Club Troppo

I remember being at a wedding reception talking to someone who was 70 odd.  I asked them whether in their day it was normal for the bride and groom to put the tip of the knife in the cake and then beam at the cameras for two or three minutes – celebrities on their special day. Sure enough, back in the day, the camera was at the service of life life or was most of the time, not vice versa.

Today I’ve noticed a similar, subtle but profound difference in the zeitgeist. Listening to the Australian Open commentary it’s extraordinary how much psychologising goes on. Now filling in all those hours with chat is probably quite difficult, but the current formula (or perhaps it’s just a formula built around Jim Courier’s style) is endless speculation on what the players are thinking/feeling.

“Take us inside Novak’s mind Leyton” says Jim, and sure enough Leyton does his best in the role play. Roger Rasheed is on hand in hushed tones in the stands telling us what it’s like. He’s right there you see. Well so are Jim and Leyton, but he’s so close he has to speak quietly – and of course that means he can get even further inside the players minds. (Quiet – Roger is trying to hear the players thinking.)

And it turns out that whoever is asked to take us inside a player’s mind really can!  They just say what they reckon the player is thinking – though it seems pretty likely they have no more idea than anyone else. Bruce McAvaney is into this schtick like a rat up a drainpipe of course and is endlessly asking Jim “So what would he be thinking as they change ends”.  (Continued)

Last year French parents were outraged by an advertisement that claimed Santa Claus wasn’t real. AdWeek reported:

"I have some bad news for you," a father says to his (grown) son right at the beginning of the spot. "Père Noël doesn’t really exist." Parents are all upset that their children’s illusions about the world will be shattered by this uninvited revelation, since the ad aired during a broadcast of Ratatouille. One child psychologist even claims this could have the effect of a "bomb" on children.

But 60 years ago attitudes in France were different. In a pastoral letter the Catholic Bishop of Toulouse wrote: "Do not speak of Santa Claus for the good reason that he does not exist and never existed. Do not speak of Santa Claus because Santa Claus is a fiction clever people use to remove all religious character from the Christmas holiday."

The bishop’s condemnation was only the beginning. In Dijon, a young priest, Abbe Nourissat, burned Santa in effigy in front of a crowd of cheering children who pelted him with orange peel.

As it happened, Santa rose again to deliver a speech from the town hall: "Nobody can kill me," he said, and assured the children that if they believed in him, there would be plenty of gifts.

(Continued)

Clive Hamilton writes:

Women’s morality differs from men’s. Feminist philosopher Carol Gilligan argues women are motivated more by care than duty, and inclined more to emphasise responsibilities than rights. They seek reconciliation through the exercise of compassion and negotiation rather than demanding "justice", through force if necessary.

While the idea has widespread appeal, empirical research has failed to find large differences in the way men and women think about morality. Psychologist Janet Shibley Hyde argues that a "consequence of his overinflated claim of gender differences is that it reifies the stereotype of women as caring and nurturant and men as lacking in nurturance" (pdf). Research suggests that women who violate the stereoptype of being caring nurturant can find themselves penalised in the workplace.

American psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that there is much more to morality than concerns about care and justice. He lists five sets of moral intuitions: Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity (pdf). According to Haidt and his colleagues, some of the biggest differences in how people think about moral issues are between liberals and conservatives rather than between men and women.

(Hat tip: Mindy at Hoyden About Town).

At #76 on the Things Bogans Like list, McMansions are a symbol of the culture of overconsumption and a triumph of marketing over common sense. Built on the urban fringe, kilometers away from services and public transport, McMansion owners are doomed to spend hours in their cars. And with all that open plan space, these supersized houses are costly to heat and cool. Critics deride McMansion buyers as greedy, environmentally irresponsible and lacking in taste.

At Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony, Helen argues that McMansion buyers are being duped into buying substandard housing by developers and their slick, manipulative marketing campaigns. She argues that, if developers and their advertisers wanted to, they’d have no trouble convincing buyers that "they’d be happier and more comfortable (and richer!) in a smaller but better constructed and environmentally intelligent house." But is it really that simple?

(Continued)

Richard Posner is puzzled by by increases in female earnings. After all: "Women are not as well suited to perform jobs requiring upper-body strength as men are, but men can perform virtually all service jobs as well as women can."

Really?

(Continued)

In the Sydney Morning Herald of 1 June, Julie Novak of the Institute of Public Affairs criticised an article by Gavin Mooney and Alex Wodak, writing in the previous day’s Herald, which argued for higher taxes , in part based on arguments developed by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level arguing that Wilkinson and Pickett’s analysis should be taken with a grain of salt.

Now being an international comparisons pedant, I also have a lot of problems with aspects of the Spirit Level (mainly related to the fact that Japan is assumed to be a low inequality country and shouldn’t be).

But we’ll put that to one side, because along the way she raises an argument that is even less well founded than anything in “The Spirit Level”.

In particular, she asserts that “the primary beneficiaries of big welfare are the middle-class bureaucrats who administer the welfare state in fine detail. To get a sense of how much welfare-state funding is being misdirected, consider this: based on an upper estimate of 13 per cent of Australians living in poverty, the Commonwealth’s social security and welfare budget of $117 billion could have been evenly shared among the poverty stricken with a $40,817 payment.”
But let us stop for a minute to have a reality check. A payment of more than $40,000 per person means that we could pay a family of four more than $160,000 per year out of the current welfare budget; but only a small minority of families make this much in earnings. Is this possible? Well the answer must be “Sadly, No”.

Now if you divide $117 billion among 13% of the Australian population, it is arithmetically correct that you come up with about $40,000. This calculation is simple, straightforward and completely misleading.

People I have a lot of respect for criticise the estimates that the poverty rate in Australia is 13%, but let’s accept for the moment that Australia’s welfare system is not sufficiently generous to raise everyone out of poverty, and leaves 13% of the population below the poverty line.

But the point overlooked in this calculation is that in the absence of our welfare system a lot more people would be poor. So, the relevant figure is not how many people are in poverty after receiving social security benefits, but how many people are poor before they receive benefits.

OECD figures for around 2005 estimate that 12.4% of Australians were poor after taking account of taxes paid and benefits received, a figure a little lower than Julie Novak’s estimate. But 28.6% of the population would have been poor in the absence of welfare benefits. So if we divided all of the current welfare spending of $117 billion dollars equally among all pre-transfer poor people rather than giving them a payment of more than $40,800, we would only be able to give them a payment of $17,700.

If we completely abolished Centrelink and were somehow able to pay people benefits without actually having anyone to administer the system, then we would have about $3 billion to add in, which would give all poor people an extra $450 a year.

The combined amount is actually less than the current single rate of age and disability pension of around $19,000 (including supplements) – although it would be a big improvement on the rate of payments for the unemployed of around $12,400.

Of course to use up all of the welfare budget in this way would mean that we would no longer be paying for child care support, nursing homes, services for people with disability or support for the homeless.
Julie Novak also argues that “An insidious effect of progressive income taxation is to substitute leisure for work and, combined with a large welfare state, to impose high effective marginal tax rates that punish individuals financially for supplying more labour.”

It is not entirely clear what withdrawal rate she has in mind, but if you only wanted to give welfare payments to the poor, then you would probably be talking about a 100% withdrawal rate, which would make our current effective marginal tax rates look pretty low.

While she admired Winston Churchill, his resistance to conditional welfare was exasperating. For years Beatrice Webb had been arguing with Churchill and other Liberals about social insurance and she was getting nowhere. She insisted that: "Doling out weekly allowances, and with no kind of treatment attached, is a most unscientific state aid". But in 1911 the government ignored her advice and set up an insurance system that made relatively few demands on recipients.

Webb wanted to prevent problems like sickness and unemployment by making income support conditional on responsible behaviour. Together with her husband Sidney she argued for a system based on the "doctrine of mutual obligation between the individual and the community." Under this system:

… new and enlarged obligations, unknown in a state of laisser faire, are placed upon the individual — such as the obligation of the parent to keep his children in health, and to send them to school at the time and in the condition insisted upon ; the obligation of the young person to be well-conducted and to learn ; the obligation of the adult not to infect his environment and to submit when required to hospital treatment. To enforce these obligations — all new since 1834 — upon the individual citizen, experience shows that some other pressure on his volition is required than that which results from merely leading him alone (p 270-271).

The Liberal government compulsory insurance scheme posed a threat to the Webb’s vision of conditional welfare. (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.

When the SL-1 nuclear reactor exploded in Idaho releasing a radioactive plume and killing three workers, a local paper reported the accident on page 12. That was 1961. Today some residents of Idaho are so worried about the nuclear accident 8000 kilometers away that they’re buying potassium iodide pills.

According to a history by Susan Stacey: "Editorial comment in Idaho and other newspapers categorized the SL-1 accident as a regrettable mishap, an inevitable occurrence if society were to accrue the benefits of a new technology." Today experts argue about whether the thick concrete containment around Fukushima Daiichi’s reactor vessel is safe enough and residents of inland American states worry about nuclear radiation from the accident. But the low-powered SL-1 boiling water reactor in Idaho had no containment. It was designed to be light weight — a prototype for reactors that could be shipped to the Arctic Circle to power remote military radar stations (pdf).

During the 1950s the US military looked to nuclear power as a practical way to solve problems. One problem was how to extend the range of its bombers. It sounds outrageous today, but the air force had plans to power aircraft using nuclear reactors. As a General Electric engineer, told Congress, a nuclear powered aircraft would be "limited in range only by sandwiches and coffee for the crew".

General Electric was one of a number of contractors engaged on the military’s aircraft nuclear propulsion program. At the National Reactor Testing Station (NRTS) in Idaho, GE’s engineers tested a nuclear power plant that sucked air directly into the reactor with the exhaust streaming out of a pair of specially modified jet engines. To test this ‘direct cycle’ engine, GE needed an outdoor test pad. According to Stacey:

Contaminated air could not be allowed to blow out the nozzle indoors—or near work areas. Rather, the reactor-cum-engine traveled back and forth between an assembly area and the test pad, a distance of a mile and a half. A man driving a shielded locomotive hauled a dolly carrying the eighty-ton assembly on four-rail tracks. At the test pad, the engine connected to a "coupling station"where the exhaust was filtered, went up a 150-foot stack, and was released to the open air (pdf).

(Continued)

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.

(Continued)