I have a letter in The Chronicle of Higher Education responding to Steven Teles’ call for more conservative college professors. It’s a shortened version of a longer piece I wrote, which I’m posting here.

The fact that conservatives are thin in the humanities and social sciences departments of US college campuses is well known. A natural question, raised by Steven Teles, is whether the rarity of conservative professors in these fields reflects some form of direct or structural discrimination.

But the disparities are even greater in the natural sciences. In 2009, a Pew survey of members of the AAAS found that only 6 per cent identified as Republicans and there is no reason to think this has changed in the subsequent 15 years. One obvious reason for this is that Republicans are openly anti-science on a wide range of issues, notably including climate science, evolution and vaccination.

The absence of Republican scientists creates a couple of problems for Teles. First, Teles’ proposed solution of affirmative action is particularly problematic here. Around 97 per cent of all papers related to climate change support, or at least are consistent with, the mainstream view that the world is warming primarily as a result of human action. The view, predominant among conservative Americans, that global warming is either not happening or is not due to human action, is massively under-represented.

The same is true across an ever expanding range of issues that have been engulfed by the culture wars. It seems unlikely that Teles would advocate enforcing a spread of opinion matching that of the US public in these cases.

Second, it is hard to see how discrimination is supposed to work here. By contrast with large areas of the social sciences and humanities, it is difficult to infer much about a natural scientists’ political views from their published work, except to the extent that anyone working in fields like biology, climate science works on the basis of assumptions rejected by most Republicans. A Republican chemist or materials scientist would have no need to reveal their political views to potentially hostile colleagues.

Economics is exempted from Teles’ criticism, but the difficulties are equally great here, though they do not fall on neatly partisan lines of conservative vs liberal. Although there are a range of views among economists on trade policy, there are almost none (with the exception of Trump’s adviser Peter Navarro) who are as sympathetic to tariff protection as the median American voter. Achieving a balance of opinion on trade policy among academic economists similar to that of the American public would require affirmative on a scale that would make Ibram X Kendi look like a piker.

But what of the social sciences and humanities? Implicitly, Teles is rejecting the view that the views of American conservatives in these fields could be wrong in the same way that scientific creationism and folk economics are wrong. If, for example, a scholar of international relations agrees with George W. Bush and the majority of Republicans that the United States is “chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model to the world”, that should not be problem for a selection committee on Teles’ account.

The ever-expanding culture wars have contracted the areas where academic work has no direct political implications. Nevertheless, there are enough such fields that the low representation of political conservatives needs some further explanation.

Explaining the shortage of Republican scientists (and academics more generally) does not require a complex story about anticipated discrimination, like the one offered by Teles. Careers in academia require a high level of education and offer relatively modest incomes. Both of these characteristics are negatively correlated with political conservatism. The outcome is no more surprising than the fact that Democrats are under-represented among groups with the opposite characteristics, such as business owners without college degrees.

Teles caricatures such explanations as saying that “conservatives are stupid”. But he would presumably agree that an academic appointment normally requires a PhD. But PhD graduates are overwhelmingly liberal According to Pew, only 12 per cent of Americans with a postgraduate degree hold “consistently conservative” and another 14 per cent are mostly conservative. Once lawyers (JD holders) and doctors (MD holders) are excluded, there’s no reason to think that American academics are significantly more liberal that PhD graduates in general.

If so, there’s no need to invoke personal discrimination in the hiring process as an explanation for the paucity of conservatives. Rather, as Teles suggests, it seems that conservatives do not pursue academic careers in the first place.

Fear of discrimination is one possible explanation here. But a much simpler structural explanation is at hand. Compared to other high-education workers, professors have relatively modest earnings (economics, where the outside options are lucrative, is a partial exception). And controlling for education, income is strongly correlated with Republican voting. So, a plausible explanation is that intelligent young conservatives pursue careers with high earning potential in business or finance, rather than academia.

Support for this hypothesis comes from a surprising source, the medical profession. Aspiring doctors face a choice between specialisations with high economic returns (such as dermatology) and others which may yield more personal satisfaction or contribute more to public good (pediatrics).

As a New York times article about the voting patterns of doctors shows, these choices are highly correlated with voting patterns. Doctors in low-income specialisations are much more likely to be Democrats

All medical specialisations yield higher incomes than that of the average professor. But extrapolating beyond the range of the data to $75k (the average salary for full-time faculty in US universities and colleges according to Wikipedia), the predicted proportion of Republicans would be around 10 per cent, which is what’s observed in the data. A cynical interpretation is that, if Republican legislators want more conservative professors, they should pay them higher salaries, pushing them into the top tax brackets populated by corporate lawyers and orthopaedic surgeons.

As Teles observes, the disparity between the views of academics and those of the legislators who ultimately fund them is a major problem for US higher education, and ultimately for the US. But this is ultimately a reflection of the fact that conservatism, in the form it currently takes in the US, involves rejection of the intellectual values of a university.

An edited version of this ran in The Guardian under the headline “Why aren’t the likes of Rex and Bonza flying high in Australian skies? Ask the politicians”. Here’s my original, a bit more sharply worded.

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Politicians fly a lot, and mostly enjoy it. So do many of the people they interact with on a daily basis: senior public servants, business leaders, lobbyists and so on. That’s a crucial fact in understanding the mess that is the Australian airline industry. 

Politicians in Australia routinely fly business class, and enjoy membership of Qantas’ invitation-only Chairman’s Lounge. Air travel is not only an occupational necessity but a relatively pleasant and relaxing part of a generally stressful job.

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From The Guardian

Among many other challenges in dealing with the failure of urban policy in Australia, the Minns (NSW state) government is faced with the task of renegotiating, or repudiating, the disastrous set of contracts for toll roads in New South Wales made by its predecessors (Labor and Liberal) with the Transurban group. As a review by Allan Fels and David Cousins has found, the government is at risk of being held hostage by toll operators. According to Fels and Cousins, immediate legislation is needed “as a backup to negotiations and to give the government power if necessary to determine final outcomes”.

This is by no means an isolated case. The failure of the National Electricity Market, premised on the idea of competition between private companies, has led state and federal governments to re-enter the business of electricity generation, storage and transmission. The disastrous experiment with private prisons in NSW is being unwound. Plans for the eventual privatisation of the NBN, established in response to the failure of the privatised Telstra to deliver national broadband, have been abandoned.

In the United Kingdom, where the Thatcher government of the 1980s led the way in privatisation, the complex and difficult process of renationalisation has been going on even longer. Rail privatisation was partially reversed with the renationalisation of Railtrack under the Blair Labour government, further limited under the Tories, and is now likely to be completely reversed.

The UK’s new Starmer government is also grappling with the impending failure of Thames Water, privatised under Thatcher and stripped bare by its private owners. Australian readers won’t be surprised to learn that the “millionaires factory”, Macquarie Group, was a leading player here.

The end of the UK’s private finance initiative (PFI), the model for Australian public-private partnerships, is already producing huge problems. But it is now clear to everyone that dealing with these problems is better than persisting with the hopeless failure of PFI.

Even Thatcher’s greatest political success, the sale of council homes, looks a lot less appealing in light of the current housing crisis in the UK, paralleling that in Australia. It seems clear that governments will need to re-enter the business of building and operating social housing in big way.

In fact, the failures of privatisation are numerous and obvious, while unambiguous successes are hard to find. Claimed examples, such as the pharmaceutical enterprise CSL, turn out, on closer examination, to have used public money to build private empires.

Why, then, was privatisation such a popular policy, at least among those who dominated the policy debate from the 1980s until recently?

The simplest explanation is that politicians saw privatisation and private infrastructure as a way to get access to a big bucket of money, which could be spent on popular projects without the need to raise taxes. This was a fallacy, refuted many times over, but resurrected just as often in zombie form. Either the government hands over the right to collect revenue to private operators, as in the case of toll roads, or the public forgoes the earnings of government business enterprises, as with asset sales.

Even now this lesson has not been fully absorbed. On the one hand, the Victorian Labor government has begun the process of reversing Jeff Kennett’s privatisation of the State Electricity Commission of Victoria. On the other, having sold its land titles office, Labor is now poised to sell the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registry where it has already increased charges for the provision of legally required information.

Economists who advocated privatisation mostly avoided this silly error. Indeed, the NSW Treasury repeatedly warned against treating private provision of infrastructure as a “magic pudding”. But, under the influence of neoliberal ideology, they committed a subtler error. Rather than examining the fiscal outcomes of privatisation, they assumed public investments should be subject to a large risk premium to make them comparable to private alternatives. This premium was not needed to cover the actual loss from failed public investments, which has historically been low. Rather, it reflected the mysterious “equity premium” demanded by private investors in financial markets. At least until the GFC, neoliberal economists relied on the “efficient markets” hypothesis to conclude that the price observed in financial markets must be the right one. In a world where meme stocks and crypto scams are now a central part of the financial system, such a hypothesis is no longer credible.

Finally, of course, there were huge profits to be made in the financial sector from the sale process and from exploiting weaknesses in the regulation of privatised companies. The list of former politicians who have sold public assets and ended up with lucrative post-politics careers is, incidentally, rather long.

The era of privatisation is nearly over, at least in Australia and the UK. But cleaning up the mess left behind will take years, or even decades.

Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the US presidential election has prompted me to write down a few thoughts about getting old and being old.

First up, I’m going to rant a bit (in classic old-person mode) about how much I loathe the various prissy euphemisms for “old” that appear just about everywhere: “older”, “aging”, “senior” and, worst of all, “elderly”. I am, of course, aging, as is everyone alive. Similarly, like everyone, I’m older than I was yesterday and older than people who are younger than me. What no one seems willing to say out loud is that, at age 68, I am old. As Black and queer people have already done, I want to reappropriate “old”.

It’s not hard to see why people are so timid when talking about getting, and being, old. It is, after all, a journey that has only one terminus. At one time, only a fortunate minority survived long enough to reach old age. But now, most people do, and it would be good if we talked more honestly about it.

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I’ve written another piece on the uneconomics of nuclear power in Australia

The big unanswered question about nuclear power in Australia is how much it would cost. The handful of plants completed recently in the US and Europe have run way over time and over budget, but perhaps such failures can be avoided. On the other hand, the relatively successful Barakah project in the United Arab Emirates was undertaken in conditions that aren’t comparable to a democratic high-wage country like Australia. Moreover, the cost of the project, wrapped up in a long-term contract for both construction and maintenance, remains opaque.  Most other projects are being constructed by Chinese or Russian firms, not an option for Australia

In these circumstances, CSIRO’s Gencost project relied mainly on evidence from Korea, one of the few developed countries to maintain a nuclear construction program. Adjusting for the costs of starting from scratch, CSIRO has come up with an estimated construction cost for a 1000 MW nuclear plant of at least $A8.6 billion, leading to an estimated Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE) of between $163/MWh-$264/MWh,  for large-scale nuclear. But, given the limited evidence base, critics like Dick Smith have been able to argue that CSIRO has overestimated the capital costs.

Thanks to a recent announcement from Czechia, we now have the basis for a more informed estimate. Ever since the commissioning its last nuclear plan in 2003, Czech governments have sought commercial agreements for the construction of more nuclear power plants, with little success until recently.

Finally, after a process beginning in 2020, the Czech government sought tenders from three firms to build at least two, and possibly four 1000 MW reactors. After Westinghouse was excluded for unspecified failures to meet tender conditions, two contenders remained: EDF and KNHP.  On 17 July it was announced that KNHP had submitted the winning bid, which, coincidentally, set the cost per GW at $8.6 billion. 

Sadly for nuclear advocates, that figure is in $US. Converted to $A, it’s 12.8 billion, around 50 per cent more than the CSIRO Gencost estimate.  At that price, the LCOE, even on the most favorable assumptions, will exceed $225/MWh.  

And unlike the case in Australia, Czechia is offering a brownfield site, at no additional cost. The new plants will replace existing Soviet-era reactors at Dukovany. By contrast, in Australia under Dutton’s proposals, the costs of a nuclear plant would need to include the compulsory acquisition of existing sites, from mostly unwilling vendors. 

The bad news doesn’t stop there. The (inevitably optimistic) target date for electricity generation is 2038, about the time Australia’s last coal plants will be closing. But the Czechs have at least a five year head start on Australia, even assuming that a Dutton government could begin a tender process soon after taking office. In reality, it would be necessary to establish and staff both a publicly owned nuclear generation enterprise and a nuclear regulatory agency with an appropriate legislative framework.

And there’s one more wrinkle.  Westinghouse, excluded from the Czech bid is engaged on long-running litigation with KNHP, claiming a breach of intellectual property. It’s been unsuccessful so far, but a final ruling is not expected until 2025. If Westinghouse succeeds, the Czech project will almost certainly be delayed. 

Summing up, taking the Czech announcement as a baseline, building two to four 1000 MW nuclear plants in Australia would probably cost $50-$100 billion, and not be complete until well into the 2040s. 

If nuclear power is so costly, why have the Czechs chosen to pursue this technology. The explanation is partly historical. The former Czechoslovakia was an early adopter of nuclear power and, despite the usual delays and cost overruns, enthusiasm for the technology seems to have persisted.

More significant, however, is the influence of one man, Vaclav Klaus, a dominant figure in Czech politics from the dissolution of the Soviet bloc to the 2010s.  Apart from sharing the same first name, Klaus has little in common with the architect of Czech freedom, Vaclav Havel.  Klaus was, and remains an extreme climate science denialist, whose views are reflected by the rightwing party he founded, the Civic Democratic Party (ODS).  Although Klaus himself left office under a cloud in 2013, ODS remained a dominant force. 

The current Czech Prime Minister, Petr Fiala (also ODS) has followed the same evolution as other ‘sceptics’, shifting from outright denial to what Chris Bowen has described as “all-too-hard-ism”. And with high carbon prices in Europe, persisting with coal is even less tenable than in Australia.  In political terms, nuclear power is the ideal solution to the problem of replacing coal without embracing renewables.  It’s just a pity about the economics.

With luck, Australia can learn from the Czech lesson. Even under the favorable conditions of  a brownfield site and an established nuclear industry, new nuclear power is hopelessly uneconomic.

What to do when we can’t trust our own eyes (or at least, the videos we are looking at.

I spoke last weekend at a panel discussion on Navigating Lies, Deepfakes & Fake News, organised by McPherson Independent. This a group promoting the idea of an independent community candidate in the (LNP held) electorate of McPherson. It’s part of the broader disillusionment with the two-party system we are seeing in Australia and also in the recent UK election.

It was a great discussion. I prepared some preliminary notes, which I’ve provided below. Comments and constructive criticism most welcome

Lies, Deepfakes and Fake News

It’s important to understand that there is nothing fundamentally new here. Both propaganda and forgery have been around at least since the invention of writing.

Deepfakes raise two issues, because they are more realistic and potentially more convincing than ever before.

First, their use in harassment, particularly sexual harassment, is more problematic and distressing by virtue of their greater realism. A range of legal and social responses are needed, but this is outside my area of competence.

Second, a form of evidence we have assumed to be reliable (video) can now be faked. This has happened before with forged paper documents, and then with photography. While there may be technical solutions, the main response must be social and relies on trust, in the form of assured provenance. If we know that a photo or video was taken by someone we trust and transmitted to us through a trustworthy process we can believe it to be accurate.

Similarly, there is nothing new about misinformation. In particular, panics about social media fail to take account of the longstanding role of traditional media (notably, but not exclusively, the Murdoch press).

Given the reluctance of mainstream journalists to attack each other (they might end up working for the same organisation, after all) social media outlets provide an opportunity for critical comment. This comment in turn is bitterly resented and misrepresented by journalists, who amplify the most offensive examples (sexist attacks on women, for example) to justify treating all their critics as “trolls”.

Misinformation works at both an individual and a social level. Individually, we can’t check everything and are prone to ‘confirmation bias’, paying more attention to things that confirm our existing beliefs. Again, we need to find trustworthy sources and (equally importantly) dismiss sources that have been shown to be untrustworthy. As regards confirmation bias, the heuristic “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”.

The bigger problem is at the social level. Social groups can help to inform their members, or they can promote confirmation bias, to the point that their members actively desire misinformation. This was true at one time of some groups on the political left and is now true of the political right as a whole, most notably in the US.

There is no effective strategy to correct misinformation once it is firmly established within a cohesive social group. The task is comparable to trying to convert a religious group to an alternative religion or to non-belief.

The only real response is to focus on loosely attached members of misinformation groups, and seek to point out how they have been misled. This is a very slow process, but there are plenty of examples of success.

Climate change provides a good example. Attempts to convince rightwing denialists using a variety of strategies (factual evidence, clever framing etc) have gone nowhere. But, over time, everyone open to being convinced has come to accept the reality of human-caused climate change. Those promoting misinformation have never admitted error, but have been forced to change tack, shifting from science denial to attacks on clean energy and promotion of nuclear power..