"A degree from Harvard or Yale is not a pre-requisite for president", says talk show host Glenn Beck while Christine O'Donnell begins a campaign ad by disclosing " I didn't go to Yale ". If there's one thing tea party champions agree on, it's that a new elite has taken over Am...
Continue reading →
Previously on this blog I've outlined a couple of themes of mine about Government 2.0. In a comment on a draft APS Social Manifesto I elaborated on both things and so I thought I'd reproduce them here. I think what you’re trying to do is worthwhile. However culture change is a...
Continue reading →
It is a nice thing that when you 'uninstall' a program on Windows, if you want to keep all your information, your profile etc, uninstall uninstalls the program but leaves lots of details about your profile in shape. It is not a nice thing however if you don't want this to happ...
Continue reading →
As I've mentioned previously, I usually participate on a Friday morning panel show on ABC Local Radio here in Darwin. It's called 3 Big Questions but it really includes 2 serious ones and a rather silly one to keep things entertaining. Today's silly question was a compound one...
Continue reading →
[caption id="attachment_13115" align="alignright" width="306" caption="Average size of equities trades plummets"] [/caption] A striking graph showing the effect of IT on finance - it's becoming economic to parcel up financial bets into much smaller parcels. From the RBA's Asse...
Continue reading →
I've posted on this a couple of times before - arguing that the populism of the left has gone missing and wondering why. This argues the same point in a different - shall we say 'genre'. I agree with most of the first half of it, but thought it got a little complacent about it...
Continue reading →
Welcome to Missing Link Friday -- a quick tour of a few of the issues Australian bloggers have been following during the week. Will it become a regular feature? Let's see. I'll be running this alongside Ken Parish's new reader-driven Missing Link where you get to share your fa...
Continue reading →
Over at Mr Denmore I commented on this post, which referred to an Annabelle Crabbe speech in which the the celebrated leaking of the federal budget in it's entirety is named as part of the rich experience of journalism which we should be valuing. Forgive my self indulgence as...
Continue reading →
A few people have sent me requests to recommend them on Linkedin but I've not really known what to say - recommend to whom? But perhaps the secret source was flattery, which as Disraeli once said should be laid on with a trowel. Whatever it was, I got this overgenerous recomme...
Continue reading →
Prompted by University of Queensland's Graeme Turner , Mark Bahnisch has a pair of posts over at Larvatus Prodeo asking rhetorically whether the Humanities at Australian universities are dying. As Turner puts it: ONCE, the humanities were fundamental to the idea of the univers...
Continue reading →
Bob Durnan is an old ALP colleague who has worked in Indigenous communities in central Australia for the best part of 30 years. Like me, he has witnessed the tragic deterioration of living conditions in many if not most remote communities and town camps in the Northern Territo...
Continue reading →
Unlike most of my fellow Troppo bloggers, my knowledge of economics could easily be encapsulated on the back of a small postcard. Perhaps that's why this post by Steve Kates on Catallaxy puzzled me: This article from The New York Times on the end of Keynesian economics in Euro...
Continue reading →
The current impasse between large mining companies and the Gillard government over its proposed resource rent tax looks like yet another example of inept public relations if not worse: JULIA Gillard says it is "obvious common sense" that higher state mining royalties would not...
Continue reading →
http://vimeo.com/15978330
Continue reading →
Tony Harris's AFR column from a few weeks ago. (posted by Nicholas G on Tony's account.) The Australian National Audit Office last week reported on the government’s abandoned ceiling insulation stimulus program. It found that the environment department should have given earlie...
Continue reading →
This post is what I would have written as a comment on Nicholas’s post Listen2Learners: 1 but it got a bit big. So is this post. The following lines of his post sparked my attention I impressed upon Peter the extent to which the online world of web 2.0 is one in which people a...
Continue reading →
See sidebar at right for links to Missing Link "best blog/alt media" reading recommendations. If you see an excellent post in your blog ramblings please link it here with a brief explanation/review so we can consider including it.
Continue reading →
Last week I ran a red light. I was tired. I thought it would stay yellow. I wanted to go home. In short, I was stupid. As I sailed through I saw the flash of a camera in the buildings in front of me. Today I got a warning letter. I'm happy enough about that. Fine's are expensi...
Continue reading →
Click here if you have 7 spare minutes or so to listen to an excerpt from an ABC Local Radio panel show I usually do on Friday mornings. Update - Roger from Values Australia has also milked the McKillop cow (though rather less light-heartedly than yours truly) as has Adele Hor...
Continue reading →
Gummo Trotsky, the Methuselah of erudite commentary, now has his very own blog . And he's "come out" under his real name, what's more. He calls the blog Sardonic Detachment Therapy. Gummo can be sardonic, but detached? I think I'll keep calling him Gummo anyway. I'm a creature...
Continue reading →
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is something I'd like to do some more work in. I haven't because I've not been able to get a consulting gig for Lateral Economics on the subject (hint, hint, if you know anyone who wants some consultant to go boldly where no consultant has...
Continue reading →
I made a comment here a couple of days ago which I believe expresses the frustrations of many about the chronic failure of the Labor government, both under Rudd and Gillard, to effectively prosecute the case for reform in just about every area: The puzzle here, as in contempor...
Continue reading →
This post began as a response to Julia Thornton's brief comment on a previous post in which I outed myself as a fan of the philosopher Hegel, directing me to a site where Hegelians roamed free. It's an interesting thing what we make of what we learn at uni - and to some extent...
Continue reading →
NSW Premier Kristina Keneally has continued her stoush with Prime Minister Julia Gillard, described being forced to choose between signing up to uniform national workplace laws and $144 million in federal grants as a "Sophie's choice". I wonder whether the photogenic but seemi...
Continue reading →
Well well well. I'm a fan - perhaps a bit of an ex-fan of WordWeb . It's a great little dictionary, thesaurus which enables you to highlight any word in any app and by clicking a few keys get a definition of a word and synonyms, antonyms and so on. It's a 'freemium' model of m...
Continue reading →
From Deidre McCloskey's The Secret Sins of Economics A very pompous linguist was giving a talk at Columbia and noted that there were languages in which a double negative meant a positive (standard English, for example: “I am not going to not speak” = “I am going to speak”) and...
Continue reading →
As readers of this blog will know I regard the state of the economics profession as a scandal, and have for years. It's only occasionally when it really matters, as no matter how good the discipline was it is mostly condemned to ignorance - the world is too complex to understa...
Continue reading →
Japan. (HT The Melbourne Urbanist ) What is more interesting however is the fact it looks like...a Phillips curve. This is kind of astounding. You could pick up a vintage late 60s macro textbook and it'd be struggling to explain the situation that was unfolding then, but the p...
Continue reading →
Yes, folks it does at least according to the paper below. Which is pretty good news, because cultural diversity does or can do some other bad things - like undermine social solidarity and trust. Like the resource curse, I suspect cultural diversity can be pretty good all round...
Continue reading →
One word would be OK too - Tragedy. HT Lord Turner (again).
Continue reading →
Credit derivatives “enhance the transparency of the markets’ collective view of credit risks.. [and thus]… provide valuable information about broad credit conditions and increasingly set the marginal rice of credit. Therefore, such activity improves market discipline” “There i...
Continue reading →
Julia Gillard's tactic of targetting Tony Abbott's refusal of an offer to join her trip to Afghanistan was certainly a bit tacky , but it pales into insignificance beside the cynical efforts of Abbott and his team to extract maximum partisan advantage from the Afghan engagemen...
Continue reading →
When you're regulated, like mortgage brokers are, regulators sit around thinking what it would be good for you to do. What could be better than to get you to do 'professional development'? Wasn't that one of the reasons you got regulated in the first place? Because you weren't...
Continue reading →
I'm afraid I don't have time to explain this in any detail. But Hegel is perhaps my favourite philosopher. I worked out I'd like to know more about Hegel when so many of the people who interested me seemed to somehow go back to Hegel. R.G. Collingwood is a good example, but lo...
Continue reading →
I recently attended the David Solomon Lecture in Brisbane as part of Right to Information Day. David Solomon designed the freedom of information architecture of Qld and Anna Bligh asked him to do it and more or less implemented what he recommended. So good on her. He is a Good...
Continue reading →
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHlN21ebeak
Continue reading →
I'm seriously conflicted by the debate over Labor's National Broadband Network. On one hand, the future of CDU's online Bachelor of Laws programs, whose creation and development I oversee, is heavily dependent on the availability of almost universal truly fast broadband within...
Continue reading →
https://youtu.be/tUiUVfqFOhw A couple of months ago I caught up for lunch with Peter Dawkins whom I've known since my time at the BCA - which is to say since 1997 when he was running the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research. He's now head of the Dept of...
Continue reading →
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh0jOiz7pXk Joan Sutherland has passed on. Inevitably, obituarians are taking the opportunity to contend that she was the greatest soprano, or even the greatest singer, of the post war period, or even of the 20th Century. Others are content just...
Continue reading →
The other day I was describing my honours research to someone (namely James Farrell), which started me churning some of the frustrations I have had with the empirical institutional literature of the past 10 years and I stumbled upon another issue I hadn't considered before - i...
Continue reading →
I've often mused at the paradoxical fact that we buy insurance to reduce risk and then gamble to increase it. Which led me to wonder how one could harness the gambling instinct to try to make the lives of those who like going to casinos better rather than worse. I don't have a...
Continue reading →
Thank you Nicholas for a generous introduction, not to mention the gift of an opportunity to pontificate. And hello Troppodillarians. Formally. Nicholas's "formidably well read" comment in his intro was a bit OTT, replies to blog posts being an opportunity to make a great deal...
Continue reading →
I'd like to introduce Julia Thornton to Troppodillians. IJulia is involved in the Accountability Roundtable has been dropping in to Troppo for a while now and judging by threads like these is formidably well read in a range of areas. Now speaking as one of the chief bloviators...
Continue reading →
Since I heard of it, I've been fascinated by an idea that William Hazlitt wrote up to prosecute his case for the "natural disinterestedness of the human mind". From an early age and then until his death Hazlitt fancied himself as a philosopher even though it wasn't where he ma...
Continue reading →
This story on slashdot is an excellent example of how debauched intellectual property is as a means of stimulating research, development and innovation: As we discussed on Tuesday , Andre Geim won this year's Nobel prize in physics for graphene , but he never patented it. In a...
Continue reading →
In a recent post I noted the massive investments that are going into moving the servers of traders for hedge funds and such like as physically close as possible to exchanges so as to get a few milliseconds ahead of their competitors. I proposed this solution Buyers and sellers...
Continue reading →
The Monkey Cage , via Mark Thoma Does Inequality Make People More Conservative? Yes, according to some new research (pdf) from Nathan Kelly and Peter Enns . They rely on a a yearly measure of “policy mood” from 1952-2006. This is an omnibus summary of the public’s ideological...
Continue reading →
A while back I was rung up and interviewed by a student doing a thesis on Government 2.0. She asked lots of good questions and they brought out in me a bunch of things I've been thinking about regarding Government 2.0. Since she sent me a transcript, I thought it may be useful...
Continue reading →
Some readers will be familiar with a famous refrain from the Tea Party "Keep your Government hands of my Medicare payments". Anyway, I liked this property newsletter which complained that negative gearing really wasn't what it used to be: It’s been all bad news for property in...
Continue reading →
Next week the Mont Pelerin Society has a General Meeting in Sydney (Australia). Speakers will address a range of topics under the general theme of The 21st Century Liberal Enlightenment. I appreciate that there is a high level of scepticism regarding the MPS on this site howev...
Continue reading →
Lang, Kevin. 2010. "Measurement Matters: Perspectives on Education Policy from an Economist and School Board Member." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 24(3): 167–82. DOI:10.1257/jep.24.3.167 Abstract One of the potential strengths of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act enacte...
Continue reading →
Web 2.0 is a great thing not least because we no longer have to rely on journalists for our reading about contemporary events. Particularly in the area of commentary, why read a journo when you can read a Nobel Prize winner in their field. This sentiment finds its apotheosis i...
Continue reading →
Here's a review essay I worked on in early 2009 which was published in the monthly . I've reproduced the review as filed rather than as printed as The Monthly needed to prune it back for reasons of space. The easiest way of doing so was to get rid of a great quote from Wolf, w...
Continue reading →
Envy and Altruism in Children Date: 2010-09-17 By: Kirsten Häger (School of Economics and Business Administration, Friedrich Schiller University Jena) URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2010-063&r=exp Envy and altruism have been studied extensively in adults. Here, w...
Continue reading →
I put off buying an iPad. It was cheap (good) but I was wary of the iPhone software. I expected some decent clones out in a few months of the Apple's launch but got sick of waiting. It's roughly what I expected. Nice, natty and with some stupid things, like the absence of a US...
Continue reading →
Black to play C Lolli vs D Ercole Del Rio 18. ...? See game for solution. about our puzzles OK, so it's not hard to work out the answer, but it's cute, and it happened in Modena in 1755. Before Adam Smith finished The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759 there was, obviously eno...
Continue reading →
Yes folks as part of our relentless drive to leverage our world class infrastructure and skills to bring our readers to their personal delight point - and beyond, Subho Banerjee of PM&C emailed me (amongst others to tell me of the opportunities below). He assured me that anyon...
Continue reading →
Vince Cable, Secretary for Business, UK. Liberal Democrat. “On banks, I make no apology for attacking spivs and gamblers who did more harm to the British economy than Bob Crow could achieve in his wildest Trotskyite fantasies, while paying themselves outrageous bonuses underwr...
Continue reading →
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SBL6dgBBak
Continue reading →
Looks like a technical detail but what it signifies is of huge consequence - the further development of the division of (intellectual) labour. May Amazon's tail continue to thicken! The Longer Tail: The Changing Shape of Amazon’s Sales Distribution Curve Erik Brynjolfsson Mass...
Continue reading →
Terence Kealey is the Vice-Chancellor at Buckingham University and he will be in Sydney next week for the Mont Pelerin Conference. In 1996 he published a book which has a few controversial ideas in it. I don't recall any talk about it at the time and it was not on my radar whe...
Continue reading →
Well folks. I'm off to the MCG. Again. Who knows who will win but I have a bad feeling. Here are my thoughts. Collingwood is a better side. Much better. To a remarkable extent collingwood forsakes the main weapon of most sides - the lead out from goal, the pass to the lead. Ot...
Continue reading →
A while back I posted wondering what had become of the populist left . The idea was that there are no shortage of seriously angry and pretty extreme right wing pundits. There are some predictably left pundits, but there's nothing that I can think of on the left that matches pe...
Continue reading →
