Monthly Archives: January 2011

Crime and punishment – umpteenth chapter

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Recent NT News discussion on the perennial topic of crime and punishment seems to have generated more heat than light.  Chief Justice Trevor Riley wrote an excellent piece pointing out basic facts about the NT criminal justice system, not least the fact that NT judges and magistrates are actually tougher on crime than any other part of Australia.  However, that hasn’t stopped a succession of subsequent correspondents from asserting that judges are “out of touch” and adopting an excessively lenient approach.

Former Chief Minister Shane Stone even weighed into the debate with a piece advocating re-adoption of an expanded mandatory sentencing regime, ignoring the fact that crime in relevant categories actually increased while the last version of mandatory sentencing was in force and fell when it was repealed.

Territorians are justified in being worried about crime.  Crime rates are twice as high here as the Australian average in most categories; in some they are significantly higher.  Moreover, things are getting worse in some categories.  Crime rates for homicides, house break-ins and sexual assaults have not changed over the last 6 years, but non-sexual assaults have increased by a disturbing 73% from already high rates, armed robberies by 58% and commercial break-ins and vehicle thefts by 71%.

There are limits to the extent any NT government can reduce crime rates, because we have a very young population with a high indigenous component and high levels of alcohol consumption.  All are factors associated with higher crime rates.  However that doesn’t deny that we can do better than at present.

Research and practical experience indicate that crime is not deterred by longer and longer prison sentences, but that increasing the certainty of being caught and meaningfully punished has a measurable crime-reducing effect.  On the other hand, imprisoning young first offenders for short periods tends to increase crime rates.  Most first offenders never commit another crime, but for some the “school for crime” effect of prison may outweigh any deterrent effect.  That’s why judges view imprisonment as a last resort for young first offenders, even where the offence committed may seem one that warrants imprisonment.  It depends whether you view crime reduction or “just deserts” as the main aim of sentencing.

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Warwick McKibbin has challenged Wayne Swan to reappoint him

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Those are the words that the sub-editor of the Australian – I presume that is who wrote them – used to describe these comments from Warwick McKibbin.

“It is more important to have independent voices (on the bank board) than ever, because the policies being proposed in recent years I don’t think have been in the national interest, and the composition of the board matters a lot,” Professor McKibbin told The Australian.

“If they want to reappoint me, I’m available, but it is their choice. I understand that if there is a better candidate available, then so be it.”

That’s apparently ‘challenging’ the government to reappoint him. I’d call it responding to a question in a straightforward way. Likewise if one is anyone of consequence and one criticises the government – or anyone else – and it’s deemed newsworthy, it will be so-and-so ‘slams government’.

And so our lives go on, with the media hyping them up so that they’re essentially unrecognisable to the players. Except that the players are so inured to it all that they barely react, and indeed barely notice that public life becomes the nearest thing to fiction it is possible to have whilst not actually changing any facts.

Missing link Friday – Bad mother edition

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This week we’re stealing a few links from the Profligate Promiscuous Strumpet before moving on to a couple of stories from the US blogosphere. The theme is motherhood.


So that’s what they’re for!

"Why does a woman breastfeeding in public cause such alarm among some people", asks Demelza at SAHM Feminist. "I would never comment to a woman bottle feeding her baby that its unhygienic or disgusting yet people do this to breastfeeding mothers a lot."

At Hoyden About Town Lauredhel writes that moral panics about women breast feeding in public "happen with dispiriting regularity":

Here in a Florida Sentinel comments section, for example, one commenter compares their discomfort on seeing breastfeeding to their discomfort on seeing fat or disabled people going out in public. Another compares it to public urination, defecation, and sexual intercourse. A nursing mother is accused of being a child molester, another diagnoses mothers as mentally ill. Another calls feeding a child “disgusting”, “wrong”, and “filthy”.

At On the Rocks and Straight Up, Angie complains about the pressure to breast feed: "For four and a half months, I tried to give my babies every drop of milk I could, and it damn near killed me."


Tiger mothers

On their own, children never want to work, writes Yale Law School professor Amy Chua. And that’s "why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up."

Chinese mothers can tell their daughters "Hey fatty—lose some weight" writes Chua. But Western parents tiptoe around the issue "and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image".

Chua’s new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, ignited a huge controversy in the US media. When Stephen Colbert introduced her on his show he said: “Your book has both enraged and secretly threatened mothers across America — they think you’re wrong, but privately think maybe you’re right and doubt how they’re raising their own children. Did you achieve your goals?”

On her blog, May-Lee Chai argues that the debate isn’t really about ethnicity but about class. "Chua’s super-controlling style of parenting is not ‘traditional Chinese’ for many reasons, most obviously the fact that most Chinese have had no opportunity to parent the way Chua does", writes Chai. What nobody seems to be talking about is how much Chua’s wealthy background has shaped the lives of her two daughters. Chai continues:

We as a nation need to look for real solutions that will help ALL OF US as a society, not just a few of us. We need to stop blaming “indulgent Western parents” or unions or teachers or such-and-such ethnic group, and look at the lack of opportunity that a society increasingly segregated by class leads to as well as the declining state of our public school systems, for example. If you can put your kids in a $30,000/year private school, then of course the kids can get a good education and meet many children of influential people who will help them later in life.

At the Rush Limbaugh Report (not affiliated with Rush Limbaugh) Caroline has another interpretation:

… when this author was talking about and criticizing Western moms…which lousy parents was she talking about? It seems like its the parents of minorities who – statistically speaking – do not value education for their children. Usually because tehre’s [sic] only one parent, the mom, and she never graduated from high school herself and is living just fine on welfare, thank you.


Stealing opportunity


Blue Milk links to this story about a mother from Akron Ohio who was tried, convicted and jailed when she bent the rules to get her daughters into a better school. Continue reading →

Any alternatives to a levy?

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I might have preferred for the Government to take a risk with the surplus in 2012/13, and perhaps to have a go at middle-class welfare, but that would have been politically too hard. It has been seen as “an intellectual defeat” to the Coalition – but is it not a fact of life with the present minority government?

Instead, we have got a modest tax levy and many spending adjustments. The levy can be justified on several grounds:

(i) 60 per cent of workers will be exempt from the levy and most of the remainder will pay $1 or $2 per week;
(ii) it is quite possible that the Australian labour market will remain very tight, with shortages of workers forecast in Queensland and WA; wage pressures will add to high food prices, so the levy and spending cuts should thus reduce pressure on interest rates;
(iii) any further cuts i(to meet new disaster relief) will be met (we are told) by further cuts in spending, not by drawing on the levy;

What is the alternative to the levy – e.g. to slug a few rich and poor public servants? How is that fairer than hitting relatively high income earners?

Real journalists don’t do data

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When conservative commentator Tucker Carlson launched the Daily Caller last year he promised readers original reporting on US politics. As he told the Columbia Journalism Review: "our view is that people want reliable information they’re not getting other places".

When journalists promise reliable information, what they usually mean is that will accurately report what their sources say. So when the Daily Caller reports: "Friend says Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie told him there is no Obama birth certificate" they’re not claiming there is no Obama birth certificate. All they’re saying is that a Hollywood reporter called Mike Evans told KQRS radio that he was talking to the governor of Hawaii and that the governor said he couldn’t find Obama’s birth certificate. So that’s a 100% reliable story. So far so good …

But not all the reporting at the Daily Caller meets even this low standard. For example, here’s how they covered a recent report on pedestrian traffic fatalities:

Pedestrian deaths increased sharply during the first half of 2010, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA). On Wednesday, the Executive Director of the GHSA accused the first lady’s obesity program of causing the deaths by encouraging people to exercise.

The first statement is just wrong. What the report actually said was:

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The cold shower effect – alive and well and living in twelve European economies.

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The cold shower effect is a dangerous beast. It supports free market types in supporting trade liberalisation. When last seen, the cold shower effect was explaining why trade liberalisation is even better for you than you thought. If there’s a cold shower effect it means that if firms get a hard time from imports, they just try harder. And if you’re a leftie, then the cold shower effect gets another name I guess, but minimum wages give firms cold showers and they just have to try harder. Anyway, Chinese imports gave a bunch of European firms a cold shower.

Trade Induced Technical Change? The Impact of Chinese Imports on Innovation, IT and Productivity by Nicholas Bloom, Mirko Draca, John Van Reenen – #16717 (EFG IO ITI LS PR)

Abstract:

We examine the impact of Chinese import competition on patenting, IT, R&D and TFP using a panel of up to half a million firms over 1996-2007 across twelve European countries. We correct for endogeneity using the removal of product-specific quotas following China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. Chinese import competition had two effects: first, it led to increases in R&D, patenting, IT and TFP within firms; and second it reallocated employment between firms towards more innovative and technologically advanced firms. These within and between effects were about equal in magnitude, and appear to account for around 15% of European technology upgrading between 2000-2007. Rising Chinese import competition also led to falls in employment, profits, prices and the skill share. By contrast, import competition from developed countries had no effect on innovation. We develop a simple “trapped factor” model of innovation that is consistent with these empirical findings.

80 Million People can’t all get along – China’s past and future

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It’s becoming a point of distinction not to have prognosticated on the future of China, especially in Australia as China takes great significance in our region and in our economic future. A lot of this prognostication must be infuriating to veteran China Watchers, being conducted by Johnny Come Latelys who never cared about the country until there was a dollar to be made, and by people who never struggled with the language to earn their right to be heard on the matter.

I’ll join the ranks of the prognosticators though. After all, my Mandarin is merely highly inadequate, rather than nonexistent. I also think that the others are missing something highly important ; The Communist Party (CCP) is huge, and it is not a monolith that acts as if one..

China is a massive and diverse country. It is only to be expected that strong divides will occur. But the Communist Party itself is huge. If it was a country, it would be around the 15th largest in the world (79 odd million), alongside Egypt and behind 11 countries whom have all suffered major unrest, civil wars, division and separatists in the past 70 years. The remaining three are China itself, Japan (more on that later) and the anomalously stable United States which has a polity that has managed its divides without conflict for nearly 150 years. If large countries keep experiencing these conflicts, it is  likely a party the size of a country will also.

The difference, of course, is that these divides happen amongst the powerbrokers of a much larger society, and if managed poorly, they can leverage large parts of that society into greater conflict. And worryingly, the CCP has historically done very very poorly at managing them. It’s almost the story of 20th century China.

It predates the Party. The 20th century effectively began for China with the Xinhai revolution. Not only because it ended the institution of Emperor and replaced it with the ideological turmoil typifying the last century, but because it marked the beginning of the institutions of power turning on themselves. Unrest and rebellion had been common throughout history, but dynastical changes came from outside the establishment, from peasantry or from barbarians and other unrest, such as the astonishingly bloody Taiping rebellion [fn1] and many others over the preceding century had also provincial origins. The Xinhai revolution also nominally began far from the capital, but it involved an institution of the state, the military, in rebellion and provided a basis for other establishment actors to do so. From the chaos that followed, it was not a peasant leader, a barbarian or an Chinese from outside the establishment (such as Sun Zhongshan, better known here as Sun Yat-Sen) that emerged as President but the Empire’s prime minister and military leader Yuan Shikai. Rebellion became revolution when the state turned on itself.

The country descended into warlordism, but the warlords were not local thugs taking advantage of the chaos, but the leaders of a fractured Imperial military. Unification did occur briefly under a leader from outside the old order, Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai Shek), after the Northern Expedition, but this new state soon turned on itself.

Jiang recognised a threat to himself in the institutions of the new order, namely the administratively adept Chinese Communist Party with whom Jiang’s Nationalist party (GMD) had allied. Their organisational capacity (and foreign support from the USSR) could prove a rival to the military power of the GMD component of the new Republic. They were expelled, but not eliminated.

Thus civil war began between the two parts of the state. Japanese invasion required a united front in name, but Jiang recognised that the CCP was still the main threat to his own supremacy. Sure enough, in 1949, the former secretary of Peasant Affairs, Mao Zedong, declared the new People’s Republic of China.

After only 8 years things began afresh. Jiang feared the highly trained and Soviet influenced technocrats in his government. Mao began to do the same. It didn’t help that the elitism of a Leninist Vanguard party was too close to Confucian orthodoxy or the educated republican intellectuals who had one rejected him and filled him with resentment. Disquieted by the diversity of views in the 100 flowers period (in which divergent views were encouraged) the state began persecuting rival voices including those within itself. The PRC split from the USSR, cutting technocrats off from a possible patron and the unorthodox, and ultra untechnocratic and ultra anti-elitist Great Leap Forward was launched. Tens of millions died. Continue reading →

‘Neoliberalism’ – The ideology of pragmatism

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At Larvatus Prodeo, Kim writes about The great American neoliberal liberal blog kerfuffle where blogger Freddie deBoer claims that "almost anything resembling an actual left wing has been systematically written out of the conversation within the political blogosphere".

According to deBoer "the nominal left of the blogosphere is almost exclusively neoliberal". But Australian readers shouldn’t assume they know what this means. The term ‘neoliberal’ has a peculiar history in the United States where it often refers to a precursor to the Third Way.

The liberalism that’s being reinvented by this neoliberalism is not the classical liberalism of Adam Smith and John Locke as revived and reinterpreted by thinkers like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Instead it’s the American liberalism of Franklin D Roosevelt and Lyndon B Johnson subjected to an extreme make-over by journalists at the Washington Monthly and the New Republic.

Here’s how the Washington Monthly‘s Charles Peters described the movement in 1983:

If neoconservatives are liberals who took a critical look at liberalism and decided to become conservatives, we are liberals who took the same look and decided to retain our goals but abandon some of our prejudices. We still believe in liberty and justice and a fair chance for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out. But we no longer automatically favor unions and big government or oppose the military and big business. Indeed, in our search for solutions that work, we have come to distrust all automatic responses, liberal or conservative.

As Ezra Klein notes, neoliberalism often looks more like a positioning device than an honest critique of American liberalism. When Ronald Reagan came to office in 1981, liberalism had become a dirty word. So the neoliberals tried to strip away the most objectionable features of post 1960s liberalism — the perception that it was soft on crime, welfare dependency and national security. And they went on to attack what they saw as the Reaganites’ Achilles heel — the ideological claim that every problem could be solved by cutting taxes and reducing the size and scope of government.

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