ARTS DEGREES AT AUSTRALIAN universities are predicted to cost more than fifty thousand dollars:

In practice, the legislation meant students wanting to study classical subjects such as history, politics and philosophy as well as communications faced fee increases of 113 per cent. It immediately increased the price of standard three-year arts degrees to above $40,000; next year, the cost will exceed $50,000.

To me this is a pricing error. You can see alternative prices set one of three ways. The first, which I favour, is that the cost to a student of a degree should be zero; and the benefit they get in the form of higher wages taken out in the tax system. Fine, socialism, got it. The second, which is the 'realist' position, is that universities are organisations in a market providing a commodity, which should be obliged to cover the costs of what they provide through fees to students who expect to enter into a middle-class career, rather than having those well-off kids provided for by the taxpayer. In this model, fifty thousand is still far too high: on a transactional basis, a three-year BA in no way guarantees entry into that middle-class career, much less the promise of a salary bump of >$50k (compared to not having a 3 year BA). Entry level positions need a good deal more these days than a three year degree.

Lastly, you can look at university humanities degrees as the continuation of private school education, which rather than the promise of entry into middle-class career, promise the exclusive entry into a class which has a hold on those careers. To some extent this reflects already the cohorts of students who have been studying those degrees for decades (and hence the 'wealth shock', of kids from public schools suddenly encountering these people, when they start uni). That university education really is the middle class's way of reproducing its own values has always been pronounced silently in policy.

But already existing high schools like Ascham and SCEGGS charge >$40k just for single years' tuition. These are the pipelines for the kinds of students who would be the market for >$50,000 arts degrees, since for them, the transactional benefit of education in future earnings has already been priced in to the private schools they've already attended. In this model, fifty grand for a whole degree is far, far too low. If this is the model of humanities education, along the lines of Oxbridge in the UK and the elite colleges in the United States, that ought to be expressed in the price, and allow universities to actually hire teaching staff accordingly!

Richard Jones, Soft Machines:

I agree with the Anglofuturists that we shouldn’t resign ourselves to our current economic failures. I think we need to ask ourselves what has gone wrong with the variety of capitalism that we have, that has led us to this stagnation. It’s a problem that’s not unique to the UK, but which seems to have affected the UK more seriously than most other developed countries. The slowdown seems to have begun in the 2000s, crystallising in full at the Global Financial Crisis.

Dave Karpf, UNCOUTH, 4 December 2024:

I have come to think of this as the hidden, unspoken ideology of our media and political elites. They behave, in word and in deed, as though what is most important is the protection and maintenance of the status hierarchy.

A thing is wrong and objectionable if it is uncouth — crass behavior that undermines faith in social institutions and the social order.

THIS USED TO BE a good blog, a food blog. What happened to that? I got a job, obviously, and the impetus to post food subsided. So here are the nori rolls I like to make on Fridays (in an exercise of quasi-Catholicism) after I go and get some fresh sashimi.

First, get yourself a can of beer and put it in your Broken Hill stubbie holder. This is a key element to the recipe. For this is about comfort, and the small euphoria of an end to the working week, with alcohol, salty-sweet food, and some delicious carbohydrates.

Wash, and make in your rice cooker, two cups of sushi rice. Mmm, glutinous.

Mix half a cup of mirin and some sugar and salt and mix it about in the rice. Let it cool down for an hour or so. Drink the can of beer, and start relaxing after the week you've had.

Now that the rice is cool, divide it into quarters. Roll out a quarter onto a square of seaweed, squashing it nice and flat, then roll up something in it. I like avocadoes and/or cucumbers, because I'm extremely boring and Australian.

WE LIVE IN AN age identified by meritocratic principles. Those aren't ones which describe the world as it is, since clearly the best people are not selected to the highest positions of privilege (I mean, look around), they're principles that describe the world as it ought to be, and which serve to justify what will be. The meritocratic model of the world is one in which it's the inequality of human achievements, intelligence, hard work, talents, that justifies the existence of inequalities of power and privilege, and which aims to exclude accidents of undeserved success. The meritocratic model says, good things should come to the good, and by implication, lays the judgement of failure on the failed. From here, let me introduce a seemingly irrelevant but actually critically relevant event: US President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden.

The Presidential power to issue pardons is a curious holdover from pre-modern ideas of what a sovereign is. In post-Roman Europe, the law came to be vested directly in monarchs, with the key virtue of the king or queen being their place as a political and legal head. Monarchs were ideally merciful, and were unequal parties in the law, judgements in this model went down. Kings pardoned, exercising arbitrary decisionmaking power, and the decision meant very little about the virtues of the pardoned, but a great deal for the worth of the monarch doing the pardoning. It did not go the other way. It was one of the key issues of the English civil war to what extent the King was bound by law or parliament at all, and modern legislation in Australia usually contains a clause 'binding the crown' because it used to be a very live question. Thomas Hobbes, stand-up-philosopher, wrote Leviathan in this context of English civil violence, and he picked human equality as the factor leading inevitably to bloodshed.

From this equality of ability, ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our Ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which neverthelesse they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their End, (which is principally their owne conservation, and sometimes their delectation only,) endeavour to destroy, or subdue one an other. And from hence it comes to passe, that where an Invader hath no more to feare, than an other mans single power; if one plant, sow, build, or possesse a convenient Seat, others may probably be expected to come prepared with forces united, to dispossesse, and deprive him, not only of the fruit of his labour, but also of his life, or liberty.

From here, if you are familiar, you know the story. Because the consequences of statelessness are so horrible, Hobbes proposes-justifies investing political and legal power in an absolute sovereign power which is not equal to humans, in fact not really human at all: in the State, which draws legitimacy from the decisionmaking it has to exercise on our behalf. From here, we've really got the basis of the modern regulatory State in all its glory, which acts as an indifferent sovereign, stopping us from civilly warring, judging our virtues, embodying (and Hobbes was disturbingly literal here) our laws. Hobbesian societies are utterly unequal in power between citizen and State; but they are fair, and allow for meritocratic ideas, and for the development of human flourishing.

WORTHINESSE, is a thing different from the worth, or value of a man; and also from his merit, or desert; and consisteth in a particular power, or ability for that, whereof he is said to be worthy: which particular ability, is usually named FITNESSE, or Aptitude.

For he is Worthiest to be a Commander, to be a Judge, or to have any other charge, that is best fitted, with the qualities required to the well discharging of it; and Worthiest of Riches, that has the qualities most requisite for the well using of them: any of which qualities being absent, one may neverthelesse be a Worthy man, and valuable for some thing else. Again, a man may be Worthy of Riches, Office, and Employment, that neverthelesse, can plead no right to have it before another; and therefore cannot be said to merit or deserve it.

Hobbesian States permit no competitive loyalties except to the State itself. But there is another tradition, that didn't die with the emergence of modern nations, which has its own very different concept of human inequality. These are client-principal relationships, relationships of patronage and support, of getting along, of mateship, and of honourable corruption. The tradition values loyalty, needs of institutions, strong networks of trust, staunchness and collective identity. It identifies worthy people not by their intrinsic virtues, like ability to pass set tests, meet KPIs, or display objective measurable qualities, but by their ability to display loyalty and group solidarity, to exhibit unmeasurable characteristics like courage (or servility). This tradition is absolutely opposed to meritocratic principles, seeing them as pious liberal hypocrisies, used to self-justify the existence of elites unaware of their own lack of other abilities.

Does this sound like a familiar politics in 2024? It should. At best, it's part of a basis for thick civic links and the production and reproduction of values over generations. At worst, it's grotesque and nihilist gangsterism. As I wrote then, it is the tradition of 19th and 20th century Australian municipal and State politics. It is obviously also the grand tradition in which personalist rulers like Vladimir Putin work, and its values were absolutely crystallised in the TV show The Apprentice, starring Donald Trump. The Boss is the centre of things, the object of decisionmaking, not its subject, he dispenses law and fires people, but he is also merciful, and pardons.

And so back to Joe Biden pardoning Hunter Biden. The President justified his use of the Presidential pardon on the---correct---grounds that the charges faced by Hunter Biden were politically motivated. Critics point out---also correctly---that this kind of use of sovereign power for family benefit smells of corruption. Family pardons are opposed to the notion that the Hobbesian sovereign can be a disinterested creature above the individual interests of families, or sects, or companies, but then, has it ever really been such a thing? Marxists have long pointed out that the modern State is a committee for the interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole. Disinterested sovereign power doesn't have many backers these days. But elitism run riot, as I've written, is a key result of meritocracy:

Friends don’t help each other, nobody does favours, and each deserved outcome is the best of all possible worlds. Because merit must be imagined as an individual capacity (or else commit the error of bell-curvy prejudice) here is no, can never be any, meritocratic ‘we’ of belonging, or ‘one of us’. As the result, the fact of ruling class political and economic power, increasingly obvious to insiders and outsiders, threatens the whole ideology.

What would it look like to return to supporting a disinterested sovereign, a healthy regulatory State, a rule of law? Certainly not in the kind of meritocracy that justifies only power, praising the virtues of the self-selecting 'best'. There's a third grand political tradition, in Australia as in the United States and elsewhere, that offers a way out, I think: anti-corruption.

THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT HAS released its Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill and it's not very good, and can't really work. But that's not what interests me about it. That this bit of legislation has been such a prominent part of the government agenda is, I think, a sign of a move away from Labor's role as a State party.

A 'State Party' is a political science concept.¹ State Parties are political parties in genuine multi-party democracies which have as their foundational interest the interests of the State in which they're constituted, and whose core concerns overlap with those of the State they're in, to the point that they're hard to imagine existing outside the context of that State. They rarely want to fundamentally change the political arrangements, but rather to manage power within existing ones. They're to be distinguished against parties with sectional interests (of workers, of a bourgeoisie, of ethnic/racial groups, of religious groups, or specific business or cartel interests) which are interests held against the State, parties that are the 'natural party of Government' which simply happen to win a lot, parties which have interests that cross States (like the early 20thC Communist Party, or pro-Russian parties in former Soviet countries), and State Parties of single-Party non-democracies (like the modern Chinese Communist Party which is older and more powerful than the PRC, or the Baath style shadow-parties any number of other sordid single-party Republics).

Australian Labor began as a sectional Party of workers and trade unionists, but around 1916-1917 for reasons which are beyond this blog post, switched to having, as its core interest, Australia; or at least its own vision of that. The modern Coalition is an amalgam of one State Party in the post-Menzies Liberal Party, and one smaller non-State sectional one, which has the 'regions' as its core interest. One Nation despite its name is not a State Party, but an ideological one at its (very incompetent) core. Clive Palmer's various bids have only his own business interest at heart. The Greens most interestingly are in tension: on one hand they're firmly in a tradition of anti-State activism, most comfortable in opposition to bad changes, but on the other they're representative of the genuine concerns of the regulatory, higher-education focused, expertise-led State, and their voters show it.

States which feature State Parties in their governance also tend to develop public service cultures in symbiosis with the political environment. Our various levels of public service are fiercely independent (mostly), but they all have a very keen sense of how to work with the different styles of government as they come and go. Yes, Minister. In the United States, with its two extraordinarily well-developed State Parties, there are almost two public services, who swap in and out according to the demands of the election winners... or at least, at the time of writing, watch this space.

Why is it interesting? A State Party succeeds because it's very good at leveraging the core competencies of the State in whose context it exists. Our State Parties have different ideas of what the Federal and State governments should do, whether it's infrastructure development, or free trade, or war, or whatever, but until now they've been extremely well-connected to the actual means of how these things, and haven't pushed the State to do things it's incapable of doing. The social media bill is a really glaring example of the use of State power for something that's simply unfeasible: there's a breakdown, I think, of Labor as a State Party understanding what is and isn't possible, and also of the public service, which must understand, being able to communicate to it. So what kind of organisation will Labor be if not a State Party? I have no idea.