Wendy James posts the thoughts on public schools of pseudonymous teacher S. Whiplash, who says

If the figures are to be believed, increasing numbers of Australian parents are choosing to send their children to private schools. I believe this is happening totally – well, maybe not totally, but damn near – because parents are unhappy with the values being taught in public schools. Some of these values are taught overtly and some covertly. Either way, parents don’t like the values package on offer and are voting with their children’s feet.

As it happens, my opinion piece in yesterdays Financial Review (subscription required)was on this very topic, making the point that economists would look at the issue rather differently

Consider first the premise, shared by Howard and many of his critics, that the shift in enrolments from public to private schools must reflect increasing dissatisfaction with the public system. An economic appraisal suggests a much less abstract explanation.

Thanks to changes in Commonwealth government policy, subsidies to private education have been steadily increasing. Meanwhile the effective subsidy to publicly educated students has remained constant or declined in recent years. Standard economic analysis suggests that when a service is subsidised, its consumption will increase.

The analysis even works when comparing Catholic and other independent schools. Under Labor, the Catholic system received fairly generous assistance, but aid to the wealthier independent schools was limited. The Howard government has greatly increased aid to the wealthiest schools and enrolments have followed, with both government and Catholic schools losing market share in recent years.

From this perspective, in fact, the surprise is that the increase in attendance at private schools has been so small. In 1963, before the Menzies government began the provision of government aid to private schools, around 24 per cent of students attended non-government schools. After 40 years of steadily increasing public assistance, the non-government share has reached only 32 per cent. This suggests either that parental preference for non-government schools is very weak, or that the perceived advantages of private education have been declining over time.

I should observe that one reason for high attendence at private schools before 1963 was the effective subsidy provided by the voluntary labour of members of religious orders in Catholic schools. The gradual disappearance of this group and its replacement by lay teachers, paid out of public subsidies, has greatly reduced the differences between Catholic and government schools.

In my experience there is a close to 100 per cent correlation between the stated belief that society is suffering from a decline in “civility” and a willingness to proclaim that we are all being oppressed by “political correctness”. John Howard neatly illustrates this. A week or two ago, he was denouncing public schools as hotbeds of political correctness, and the excessive concern with offending religious minorities that (allegedly) led to the curtailment of Christmas celebrations. Now he’s calling for more civility.

The common analysis underlying both demands for “political correctness” (this actual phrase was never used, except jocularly as far as I know, until critics seized on it, but terms such as “sensitivity” or “inclusive language” cover much the same ground) and for “civility”, is that offensive words give rise to offensive acts. In both cases, there’s some ambiguity over whether the problem is with the offence to the recipient or with the reinforcement of the hostile/prejudiced attitudes of the speaker, but the central claim is that modes of speech are an appropriate subject of concern and that some form of government action to encourage more socially appropriate modes of speech, ranging from subtle pressure to direct coercion, is desirable. The only difference between the two positions is that they have different lists of inappropriate words.

I don’t have a sharply defined position on any of this, except that I find people who think that being “politically incorrect” is exceptionally brave and witty to be among the most tiresome of bores. I doubt that changes in speech will, of themselves, produce changes in attitudes. The obvious evidence for this is the rate at which euphemisms wear out and become as offensive as the terms they replaced (for example, ‘handicapped’ for ‘crippled’). On the other hand, I think there’s a lot to be said for avoiding offensive words and forms of speech and can see a place for (tightly drafted and cautiously applied) laws prohibiting or penalising various forms of collective defamation.

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Having finally managed positive earnings over a full year, Amazon shares have now acquired that most basic measurement of value, a price-earnings ratio. With shares at $53 and earnings of 17 cents per share, it’s a bit over 300 to 1, which suggests that perhaps the New Economy is not dead after all.

Thanks to the nice people at Copyright Agency Limited, I just got 77 cents in royalties on this article, reviewing Lawrence Lessig’s attacks on the extension of copyright.
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To Steve Waugh on being selected as Australian of the Year. Commentary on the award focused on the fact that Waugh was the third Australian cricket captain in a row to get it. The implied critique is that, if the award is thought of as rewarding excellence in some particular sphere, sport in general, and cricket in particular, get much more than their fair share.

My view on this is that, assuming the award is some sort of all-round commendation of a prominent Australian, Waugh is considerably more deserving than his two predecessors. His charitable work in India, and all-round good behavior seems to go well beyond the perfunctory good citizenship expected of sporting role models. I hope that Waugh’s award will set a high benchmark and that the committee (or whoever) will think long and hard before making another award based on nothing more substantial than a good batting average.

I’m not clear enough on the workings of the British Parliament to know whether Blair’s 5-vote win on the second reading of his education bill means that the political fight is over, but I thought I’d have my say anyway. The core elements of the bill are a substantial increase in fees, the right of universities to charge variable “top-up fees” and the introduction of a HECS-style repayment mechanism using the tax system. Thus it’s like a combination of all the education financing changes in Australia from the late 1980s, when HECS came in, to the recent Nelson package. Not surprisingly, I like some parts of it, and dislike others.

First, I’ll respond to other CT bloggers who’ve discussed this issue. Chris primarily makes the argument that, given that money isn’t going to come from anywhere else, or on any other terms, it’s better to take what’s on offer than to refuse on the basis that the terms are bad ones. I suppose I agree with this, but it’s not a helpful basis on which to discuss policy. Assuming you don’t want the Tories back, the same argument could be used for acquiescence in whatever policy Blair chooses to propose. Chris also dismisses concerns about variable fees, and I’ll return to this.

Daniel argues on risk grounds against the repayment mechanism (borrowed from the Australian HECS scheme) and, in my view, gets the risk analysis wrong. For precisely the reasons he outlines for not using NPV rules in assessing the effects of fees, the insurance implicit in the provision that no repayment is required until/unless earnings exceed some percentage of average earnings is considerably more valuable than he suggests. Assuming the proportion is set to give a level higher than the average earnings of non-graduates, it makes education a one-way bet. If you win, by earning more than you would have expected otherwise, you pay back some of your winnings. If you lose, you pay nothing. I don’t know what the actual proportion is, so I should stress that my support for the repayment scheme depends critically on this variable – in the absence of a high threshold substantial insurance, Daniel’s analysis is correct.

The critical sticking point, though, is not the level of fees but the principle of variable fees. If this provision had been dropped, it seems clear that the rest of the package would have passed fairly easily. The claim that these are not the same variable fees that were specifically excluded in the manifesto is nonsense, and the determination with which Blair and Clarke have stuck to them shows this.
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The idea of a magazine about the Internet seems strange at first sight, but the idea that the Internet was going to wipe out print media can now be seen as one of the popular delusions of the late 20th century, and if I can blog about what’s in magazines, there’s no reason why magazines shouldn’t run stories about blogging.

Internet.au (whose very limited online presence is here has done just that in its February issue, including quite a few comments from me. There’s a teaser about how “blogs are so dangerous they could get you into trouble with your work, the government … or your mum …”, but the article itself is quite sensible, except that a piece from the Onion on the last point is reported as fact.

Talking of slackness, I looked at my blogroll and realised that I’d failed yet again to include Chris Sheil’s excellent Back Pages. This time, I promise I’ll get it right.

I realised as I was going to bed that I’d failed, yet again to open up the Monday Message Board on time, though it is still Monday in Queensland, just. I can only plead that a long weekend does not get me into a Monday mood. As we all return to work, please vent your frustrations on any topic (in a civilised fashion and without coarse language, of course).

My summer holiday activities over the last couple of months included a lot of work on my music collection (I’m slowly transferring from vinyl to MP3/AIFF) and rereading Nick Hornby. So, I was naturally struck by how rapidly the skill of making compilation tapes, a central theme of High Fidelity has gone from the esoteric to the everyday. Not surprisingly, not everyone is happy about this. Joel Keller, writing in Salon, says

Putting together a home-brewed compilation of songs used to be an act of love and art. Now it’s just too damn easy to be worth caring about.

and much more in the same vein, though his conclusion is more elegiac than polemical

When making the decision between practicality and artistic merit, I’ll choose practicality more often than not. I may be wistful for the old days, but I’m not an idiot.

So let’s have a moment of silence, for the mix as we used to know it is dead. Technology has overtaken the experience and made it cold and impersonal. But it’s time to look forward, as the Internet has allowed us to trade and download more varied types of music, making for better-sounding, albeit more antiseptic, mixes. One of these days, Nick Hornby should do a sequel to “High Fidelity” and list Rob’s Top 5 music downloads. I’m sure it’ll be a nice read. But it just won’t be the same.

The first time I heard this form of argument, it was from my Grade 4 teacher, lamenting the arrival of the ballpoint pen, and its adverse effect on the quality of handwriting. Possibly since I never mastered the steel nib/inkwell technology still favoured by the South Australian Department of Education in the 1960s, I was not impressed. Since then, I’ve seen the same argument applied to calculators, word processing and desktop publishing. And of course, the argument wasn’t new when I first met it – in one form or another, it’s been applied to almost any technical innovation that replaces a complex skill with an easily usable machine. (It’s separate from the income-distributional arguments that apply when skilled workers are displaced by unskilled ones, although the two are often entangled).

Before defending modernity on this , let me extract what I believe to be the core of validity in this argument. If the production of an item requires substantial skill and effort, the average quality of the items produced will be higher. This is for the same reason as (I ahve been told) some Japanese stores giftwrap their fruit – given the cost of a piece of fruit, giftwrapping makes sense. If making a compilation tape at all takes hours of work, and requires skills that only a music enthusiast will bother to acquire, a lot more effort and judgement will go into the selection and ordering of the tracks, correction of the levels and so on, than if a 14-year old can put together a CD in five minutes, as is now the case.

Similarly, when WYSIWYG word processing first became feasible, it was asserted that the quality of writing declined because students were spending too much time on flashy presentation. While this possible, I suspect the truth is that the total input of time declined substantially. Students judged (probably correctly at first) that an essay that looked professional, contained no spelling errors and so forth would get by even if the content was pretty weak. Moreover, cut and paste made it easy to produce an apparently final version without rewriting. In this case, the problem is that those setting the essays wanted to elicit some amount of work from the students but (with the exception of those students who actually wanted to learn something) the student’s objective was to minimize the effort required to do the job. At least until teachers learned to disregard cues like good presentation, the result was a decline in average quality which (if you agree that Teacher Knows Best) made everyone worse off.

Another case where average quality declined with bad effects, following an increase in ease of use, was that of Internet newsgroups. These were useful forums as long as the skills and effort required to use them confined access to those willing to make serious contributions. When they became easily accessible (roughly when AOL merged with the Internet) the newsgroups were flooded with garbage. It’s only since the rise of blogging software that the old vision of the Internet as a forum for debate that could bypass media monopolies has reasserted itself.

In most cases, though, (including that of blogging) a decline in average quality is quite consistent with an improvement across the board, in the sense that more and better good quality outputs are produced, even while the average is dragged down by people who would previously not have produced at all. People like Sal Tuzzeo, quoted by Keller may sneer that

On the subways you see people with iPods. They have, what, a thousand songs on them. Ten thousand, even. They stare random-glared into oblivion. [R]obots with s***ty music taste and too much money to spend on music-listening hardware and shoes, in that order

but why shouldn’t people be free to follow their taste, s***ty or otherwise? Keller argues that

Fewer people who are connected to the music they listen to translates into a less critical and picky audience for the crapola that the record companies and radio stations promote. The quality of music overall goes downhill.

but, again, why should anyone care about average quality or what is promoted on radio stations? People who are critical and picky, but don’t have the time or skills to make compilation tapes, chase down obscure records and so on, now have a much better capacity to find and reward those who are producing it.

By the way, talking of innovation, this post was produced using Ecto, a blogging client for Mac OS X currently in version 0.2.1, but already a big improvement on anything else I’ve used. Thanks to Brad DeLong for the tip.

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