Posts by Daniel Barnes
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Stephen:
>Your reluctance to spell out these incentives you keep talking about is what makes me (and perhaps kowhai and Emma as well) suspect your motives.(sigh) Look, I may be guessing entirely wrong. Maybe everything is just AOK policywise, and couldn't be better. It's just that very often this isn't the case, so it's a good place to start poking around.
>Preventing the abuse of children by step parents is one policy consideration, and we need to balance it with the other ones that led to the introduction of the DPB in the first place.
Well, that's fine. Do you consider that this balance is being currently well achieved? If not, why not?
>Have you been living under a rock for the last 30 years?
Look, if you'd like to give a quick run-through of current policy and explain why it does not in fact have any of the problems I'm guessing at, then I'll be very interested in listening. This is the kind of discussion I'm talking about.
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Emma:
>Well, let's say that for some bizarre reason you'd decided step-parenthood causes abuse in and of itself.Hi Emma
The argument that step parenthood causes abuse in and of itself is not just any "bizarre reason." It's a powerful argument that comes out of evolutionary psychology; it's deductive conclusions turn out to be very well supported empirically across diverse cultures, which is the hallmark of a good scientific theory. Thus it is the exact opposite of the kind of "feckless" ideas Russell's article criticises. It is a very serious idea. You can read a bit more about it here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella_Effect
Kowhai:
>I take it that the DPB is your particular hobby horse but you are still not stating what you think should be done.No, it is far from my "hobby horse"! I know very little about the DPB and how it operates, and this is precisely my point: that the basic policy mechanism is one thing that gets almost zero airing in the media for public critique. Look, imagine you had cars that kept crashing and killing children, and the media spent all its time saying that to stop this happening, we need to redesign all the roads, or try and change our "culture of cars". Whereas a simpler technical policy change - like making wearing seatbelts compulsory - may make just as much difference or more much more quickly. Unfortunately this is not really the way the debate seems to be being conducted.
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I would also note that my suggestions above contain little or no racial or cultural distractions, and in principle would have explanatory power in Sweden as much as in New Zealand.
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Brent:
>But anyway, it is not the violence in games per se, that I am vilifying.As I say, I am sympathetic to this idea as it has some scientific basis. It's probably in there somewhere. Problem is no-one's sure quite where exactly, or how powerful the effect is.
Why don't we start with a few things we <i>do</i> have clear steers on? For example we do have evidence that step-parenthood is the highest risk factor for child abuse ever identified, by a factor of 40-100 times the biological norm even once corrected for co-factors such as poverty. We also have a pretty good idea of how incentives operate in a typical economy. What I don't personally know, but would be keen to see more widely discussed, is how well existing New Zealand welfare policy design stacks up against these strong arguments, both of which have good empirical and deductive support. It seems to me by combining these two facts, if you wanted to have a high rate of child homicide, you'd incentivise step-parenthood, and vice versa to lower it. Is it possible the current policy design contains some perverse incentives? If so, then these may be less complex to fix and give quicker results than, say, trying to regulate increasingly diverse, inexpensive and fragmented media outlets or undoing a "culture of violence."
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Michael:
>I do think money is a huge part of the answer.OK, well that may be. If that's the case, perhaps we should double the DPB after all.
Another important question might be whether the current NZ policy encourages step-parentdom or not. There is compelling research that a step-parent is 40 to 100 times more likely to kill a young child than a biological parent, even when additional factors such as poverty are taken into account.This is the well-known "Cinderella Effect." In fact step-parenthood is the strongest risk factor for child abuse ever identified (see Daly and Wilson, cited in Pinker, 1997).
While of course the vast majority of step-parents are good people who do not harm their children surely we cannot ignore such a massive risk factor in terms of policy design. How does the current policy address this, if it does at all, I wonder?
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Michael F
>Daniel you've bravely waged in bashing up solo women on the DPB. Even when presented with the evidence that this has nothing to do with the tragedy. I've missed it, could you reiterate you're valueble insight again?Hi Michael,
I'm not waging war against solo women on the DPB, and this particular case is not the only example.
I'd be happy to support radically increasing the DPB if some good arguments could be put forward that this would radically decrease such abuse.
What I'm noting is the moral posturing around the issue, mainly from the media, rounding up the perennial unfixables to indicate deep seriousness and sincerity, and the absence of much in the way of specific policy discussion. The late great Bruce Jesson lamented that if you spoke to the right about social issues their eyes glazed over, and the same thing happened when you talked to the left about economics and finance.
All I'm saying is why not start by examining the basic policy mechanics of programs like the DPB before leaping to big-picture solutions? Can anyone tell me where the system has been discussed in much detail by the media?
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Stephen:
>Now, which of those effects are going to be strongest? Yours or mine? I don't think that this thought experiment is helping at all.Well, ok. But it seems to me that wondering about unintended economic incentives to abuse children is at least a reasonable place to *start* unravelling the problem, no? If we're happy the existing policy is AOK, then we can move on. But are we? The discussion seems to be focussed around conveniently broad generalities. Colonialism may indeed be a contributor to the situation, but both its direct connection to child abuse, and exactly what kind of policy we might invent to overcome it in this regard is far from clear.
The same kind of arguments might be made, for example, about violence in the media. Mikaere Curtis made some comments earlier that I am sympathetic to in this respect. We are animals after all, and animals are programmed to learn by imitation, so it is a reasonable assumption that this is in there somewhere too. However, this is an exponentially more difficult problem to solve than a (possibly) poorly designed policy. (and I would say that compensating for the effects of colonialism is an order of magnitude tougher than that). My point is: where is the actual policy discussion? Perhaps we can improve the existing one and get better effects more quickly than with all these vague op-ed mega-projects, which we can get to once we're sure the simpler solutions have all been milked.
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kowhai montgomery:
[quote]I am not trying to overly critical of the poster, I was just curious about why he proposed this thought experiment and what he actually thought.[/quote]Well, most of the op-eds I've read seem to be heavy on the vaguely-well-meaning-but-practically-useless suggestions.
Ask yourself: which is the easier place to start:
1) examining and potentially correcting a particular policy, which may through poor design be contributing to the problem it is supposed to solve, or
2) trying to redesign a culture or societyI'd pick 1) as the place to start, personally...;-) And then if you're going to design a policy that has economic effects, you better start by making sure you've got the incentives pointing the right way, otherwise you are going to get perverse effects.
My guess is that on a simple model you'd get more child neglect if you doubled the DPB. This is because you would be adding incentives for people to treat kids as means, not as ends in themselves. So you'd see an increase in kids who are basically unwanted, and are subsequently treated as such.
I mean it's totally obvious the situation is nuanced and complex, and lots of other factors come into play around this simple engine. But sometimes simple models can help us at least begin to understand complex problems.
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rogerd:
The DPB is, I would assert, the worst possible thing to chop if you want kids out of abusive situations.
Thought experiment: let's double the DPB. What do people think would happen to child abuse rates? Increase, decrease, stay the same?
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Russell:
None of them seem unduly troubled by the fact that Nia Glassie's mother, Lisa Kuka, was not a beneficiary. She worked long hours in a kiwifruit factory in Te Puke; six days a week, leaving the house at 5am and sometimes not returning until 10pm. For $600 a week.
Well that's a great point. I didn't pick up on anyone saying this in all the reams of righteous bumpf that poured thru my mailbox on Sunday.
That said, I am open to the argument that current welfare policy may in fact have some design problems and have some bad unintended consequences. I can understand that, in broad principle, if someone wanted to maximise the financial benefit to themselves of something like the DPB, it would involve having as many children as possible, and neglecting them as much as possible. And indeed, this model would, albeit very abstractly and crudely, predict some of what we're seeing. The thing about looking at incentives too is that it also doesn't have any racial or cultural overtones, so it's not a bad place to start. Plus, tricky it is to redesign a particular policy, it's much easier than trying to redesign culture or society!
The other point missing from the overall Sunday commentary is that the DPB rates declined 5% last year. The explosion of media interest in the topic seems to create an equally explosive impression.