I echo Possum’s congratulations. While LP bloggers have certainly disagreed strongly with Andrew at times, in my view his combination of talents and interests are potentially a big asset to the Labor Party and the country. I personally wish him all the best, even tinged with disappointment that his opportunities to speak his mind publicly will diminish.

That said, I do have to wonder how often evidence-based policy is going to crash into the the need for politically expedient policy-based evidence.

Australian journalists are close to the centre of the political spectrum, but their editors are more likely to take a party line, according to new research from The Australian National University.

The study, conducted by ANU economist Professor Andrew Leigh from the Research School of Social Sciences and Melbourne Business School economist Professor Joshua Gans, used a number of different approaches to measure ‘media slant’ in newspapers, radio and television.

Professors Leigh and Gans used three approaches to test for media slant; reviewing media mentions of 100 public intellectuals, rating election stories and rating newspaper headlines. The researchers found that although most media outlets showed no significant slant in reporting, there were some notable exceptions.

“In terms of content, Australian journalists seem to be a centrist bunch”, said Professor Leigh. “Using the first approach, only one out of 27 news outlets had a significant slant. This is ABC Television News, which had a significant slant towards the Coalition in the period 1999-2007. All other outlets (including six ABC radio stations) were essentially centrist.

I can’t say that the findings about the pro-Coalition bias of the ABC television news are greatly surprising to me, though they seem to have ruffled some right wing feathers.

The full paper can be accessed here.

For not-so-surprising reasons, I’ve been thinking lately about lifecycles. My AFR op-ed today (partially written with a newborn babe in the crook of my arm) is on age and creativity.

[The prompt for his reflections, by the way, is explained here.]

Leigh’s piece reports, inter alia, on the work of the American economist David Galenson. Galenson has developed a binary typology of two forms of innovation – conceptual and experimental. Interestingly, this classification is applied to both economists and creative artists; and a taste of what he’s getting at is easily discerned from this excerpt:

What marks a conceptualist from an experimentalist? In art, Galenson distinguishes conceptual artists (Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch) whose work aims to communicate specific ideas and emotions; from experimental artists (Edgar Degas, Wasily [sic] Kandinsky) whose ideas are vaguer, and often regard the artistic process as a journey.

I don’t know about that. Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art has recently been republished, and it’s freely available online. It seems to me either a gross simplification, charitably, or just empirically wrong to suggest that his ideas are vague. I’d also want to quibble, I think, with the other visual artists cited, and I suspect some holes could be shot in the application of the typology to other artists in different forms named.

That’s the problem with a binary classification – it sacrifices explanatory depth for conceptual neatness, because it accentuates some qualities but forces far too many phenomena into a polarised typology that’s just too simple. It’s not difficult to make the obvious point that Galenson might have been better off doing a little more experimental work before leaping into the conceptual. It’s also a bit difficult to see the connection with the later arguments made about shifts in the type of knowledge produced over the life course, and it’s completely unclear what critical judgements underpin assertions such as “Kandinsky painted his best work around age 50″.

There is some fascinating humanistic work published about shifts in style in the creative arts over time and with age. For instance, in classical music and literature, Edward Said’s very interesting and suggestive On Late Style. I’m not sure what underlies the assimilation of the work economists do to that of creative artists, but sadly, I think once again we’re seeing – in Galenson’s oeuvre – the all too predictable results of an imperialistic profession which – far too often – simply refuses to credit the work of other disciplines and knowledges. All too predictable, and not very creative at all, but more exemplary of this big a Age than Galenson himself would probably credit.