Catallaxy Files

While we are talking about research grants, by incredibly good fortune a book on a related topic has come to hand.

Making Science Pay, by a local pundit, public intellectual and man about town.

This collection of papers addresses various aspects of scientific productivity, both the production of knowledge and the delivery of economic returns from scientific research. The main theme is to challenge some widespread views about science and scientists, especially the effectiveness of Big Science driven by government funding.

The first paper dates from the time when the Australian university system was being radically expanded and bureaucratized under central direction in the hope of greater administrative efficiency and better economic returns from teaching and research. That was a cruel joke and it would have been clearly perceived as such in the light of experience in the US reported by Jacques Barzun from the 1940s to the 1960s and the research reported in Terency Kealey’s book which is summarized here.

H/t Alan Jones. Today at Melbourne High School three outstanding athlests will be honoured, with the Governor in attendance, himself a Melbourne High alumnus.

Ron Clarke, Ralph Doubell and Merv Lincoln all attended the school the 1950s.

Clarke was the greatest athlete never to win Olympic gold. He could run world records but he could not kick home in the last lap against equally good runners. His finest achiement was in 1965 when he toured in Europe for 44 days. Asked about the short tour, he explained to Alan Jones that it was possible to claim expenses from the AAF for 30 days, with 14 days extra for special circumstances. [They didn't run for money in those days and there was no sponsorship].

In 1965, at the peak of his career, he competed 18 times in eight countries during a 44-day tour of Europe — and set 12 world records. Nine of those records were established inside 21 days. He lowered the world 5000 metres mark four times (by a total of 18 seconds) and the 10,000 metres record three times (clipping it by an overall 39 seconds).

His brother played for the Bombers, as did his father who also represented Victoria. After six years he transferred to Brunswick in the VFA (the Association) which payed better money than the VFL (the League) and Ron grew up in a house purchased with the proceeds of the VFA career. Ron said he turned to athletics because he wasn’t good enough at football. He told Alan Jones that nobody knew how fast he was running at school, he won all the events from the 100 yards up to the mile but it was only in his final year that he was clocked with a stopwatch. He ran a world record for schoolboys before he knew anything about world records.

Percy Cerrutty, the aggresive and confrontational coach, accused Clarke of having no heart, to explain his repeatedly failure at the Olympic level. In retrospect Carke recognised that he should have run better tactical races, and regretted not having a fulltime personal coach. After his sensational collapse at high altitude in Mexico City he did have a genuine heart problem. There is a beautiful story of Emil Zatopek slipping Ron Clarke one of his four gold medals at Prague airport.

Why did Clarke’s magnificence on the track not translate to Olympic gold? Largely self-coached, he won bronze in the Tokyo 1964 Olympics, and was placed ninth in both the 5000 and the marathon. His own candid assessment is that he ran bad tactical races, and that with the guidance of a good coach would have won the 10,000 and placed second in the 5000.

In Mexico City in 1968, when the high altitude gave a distinct, disgraceful advantage to distance runners who lived and trained in mountain country, he ran out of oxygen late in the 10,000 metres. He staggered on bravely, virtually unconscious, to finish sixth. He collapsed on the line and suffered heart damage which even now causes him to take daily medication.

Olympics aside, Clarke could hardly have had more successful careers in athletics and business. He now runs a resort on South Stradbroke Island that has set new marks for design and environmental management. And one of his greatest prizes is, yes, an Olympic gold medal. The athlete he admires most, Emil Zatopek, slipped it to him in a package once at Prague airport with the words: “Look after this. You deserve it.”

Zatopek owned four gold medals. This one was for the 1952 10,000 metres. The admiration was mutual.

Ralph Doubell had a short career at the top, crowned by unexpected gold in Mexico in 1968 when he ran a time in the 800 that has not yet been beaten by an Australian.

Merv Lincoln was right up there at a time when Australia had a heap of fine middle and long distance runners including John Landy and Herb Elliot. He managed a silver at the (then) Empire Games. John Landy will be speaking at Melbourne High School today.

Hayek spent five weeks in Australia between 3 October and 6 November 1976. The visit was crowded with more than 60 appointments, seminars, informal meetings and formal presentations. He and his wife travelled from Cairns and the Barrier Reef to Melbourne Canberra and Adelaide with excursions to the country in Victoria and Queensland.

These notes come from the draft of a paper for a forthcoming collection of essays on various aspects of Hayek’s life and work, edited by Rob Leeson.

There are sections on the political situation at the Federal level and some aspects of the climate of ideas at the time before terms like deregulation, economic rationalism and the New Right were in common use. For many people now under the age of 50 that is practically ancient history but some of it is essential to appreciate the difficulty of getting any traction for Hayek’s ideas and for changing the direction of economic policy in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s.

The central issue in politics was the willingness and ability of the newly elected conservative Fraser administration to regain control of the economy after the big spending and other initiatives of the Whitlam era from 1972 to 1975. Inflation and unemployment were high and there were major issues to be resolved regarding monetary policy and the exchange rate. The political debate was soured by the resentment of ALP supporters following the Constitutional crisis in 1975 which the Governor General resolved by dismissing the Whitlam government on 11 November and calling upon Fraser as a caretaker pending a general election which the Liberal-Country Party coalition won in a landslide.

Many people had high hopes for Fraser and progressive circles were alarmed by a rumour that he was a reader of Ayn Rand. This was before it became apparent that Fraser was in fact the kind of conservative who Hayek had in mind when he wrote “Why I am not a conservative”, a man more concerned with holding political power than limiting it and more concerned to protect existing industries than to sweep away obstacles to free development. Hayek’s views were not music to the ears of the Prime Minister and the elders of the Coalition government, as indicated by the meeting of Hayek and Fraser.

In the mid-1970s interventionism had all the running in the formation and discussion of public policy. The strength of interventionist tendencies on the both sides of politics can be seen in the tenor of criticism of the so-called New Right a decade later when the Labor administration led by PM Hawke and Treasurer Keating became serious about deregulation. For many years the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) in Melbourne was the major source of informed economic commentary on the conservative side of politics. Formed in 1943 it pre-dated the Mont Pelerin Society.

The Regulation Nation took a great leap forward during the war when the federal public service doubled in size between 1939 and 1945. The Keynesian “Nugget” Coombs was the most influential advisor to Labor and Liberal governments over many years, driving the new order based on central control of the economy, using the insights of Keynes to deliver sustained economic growth with full employment and other social benefits. Not only ALP supporters who were impressed by Keynes, much the same conversion happened to the remarkable industrialist and organizer Herbert Gepp, who formed the Institute for Public Affairs and charged C. D. Kemp with the task of producing a program for it.

An academic James Walter wrote “By the late 1930s Gepp, like Coombs, had discovered Keynes, and begun to propound a version of neo-Keynesian economic planning. Unlike Coombs, however, he drew the line at anything that looked like collectivism”. The Keynesian synthesis of private ownership and state planning provided a framework of ideas that the social engineers and the business community could share, even while they disagreed on details. This framework included a highly interventionist function for the state, and neglected the microeconomic foundations of productivity. Much of the institutional framework had been put in place by the first Federal Government at the turn of the century with tariff protection for industry and central wage fixing for the workers (in reality for the most militant trade unions and their workers).

Classical liberalism and libertarianism had practically no profile in Australia through the 1950s and 1960s until in 1974 a new party appeared with a libertarian program and aroused a deal of disbelief but little electoral support. First called the Workers Party (heightening disbelief), later the Progress Party and currently the LDP it has yet to garner sufficient support to make an impact in State or Federal elections. In 1976 the pros and cons of economic rationalism or deregulation were not yet significant topics for public discussion, and there was still a serious battle to be fought on the conservative side of politics before the agenda of deregulation achieved full support in the Liberal Party round about 1990. The tour came before the network of academics, the new think tanks and the “backbench Dries” of the Liberal Party achieved some traction. The Centre for Independent Studies started operations in 1976 but was not up and running when Hayek toured, although people like myself, who were not paying attention, later thought that the Hayek tour might have been timed to promote it.

Impact and outcome of Hayek’s visit

The major public record of the tour is an Occasional Paper published by the Centre for Independent Studies containing the the text of his three major speeches. His address to the IPA appeared in the IPA Review in 1976), as did his paper on Socialism and Science. A version of the Whither Democracy paper was published as “Can Democracy be Saved?” in Quadrant, November 1976.

A survey of four daily newspapers, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Financial Review revealed no mention of Hayek and the tour. The SMH (15 October) announced Friedman’s Nobel award on the front page (near the bottom of the page, under the lead story on the five point plan for economic recovery presented by Gough Whitlam, the Leader of the Opposition). That would have been a timely moment to mention that a recent prizewinner was in the country at the time. The Financial Review (5 October) ran a short story on Gunnar Myrdal, who shared the prize with Hayek, reporting that Myrdal still saw socialism as the hope of the future despite a recent setback to the Swedish Socialist Party in the polls.

The impact of the visit is impossible to assess. Later in the decade Hayek would have found many more interested listeners as the forces for reform became better organized and more articulate. There is no doubt that his ideas energised many of the people engaged in the push for reform but it took more than a decade and a change of government to achieve real, and possibly permanent, progress towards a more open and competitive economy.

On the Power Radio with Steve Price and Andrew Bolt.

After a long wait listening to reminiscences of the Seekers 50 years ago and harrowing tales by carers of disabled people.

This administration has zero credibility on concern for disabled people.

If they really cared they would have done something in their first year of office, they could have hit the ground running with funding for respite care, affordable and desperately needed assistance paid from the Howard and Costello surplus. They could have injected funds through existing channels of State and other agencies that are in place and in touch with people in need to provide help in a timely and affordable manner.

They could have learned more about the needs to the sector to provide additional assistance year by year, phased in for maximum benefit. No new bureaucracy, just funding through existing services to the most pressing areas of need.

Some of the people who needed help five years ago will be dead before anything is put on the ground by the NDIS.

Carers and the disabled need some help now, not the distant expectation of a gold-plated scheme that is not affordable, thanks to the criminal mismanagement of the last years. Remember that every billion wasted in administration of the new scheme is a billion denied to people who actually need it.

Previous posts on this topic.

Is this really the way to do disability?

Is the NDIS a cruel political stunt?

In 1974 John J Ray, at that time a sociologist at the Uni of NSW edited a collection of papers called Conservatism as Heresy: An Australian Reader. This has two features of interest, one to background my story about Hayek in Australia in 1976 with an account of the political situation at the time. The other aspect is the way it anticipated Nick Cater’s study of the “new class” of politically correct, tertiary educated anti-conservatives. This is not the point of this post, but it is very interesting to see that the ethos of the new class had captured the public discourse among “educated” people, even by 1974, to the extent where perfectly reasonable classical liberal/conservative ideas had indeed become heresy in progressive cirles.

You can find most of the contents of the book in a list at this site. Unreal! Go down a couple of screens and just above an indent labelled Note you will find a link to the book.

There is a very strange paper by Ray himself on the rival platforms in the 1974 election, where Ray controversially suggested that economic liberals should have seriously considered voting for the ALP. Maybe there are people approaching 100 years of age who have a clear memory of the time to correct Ray’s impression (I was much too young and economically naive), maybe he was just stirring and of course his support for the ALP, if he did indeed vote for it, would have been heavily qualified and very much influenced by the sanity that Bill Hayden introduced into their economic thinking.

Reading John Howard’s account of the Fraser years in Lazerus Rising lends some support although there is no detail on the 1974 platforms. As Howard made a rapid transition in the direction of economic rationality after 1975 he ran into major opposition from Fraser and the old guard who were quite relaxed and comfortable with tariffs and subsidies, they just wanted to tweak the playing field to give the unions less influence. Maybe they even pretended that they wanted to spend less but Howard described the dreaded “razor gang” as a great wet squib of the Fraser administration.

A quick scan through the IPA Review for 1974 did not illuminate the issue, the huge concerns were inflation and unemployment and the discussion revolved around wages, taxation and spending but concern about regulation and deregulation was not apparent.

Ray wrote:

The Whitlam government has done a great deal to promote the efficient functioning of the market economy…the reduction of tariffs, the reliance on monetary policy, the revaluation and semi-floating of the dollar, the elimination of rural subsidies and the attempt to strengthen legislation aimed against collusive trade practices must have support from conservatives…there the Whitlam government took steps that our supposedly conservative previous government could have taken but did not.

In fact the L-CP coalition in the 1974 election campaign advocated the reversal of most of those measures.

In conclusion, then, I believe that in 1974 the conservative thing to do, if you wished to vote at all, was to vote ALP. This is obviously far from an endorsement of all the ALP’s policies. It is perhaps more importantly a condemnation of the sad state of our supposedly conservative opposition.

Discuss.

If ideas matter, then the course contents at schools and universities matter.

It is hardly surprising that Keynesianism remains influential when you recall that Paul Samuelson’s economics textbook was the best seller for some decades. Even when you inject better ideas into the education “stream” it will still take many decades for Keynesianism to “wash out” in the general population.

The Sydney chapter of the Australian School of Economics has convened a subcommittee on school education in economics to support anything useful that IPA and Mannkal are doing, and to contribute suggestions about what needs to be done.

It will help to get a scan on the course contents and text books but the real problem to get something better in place, assuming from anecdotal accounts that they have not improved since the last survey in 1990. If we manage to achieve wall to wall conservative governments across the country there will never be a better time but it will never be easy, which is where the political economy comes in.

Some years ago there was a scare in New Zealand when the high school science curriculum was propagating the “social construction of science” theory that the truth depends on the majority of experts. Like the climate scientists paid by governments to promote the political agenda of the IPCC. This was traced to a single person in the Curriculum Unit of the Department of Education.

So I am calling for a volunteer in each state of the nation to do some research along the following lines.

1. Name of Minister of Education with profile of track record. Plus the names and background of advisors if any can be located.

2. Organization chart of the Department of Education, to locate the box (and the people in them) labelled “Curriculums” or “Courses” along with the boxes that it reports to and the boxes, advisors and standing committees that report to it. Names, qualifications and track records, plus affiliations of interest in the education industry, including text book publishers.

The idea is to find where the significant decisions are made and to find if the government is prepared to make an effort to put appropriate people in positions where they can do something (anything) more useful than just rubber-stamping decisions by people who are happy the way things are.

Of course the same kind of study is required in other areas like history and social studies. Any more volunteers?

Interesting ideas in Chris Bowen’s speech at the Cater launch (Revesby edition), reproduced in a column in the current Spectator. He lists financial deregulation and Medicare among major innovations to boost the economy that can be claimed by the ALP, also greatly expanded university education.
Surely financial deregulation should be attributed largely to John Howard’s efforts and the Campbell report that he sponsored.
Medicare is a contribution to the economy?
And he thinks it would be great for everyone to get a crack at uni so they can earn more, have better lives etc.
Sobering results from the US where they have taken this process even further than we have managed so far.

There’s much debate these days about the return on investment of a college education. Much of that conversation is focused on what students spend on college compared to what they get in return in terms of a salary. But if the purpose of college is to get an education, why don’t we measure the return on investment in terms of what students learn in college?

Here’s the problem: we don’t know for sure how much students learn in college. As much as we spend on college, no bottom-line evaluation method exists for measuring what actually happens in the classroom and how that eventually translates into the value of the degree. Sure, there are the U.S. News & World Report rankings, but they mostly measure the students on their way in the door (how many students a college rejected, SAT scores) or how much colleges spend on faculty or students.

There are now ways to measure learning, chief among them the Collegiate Learning Assessment. Known as the CLA, the essay-only test gives students a set of materials and asks them to synthesize evidence and write a persuasive argument. More than five hundred colleges use the exam to measure their curriculum and teaching, although few release the results, or even averages, publicly.

The study’s bottom line: 45 percent of students in the study made no gains in their writing, complex reasoning, or critical-thinking skills during their first two years of college. After four years, the news wasn’t much better: 36 percent failed to show any improvement.

The main reason for this, the researchers found, was a lack of rigor. Through surveys they learned that students spent about 12 hours a week studying on average, much of that time in groups. Most didn’t take courses that required them to read more than 40 pages a week or write more than 20 pages over the course of an entire semester. Students who studied alone did better, as did students whose teachers had high expectations or assigned a significant amount of reading or writing…

To determine how these students fared after college, the authors later resurveyed more than nine hundred of them after graduation. Not surprisingly, the students who scored the lowest on the CLA also struggled in life after college. They were three times more likely than those scoring at the top to be unemployed, twice as likely to be living at home with parents, more likely to have run up credit card bills, and less likely to read the news or discuss politics.

Now, many students graduating this month might think it’s fine that they skated through college. But for students and parents who paid the tuition bills thinking they were getting a rigorous and life-changing experience, they deserved better. So do potential employers who will hire this month’s graduates. We need more authoritative and accurate ways of measuring the value that a college adds to a student’s life than some arbitrary rankings system created by a magazine that doesn’t even publish anymore.

Recalling that Hayek visited a forest in 1976 to listen to the lyre birds. The amazing creatures can mimic the camera shutter and the chainsaw in addition to the calls of about 20 other bird species. Is this real or is David Attenborough having a lend of us? Has anyone else heard the bird do the chainsaw?

Was going to call this “News from Nowhere” but that was taken by the socialist William Morris who made his living designing furniture and wallpaper for the rich and famous.

Should provide a blow by blow descripton of the journey to Revesby, the exchanges of ideas, the dinner, the car raffle and etc but too busy preparing the papers for the fortnightly meeting of Australian School of Economics (Sydney chapter) and drafting materials for the next volume of Critical Rationalist Papers. The best part of the event was meeeting a couple of Cat readers who were pleased to make visual contact with the legendary but shadowy and elusive figure who has been described as “Australia’s foremost blogger”.

This morning the Lower Neutral Bay faction of the Aust School will meet with the Rozelle faction and the part of the ungrouped faction to plot the overthrow of the welfare state and global socialism. The venue is a conveniently located coffee shop near the North Sydney Pubic Library and Cats who might be interested should make contact on rchampATbigpondDOTnet.au to request a set of the application forms to apply for membership.

Almost in press, adding to the list of Critical Rationalist papers, a collection on the topic of productivity in science. Regrettably this collection is several decades too late to avert the damage that has been inflicted on higher education by the Dawkins debacle. One of the pieces did appear in 1988, concluding:

The debate on higher education and its economic benefits needs to be informed by some study of the ecology of excellence in research and development. Agriculture provides numerous examples, and others would be found elsewhere. So far the plans for reorganisation of education and research are guided more by simple-minded notions of bureaucratic efficiency than from understanding of the conditions that promote effective learning and prompt application of the findings.

The papers in this collection address various aspects of scientific productivity, both the production of knowledge and the delivery of economic returns from scientific research, especially research backed by government funding. Rural research provides a case study of succes and there is a record of interview with the late Jim Vincent who was an important pioneer in microbiologh, especially applied to soils, and the mentor a large number of students, some of whom achieved world renown and placed Austrlia at the front of some fields.

The summary of Terrence Kealey’s monumental work on the economics of scientific research is reprinted, it started as a series of posts on the Cat.

There is a piece about Sir John Eccles, an Austrlian Nobel prizewinner, a review of a book by Francis Crick of The Double Helix and a review of a book of interviews with Nobel prizewinners.

And much more.

Cats who are contemplating the list of publications with their fingers poised uncertainly on the mouse as it hovers over “one click to purchase” should bear in mind that half the proceeds of Jacques Barzun and Others go to IPA, half of Quadrant Papers to Quadrant, 10% of the Popper Guides to Jo Nova and half of The Duhem Problem and the forthcoming Productivity in Science to Mannkal Economics Education Foundation.

Nick Cater’s book (see link below) is a great addition to a genre that includes Nick Cohen in Britain and David Horowitz the the Ramparts man in the US, now a hyperactive conservative.

There is a lot of it and an extended summary of key points will be helpful for busy people. In Chapter 8 we encounter the sea-change in the ALP when Gough Whitlam took over from Arthur Caldwell in 1967. Phillip Adams described Gough as a religous experience, which explains the sense of shock and disblief when he was sacked in 1975. With the ascent of Gough the ALP turned from battling for the workers, a task substantially achieved by the 1950s and settled on the idea of Social Justice by way of Big Government.

It was fun to encounter the following turn of phrase, after the Bolt Report with an account of the financial vandalism of the current administration.

Whitlam would devote his considerable mind, not to creating wealth, but to spending it.

See you at the Revesby Workers, watch out for launches in other states.