There is a lesson here for Australia. Policy decisions need to be based on good research. One of the depressing features of the recent election campaign in Australia was the almost wilful neglect by both parties of the available evidence on issues such as climate change, immigration and population policy, refugees, crime and taxation. Let me give one example. The Gillard government’s ‘cash for clunkers’ program (the proposal to give people with old cars a $2000 payment towards the purchase of new, more fuel-efficient cars) overlooked three facts known to anyone with any expertise in the area. The first is that the relative success of the program in the United States depended on the fact that its car industry was in crisis. Cash for clunkers in the States was a version of our $900 stimulus package. The second is that making cars has a carbon cost. The third is that people with new cars drive more (fancy that). The latter two points mean that encouraging people to trade up is probably bad for the environment.

My remarks in the previous paragraph are a little unfair. During election campaigns, politicians have no choice but to play to their constituencies, to pay attention to the views of people in marginal electorates, even when they are deeply irrational, and to buy some votes. Above all, they need to make things sound simpler than they are. But I am not being totally unfair. As many have said, things got beyond a joke during the recent federal election campaign. What is more, the picture outside of election periods is not a pretty one. The standard of public debate on vital policy issues in Australia is much lower than it should be. There are exceptions. Some commentators, academics, public servants and journalists, and, very occasionally, politicians outside the election cycle, write with understanding, knowledge and in ways accessible to most of us, about water policy, voting systems, immigration, how to tax savings, and the like. But they are the exception. How often does one open the paper hoping for insight on some pressing issue only to find pieces written by spokespersons with barrows to push or by journalists who mistake passing on press gallery gossip, or noting points of inconsistency between what a politician said on Monday and what they or a colleague said on Wednesday, for serious analysis?

What have these somewhat depressing comments got to do with Stuart Macintyre’s fine book? His book is about the development of the social sciences in Australia, much of it focused on the developments that led to the establishment of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and it is the social sciences especially that bear most directly on policy questions. It is not possible to have a sensible discussion of a proposed taxation change without considerations of equity (philosophy), of what we learn from practices elsewhere and in the past (history, comparative politics), of its likely effects on society (sociology), of its effects on, say, savings behaviour and house prices (economics, psychology), of its chances of being adopted (politics), and so on. Indeed, as Macintyre details, it was a concern with policy issues that drove the early stages of the development of research in the social sciences in Australia between the wars and, most especially, during the post-World War II reconstruction period.

Why the ‘poor relation’ in the title? Research in the social sciences has always played second fiddle to research in the medical and physical sciences. One reason is subject matter. It is easy to convince politicians and the general public, not to mention funding bodies, of the merits of research on the causes of diabetes, the best way to tackle cane toads or quantum computing. It is not so easy if one’s project concerns the nature of consciousness, the influence of our involvement in the Vietnam War on attitudes to Asian immigration, or the social construction of reality. The other reason is advocacy. Researchers in the medical and physical sciences have been very effective operators in the halls of power. By contrast, as Macintyre notes, researchers in the social sciences are sometimes uncertain how to sell the importance of what they do, and their attempts too often sound like special pleading. I think, though, that Macintyre somewhat overplays the poor relation part of his story. Of course, we social scientists would love to have something like the CSIRO, or Australia’s bevy of medical research centres, but we do better in many ways than researchers in pure mathematics or the more blue skies, curiosity-driven parts of physics and chemistry. It is easier to explain why we should carry out research on the impact of the first home-owner grant than it is to explain the need for research into recondite questions in cosmological theory, or issues to do with the distribution of prime numbers. Many staff in university physics, chemistry and mathematics departments would love to have the kinds of research support (and salary loadings) enjoyed by their colleagues in economics. All the same, Macintyre is right that there are problems, ones not widely understood in the community at large, and here I will be singing from the same song sheet as Macintyre but with some differences in key.

First, the connection between research in the social sciences and public policy is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing we have already touched on: it makes it relatively easy for social scientists to justify what they do in the eyes of public servants, politicians and funding bodies. Also, and importantly, it means social scientists can make a difference for the better. HECS – the higher education contribution scheme, Australia’s internationally admired way for students to pay university fees – was the product of research in the social sciences (by Bruce Chapman especially). The curse is that it invites the thought that all research in the social sciences should have a policy justification. Why work on consciousness or the foundations of rational choice theory when you could be mapping the job outcomes of students who leave school early? (To which the answer is that we are human beings, not worker bees. Consciousness and rationality are among the features that make us special, and anyone who thinks that investigating what makes us special isn’t a priority has a warped value system.)

Secondly, the introduction of the unified national system in 1989, along with subsequent developments, have had bad effects on Australia’s universities, and here the problems are not specific to the social sciences. Prior to the introduction of the UNS, there was a sharp distinction between universities and colleges of advanced education. The first were funded for teaching and research, the second for teaching only. When the colleges were given university status, the government had to find a new way of distributing research funding. Without going into the details, the method it settled on has had two very unfortunate consequences. First, it imposes a substantial administrative burden on universities and their staff. Australia is said to have the second highest usage of tax agents in the world. This is rightly seen as a black mark against our tax system. Staff in Australia’s universities spend more time writing research grant proposals and responding to government requirements than in any comparable university system. Second, because a major element in the funding mechanism is a formula that is identical across the sector, our universities lack the healthy diversity characteristic of universities in the United States. There is some sign that the government is aware of these two problems, as Macintyre notes. Fingers crossed.

Finally, there is the vexed issue of the role of the various disciplines. Those inside the academy tend to be defenders of the traditional disciplines (although the exceptions include some distinguished researchers); many outside the academy think of the disciplines as obstacles to progress in social science research. They preach the virtues of interdisciplinary research. Macintyre is a defender of the disciplines, and I side with him, while worrying about how he puts matters. Here is the crucial passage:

Those who manage research regard disciplines as obstacles to collaboration. A lazy metaphor describes them as silos, disregarding the function of the silo as a facility that stores grain and protects it from predators ... [disciplines] are powerfully durable ways of organising and advancing knowledge. The social science disciplines provide models of society, each one with its own conceptual map that defines what it is possible to know and how it can be known. It is the partial, specialised character of these disciplines that gives them their force and coherence, constitutes them as disciplined forms of inquiry.

The second sentence is a nice turning of the silo metaphor. My worry is that I doubt if people outside the academy will understand the sentences that follow. Indeed, speaking as an insider, I am not sure I understand them myself.

The case for the disciplines is the huge reach of the social sciences. They cover too many different topics for any single person to master. We partition the territory to make things manageable. Surgeons do the same thing. Suppose you had a problem in both your stomach and your brain. Wouldn’t you prefer to have an expert on the brain operate on your brain, with an expert on the stomach operating on your stomach, as opposed to one person with less expertise having a go at both? Of course you would want the two expert surgeons to communicate with one another. The same goes in the social sciences. The correct term for what we social scientists should be doing is multi-disciplinary research – not all the time, but as required by the problem at hand.