Public ideas
Sex and politics
What does sex have to do with political polarization?
Quite a lot actually.
When we marry or form long -term intimate relationships, we tend to do so with people who share our political and religious values, and who have about the same level of educational attainment.
That is hardly surprising, but the strength of those relationships is demonstrated mathematically in a post on the ABC website by Inga Ting of the Digital Story Innovation Team: When it comes to modern love, how much do opposites really attract?.
She has delved into an academic paper Evidence of correlations between human partners based on systematic reviews and meta-analyses of 22 traits and UK Biobank analysis of 133 traits and presented its main findings in a simple bar chart in her article, displaying the extent to which partners’ traits and attitudes match.
Of 17 important traits and attitudes, “political values”, “religiosity” and “educational attainment” show the strongest correlations between partners. “Smoking status” is next, but other variables that may relate to physical attraction, such as height and body mass show much less correlation. The bottom three with low correlation are “agreeableness”, “neuroticism”, and “extroversion”.
In short, when it comes to the most meaningful relationships we make, these behavioural properties are much less important than the extent to which we share values. Their strength is high: a non-smoking Labor supporter would prefer to share his or her bed with a smoker than with a Coalition voter.
The study is based on heterosexual relationships, in a country (the UK) with far less social mobility than in Australia. It is about intimate-partner relationships: it does not necessarily reveal anything about the way we relate to close friends or work colleagues, but these relationships are at least partially shaped by some of the same basic drivers, such as the socio-economic status of the regions in which we grow up. The study from which Ting has assembled her article finds that people’s birthplaces are among the factors with the very strongest correlations, which means the study may be revealing something about the polarizing consequences of regional disparities.
Immigration and taxation – hard choices
The ABS has gathered a set of demographic time-series, and released them as a package: Historical population: demographic data going back as far as data is available. For the ABS that means it has used some data stretching back to 1902, just after Federation in 1901.
The ABC’s Ahmed Yussuf has delved into the ABS data and produced Twelve charts that show how Australia's population changed over 120 years. They tell stories of population growth, urbanisation, lengthening life expectancies, a changing ethnic mix, and our changing reproductive habits.
Our fertility rate has decreased from about 3.1 births per woman in 1921 to about 1.7 in 2021. Also women are delaying reproduction until they are in their 30s or older.
These are established trends. There has been media attention to a so-called “baby recession” noted by KPMG, which shows a sharp fall in births in big cities. High rents and high mortgage interest rates have had a disproportionate impact on people who are at an age when most couples have children, but this may be simply a temporary amplification of an established trend.
Yussuf’s charts tell a story of a country that has grown strongly and has been kept young through immigration.
That’s as far as his presentation takes us – and that’s a long way. Australia’s demographic history over the years since 1945 is extraordinary. For example, since 1945 the population of Australia has grown by 250 percent, compared with 150 percent in the US, 37 percent in the UK, and 20 percent in Germany, for example.
As a young country we have been able to sustain a reasonably high standard of government services on a low tax base. With our declining fertility, if we are going to sustain that pattern, we will have to continue with a reasonably high program of immigration.
Or we may choose to cut back on immigration and slowly join the ranks of other high-income “developed” nations, with an older population.
If that’s the path we choose, we will have to raise our taxes to the levels prevailing in those other already-older countries, if we are to maintain the standard of government services. Or if we don’t raise our taxes, we will experience even widening inequality, and declining standards of public health, education, infrastructure and community safety – the public services that support a country’s prosperity.
This is the public discussion we are not having. The government is muddling through, largely avoiding the issue, carefully shaping its budget projects to keep federal taxes below 24 percent of GDP. The opposition is far worse, because it is promising lower immigration and lower taxes. That’s a populist path to poverty.
Cancel culture in libraries?
National Library – a haven of liberal neutrality
Writing in The Conversation, Sarah Polkinghorne and Lisa Given, of RMIT University, describe the principle of “library neutrality”:
Library neutrality is a concept dating back decades that still prompts deep disagreement among librarians. Proponents insist the proper role of libraries is not to “take sides” on issues. Rather, to meet their mandates, libraries must focus on providing information that meets community needs, without privileging viewpoints, including their own. As defenders of neutrality point out, this includes protecting the availability of information that is deeply unpopular or offensive.
Surely that’s uncontentious in a robust liberal democracy.
But they have written their article in the context of the State Library of Victoria having cancelled a program of “teen writing bootcamps”. These classes would have exposed the participants to strong views on Israel’s war in Gaza. The library suggested that the cancellation was for safety reasons, but it has the strong appearance of application of “cancel culture”.
The article raises the broad question of what constitutes neutrality:
Given the challenges we face globally – from the climate emergency, to threats from disinformation and the need for sustainable development – many argue libraries must move beyond neutrality to acknowledge complex social issues and power imbalances, and help our communities navigate those issues.
Would this discussion be necessary if high school students were equipped with skills in scepticism and critical thinking?
How we value social media: maybe we see it as a liability
Writing in The Conversation Peter Martin explains the conceptual and practical difficulties in valuing social media: Would you pay to quit TikTok and Instagram? You’d be surprised how many would.
As he points out “social media is a problem for economists. They don’t know how to value it”.
This is a common problem for goods provided free at the point of consumption, which have been financed through taxes (traditional “public goods”) or through advertising, as has been the case for free-to-air broadcasting and is also the case for social media.
Economists’ normal approach is to rely on surveys, asking: “what would you be willing to pay to have this service if it were not provided free?”
That approach has its biases, but it usually results in a credible positive number.
But social media are different from free-to-air broadcasting. Like telephones, they are what are called “network goods”. A telephone is of no value to me unless my friends and those with whom I do business also have them and use them. So too with social media.
But what if I am overwhelmed with network goods – telephone, SMS, email, TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp … ? Maybe I would like to drop one or two of them to cut back on the interruptions and the time I have to keep checking. But I am also gripped by a fear-of-missing-out. It’s only my FOMO that keeps me connected. I would be far better off if my friends and business associates also disconnected.
Peter Martin is describing something economists have not so far incorporated into their models: the mathematical logic of network goods can produce a negative result.
Maybe Trappist monks have understood this for centuries.
More generally, his contribution is a reminder that assigning a value to any good or service is a difficult and imprecise exercise, because the value I put on that good or service is different from the value you put on it. We should be wary of all categorical statements of value, because they are always based on (generally undisclosed) assumptions.