James Mahmud Rice


James Mahmud Rice is an Australian sociologist in the Demography and Ageing Unit, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne. He works at the intersection of sociology, economics, and political science, focusing in particular on inequalities in the distribution of economic resources such as income and time and how private and public conventions and institutions shape these inequalities. In 2009 he was awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research.

Early life

Rice was born in 1972 in Honolulu, Hawaii. His mother was a Minangkabau woman from Medan, North Sumatra. His father, who was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was an economist who taught economics at the University of Hawaii and Monash University, in addition to conducting a large number of consultancies in Indonesia.

Research

Appliances and their impact

Research by Michael Bittman, James Mahmud Rice, and Judy Wajcman has shown that domestic appliances which are designed to make our lives easier do not reduce the overall time spent doing housework, and in some cases may even increase the time spent doing chores.
"The authors... believe that people use the devices simply to achieve ever-higher standards of cleanliness and refinement in their home, rather than to free up time for other pursuits," according to John Elliott in The Sunday Times.
The results of this research received wide press coverage in Australia and the United Kingdom.

Discretionary time

Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom was published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. It is based on the authors' analysis of data from the United States, Australia, Germany, France, Sweden, and Finland.
The authors propose that temporal autonomy can be used as an indicator of freedom, which is measured by how many hours people are free to do as they please.
Another one of their statements is that the richer an individual is, the more he or she feels stressed. However, they argue, a richer individual's prosperity could be part of the problem. An example is that a banker who earns £200 per hour has a greater opportunity cost by choosing not to work, than a cleaner who earns only £10 per hour. As a result, the banker may feel compelled to work a greater number of hours than the cleaner does, despite making a greater total income.

Australian National Transfer Accounts

At present, Rice is working on the development of a system of Australian National Transfer Accounts, based on methodologies developed by the global National Transfer Accounts project. National Transfer Accounts are systems of macroeconomic accounts that measure present economical flows distinguished by age, in a manner that is consistent with the United Nations System of National Accounts. NTA measure age-specific labour income, asset income, consumption, and any savings or transfers, accounting for flows within and between households and through the public sector, along with the rest of the world.

Awards and honours

In 2009 Rice was awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research, together with Robert E. Goodin, Antti Parpo, and Lina Eriksson. The prize was awarded for their book Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom.

Selected bibliography

Books and reports

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