Old time Troppo readers who actually liked my stuff can get their fill at my new blog here . (Blogger is a really sound platform these days.)
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Nicholas Gruen is coming to town next weekend, Sunday Oct 9. It is a long way from home so he might appreciate some convivial company. What if we make this an opportunity for a bloggers night out? How about the Clock Hotel in Crown Street, Surry Hills? Any takers, any other su...
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I can't quite put my finger on it, but I find the Australia Institute's latest effort (pdf) particularly irksome. It uses data from Roy Morgan to describe the drivers of four wheel drives as unusually aggressive, lacking in community mindedness and various other things. Someti...
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The story in the two posts so far in which some foreshadowing of what's to come is snuck in. Smith's great work in sociology and psychology The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) shares a deep logical symmetry with his (now) more famous work The Wealth of Nations (WN). That symm...
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Here's a favourite economic journalist - Samuel Brittain - dispatching the idea that economics shouldn't make interpersonal comparisons of welfare. He's spent most of the column - engagingly titled "Truth, bullshit and economics" hopping into the more extreme relativist claims...
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As readers of an earlier post will know, I've become interested in the arguments that suggest that greater deregulation of land usage could improve land usage and in the process lower house prices to the great benefit of those trying to buy their way into the market. Here's th...
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Crikey outlines how much more engagement there is in political campaigning over there. And Tim Colebatch says some things that are similar to my own thoughts about the upshot of the NZ elections - namely that the power of incumbency combined with the power of being seen to wor...
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In 2000, out of the blue, the OECD rang me and asked me to present a paper I'd written to their senior treasury officials meeting (That's Treasury and/or Finance Secretaries). The paper advocated refashioning fiscal policy in the image of monetary policy. I decided to do what...
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If you are disgusted and dismayed by bile and propaganda thinly disguised as news, if like, Adam Smith you abhor views presented "with all the passionate confidence of interested falsehood", if you wonder how you could possibly get your case heard through the distortion and bi...
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Courtesy of Ian Rogers of 'The Sheet ' newsletter on the financial industry: Few CFOs pay down their credit cards In keeping with the findings of this East and JP Morgan survey in the past, the research found that less than 20 per cent of respondents at the top 500 companies m...
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David McKnight has set up a blog to promote discussion of his book. It is a very interesting exercise and I am making an effort to help him in his endeavours, especially to improve the revised edition of his opus. Commentary on some of the chapters can be found on Catallaxy. C...
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I have little doubt that when people look back on the Howard era they will see - apart from other things a similar set of wasted economic opportunities to those we saw under Fraser. The main difference is that Fraser inherited a difficult hand - and played it in a mediocre but...
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Check out this post on Catallaxy for a good interview with a friend and colleague of the late Paul F, philosopher of science, dadaist, man about town, opera buff and prodigious correspondent.
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On July 4, 1054 A.D., Chinese astronomers noted a "guest star" in the constellation Taurus; This star became about 4 times brighter than Venus in its brightest light, or about mag -6 (whatever that means), and was visible in daylight for 23 days. Over the fold you can see what...
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It will be interesting to watch the evolution of open source software (OSS) in the next few years. On the one hand it's a fabulous, powerful new way of working. But will it displace slightly less fabulous ways of working - like Microsoft's. I've always been sceptical that MS w...
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Here's Michael Bassett - former Lange Govt minister on the NZ election in today's Australian . National's caucus gets 24 fresh faces, several of them with substantial track records - diplomats, a top lawyer, a prominent secondary school principal and a medico. Hard to imagine...
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Belay there, me hearties, today Monday Sept 19 be International Talk Like a Pirate Day . Among a wide range of attractions and distractions on the site is the pirate personality test .
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From the SMH on the NZ campaign . Then there was an . . . unforgettable moment when a semi-naked, anti-Labour protester (later dubbed Undies Man) jumped in front of the PM, who promptly asked for a magnifying glass and branded him a "disappointment". Us boys couldn't get away...
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Andrew Norton had an interesting post on the different perspectives of 'classical liberalism' and 'social democracy' a week or so back on Catallaxy. He quoted this passage from Tim Colebatch's article on cutting the top marginal rate. There are good reasons to cut taxes, and b...
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The story so far. . . Smith's 1759 The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) builds a picture of people as inherently dialectical beings. As Montes (2004: 55) puts it "The TMS presupposes sympathy as a principle in human nature that fosters a continuous relationship between spectat...
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Below the fold a column for the Fin which appears tomorrow. It outlines the argument for an increase in the 'default' rate of super. I posted early drafts of the essay on which it is based on Troppo - here, and here . The essay is being launched as one of four Progressive Essa...
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This week's column tackles the thorny question of economic reform in NZ and Australia. Actually it doesn't really tackle it - it ducks the main bit of trench warfare according to which one side says that NZ performed badly because of reform and the other says it performed badl...
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In a recent ABC Radio National Program a psychologist said this: Looking Out for No.1, that they keep an idea sort of for the invisible hand of the market place that will somehow take your own self interest and turn it into good. That is you know from Adam Smith's famous theor...
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I put WW into my browser tabs as he's a pretty sophisticated commenter on a range of philosophical issues. I liked the way he gnawed on that bone of Layard on Happiness till he'd got something he wanted to say said. It was interesting, stimulating and rigorous stuff even if I...
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Look around any old, inner city suburb and see how little we care about kids. Compare the grounds of most private girls schools to most private boys schools and see how little we care about girls. (Though perhaps their style of socialising actually requires less space). In the...
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The latest end of Policy Magazine has an article discussing one of the latest crazes in economics happiness studies. The field usually involves working with data that has been generated by asking people how happy they are with their lives, their job, their personal circumstanc...
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For those who don't know anything about me, I used to be a regular solo blogger here . I'm now pleased to join the illustrious Troppo crew as an occasional (monthly) guest blogger. As a special treat for my first guest post, I've sworn to avoid all of my previously-known hobby...
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I think it was Barista that first pointed me towards this marvellous site . It opens up with all the other daily sites I load on my Mozilla Firefox browser - which has tabs unlike Internet Explorer unless they've done some updating and not told me about it. Jeez these guys are...
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I like sport, but I don't think you'll get many sport posts out of me. But in my opinion we're being uniquely ourselves in the way we're losing the ashes. Good on the Poms for playing so well, particularly their bowlers. And it's been amazing to watch Warnie. Warnie's never lo...
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Helen Pringle tells us that Voltaire didn't really say : 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it' which is a bit sad. I hope she doesn't debunk one of my favourite 'famous last words'. Please tell me it's true. I've always believed th...
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Below is this week's column on Hurricane Katrina. It seemed to me to be a good illustration of the importance of public goods that we take for granted. I also wanted to tell the story of my days in the Canberra bush fires. As I got into it, it seemed that the example of domest...
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Read all about it here : Back in New Orleans, many of those who survived the storm were heading through the stinking flood waters towards the Superdome, now home to almost 30,000 people. Police armed with assault rifles attempted to keep order, but they were overwhelmed by she...
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An excerpt [Brendan] Nelson has said intelligent design should be available in schools because "it's about choice". That is postmodern rubbish. Schools are not about choice, they're about discrimination, about using limited time and resources to teach children what our society...
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I've commented before on my view that three or four of the best films I've seen in the last 10 years have been from New Zealand. Once were Warriors and In my Father's Den were amongst the best films I've ever seen. Then there was Whale rider . I can take or leave the Lord of t...
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Nicholas kindly suggested to me that we might like to cross post our three favourite posts from August at each other's blogs to see if commenters' reaction is different. So here's the first of mine, originally published at LP . -------------------------------------------------...
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I've been reading a fair bit of Adam Smith and stuff on him lately and will probably do some more posts on the great man. But here I just thought I'd note that my reading has enabled me to further uncover the provenance of the phrase that (I think) Alan Blinder used as the tit...
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I thought readers - well some readers - might like to see one company's - Peach Discount Mortgage Broking's - take on operating system market shares. Here it is. Linux has a long way to go! Operating System % of Total 1. Windows XP 75.30% 2. Windows 2000 11.95% 3. Windows 98 5...
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The Australian Red Cross will be accepting online donations to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina as as soon as they have clearance to issue tax deductible receipts. If getting a tax deduction isn't your first concern you can make a donation to the American Red Cross . Othe...
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I have always felt that a cold hard universe cannot explain the yumminess of a really good spaghetti marinara. And so I was pleased to see spaghetti coming centre stage in that tussle for openness of mind being waged on behalf of the theory of intelligent design. Indeed, looki...
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Looking at this story of Enceladus , the moon of Saturn of which I have never heard before, it struck me how different all the planets and particularly all the moons of the planets are - at least those big enough to have become spheres rather than large rocks. The laws governi...
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