How the left use the myth of the noble savage to keep black people poor

We are often reminded that levels of poverty across the world have fallen. We need to remember that the natural state of man isn't some sort of bucolic utopia but abject, brutal, painful poverty. Before the 19th century all but a fortunate few lived in absolute poverty, the sort of 'less than a dollar a day' subsistence that is still the reality for too many in Africa, Asia and Latin America. We also need to consider that we're not so very far from returning to that terrible past - read about the decade after WW2 or take a look at Venezuela today.

There are some people, however, who (as they would doubtless put it) challenge the neoliberal narrative of poverty decline. They are, I guess, the economics version of climate change deniers:

Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor.

What an idyllic description of life in Africa, India and America before bad people arrived. It's like one of those old romantic characterisations - the noble savage living a carefree life unconstrained by the hideous trappings of civilisation. From its progenitor in Rousseau through to Engels and other early socialists comes this idea that somehow man fell from a state of near perfection to a corrupt state obsessed with possessions. It is still found in literature (popular science fiction is riddled with it) and has a more troubling home in academia where it still exercises a malign influence on international aid strategies and policies.

At the heart of this argument, promoted by Oxfam as well as elite academics at top London universities, is the idea that people like subsistence agriculture (not the academics or aid workers obviously, just the darker coloured peasants). That those "robust systems of sharing and reciprocity" are in any way real. And that disease, famine, murder, rape and brutality aren't more typical of the noble savage's world. What's still more depressing is that rich white academics like Jason Hickel (whose article I took that Rousseau-esque quote from), living a lovely life among the western elite want to deny the opportunity for that life to poor black and brown people elsewhere in the world.

It is a ridiculous idea that, presented with the idea of faster travel, with piped water, with telephones and safe packaged food, people will choose to remain scraping at half an acre of garden with a blunt hoe. Yet Hickel - and so many of his fellow left-wing academics - persist with the idea that somehow there's a way to maintain the noble savage in their mythical perfection while allowing them to have (doubtless state funded) access to a few of those good things that are enjoyed by the western elite. We have an ideology so invested in opposing neoliberalism that it is prepared to use a myth, the noble savage, to justify keeping black people trapped in brutal, abject poverty.

....

The "phone a friend" approach to evidence in policy-making

****

When we read about evidence-based policy-making, we're encouraged to believe that the people doing this stuff are carefully sifting the academic literature, testing their ideas against the body of knowledge and exploring new approaches based on this work.

You'd be wrong - they're just phoning a friend:

Unsurprisingly, good relationships and collaborations between researchers and policymakers help research use. This is a common finding—we already knew that policymakers often prefer to get information and advice from friends and colleagues, rather than papers and journals. One consequence is that policymakers may take advice from academics they already know through university or school. In the UK, that tends to mean Oxbridge, LSE, UCL and Kings.

In our everyday lives, we seek advice from friends and colleagues; we don’t trust people who have been wrong before, or who seem to be biased – or with whom we just don’t get along. Exactly the same applies to the process of policymaking and, in our experience, in the process of research collaboration. Negative stereotypes abound on both sides, and our review found that personal experiences, judgments, and values were important factors in whether evidence was used.

Yes folks that thing you thought was evidence-based could well be just as partial as designing policy via an impromptu focus group over lunch in the Dog and Partridge.

....

Why we don't need an Evidence Information Service (but do need better access to evidence)

****

Whenever I think about evidence-based policy making and the use of data by government, my mind turns to an article by Dr Vince-Wayne Mitchell:

Demographic segmentation variables are cheap and easy to measure, while psychographic variables are more expensive and harder to measure, but can provide more insight into consumers’ psychology. Suggests that a prima facie case exists for the suitability of astrology as a segmentation variable with the potential to combine the measurement advantages of demographics with the psychological insights of psychographics and to create segments which are measurable, substantial, exhaustive, stable over time, and relatively accessible. Tests the premise empirically using results from a Government data set, the British General Household Survey. The analyses show that astrology does have a significant, and sometimes predictable, effect on behavior in the leisure, tobacco, and drinks markets. Discusses managerial implications of the results in terms of market segmentation and promotion.

Dr Mitchell is a very highly regarded researcher in consumer behavious and marketing and I've no idea whether he believes in horoscopes or not. But what these results tell us is that we should treat the findings of research studies with a degree of caution. Just because it's badged as science doesn't mean that it's right or that there isn't some other research telling us something entirely different, even opposite. Indeed we know that sometimes supposedly evidence-based policy is anything but:

In 1980, after long consultation with some of America’s most senior nutrition scientists, the US government issued its first Dietary Guidelines. The guidelines shaped the diets of hundreds of millions of people. Doctors base their advice on them, food companies develop products to comply with them. Their influence extends beyond the US. In 1983, the UK government issued advice that closely followed the American example.

The most prominent recommendation of both governments was to cut back on saturated fats and cholesterol (this was the first time that the public had been advised to eat less of something, rather than enough of everything). Consumers dutifully obeyed. We replaced steak and sausages with pasta and rice, butter with margarine and vegetable oils, eggs with muesli, and milk with low-fat milk or orange juice. But instead of becoming healthier, we grew fatter and sicker.

We see this problem repeated time and time again - governments enact legislation that draws on the scientific evidence, on the environment (diesel cars), in health (vaping), in criminal justice (tagging), and farming (agricultural protection) only for the results to be either sub-optimal or else for evidence to arise showing the policy to be plain daft. In part this is because evidence isn't definitive - in the case of fat, there were a different set of scientists who government ignored saying we should look instead at carbohydrates and sugar. And the same is true on vaping - the experts used by the World Health Organisation and European Union to support severe restrictions on vaping and the sale of vaping products are countered by another set of experts with a very different position who argue that vaping should be encouraged by public health not controlled.

The problem here is that these experts move from being producers of evidence to recommenders of policy. After all, when researchers write up their findings for publication they will be expected by the journal (and probably their funders) to comment on the implications of their findings as well as to describe limitations and the areas where further research should focus. The findings, however, don't necessarily tell us what the policy should be - we may discover, for example, links between high levels of sugar consumption and type-2 diabetes but this doesn't mean we have to introduce a soda tax. Other policy solutions - or none -  are available and just as valid.

This brings me to the proposal set out by Chambers et al in The Guardian, for a new Evidence Information Service:

Our idea is to create a hub for connecting a broad network (hive-mind) of UK scientists and researchers with the political community. At present, the knowledge and expertise of more than 150,000 UK scientists and academics is being underutilised. To ensure the smartest possible democracy we need to create the largest active network of engaged scientists and researchers in the world, and then we need to use it.

Superficially this seems a great idea - make it easy for politicians (and a slightly sinister grouping entitled "policy-makers", who presumably aren't necessarily politicians) to connect with the academic and research body of knowledge. The authors go on to observe that there's an imbalance in the information available - ministers have more policy-making resource than a back bench MP or opposition spokesperson. And, as the leader of an opposition group on a large metropolitan council, I can confirm that this is true. The question is whether creating this Evidence Information Service really improves the way in which policies are decided?

I think not. Indeed, I think there are genuine risks in the proposal were it to be implemented.

Firstly, the connection made for the policy-maker isn't a connection to the evidence but is a connection "with specialist experts in that field". Now it may be that these experts simply hand across their evidence to the policy-maker who goes off to craft his policy on painting bus lanes green or whatever. Or it could be that the policy-maker asks the researcher what his or her policy prescription is rather than just for evidence. It's also likely that confirmation bias kicks in - a left wing policy-maker might seek out or prefer evidence from a sympathetic source while ignoring evidence from a source that seems counter to that policy-maker's ideology (this, of course, applies to conservative policy-makers equally).

The second problem is that the proposed Evidence Information System creates valorised and non-valorised evidence. So evidence provided by the new system is 'good' evidence whereas evidence from outside that system is not to be trusted. And because the Evidence Information System is entirely about institutional researchers (academics, in effect) the value of independent research and evidence from outside that sphere is undermined. By way of example, the proposed new system excludes commercially procured research, good quality journalism (including blogs and websites), many think tanks and opinion polling. There is an assumption that only those "150,000 UK scientists and academics" are a valid source of evidence for policy-making.

Next we have the problem of ideology. By this I don't mean socialism vs neoliberalism but rather than policy-decisions are informed by ideological issues. To use vaping as an illustration, we can see two distinct ideological positions within public health and tobacco control. To simplify a little these are essentially Harm Reduction and Gradual Prohibition. This divide applies throughout, to policy-makers and to researchers. No amount of evidence showing how vaping reduces harm will persuade someone ideologically committed to Gradual Prohibition as the purpose of tobacco control. We can pull across this issue into any area of public policy - we encouraged diesel engines because they had lower carbon emissions but now pay a price as those engines have a negative impact on urban air quality and health. In the proposed Evidence Information System there is no safeguard, no means of knowing whether research is ideologically-framed (or more likely, how that research is ideologically-framed). And we can't assume that researchers - especially in social science fields - don't fall foul of confirmation bias or ideological preference.

Lastly we need to get some idea as to what we mean by evidence (knowing from the start that this is a very contested idea). On the one hand we have data which is just that, a great pile of information that, if we're not careful, throws up evidence along the lines of the Mitchell research I opened with. Without some form of analysis, data is pretty useless but which is the better route - giving policy-makers the tools to interrogate the data or getting that interrogation mediated by (possibly biased, perhaps ideological) academic researchers? We then have - especially since it is social science research that will dominate policy-maker enquiry - the issue of 'soft' evidence. Is a qualitative study gathering the views of 50 teachers on in-class discipline more or less valid than a big analysis of Ofsted reports in 1000 primary schools? And what about discussion, op-ed and speculation, where do these fit in - they're important to academia but do they form part of the evidence base?

I applaud the attempt to get better data, information and evidence in front of those who design, decide and implement public policy but don't think that an Evidence Information System as described is the way to proceed. If the issue is asymmetric access to evidence surely the answer is to get more open data and better (easier to use perhaps) tools for using that data. I also worry that the Evidence Information System would create a different asymmetry in access to and use of evidence by valorising only academic evidence. Finally, governments can and do lean too heavily on evidence in decision-making often, as anyone familiar with England's Local Plan process would attest, to the point of sclerosis or even stasis.

Policy-making will always be a balance between having enough evidence and the need to act. It has always been something of a cop out to say, "we need more evidence", when you actually need to do something. And the interest of voters will always trump evidence in the minds of people who are elected by those voters - this is why there's no comprehensive review of London's 'green belt' and why Australia scrapped its carbon tax. Finally, we need to remember that - remember the diesel engines issue - different policy area conflict and the policy decision is not simply a matter of looking at one set of evidence but rather at a series of sets that can point to radically different decisions.

There's a good case for better connections between researchers and the real world - not just politicians but business people, writers, charities and schools - but this proposal doesn't achieve this outcome and would create a service with limited access. Far better would be to negotiate a public library license with publishers making all that evidence - and the search tools needed to use it - available in every community and for every person.

....

Academic bias against conservative ideas is bad for society

****

And it's not just because conservative-minded folk have got better things to do than be sociology professors. There's a real bias against conservatism:

Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

O.K., that’s a little harsh. But consider George Yancey, a sociologist who is black and evangelical.

“Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black,” he told me. “But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.”

The heart of the problem is that, in a business entirely dominated by a left-wing - "progressive" - mindset, there is an inherent bias against any conservative outlook and especially a socially conservative outlook. As the article I quote above makes clear this is rationalised by those progressive academics belief in the wrongness of conservatism - “Much of the ‘conservative’ worldview consists of ideas that are known empirically to be false,” as we're told by one academic.

This ignorant outlook - and that is the only way to describe such a viewpoint - presents a huge problem by presenting students studying humanities, social sciences and arts subject with an ideologically one-eyed perspective. The result is a cohort of graduates who are unable to grasp that social conservatism is not simply gay-bashing, racism and making women clean behind the fridge. So when these students meet people who make choices to behave in a socially-conservative way they are bemused and muddled.

Just as importantly, the left wing domination of universities means that there is no real political discourse within academia, no argument and little challenge to the orthodoxies of socialism. The presentation of conservative, classical liberal or libertarian approaches to the study of society is done in the manner of a freak show - "here we have some people who are very strange and think some odd things, aren't they funny and don't we know better."

Even worse, the academics presenting a bias outlook simply don't consider that they are biased or ideological. Here's macroeconomist, Simon Wren-Lewis:

I think I’m like the majority of people in not having any fixed ideological position about whether the state should be large or small. The state is clearly good at doing some things, and bad at doing others. In between there is a large and diverse set of activities which may or may not be better achieved through state direction or control, and they really need to be looked at item by item on their merits.

What Wren-Lewis failed to spot was that his criticism of 'small state people' was entirely ideological - he is completely blind to this since he cannot encompass the idea that there is any intellectual credibility to conservative or liberal ideas. It is this bias that damages our intellectual discourse, leads to research that seeks out evidence to reinforce ideology, and results in lazy peer-review and junk science.

Our understanding of society is contested but much of academia seems unable to allow that contest to take place. It is pretty near impossible for someone writing from a right-of-centre perspective to get published in leading journals, unless they already have a secure position. It is equally impossible for that right-of-centre writer to secure the academic positions necessary to allow their view to be even considered worthy of examination or publication.

I don't see this as a threat to conservatism - most people discover conservative ideas when they get their first paycheck and see how much money the government has taken, when their children arrive at school to be faced with sand play and cuddles rather than reading, writing and arithmetic, or when they arrive home to face broken glass and gaps where electrical goods used to sit. Socialism may be lovely when we're young and want to change the world but life's realities are unremittingly conservative. It's a big shame that the people studying our lives seem not to think this.


The result is that a combination of bias, ignorance and ideological prescription results in policy proposals and strategies that miss entirely the real lived experience of the ordinary people those policies are aimed at. The 'experts' drawing up policies are unable to see that things such as personal responsibility and choice might be worth considering before we get to regulations, bans, taxes, controls and the creation of new agencies to 'address' whatever the latest problem might be. And those experts might like to forget the psychology of Heinz Kiosk and remember that we aren't all guilty.


....

Quote of the day - on teachers who blog and tweet

****

A quite superb little article from Andrew Old contains this gem of a paragraph:

But, of course, there are many reasons why teachers on social media might be worth listening to. Teachers work in actual schools, not theoretical ones. Some educationalists have not tried to teach a child in decades (sometimes never) and their ideas about how it should be done are pure fantasy. Teachers don’t have to follow an ideological line. Educationalists, by contrast, have a habit of signing up to doctrinal statements like this one. Teachers on social media are often actually trying to communicate a clear message. Educationalists are often just trying to prove how clever they are, even if it means saying things that are not understood. But most of all, teachers on social media have little reason to lie about educational issues. They are speaking to other teachers about things both they, and their audiences, encounter. By contrast, educationalists don’t even unanimously agree that telling the truth is a good thing even in principle. And don’t get me started on educationalists who claim to speak for teachers, claim that criticism of them is criticism of teachers, or who insist that they should have a place in a professional body for teachers.

The whole article is a brilliant challenge to the arrogance of academia. As such, it is a delight and relevant way beyond the field of education.

....

We shouldn't be surprised when right-wing politicians stop funding left-wing academics

****

The Japanese government isn't all that keen on social science and humanities - preferring what it calls socially useful subjects:

A recent survey of Japanese university presidents found that 26 of 60 national universities with social science and humanities programmes intend to close those departments during the 2016 academic year or after. The closures are a direct response to an extraordinary request from the Japanese government that the universities take “active steps to abolish [social science and humanities departments] or to convert them to serve areas that better meet society’s needs.”

Now I'm not here to defend what the Japanese government has done but rather to ask why, given the nature of these courses, we have got to the place where a national government can deem them less able to meet society's needs. All that sociology, social psychology, political science, literature and history is to be sidelined - I'm guessing for science and engineering, business and languages.

This comes on the back of the decision by the US Congress to pull funding for social sciences from the National Science Foundation:

First, in April the House passed a reauthorization of the National Science Foundation — the America Competes Act (H.R. 1806) — that cuts funding to the social sciences by 45 percent, even as it increases funding to the NSF overall.

The question here is again - why? It's easy for the establishment of social science academia to cry political foul - after all these are political decisions made on partisan grounds - but what they fail to appreciate is just how utterly loathed and detested much of their output is outside their narrow milieu. Frankly you can't expect the political right to support a set of academic disciplines that make it their business to argue that all conservatives are thick or that neoliberalism, capitalism or free markets are at the heart of all society's problems. The reason for this problem is simple - and I would support 'defunding' UK universities on this basis: the academic disciplines concerned are completely dominated by a left-wing, anti-conservative agenda.

While the authors’ political motivations for publishing the paper were obvious, it was the lax attitude on behalf of peer reviewers – Jussim suggested – that was at the heart of the problems within social psychology. The field had become a community in which political values and moral aims were shared, leading to an asymmetry in which studies that reinforced left-wing narratives had come to be disproportionately represented in the literature.

This example isn't a one off - the literature in sociology, political science, regional studies, and psychology is entirely dominated by a set of left-wing ideological certainties. And researchers cannot - if they want to get published, secure funding or advance an academic career - step beyond this narrowly defined world. It's easier to be a Stalinist communist in most social sciences than a moderate conservative. Until this imbalance - this sustained bias - is addressed, I see absolutely no reason why a conservative would want to support funding social science 'research'. What is remarkable is that Conservatives and conservative-led governments have continued to fund academics who both despise those conservatives and have the means to promote an anti-conservative ideology through their academic discipline.

If social science faculties want to protect themselves better, they should look to their own central failing - an almost complete capture by the ideological left. Until this happens the value of the disciplines within those faculties will continue to decline in the eyes of everyone but those immersed in that part of academia or else entirely wedded to illiberal, anti-democratic and oppressive left-wing ideologies.

UPDATE: Another article setting out the egregious bias and misrepresentation in social psychology concluded:

I think reform is urgently needed because I think there’s a significant risk that the field will be defunded within the next few years. I urge social psychologists to take this risk seriously. In the US, we have a funding monoculture that is largely dependent on a couple of US government agencies. If most of our findings are false, I think policymakers will question why taxpayers should fund our work. There is also strong evidence (PDF) that the field discriminates against non-leftists and conservatives — this alone may prove disastrous for us, especially since the field has taken no action to prevent such discrimination.

....

So most academic research is pointless?

****

This was really striking:

In his new book “Higher Education in America,” former Harvard president Derek Bok notes that 98 percent of articles published in the arts and humanities are never cited by another researcher. In social sciences, it is 75 percent. Even in the hard sciences, where 25 percent of articles are never cited, the average number of citations is between one and two.

We are conducting research because the system says you must research. We are publishing - and supporting a vibrant academic publishing industry - simply because we're measuring performance on that basis.

We privilege academics as specially clever people but the reality is that many of them spend their time doing things that serve no real purpose, conducting research that no-one (bar the journal editor and the academic's mum) will read about.

...

I've discovered why there aren't any right-wing sociologists. Lefty academics are biased.

****

Well pretty close to that - these are social psychologists:

Inbar and Lammers (2012) found that most social psychologists who responded to their survey were willing to explicitly state that they would discriminate against conservatives. Their survey posed the question: "If two job candidates (with equal qualifications) were to apply for an opening in your department, and you knew that one was politically quite conservative, do you think you would be inclined to vote for the more liberal one?" Of the 237 liberals, only 42 (18%) chose the lowest scale point, "not at all." In other words, 82% admitted that they would be at least a little bit prejudiced against a conservative candidate, and 43% chose the midpoint ("somewhat") or above. In contrast, the majority of moderates (67%) and conservatives (83%) chose the lowest scale point ("not at all").

And the same went for assessing grants and reviewing papers. What really saddens me in all this is that these biased lefties - 'liberals' in American-speak - are completely destroying the relevance of their discipline. When reviewing anything written by most social scientists (economics being the possible exception), you have to assume that the the research is skewed by a prejudged left-of-centre ideology.

I've said before that the sociology department that sets out to recruit a group of centrist or right-of-centre thinkers is going to clean up on breaking new ground in the subject.

....

Maths and social science...

****

The research methods lecture for my MSc sticks in my mind. Not just because I have a curiosity about different research methods and their rationale but also because the lecturer told us not to worry about maths, indeed that she wasn't any good at maths.

Sadly, the results of such wilful ignorance look like this:

"Not many psychologists are very good at maths," says Brown. "Not many psychologists are even good at the maths and statistics you have to do as a psychologist. Typically you'll have a couple of people in the department who understand it. Most psychologists are not capable of organising a quantitative study. A lot of people can get a PhD in psychology without having those things at their fingertips. And that's the stuff you're meant to know. Losada's maths were of the kind you're not meant to encounter in psychology. The maths you need to understand the Losada system is hard but the maths you need to understand that this cannot possibly be true is relatively straightforward."

In the social sciences (and this is psychology among the most maths rich of these disciplines) the use of maths appears almost discouraged - we're told about qualitative research, how it gives greater insight and understand than mere number crunching. And, when someone comes up with a complicated quantitative explanation of everything ("The Spirit Level" springs to mind as a good example here) the legions of non-mathematicians leap upon the research with glee and excitement. Sadly, what they can't do is explain the maths.

It is a deceptive idea that we can call something 'science' - even with the qualifier 'social' - and then pretend that it can be studied without a reasonable degree of competence in maths and with research methods based on experiment, empirical study and data analysis. This isn't to dismiss qualitative studies - I used to be Planning Director in an ad agency, I love a nice focus group - but to say that, for all their value, such methods simply aren't science.

....

Possible predatory open-access publishing and public health...

****

A couple of days ago I wrote about a piece of research published in a journal called "Food & Public Health" and written by authors including one Dr Ricardo Costa from Coventry University. I commented:

Nothing in the research suggests that Jamie, Nigella and Delia are making us all obese with their glorious culinary temptations. The authors however make a huge leap from these temptations to suggest that these wicked TV chefs are affecting our food preparation habits (again without any evidence) and that they are, as a result:

...a likely hidden contributing factor to Britain’s obesity epidemic and its associated public health issues.

Yesterday, while talking with Cullingworth's resident academic publishing guru, I mentioned that "Food & Public Health" was an open access publication. Kathryn's response was to wonder whether this journal - an its publisher - was on Jeffrey Beall's list of  "Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers". I'd never heard of this list but it's a consequence of the open access publishing model:

This is a list of questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. We recommend that scholars read the available reviews, assessments and descriptions provided here, and then decide for themselves whether they want to submit articles, serve as editors or on editorial boards. 

Beale (who is an American academic librarian) provides a comprehensive list of the criteria he uses to determine whether the publisher or journal is included on his list.

"Food & Public Health" is published by Scientific & Academic Publishing, a publisher that is included on Jeff Beall's list. To indicate part of the problem check out the guidance to authors on review:

You may suggest information of some particularly qualified reviewers who have had experience in the subject of the submitted manuscript, but who are not affiliated with the same institutes as the contributor.

So in effect you can certainly influence - and maybe even pick who'll review your paper. But it gets better:

You may also submit a list of reviewers to be excluded. 

So any academic who might disagree can be excluded from the review process - hard to see how this is open and transparent publishing. Letting authors direct or influence review is, quite simply, a recipe for bad science, ideological capture of academic disciplines and the exclusion of challenge. Precisely the problem we see with public health.

What we can't determine from the publisher website is the publication fee - remember that in an open access academic publishing model the cost of publishing shifts from user (or user's institution) to author (or author's institution). The typical open access charge is $3000 to publish an article so we can assume that Dr Costa - or Coventry University or the Heart of England NHS Foundation trust - paid a charge of this sort to have the article published.

What some predatory open access publishers do (although we don't know this is the case for Scientific & Academic Publishing) is, in effect, spam academics to get material for publishing. This takes advantage of pressures to publish, especially for academics in less well-known institutions. Worse still, the journalist (say at the Independent) probably can't distinguish between this sort of predatory publishing process and processes of higher quality. With the result that ideological and weak articles such as Dr Costa's get the same credence as articles in established subscription publications - to that journalist it's all "academic publishing".

....

How academic public health deceives us...

****

But the most significant aspect of this story is that the paper is reporting a conclusion based on data which demonstrate the opposite. The paper reports that heart attacks declined after the smoking ban, but the data show that heart attacks did not decline after the smoking ban.

Yes folks, that our public health folk - the facts don't fit what you want? Just ignore them!

....

Why are there no right wing sociologists?

****

Or for that matter academics in social policy fields?

In one respect this is a 'ha ha ha' sort of question - of course there aren't any right wing sociologists, it's all a load of lefty rubbish after all! But I ask in all seriousness because studying 'society' and developing policies reflecting social concerns and challenges is an important area of enquiry.

And it is overwhelmingly left wing - here's a tweet from Peter Matthews who lectures in social and community regeneration and stuff like that at Heriot Watt University:

I'd suggested that the discipline might benefit from actively recruiting people with a world view that isn't 'left wing' - conservative, libertarian, classical liberal, voluntarist. People whose default position isn't to blame it all on the evils of neo-liberalism or who say (to polite murmurings of assent from peers):

"This article argues that the cuts continue a thirty-year process of redistribution to the rich."

None of this is to say that academics shouldn't believe such nonsense but rather to assert that sociology and social policy would be better for seeking a better balance across the political spectrum - to join the real world rather than live in one where the most right wing opinion is just to the left of the current Labour leadership. The idea that the 'disciplinary basis of social policy' should be left wing explains why so many of us - despite caring deeply about social concerns and public policy issues linked to those concerns - find sociology and 'social policy' to be a load of biased lefty trash not worthy of consideration.

Not that this little jotting in a blog read only by the occasional aficionado will change any thing but perhaps sociology would benefit from some right wing thinking, a few conservative pebbles in its leftist sandals?

.....

No surprises here then...

****

Among full-time faculty members at four-year colleges and universities, the percentage identifying as "far left" or liberal has increased notably in the last three years, while the percentage identifying in three other political categories has declined. The data come from the University of California at Los Angeles Higher Education Research Institute, which surveys faculty members nationwide every three years on a range of attitudes.

Sadly the article doesn't explain how academics got so removed from common sense!

....

On the Elsevier boycott...

****

...and why it isn't working. This is from Exane BNP Paribus on the LibLicence ListServ:

* Noise around boycott against Elsevier offers short term trading opportunity

Reed Elsevier was the worst performing media stock last week. We believe this is due to investor concerns on the back of T. Gowers' petition to boycott publishing and refereeing in Elsevier's journals. We believe the share price reaction was overdone and recommend buying the shares.

* Scientists are boycotting the boycott

Similar petitions in favour of Open Access were organised in 2000 and 2007, with no impact on Elsevier's fundamentals. Our tracking not only shows that this latest petition lags behind the two preceding ones but also suggests that its momentum is slowing. Fewer than 5,000 scientists have signed up, whereas Elsevier works with more than 6m scientists worldwide. The low take-up of this petition is a sign of the scientific community's improving perception of Elsevier.

* Open Access unlikely to hurt financials in the medium term and is priced in

The proportion of Open Access is growing at less than 1% pa. Elsevier's contract lengths are getting longer and the company's growth efforts are focused on new products rather than pricing. Open Access is unlikely to hurt Elsevier in the next five years and the longer term risk is more than priced in, in our view

The killer line in that for me is that Elsevier works with Six Million authors - those "protesting" make up less that 0.1% of that base. And since studies show that 90% of academic researchers are satisfied with their access to the research literature, the whole spat just seems more like an annoyance that something that will lead to journal publishers changing their business models.

....

Educating future lawyers...

****

Let me introduce you to Dr Ian Grigg-Spall:

Dr. Ian Grigg-Spall is Director of Studies of all undergraduate law courses at the University of Kent, and solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales. He also acts as the liaison officer with the English Law Society and Bar. He taught previously at the University of Cambridge, and at the Boalt Hall School of Law, Berkeley, California.

And - courtesy of Samizdata:

The Left needs to defend the riots; not to valourise the burning of grannies’ cars, but to make clear that we reject the whole bourgeois construction of events, that we stand in solidarity with the oppressed and that, when it comes to it, we will, without hesitation, join the “rioters” to overthrow the legitimised exploitation, state-sanctioned violence and sham “democracy” that oppress us all.

Hey, I might be wrong but I bet he went to public school!

...

All very pretty, such a lovely graph - but where's the evidence?

****

The Centre of Local Economic Studies (CLES) does itself no favours when it allow comment on economics - complete with graphs and snide remarks about Ronald Reagan - that have no evidential support.

This piece on "Voodoo Economic Development" sets out its left-wing stall early on:

Simple Reaganomics was focused on a ‘having your cake and eating it logic’, which was brilliant in its simplicity, namely that a lowering of taxes would improve the economy and lead to more tax revenues. 

Now there is evidence for that - indeed the article refers to the Laffer Curve. And there may be evidence to support the article's contention that:

...in many places we still need significant and hefty interventions.

It's just that the author - one Neil McInroy - fails to present us with any of that evidence. And its accompanying graph appears to be merely a pretty representation of the writers opinion rather than something with an evidence base. All we have is fine - slightly lefty - words.

Yet this author gets before parliamentary committees, gets high profile places in national publications and leads a significant think-tank. And is unable to provide any link to the evidence supporting his argument for more of the same in regeneration.

Awful.

...