Richard Green is an honours graduate from Newcastle who is also an interesting and thoughtful fellow. He is eager for an audience for his work. So I've upped his permissions from 'subscriber' to 'author' so expect some posts from him in the early new year.

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I'm going to try to write some posts about public goods as part of writing something about the new age of public goods. As readers to this blog will know, I've got a bit of a thing about public goods, and most recently argued that Web 2.0 is the product of ' emergent public go...

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A bit of holiday trivia for you. I came upon a form of tourism I didn't quite believe. "Travelling Gentlemen" accompanied their countrymen to the Crimean War, and set up out of cannon range from the battlefields with their wives and hounds and had a jolly good time of it. Thei...

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Interesting stuff methinks: In Growing up in a Recession: Beliefs and the Macroeconomy (NBER Working Paper No. 15321), co-authors Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo substantiate the importance of the historical economic environment in shaping economic attitudes, affecting...

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The lads from the BBC radio comedy The Now Show, distill the essence of Copenhagen. The English Blog has the transcript

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I've been watching the Regulatory Responsibility Bill for some time. "What is the Regulatory Responsibility Bill?" I hear you cry. Well it's one of the last gasps of the ideological fervour that grips our antipodean cousins across the trench in New Zealand. As I observed in a...

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I'm dreadful at Christmas Cards. I don't think much of signing hundreds and having them sent off by a secretary, so if I do write them I try to write a bit on them, otherwise I can't see the point. I'm dead late this year again - though with a bit of an excuse - and the cards...

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[caption id="attachment_34760" align="alignright" width="415"] Julie Hempenstall from Bendigo[/caption] Here's today's column in the SMH which was slightly edited back from the original. Who is Julie Hempenstall? She lives in Bendigo and she likes reading Australia's historic...

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This is a survey of the treatment of selected themes in the famous textbook from the first edition in 1948 to the last in 1995. The sales figures: Edition, Year, Author(s,) Sales 1, 1948, Samuelson, 121,453 2, 1951, Samuelson, 137,256 3, 1955, Samuelson, 191,706 4, 1958, Samue...

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Jumping the shark Untill Tuesday night Ian Plimer was the respectable face of climate scepticism in Australia. Plimer looks the part of the distinguished professor, and as a geologist gives the impression of understanding the long run forces affecting the earth's climate, as o...

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"The concept of utility in economics refers to the pleasure, or relief of pain, associated with the consumption of goods and services" writes economist John Quiggin . Another economist, Robert Frank, suggests that it is closer to the idea of satisfaction. In Luxury Fever he wr...

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How will Paul Samuelson be remembered? This is the positive side of the story, the glowing record of the Nobel Laureate and author of the most widely read textbook in modern times. History may be kind to Samuelson. He had the good fortune to surf three waves that carried all b...

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It seemed like a simple enough question. What do economists mean by 'utility'? But after scouring the literature I'm more confused than when I began. The Penguin Dictionary of Economics defines it as: "The pleasure or satisfaction derived by an individual from being in a parti...

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Kopenhagen is currently witnessing two comic relief shows. One is regularly seen in the amusement area known as Tivoli, and the other is the climate change conference. The core element of pure humour in the second circus is that the actions of many governments are diametricall...

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As usual I'm a year behind the publicity machine, so I missed the original reviews of this book , as well as the fanfare during the Sydney Writers' Festival, which the author Mark Rowlands attended. This post is for any reader who might have encountered The Philosopher and the...

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Here's yesterday's column in the Financial Review coinciding with the release of the Draft Report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce. The Fin's headline was "Web and open government a way to a better world". The expression Web 2.0 connotes the internet as a platform for collabora...

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Balmain is not just the city of basket weavers it is also a place to find thinking drinkers and binge thinkers. Put this in your list of favorites. Shaken and Stirred , the brainchild of Parnell McGuinness and Leonie Phillips, is a space for the free exchange of opinions witho...

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Every December since 2002 Sydney's Pinchgut Opera has produced an obscure baroque opera at the City Recital Hall. The company employs top-notch instrumentalists wth period instruments that produce an incredibly haunting and evocative blend of sounds; they gather outstanding so...

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Suppose you believed the world was getting warmer due to humanity's greenhouse gas emissions and you worried about it but you cant get yourself to believe that the 200-odd countries in the world are ever going to agree to drastically reduce their emissions via some joint schem...

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''Hang on, woah woah woah woah!" If you believe Paul Sheehan we can thank Alan Jones for the demise of Malcolm Turnbull and the derailment of the CPRS. Every time a Liberal backbencher is asked why he or she withdrew their support for Ian MacFarlane's deal, the answer is the s...

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For four years now (ages in blogosphere terms) Club Troppo and On Line Opinion have sponsored a showcase of Australian independent blogging, which we call Best Blog Posts of <year>'. With Christmas fast approaching, the time has come to launch 'Best Blog Posts of 09'. On Line...

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My particular problem at the moment is which chess clock app to download. There are oodles of them. I've also downloaded a business card reader, but where do I find out which of what is often many competing apps are the best ones?

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I've been reading RG's strange columns with increasing incredulity. About how raising interest rates will drive house prices up. Now he doesn't seem to understand that you can compensate someone for increased energyprices and they might still reduce their energy consumption (b...

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Mike Steketee was one of several commentators echoing Turnbull's point that the ETS is basically the policy that the Howard Government took to the 2007 election. He infers from this that the poor old Liberal Party has been captured by a rump of reactionaries who have taken adv...

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Steve Horwitz at The Austrian Economists is running a series of posts to show how the poor in the US have become better off over the last thirty years or so. This table shows how real wages have improved to shorten the time required to pay for some household goods. He notes th...

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Last week the Prime Minister made a plea to the House, for the members to vote in the national interest, not their party interest. Where are the members of the ALP who are voting in the national interest?

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I appreciate that this has been posted before and nobody has to read it again, it is just for the benefit of new people and those who like to be reminded of the achievements of this remarkable man. Barzun's work represents a major and pioneering contribution to cultural studie...

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It now looks as if Malcolm Turnbull is gone for all money as federal Liberal leader (a shame from my viewpoint). Meanwhile, Rudd Labor is ramping up the rhetoric hinting at a double dissolution election. But is that really likely? There are a couple of major factors suggesting...

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Some things seem to need no explanation, but are not obvious at all on reflection and, if you wonder about them, suggest something of interest about the economic system. Consider the question of why the informal economy is so small, leading to the question of how much more pro...

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From the State Government that brings car racing to our most idyllic park, turns nature reserves over to shooters, refuses to cap political donations, reneges on public transport promises faster than it makes them, and philanders while its health system burns, it's nice to see...

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Bobby Cheng is pretty good on the Melbourne primary schools under 12 chess circuit. In fact he's pretty good on the Melbourne under 14, under 16 and a few other circuits. With a rating of 2,200 not far from international mastership he went off to the world championships in Tur...

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[caption id="attachment_9707" align="alignleft" width="484" caption="Pope's Odyssey as it appears on your Kindle"] [/caption] I wrote previously about two of my sub $300 IT purchases. The Livescribe continues to amaze and delight - amazed that it's not simply taken over univer...

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Magnus Carlsen is not only now the highest rated player in the world, but like a lot of chess geniuses seems to be a cut above the others when it comes to lightning. Have a look at him taking apart a couple of super-grandmasters. If you enjoy chess, it's fun to watch him slowl...

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Julia Gillard has announced that the new national website for schools will include average NAPLAN scores. Principals hate the idea, as do some education academics . The Minister has responded to the criticisms by being uncharacteristically evasive . She invokes 'transparency',...

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Richard Ronald Brautigam:'What's really remarkable is not so much that he could compose something like this, but that he could play it.' I've only just managed to see In Search of Beethoven , and it's probably nearing the end of its inevitably short season. But it's still show...

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[caption id="attachment_9654" align="alignleft" width="180" caption="This coupon available for books about rabbits (and for other books)"] [/caption]

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Although labour demand is not quite keeping up with jobs, the labour market remains broadly stable. This is hardly surprising, given the strong fiscal and monetary stimulus. This is now expected to decrease gradually in the next few months. Yet we are still left with very high...

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The High Court has ruled that people serving alcohol are not at risk of of massive claims for damages if a drinker comes to grief on the way home. One would hope that commonsense will prevail and folk will conform with responsible serving guidelines. Some of the claims were a...

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Peter Coleman described the rise and fall of the Congress for Cultural Freedom which started at one of the darkest moments of the Cold War. In the Preface to The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe he wrote In J...

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This is best viewed with its pair . Twenty years on, where do East Germans stand in economic terms? The Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft has reportedly published a study estimating that GDP per capita has risen in the east from 30 percent of that in the west in 1991 to 70 per...

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As we celebrate the Fall of the Wall 20 years ago we should remember the effort that was put in by the friends of freedom in the West during the Cold War. I am thinking of the worldwide network of groups which resisted the propaganda efforts of the communists and their fellow...

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Interesting development! Last week a UK High Court gave the green light for a green activist to sue his employer, who had sacked him for refusing to do an errand because it conflicted with his green beliefs. For intellectual ballast, the judge quoted no less or, should I say,...

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George Soros picked up the idea of the open society from Karl Popper at the London School of Economics and he spent a great deal of money promoting the idea through Open Society Institutes in Eastern Europe. Lately he has moved on to target market fundamantalism as the great t...

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The chances of the forthcoming UN Climate Change Conference actually reaching a workable global agreement to reduce greenhouse emissions sufficiently to make a major impact on warming are remote. In an article at Online Opinion , three academics from the Centre for Global Stud...

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In case anyone's interested, here's an interview I did on the Government 2.0 front. Just checking out the 'embedded' media player. Let me know if it all works.

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For a bit of commentary, explanation and another very different closeup of the crystalline surface, click here .

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With Rudd Labor's sudden slump in opinion polls this morning, I can't help saying "I told you so" (in my recent post about asylum seeker policy ): Indonesia is doing all that it can to stem the flow, but with partial success at best. It is unlikely that action by Indonesia alo...

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Last year I wrote on this blog Meet Nikita McBride. Shes the daughter of friends of mine Ken McBryde and Stephanie Smith who are the co-founders of the wonderful architecture firm Innovarchi . Nikita has recently been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes type 1. In January 2009 sh...

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I'm usually a proud technology laggard, letting more intrepid people go ahead of me so they can help me out when I get round to the technology, letting systems get better sorted out and bug-fixed, and letting prices fall before I jump in. But, given how cheap they were - each...

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Tomorrow evening, as I've done on this date for the last two years, I'll put this sign on the front door: Trick-or-treaters: If you've come in a scary costume, please ring the bell. Otherwise, try again next year! It worked last year and the year before. In the preceding years...

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I've never been much of a fan of Lionel Robbins 1932 Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. It smacks of what I'd call 'authoritarian methodology' which had its sterile apotheosis in Popper's efforts to demark 'science' and 'non-science'. To cut a long story...

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One of the problems of mechanisms of 'regulation review' - for instance the requirement for new regulations to be accompanied by regulation impact analysis, is that this constraint is itself regulation - it's regulation of the regulators. An infinite regress beckons. I'm not a...

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In a post a few weeks back, I raised the question of what additional production factor one would have to include into the current production function framework in order to have a plausible story about the recent crisis. That post included a set of conditions any candidate woul...

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It's becoming increasingly clear that the only likely outcome of the current manoeuvrings over the Rudd government's Emissions Trading Scheme is that it will either be rejected by the Senate or so drastically watered down as to be almost entirely useless. If (like me) you acce...

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The decision to grant protection visas to all 42 Afghan asylum seekers from the SIEV36, the boat that exploded off Ashmore Reef on 16 April killing 5 people, may prove to be one of the biggest political and policy mistakes the Rudd government has made. Presumably they were all...

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A recent version of the Taylor rule specifies that the Federal interest rate target should have a threefold aim: (a) to curb inflation (b) to avoid excess unemployment and (c) stop prospective asset prices. With a rising Australian dollar (and with an under-utilised labour mar...

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My local council, Port Phillip is holding a competition for young people to name this dragon which has just been built in a playground. If you're any of the 0-17 kids reading this site you probably have some 'issues' but perhaps you can show it to your kids. If you get your en...

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Another one of those articles I'd like to read. I will in this case, but would be interested in others' thoughts on the contents either when I've read it or before. Looks interesting. Public Sector Employees: Risk Averse and Altruistic? Date: 2009-09 By: Buurman, Margaretha (E...

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I'd read this paper. Date: 2009-09-22 By: André De Palma (ENS Cachan - Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan - Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan, Department of Economics, Ecole Polytechnique - CNRS : UMR7176 - Polytechnique - X) Nathalie Picard (Department of Economics, Ecole Po...

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A few of my posts dotted about celebrate events like what seemed to be the truly contrite reaction of Allan McAlister on discovering how badly he'd handled the Nicky Winmar incident at Victoria Park all those years ago. This video is about a now famous event in which a truly e...

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Toby Huff in Max Weber and the Methodology of the Social Scienes (Transaction Books, 1984) suggested that the philosophy of science that Weber was reading read at the turn of the century was in better shape than the positivism that took off later under the inspiration of Mach,...

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The people on the Dunera were a clever lot. I keep finding new and clever things they got up to. Anyway in the latest Dunera newsletter (now powered at least as much by the second as the first generation) I saw this design. It was (I presume) a cover design for the Dunera Stat...

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(cross-posted with Core Economics) There has been much talk in the last 12 months about the relationship between macro-economic theory and explanations of the current recession. Krugman essentially dismissed most current macro theory as being delusional about the workings of m...

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His last five games - to win four and a half games out of five against super-grandmasters rated over 2,700, including beating the World No. 1 Topalov a queen down (OK that last bit wasn't true) is playing at a rating strength of 3143. A very amazing little 18 year old. Have a...

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Jeffrey Friedman has produced a special edition of Critical Review devoted to various perspectives on the crisis. Among the contributors are Friedman himself, Joe Stiglitz, Vernon Smith and Lawrence White All the abstracts are here . Friedman wrote a long lead article. ABSTRAC...

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Peter Martin tweets a reference to this blog post outlining Dan Pink's well documented argument that bonuses might be good for productivity for simple tasks, and that they're at best a double edged sword for complex tasks, where intrinsic motivation is more important, and bonu...

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As Michael Nielsen says the ultimate productivity blog is "Surprisingly good".

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White to play I Rogers vs T Tao 19. ? See game for solution. I thought I would display this game because it was won by the best Australian player of his generation - the recently retired Ian Rogers.

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It's hell out there.

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There are two interesting pieces in todays blogs and newspaper articles. The first is from Robert Reich http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2009/09/is-government-helping-or-hurting-business.html He makes the evident point that the Dow is hitting the 10,000 mark be...

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Short answer? No. Do financial advisors aid their clients in making wise investments? This column shows that investors who delegate their portfolio management achieve better results. But thats due to the fact that advisors tend to be matched with richer, older investors. In fa...

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Hint - it's not a comet!

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A paper called Blogometrics has created a ranking of economics bloggers and their blogs based on citations of their academic publications. Hat tip to The Economic Way of Thinking (Beaulier, Boettke and Prykitcho). My new, outstanding colleague in Econ, Frank Mixon, and his co-...

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White to play Imbaud vs Strumilo 9. ? See game for solution.

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As someone once said (was it TS Elliot?) human beings cant stand very much reality. Every now and again communities, and sometimes whole nations go potty - psychotic. Jonestown is perhaps one of the best examples, although it was a kind of concentrated community a cult which a...

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Another one bites the dust

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From Economics Journal Watch a nice story (pdf) of someone who wrote a well considered, and expressed paper which was rejected, only to massively complicate it with otiose mathematics - whereupon it was published by the first journal it was submitted to. Some highlights below...

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The Universe Today held a competition to ecapsulate the big bang, and/or the history of the universe in a tweet - which is limited to 140 characters. The top ten are here . My fave is below the fold. #sci140 starburst, molecule, amino acid, protein, cell development, cell divi...

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I saw The Boy in the Striped PJs on an international flight to the US. I thought it was a good film. It had a deliberate and rather insoucient simplicity and naivete. The resulting occasionally fantastical quality helped the story move along without worrying too much about bas...

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In comparative terms, Australia has only been mildly affected by the economic crisis. Whatever's enabled us to sidestep the worst of it so far, it's still fair to wonder whether this good fortune can last. A recent research update by two University of Chicago professors (hat-t...

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If you are of a certain age, you will know what people mean when they refer to "The War". You will be able to cast your mind back and imagine a type of blustery former warrior, of proud bearing, and fixed views on pretty much everything. Having been in the War, they were accor...

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As regulars to this site know, part of Troppo's mission (at least while I'm here) is to bring you a slow but steady stream of 'immortal games' defined as games in which amazing things happen culminating in an attach in which the ultimate victor sacrifices all the pieces they h...

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Krugman wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine last week entitled "How Did Economists Get It so Wrong?". This is unlikely to be news to anyone interested in economics. As usual with any of his efforts, it's received a lot of attention, most of it favourable. He's always...

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Karl Rove charges 7K, Sarah Palin 25K. Not to mention some of our own politicians. I think this is a terrific idea and I'm open for bids.

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Even if it's a bit long. Here .

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HT : Peter Martin

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For economists and other social scientists who read this blog but don't pop over to the Government 2.0 Taskforce website, you should - there's m oney to be made serving the public interest - never a bad thing.

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Cross posted from www.gov2.net.au At a roundtable in Sydney, Miriam Lyons of the Centre for Policy Development (CPD) mentioned the idea of inquiries 2.0. As I said to her at the roundtable, Ive been giving a fair bit of thought to that question myself. Having spent some time o...

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One of the things that surprises me is that - with Google providing cloud competitors for Microsoft's other products, they don't provide a database, or what is the same thing only tailored, a simple small business accounting package. OK putting Microsoft in there is a bit of a...

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just thought Id drop in here and offer a heads-up for Troppo readers that ABC will be re-broadcasting the first three series of The Wire on ABC2 at 9:30.

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This is how Anke Hoeppner appeared when she played Leonore in Opera Queensland's production of Fidelio in July. On Saturday night she sang the same role in the Sydney Opera House in a cocktail dress (or some such thing) from the corner of the stage while Nicole Youl, in costum...

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Does anyone else have the problem that their Google reader occasionally just loads up a little more than the Google reader logo and then, while it proudly dispalays a sign against a dull yellow background saying "loading" it does anything but. It just sits there. This has happ...

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I'm sitting in a queue waiting for a Tiger plane from Melbourne to Perth. There's a good chance you'll not get on the plane if you don't arrive 45 minutes early. They're a budget airline you see. Well this is all very well, but in a thin market like ours when they often have f...

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What is the probability your vote will make a difference? Andrew Gelman , Nate Silver , Aaron Edlin NBER Working Paper No. 15220 Issued in August 2009 NBER Program(s): LE PE Abstract One of the motivations for voting is that one vote can make a difference. In a presidential el...

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It seems opportune to revisit my 2006 paper, Equal Opportunity in Australia: myths and reality1. I wrote this brief up-date for NewCritic (put out by the University of Western Australia). Ones life chances depend in good part on ones innate qualities and character, but are dep...

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This question is posed by Bruce Bartlett in Economists View . The answer depends on how you define a conservative. Is it someone who believes in small government? Is it someone with an antiquated, minority philosophical stance - such as on Says Law relative to Keynesianism? Do...

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My family is staunchly lower class English on my dad's side (his mother emigrated from England as a lady's maid and then started a chicken farm in Greenacre in Sydney's western suburbs) and bog Irish/Scottish Catholic on my mum's side. However, not much is known about my mater...

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Republican Death Trip By PAUL KRUGMAN I am in this race because I dont want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I dont want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America. So declared Barack Obama i...

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A couple of interesting pieces, courtesy of Michael Warby, a tireless provider of hot links . This is an interview with a Somali pirate , feel free to take it with a pinch of pirate salt! How are the pirates organized? (Are there pirate leaders, financiers, and specialists?) T...

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Independent MLA and "kingmaker" Gerry Wood has just about made up his mind how he'll vote on Friday's Legislative Assembly no confidence motion, and is delivering tantalising cryptic hints: Mr Wood says he has almost made up his mind and will tell the leaders of his decision b...

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White to play Schlechter vs Meitner 25. ? See game for solution.

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So far during the current recession, the drop in employment hours has been much greater than the drop in employment. Some have described this as evidence that firms are seeking to hang onto their skilled workforce by reducing work hours rather than laying people off. Julia Gil...

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Friday's NT Legislative Assembly debate will probably be more peaceful than proceedings in Taiwan's parliament, but you never know ... This Friday 14 August will witness the NT Legislative Assembly debating a "no confidence" motion in the current Henderson Labor government (se...

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Yes, it's true folks. But there is a catch. You have to be between 18-28. And you have to be 'progressive'. Me? I cover the field , so I can do progressive, but I can't do 28 anymore. So I'm out. But you - you may be in. So get those skates on and get over to the Australian Fa...

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HT HomePageDaily.

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As Charles Darwin University's designated "expert" political commentator, I've been doing lots of media interviews in the last week or so for both national and local media. As many Troppo readers will have noticed, the Henderson Labor government seems to be in the process of s...

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At John P. Boerschig Ranches , they 'do have an organized Black Buck hunting package. This hunt is available at our Brackettville Ranch, which has excellent accommodations with all the comforts of home.' Is it ethical to hunt feral pigs for fun? James Valentine thinks so. He d...

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To the right are a couple of graphs of nominal share prices on the American stock market. What is odd about them? The fact that there is such a strong nominal anchor for share prices. Though the price of goods and services tends to keep going up reflecting inflation or down re...

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For those who've read the essay below and have no desire to re-read it, my apologies. I didn't post it at the time out of deference to the original publisher - the AFR. However with a couple of years having passed, I thought I'd post it here. It is below the fold and I occasio...

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I cannot really understand how such a talentless and unlikable person as Kyle Sandilands ends up earning m$4 per year . But then, I am not part of the Idol or 2dayfm demographic. I would rather listen to the ABC or watch the SciFi channel. I am also the kind of person who like...

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Technically speaking it was a tricked up cover band knocking out a few old Beatles numbers for a bunch of grey haireds on a nostalgia kick. But for those of us actually living the nostagia kick in Hamer Hall this evening, we were living the dream. It was the Beatles' White Alb...

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I think the Dave Beeton Special, hereafter known as the DBS was the greatest concession Dave ever made to how things actually are in the world. Consequences were not his strong point which meant that every moment came to him as a sort of surprise. This genuine innocence and de...

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Last days in the sanctuary of a loving family Body still and quiet now the great loving generous funny-if-infuriating spirit has left it behind ... When the doctor telling Dave he was about to die started crying, he placed his hand gently on her shoulder saying "Don't worry Do...

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If you take an interest in the 'free trade versus protection' debate - which I've tried to use a rather more general formulation of in the heading above - and you are alive to the possibility that the debate might be about something rather than just the ranting of people who j...

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Cross Posted from Gov2.net.au . Its a truism that the public sector is risk averse and that thats one of the things holding up the adoption of Web 2.0 approaches and indeed quite a few Web 1.0 approaches. I dont think this is inaccurate, but its also too general a statement to...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="399" caption="Dr Gruen insisting that he only appear within photo borders which theme with his tie "] [/caption] Over a month ago I gave a paper at a conference organised by Brian Fitzgerald which I reproduced earlier on Troppo here . T...

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Michael Stutchbury addresses Rudds assault on neo-liberalism in The Australian, 28/7/09. Stutchbury has some good points to make but he is, like everyone else in The Australian, obsessed with the debt question and the justification for active (discretionary) government interve...

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From Universe Today Ice loss in Barrow Alaska from 2006 to 2007. Credit: US Geological Survey Last week the US government released more than a thousand intelligence images of Arctic ice that have been used to help scientists study the impact of climate change. The images were...

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I attended the third and final session in the public forum series Getting to Grips with the Economy , organised by the Whitlam Institute at the Riverside Theatre in glorious Parramatta. This one featured John Quiggin , Steve Keen and the confessed non-blogger Guy Debelle from...

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There is a thoughtful article in the Financial Times by Paul De Grauwe which is found in http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/478de136-762b-11de-9e59-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss It notes the big disagreement between two opposing camps on macro-economics (the Ricardians versus Keynesians...

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A late call on the departure of the distinguished scholar Leszek Kolakowski. A short obituary . Starting off as an orthodox Marxist in postwar Poland, Kolakowski became progressively disenchanted and his calls for a more democratic version of socialism led him into conflicts w...

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From Three Quarks : Here's the speech Nixon had ready in case things didn't go according to plan. "Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there...

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James Morris is 15 years old, and he's bloody good at chess. He's just become an International Master . He's so much better than me, it's sad (for me that is.) But from all us patzers, congratulations James. I love it when people do something amazing! Should be encouraged!

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Chartered Secretaries Australia are putting on a show called a Public Sector Update in which I'm talking on Public Sector Innovation under the unnecessarily pessimistic title of "Can innovation in the public sector exist?" How to harness your intrinsic motivation to drive inno...

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I first learned how to work a computer on an Apple Mac. Marvellous things they were - I've still got my old Apple Mac 128K in my garage. I didn't want to learn on a DOS machine. It looked like the effort might be considerable and for the limited reward of rather clunky word pr...

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The Joy of Sachs By PAUL KRUGMAN The American economy remains in dire straits, with one worker in six unemployed or underemployed. Yet Goldman Sachs just reported record quarterly profits and its preparing to hand out huge bonuses, comparable to what it was paying before the c...

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I've got to say I wasn't expecting Ivanchuk's next move . But then I'm not Ivanchuk.

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You've got to hand it to them. What a great range of opinion they bring us on Fox News.

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Satisfaction 2.0. HT Craig Thomler .

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This book sounds like a lot of fun. A history of science with a touch of humour and a good flavour of the characters involved. Reviewed here . In order to structure his big, sweeping book about such issues, Mr. Holmes uses two exploratory voyages as bookends. The first, a trip...

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I've wondered why it wasn't coming. Maybe it is .

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In the July Monthly , Noel Pearson zeroes in on one of the key structural issues underlying the recent crisis; why did so many corporations (especially financial ones) act in a manner so disastrously contrary to their own self-interest? His short answer? "The cause of Greenspa...

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Christopher Joye rang me recently and asked if I'd sign a statement supporting a comprehensive financial system inquiry. I agreed for reasons that are explained in the statement. So did Joshua Gans, Stephen King, John Quiggin and Sam Wylie. In short, as people with a bit of no...

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Hi all, Apologies for not having posted here for a while. I've been flat out , but already have some posts I want to write - now to get the time . . . Meanwhile I would greatly welcome Troppodillian's views on which design(s) are best for the Government 2.0 taskforce - both in...

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Frank Devine passed away on Friday morning. He enriched the lives of many people, whether or not they agreed with his views on politics, religion or anything else. An early tribute can be found in The Australian, from Bernard Lane . The Weekend Australian tomorrow will carry s...

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About 10 days ago all State and Territory Attorneys-General agreed to enact uniform anti-bikie gang laws . The new uniform national regime will be modelled on the Victorian regime which is broader than three very similar laws recently enacted in South Australia and New South W...

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One of the most widely accepted tenents of tax theory is that it is most efficient to tax immobile factors of production such as land. Such taxes cannot be avoided, and so they do not distort behaviour. Consequently, most economists would argue that an annual land tax is prefe...

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I can't think of a single song of his that is a really big favourite of mine. But has there ever been any big star who was more of a genius as a dancer? Surely not. Not even Fred Astair comes close.

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This plane is a very fast plane. It has flown from New York to London in 1 hour 54 minutes 56.4 seconds , which is more than I can say I have done. All of which reminds me to ask Troppodillians why, when the big supersonic passenger planes failed, there weren't a few supersoni...

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Australia is in the midst of a flat-screen TV crisis, says Clive Hamilton . Driven by an insatiable desire for "stuff", we spend more time chasing money and less doing the kinds of things that would really make us happier and more fulfilled -- spending time with friends and fa...

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I read Disgrace before seeing the film; thanks to that, once again , the film didn't have much impact in its own right. It was well made, as expected, and faithful to the novel. So the principal interest was in judging its merits as an adaptation, discovering small points of d...

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Troppo's Paul Frijters, too self-effacing to push his work on Troppo, has a new paper on the effect of the internet on quality news content. I discovered it on a newsletter of new papers. Looks interesting, so I'll have to have a closer squiz when I get the time. Is the Intern...

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[caption id="attachment_8804" align="alignleft" width="417" caption="Like Fred Reinfeld says, White's next move is "one of the most beautiful ever played on the chess-board.""] Click diagram to see the game[/caption]

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Several years ago I posted a graphic plotting countrys GDP per head against mean lifetime and drawing attention to the tragic loss of life in southern Africa, mainly due to AIDS. There is a fantastic data visualisation tool called GapMinder that tells this story and other stor...

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I subscribe to Learn out loud's newsletter and so receive lists of books that you can get audio files of to podcast to yourself. You generally have to pay for these files, and because I have more than enough ways of spending my time including listening (well trying to listen)...

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From UK PC world . A new type of PC which is incorporated into a conventional three-point plug is being released in the UK. The Plug Computer is based on a platform developed by US semiconductor firm, Marvell. The device squeezes a 1.2GHz processor, 512MB of DRAM, 512MB of NAN...

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The article on Social Liberalism is: http://www.cis.org.au/Policy/winter09/links/argy.pdf Any comments welcome.

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Not everyone enjoyed my recent post about PoMas -- post-materialist consumers who live modestly but spend up big. Some readers were particularly irritated by the comment about food intolerances. For example, Galaca says : I can’t help feeling this is yet another article sneeri...

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Andrew Norton, from the Centre for Independent Studies, kindly invited me to submit an article for the Policy magazine. It relates to the choice between classical Liberalism and what I called Social Liberalism. The link to the article is : http://www.cis.org.au/Policy/winter09...

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Why does Toyota's humble hybrid drive some people into a rage? Around 2005-2006, journalists started writing about " Prius rage ", " Prius envy " and "hybrid hatred". According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , it started in California where the state allowed solo Prius drivers...

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A perfectly good player. Meets grandmaster rated opponent. Things end happily, for everyone except the perfectly good player. A very nice combination. White to play S Zagrebelny vs A Ponyi 16. ? See game for solution.

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Behavioral Assumptions and Management Ability: A Tentative Test Date: 2009-06 By: Benito Arruñada Xosé H. Vázquez The paper explores the consequences that relying on different behavioral assumptions in training managers may have on their future performance. We argue that train...

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British Airways chair Willie Walsh has asked the company's 40,000 employees to work unpaid for a month to save the company and their jobs. The airline made a £401 million loss for the year ending in March. This seems to be due primarily to higher fuel prices, but partly to dec...

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Are you appalled by McMansions, $4000 barbeques and luxury four wheel drives that never leave the bitumen? Does Clive Hamilton's book Affluenza strike a chord with you? Do you dream of downshifting to simpler lifestyle but feel you can't afford it? If so, you could be a PoMa -...

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Complexity has been something that thoughtful souls have worried about regarding consumers. For a couple of decades policy makers' first instinct in dealing with problems in the consumer market has been better disclosure. It can't do any harm and may do some good. Once you've...

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Paul Krugman has an article on the need to stay the course - Paul Krugman makes a few telling points against the proposition that Obamas fiscal package now needs to be gradually pulled back. The Fed is raising the monetary base: does this risk a resurgence of inflation? The mo...

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"Australia has very few anarcho-capitalist bloggers like Paul Staines of Guido Falkes [sic] fame, reformed raver libertarians with an eye for scandal (and another on the latest market moves)" writes Christian Kerr . Instead of breaking stories, he says Australia's political bl...

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HT: Kieran Healy's Weblog

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If you're a blogger and you venture into government whether in the bureaucracy proper or as a 'staffer' you've got a problem. You can't keep expressing yourself as candidly as you might wish for fear of breaching the relevant public service code of conduct, of having some perf...

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Well bargain hunters fresh from your kills at Borders (they don't stand a chance when you've got those Troppo coupons in your hand) have we got a deal for you? The entire autobiography of Ben Franklin read by Ben himself. OK, well I lied about that last bit, it's really Greg H...

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The Harvard Open-Access Policies The goal of university research is the creation, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge. We collectively take this to be a good. It is an essential part of our duties as faculty members to distribute the fruits of our scholarship as widel...

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Truly ruly.

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Exciting stuff! Infrastructure For A Learning Health Care System: CaBIG In his proposal for a new cancer care policy in a data-rich future (Jan/Feb 09), Lynn Etheredge correctly notes that the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has built the requisite infrastructure for a learnin...

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Take a look at the job advertisement below the fold . The pay is good, but not great by UK standards (though I guess you couldn't complain at the top of the scale). They do seem to have a rather comprehensive set of requirements for the right applicant. Anyway if you were thin...

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Billy Joel Masterclass Concert 2001 (Pt.2 of 12) Uploaded by denimel . - Watch more music videos, in HD! If you click through to the source, you'll find twelve of these segments from a 'master class' of 2001. And I'd never heard the song featured in this final segment. Billy J...

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Who doesn't like awards? When Alexander first went to school becoming Cool Kid of the Week was pretty much the major priority. After having earned the award a few times, resentment set in when Alex realised that the award seemed pretty randomly passed around and that in fact i...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="800" caption="Will Longstaff's thoroughly spooky and fabulous Menin Gate at Midnight. If you haven't seen it in the AWM, go now, right now!"] [/caption] A very balanced and interesting article on the subject, even if it could have been...

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White to play J Klinger vs Blatny 36. ? See game for solution. I really don't want to turn this into a chess blog. So this is overdoing it a bit. Then again, I've been surprised at the number of people I encounter who enjoy these posts, so I won't feel too bad. Anyway I enjoye...

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Amongst others, I recently argued that the Federal Government should pay its bills within 7 days rather than the 30 that they were speeded up to with much fanfare as part of our efforts in fighting the recession. I don't think there's been any progress on that at the Federal l...

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Famous for his swashbuckling attacks, Mikhail Tal was one of the most talented players never to really hold down the world championship. He won it and held it for just a year or so in 1960. From Wikipedia I learned this: In 1960, at the age of 23, Tal thoroughly defeated the r...

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Google docs is a Good Thing. It's not a great substitute for a rich client word processor or a spreadsheet, but both the word processing and spreadsheet parts of Google docs are great to have something simple in a cloud. Peach Home Loans and Lateral Economics operate from home...

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In New Matilda Ben Eltham asks "Yesterday's GDP figures show the Government's fiscal strategy has worked, writes Ben Eltham. So why isn't Labor saying so?" Well yes, they do show that they worked (like some of us commonsensically suggested they would) and Labor is saying so. WTF?

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Yum. My favourite. I just got sent this by email from in inimitable Tim Harkowitz. Others please feel free to add to Troppo's stock of Jewish jokes in comments. There is a very pious Jew named Goldberg who attends synagogue every Sabbath. Every Sabbath, he prays: God, I have b...

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Well that's an overstatement, but there's been a long standing idea - going back to before Adam Smith that there's something 'good' about "making things" to use some words that have suddenly become very popular. In reaction against this the economic establishment is of course...

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I have a credit card with a limit of just $500 for internet purchases and other risky transactions from the CBA. It is often in arrears and I don't bother paying it because I'd rather pay the usurious interest rate when the amount outstanding is $100 or whatever. So they somet...

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Shit Box Cardboard crapper Click to enlarge Little Jack - Blue Little Jack - Pink In Stock £14.99 Shit Box In Stock £15.99 Show prices in Euros and US Dollars Next Day Delivery is available. Order by 4pm > Poos. We all do them (except Her Maj, of course). The trouble is, dropp...

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The statement below appeared in the AFR today, and I've been travelling all day so hadn't had a chance to put it up. In Paul Krugmans words, right now, knowledge is our only defence against catastrophe. A natural reaction would be to retreat into timidity. But that would repea...

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From Usury Condemned (1643) by John Blaxton At a seminar yesterday the speaker described his project as one of discovering the conditions for an economy without interest on loans. In other words, what would the financial system of the ideal Islamic state be like? This raised a...

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I've been thinking for a while about retail and information flows. If sellers were performing their task in a socially efficient way, they would be conveying the best information they could to their customers. Of course retailers and marketers don't do that. They try to spin t...

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Someone asked me the other day for ten books on economics that they should read (not being an economist). I haven't given this a lot of thought, but here are some books - and some comments on them. I'm hoping the list can be filled out by other Troppodillians. John Kay, The Tr...

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Having just read this pussy footing review of this film, I am brought back to thinking about it, though not that much. I saw it last week in Sydney while killing some time before heading off to my hotel for the night. I was very keen to see it having seen it get five stars (th...

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By which I mean, one in which amazing, deep moves are made, and after a flurry of sacrifices, the king is slain, with each of its opponents' remaining pieces playing a role in dropping the final curtain. For those of you who care for such things, Enjoy!

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From Martin Wolf We have three alternatives: liquidation; inflation; or growth. A policy of liquidation would proceed via mass bankruptcy and the collapse of a large part of the existing credit. That is an insane choice. A deliberate policy of inflation would re-awaken inflati...

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Sydney Morning Herald 29 May 2009 An abattoir worker has been jailed for eight years for raping his 14-year-old stepdaughter and then blaming his crime on her wearing short skirts around the house. The man, who cannot be named as it would identify his young victim, tried to se...

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But then I would say that wouldn't I? Lawrence Lessig quotes an Australian economist explaining why free access to public goods isn't 'socialism', it's 'civil society'. Lessig's piece is below the fold. Et tu, KK? (aka, No, Kevin, this is not "socialism") May 28, 2009 5:57 PM...

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A triffic little service , allowing you to have a peek in 'real time' as we say, at the state of Sydney traffic. Click on one of the bright green diamonds. (Apologies if this is old news and you know all about it).

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I put quite a bit of effort into my two pieces o n Adam Smith in Ross Gittins' column while he was on leave and got quite a lot of positive feedback about them. So when I was asked to talk to an excellent conference organised by the indefatigable Fitzgerald siblings of QUT - P...

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The speakers were taking questions, and a member of the audience asked whether mandatory superannuation contributions had helped to insulate Australia from the GFC, by promoting saving and reducing borrowing. The keynote speaker, one David Gruen from the Treasury, replied that...

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Steve Keen recently produced an interesting (and sobering) look at the Australian real estate market entitled " Lies, Damned Lies and Housing Statistics ". In it, he takes issue with a number of fairly widely held perceptions, among them that housing affordability is now back...

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With John Quiggin proposing bets on the respective labour market performance of the US and Europe counting prison populations, t he Dutch are closing jails for lack of prisoners . Poor cuties. (HT: Michael Neilson )

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Penélope Cruz? You decide. I saw Elegy last night. It's been around for a while but hadn't caught my attention, mainly because I haven't been paying much. These comments will be of interest only to readers who have seen the film, and might spoil it for someone who still intend...

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[caption id="attachment_30918" align="alignright" width="580" caption="Artist concept of Kepler in space. Credit: NASA/JPL"] [/caption] From Universe Today The checkout and calibration phase for the Kepler spacecraft has been completed, and now the telescope will begin one of...

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The definitive experiment, February 2008 Here's the picture to accompany my comment on Nicholas's post about big things. My point is just that, as a design dictum, 'bigger is better' does not supplant 'all things in proportion'. Malcolm Oliver, no doubt the undisputed authorit...

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HT Gizmodo and Joshua Gans

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From Crooked Timber Jon Mandle On her show last night, Rachel Maddow provided a genuine service. [tip: TPM ] She reviewed Bush Administration claims about the link between al-Qaeda and Iraq (with clips) and ran that alongside a time line concerning the use of torture. This too...

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I was struck by Krugman's column on greenhouse . I've been working myself up into a lather of pessimism on greenhouse. Not only is this a really really hard problem to solve, but the way we're going about solving it is just so awful from so many perspectives, it's hard to innu...

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David, Cate and Andrew in happier (very recent) times - from SMH It's always sad when heroic high achievers begin to lose their powers, still more when they fail to age gracefully and succumb instead to bitterness and envy. But so it seems to be with David Williamson, once sai...

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Andrew Leigh asks : "are smokers more likely to vote for parties of the right (because they believe in individual liberty) or parties of the left (because they tend to be poorer than non-smokers)?" The answer in the United States is that smokers are more likely to vote Democra...

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Many years ago, as we were looking at a scrum in a rugby game being played in Towoomba of all places, a friend of mine commented that it looked like the quintessentially British institution! The other wise observation I have for you is that political think tanks on both sides...

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Grollo's Amazing Melbourne Tower was lambasted by the soft left as phallic. Perhaps it was. Perhaps it's because I'm a boy, but I just lerve things that are so big it makes me go 'Wow!'. (Unless they're unusually ugly, which they usually aren't). And we seem to get towards fin...

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This New Yorker cartoon by Australian cartoonist once plying her trade in the Good Weekend and now made good in the Big Apple is good fun on it's own. Turns out it's also a comp . I presume a caption comp. No reason we can't participate.

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Today's Canberra Times has a very pertinent article by John Pitchford on the benefits of the fiscal stimulus (no links). He makes three points: (1) Rudd's anti-recession economic stimulus package has effectively prevented much lower output, profits and employment (200,000 Aust...

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From Mark Thoma . Click through to his site or read over the fold. Bill Easterly sent me a link to the post The Vortex of Vacuousness that I posted the other day, but I like this one better: Maybe we should put rats in charge of foreign aid research, by William Easterly : Labo...

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With black to move, the threat of white capturing the f7 pawn in this position makes for an inevtiably wild ride. Even Fischer has lost as white in a good looking position. But I've never seen anything like this madness. The guys who fight this game out seem to have form. Here...

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I recently linked to designer Milton Glaser's ten point credo about life one of the points of which was this. PROFESSIONALISM IS NOT ENOUGH or THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT. Early in my career I wanted to be professional, that was my complete aspiration in my early life b...

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Ken: G'day Tab. Tab: G'day Ken. What are ya doin'? Ken: Just sitting here reading the Sunday paper and eating these squid satays ... Tab: Mind if I join you? Ken: Not at all. Pull up a chair ... Tab: What are you doing these days? (I represented him at one stage in one of his...

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I had a knee operated on last Thursday. Having had almost exactly the same thing done on the other knee a couple of years ago, I told my doctor I wasn't that happy with the way I was treated, and asked if he could suggest anyone else. Though it's a very minor procedure, it's s...

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Peter Thiel is a super-smart, super-successful businessman and libertarian activist. He co-founded PayPal , invested in Facebook and has pledged three and half million dollars to a project searching for the key to human immortality . He also thinks it was a bad idea to give wo...

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Remember how Luke Skywalker destroyed the Death Star ? At the crucial moment, the young Jedi switched off his targeting computer and used the Force to aim his laser torpedoes. It was one of the most important decisions of his life, and he made it, not on the numbers, but on in...

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HT Michael Neilson

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Strength through joy wasn't such a big hit in the end, but fun through stupidity - now that's an inexhaustible well. Michael Neilson links to ten videos of chairs being used in various silly 'extreme' sports. Except for the very first office do, virtually everyone is a young m...

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HT Three Quarks

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The finish of this game is pretty cool. I would in fact go so far as to call it tres cool . Indeed, Adoph Andersson won plaudits in the nineteenth century infancy of the modern game of chess for his 'immortal game' against Lionel Adalbert Bagration Felix Kieseritsky(!) in whic...

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Paul Collier has finally 'nailed it' as they say on Australian Idol. Climate change is, in fact, infested with ethical baggage, much of it unhelpful. Lets get rid of some of it now. First, climate change has been hijacked by the environmentalist hatred of industrialized modern...

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Black to play A Yurgis vs Botvinnik 34. ...? See game for solution. about our puzzles

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"I must admit to having no compence in economics whatsoever" wrote Robert Manne in the Introduction to The New Conservatism in Australia (1982). He proceeded to demonstrate the truth of that admission by turning his face against economic reform and advocating the kind of polic...

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Mark Blaug (1937- ) was born in the Netherlands, raised in the US and became a naturalised Briton in 1982. He made far reaching contributions to a range of topics in economic thought. In addition to work on the economics of art and the economics of education, he is best known...

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Every cycle of monetary policy seems to bring forward some piece of confused thinking that somehow turns up centre stage. It's not as if monetary policy is easy - given the inevitable level of ignorance and the long and variable lags in the effect of monetary policy. But centr...

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I attended a graduation last week, and submitted to my usual ritual of explaining, to everyone who asked, why I sat in the stalls in mufti rather than on the dais in academic regalia. Some of my colleagues inform me that they hate graduations, either because they are bored by...

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There's lots of crowing by opponents of the right in both Australia and the US that the right are in grave trouble. It always looks that way. And in Australia it does look like oppositions spend a lot of time out of power. But there's always a lot of luck involved. Howard was...

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I enjoyed the launch of the John Button Prize in Melbourne last 'Thursday night. After the event I retired to a restaurant Button liked in Little Bourke St - The Shark Fin with two of his three sons, two of his three wives and two of what may be three grandchildren and some ot...

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Thatcherism is just another word for neoliberalism, says Kevin Rudd . It's been almost two decades since Margaret Thatcher left office and her record has been obscured by mythology. Sure she took on the unions and sold off some public enterprises , but did she really " roll ba...

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I'm pretty downcast having read Glenn Stevens latest speech. It's on the usual topic - the economy, its past fortunes and future prospects. I don't read these kinds of speeches much because I'm not an 'economy watcher' trying to predict the next GDP numbers and I have a strong...

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When Ross Gittins asked me to write a couple of columns in his place as he went on leave I agreed and realised shortly afterwards that they would coincide more or less with the 250th anniversary of the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments . So I decided I'd try to wri...

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Not a show I watch I admit, but as Troppo's reality TV correspondent I read this piece from New Matilda "Reality TV Sh!ts In Its Nest" It's an expose of Ladette to Lady. I though it would explain how the girls were exploited in the sense of being deliberately set up to be type...

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I was once on a tram in Melbourne and got talking to the woman next to me. She asked what I was doing and I told her that I was down from Canberra for the day. I told her that I was advocating a particular policy. Being the son of an academic I was brought up to believe that t...

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From the US General Accountability Office. HT - an email from David Lian. The federal governments financial condition and fiscal outlook are worse than many may understand. Despite an increase in revenues in fiscal year 2006 of about $255 billion, the federal government report...

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I'm re-reading the Theory of Moral Sentiments . Some of it's great. Some of it, not so much. Anyway a well known phsychological phenomenon is they way that our happiness reverts to our mean level of happiness which tends to be determined more by our temperament than our circum...

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Full of relevance for our own brand of muddling through. Here's the column . Labours affair with bankers is to blame for this sorry state In Wednesdays Budget statement, Alistair Darling acknowledged that even on his optimistic assumptions a decade was needed to repair Britain...

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From Dani Rodrik's blog . Macroeconomics doesn't get much plaudits around now, but here is a real-life story that should hearten those who think the field is really broken. It concerns Andres Velasco, a distinguished macroeconomist who is currently the minister of finance in C...

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Reclaiming Americas Soul, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times : Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. So declared President Obama, after his commendable decision to release the legal memos that his predecessor used to justify tortu...

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I've had a few requests for more of these - so I'll pop them up when they're especially classy. Click on the link to the game Breyer vs J Esser to see the answer. And of course any day you want a fix, just go to Chessgames.com White to play Breyer vs J Esser 17. ? See game for...

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It's quite tricky to teach undergraduate law students about the Whitlam Dismissal. You have to cover it because it's the only example of exercise of vice-regal reserve powers of dismissal of an elected government since federation (at least at federal level; there's also Sir Ph...

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Australia's economy may be officially in recession, but Lateral Economics at least is doing its bit to reduce the effects. In addition to the research assistant Nicholas advertised for earlier this week, we also need someone with some web design and Wordpress backend experienc...

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On today's Science Show .

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[caption id="attachment_31877" align="alignright" width="332"] Our Cate, looking stunning just three minutes after giving birth to her latest accessory. Really how does she do it?[/caption] The night I got Kevin Rudd's email advising me that the Government had got its full res...

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And fair enough too. If someone is brain damaged perhaps they shouldn't be punished for bludgeoning their mother to death, after that is he had stabbed her, dug his hands into her face and on one occasion tried to choke her. But then you wonder why they're being convicted and...

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What Martin Wolf thinks of Britain's national debt, I think of our foreign debt . I have no idea whether the government can both get away with this optimism and postpone the moment of truth at least until after the general election. Markets have been forgiving. The difficulty...

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HT Brad Delong: In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use : The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods u...

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Not if you read fellow second generation Dunera Boy Peter Brent's analysis , it makes you relieved if the prospect of the paranoia of the past gives you the willies as it does me. Brent's analysis is calm and persuasive. I'll reproduce it below the fold. HIS WAS THE WEEK the f...

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Am I mistaken or is this a reasonable description of the last - say - thirty years in cinema. A generation ago, you could do a film about foreigners in a normal English speaking accent. The Sound of Music was done in a mix of fairly unobtrusive (to us) English accents (the adu...

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Here's how you do free association economics? You start writing a piece on the politics of the budget and then you just say pretty much anything that comes into your head. You use the general riffs that are doing the rounds at the moment and just see how it comes out. You make...

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The High Court this morning rejected an appeal by former radio star John Laws' employer Radio 2UE against a defamation verdict for comments he made about fellow shockjock Ray Chesterton. The SMH seems to summarise the judgment accurately as far as I can see from a quick scan r...

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I see PJ O'Rourke is in the country to strut his schtick for the Centre for Independent Studies. He wrote an opinion piece in yesterday's Oz along predictable lines: the keynesian socialists are squandering our money on all these GFC stimulus measures, when the best thing to d...

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The Thomas v Mowbray thread has taken an unexpected but fascinating turn, at least from my viewpoint as a public lawyer. It's kickstarted a productive debate about the form of an Australian bill of rights. As this is only tangentially related to the topic of the post, I've dec...

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There's been a lot written about this subject lately, but this two pager (pdf) from Paul Ormerod seems pretty good to me.

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Alex Sloan at ABC Canberra and I have a chat on air about fortnightly usually corresponding to one of my columns. We had a chat on Adam Smith and the Theory of Moral Sentiments last Thursday and I was in some trepidation that I might become rather incoherent as the ideas are q...

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In 2008 a group of people and organisations coming together under the name of Australia 21 invited both John Quiggin and me to discussions in Sydney to discuss the issue of resilience with them. Resilience, they suggested was something that we should be concerned about general...

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[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Steven Hawking"] [/caption] [caption id="" align="alignright" width="246" caption="Richard Pratt"] [/caption] If 'gravely ill' is a euphamism for 'dying' spare a thought for the two souls pictured.

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Well it was a great success - last time I mentioned that I was after a research assistant I got about twelve applications in the space of a couple of days. Most of them were very good. Since then three people have done occasional work for us mostly very well. In the case of ea...

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Occasional visitor "Edward Carson" wrote a somewhat cynical comment on my previous post about asylum seekers : Does this mean that if they fill out the appropriate forms in duplicate, we are then obliged to accept them all into our country? Although I strongly suspect "Edward"...

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Andrew Norton wonders how the term 'neoliberalism' came to Australia . After searching the literature, he thinks it "probably started in Latin America, and came to Australia via US academia". Andrew's probably right. There's some evidence that, during the 1960s, free market su...

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Given the grim circumstances the world faced, I've always been queasy about being too gung ho in criticising the bombing raids of the allies in World War Two (though the allies circumstances were less and less grim, victory more and more inevitable when some of the worst raids...

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A question that seems obvious once it's been asked. Find out the answer in this revealing video. The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c The Colbert Coalition's Anti-Gay Marriage Ad colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

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"Jihad" Jack Thomas I've been meaning for ages to write about the High Court's 2007 decision in Thomas v Mowbray , in fact ever since it was handed down. Complex constitutional decisions are really difficult to write about in a way that's accessible and interesting to a genera...

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Notes written at 12,000 metres. On various planes between Australia and Europe going hither and yon I had the chance to see most of the film Australia. Ive just filled in on most bits I missed going hither (from Beijing to Helsinki) going yon (from Helsinki to Honkers). There...

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As Chris Dillow from Stumbling and Mumbling argues David Semple thinks the left should join American tea parties, which protest against high taxes. I think I agree. The desire to shrink the state should be a leftist aim. I say so for four reasons. 1. Big government cannot be r...

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In case anyone's interested, some time commenter on Troppo and IP analyst turned impresario of rupute Duncan Bucknell asked me to participate in a podcast on manufacturing for export - one of my causes du jour . So feel free to have a listen if you like. Of course there are ge...

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Sometimes videos detract from an original piece of music. This vid is just too obvious and adds a little too much schmaltz to Mitch Benn's funny and rather moving little number. I think it's better with your eyes closed.

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Yesterday's "boat people" explosion near Ashmore Reef west of Darwin, in which 3 people were apparently killed outright and many more seriously injured, has eerie if obvious parallels with the "children overboard" saga of 2001 which helped John Howard to his third successive e...

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I don't have time right now to read the essay which is abstracted below . But I'd love to. And I don't really have time to defend the propositions that I'll put before you here, nor to get them into a state that I would be confident I wouldn't have to revise once I'd posted th...

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President Iloilo [ Cross-posted from the blog I run for CDU public law students ] There doesn't seem to be anything especially remarkable about the current (2009) Fiji coup whereby Fiji's ageing and ailing President Josefa Iloilo sacked the Fiji Court of Appeal which only last...

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Not so long ago Nicholas Gruen published a post lamenting the extraordinary cost and complexity of civil litigation in Australia and common law countries generally. He ascribed it partly to the adversarial system and canvassed the possible advantages of a more European-style i...

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(*This was posted elsewhere for my CDU Intro to Public Law students, so it might be a bit dry and technical for some. Nevertheless others might find it worth reading) The Rudd government's proposed reforms to the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Cth) ("FOI Act" ), sponsored by...

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East Point beach, pretty much where the channel and lock would go through for "Arafura Harbour" according to the concept plan. I suspect this aspect of the plan will change to force the channel to emerge on the north side of East Point, which would make a lot more sense. I've...

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Richard Ackland has an enjoyable rant this week about an upcoming UN talkfest in Geneva known as Durban II. It's organised by the UN Human Rights Council, which in a delightful (but typical of the UN) irony is chaired by Libya. As Ackland points out: The Human Rights Council i...

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Fiji's president takes charge (SMH) Fiji is in a state of political flux after President President Ratu Josefa Iloilo announced he had repealed the country's constitution, appointed himself head of state and set a 2014 election deadline. He said on Friday he had also sacked al...

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Internet company to be sold by 2022 (SMH) THE Rudd Government will next month try to lock Parliament in to approving the sale of its new broadband company by 2022 in a bid to avoid a repeat of the bitter Senate debates over the privatisation of Telstra. In an interview with th...

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Herewith my column in today's SMH , replacing Ross Gittins as you eat your Weeties. Thanks as ever to James Farrell for reading an earlier draft and making suggestions - something he does and I fail to acknolwedge on many columns. Cut-throat behaviour makes empathy flow Ages a...

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The police have been dusting for prints. There are dark smudges on the laundry door around the handle and locks. The forensics officer suggested I wipe it off with a dry cloth. It turns black if gets wet, she said. The powder is surprisingly difficult to remove and seems to ha...

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I'm in a London pub thinking of all the Troppodillians back home and of course I'm thinking of intellectual property. Today's column in the Fin outlines a very stupid situation we have gotten outselves into. (This was a direct washup of our previous Prime Minister's leadership...

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I dont know whether youve noticed, but theres a bit of an obsession with crime thats built up the last few years. I put it down to the Underbelly effect. The writhing naked bodies and the brazen offhand, almost pedestrian depiction of violent and murderous crime, has been migh...

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Dave Bloustien looks like a cross between Dr. Who and a 1960s mod with a cravat, waistcoat and sideburns. Certainly a contrast to the t-shirt and jeans that constitutes the usual comedy clobber, but Mr. Boustein doesnt deliver the usual stand-up routine either. Instead he offe...

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At last, a brief article on the financial crisis that goes behind the facade to look at some of the deeper structural issues. The author is Satyajit Das and the article ("Built to Fail ") was published in the latest Monthly . He sees the principle cause as excessive debt: The...

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Well it may not impress many of you, but I've just been heading North from London to Edinburgh and the train has wifi (though like most things in the UK it doesn't work very well). In any event, on line I found Ken Parish burning the midnight oil and have been gasbagging to hi...

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Earlier in the week, I raised the question of what might happen to Turnbulls argument if we did a counter-factual calculation - and in particular what might happen to debt levels over the next few years if the Government chose to do nothing (in response to the budget). Nigel R...

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New Page 1 I finally got around to seeing The Reader , and for once I'd read the book first (it helps that it's short). The film was well made. The acting was impressive, especially by young David Kross -- I was confirmed in my hypothesis that Kate Winslett deserved her Oscar...

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Costello went through all the documents relating to the summit, to see if there was anything at all on the global financial institutions. He said he looked hard and found nothing . He failed to look hard. This is my submission .

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Club 1: Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Malaysia, Mali, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Sri Lanka. Club 2: Bolivia, Brazil, Gabon, Ghana, Guatemala, In...

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Here's a piece of blatant and unashamed recycling. I run a discussion board for my Intro to Public Law students where they're welcome to post and discuss news items with a public law angle. Over the weekend one of them posted a link to the current stoush between Defence Minist...

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"The hallmark of economics," writes Geoffrey Luck , "is not its ability to forecast the future but to explain things." So when economists or others offer advice about the future of the housing market, is it best to ignore them? In 1995 economists Steven Bourassa and Patric Hen...

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I've always thought that autism is the doozy of mental illnesses. Many others come in 'episodes', and disabilities don't get in the way of human bonding. But autism, being related precisely to human bonding, does. And parents of autistic children (so it seems to me) must despa...

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Andrew Norton has asked me to post a link to a survey he's running on the policy views of those willing to identify with political labels such as classical liberal, conservative, social democrat. Looks interesting.

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Brad Delong's (re)pos t provides a nice example of how capriciously the media create by analysing the 'spin' they keep telling us it's their job to cut through. In this no-man's land primeval biases can run wild. One such bias is that the right are 'sound', that it would be so...

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Here is a blog post devoted to what you Londonophiles have always wanted to do - share with Troppodillians your deep knowledge of London. Ill be in London from the 31st of March to the 2nd or 3rd of April and wondered if any Troppodillians can suggest a place to stay. Im tryin...

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The above is the title of an op-ed piece by Roger Cohen in today's New York Times . In it, he examines a bipartisan statement containing recommendations for settling the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. It's been presented to President Obama and the signatories are not only well-k...

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I'm in Bejing at present - ironic when I read of the British Government's latest plans . The Government has announced plans to monitor people's communications on social-networking sites. The new proposals will see sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo compelled to retain in...

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A few weeks ago, Joseph Stiglitz wrote an article ("A Bank Bailout That Works") for The Nation . He was highly critical of the policy decisions taken to date by both administrations. Even though he didn't at the time have the details of Geithner's latest plan, its core princip...

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Regarding last night's Four Corners about Marcus Einfeld's disgrace , there are exactly two things to be said. The first is that it's a complete mystery why he approached the interview, made with Sarah Ferguson just before sentencing, in the way that he did. It would have been...

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Black to play L De Veauce vs Keene 6. ...? See game for solution. A seven move game. Not hard to see the answer, but kind of humorous nevertheless, especially given that this was a near grandmaster standard game.

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="399" caption="A bit of feline behavioural economics "] [/caption] Generally it's a good thing to leave people to decide what they should do and respect their decisions. But a bit of friendly paternalistic 'nudging' never did much harm d...

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I raised the issue a few weeks ago of what might happen to GDP output and public debt if the discretionary stimulus package were simply cut off in mid-stream. I argued that this would lead to higher numbers on jobless benefits and much lower corporate profits. Could it also pr...

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I'm doing some research on IP and particularly on patents. As in other areas of economics we tend to debate IP according to well arranged protocols. There's a 'pro' and an 'anti' or a 'more' and a 'less' party with each accusing the other of not getting it. There's lots legiti...

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Recently, Jeremy Sammut of the Centre for Independent Studies has had a number of opinion pieces published in the Australian Welfare saps the will to save on March 5 and "Welfare killed saving" (December 18) and a longer paper published by CIS - A Streak of Hypocrisy: Reaction...

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Peter Klein at Organizations and Markets offers some calming thoughts on the AIG bonus debate . 1. The main lesson is that AIG should never, ever have been bailed out with taxpayer dollars. I said that at the beginning, and I stand by it even more today. AIG should have declar...

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Theres a laminated sign that sits over the sink in the office kitchen. It says : There is NO magical kitchen fairy please clean up your dishes yourself. I hadnt really paid attention to it before, but noticing it for the first time the other day floored me. It was after all a...

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A couple of weeks ago recently retired High Court Justice Michael McHugh entered the public debate on whether Australia should have a legislated bill of rights. The debate (such as it is) was one of the "outcomes" of the Rudd government's 2020 Summit, and more recently led to...

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All subjects are linked to crocodiles. Just ask the NT News ( via Flickr ) High Court challenge jeopardises $900 bonus - Sydney Morning Herald (19 March) - THE High Court has agreed to hear a challenge to the legality of the Federal Government's proposed $900 tax bonus to 8.7...

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Mark Crosby explains - I couldn't agree more. The RBA released minutes of their most recent meeting yesterday. Debate in the press today about the merits of the RBA keeping their powder dry, or whether they should have cut further. The minutes end with The question for policy...

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The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa by Nathan Nunn, Leonard Wantchekon NBER Abstract: We investigate the historical origins of mistrust within Africa. Combining contemporary household survey data with historic data on slave shipments, we show that individuals...

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It seems incredible, hard to believe, but we've got ten double passes to give away to Highly Suss , which looks like fun. I'd go myself if I wasn't going to be overseas. If you're planning to be in Melbourne for the 4th of April, then let us know and we can send you a ticket t...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="470" caption="July 20, 2007, MACQUARIE Bank chairman David Clarke yesterday was forced into a staunch defence of the controversial bonus scheme that delivered $200 million this year to its top 13 senior executives following an unprecede...

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This man is Dave Bloustien. Why should you be interested? Because you will always remember this man's face as the first sign that being a reader of Club Troppo made you an insider , somone in the know and on the money . Yes, folks, due to our extraordinary buying power, our pu...

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Michael Duffy liked my most recent column for the Fin and invited me onto his Counterpoint program where we had a bit of a chat about various things - including Oscar Wilde - though the topic was the permanent income hypothesis and what will happen to the handouts. In any even...

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It it not necessary to be a fan of the Rudd administration or the alcopops tax to deplore the horse-trading that is going on to hold the Government to ransom on legislation to ratify the tax. Abuse of the Senate is not a novely and the man from Tasmania was probably the worst...

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From Today's Crikey Trashing Pauline Hanson was a class act Jeff Sparrow, editor of Overland writes: Yesterday, Jonathan Green asked the excellent question: if photos of a youthful Peter Costello mugging in his Speedos found their way to a newspaper editor, would the images tu...

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I've been sent two free tickets to an advance screening of the film Elergy, but unfortunately it turns out I can't make it. So please email me on nicholas AT gruen DOT com DOT au and if you can pop round to my Port Melbourne house to pick up the tickets, you can have them. The...

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The respected Institute of Fiscal Studies has raised the spectre of a two-nation Britain, after finding that some of the poorest households are facing much higher inflation rates than average. You may catch a preview of the publication in http://www.ifs.org.uk:80/publications/...

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Australia doesnt really do social insurance. For many years income protection policy has focussed on poverty alleviation rather than protection against negative income shocks. The forthcoming recession might be a time when we begin to regret this model. As the graph below show...

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Bruce Bradbury and frequent commenter - though mostly a while ago - Peter Whiteford, both distinguished academics at the Uni of NSW emailed me asking if we'd be interested in having them as contributors. The answer was 'yes' and so you should expect a post from one of these fi...

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One of the things that has surprised me in this first of all blogged financial crises is that there's been relatively little talk of the move from a uni-polar to a multi-polar world. Long periods of global progress have tended to be accompanied by a hegemonic world power able...

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[caption id="attachment_34331" align="alignleft" width="347"] The earth: it's all about YOU![/caption] Hayek argued that were were naturally selfish. In fact he proposed the opposite - that human beings are naturally solidaristic, by the 'natural morality' that evolved in preh...

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I was looking for something else and came upon this review I wrote for the CIS magazine Policy in its pre-Andrew Norton days. I'm always surprised when I read old stuff. It's never as I recall it. Always a bit better or worse than I thought. Anyway, I remember being a bit unha...

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There is an interesting new boy on the block! Gerard Henderson's Media Watch Dog is sure to be stimulating read because he has a good memory and he knows where a lot of bodies are buried. He has a long and honourable history as a media watcher, starting in 1988 with a print ve...

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Andrew Leigh links argues that social policy makers should use an evidence hierarchy to sift through policy relevant research. The idea of a hierarchy of evidence (or ' levels of evidence ') comes from the evidence based medicine movement. As Andrew explains, there are thousan...

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In a little over a week I'll be heading for Europe and back via Bejing. So I need around 40 hours of really good iPodian entertainment. Suggestions are gratefully received. In the spirit of reciprocity, I can tell you that " Not without you " on life matters is a wonderful thi...

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I've been enjoying Brad Delong's agro for a while. Luigi Zingale is a very smart guy with some interesting proposals. I'm reading an excellent article of his right now on " The Future of Securities Regulation ". But Delong is not impressed with his line that 'we have a banking...

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The following is taken from http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2009/03/ken-rogoff.html---. It is a comment by Paul Krugman to the many people, such as Ken Rogoff, who are anxious to pin our economic problems on the deficit. He says: The stimulus package wont prol...

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The Daily Show With Jon Stewart M - Th 11p / 10c CNBC Gives Financial Advice Daily Show Full Episodes Important Things With Demetri Martin Political Humor Economic Crisis

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Well, I guess, given their inability to access funding it doesn't really matter. But remember those days when Aussie Home Loans and Wizard were slugging it out as the two mortgage securitisers taking it to the big banks - together they shaved around two percentage points off t...

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IIRC Keynesian economist AGL Shackle coined the expression "the world is kaleidic" which is a nice way of saying that one can go from the heights of optimism to the depths of despair by just changing a few things. Economics and other things with positive feedback loops in them...

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I was asked to do this column at short notice today. I had in mind incorporating a bunch of things I didn't manage to do. In any event, for the record, here it is. If I get the time, more on this shortly. Will the cash splashes lift the economy? When they were first announced,...

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In the February issue of Quadrant , Steven Kates laments the resurrection of Keynes , and warns his readers not to fall for the doctrines of a man who denied one of the key laws of economics. According to Kates, Say's Law is a proposition that since 1936 every economist has be...

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An amusing post by Greg Ransom on Taking Hayek Seriously. Based on the story of Hayek's visit to Australia in 1976 as told by Ron Kitching with some more background on Catallaxy . In brief, Ron Kitching and the late Roger Randerson organised financial backing for a month-long...

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The media are supposed to be finding out and telling us what is going on. They don't do that of course. They spend most of their time reporting on various lamely constructed dramas. The main meta-narrative is racecalling the parties or what I call pub-talk. Is Kevin or Malcolm...

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Yesterday Nicholas Gruen asked : What single book is the best introduction to your field your field for lay people? In the field of welfare reform I'd recommend Thomas Fowle's 1898 book The Poor Law . Progress comes slowly in social policy. Much of what passes for innovation i...

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From Sydney Morning Herald (I'm sure they won't mind) The strict political neutrality of Australia's Governor-General is a crucially important democratic principle, but one whose mention usually elicits a combination of boredom and baffled incomprehension from most people. It'...

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"The developing world, especially China, ran huge trade surpluses assisted by an overvalued currency." Ehem - try 'undervalued currency'. Malcolm Turnbull on the causes of the crisis. However perhaps it was a misprint. Anyway I just discovered this - no doubt others have been...

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Across Latin America, governments are turning to conditional cash transfers to overcome poverty and inequality. In a recent post, Andrew Leigh asks whether we should trial the approach in Australia. Conditional cash transfer programs attack poverty in two ways. Like income sup...

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Michael Neilsen links to a list of answers to this question: What single book is the best introduction to your field or specialization within your field for laypeople? He says it's a gold mine. Perhaps it is. On economics it has just one link - to Henry Hazlitt's Economics in...

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News that South Australian Premier Mike Rann is contemplating a High Court challenge to the federal Murray-Darling water deal is good news for constitutional lawyers, because it would result in the resolution of a question raised before Federation but never litigated. Such a c...

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Well the previous puzzle seems to have intrigued a few people. This one is dead difficult (for people of fair average stupidity such as myself anyway). Black plays two important moves. The first is the one I guessed. The second I wouldn't have guessed in a million years, but o...

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I was at a function yesterday with a bunch of economists - amongst some other people - and was annoyed to note that there wasn't much push-back against the casual assumption that the cash handouts had not worked - that people had just saved the money they were given. It all se...

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Keating: a chance to remake the global financial system Global financial confidence, once destroyed, requires myr­iad positive events and a heavy convergence of them to counter ambient pessimism and gloom. The recent series of government packages, notwithstanding their scale a...

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This one features gratuitous swearing so I'm linking to it rather than posting directly on Troppo. Don't want to lower the tone around here too much. Probably not safe for work.

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The monthly RePec rankings for Australia are in again. Always an exiting moment for the professional economists in Australia to see whether their latest publications have already been spotted by the automatic search routines, whether they have been cited as often as they deser...

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While it's very unedifying when people are stirred up, I enjoy the odd 'meta' discussion, or at least thinking about what the right principles are for discussion in the blogosphere. So I was intrigued to see them eloquently expounded in Crikey today - by virtue of the publicat...

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Treasury always supports foreign investments. It believes resources should flow to wherever they earn the best return. It says overseas investment is especially important for Australia because we depend on foreigners to fund our capital expansion. And in these financially stra...

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By yearend, investors of all stripes were bloodied and confused, much as if they were small birds that had strayed into a badminton game. -- Warren Buffett

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White to play and win. A very natty move.

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Patriotic Sydney siders who want to know how a simple bit of tax policy can put a bit of rocket fuel in our economy should pop along to the Reserve Bank at 12.45 for an explanation at an Economics Society of NSW function. I'll be doing a presentation Are you still feeling luck...

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Perhaps as long as twenty five years ago certainly more than twenty years ago I was in Venice, on a trip to touristy Murano and I bought a little statuette of an eighteenth century fellow sitting at his desk, wig atop his head, quiver in hand writing on a scroll, a vase of ink...

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From Crikey! McGauchie loves Sol, shareholders not so much Adam Schwab writes: It was certainly fun while it lasted. This morning, Telstra confirmed the worst-kept secret in corporate Australia, announcing that CEO Sol Trujillo was resigning his role and returning to the Unite...

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Regular readers won't be surprised that I had another crack at this topic. The time seemed right. From a column published today in the Age . Call it the audacity of hope. In the political playbook of George W. Bushs advisor and confidant Karl Rove, you go after your enemy wher...

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Last Sunday, on the same opinion page where John Hewson excoriated Peter Costello, Kerry-Anne Walsh wrote a piece defending Julie Bishop , and accusing her detractors of double standards. Bishop wasn't a bad performer. Yes, she made a few stumbles but the one that was most oft...

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If you go to this page on the BBC's website in the next few days, or if you arrive in the next month or so if you download this file (mp3), you will hear an extraordinary interview. It is with a softly spoken Canadian farmer. He euthanased his 12 year old daughter who suffered...

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Journalists are ranked as the least trustworthy profession according to a recent UK poll by Ipsos MORI . While 92% of respondents said that they generally trusted doctors to tell the truth, only 19% said that they trusted journalists. At 60%, even the "ordinary man or woman in...

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I had to laugh. Tips from Wall Street. Very funny. At just $16.47 it's a steal - no pun intended. We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky have also purchased Expect to Win: Prov...

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Apologies to Nicholas, who I've just discovered has already reviewed this film . But I know he'll be consoled by the knowledge that readers will appreciate his wisdom and sobriety all the more when contrasted with my naive gushings. ----------------------------------- I saw An...

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Here's today's column in the Fin. They say you should choose your parents wisely. Right now that makes me think of our car makers. Its so easy to put off upgrading your car, that just the anticipation of hard times can devastate new car sales. And this time its serious because...

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A friend send me this cartoon.

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I was underwhelmed I'm afraid. Here are a couple of good reviews which say the film is good. So go ahead and don't believe me. But for me this was (yet another) Hollywood film with good acting covering up a film that didn't quite do it for me. (Others include the other Kate Wi...

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Here is a piece by Mike Steketee on Superannuation . He lists all the horrific inequities noted by Darren Wickham, arising from our present superannuation arrangements. For example: contributions to super are taxed at a flat 15 per cent; this provides no tax break at all for l...

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Over at Penguin Unearthed . Extreme distributions 20 February, 2009 by penguinunearthed John Connor , CEO of the Climate Institute , made a speech today talking about bushfires. Ive been pondering one of his key points for the last two weeks, ever since the bushfires . Climate...

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And no exception here . CAMBRIDGE Capitalism is in the throes of its most severe crisis in many decades. A combination of deep recession, global economic dislocations, and effective nationalization of large swathes of the financial sector in the worlds advanced economies has d...

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Car theives steal cars but they steer away from cars that are worth nothing and they steer away from more recently made and more expensive cars that are fitted with anti-theft technology like engine immobilisation. The CIS prefaces its reporting of this pedestrian fact as foll...

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From finance industry newsletter The Sheet . It's nice to know that after swallowing all those bank guarantees Wespac are keeping on keeping on. If only the entire economy was a bank, we could just sail through the crisis. T he most profitable bank in the world may be Westpac....

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Richard Parker writes HT Mark Thoma . It's easier to unwind. Dear Mr. President, In a future two-volume work, I intend to deal with the relation of a President to economists. I will naturally urge that he listen to them attentively, and indeed with a certain respect and awe. B...

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Crikey! rang today wanting to publish something developed from yesterday's post Costello 1, Keating 0 . I obliged. Readers of the first may find it a bit repetitive, but I reproduce it below as a matter of record and also because it has a few additional thoughts on foreign inv...

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From Tuesday's Financial Review: The Australian Institute of Company Directors acknowledged last week that there have been mistakes made by company boards in setting executive remuneration. As feeble as this admission is, it is the only one shareholders are likely to see from...

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HT: 3Quarks . FORMER GITMO GUARD TELLS ALL Scott Horton in Harper's : Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo in the first years the facility was in operation. With the Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him, now gone, Nee...

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I think Peter Costello gives a good account of himself here (reproduced below the fold). This will fill some with horror of course. It's difficult to understand what one is doing when one is deciding whether or not to allow a foreign takeover and if so on what terms. Costello...

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If at least one agency in the Victorian Government wasn't too flash at helping Victorians when the fire was raging , some true believers in there are making amends, using an embeddable panel, complete with a Google Map to notify the public of Bushfire Events as per below. The...

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So the economy has problems. Spare a thought for the citizens of New York where the bedbug plague is reaching crisis proportions with a 34% increase in official complaints last year. There are lots and lots of people who are having a devastating experience with bedbugs," said...

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The "Austrian" is Gerard Jackson who puts out weekly bulletins of opinion and commentary. This is his rejoinder to The Weekly article by the PM. He accuses Hayek of treating the market as a "game" "specifically a game of 'catallaxy'". Thereby dishonestly giving the impression...

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Like Australians generally, bloggers are donating generously to the Victorian bushfires relief appeal, over at John Quiggin's place and LP . And this morning news here in Darwin praised the old diggers at Darwin RSL for raising $20,000 over the weekend, while earlier news reve...

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Economic conservatives never really trusted Richard Nixon. Faced with rising inflation the president resorted to price and income controls declaring: " I am now a Keynesian in economics ". Almost everyone agrees that his timing was terrible. As Keynesians struggled to make sen...

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It's pretty easy to touch a nerve with bloggers, says cartoonist Gary Trudeau . Since most of them are not getting paid, he says that narcissism is the only explanation for what they do. Trudeau is the creator of Doonesbury , a popular syndicated comic strip. And last year his...

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I've just been to see the film, and I'm afraid I wasn't impressed. It is of a piece with 'Doubt' which is very well acted but has a slick and ultimately superficial script. I had no idea what the film was about but somehow by osmosis I took in that it was a Good Film and I wan...

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A column published today in the Age. Its all shoulders to the wheel on the fires. Or is it? On the weekend, Google, the largest internet company in the world and (how can it be?) one of the most agile offered Victoria a helping hand. It was turned away. The Country Fire Author...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="262" caption="Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos displays the Kindle 2 e-book reader at an event Monday."] [/caption]" They don't have the right to read a book out loud. That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law " Paul Aiken, ex...

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I often wondered why The Tragedy of the Commons was such a recent article. After all, it's not as if the idea is especially difficult or new. Sometimes an obvious idea does the rounds and gets put in in asides and so on but someone has the chutzpah to write it up as their own...

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The most recent column in the Fin. We wont criticise Kevin Rudd for his Christmas break, but it was ironic that on the first day after his months leave he could only say, The government stands ready to take whatever action is necessary in the future. This must have been import...

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STOP PRESS: $55 last day! Offer closes Tuesday 24th February 2007 (told you!) Now Closed. Hi all, It's on again this year - with our group subscription running out, it's time to resubscribe - if you want to. The amount you'll pay is a function of how many takers we have. Here'...

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Right now we're trying to reduce savings (increase consumption) in the short term before doing the opposite in the long term. So far so good. How might one use the tools of 'behavioural economics' to help. Here are a few ideas - none of which will surprise readers of this blog...

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I should emphasize at the outset that my participation in this Inquiry is strictly in a personal capacity and that the views I express here should not be interpreted as being those of my employer or any of its executives. In the last few months it has become increasingly appar...

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An interesting debate has kicked off on executive remuneration in Economists View It is not yet clear how Obamas proposals on executive remuneration will pan out. It may include a $500,000 cap on salaries for financial institutions receiving aid - subject to a reporting mechan...

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Today's Column from the Fin: In a stand-up routine, Woody Allen is about to be lynched by the Ku Klux Klan. His life passes before his eyes. The childhood in Kansas, swimming, fishing, eating cat-fish with gingham clad sister Mary-Lou. Does this sound like Woodys childhood to...

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Adam Smith had this idea that 'commercial society' made a lot of things better, particularly improving the politics and mores of earlier social structures. As I outlined i n a post long ago , he was particularly keen on the way in which the nascent capitalism of his day distri...

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A really first class post from John Quiggin.

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Brad has a category 'utter stupidity' on his blog. If any of us were as smart as Brad, we might chance one ourselves on Troppo.

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Geraldine Doogue had an interesting interview yesterday with Walter Russell Mead ( a Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations). He's recently written an essay for the Foreign Affairs journal entitled: "Change They Can Believe In: To Make Israel Safe, Give Palestinians Their...

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Lateral Economics is conducting a survey of bloggers and other sites that are trying to encourage debate in the oz-blogosphere and more generally. Im afraid I can't tell you the client it's confidential. However Im hoping that anyone who does or has run a blog, or been involve...

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" The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge." Paul Krugman. The rest of his impassioned column below the fold. Of course Australia's economy is not in the kind of dire straights the US one is in (at...

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John Clarke, living national treasure, is on ABC radio national again. On poetica this weekend, or downloadable here .

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