The headlines all warn that core inflation "remains high" and that the futures market is predicting a 78% chance that the RBA will increase rates next week. We need to keep things in perspective. First, after three annual increases in interest rates and with the gradual easing...

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Google removes Aboriginal flag from winning Doodle 4 Google entry Last year 11 year old Jessie Du won Google's Doodle 4 Google competition with her entry 'Australia Forever'. Displayed on Google's homepage for Australia Day, the doodle features Australian animals formed into t...

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Two apparently unrelated articles by superstars of the 1980s and 90s in their respective fields which share a common theme - the market's aversion to serious innovation, it's tendency to move incrementally towards lower levels of innovation leaving really fundamental and specu...

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One thing I've been at pains to stress is that Web 2.0 platforms - like Wikipedia, Blogger, Google Search, Google Calendar, Facebook - are public goods. Further, although a core function of government is to build public goods, none of these public goods were built by governmen...

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As we lurch from one disaster to another, I think Mark Thoma quoting Chris Blattman, hopping into David Brooks gets it exactly right. Chris Blattman: David Brooks saves the world in 1000 words, by Chris Blattman : Haiti, like most of the worlds poorest nations, suffers from a...

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In the first post in this series I talked about recent empirical work on institutions and development and the problems I had with the use of constructed indices for measuring institutions. In the second post I talked about a particular paper I decided to retest and the alterna...

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Down here in Victoria (well I'm not there right now but will return in late Jan) things have turned nasty as the Indian Government keeps pointing out when we kill another Indian. I'm not as concerned as some other people as to whether it's racially based violence. It's violenc...

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Today Artworks is replaying a program from May on Erwin Fabian - possibly the oldest surviving Dunera boy who continues to sculpt every day in his studio in North Melbourne. I have posted on him a few times before . I teed up an oral history project to record Erwin's recollect...

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In the second of what is turning into a great series of posts Richard Green has been discussing economic methodology with a bunch of us, most particularly Paul Frijters. In the last post Richard says this: The 1st generation of work will come up with a mess of concepts. The se...

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In the first post of this series I described recent work in empirical institutional economics and why I thought the work pursued a virtuous end but was compromised by the use of poor institutional measures. Today I will introduce a specific paper of this type that had drawn my...

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The Atlantic Monthly writes up Facebook's happiness index - they call it Gross National Happiness, but it's not - it's net of unhappiness - at least as measured. I'm a sceptic as to what conclusions one can draw from this, but one can see that killing some pirates rates as the...

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"I expected it to taste greasy and salty;" writes Clay Risen , "instead it was dry and smoky, with a hint of meat." Across America cocktail bars are serving up bourbon cocktails flavoured with bacon . In the Atlantic Risen explains the process: First, you fry up several thick...

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"Eat our weiners and gorge", says the sign on this Los Angeles fast food joint. Every time I look at this photo I wonder what that means. Is it an invitation to overeat? Is gorge the name of some American fast food delicacy? I took this photo in early 1987. From memory, it was...

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Reading this paper (abstract below the fold) led me to think of something which no-doubt others have suggested before. We would probably be able to get more money donated to charity by getting the tax office to establish authorised RSS feeds to verify the amount of money that...

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In 1997 I went out and bought a Sharp ultra light laptop. A lovely thing it was too. I still have it. It has a 6 gig hard disc and though that would seriously cramp my style if I were to use it as a main computer now, it would still be a great second machine, but I can't jigge...

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After you've checked them out and tried to work out whose side you'd rather be on, click the diagrams to see how these guys got into these positions and what they did with them. Amazing games.

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Remember when one of Peter Costello's killer arguments for replacing the GST with a WST was that Swaziland had a wholesale sales tax (WST)? As one of the minority of economists who opposed the GST but thought a broad based consumption tax was a good idea, I argued that a multi...

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How can we quantify culture? This sounds ridiculous. It sounds like a quixotic intellectual conceit. But I think the idea is important to economics because of the way we are now using the concept of institutions to explain social and economic phenomena. The fact that instituti...

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