Weekend Reading & Selected Links
Happy weekend! Here are some links to things I've been reading or watching that you might also enjoy:
- My new podcast episode, with Judith Brett. At the bottom of this email, I've included three excerpts from the conversation.
- 'The Last Decision by the World’s Leading Thinker on Decisions'.
- Andy Roddick interviews Rafael Nadal. Extremely interesting from 29:00 - 50:00.
- 'Australians now account for almost half of all punting positions on football teams at the 134 D1 US colleges'.
- 'Most Externalities are Solved with Technology, Not Coordination', very good new post by Maxwell Tabarrok.
- 'Getting the Picture', a paper by Robert Akerlof, Richard Holden and Hongyi Li.
- 'The Work of Chad Jones', new post by Nicholas Decker.
- Lavrov interviewed in English.
- 'Revealed: How the UK tech secretary uses ChatGPT for policy advice', a recent article by New Scientist.
- 'Preparing for the Intelligence Explosion', by Fin Moorhouse and Will MacAskill.
- 'The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent', 1993 article by John Mearsheimer.
- 'When it comes to submarines, Australia is going to be left high and dry', a recent article by Peter Briggs.
- I'll be in San Francisco for the next couple of weeks. If you'd like to meet up, reply to this email or DM me via X/Twitter here.
Have a great weekend,
Joe
Excerpts from my podcast with Judith Brett
1. The low taxation of the colonial era gave Australians a benign view of government
JOSEPH WALKER: Speaking of John Hirst, one of the things that I'd overlooked until I read your book was this second historical explanation for our Benthamite society, which I think John Hirst wrote about as well, and that is that for about the first 100 years of Australian history, the British government paid for our governments and taxation was accordingly pretty low here.
Whereas that was not the case in America; they had, you know, the problem of taxation without representation, and that inspired the Declaration of Independence.
So the attitude Australians developed towards government during the colonial era was that it was this sort of thing that just gave you stuff without really costing much money.
I was curious: of those two reasons—the Benthamite philosophy being in the air, so to speak, and then the low taxation environment—which one do you think weighed more heavily on our political culture?
JUDITH BRETT: Look, it's a bit hard to know because…W.K. Hancock, who wrote that little book called Australia in the 1930s, wrote that Australians look at government as a large public utility for the service of individual interests. The big problem of government being: yes, we need it for law and order, we need it to defend the borders, but we've given it this authority, but it's potentially coercive, and we have to make sure it doesn't coerce us... And we'd have to make sure it doesn't take too much of our property to pay for itself.
And as you say, because Australians weren't paying that much towards the upkeep of the government, and the government was essentially building a colony, so it was borrowing the money to build the infrastructure...
In America, the railways were put through by private enterprise.
In Australia, the railways were developed by governments. The land was sold by governments, and that's how they were raising money. They were raising money from the selling of the Indigenous people's land, essentially. But roads, ports, if productive life was to be possible in this new society, this new colony, well, then infrastructure was needed, and the infrastructure was provided by the government.
So, I think what that does is it means that there's a certain trust in government as potentially benevolent, rather than as potentially oppressive.
WALKER: Right.
BRETT: Which is the more influential? I think probably that latter, I would say. The fact that we depended on government for the development of the infrastructure and also a lot of migration. A lot of the migration was assisted migrants. The government helped them get here.
2. The two strands of Australian culture
WALKER: I want to test a more kind of fine-grained cultural analysis on you and get your reaction. So if I think of the dominant strands of Australian political culture, the two that stand out to me as being the longest running are first egalitarianism and second, our obedience to impersonal authority, which again was a point that John Hirst was famous for making.
The egalitarianism comes maybe from the fact that in the early days of the colony, there was a labor shortage, so workers had more power relative to capitalists than did their counterparts back in England. Another explanation might be that the gold rushes brought all of this immigration, which kind of shook up Australian society like a snow globe, remixed society, diluted hierarchies. But for whatever reason, we have this sort of long-running egalitarian strand.
We also have this other obedience to impersonal authority strand. I suppose the distinction here is between personal and impersonal authority. So Australians are just as individualistic and WEIRD (in the sense of the acronym, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic), as Americans are, but when it comes to institutions, we're very obedient.
And I think maybe those two strands were kind of consummated in the bureaucratic state, because to create and maintain an egalitarian society you need high levels of redistribution, and to have redistribution, you need a bureaucracy.
So that's my kind of armchair cultural analysis. Can you edit that or give me feedback?
BRETT: Well, the only thing I would say is bureaucracies are in many ways inherently... meritocratic if you like.
If you think of what are the 19th century radicals or reforming working class or the beginnings of the labor movement–what are they opposing? They're opposing a society in which people's status is fixed by birth, right? And people, and positions, posts, are distributed according to your personal networks.
Bureaucracies are impersonal. That's part of what they are. They run by rules... The bureaucrat administers the rules impartially, and it shouldn't matter whether that bureaucrat was your mother's cousin when you went to Centrelink, you know? He's not going to give you more money and he didn't get the job because he was somebody else's cousin, you know?
So there's something inherently democratic, if you like, in a bureaucracy because it's against a sort of status-based society. So in a way that sort of makes sense that it brings the egalitarianism and the bureaucracy together I think.
The thing that John Hirst said about Australians' egalitarianism though was that it was most obvious in our informality of manners.
3. Compulsory voting as an extension of Australia's majoritarian political culture
BRETT: [P]eople started talking about compulsory voting, putting up possibilities of it, in the Australian colonies in the late 19th century.
And the arguments were always that: that way the government would have the support of the majority of the voters, not just the majority of the people who turned up. What really struck me when I went through the parliamentary debates and I looked at some of the newspaper discussions, and letters to the paper, and there'd be reports of political associations or political leagues having debates about compulsory voting—how little attention was paid to the philosophical arguments against compulsory voting.
Hardly anybody raised questions about liberty or individual conscience or freedom or the sort of arguments that—many of you I'm sure have discussed this with people from the United States—that you would get there, with people who just think that compulsory voting is undemocratic, is illiberal.
Those arguments were barely there. The arguments about why it couldn't be introduced immediately were partly pragmatic ones about 'it'd be administratively difficult because too many people wouldn't vote'.
The Labor Party also was against compulsory voting until we had compulsory registration. Because it saw that as more important to make sure all of the itinerant workers and the drovers and shearers and people who might be away from home would be able to register and hence to vote...
...
WALKER: Just to underscore your point about how uncontroversial compulsory voting was when it passed: in the book you make the point that when the bill finally passes in 1924, it's preceded by about one hour of debate...
BRETT: Yeah. And one person votes against it, I think...
WALKER: Oh, really?
BRETT: One speech is made against it, and it's by somebody from the Labor Party who says... So this is 1924, right? So it's only six years after the end of World War I, where there'd been two very bitter debates about conscription in Australia. And this was a Labor man, and he was a very committed anti-conscriptionist, and he said, "I don't believe the state should be compelling us to vote, like I didn't believe it should be compelling people to go to war, to be conscripted." And then he said, "But I'm a member of caucus, so I'll vote the way the majority does."