James Mahmud Rice

When children are included, it is clear that changes to net public transfers have favoured both younger and older people.

For a more detailed discussion, see:

bsky.app/profile/jame...

Here is a figure which includes children, taken from Rice et al, "Intergenerational inequality and the intergenerational state", 2021:

doi.org/10.1007/s125...
rdcu.be/cylFh (full-text, view-only)

This figure is misleading. Notice how the chart does not include children, even though, as the article states:

"People receive benefits from the state as a child. They attend childcare paid for by government subsidies and they get a free (public) or subsidised (private) education."

The photo is of the La Trobe Reading Room, State Library Victoria, in Melbourne, Australia, as viewed from the 5th floor.

It's by David Iliff (license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-...).

La Trobe Reading Room, State Library Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, as viewed from the 5th floor. Photo by David Iliff. License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

10 beautiful libraries, including the State Library Of South Australia and State Library Victoria:

www.1000libraries.com/post/2025-to...

Thanks!

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis

Vladimir Nabokov, Collected Stories

I've been having a fun time browsing through @chrispower.bsky.social's brief survey of the short story:

www.theguardian.com/books/series...

And, happily, the following books by Machado de Assis and Nabokov (both included in the survey) arrived in the post on Friday, just in time for the weekend!

Figure 2 in the ANU study, which describes average real income per person after taxes and transfers by age for various years between 1993/94 and 2022/23.

ANU study: "Australians over the age of 60 have enjoyed a post-tax income similar to that of mid-career working age Australians"

Study's findings on post-tax income, 2018/19-2022/23:

Mid-career working age Australians: $125K
Australians over 60: less than this
Australians over 75: $100K (20% less)

Without this blurring of lines, it is clear that changes to net public transfers have favoured both younger and older people, that is, those people who have always been net recipients of public transfers.

This picture is only possible, however, because of the blurring of lines between the net public transfers received by younger people and the net public transfers paid by working-age people.

The picture painted by the Varela et al figure is one in which changes to net public transfers have largely favoured older people and older people alone.

Grouping together these increases in net public transfers paid and received leads to the modest changes over time depicted in the Varela et al figure for working-age people. These modest changes, though, hide the substantial changes for younger people and working-age people identified in Rice et al.

The trends over time for working-age people in the Varela et al figure are also, in a rough sense, the result of grouping together the increases in net public transfers paid by working-age people and the increases in net public transfers received by younger people, as identified in Rice et al.

The lines for working-age people in this figure are, in a rough sense, the result of grouping together the lines for younger and working-age people in the figure from Rice et al.

Here is the figure from Varela et al. I assume the vertical axis should read "transfer payments minus taxes".

The figure does not cover the entire life cycle, because public transfers received by children (like school education) are grouped together with those received by their working-age parents.

The trends over time are straightforward. As incomes have risen over time, the amounts of net public transfers paid by working-age, net payers have increased, while the amounts of net public transfers received by younger and older, net recipients have also increased.

As this figure shows younger people are net recipients of public transfers, while working-age people are net payers of public transfers. Older people, like younger people, are net recipients of public transfers.

Both papers include a figure that describes net public transfers (public transfers net of taxes) across the life cycle, where this difference can be seen.

Here is the figure from Rice et al.

In contrast, in Varela et al public transfers intended to benefit children are allocated to their parents, rather than to the children themselves. For example, increases in public resourcing of schools are allocated to working-age people who do not attend these schools (the parents).

One of the most important differences relates to the treatment of children. In Rice et al public transfers are allocated to the intended beneficiaries of the transfers, including children. For example, increases in public resourcing of schools are allocated to students at these schools.

Intergenerational inequality and the intergenerational state

Rice et al, 2021

doi.org/10.1007/s125...
rdcu.be/cylFh (full-text, view-only)

Measuring the changing size of intergenerational transfers in the Australian tax and transfer system

Varela et al, 2025

crawford.anu.edu.au/content-cent...

A few years ago I published an article on the effect of public transfers on intergenerational inequality in income. A recent working paper by Peter Varela, Robert Breunig and Matthew Smith approaches the same topic with a similar methodology.

The papers (see below) differ in important ways however.

Wow! 🔥

...Personally, I think it can be a good experience for sociologists to immerse themselves in a variety of social systems, where social norms and policies are different to those with which they are familiar. I hope the move is going well!

I'm pretty good. I've been away from social media for a while, partly because of contracted work for the government on recent child care reforms. As a result, I only learned about your huge, intercontinental move very recently (following a path to Hong Kong previously travelled by Jack Barbalet)...

I switched on the radio in my car on Wednesday and, after a minute or so, thought "I know that voice"!

That looks like a nice place to walk in the springtime!

RetractBASE, el mayor buscador especializado en publicaciones retractadas (retracted article), notas de retractación (retraction) y artículos retirados (withdrawn). IESA-CSIC
Más de 120 mil publicaciones científicas aparecidas entre 2000 y 2024.
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I just read this @thesiswhisperer blog, then went to the Atlantic site to find my publications are mentioned 105 times in Meta’s AI pirater 😳
Seems everything via Taylor & Francis, Palgrave, Routledge, & Cambridge Uni Press! 😭😭

"Surprise may be the essence of mystery stories and science fiction but it is not the test of fruitful and important sociological research. Indeed, I do not know how one could surprise the common sense that affirms on the one hand that 'Too many cooks spoil the broth', but on the other that 'Many hands make light work'; that advises 'Penny wise, pound foolish', yet warns 'Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves'. Common sense in fact is little more than a treasure-trove of mutually contradictory statements in terms of which any social event or human experience can find a reassuring interpretation. While I would never presume to steal a march upon common sense, it is obviously worthwhile to investigate the conditions under which one segment of common sense may be more applicable than another."

In his book "Dimensions Of Urban Social Structure" (University Of Toronto Press, 1969), Frank Lancaster Jones makes some interesting observations on the value of social research that "states the obvious" or produces "commonsense" results rather than surprising ones: