Club Troppo

I was in John Dawkins’ office when, to my amazement he decided to move the (then) Industry Commission, now Productivity Commission, to Melbourne. Anyway, with Dawkins having rebuffed attempts to dissuade him, as the move proceeded against great angst and gnashing of teeth, the Treasury and IC came back with Plan B, which was to have it straddle both Melbourne and Canberra equally, which it has done since Dawkins relented. I’d be interested in what people think the good and bad points about that model have been.

Anyway, on receiving Warren Mundy’s group email telling us all that he’s become a Commissioner, rather than an Associate, I went to the page outlining all the Commissioners. All the full-timers are Canberra based, meaning that if you’re in Melb0urne you’re a part timer. There is only one Canberra part-timer – Warren. If we assume full time commissioners are a full time equivalent, there are six and a half Canberra based commissioner FTEs and if we assume part time commissioners are half an FTE, there are two Melbourne commissioner FTEs.

[And isn't that a pretty graphic! I think in the public sector, Canberra is in the centre, coloured green. NG]

I was talking to my wife today about an alternative form of reverse discrimination and came home to find something else I’d said about it linked to by Richard Green. To introduce the issue, here was my comment.

I’ve always thought that the absence of women in politics is in fact a symptom of a larger problem which is the way in which politics is skewed towards a particular personality type – of whatever gender.

And that’s really a variant of a larger phenomenon which one might call the Groucho phenomenon. (I’m thinking of his comment that he’d never join a club that would have him as a member.)

There are professions in which the people who want to do them, are disproportionately, by that fact, the wrong kind of people. I expect this is a relatively small sub-set of all professions, but it’s numerous enough. I can think of these.

* politicians (are they in it to really do a good job or do they just want to be the centre of attention)
* psychiatrists (are they flakey types who did psych because they wanted to work themselves out and never did?)
* ‘spiritual counsellors, like priests (are they generally committed to the spiritual or emotional journey or are they dullards who want to do something safe, secure and well thought of by their narrow community.)
* public servants (ditto, mutatis mutandis)
* police, jail-warders and security generally (is part of the attraction physically lording it over people?)
* judges (perhaps) (How pompous are they? How much do they want to see justice done?)

Note that the desire to do these jobs may contribute to someone doing a very good job, but often the desire is ‘tainted’ with bad qualities.

Whenever I see people raising the issue of discrimination, I always think of all those kinds of discrimination that we just don’t worry about, just pretty much let go through to the keeper, in favour of height, good looks or even just ‘introversion’. But as you forshadow, it’s not easy to come up with rules which treat these matters.

Which leads me to say that, while quotas may or not be worthwhile, their obvious problem is that they’ll end up turning up the very most narcissistic women! I think this is a genuine problem for instance in grooming women for corporate and other kinds of leadership. If one of the benefits one was hoping to get out of it is a different kind of personality type, you may not get very far, and women may begin demonstrating various tendencies one didn’t much like in men.

So I have a partial response to all this – and it’s odd that I’ve not thought of it before, but there you are. Presumably someone else has. But I’ve always thought that one of the main things driving the fact that women get so much less senior jobs than men (something that’s fading fast in many areas but much more slowly in others) is that they take large career breaks to look after their kids. So my proposal is for ABS to go out and measure what proportion of the community take ‘caring’ breaks from work of some appropriate period of years – say ten. Then one can start aiming one’s affirmative action and reverse discrimination policies towards trying to get the proportion of people in senior positions up towards that proportion.

(Walks off, dusts hands . . . . another problem solved.)

A while ago Paul Montgomery, whom I didn’t know, tweeted that he had wanted to set up a blog of the radical centre.  His tweet was about his crestfallen discovery that we beat him to it. Anyway, my handle @nichlasgruen was in this tweet so I saw it and suggested that Paul submit a guest post – which he did. It’s below.

One of the blog series nominated in the comments of the Best Blog Posts of 2010 competition, run by Club Troppo and On Line Opinion, is the series on the National Broadband Network by Joshua Gans at his Core Economics blog. Paul Frijters’ nomination went like so:

1. The series of blogs (eg. here, here, here, and here) by Joshua Gans on the National Broadband Network. He writes about his area of expertise, i.e. monopolies and government regulation, it’s a big national issue, and he mostly gets it right (I think).

“Right” is a matter of opinion, especially to those who would prefer an analysis to go beyond mere economic issues, as I would. The left in general has been fully behind the NBN from the start, with the policy being released by a card carrying member of the ALP Right in Steven Conroy in the name of microeconomic reform, but also fulfilling a lot of leftist ideals for government intervention to construct public institutions. The ALP Left seemed quite happy for the Right of its own party to take up the cudgel of the “vision thing”, while the mostly inner-city Greens could only applaud the extension of a key part of their own lifestyle to the masses, and the regional Independents put their provincialism ahead of their principles to swallow the Government’s promises of early roll-outs to the bush. Thus most of the inquiry into the NBN as a policy issue has come from the right, for better or worse.

As the major policy item in a federal election this year which was otherwise bereft of serious discussion, the Coalition did not do a very good job of prosecuting their anti-NBN case in the eyes of the electorate, if the pre-election opinion polls and the post-election exit polls on the issue were anything to go by. The Coalition itself was not the best antagonist to argue against the NBN, as Malcolm Turnbull is its only parliamentarian qualified to speak on the technicalities and his performance was weighed down by his obvious political baggage. The Australian, a newspaper that prides itself on the power and influence of its frequent campaigns, could not mount a sustained attack on the NBN despite having many of the finest IT journalists in the country in its ranks. The media has let the public and/or the conservative side of politics down by not scrutinising the NBN enough, allowing some very rubbery figures to go by mostly unchallenged.

(Continued)

The rough beast is slouching towards Bethlehem again. In the latest issue of Quadrant Rob Nugent warns that young people are losing their connection with history and culture. Literary reading is in decline and postmodernism is to blame. According to Nugent, our intellectual elites no longer perform their role of transmitting culture to the young.

A generation of history numbskulls

The evidence Nugent offers is almost entirely anecdotal. He starts with the results of an informal survey of first year economics students at the University of Cardiff that showed that few of them could answer seemingly easy questions about British history. For example, only 11.5% of the 284 students surveyed could name even one 19th century British prime minister (pdf). Presented with an easy to digest cliche of declining educational standards, the Mail Online picked up the Cardiff story and posted it next to pictures of semi-naked celebrities with the headline Trendy teaching is ‘producing a generation of history numbskulls’. But Nugent is a serious fellow who complains about celebrity gossip, so he probably read about the study somewhere else.

Nugent couldn’t find quantitative evidence for Australian young people as a whole, Australian university students or even a few of hundred students studying a particular course at an Australian university. So instead of demonstrating that Australian students don’t know anything about history, he offers a single example of the kind of trendy teaching he believes is causing the problem. His example is "a first-year course in early modern European history that "reflects the fundamental problems facing the teaching of humanities subjects in universities worldwide". It’s a course that sounds suspiciously like ‘The Worlds of Early Modern Europe‘ — a unit offered by Macquarie University. Not only does it include frank discussions of sexuality, but it is taught thematically rather than chronologically — an approach Nugent insists deprives students of "the mental scaffolding they need on which to build any kind of real analysis."

This is the kind of salacious chatter tabloid editors love — academics wasting taxpayers’ money on titilating trivia. After all, every Mail Online reader knows that history is supposed to be boring. Just as mathematics is about memorising multiplication tables and doing long division, history is about memorising names and dates. It’s about wars, battles, kings and prime ministers. It’s not about transgender prostitutes, witches, the everyday lives of women or about food — that’s the kind of thing the internet is for. And why on earth are first year history students being told that Saint Thomas Aquinas liked herring?

(Continued)