Another reason for sortition. As these AI snapshots clearly show, for Asians and caucasians, sortition makes you DELIRIOUSLY HAPPY! Not like the current dismal situation.
Well no.
I remember visiting Singapore a decade or so ago and reading an op ed penned by the PM in which he explained that Singapore was (effectively) a one party state and that the reason for this was that being just a few million souls they were too small to have a sufficiently good B Team — LOL.
But then I deployed my only superpower which was to take what he was saying seriously. Not credulously but seriously. (I learned this superpower studying history — to assume that, however much people might be trying to sell you something, they’re also trying to tell you something.) Yes, he was self-interested, but it was also pretty plausible that he really had something to say, not so much about Singapore’s inability to field a B team but about how Western party democracy was increasingly a freak show. He looked on the way in which Western democracy had been sucked into the vortex of its entertainment industry with horror. Rather like we do too today.
It occurred to me then that perhaps sortition might be a mechanism by which Singapore and China might become more democratic. It’s quite low key and sobre, not a carnival of performativity. In fact they do use plenty of mechanisms like this to increase democratic accountability at the local level.
Anyway, this column is written with something similar in mind. And it makes a compelling case that sortition could detox some of the worst things about Western Democracy. But it argues it can also detox the worst of confucian authoritarianism — which it calls “meritocratic one-party states”. And one way of making the case is that it militates against each system’s specific kind of groupthink.
Selecting a proportion of legislators by lottery, rather than by election (in democracies) or by appointment (in meritocracies), would create a new dynamic in politics, reducing party dominance and allowing participants to speak and vote according to their consciences rather than their partisanship. Liberal electoral democracies and meritocratic one-party states could find common ground here in a practice that would strengthen both forms of government by helping to counter the flaws of each. In electoral democracies, contributions from legislators selected by lottery would weaken party domination, counter the prioritizing of short-term political objectives (always eyeing the next election), reduce partisan divisiveness, and prevent the president or prime minister from wielding almost autocratic powers. Similarly, in meritocracies or one-party states, a lottery system would also be beneficial, moderating a party’s tunnel vision and reducing the “echo chamber” effect often experienced in such states by introducing greater representation and broader perspectives.
This may seem like a radical idea, but it is firmly rooted in history. It’s only relatively recently that democracy has become synonymous with elections. Prior to the 19th century, electoral democracy was a rarity, and it wasn’t until the 20th century that universal suffrage became the main characteristic of democracies. Earlier in history, in ancient Athens and medieval Florence, for example, electing leaders was actually seen as distinctly undemocratic, as only wealthy or high-status people could be elected (just think of the US today). So can you guess what system they used to ensure that a wide range of opinions and ideas were garnered? That’s right: They used lotteries. For over 200 years, the ancient Athenians practiced their form of democracy by the random selection of legislators and officials, chosen by lot and permitted to serve for only a limited time. Moreover, anyone who had previously held office was excluded from immediate re-selection. Thus, everyone took turns in the process of government. … [Aristotle defined democracy as everyone taking turns in governing and being governed — Ed.]
Hong Kong, currently a hybrid of democratic and meritocratic government, is ideally placed for developing such a system. Like ancient Athens, its compact size and well-educated population would readily facilitate such a move. Introducing an element of sortition into the Legislative Council would answer the call for greater representation of the people without risking a return to the sort of partisan conflict and obstructionism that previously characterized the legislature. This would establish Hong Kong as a model of modern government, truly representing the people but without the vested interests and divisiveness of warring political parties. Such a system would also reflect Hong Kong’s unique amalgam of Western and Chinese influences, combining democratic values with the nonpartisan Confucian values of harmony and social cohesion. Indeed, this could provide an excellent model of government, not just for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, but for any place wanting to enhance political participation, reduce partisan division, and ensure that the common good rather than party interests always prevails.
I’ve posted the clip of me responding to the RBA review a year or so ago before.
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In the more recent interview with Leon Gettler immediately below the clip I discuss a speech made by Andrew Hauser, Deputy Governor of the RBA on how little forecasters know and how much humbler we should all be. I focus on what he didn't say, which is that the best way to tackle hubris and improve forecasting is to run open forecasting tournaments. Only then can you access 'superforecasters' — those people made famous by Philip Tetlock's bestselling 2015 book but whom official forecasters have never heard of or, having heard of them, try to put out of their mind. The recording is also available to be podcasted in the normal way from my podcast channel here.
Krugman on the left behind
Fresh from a busy week and from becoming a septuagenarian, the Australian Statistician (AO) dropped me a line recommending this column.
There were local elections in several German states a few days ago, and the results — a strong showing by the Alternative for Germany or AfD, a right-wing extremist party — were shocking but not surprising. … I am not any kind of an expert on Germany, and I won’t speculate about what these results mean for the Bundesrepublik’s future. What I can say as an American is that despite the vast differences in our nations’ modern histories, the rise of Germany’s modern far right — and especially its concentration of support in economically depressed areas — looks remarkably familiar.
Put it this way: In some important respects Thuringia, the German state where the AfD won more votes than any other party, resembles West Virginia. … After Donald Trump won the 2016 election, there was a lot of facile talk about voters driven by economic anxiety. …
But MAGA’s rise does seem connected to the economic decline of much of rural and small-town America. …
So what stands out when you compare West Virginia with other parts of America is the number of men not working. I say “men” because even now, despite the rise in the percentage of women in the paid labor force since 1970, our expectation that adults of working age will, in fact, have jobs is stronger for men than for women.
Why are jobs, especially for men, so hard to get in West Virginia? … The most likely story is that the 21st-century economy is driven by knowledge-intensive industries that flourish in metropolitan areas with highly educated workforces. This has led to a self-reinforcing process in which jobs migrate to places with lots of college graduates, and college graduates migrate to the same places, leaving less-educated places like West Virginia stranded. …
The federal government provides a lot of support to U.S. citizens via Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; even poor states receive the full benefit of these programs. But poor states pay relatively little in federal taxes, which support these programs. So the result is huge implicit aid to lower-income states.
In effect, the state received “foreign aid” from wealthier states of almost 12 percent of G.D.P., which is huge. West Virginia also benefited immensely from the Affordable Care Act, which greatly reduced the number of its residents without health insurance:
You might say that the federal social safety net increases people’s incomes but doesn’t create jobs. But that’s not true. Social Security supports consumer spending, which creates jobs in retail and more. Medicare and Medicaid support jobs in hospitals, doctors’ offices, and so on. West Virginia may still think of itself as a coal-mining state, but by the numbers it has long been more accurately described as a health care state, with much of its employment ultimately driven by those federal dollars. …
What is true, and may partially explain political rage in left-behind regions, is that many of the jobs federal aid creates tend to be female-coded, certainly more so than coal mining — which may in turn explain why the problem of adults without jobs appears to be worse, at least in terms of its political weight, for men than for women.
That said, the Biden-Harris administration has been making a serious effort to promote manufacturing as part of its industrial policies — an effort that seems to be disproportionately helping heartland states.
The odd thing is that the politicians angry heartland voters support — Trump received more than twice as many votes in West Virginia as Joe Biden in 2020 — oppose the very programs that aid these depressed areas. Trump tried, in effect, to kill the Affordable Care Act. Not a single Republican voted for the Inflation Reduction Act, which is helping to create manufacturing jobs in the heartland.
But then Adam Tooze, who does know something about German political economy, tells us that while the AfD talks a lot about “social distress” in lagging regions, this “does not translate into a platform that supports greater state spending.”
In Germany as in America, then, voters in left-behind regions are, understandably, angry — and they channel this anger into support for politicians who will make their plight worse.
It’s hard to think of a politician with a better use of the Australian idiom. He was also a brave politician who got a lot done. But also crazy-brave. Without Bob Hawke to cover him his career at the top might have been much shorter. Alas Keating might also be the politician who contributed more to inequality in Australia than any other. Under him we
Cut company taxes from 42 to 30 percent.
Cut the top marginal tax rate from 60 percent to 49.5 percent, though Keating wanted to cut it to 30 percent but was, fortunately stopped at the pass by colleagues such as Peter Walsh who jealously defended the public purse.
Established dividend imputation which today directs tens of billions of dollars into Australian shareholders pockets overwhelmingly towards the wealthy. And
Introduced a flat tax on what is now three trillion dollars of Australians’ saving.
(These numbers are provided from memory.) I think there was probably a case for the first of these. But the others are a travesty, most egregiously dividend imputation. If I told you to spend forty odd billion or whatever it costs the fisc today in forgiven taxation on the providers of capital to Australian enterprises, it would take a lot of ingenuity to do so without lowering those enterprises cost of capital. But by God we did it. Because it’s unavailable to offshore investors whose level of investment is far more responsive to incentives, the billions just circulate as a windfall.
Anyway, Keating is outraged that his flat tax arrangements are being spoiled by the ALP government wanting to place limits on its largesse to the very wealthy. (Oh — and of course it would be a terrible thing to allow Australians to use their super for a housing deposit, as they do in most comparable countries because for young families its the best place for them to invest some of their savings — cutting the financial sector out of the action and generating external benefits as people get a stake in their neighbourhoods.)
Anyway, as Crikey’s headline puts it: “Keating’s vision for super is crumbling. Good”.
With each passing retort to the Albanese government, dutifully relayed by The Australian and the AFR, it becomes harder to maintain that former prime minister Paul Keating is any kind of progressive.
Sure, he may once have contributed to some noble policies, and some of his foreign policy views — vulgar China apologia aside — provide a useful counterweight to the defence establishment. But on economics, his supposed forte, he merely tries to drag an already lacklustre government further to the right.
Take his most recent pronouncement: last week, the AFRreported that Keating is opposed to Labor’s $3 million cap on superannuation tax concessions and has been saying so to various fund managers. He reportedly wants the threshold raised to at least $5 million. …
Keating is lauded for his role in establishing compulsory superannuation. But his reasons for resisting Labor’s current changes cast his vision for the system in a more questionable light.
According to the AFR, he thinks Labor’s changes would “condemn super to becoming a low- to middle-income scheme, completely at odds with the universal scheme he introduced”. He believes the key to the system’s longevity is its support from high-income earners. …
Most universal programs, such as pensions paid to all elderly people, buy support from those on high incomes by benefiting them a little. However, they still benefit lower-income earners much more, relatively speaking. In Keating’s vision, high-income earners must benefit disproportionately ad infinitum, to the tune of untaxed millions, so that lower-income earners can benefit a little — or, for those who have spent significant periods out of the workforce, hardly at all. …
Keating is particularly incensed by the decision not to index the threshold to inflation, calling it “unconscionable”. …
This is because over time inflation will lower the cap in real terms; when people now in their 20s and 30s retire, it will be more like $1 million in today’s dollars. The Financial Services Council estimates more than 500,000 current taxpayers will be impacted during their lifetimes.
But 500,000 is still a relatively small proportion of Australia’s population — and these would still be some of Australia’s wealthiest residents. Plus, once you consider such an account will keep accruing investment gains (most superannuants die with more in super than when they retired), $1 million is a reasonable nest egg — and the aged pension is always a fallback.
Super should be for your retirement, not your kids’ inheritance. You only need so much. …
All of this tinkering is necessary because Keating’s overhyped superannuation reforms were full of holes from the outset. The least he can do now is get out of the way while his Labor successors tighten up the rules and impose limits.
Labor’s current reforms modestly backpedal from Keating’s flawed vision. Perhaps the elder statesman should consider retirement as the government — whose treasurer wrote his PhD on the man — charts a new course.
This piece appealed to all my prejudices, even if I think one needs more care in the way they set up the idea that we’re really pro-social — us humangoes that is. We are in some circumstances, and not in others. And that’s where the contributions need to be made, rather than imagining that dismissing one paradigm somehow, simply by that fact, transports us to something better.
While Bangladesh’s new “caretaker,” Muhammad Yunus, has been widely recognized for pioneering the field of microfinance, mainstream economics has largely dismissed insights from this development model as folksy, feel-good anecdotes. But there is reason to think that they are much more than that.
“Economics is a meaningless subject,” Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, microfinance pioneer, and rogue economist toldTime magazine a few months ago. Little did he realize that he would soon have an opportunity to demonstrate what he meant. Following the ouster of Bangladesh’s authoritarian prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, earlier this month, Yunus was chosen to lead the country’s caretaker government. …
When many other developing countries were being suffocated by the neoliberal Washington Consensus, Bangladeshi figures like Yunus (with his Grameen Bank) and Fazle Hasan Abed (the founder of the anti-poverty nonprofit BRAC) were leveraging a third tool beyond the state and the market: civil society.
Working as a young development scholar in Bangladesh in the early 2000s, I witnessed these pioneering NGOs’ early work firsthand. They sought solutions not on the blackboard but in the field, creating a global petri dish for innovations in development. As one of my interviewees put it, Bangladesh was “the Wall Street of development.” …
This year’s unrest was a reaction not only to Hasina’s repressive politics, but also to her economic policies. To be sure, rapid GDP growth and infrastructure improvements gave Bangladesh a reputation as an economic “miracle.” But Hasina had clamped down on the very civil-society organizations that had put Bangladesh on the development map in the first place.
She was especially contemptuous of Yunus, whom she called a “bloodsucker.” After driving him out of his position as the head of Grameen Bank in 2011, her government pursued various trumped-up legal charges against him. Hasina’s own economic strategy was to take a page out of the conventional development-economics playbook. To harness export-led growth, she positioned Bangladesh as a low-cost manufacturing hub for garments. With staggeringly low wages and minimal regulation, the country became the world’s fast-fashion sweatshop.
One consequence of this strategy was that there were very few employment opportunities for college graduates outside of government jobs, which are allocated through a corrupt, nepotistic quota system. It was this system – along with high inflation and other lingering effects from the pandemic – that triggered the summer protests. …
As I have documented elsewhere, microfinance’s big innovative breakthrough lay in providing loans without the kinds of economic or legal guarantees (such as collateral and binding contracts) that conventional economics insists are necessary.
Contrary to what the textbook perspective would predict, microfinance institutions (MFIs) around the world report repayment rates of well over 90%. While Yunus was widely recognized for his role in introducing one of the most important development interventions of the past few decades, I have long suspected that the psychological insight at the center of the microfinance model could reshape our thinking more broadly.
Rather than assuming that borrowers (mostly poor women in Bangladeshi villages) were utility-maximizing “rational actors” for whom repayment would be irrational in the absence of coercion, MFIs took a chance on them. And instead of targeting individuals, MFIs lent to groups of five or so women.
Since individuals are almost always embedded in groups, the logic of this approach is obvious. Yet intra-group dynamics remain notoriously undertheorized in economics (where households and firms are the main decision-making agents and units of analysis). By taking this approach, MFIs create social cohesion within the recipient groups, which generally hold regular meetings and public repayment rituals, thereby eliciting prosocial behavior from all participants.
As I have noted in work contrasting India’s SKS Microfinance with Grameen Bank’s track record, it is these social-reinforcement mechanisms, rather than the economic incentives, that underpin the model’s success. Another valuable insight from microfinance is that it is important to get group size right, which in this case generally means keeping groups small.
While theorists like Leopold Kohr and E.F. Schumacher made this point in the past, mainstream economists remain obsessed with economies of scale (bigger is always better). Having been replicated in more than a hundred countries, the Bangladeshi microfinance model is distinctive for having been incubated in, rather than imported into, the Global South. This provenance makes it well suited to the cultural context in which it operates.
Could an institution designed to engage individuals’ “instinctual” rather than “deliberative” system elicit systematically different behavior? What if we start with the assumption of a prosocial economic agent, rather than a selfish, atomistic one?
What if we reconfigure our networks to make them more cooperative? Perhaps we could avert economics’ self-fulfilling prophecy of a tragedy of the commons. If we stop “crowding out” our intrinsic goodness, perhaps we can build what Samuel Bowles calls a “moral economy.”
One hopes that Yunus can help steer Bangladesh away from being the world’s sweatshop, and back toward serving as the world’s laboratory for human development and social progress. At a time when many are debating what comes after neoliberalism, the “banker to the poor” can help imbue economics with the real-world experience and spirit of innovation it so sorely needs.
A good piece by Freddie Deboer. I’ve waded through it’s (unnecessary) bulk and extracted it’s basic message. (You’re welcome!)
Rebecca Traister has been in the game for a long time, and her beat is feminism and gender relations. Yet this piece for New York magazine, on seeing Tim Walz and Doug Emhoff as models for modern masculinity, suggests that she’s missed the past fifteen years of male feminism - in particular, how a generation of progressive men made being unthreatening a core part of their public persona and failed to make the world safe for women in doing so. In fact, those very men often proved to be vectors of abuse themselves. …
I’ve spent most of my life in academia in one role or another, and … I’ve known many loudly feminist, ostentatiously nice guys whose unthreatening demeanor was tied to a fundamentally predatory approach to women. … Is Tim Walz one of those guys? Doug Emhoff? I sincerely doubt it. But I certainly don’t know, and neither does Traister. That’s the whole point, right - that in the last couple decades we’ve learned, or we should have learned, that all of that supportive ally branding is just marketing, somewhat literal marketing in the case of politicians but still just marketing even for those men who are only marketing themselves on Instagram or in the workplace. Tim Walz isn’t predatory because of his smile? Doug Emhoff is genuinely feminist because of his professional accomplishments? Traister would never fall for such claims, plainly stated that way. And yet her essay and so many like it seems incapable of understanding that men who mean women harm are perfectly capable of absorbing the 21st century feminist perspective and exploiting it. …
Here’s the reality, for women and everyone else: you can’t actually determine someone’s character from their costuming. None of us can see past every mask, every time. If guys who yammer on about how white men need to just shut and listen for awhile were reliably good people, if they never DM’d teenagers or put their hand on a woman’s ass on the subway, the world would be an easier place. But I’m afraid that sometimes Try Guys cheat on their wives with subordinates, and sometimes nice guys are only nice until they can get women into a vulnerable position. Sometimes lunkheaded Joe Rogan-worshipping video-gaming men who complain about woke Star Wars and belong to Barstool’s shirt of the month club are fundamentally moral beings who don’t want to hurt anyone, even if they have stupid politics. And sometimes vice versa to all of that. The point is that you don’t know someone’s character until that character is revealed to you in a way that’s entirely separate from the performed, self-conscious aspects of a person. This, again, is another aspect of human social life that’s made harder in the internet era, given that there is no such thing as an affect-free presentation of the self online. Decency and integrity can only be discovered through the process of actually getting to know someone; they are not superficial virtues but instead deep, in-the-bone qualities that reveal themselves only slowly and with effort. Rebecca Traister doesn’t know Tim Walz’s character, and while sometimes a Try Guy is just a scared man trying to navigate an evolving social world as best he can, sometimes a Try Guy is a predator. You don’t know until you know.
A decent man does not have to put on an elaborate performance of being sexless and unthreatening towards women, in part because he understands that such a performance is no guarantor of safety at all. Very often, such affects are the very tools of predation. Nor should any of us operate under the impression that because some men are strong in the commission of abuse then the problem is the strength and not the abuse. It would probably be more convenient if good and bad came to us labeled and prepackaged, but they don’t. Sometimes the best men are some of the least ostentatiously feminist men, but only sometimes. You just have to live with someone long enough to find out when nice is only Nice. As Little Red Riding Hood taught us, nice is different than good.
In sum, where others see America’s determination to stare down China in a contest for regional supremacy, with Australia by its side, I see mostly inertia.
Sam Roggeveen
AUKUS is far from anodyne and apolitical. Right down to its highly enriched uranium reactor core, it is about geopolitics and about the US–Australia alliance. In fact, it’s the most important thing to happen to ANZUS since it was founded in 1951. Australian nuclear-powered submarines are the most prominent feature of the agreement, but we shouldn’t forget the basing arrangements: HMAS Stirling in Western Australia will host up to five American and British submarines, while the Tindal air force base will be expanded to accommodate US bombers including the B-52 and B-2. If the United States goes to war with China, operations will be conducted from these bases, and several others.…
Two alternative views about America’s objectives for AUKUS have been presented in the Australian debate, both of them by AUKUS critics. One [Keating’s] is that AUKUS is about reinforcing US hegemony in Asia, and the other [Hugh White’s] is that, even if hegemony is the ostensible purpose of AUKUS, the US doesn’t have the resolve to be regional hegemon or even to maintain its presence in Asia. Ultimately, Washington is likely to retrench. …
White is prepared to believe that the US thinks AUKUS helps it to reinforce its strategic leadership in Asia. But he believes the US is mistaken about the scale of the task it faces. China’s rise makes it impossible to preserve the old US-led order, and American attempts to perpetuate that order are therefore doomed. This makes AUKUS an Australian bet on the losing side of the struggle for leadership in Asia. China will take America’s place as Asia’s dominant power.
Yet there is little evidence that the US is truly committed to hegemony or to containing China. Instead, we mainly see signs of inertia. As we examine America’s record, keep in mind what we have been witnessing in China since the 1990s: the explosive growth of the Chinese economy and alongside it perhaps the most rapid military modernisation of any nation since the second world war.
In response, what has the US done?
We have seen no substantial change to America’s force structure in Asia since the end of the cold war: troop numbers and equipment levels are roughly the same. … An “Asian NATO” remains a dim prospect. The US hasn’t retrenched from Europe or the Middle East to reinforce its Asian position. It offered no resistance to Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea in the early 2000s. …
What about AUKUS? Doesn’t the almost unprecedented transfer of nuclear technology to Australia signal America’s deep commitment to regional hegemony? First of all, AUKUS was an Australian idea, not American. And what a deal for America! It promises to bring hundreds of billions of dollars into the US shipbuilding and arms industries, and will ultimately give US what is effectively an adjunct to its own Pacific fleet. …
Of course, doing nothing doesn’t mean nothing changes. China gets a vote too. So, while the US has chosen inertia over the last thirty-odd years, China has built a huge navy and air force, thus shifting the regional balance of power towards Beijing. And while the US has chosen inertia, China has built military bases in the South China Sea, thus turning that part of the region into a Chinese lake. Someday, the same might happen in Taiwan. China will make a move, and the US will again choose inertia. But even if Taiwan falls, inertia is likely to stop wholesale American retrenchment. The US can maintain its most solid bases of support in Japan, South Korea and Australia because those countries will still prefer to be protected than go their own way.
In these circumstances, what kind of regional order do we get? I would describe it as a steady drift away from American hegemony but stopping short of Chinese hegemony, a “long in-between” if you will. America’s role in the region will become, wholly and solely, a matter of protecting the territorial integrity of its treaty allies.
That’s a limited aim that can be achieved at acceptable risk and cost; all it demands is that the US maintain enough presence in Japan, Korea and Australia to sink Chinese ships and shoot down its aircraft. Such a posture doesn’t demand that the US maintain military superiority over China and doesn’t require that the US be able to defeat China decisively in a war. All it asks is that the US has sufficient forces to blunt any aggressive Chinese intent towards its allies.
My guess is that if the US continues to drift into the minimalist strategy described here, China will choose to live with that, not because it is content with an indefinite US role in Asian affairs but because even if the US withdrew, Beijing wouldn’t suddenly have free reign over the entire region.
Yes, China is likely to become something like a hegemon in continental Southeast Asia, because no rival power has the will or means to stop it. But in maritime Asia, which is what the US and its allies care about most, Beijing’s ambitions will be blunted because, even with all its resources, projecting power over Asia’s vast seas is so difficult and costly. The American strategist John Mearsheimer calls it “the stopping power of water,” and it will exercise a decisive influence over Asia’s new order.
NAPLAN and other data are revealing a trend we really should be worried about, yet has had barely any coverage at all. [T]he figures show that differences in student outcomes are increasingly explained by the social background of families and schools. …
My School was launched years ago with the promise that it would make schools more accountable and easier to compare. Critics see it as a very visible artifact of a failed neoliberal experiment to force schools into competition with each other and, we were told, lift overall results. Instead, what we are left with is a status ladder of schools, largely created by who they enrol.
My School gives a figure, known as ICSEA, that indicates each school’s socio-educational advantage as well as their NAPLAN scores. Is there a relationship between ICSEA and NAPLAN? Absolutely. My School makes it possible to see how schools in a given community form a loose hierarchy, with the schools displaying the highest socio-educational index usually churning out the highest NAPLAN scores.
How do we know this is happening? The statistical relationship between ICSEA and NAPLAN tells the story. For any group of schools — down to a selected sector in a given location — average NAPLAN scores can be combined with ICSEA figures to generate a scatter graph. The pattern formed by the dots, summarised in a trend line, invariably shows that the schools with high ICSEA values also have high NAPLAN scores.
The angle of the trend line, expressed as a percentage, shows the strength of this relationship, described as an equity slope. Higher percentages, representing a steeper slope, indicate a closer relationship between ICSEA and NAPLAN — and therefore less equity. Lower percentages indicate greater equity: social advantage (and everything that comes with it) may not be as big an influence, and what schools are doing is having a more significant impact.
Here are a couple of large-scale examples, for Australia as a whole and for the Northern Territory [See graphs above.] …
Back in 2012 quite a few groups of schools had an equity slope in the 20 to 30 per cent range. Now most are in the 30s and even the 40s. (Remember, high numbers mean poor equity.) The change has been pretty consistent, and in some cases dramatic. …
The most interesting group are those on the top of the ladder: the schools to which families often aspire. They might be good schools by some measures, but over the decades they have shaped their success by selecting who they enrol, something that even schools down the ladder have tried to emulate. These schools run the show: if you want to do well, they say, you need to look like us.
So here’s the biggest shock: it is these schools, the ones oozing success, where equity is worsening most rapidly. The equity slope of Australia’s schools above ICSEA 1100 (well beyond the 1000 average) rocketed from 37 per cent to 56 per cent between 2012 and 2019. Perhaps their 10,000 teachers are having less of an impact on student achievement than we are led to believe. In New South Wales, where there is an affinity of sorts between high-end private schools and almost fifty selective public schools, the slope shifted from 39 per cent to 64 per cent. “Elite” schools are making a difference, but not the one we expect.
The surprises keep coming. In New South Wales the equity slopes in the three school sectors — government, Catholic and independent — are almost as bad as each other, especially in the major cities. Outside the cities the public schools have a much lower (better) equity slope. Despite having more of the strugglers, public school teachers in the bush seem to be more successfully lifting the achievement of their commonly marginalised students.
Among other revelations, school equity seems to worsen between Year 3 and Year 9, perhaps because enrolment segregation between schools is greater at the secondary school level. The slopes seem steepest for reading and largely unchanged for writing, perhaps because reading is more likely to begin in the home, while writing is more a school thing.
Of course, school achievement is subject to many influences; any educator could come up with a list. And measures of anything can be less than perfect. But our equity slopes have been steepening, and this suggests that inequity is now baked into our framework of schools. It also suggests that nothing short of the changes recommended late last year by the federal government’s expert panel on Improving Outcomes for All will suffice.
The panel found that “concentrations of disadvantage not only undermine the capacity of schools to build diverse communities of future citizens but also lead to poorer learning outcomes for students experiencing disadvantage.” It recommended that “governments, school systems and approved authorities commit to increasing socioeconomic diversity by reviewing existing policy settings by the end of 2027 and implementing new policy levers to increase socioeconomic diversity in schools and lift student outcomes.” Progress should be tracked and reported on annually, says the panel.
Those welcome recommendations seem to have been buried in the ongoing fracas over school funding, but at the very least they should be embedded in current plans, especially the new federal–state Better and Fairer Schools Agreement. If that doesn’t happen to the extent needed, the next ten years will be like the last fifteen.
We know that the best-performing school systems are usually the most equitable, and we know that governments in Australia routinely trumpet their equity goals. But they’ll never achieve those goals until they identify and deal with the fundamental features of school education that get in the way.
The U.S. has witnessed a resurgence of labor activism, with teachers at the forefront. We examine how teacher strikes affect compensation, working conditions, and productivity with an original dataset of 772 teacher strikes generating 48 million student days idle between 2007 and 2023. Using an event study framework, we find that, on average, strikes increase compensation by 8% and lower pupil-teacher ratios by 0.5 students, driven by new state revenues. We find little evidence of sizable impacts on student achievement up to five years post-strike, though strikes lasting 10 or more days decrease math achievement in the short-term.
Germany is still messing around with its future
From Noah Smith
About a year ago, I wrote a post arguing that Germany has become a country that is deeply unserious about its own future:
I argued that by allowing itself to become dependent on Russia and China, destroying its nuclear power plants, not spending enough on its military, and failing to address its chronic issues of NIMBYism and red tape, Germany was putting not only its own economy and physical security in danger, but that of all of Europe as well.
A year later, I fear that the situation I described has worsened on all fronts. The screenshot at the top of this post is from a video of Germany demolishing its nuclear plant at Grafenrheinfeld — a perfectly good zero-carbon energy source that had already been paid for and that didn’t make Germany dependent on Russia. Demolishing this nuclear plant and others like it was an extraordinary act of national stupidity. The result is that Germany is now going to spend a whole lot of money to build new carbon-emitting natural gas plants to replace the lost nuclear energy.
Germany is also notably failing to become Europe’s arsenal of democracy. Its defense budget increases have been far smaller than promised, despite the defense establishment’s warning that the country could soon be at war with Russia if Ukraine falls. And Germany is even putting a freeze on new military aid to Ukraine:
The German government will stop new military aid to Ukraine as part of the ruling coalition's plan to reduce spending…In a letter sent to the German defense ministry on Aug. 5, Finance Minister Christian Lindner said that future funding would no longer come from Germany's federal budget but from proceeds from frozen Russian assets…Berlin, which is Europe's main supplier of military aid to Kyiv, had already signaled a change in course on Ukraine last month, when the governing coalition of the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Liberals adopted a preliminary deal on a draft budget for 2025…to slash future assistance to Ukraine by half to €4 billion to fulfill other spending priorities.
Meanwhile, despite the existential threat to Germany’s auto and machinery industries, German companies continue to pour investment into China:
German direct investment into China has risen sharply this year, in a sign that companies in Europe’s largest economy are ignoring pleas from their government to diversify into other, less geopolitically risky markets…The investment, much of it driven by big German carmakers, comes despite warnings from Olaf Scholz’s government about the growing geopolitical risks associated with the Chinese market…
Experts say much of the investment dollars are reinvested profits earned in China…They said the uptick in German direct investment reflected a new “In China, for China” strategy pursued by companies such as Volkswagen aimed at shifting more production to one of their biggest markets.
Shipping German industry overseas is causing a drop in Germany’s exports to China — one of the bright spots that saw Germany through the aftermath of the early 2010s crisis:
A partially-self-inflicted energy crisis and falling exports are among the reasons Germany’s economy is now the “sick man of Europe”:
And this is compounded by other long-term issues — a drop in the working-age population, a lack of public investment, and the aforementioned NIMBYism and red tape.
Overall, this paints a picture of a country whose leaders, elites, and voting public are deeply unserious. Instead of addressing the country’s myriad challenges, they are choosing to dither, bury their heads in the sand, indulge in comforting fantasies, and look out for themselves instead of for the national interest. As a result, things are getting worse, both for Germany and for Europe itself.
Yet another eclectic, well researched and thought provoking post. Nicholas’ arguments open for challenging group think in the RBA (and more generally) approach to forecasting/analysis are compelling. To move the ball forward, how about an open letter to Michelle Bullock inviting her to sponsor a competition, with the RBA forecasting methodology as datum? (This might also elicit a clear statement of the rationale for the fixed 2-3% inflation target.)
Yet another eclectic, well researched and thought provoking post. Nicholas’ arguments open for challenging group think in the RBA (and more generally) approach to forecasting/analysis are compelling. To move the ball forward, how about an open letter to Michelle Bullock inviting her to sponsor a competition, with the RBA forecasting methodology as datum? (This might also elicit a clear statement of the rationale for the fixed 2-3% inflation target.)