Comments on: Advance Australia (un)Fair

By: sg

sg — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:20:52 +0000

Is it just me or is the second example in that wikipedia description of “ecological fallacy” actually a description of “confounder”, with the unobserved variable being proximity to the factory…? Obviously the first example is an ecological fallacy (people aren’t the same as their neighbourhood). But the second one seems to confound the discussion of fallacy with the discussion of confounding - a study which correctly adjusted for the position of the factories would still be subject to the ecological fallacy.

By: Klaus K

Klaus K — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:38:29 +0000

Yes, good points about C19th Liam, and you are right about the importance of the Australian settlement in C20th. Of course, part of what underwrites that colonial-era mobility of the C19th is dispossession, but the parallels in terms of a resource boom and the other things you mentioned make for an interesting comparison with the present.

By: Kim

Kim — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:21:27 +0000

That’s cool, Liam. I just thought there was a pretty manifest contradiction between the two poles of your argument - viz. that there wasn’t much social mobility under the “Australian settlement” but that was compensated for in various ways, and that there was a move from the Anglo-Celtic (forgiveness begged) male working class up the ladder over time. It starts to make sense if you distinguish between social mobility over the lifecourse of one individual and intergenerational mobility.

By: Liam

Liam — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:15:33 +0000

I hadn’t though of that but yes—intergenerationally, as the second and third generations of the Australian immigrants have tended to do better and better for themselves in the very late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
Though I hasten to add that my claims here are based on nothing but the basest of ludicrous generalisation and a-while-ago reading of admittedly dated Australian colonial history. How do economic historians admit ignorance again?
[flick, flick]
Of course as yet I’m not willing to state this conclusively, without a more comprehensive survey following a literature study.

By: Kim

Kim — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:09:21 +0000

The whole story of the Labour movement in this era is that of skilled but uneducated men (and almost only men) entering the professional/bureaucratic class.

Integenerationally, you mean, Liam?

By: Liam

Liam — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:06:18 +0000

Yes, your first statement is exactly what I mean, Kim, at least in the twentieth century.
In the twentieth century, Australians’ income and professional mobility was rare and difficult. In the nineteenth century, in the odd colonial space Australia was, there was great opportunity for a small number of people—immigrants from the right kind of place—to “improve” themselves, in terms of skill and income. The whole story of the Labour movement in this era is that of skilled but uneducated men (and almost only men) entering the professional/bureaucratic class.
I meant to take up Klaus K on this, about the nineteenth century.

By: Kim

Kim — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:56:04 +0000

I’m not meaning to be pedantic, Liam, but my recollection from the Western study was that it was very rare for individuals to move between less skilled and more skilled occupations during their adult lives, and the blue-collar white collar divide was very rarely crossed. Are you talking about the relative distribution of incomes maybe?

By: Liam

Liam — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:50:04 +0000

Why, objective, of course, Kim. I’m not that far gone down the dark path of Luvvieconomics.
I’m not a social scientist. At all, but that never stopped nobody from blog commentin’:
If the study by Western you’re referring to is from 1991, and I’m reading the same one you are, it tends to bear out my huge unsubstantiated generalisation: that the Australian settlement of white trade union bargaining tended to settle Australians’ mobility up-and-down classes within their society, in favour of a sense of fairness, at least until its dark bloody end at the hands of Paul Keating as Treasurer and Prime Minister.
Since the mid-80s we’ve been seeing a return to certain aspects of the late Australian nineteenth century: a general growth in income across the board thanks to resource wealth, an easing of any restrictions on absolute smacking fortunes being made by clever well-connected people, and (at least while immigration to Australia remains restricted) a shortage of skilled labour, at the expense of income equality.
Let’s see if it results in an outpouring of art equal to that of the 1890s through 1910s: I bags the role of that militarist ratbag CJ Dennis.

By: Kim

Kim — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:36:48 +0000

How would you define that? Marxist or Weberian? Subjective or objective?
Serious question though. My recollection is that the last big project seeking to analyse inequality by class - the Western et al thing from UQ - used an “objective” measure of class - basically according to occupational stratification - ie “managers”, “professionals”, etc. - using adapted ABS categories and found there wasn’t much mobility between occupational grade.

By: Liam

Liam — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:27:56 +0000

No, I suppose not. I really mean class mobility, and should get my terms straight.

By: Kim

Kim — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:23:08 +0000

Sorry, Liam, I’m not clear what sort of concept of “income mobility” you’re working with there - do you mean increasing income over the lifecourse?

By: Liam

Liam — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:19:44 +0000

I would be very interested to know how much income mobility there really is. The classic accounts suggest virtually none, even intergenerationally, but there is probably more now than a hundred, or even thirty, years ago.

Klaus, as I understand it in the historical view, from the 1850s through to the First World War Australia had enormous social and income mobility, greater by far than the mobility due to mining prosperity than we have now, at least within a relatively small ethnic group (native-born or UK-born Anglicans, Protestants and Anglo-Catholics). The great gain of Australia’s last thirty years in my view has been the extension of social and income mobility to immigrants from outside the UK and Indigenous Australians, and that, alas, is a quality left unmeasured in measurements of average income growth.
There is certainly more income mobility now than there was thirty years ago, but then thirty years ago the “Australian settlement” was still in force, settling a staid fairness at the expense of income mobility. Those things were then, of course, seen as irreconcilable aims.

By: Kim

Kim — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:37:34 +0000

Point taken, Anthony, but the methodology and caveats are noted in this NATSEM paper. I think there is value in looking at spatial inequality for at least two reasons:

(1) Many services are delivered geographically (ie health, education) and access to them may significantly change the life chances and social amenity of those on low incomes - that is, those who are favoured in terms of geographical access to services effectively get something like a social wage compared to those on the same incomes who are not so favoured.

(2) This of course is a value judgement, but it seems to me that Gregory’s point about social cohesion and the spatial distribution of inequality has some force.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:21:42 +0000

Kim, Bob Gregory and Boyd Hunter’s work on spatial disadvantage which you avert to - and generally I have the greatest respect for a lot of Bob and Boyd’s work - was, I suspect, even more fraught than NATSEM’s more recent work on spatial inequality. And they used more loaded language about ‘ghettoes’ which (wittingly or unwittingly) just reiterated underclass or ‘culture of poverty’ theories about, you know, too many poor people all living together reinforcing each others’ bad habits. Peter Whiteford did a good critique of their analysis, whereby he mainly focussed on the problems of crude measurements of spatial inequality which I have tried to raise here. I’m not saying there is no story to tell about growing inequality in Australia, just that the graph produced about spatial deciles might be a particularly opaque and problematic way of doing so, given the issues of spatial mobility etc etc I referred to earlier.

By: Kim

Kim — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:15:24 +0000

I wonder why NATSEM chose gross income, Chris? However, I suspect given the reach of income transfers into the higher deciles in this period, there would have been a relationship.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:05:12 +0000

Kim - I think the graphs are misleading if they are to be interpreted as the report and you conclude that they are indicative of changes in living standards. Net income which was not considered is much more relevant. As I mentioned in an earlier comment, just because the higher deciles may have had higher percentage increase gross income, doesn’t mean they ended up with higher percentage increase in net income.

By: Kim

Kim — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:56:28 +0000

Nor am I sure why the ecological fallacy comes into play here when the graphs are read in the context of the report’s discussion.

By: Kim

Kim — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:49:35 +0000

I thought it was clear from the post that the data was on spatial inequality. The reason why it’s worth focusing on spatial inequality is that it’s much more pronounced in Australia now than it was, and there are strong correlations between all sorts of outcomes that might contribute to social mobility and indeed current social and health outcomes and spatial advantage or disadvantage. Bob Gregory, I think, was the first to point out how much more important this had become in Australia as compared to the 70s.

By: skepticlawyer

skepticlawyer — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:42:26 +0000

Was waiting for someone to play ecological fallacy bingo, DD (although it’s a while since I’ve heard it called that).

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:07:59 +0000

Not really on topic, but that analogy shits me to tears. Tides lift all boats because they’re all at the same level in the first place!!!

Same water level, but some boats are taller than others