

And, I should add, that apart from ‘bad’ Peter Saunders, mutual obligation and the other forms of compulsion visited on welfare recipients are not favoured among libertarians/classical liberals. Yes, welfare payments need to be relatively low to avoid moral hazard. However, punishing people for receiving them, or – even worse – for working part-time to supplement them – is perfidy of the worst sort.

The only people who read the reports in full are journalists and politicians, both far more interested in finding some kind of catchy information that happens to agree with their preconceptions (much like the tanks themsevles), than a real debate about policy.

The publications are then watered-down, and fed to the public, even more distorted and simplified than they already were, with much made of the fact that it comes from a “think tank”, and attached to an aura of legitimacy that is totally unjustified; as if the appellation ‘think-tank’ means anything.

If media and politicans referred to (non-university) think tanks as what they really are – lobby groups – I think they would be far more likely to get the respect they deserve.