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The Forum > Article Comments > Double standards over diversity > Comments

Double standards over diversity : Comments

By Paul Frijters and Tony Beatton, published 19/2/2007

There is a deplorable tendency among social scientists to blunt their critical rigour.

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Right on mate . We don't value our own past but we value anothers. perhaps its partly about the cringe factor( http://cringenomore.blogspot.com ) . We don't take ownership of what's ours . Maybe you need to factor guilt and projection into the datasets .
Great scoping work, but we've only just started to cut the surface on the sacred and a more truly scientific approach to it. Hope to see you all on blogs
Posted by sirhumpfree, Monday, 19 February 2007 9:36:51 AM
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Very annoying, very lazy article.

On the issue of aboriginal health, the key question is not whether conditions for indigenous Australians have improved, rather whether they have improved as much as for non-indigenous Australians. In 1900, Australian male life expectancy at birth was 55.2 years, whereas today it’s around 78 years. http://www.aihw.gov.au/mortality/data/life_expectancy.cfm

However the life expectancy for indigenous males remains at the non-indigenous population’s 1900 levels. At a human level, it doesn’t matter how you define indigenous for the purpose of these statistics. The fact that we have a group in our society who live shorter, less healthy lives should be ringing alarm bells. Instead we have Frijters and Beatton ignoring the human misery behind these numbers while they quibble about definitions. Good one guys.

On the issue of the benefits of diversity, Leigh’s article doesn’t claim that diversity is universally good for a society. On the contrary, he brings rigorous data to support the view that there are some disadvantages. All F&B seem to be able to take issue with is his anodyne observation that ethnic cuisines enrich our lives. I suspect that a rigorous study on their part might reveal that the causes of obesity are more related to improvements in transport and food processing, which make our favourite food items easily and permanently available.

Linking the rise in obesity to the increased availability of ethnic foods looks to me like one of the classic logical traps – a confusion of coincidence with cause.

Before F&B start lecturing others about intellectual rigour, they need to apply a bit of it to themselves.
Posted by w, Monday, 19 February 2007 10:22:54 AM
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I find it a significant concern when a paper on a topic starts out with an acknowledgement to the currently acceptable views on that topic.

Gone is any sense of serious questioning of those underlying beliefs.
If the paper thens comes out in support of those views then it's all to easy to assume that it is because the authors never seriously questioned those views.

I much prefer the authors who have in their conclusions a statement along the lines of "The first two results run counter to conventional wisdom and to the hypotheses with which we began the paper." http://www.fact.on.ca/Info/dom/heady99.htm

R0bert
Posted by R0bert, Monday, 19 February 2007 10:44:01 AM
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I haven't read the original article, and I agree that precision in the social sciences is always difficult to obtain. But I raised my eyebrows at the present authors' comments about food. Nothing in the culinary literature would support the notion that England knew 100 different ways of cooking parsnips a century ago. Indeed, English writers on food, few as they were, seemed to think that there were only a few ways to do anything, and expressed surprise that the French had so many different recipes for eggs, for example. My first 'ethnic' meal was in 1954, at a Chinese restaurant in a country town, and I discovered real (not canned, ie) pasta in an Italian restuarant in Sydney the next year. But there were very few restaurants then anyway. We ate at home, mostly because few could afford to do anytthing else. The diversity of food available now flows not only from immigration but from higher incomes. Eating out, and eating fatty/sweet takeway food, are no doubt connected to obesity, but I can't see how one would connect it to the diversity of ethnic restaurants.

And I'd be glad to know where 'w' has gained knowledge of Aboriginal death rates a century ago. I'm not aware of any such statistics.
Posted by Don Aitkin, Monday, 19 February 2007 10:47:28 AM
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The trouble is the Australian for at least a decade has become an empty opinion rag which unlike the millions of blogs online kills trees to inform us of nothing.

The article misunderstands the anthropological dimension of Australian society. Away from the jingoism, the skin head chant of 'oi, oi , oi', the need to view ourselves as a cartoon parody manufactured by media the cultural difference between the house holds of siblings is as great as the cultural difference between migrants , the indigenous and 5th generation Australians.

We all possess a commonality in that we come together in mutual understanding to create law, to communicate , to form relationships and to trade. Nothing can take away diversity, even in communist Russia and fascist Europe ethnicity and diversity survived. As long as everybody goes about their buisness as themselves diversity will prevail.

Anglo culture of the 19th century brought with it survival responses from source communities , many things became irrelevant to daily life. Both indigenous and migrant people of the past responded to their environment to survive. Technology and circumstances have changed and survival strategies have also changed. The fact that Indigenous Australians on the whole have been hard done by is a symptom of the failure of our political system to deliver what Australian communities such as the Indigenous community need and want. The way Indigenous Australia has been treated reflects the way the migrant community since 1788 have competed for resources and then shared resource gains.
Posted by West, Monday, 19 February 2007 11:33:21 AM
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We bought a parsnip yesterday. Seems like a pretty commonsense assertion to say you can't get them any more.

My understanding is that less physical activity and more highly processed food combine with the intake of Maccas and KFC to make a big contribution to obesity. Maccas and KFC are foreign imports too.

A couple of hundred years ago when indigenous life expectancy was 30 (according to the article this is a best estimate, which isn't very precise) Aboriginal people were not living in modern society and weren't expected to. What was the average life expectancy of Anglo-Australians at the time? It certainly wasn't 80.

Social science works with real life, which is diverse, messy and imprecise. The alternative is to put us all into pigeon hole categories and move even further away from the truth
Posted by chainsmoker, Monday, 19 February 2007 1:07:02 PM
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