RSSS Theme events for 2007

The 2007 major Theme Conference 'Governing by Looking Back: How History Matters in Society, Politics and Government' held 12-14 December 2007

Conference papers

Mon 5 Feb: 8.30am-5.00pm, Innovations Building Theatre
Conference on
'The Economics of Teacher Quality'

Speakers include:
Eric Hanushek (Stanford),
The Market for Teacher Quality (with Steven Rivkin)

Ken Rowe (Australian Council for Educational Research),
Conceptualising and Evaluating Teacher Quality: Substantive and Methodological Issues (with Lawrence Ingvarson)

Chris Ryan (ANU),
How and Why has Teacher Quality Changed in Australia? (with Andrew Leigh)

Gigi Foster (University of South Australia),
Teacher Influence on Student performance and Selection in Broad-Spectrum Tertiary Education

Hamilton Lankford (Albany),
Teacher Attrition, Teacher Effectiveness and Student Achievement
(with Don Boyd, Pam Grossman, Susanna Loeb and Jim Wyckoff)

Jonah Rockoff (Columbia)
Predicting Effective Teaching: Evidence from New York City

contact AndrewDOTLeighATanuDOTeduDOTau

Wed 14 Feb: 9am-1pm, Coombs Seminar Room B
Workshop on 'Deliberative Democracy & Preference Transformation'

Speakers include John Dryzek (ANU), Simon Niemeyer (ANU), Claudia Landwehr (Hamburg), Kasper M¿ller Hansen (Copenhagen)

(with related seminars by: Landwehr 13 Feb, 12.30-2pm, Coombs Seminar Room F: Hansen 19 Feb, 12.30-2pm, Coombs Seminar Room D; and Hansen, 26 Mar, 12.30-2pm, Coombs Seminar Room D)

contact Bob.Goodin@anu.edu.au

Mon 26 Feb, 2-5pm, Menzies Library McDonald Room
Workshop on 'The Australian Census: History versus Privacy'

Speakers Terry Hull (ANU), Kim Rubenstein (ANU) and a representative from the Australian Bureau of Statistics

contact Tim.Rowse@anu.edu.au

MONDAY 26th MARCH
3.30-5.30PM
ROSS HOHNEN ROOM, CHANCELRY BLDG

THE QUALITY OF WELFARE STATES: HOW AUSTRALIA COMPARES

How well do the institutional arrangements that countries have put in place to govern the welfare of their populations actually perform?

How well off are Australians compared to citizens of some of the Western nations?

And how well are public policy researchers able to answer these questions

Professor Frank Castles
Not All Social Expenditure Measures Are Equal
Using OECD comparative data, Frank Castles shows that, if our ultimate welfare state quality criteria are low levels of poverty and inequality, not all social spending is equal. High levels of public spending and high taxes on public spending deliver higher quality outcomes than private spending and low taxation.

Professor Deborah Cobb-Clark
Will We Know 'Quality' in Social Policy if We See It?
In Australia, as in many other countries, there is increasing interest in understanding the effects of social programs and public policies. While academic researchers are working to assess the strengths and weaknesses of alternative evaluation methods, policy makers are turning to the results to provide the foundations for evidence-based policy. This talk will discuss how we can begin to develop a deeper understanding of how well social programs actually work.

Professor Bob Goodin
Looking at Welfare State Quality Through the Lens of Time
In assessing people's welfare time, matters as much as money, as is emphasized in recent discussions of 'work-life balance'. Goodin and his colleagues on a recent ARC project have attempted to recalibrate the contribution of different countries' public policies in temporal terms. In this paper Goodin will report how Australia compares to other countries in increasing people's 'discretionary time'.

Moderator:
Professor R.A.W. Rhodes, Director RSSS

Public & Private Reasoning Theme
Research School of Social Sciences
College of Arts & Social Sciences
Special Seminar

Friday 16 March 2007
3-5pm
Spark-Hellman Theatre 2, ANU College of Law
Fellows Road, ANU

"What Ifs" in Theory and Practice

Richard Ned Lebow

Ned Lebow is James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. His book The Tragic Vision of Politics (CUP 2003) won the Alexander L. George Prize for the best book in political psychology of its year. His talk draws on his recently published book, coauthored with Phil Tetlock and Geoffrey Parker, Unmaking the West: "What-If" Scenarios that Rewrite World History (U of Michigan Press, 2007).

Response by Daniel Nolan

Daniel Nolan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham, having previously been Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at St. Andrews and Allen and Anita Sutton Distinguished Faculty Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Syracuse. His book Topics in the Philosophy of Possible Worlds was published by Routledge in 2002.

RSSS THEME SEMINAR
Monday 30 April 2007
3.30pm-5.30pm
Ross Hohnen Room, Chancelry, ANU

The End of Monetarism
Dr William Coleman (Reader, School of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Commerce, ANU)

The recent death of Milton Friedman provides an occasion for a retrospect on the Monetarist episode. The paper uses this occasion to analyse the episode as case study in the power of ideas in economic policy.

The paper argues that the rise of Monetarism provides a good test of the ‘power of ideas’ as its core - the Quantity Theory of Money - is located at the centre of the ‘economic way of thinking’, and was in sharp conflict with the practices that dominated anti-inflation policy in the mid-century. The paper contends that this conflict precluded any adoption of Monetarist tenets until the inflationary crisis of the mid-1970s made for the rapid and total displacement of older practices. These contentions are corroborated by the local response to Monetarism, and are underlined by Milton Friedman’s two visits to Australia. This apparent ‘triumph of ideas’ was, however, undone by the experience of the subsequent decade that revealed how fraught was the rendition Monetarist doctrine into policy. The paper records how Monetarism was soon supplanted by a (now universal) policy regime that in several of its elements - especially the desirability of Central Bank independence - was completely antithetical to Monetarism. How much this successor regime constitutes a ‘triumph of practice’ is a moot point, as its origins are indistinct and mixed; and include both theoretical developments, as well as near-accidents of personality.

Further details: Contact Andrew Leigh (Email: AndrewDOTLeighATanuDOTeduDOTau)

RSSS THEME events May 2007

Monday 28 May 2007
3.30pm-5.30pm
Ross Hohnen Room, Chancelry, ANU

'Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Indigenous Crime'

In recent times, the media has focused attention on domestic violence in Indigenous communities, but many other aspects of crime remain largely ignored. Drawing on the perspectives of history, economics and law, the discussion will ask: what can social science say about these challenges, and how might policies be better crafted to address them?

Speakers:
* Boyd Hunter, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research
* Tim Rowse, History Program, Research School of Social Sciences
* Jennifer Clarke, College of Law

Moderator:
* Peter Radoll, Director, Jabal Indigenous Higher Education Centrep Further details: Contact Andrew Leigh (Email: Andrew.Leigh@anu.edu.au)

Public & Private Reasoning Theme

The Epistemology of Experience: Friday, May 25 2007

Location: National Europe Centre, ANU

A one-day workshop on 'The Epistemology of Experience' will be held at the Australian National University on May 25, 2007, organized by the Philosophy Program in the Research School of Social Sciences.

The focus of the conference will be on the epistemic role of experience, particularly as this connects with issues surrounding basic knowledge. Speakers will include Carrie Jenkins, Jim Pryor, Nico Silins, and Declan Smithies.

Attendance at the workshop is free, but both lunch and morning/afternoon tea will be provided, so if you plan to attend please e-mail Daniel Stoljar at dstoljar at coombs.anu.edu.au by Monday May 21, 2007.

June 2007
Public & Private Reasoning Theme

Friday June 15 2007
Sparke Helmore Lecture Theatre 2, ANU

Phenomenology and Intentionality

The focus of the conference will be on the relationship between the phenomenal character and the intentional content of conscious experience. The schedule will be as follows:

• 10am-12pm Susanna Siegel (Harvard) Do Experiences Have Contents?
• 1:30pm-3:30pm Adam Pautz (ANU/Texas) The Intentionality of Phenomenology
• 4pm-6pm William Lycan (North Carolina) Phenomenal Intentionalities?

David Chalmers

Mon 25 June 2006
3.30-5.30pm, Ross Hohnen Room, Chancelry

'Tricks of the Argumentative Trade'

'Tricks of the Argumentative Trade'
'Philosophical Heuristics'
Alan Hajek (Philosophy, RSSS, CASS, ANU)

Chess players typically benefit from mastering various heuristics: ‘castle early’, ‘avoid isolated pawns’, and so on. Indeed, most complex tasks have their own sets of heuristics. Doing philosophy well can be a very complex task; are there associated heuristics? I find the grandmasters of philosophy repeatedly using certain techniques, many of which can be easily learned and applied. Some are pointers to where good arguments, or good counterexamples, may be lurking. Some suggest ways of generating new arguments from old ones. Some are heuristics for creating new arguments from scratch. Some provide self-defence against fallacies. These various techniques can especially help philosophers to be self-critical: they help us spot problems in our own work before others all too helpfully spot them for us. And many of them generalize beyond philosophy, providing inoculations against poor reasoning, wherever we might find it, or improving our own reasoning, whatever our purpose.

I will identify many such techniques, each illustrated by numerous examples. Topics to be discussed include (time allowing):
- definite descriptions;
- arbitariness, and multiplicity of candidates for some philosophical job;
- self-undermining positions;
- reflexivity and self-reference;
- extreme and near-extreme cases;
- the 'proves too much' strategy (which, I argue, proves too much).

'Argumentative Tricks in Politics and Journalism'
Morag Fraser (The Age)
Politicians and journalists use many argumentative and rhetorical techniques, some of their own devising, others thrust upon them. This talk will survey a field of examples from the media and politics - from the ways and means of factual communication to ‘spin' - and take an occasional detour through historical precedents and prescriptions.

Themes Seminars
July 2007
PUBLIC & PRIVATE REASONING

Speakers:

• Stephen Stich (Rutgers),
• John Doris (Washington, St. Louis),
• Joshua Knobe (N Carolina),
• Frank Jackson (Princeton/ANU/LaTrobe),
• Michael Smith (Princeton),
• David Chalmers (ANU)

Subject: the relationship between the experimental study of intuitions and reasoning and the use of these intuitions in conceptual analysis - how studying the public aspects of reasoning sheds light on private intuitive reasoning. Contact: Máire Ní Mhórdha, maire@coombs.anu.edu.au>

July 19 - F H Gruen Lecture

5.00pm Thursday July 19 2007
Venue: Haydon-Allen Tank Lecture Theatre

Quarantining Australians’ Welfare Income: Lessons from the U.S. Professor David Ribar, University of North Carolina

MONDAY JULY 23 2007
2.00-5.00PM
MILLS ROOM, CHANCELRY

Speakers:

• Jon Altman (The Australian National University)
• Ian Gray (Charles Sturt University)
• John Gray (Anthropology, University of Adelaide)
• Daniela Stehlik (Curtin University of Technology)
• Carolyn Morris (University of Canterbury)

Ruralism and the limits of neo-liberalism
In many nations, including Australia and New Zealand, rural communities have had to contend with the global extension of market-based social and economic policies. Their self-understanding as 'families' and 'communities' have been challenged by governmental social imaginaries in which they appear as incipient or actual entrepreneurs and enterprises or as unreconstructed pockets of subsidised, rent-seeking inefficiency. Succeeding generations of rural dwellers have been invited to identify with either their rural heritage, with the winds of change, or to contrive their own compromise between the two. In Australia there have been two versions of this clash.

One has featured non-Indigenous practitioners of various forms of agriculture. Public policy in the past secured their land base cheaply, ensured their access to relatively inexpensive finance, and stabilised the markets for their produce. It was widely assumed that there was a sympathetic relationship between the norms of kinship and of productive efficiency. There has long been a market-based critique of this form of 'rurality', but it had a strong political defence. The advance of neo-liberal approaches to property, finance and trade has strengthened the political challenge to these Australian rural institutions and ways of life, in the last thirty years.

The other clash has emerged more recently. Over the last forty years, Indigenous Australians have lost their position as a rural labour force, and become owners of a large proportion of the Australian land mass (around 20 per cent). There have been large variations in the pace and the extent of this shift from being labourers to being land-owners. One of the most striking instances of this shift was the decentralisation of the remote Aboriginal population, a shift made possible by changes in land tenure and by the entry of remote Aboriginal people into the Australian welfare state. In recent years this rural transition has come under sustained critique by policy intellectuals who argue that this rural reformation has produced 'ghettos', a 'lost generation', a socially unviable economy propped up by public subvention. These critics seek the social inclusion of remote Aborigines as bearers of human capital, as private home-owners and as commercially-oriented owners of natural resources - transitions that require public policy to intervene in new ways in the social reproduction of remote Aborigines.

The purpose of this symposium is to bring into the one framework of discussion these two instances of embattled rurality (or of rurality in transition?).

Special seminar, jointly sponsored by the RSSS History and Philosophy Programs, the Centre for Consciousness, and the Public and Private Reasoning theme:

Jessica Riskin (History, Stanford University)

"Mechanical Christs, Hydraulic Brutes and the Invention of Consciousness"

Friday 13 July, 2pm, Seminar Room E, Coombs Building

Themes Seminars
August 2007
PUBLIC & PRIVATE REASONING

6 August

Democracy Tracking the Truth Workshop

Speakers: John Deigh (Texas), Tom Christiano (Arizona), Wlodek Rabinowicz (Lund), John Dryzek (ANU), Bob Goodin (ANU); replies David Estlund (Brown)

Subject:  Estlund is one of the leading scholars of deliberative democracy, and especially its epistemic virtues in tracking the truth.  He has written a book on that which is bound to become a landmark in the discipline.  Having begun the book while on a Harsanyi Visiting Fellowship in SPT, RSSS, he is now coming back to workshop the full text of a near-final draft of the book.

Time/Place:  9-5, Seminar Room B, Coombs Building

Contact:  Bob Goodin Bob.Goodin@anu.edu.au

8 August

Jack Smart Annual Lecture

Speaker: Philip Kitcher ( Columbia ), 'Ethics after Darwin '

Time/Place:  4-6pm, Law Link Theatre, ANU College of Law

Contact:  Di Crosse < dicrosse@coombs.anu.edu.au>

10 August

Public Lecture on Knowledge & Democracy

Speaker: Philip Kitcher ( Columbia )

Time/Place:  4-6pm, Coombs Lecture Theatre

Contact:  Di Crosse < dicrosse@coombs.anu.edu.au>

22-23 August

Reasons, Reasoning and Rationality: Themes from the work of John Broome Workshop 

Conference co-organisers
- Nic Southwood (RSSS) - < Nicholas.Southwood@anu.edu.au>
- Daniel Star (CAPPE) -

Description
John Broome, White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford, is a leading figure in contemporary moral philosophy. The purpose of this conference is to bring together leading philosophers to engage with themes from his recent work on the nature of (practical and theoretical) normativity, reasons, reasoning and rationality.

Venue
The Chancellery Building, ANU

Registration
Attendance at the conference is free. However, if you plan to attend and are outside the ANU, please e-mail Nic Southwood or Daniel Star.

Conference Dinner
There will be a conference dinner at 7:30pm on Thursday 23 August. The cost will be approximately $50 per head. If you plan to attend (whether inside or outside the ANU), please e-mail Nic Southwood or Daniel Star.

Schedule
WEDNESDAY AUGUST 22 (Ross Hohnen Room, Chancellery Building)
10:00 - 11:15 Jamie Dreier (Brown): "Subjective Reasons and Buck-Passing"
11:15 - 11:45 Morning tea
11:45 - 13:00 Nicholas Southwood (RSSS): "The Normativity of Rationality"
13:00 - 14:30 Lunch
14:30 - 15:45 Andrew Reisner (MacGill): "Why Rational Requirements Are State Requirements"
15:45 - 16:15 Afternoon tea
16:15 - 17:30 Wlodek Rabinowicz (Lund): "Modelling Parity and Incompatibility"

THURSDAY AUGUST 23 (Mills Room, Chancellery Building)
10:00 - 11:15 Geoffrey Brennan (RSSS): "Meta-ethics out of Economics"
11:15 - 11:45 Morning tea
11:45 - 13:00 Daniel Star (CAPPE): "Reasons: Explanations or Evidence?"
13:00 - 14:30 Lunch
14:30 - 15:45 Garrett Cullity (Adelaide): "Reasons and Decisions"
15:45 - 16:00 Afternoon tea
16:00 - 17:30 John Broome (Oxford) "Response"

25-26 August

Philosophy of Biology at Dolphin Beach 2

Speakers:  Christian List (LSE); Ben Kerr (U Washington ), Peter Godfrey-Smith (Harvard)

Subject:  Exploring the structural parallels between evolutionary theory and social theory.

Contact:  Kim Sterelny kimbo@coombs.anu.edu.au

STEPHEN DOVERS
The Fenner School of Environment and Society, ANU
KAREN HUSSEY
The National Europe Centre, Research School of Humanities, ANU

MONDAY 27 AUGUST 2007
ROSS HOHNEN ROOM, CHANCELRY
3.30-5.30PM

Australian water policy and management are undergoing rapid and immense change. Responding to drought, technological advances, climate change and demographic and economic shifts, the 2004 National Water Initiative and 2006 Australian Government water policy statement propose a fundamental shift in how Australians will use and manage water in the future. These directions are broadly supported, but agreeing a new policy agenda is only the start and now that reform agenda must be implemented, by national, state and local governments, by water users, by industry, by catchment authorities, and by Australian citizens and consumers.

The implementation of the national water policy presents many challenges - the creation of water rights and markets, comprehensive water planning, new legislative settings, community participation in water management, linking urban and rural water management, and more. It is also evident that the challenges in implementing the NWI are exacerbated by Australia’s federal system of government, the different systems of management in each of the States and Territories, the different sets of legal arrangements in each of the States and Territories and the limited capacity of the Commonwealth to deal with the management of water resources.

In this seminar, Hussey and Dovers draw on the themes presented in their book, Managing Water for Australia: the social and institutional challenges, and identify the major challenges in achieving sustainable water management and in particular the crucial role of the social sciences in furthering water reform and ensuring the successful implementation of the national water policy.

Discussant: Professor Quinten Graftons (Crawford School) and Professor John Wanna (Political Science, RSSS CASS)

28-29 August

Emotions, Morality, Co-operation in Evolutionary Context Workshop

Speakers:  Ben Kerr (U Washington ), Jesse Prinz (U N Carolina), Shaun Nichols ( Ariz ), Peter Godfrey-Smith (Harvard), Richard Joyce (Sydney/ANU), Kim Sterelny (ANU/Victoria Wellington )

Subject:  Exploring the evolutionary bases of human emotions and morality.

Time/Place: 9am-6pm 28 Aug, 9-4.15 29 Aug., Lecture Theatre, Innovations Building

Contact:  Richard Joyce < rjjoyce@coombs.anu.edu.au>

 or Kim Sterelny kimbo@coombs.anu.edu.au

Themes Seminars

December
PUBLIC & PRIVATE REASONING THEME and
COMPARATIVE PUBLIC POLICY AND GOVERNMENT THEME
Research School of Social Sciences/College of Arts & Social Sciences