As I said in my last post, I’m giving as good as I get from now on, and today I seem to be getting plenty
Over at Catallaxy (Google it if you want), Sinclair Davidson is complaining about my Australian Laureate Fellowship (total budget, including lots of postdocs, PhD students etc, $2 million over 5 years) as an imposition on the taxpayer. Sinclair also receives a taxpayer funded salary of at least $150K. The standard assumption is that 30 per cent of a professorial salary is for research, the rest for teaching, administration, community service and so on. By contrast, I’m funded 100 per cent for research, my own and that of my students and collaborators. So, let’s see who is goofing off on the taxpayer dollar.
Here’s Sinclair: two journal articles, and zero working papers in the last five years. On my arithmetic, allowing 30 per cent of salary for research, that’s a rate of over $100k per publication.
Here’s me 29 journal articles and 36 working papers in the same period. That’s about $30k per publication, without allowing for material produced by the postdocs and PhD students funded by my grant.
Those aren’t exhaustive lists of publications by any means, but I doubt that the relativities would change if we had a more complete list, including books, reports and so on. Adjusting for journal quality, as perceived by the profession, would make the difference even sharper.
Updated With their usual affinity for conspiracy theories, commenters here at and Catallaxy are suggesting that my current Fellowship is a favor from my Labor mates (readers here will be aware of my slavish devotion to our PM, which has, it seems, finally paid off). Of course, the great thing with conspiracy theories is that, the longer you look, the more conspirators you find. I’m sure the Catallaxians will be unsurprised to discover that this is, in fact, my fifth fellowship of this kind (the publication count above refers to my previous one), and that the previous four were all awarded by the Howard government.
Further update Sinclair Davidson has responded with a more complete list of his publications, including quite a few that appear neither on the IDEAS database (because it doesn’t include low-grade journals like Agenda and Policy nor on his personal webpage at RMIT. As I said above, it doesn’t change the relativities.
Yet further update Davidson has managed to convince the ever-gullible Andrew Bolt that pieces in Policy (not even ranked as a peer-reviewed journal by the ARC ranked C by the ARC), Agenda (ranked B) and a bunch of CIS/IPA publications constitute a stellar publication record. There’s nothing wrong with publishing in magazines like these (I do plenty of it), but it’s supposed to be a by-product of academic research, not a substitute for it. Bolt (innumerate, and out by two orders of magnitude on the impact of emissions policy), also repeats his claim that I’m the math-challenged one.
John Quiggin 
I am troubled that Prof Q is under attack. The contribution to public debate and education from this blog is apparently not acknowledged, despite all the recent talk about the need for “democracy and diversity” in this country (Sen Conroy talked about it today).
But there are measures, and I quote the grumpy observations of the WordPress man today as support: ” Over ten years and multiple blogs, you’ve built up thousands of posts, hundreds to thousands of commenters, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of comments.”
Good on you, PrQ. It sounds like Professor Davidson is getting fat on pork over at that august institution, the
RMIT.Also note how Judith Sloan slimes on board with this comment: “Two million dollars. You have got to be joking. What does this pay for? The ARC is basically corrupt and only left wing tossers get grants.”
As I’ve said before, the Cat has turned into poor white trash trailer park since Soon left.
Hasn’t the IPA always existed with secret CIA financial, and other, support?
Isn’t the CIA the ultimate waste of taxpayer money?
When was the last time Murdoch actually paid net tax in Australia?
I see Gillard has announced thousands of dollars to Murdoch’s “Idol” as some bizarro Australian cultural program. Peak Stupid seems unobtainiumable!
@Mel
What a mouth Judith Sloan has. She has described the Walkley Awards for journalism as a “union controlled racket”. http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/assange_wins_walkley_will_the_climategate_leaker_get_one_too/
Walkley sponsors include Aust Post, Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, JP Morgan, Foxtel, News Limited, SkyNews, CNN, BHP Billiton, Minter Ellison, Pernod Ricard Wines etc.
How does a person who lies so blatantly get to be put in front of a university class?
Actually that is untrue. His salary is paid by international students, not taxpayers. I’m surprised you don’t know that.
Or perhaps you do know…
Could Catallaxy be more pathetic?
It’s just sad to see Sinclair attacking somebody for being successful and putting forward conspiracy theories about his own lack of success.
I looked up Sinclair’s post on Cat. The first thought which came to my mind when reading his copy of the cut and paste excerpt was: Well, if I were to believe Sinclair, I’d have to accept Dr Merkel, the EU Commission and all academic and non-academic economists in the EU and elsewhere are following a “very radical program”. Then I read the original paper by our host, from which the excerpt was cut and pasted, and found he noted his proposed policy aims to prevent future GFC are broadly consistent with the policies of the EU (by implication Dr Merkel, the Bundesbank and all the serious academic and non-academic economists in the EU and elsewhere who have studied the nature of the problem of the ‘financialised form of capitalism’.)
I am not sure how I should phrase my conclusion about Professor Sinclair’s Cat post. The category label of this thread will do.
As Krugman always says JQ, if they’re attacking you it means you’re getting through to people. Keep up the good work.
seems to be a reflection on our times or maybe i’s the nature of humans
i was at a town meeting once – or maybe it was a party – i really could not tell the difference
first one person would stand, clear his/her throat, then launch a tirade of abuse at one of the other people – mostly these were insults about the other’s sexuality or business acumen or belittling of their achievements
the other would sit patiently waiting until the speaker had finished and then he or she too would stand and retaliate
most of it was in a language i was not familiar with but i did catch the sometimes frequent english phrases which were all pretty foul
i gathered from the way the audience reacted that this was some form of entertainment – after a particularly eloquent verbal attack they would clap and cheer the speaker for his or her cleverness
this went on for some time toing and froing from one person to the next
i was told that sometimes it might end in quite physical confrontations though this was frowned upon
afterwards, at the session i witnessed, they seemed to be all good friends with many people clapping others on the back and praising their skill at verbal abuse
the two most senior people had spoken long and effusively and i understood that their station in the village was partly to do with this skill
apparently they could write too
and one had been to university in one of the big cities overseas
i found them to be at the same time both quite charming and childish
after all, we civilized people don’t indulge i such behaviour
do we
po
kevin1, I wasn’t trying to come across as grumpy 🙂 I was trying to be helpful. I respect what John does, and certainly the time and hard work Jacques puts in to keeping all these blogs running. I also think WordPress is just as amazing a piece of software as I did 6 or 7 years ago.
I just figured it might be starting to run up against the wall a bit performance and reliability wise having Catallaxy, LP, Troppo, John’s own popular blog and others all running on the same server account with a version of WordPress (afaik, the free one) that wasn’t really designed for that purpose.
And was just trying to suggest a few options to avoid the crashes bringing everything down – some too expensive of course, others less so. Something else that has changed in the last 10 years, is that hosting is much cheaper now than it ever was. There’s less need to bundle multiple sites together under one account, and the same set of server processes.
Keep up the good work, John. And, I guess…yeah, keep up the good work Sinclair. Professional jealousy, and wishing others out of work and income because they hold political views Rupert Murdoch disagrees with – classy stuff.
Sinclair: “Judith – the ARC has funded me in the past. But not since 2007. Pure coincidence, of course. My last application went from being wait listed to being ranked in the bottom 10 per cent. Amazing how the quality of application rises with a change in government.”
The hallmark of the libertarian – they’re always whinging about missing out on something.
“C’mon government I hate, and make no bones about hating – where’s my money?! Give me the tax dollars!”
@Gab
Unis get their money from a number of different sources. There’s normally no explicit hypothecation of revenue like income from fees and HECS payments (if Sinclair has such an arrangement, I’m not aware of it). But it makes sense to regard that as funding the teaching part of a standard appointment, and the Commonwealth contribution (about 30 per cent of total uni income) as funding research, which is what I’ve done here.
Sinclair’s fairly meagre government-funded research output is worth noting but that he is not overly committed to this work allows him to be released to do important work for the IPA. There he can criticise those whose research relies on taxpayer dollars as well as promote climate denialism, the interests of the carcinogen producers and Gina. It is important to maintain perspective. We get good value for our tax dollars indirectly.
.
And he operates Catallaxy to promote civilized discourse.
very droll, hc.
JQ,
The numbers that you mention pretty much put the picture of productivity or lack thereof in black and white.
Sour grapes at the cat? Same as it ever was…
Irony alert on.
Prof. John Quiggin, you forget that the government billions paid to big business and its supporters are all “well-targeted business assistance”. Money paid to assist anyone else like sinlge parents, the unemployed, university students, or even grants to left-ish university academics, is egregious waste and pork barrelling.
The rich must be made richer and the rest (middle, lower middle and current poor) must be reduced to bare subsistence. Only then will the glorious empire of oligarchic capital reach its pre-ordained and mandated rule for eternity.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
Irony alert off.
John Quiggin’s position (I snatched from Australia’s worst site):
Sounds like National Civic Council economic policy from the 1960’s to me.
There is nothing Left about restricting or regulating or ‘democratising’ capitalism. Sloan and Davidson et al are barking at figments of their own imaginations.
Although I am gobsmacked by the quantity of funds given generally through ARC and similar channels given the problems of homeless and sofa-surfers in Canberra in the shadow of Parliament House.
As I recall, Sloan was a recipient of NBEET funding the overarching structure over the ARC under previous governments.
My good friend and collaborator, Jason Potts, has recently commenced an ARC funded Future Fellowship at RMIT. As yet, I have had no indication the Sinclair Davidson has been storming down the corridor to tell him he is wasting taxpayers money. As another commentator above has pointed out, these attacks by the likes of Davidson and Sloan are an indication that John is being perceived by them as a serious threat. But I’m not so sure that he should allow himself to be drawn into the propaganda war and allow himself to be portrayed as a ‘leftist’ instead of an independent commentator relying on evidence, not ideology.
I don’t understand academic protocols in relation to economics (I have a reasonable grasp of how it works in biological sciences), but I didn’t think an academic could survive with two articles in five years or more. Seriously, his RMIT publishing list , which I presume he curates, has nothing whatsoever on it in years, apart from some un-refereed opinion piece drivel at the Centre for “Independent” Studies. How does he manage to still draw a salary? Maybe he’s a truly excellent teacher?
Broken link above, meant to go to: http://www.rmit.edu.au/staff/sinclairdavidson
Nope, John q, what I said stands, Just because yiu don’t believe it doesn’t make you right, but snarl away – on my tax dollars.
Gifts from your mates in the Labor party.
$400,000 a year? You’re a leech. Have some self respect and get a real job.
Repec lists Pr Quiggin as 7th in Oceania for economics (could find Davidson), and UQ School of Economics at 4th (with the RSMG getting a second bite at =17th) . Embarrassingly, RMIT Uni didn’t even make it onto the institutions list.
http://ideas.repec.org/top/top.oceania.html
define “real”.
While I have no knowledge of John’s actual salary I suspect that the $400,000 includes one or two other coworkers @Yobbo
@Gab
International student fees are paid to the institution, not to lecturers.
Your blundering is illuminating.
Pr Quiggin’s funding is far more transparent than “Pr” Sinclair’s
http://www.arc.gov.au/ncgp/laureate/laureate_overview.htm
http://www.uq.edu.au/current-staff/index.html?page=180670
Hooray! It’s not a party til Yobbo arrives.
Brace yourselves for a deluge of hard facts from old Geocities websites that scream in big orange capitals about the menace of Jews and race-mixing.
Also note that the hard working, up-by-the-bootstraps entrepreneurs of Catallaxy have hours and hours on weekdays to hang around the internet complaining that no else does any real work.
IPA – slow learners,
Here is IPA’s Chris Berg, in 2010, finally admitting;
This was obvious in the 1960’s.
But even now IPA cannot bring itself to mention the Bay of Pigs.
Tsk, tsk, tsk.
oops, IPA is even slower…..
Berg only got to this point in 2012.
@Robert in UK
Indeed. Following Gandhi’s dictum, if Professor Quiggin is at the “then they fight you” stage, the next one is “then you win”.
Political Hacks end up working for the IPA for advocacy. These days this seems to be promoting grand conspiracy theories, criticism of science, propaganda for children, seeking independent research to support conspiracy theories (R squared in search of a correlation). Pretty much the credibility and brains of the Tea Party. Though like another dubious website that does mean they will be quite popular here. All in all it’s petty jealousy much like the rhetoric.
‘Yobbo’ and ‘Gab’ are clearly right wing trolls so I doubt that there is much point debating with them. But I should point out to anyone who might be taken in by their provocative comments that the Howard Government were very happy to approve John’s previous Federation Fellowship at a similar level of funding. Why? because he is a really outstanding researcher. No need for any conspiracy theories!
this reminds me of when i was an idiot child (yes i know,still an idiot)
out the back was a rather large meat ant nest.(about eight ft across)
when we were bored we would get big (for a kid) rocks and throw them onto the nest.
boiling out of the nest would come the enraged ants and the idea was to keep stepping back so that they couldn’t pick you up and take you home for lunch.
good fun.
(if anybody tries to make that into a computer game the idea is mine and i want money!)
the interesting thing is a few days later the rocks would have disappeared,the ants had buried them.
many moons later the ants nest is still there,development hasn’t reached that far and extinguished them.
maybe cattle axy are just part of the landscape,antish in swarms and easily avoided.
is there a lesson or moral in this?
i dunno.
you have to feel sympathy for sinkers.
He cannot read national accounts nor CPI publications. He doesn’t understand budget papers.
He has no idea of basic management accounting.
He seems to think ratios are all influenced by the numerator. Even when faced with a dictionary meaning he still doesn’t understand the meaning of the word predecessor.
Even when he predicts a fall in the TOT he thinks inflation will be produced.
Sinclair responds with his actual list of publications
http://catallaxyfiles.com/2013/03/14/starting-off-badly/
2008
Sokulsky, D., R. Brooks and S. Davidson. “Untangling Demand Curves from Information Effects: New Evidence from Australian Index Adjustments”. Applied Financial Economics. 18(8) 605 – 616.
Davidson, S. Fry, T. Farrell, L. and Mihajilo, S. 2008, “Contestability of Australian federal elections”, Australian Journal of Political Science, 43(3): 1036 – 1146.
Davidson, S. “Secret Econometric Business: Watching FuelWatch and the ACCC”. Agenda: A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform. 15(4) 5 – 18. (Lead article).
2009
Davidson, S. “A ‘no tax return’ scheme for Australia? Some inconvenient facts”. Agenda: A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform. 16(4): 67 – 79.
2010
Davidson, S. and H. Spong. “Positive Externalities and R&D: Two Conflicting Traditions in Economic Theory”. Review of Political Economy. 22(3): 355 – 372.
Davidson, S. “Should we worry about sovereign wealth funds?” Policy. 26(3): 37 – 41.
Davidson, S. “Imprudent lending and the sub-prime crisis: An Austrian school perspective”. Griffith Law Review. 2010, 19(1): 98 – 108.
Davidson, S. “Bankers and scapegoats”. International Financial Review. 11: 119 – 134.
Davidson, S. “The fatally flawed Resource Super Profit Tax”. Tax Policy Journal. 6: 21 – 27.
2011
Davidson, S. “Stimulusgate”. Agenda: A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform. 18(1) 5 – 11.
2012
Davidson, S. “The limits of property and freedom”. International Trade and Business Law Review. 15: 385 – 393.
Davidson, S. and R. Heaney. “Effective tax rates and the Political Cost hypothesis: A re-evaluation of Australian evidence”. Australian Tax Forum. 27(1) 79 – 105.
Davidson, S. “Treasury Forecasts of Company Tax Revenue: Back of the Envelope or Back to the Drawing Board?” Agenda: A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform. 19(2): 53 – 62.
Since 1991 I have published 66 academic papers at an average of about three per year. The last five years that is down to about 2.5 per year. What’s going on? Ah, yes. Book chapters.
Davidson, S. 2009. “Tax and Welfare”. In, Keith Windschuttle, David Martin Jones and Ray Evans (eds). The Howard Era. Quadrant Books.
Davidson, S. 2009. Climategate: A failure of governance. In, Alan Moran (ed.), Climate Change: The Facts. Institute of Public Affairs.
Davidson, S. and V. Ramiah. 2010. “The information-adjusted noise model: theory and evidence from the Australian stock market. In Brian Bruce (ed.), The Handbook of Behavioral Finance. Edward Elgar.
Davidson, S. 2011. The faulty arguments behind Australia’s corporate income tax. In, Robert Carling (ed.) Taxploitation II: Tax reform for incentive, productivity and economic growth. Sydney: CIS.
Davidson, S. 2011. Fiscal Illusions: How big government makes tax look small. In, Robert Carling (ed.) Taxploitation II: Tax reform for incentive, productivity and economic growthI. Sydney: CIS.
Davidson, S. 2011. Tax competition: Much to do about very little. In, Robert Carling (ed.) Taxploitation II: Tax reform for incentive, productivity and economic growth. Sydney: CIS.
Davidson, S. 2011. Good intentions versus self interest. In Andrew McIntyre (ed.), The Greens: Policies, Reality and Consequences. Connor Court.
Davidson, S. 2012. Tax and Transfers. In Gary Johns (ed.), Right Social Justice: better ways to help the poor. Connor Court.
I’ll leave it to other academic economists on the thread to say how a publication record like that would fly in a tenure application at their institutions.
Who needs tenure when you’ve got a river of donations from Gina Rhinehart pouring into your lobbying business?
Is an Australian Laureate Fellowship grant subject to income tax. Or is it tax free?
It’s not really a conspiracy theory, is it? It’s just that $400,000 is a ridiculous amount of money to pay any academic. It’s more than the Prime Minister earns.
I would be outraged if Sinclair was paid that much too.
When I said “Get a real job”, I meant one that isn’t paid for by the taxpayer.
I was under the impression that publications should incorporate original research findings. For anyone to propose these book chapters as serious academic work which should be regarded in the same light as scholarly journal articles is ridiculous. Unless of course Davidson sincerely sees no difference in the nature of the publications, which would be more than a little troubling.
Sadly the temptations offered by the internet and the proliferation of think tanks have seen many members of the professoriate abandon serious scholarship. Why put in the effort to do original research when you can just dash off a chapter about ‘Climategate’ or join independent scholars like Tony Abbott in writing learned essays about ‘The Howard Era’?
@Ken_L
There’s nothing wrong with publications like these, and academics should do more of them. But without original research to back them up, they are essentially just opinion pieces (cue Seinfeld quote here).
@John Quiggin
It’s not an impressive list, but this makes your fight with him difficult to understand. Why do you bother with someone who is so far below you on the academic totem pole? (Krugman does the same thing on his blog, having brawls with economists who in his day job he wouldn’t give the time of day to.)
If I were in your position, I’d just look down my nose at Sinclair and leave it at that, letting him know exactly where he stands, without needing to say anything. In my observation it’s a technique that can be used to devastating effect.
@Yobbo
$400,000 is less than very many senior bureaucrats earn
pop
@Yobbo
Yobbo, you need to pay closer attention. The $400,000 doesn’t just pay for John’s salary but people he employs, like the post docs. Universities often take a slice of these awards to pay for rent on office space, computers etc.
JQ explicitly states he does not personally ‘earn’ $400,000 a year from the Fellowship, or anything close to it. The terms of Federation Fellowships are available online after about 60 seconds Googling.
@Yobbo
Trolls always like to keep themselves safely anonymous when they are commenting on people who are honest enough to not hide their identities. I think is disgusting. But worse, they also do not take the trouble to check the facts (oops, when did propagandists ever worry about the facts?). Of course John doesn’t earn $400,000 per annum – the total sum is for his whole project, not his salary. Even a cursory check of the ARC website would have established this. But why I am responding to Yobbo at all, given my previous post? I guess the moral outrage just gets too much sometimes.
You must be new here.
Anyone who has been involved in Australian blogging for more than 2 years knows my real name. Try google.
Or even handily provided for Yobbo’s edumacation in this thread!
The point is, Yobbo doesn’t care to understand the finer points, he merely wants to make his point.
FYI Yobbo the PM is paid $495 000 a year.