Club Troppo

As the graph below shows, the proportion of men in full-time work has fallen over time. Every recession the proportion falls sharply and in each recovery it fails to bounce back to its pre-recession level.

When I show people this graph they often offer explanations — it’s population aging, kids staying in education longer, or married men staying at home to look after their kids. But when I look at the data more closely, I’m still puzzled.

Occasionally people will interpret my question is a plea to return Australia to the 1950s where men won the bread and women were detained in fibro boxes surrounded by neatly trimmed lawns. I’ll be reminded that men are not a disadvantaged group and that women’s wages still lag behind men’s.

But despite the helpful explanations and the risk of having my motives misinterpreted, I’m still curious about the data. I suspect it might have something to do with structural change in the labour market — shifts in the demand for different kinds of skill. And I imagine these changes have affected some groups of women too. Perhaps it’s got something to do with the decline of industries like manufacturing?

In the end, I’m not entirely sure how to explain this. Can Troppo readers help?

More graphs below the fold.

(Continued)

Freedom of expression in Australia is arguably freer than it has ever been, both legally and practically.  Oppressive censorship of art and literature is largely a dim memory from the distant past (leaving aside infrequent moral panics like the Henson naked kiddie pic affair).  The High Court invented a constitutionally-protected freedom of political communication in the early 1990s and subsequently entrenched it.  And a few years ago the Commonwealth and States agreed and implemented a new uniform national defamation law which reduced the capacity for lawyers to make a fortune from representing wealthy litigants keen on winning a new weekender on the coast by claiming the media had impugned their precious reputation, which the law conveniently if rebuttably deemed to be pristine.

On the production side of the equation, publishing material to the world that might invade a person’s privacy or damage their reputation is now effectively costless, available to every Tom, Dick or Kim, and unpredictably liable to “go viral” through being picked up by Twitter or Facebook or even a large populist blog.  Moreover, just about every callow teen carries a camera-equipped mobile phone to record events they think might boost their peer status.  Social mores and conventions simply haven’t yet developed to provide a guide on how to behave in this brave new cyber-glasshouse world.  Even presumably sophisticated legal academics make egregious errors of judgment by Twittering bitchy analogies about equine fornication, while meat-headed middle-aged sporting managers heedlessly seize actual fornication opportunities with publicity-seeking nubile young teens.

Richard Ackland has been banging on for some time about the danger that media freedoms and freedom of expression generally may be seriously at risk from expansion in the scope of privacy laws, equitable doctrines like breach of confidence and even the re-assertion of more restrictive defamation laws in response to the challenge posed by the cyber-glasshouse world:

It looks like a big, fat, fruity pudding for barristers. It’s the NSW Bar Association’s submission to the government’s review of the Defamation Act, and what a corker it is. It calls for a march backwards to a more sublime time when the defamation business provided plenty of good grazing for lawyers.

Remove the cap on damages, allow corporations and dead people to sue, abolish truth alone as a defence, let juries decide everything in lengthier, more complex trials. Let’s have the law as it was before the uniform Defamation Act came into being in 2006 and slowed libel cases to a trickle. That’s the bar’s make-work mission, although there are some internal disagreements around the issue of privacy.

Personally I think it’s unlikely that the barristers will succeed in convincing politicians to revert to the halcyon defamation litigation days of yore.  Far more likely that Australian privacy laws will be expanded to provide more effective remedies for really egregious breaches of personal privacy.  Moreover, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as even Ackland begrudgingly concedes.  Freedom of speech is certainly a critical democratic value, but other values and interests like privacy and personal reputation also have a legitimate claim on the legal system.  It’s just that the law hasn’t to date managed to devise an effective set of rules to balance these competing rights and interests when they come into conflict (as they often do).

However the Australian Law Reform Commission proposed major reforms to Australian privacy laws in 2006 which, if adopted, might well succeed in striking an appropriate balance between all these competing values.  It’s an indictment in itself of the shallow, trivial nature of Australian media that this issue hasn’t to my knowledge come up for serious public discussion despite the evident threat that Ackland identifies.  The ALRC recommends (inter alia) that the Privacy Commissioner should have power to apply to the Federal Court for imposition of significant civil monetary penalties for very serious or repeated breaches of privacy.  More importantly, it also recommends that private individuals should be given a tightly constrained statutory cause of action to sue for serious infringements of privacy:

(Continued)

In this week’s Missing Link Friday bloggers discuss slutwalking, teenage pregnancy, the demise of the book, typical Australian incomes and the problem of men who don’t work.

Sex, lies and slutwalking. Slutwalking is what happens when "when the political passions of the second-wave fantastically crash into the third-wave’s warm embrace of sexuality performed in all its spectacular, confronting and revealing glory". writes Lauren Rosewarne at The Conversation.

Look at that slut. A new member of congress flaunts their half-naked body on the cover of a glossy magazine. Should we be shocked?

Shunning for your own good. Blue Milk on teenage pregnancy.

But what about when boys call me “foxy”? According to a report in Canada’s National Post: "Animal ethicists are calling for a new vocabulary about animals, shunning words such as ‘pets,’ ‘wildlife,’ and ‘vermin’ as derogatory". At Feministe, Jill’s post begins: "Sorry, this probably makes me insensitive to the feelings of non-human animals … but …"

Do Libraries Need Books Anymore? Matt Yglesias thinks libraries can save money by abandoning paper and moving to ebooks and electronic readers. But as eGov AU’s Craig Thomler explains, some publishers don’t intend selling ebooks to libraries — they plan to lease them:

Harper Collins has locked ebooks sold (via the OverDrive service) to libraries in the US and Canada. After 26 lends each ebook becomes unusable and the library must repurchase it to keep lending it out.

Why the ‘set-top boxes for pensioners’ budget allocation might not be as big as it sounds. At iTWire, Stephen Withers argues that the government’s Household Assistance Scheme isn’t as outrageous as it looks.

Monday’s medical myth: drink eight glasses of water a day. How can you tell if you’re drinking enough water? At The Conversation, Tim Crowe offers this advice: "If your urine is lightly coloured or clear, you’re drinking enough. If it’s dark, then you should drink more."

What is the typical Australian’s income? Is the Gillard government mercilessly assaulting ordinary working families struggling on $150,000 a year? Matt Cowgill looks at the data and concludes that $150,000 plus is hardly typical for a couple with two kids. According to Mr Denmore: "the problem is 98 percent of journalists are innumerate."

David Brooks On High “Structural” Unemployment. Fewer prime age men are working for a living, writes New York Times Columnist David Brooks. Brooks argues that this is a structural problem that requires greater investments in human capital. Rortybomb’s Mike Konczal disagrees.

Taxes and work. Do differences in tax rates account explain why people in some countries work more than others? Edward C. Prescott of the Minneapolis Fed says yes (pdf). At Consider the Evidence Lane Kenworthy looks at the data and concludes that: "the overall tax level doesn’t seem to be an important determinant of differences in employment hours across the world’s rich countries."

Slutwalks are coming soon all over Australia. The Brisbane variant is in 2 weeks time and the Sydney one in 3 weeks.  The craze has reached us from America where the first one was held in Toronto on April 3 in protest of a local police officer who is said to have told 10 college students, “I’ve been told I’m not supposed to say this – however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”

Ken Parish was quick to condemn slutwalks, but on reflection, I basically think he is wrong and the sluts are right. No offense intended to either Ken or sluts.

There are two questions involved here. One is whether the immediate reason for the slutwalks is reasonable and the second is whether there is an important underlying issue worth demonstrating against. The immediate question is whether the police officer was out of line and the deeper question is whether society employs a double standard when it comes to the sexuality of men and women.

Ken and others raise the point that the police officer is factually telling the truth to his audience when he say that the dress-signals of women can incite the desires and abuses of men. That is undeniably true, but is not sufficient to exonerate the police officer in question. To see the unreasonableness of the remarks of the police officer, consider the analogy with theft. Would a police officer tell someone who doesn’t want his fancy car to be stolen not to drive in it so that it can’t be seen by potential thieves? The suggestion would be seen as absurd because it would be taken for granted that the whole purpose of having a car was to drive in it and, in the case of a fancy car, to be seen driving it. Think of another analogy closer to the topic of violence. Can you imagine a police officer saying to parents concerned about the threat of a pedophile priest that they if they were worried about such things that they should not have had kids in the first place or, if they did, that they shouldn’t send their kids to mass so as not to tempt the priest? Again, the suggestion would be considered hurtful and malicious because it would, rightfully, be seen as inferring that the parents should go without kids or should change their attitudes towards potential parenthood and religion because of the possibility of a pedophile priest.

It is this analogy that is the correct one, because dressing up constitutes an important signal sent from women to their potential partners (both male and female) about their attractiveness, habits, and willingness to at least consider offers of intimacy. Dressing desirably is not an open invitation for violence, even though it would be silly to deny that it is commonly understood as a signal of interest in offers. Just like a baker who advertises his bread on open shelves, and invites customers to make bids for his bread, does not want to be told by a police office that he should hide his bread lest he invites theft, neither should a desirable woman be told by a police officer to dress inconspicuously so as not to invite rape.

In this light, what the police officer said makes no sense.  Instead, what it reflects is a wider and implicitly understood message that the police officer (and perhaps his community of police officers) morally objects to the signalling function of ‘dressing like a slut’. It is an objection to being aroused by desirable women, and/or an objection to the possibility of such women having sex, that is needed to make sense of the police officer’s statement. One might counter by saying that a police officer might reasonably suggest to the baker that he should take due care in not abandoning his shop while his bread is on display, and that parents should not leave their kids unattended with males they do not trust. In the contest of dresses that would be a statement of the type ‘when you look desirable but are not seeking sexual advances, take care not to be alone in dark alleys or alone and drunk around men you do not trust’. That is the type of sensible advice any mother and father (I have 2 daughters nearing that age) would give their offspring. They would not tell the baker to stop advertising bread and for kids to stop going to school and to church.

Hence the sluts and the slutwalkers have a valid argument that the police officer’s comments were out of order and indeed indicative of a disapproving attitude regarding the signals given by dressing “like a slut”.

Then there is the question of whether there is a deeper issue here. Does society have a double standard regarding public signals about the sexuality of men and women? I cannot speak for all countries, but there can be no doubt that the answer for Australia is an unequivocal ‘yes’. I have lost count of the number of times I have been told as a father to lock up my two daughters and buy them chastity belts, whereas all signs of sexual awareness and activity on the part of my son are seen as healthy and worthy of praise and encouragement. I have had learned and heated arguments with eminent scholars on the subject (usually when drunk, but still). I have seen both fathers and mothers putting their daughters down warning them not to fraternise with boys whilst telling their sons the opposite. It invariably involves an element of putting ‘that girl in her place’, and is usually accompanied with gleeful faces on the part of the boys. There is not a tiff of doubt in my mind that in this country, women are derided for being sexually promiscuous whilst men are praised for the same activity.

I ask myself as a father and an intellectual whether that is a good attitude, and where it comes from. I ask myself ‘so what do all these fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, leaders and followers want for their women? Do they really want them to be virgin nuns until they marry a perfect suitor at the ripe age of about 30?’. That would be such a selfish wish. The males certainly don’t want this for women when they are in the pub hoping to get laid, but it is nevertheless the logic that follows from openly looking down on sluts in their own family and set of friends. It is a pure double standard, and a very mean one at that because it essentially denies women the idea that having an active and even promiscuous sex life is healthy and normal. It burdens them with the idea that they must somehow feel themselves to be unworthy if they pursue their desires, whilst not burdening men with the same stigma. And it smacks of a power game when it comes to the attitudes of the men: why do all these brother and fathers want their daughters and sisters to live up to a notion of sexual purity or repression, whilst they themselves do not? These sisters and daughters eventually will have sex anyway, with someone else than their brothers and fathers, when they are finally married off to someone else. One cannot help but wonder: what is the personal gain to the brother and fathers of the idea that their sisters and daughters have to go without until then? At the very least it is somewhat mean, and it also smacks of gender power-politics (if not something even darker).

Hence, hurrah to both sluts and their walks. From a utilitarian standpoint there is nothing wrong with being a slut since having sex is a healthy and pleasurable experience for which, in the age of contraception, there is no good reason to have one rule for men and another for women.  From an economic perspective, sending signals increases the flow of valuable information and hence lubricates exchange on the market for intimacy.  I think that the slutwalkers are entirely correct about both the inappropriateness of blaming victims of sexual crimes for the way they dress, and about the general societal attitude about sluttiness.

Here’s one of the three pieces I contributed to Crikey as a correspondent from the lockup.  I’d not done the lockup for over a decade – and it’s very like sitting an exam, including the relief and relaxation when it’s finished after a hard slog and you can catch up with people you’ve not seen in a while.  Had a great time afterward meeting some of the Crikey and Business Spectator people and talking to Alan Kohler about his business.

As a temporary member of the press gallery, I had my ‘gotcha’ question ready for Wayne Swan, but alas didn’t join the shouting match to get my question in. But I can share it with you gentle reader – a little esprit de l’escalier a few hours later.

Treasurer, do you support the Budget’s Paper’s call for the Budget to retain “the necessary flexibility for the budget position to vary in line with economic conditions to support macroeconomic stability,” or your Prime Minister’s commitment to return the budget to surplus in 2012-13 come what may?

Julia’s promise is the best of promises – and the worst of promises.

Electorates like spending but hate the taxation to pay for it. Thus, while it’s not the most rational approach, the obsessive concern with getting back to surplus has been a healthy counterweight to the drift towards endless deficits and mounting government debt.

The average government debt to GDP of the G-7 countries is just shy of 75%. Australia’s will peak at less than a tenth of this. And Keynesianism isn’t a perennial spendathon. If you plan to increase spending to fight recession you should use booms in the way the years of feast are used in the Book of Genesis – to replenish the fiscal larder.

This government hasn’t proven itself particularly courageous in taking on middle class welfare, but wearing the hair shirt of returning to surplus come what may, is nevertheless delivering impressive constraints in outlays.

But the rigid timetable for restoring surplus could become a huge handicap – economically and politically. Announced in the haste of her very first press conference as Prime Minister and so literally the prototype for many other misjudgements of similar provenance, it looks decisive and statesmanlike – but not after a moment’s thought about what could go wrong. (Continued)

It’s hard to deny that the Gillard government’s emerging new asylum seeker policy represents a thinly disguised reversion to Howard’s Pacific Solution, although both Gillard and Stephen Smith are giving denial a good shot.  The thing is that I suspect most “punters” will neither know nor care as long as it looks tough and stops the boats (as I’m pretty sure it will after a lag as those already in the people smuggler pipeline arrive).  With the noteworthy addition of the Malaysia element, Gillard’s solution looks (and is) sufficiently different from Howard’s recipe as to avoid an appearance of craven political capitulation.

The Malaysia element adds a critical dimension to the visaless asylum seeker issue that Howard’s policy conspicuously lacked.  As I’ve observed previously, Howard ultimately had no choice but to grant visas to asylum seekers on Nauru who were assessed as genuine refugees, because other countries simply weren’t prepared to take them (apart from a one-off initial deal with New Zealand).  Howard’s “we will decide who comes here …” statement was a hollow, meaningless threat.  Indeed so desperate was Howard to disguise this fatal flaw in his policy towards the end of his term of office that he entered negotiations with the US to swap Australian refugees on Nauru for American ones interned at Guantanamo Bay.  Had that deal been finalised it would have borne a close similarity with the deal Gillard has now done in principle with Malaysia, a point Tony Abbott has so far managed to avoid mentioning.  However Gillard’s gambit is manifestly superior at least from a border security viewpoint.  Giving US residency visas instead of Australian ones to asylum seekers found to be refugees would hardly have sent a powerful deterrent message to those contemplating signing up with the people smugglers whereas sending them to the back of the “queue” in Malaysia most certainly does.  If Tony Abbott were to experience one of his increasingly infrequent moments of disarming honesty, he would admit that Gillard’s Malaysia gambit is a policy masterstroke which a Coalition government would have adopted like a shot and proudly claimed credit for had it been currently in office.

The Malaysia element is predictably being assailed from both Right and Left.  Abbott is trying to gain mileage and negate any kudos for Gillard by painting the deal as a negotiating loss for Australia because we are to take 5 UNHCR-approved refugees from Malaysia for every unprocessed boat person we return to them.  However the reality is that Australia will almost certainly gain a huge border security win by stopping the boats, which is what Abbott has until now professed was his aim, while taking in return just 1000 extra approved refugees from offshore each year in a total migration program of around 170,000 is just a drop in the ocean and hardly a concession at all, especially if it eventually allows Christmas Island and other onshore detention centres to be closed.

The Malaysia element is also being criticised as a desperate and expedient “one-off” solution.  But that was equally true of the Pacific Solution when first propounded.  By definition all such policies are expedient reactions to immediate border security crises.  Moreover, one would suspect that it will prove possible in due course to negotiate an extension of the deal with Malaysia, as long as it doesn’t result in significant adverse domestic political blowback for its government or serve as an attractant for an increased flow of hopeful asylum seekers into Malaysia.  No doubt those concerns account for the initial limited scope of the deal.  It may even prove feasible to negotiate similar deals with countries like India and Indonesia.

Criticism from the Left has focused on the fact that Malaysia is not a signatory to the Refugee Convention and has a poor record of treatment of the 90,000 or so asylum seekers within its borders (note the contrast with the tiny numbers Australians are whinging about having to cope with).  However UNHCR is cautiously welcoming of the deal and apparently regards the undertakings of “non-refouler” and humane treatment  that Australia has extracted from Malaysia as appropriate.  The Refugee Convention does not forbid return of asylum seekers to non-signatory nations, it forbids “refouler” of refugees to their homeland or another place where they may face persecution.  What will be required here is a credible regime of oversight of Malaysia’s treatment of returnees by UNHCR and Australian authorities.  As long as that occurs, objecting to returning people from whence they transited in Malaysia in favour of taking a greater number of assessed genuine refugees from there just doesn’t make much sense except perhaps to woolly-minded Greens voters.  However much the asylum seeker lobby may shrilly assert to the contrary, there IS a queue in Malaysia and Indonesia, albeit a very long and uncertain one.  Asylum seekers can be assessed for refugee status by UNHCR and are able to apply offshore for an Australian humanitarian visa.  Why should we not choose to assist both ourselves and our poorer regional neighbours by taking more of those who choose to remain in that long, uncertain queue and less of those who take the law into their own hands to gain visa priority by subjecting their families to an extraordinarily dangerous boat voyage, and in the process place serious (if disproportionate) pressures of community resentment on Australia’s extraordinarily successful non-discriminatory migration program?

PS Incidentally, the Gillard government’s emerging policy, if successful, might even provide a plausible basis for a sustainable reshaped international burden-sharing approach to refugee policy advocated by leading refugee law experts like James Hathaway and others.  In return for being relieved of the obligation to accept ad hoc visaless boat people who arrive on their shores, countries with a significant migration program like Australia would agree to accept a greater number of refugees objectively assessed to be in need of permanent protection outside their homeland, while a much wider range of wealthy nations would shoulder the financial burden of assisting poorer countries of “first asylum” to accommodate those needing only temporary protection until conditions in their homelands improved.

A warning, this is pretty much a shaggy dog story.

A while ago I had an idle thought about migrant settlement patterns. If there was a slight tendency amongst Chinese Australians to settle in ways that reflected subnational cultures from China (I was prompted by the Sydney suburb of Ashfield which is distinctly Shanghainese, not just Chinese), would the same tendency be visible in Indian Australians. After all, India is also vast and linguistically diverse, but has a far shorter history of unified statehood. Were there Punjabi and Bengali districts to go with the Shanghainese or Cantonese districts? I asked some bemused shopkeepers who did not have this impression. I then asked someone who may have looked at this as a professional (having published work on Indian migrants to Australia), a Professor Supriya Singh at RMIT. She kindly replied to my query (and I quote in part)

We have asked the question also but found there is no predominantly Indian suburb, and no  Punjabi, Malyali, Gujerati or Andhra concentration.

…

In the media there has been comment that Point Cook is developing into a very Indian suburb, with every third house being Indian. But there is no hint that it is concentrated in any one region of India. However when you look at Census distribution maps, there are no areas of Indian concentration in the way that there are Chinese, Italian or Greek cultural precincts or clusters.

This was striking in another way. Not only no clustering of subnational groups, but no clustering at all. Not only did this seem unusual compared to other migrant groups, it also seemed unusual compared to Sydney. Afterall my subjective experience would cite suburbs like Parramatta and the adjacent Harris Park, as well as other places as having a distinct Indian presence – I’d go there to try subcontinental sweets – and they were used as natural sites for cultural events like Parramasala, or a A.R Rahman concert. Maybe there was a difference between the cities. So I knocked up some maps of people born in India recorded in the 2006 census.

(Continued)

Now I realise I’m courting extreme feminist abuse by this post, but so be it.

Australian popular culture always seems to follow North American examples no matter how silly e.g. “gangsta rap”.  So I suppose it was inevitable that the phenomenon of the “slutwalk” would rapidly be emulated here, mostly by young women with little or no feminist consciousness for more substantive issues like equal pay.

Apparently the “slutwalk” movement arose after a Toronto police officer dared to suggest that dressing in a “sluttish” manner on the streets, especially late at night, might not be a really great idea.  Many young women reacted with outrage and began street demos where they dressed in “slutty” outfits.  I guess it has some kinship with the “Reclaim the Night” demos that have become an annual event in Australia, or the public reaction to Muslim cleric Sheikh Hilaly’s remarks about scantily dressed women as “uncovered meat” (who, implicitly, were courting rape).

However, I can’t help questioning the commonsense rationality of “slutwalking”.  Certainly the proposition that the primary responsibility for curbing aggressive responses to women who may be dressed in a highly sexualised way rests with the blokes exhibiting those aggressive responses is undeniably true.

Conversely, however, does it make sense to deliberately and unnecessarily behave in a way that a predictable proportion of aggressive, testosterone-driven males with poor impulse control will treat as an open invitation for a root?  How does “slutwalking” differ in substance from the hypothetical example of a middle class person of either gender parading around the streets of a notoriously poor and violent inner city suburb displaying their iPod, iPhone, iPad and a wallet obviously stuffed with money?  For a police officer to suggest that this might be unwise behaviour isn’t in any sense condoning the actions of the thieves who will almost certainly proceed to commit an opportunistic mugging.  It’s just commonsense advice.  “Slutwalking” isn’t a courageous political act, it’s just mindless, imitative, populist stupidity.

Are nurses more altruistic than real estate brokers? Find out here. But if you don’t have time, here’s the abstract.

We report results from a dictator game experiment with nurse students and real estate broker students as dictators, and Amnesty International as the recipient. Although brokers contributed substantial amounts, nurses contributed significantly more, on average 76 percent of their endowment. In a second part, subjects chose between a certain repetition of the experiment and a 50-50 chance of costly exit. About one third of the brokers and half of the nurses chose the exit option. While generosity was indeed higher among nurses, even when taking exits into account, the difference cannot readily be attributed to different degrees of altruism.

The great Scottish philosopher David Hume, friend of other great Scottish philosopher Adam Smith was 300 the other day. Crooked Timber is inviting favourite Hume quotes and Paul Krugman offers this.

I have long entertained a suspicion, with regard to the decisions of philosophers upon all subjects, and found in myself a greater inclination to dispute, than assent to their conclusions. There is one mistake, to which they seem liable, almost without exception; they confine too much their principles, and make no account of that vast variety, which nature has so much affected in all her operations. When a philosopher has once laid hold of a favourite principle, which perhaps accounts for many natural effects, he extends the same principle over the whole creation, and reduces to it every phænomenon, though by the most violent and absurd reasoning.

The quote from Hume is an example of what I was talking about in another post – the idea of understanding the psycho-pathology of disciplinary thought. And it’s also a statement in praise of the fox and against the hedgehog. As a fellow fox I agree.  And note, that Philip Tetlock who knows about these things, indicates that if you’re in the business of trying to make predictions just slightly on the right side of random, you should join us foxes.