As a summer exercise I've been thinking about places where more lotteries might be a good idea. By lotteries, I mean a decision maker selecting an option randomly, albeit perhaps from a selected pool, rather than using flawed criteria. After all, in a complex and uncertain wor...

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White to play B Kovanova vs N Pogonina 22. ? See game for solution. about our puzzles But you can look up the game, and the computer analysis on chessbomb if you're curious.

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Being in holiday mode, my brain is deeply immersed in trivial thoughts, not least who the Australian selectors could sensibly pick to begin the process of rebuilding a competitive cricket team. However an even more burning question is this: why are there so many cooking progra...

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When debating policy and strategy within firms for instance, the debate takes place as if the discourse will get us to truth or falsity. In fact our decision making is riven with biases, so an alternative to this would be to look for one's biases and to try to counteract them...

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Computers are very clever beasties - at least most of the time. Sadly their matches against each other are deadly dull. The games virtually never have strong strategic lines of thinking - which is the main thing that makes chess absorbing (for me anyway - a battle is waged: a...

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Banks privatise the gains they make and in times of crisis initially socialise their losses (amongst the private providers - so that larger more solvent banks mop up after smaller less solvent ones), and failing that us customers get the bill as taxpayers. Back in the days bef...

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It's a pity we lost Troppoarmadillo, not the blog so much (for ClubTroppo lives on) as it's archives. Anyway, I had occasion to look up the post and comments below, and they are safely encoded at archive.org, even if we don't have any backup of the blog archive itself. I don't...

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As readers may have noticed, I'm much of a one for the panto morality in which political leaders are urged to be 'leaders' at the expense of their own political viability. Yes, acts of political heroism occur. Some of them are even worthwhile, though they're mostly of little c...

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Kasparov v Anand 1990. No prizes for guessing who won. And while I'm about it, here's how to get yourself into the mother of all zugswangs.

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Why am I not surprised? An interesting new article in the Nov 2010 QJE Stock-Based Compensation and CEO (Dis)Incentives Efraim Benmelech, Eugene Kandel, Pietro Veronesi The use of stock-based compensation as a solution to agency problems between shareholders and managers has i...

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From the conclusion of huge survey of courts around the world. We present an analysis of legal procedures triggered by re- solving two speci?c disputes—the eviction of a nonpaying tenant and the collection of a bounced check—in 109 countries. The data come from detailed descri...

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Meet Joel Waldfogel. Joel published a now much quoted article on the deadweight loss of gift giving, the basic idea being that if I buy you a present I have to guess what you want. Since you'd be better at doing that than me, there's a loss of consumer satisfaction. Fair enoug...

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The other day I bought a hat. I had been intending to buy a hat for a while, but I bought this one because I happened to walk past it in the shopping centre I went to. I don't usually go to shopping centres (I don't drive much and I find them inconvenient and sterile), but thi...

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From McKinsey's . It would be similar here presumably.

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Once upon a time, masterclasses were things that were put on by people who were obviously masters at their trade. A masterclass was put on by someone whose technique everyone admired even if there might be inevitable disagreements about taste and artistry. World renowned music...

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Here is an interesting Aust Parliamentary Library write up of the law of rape in Sweden (HT: Paul Barratt) with reference to the current legal peregrinations of one Julian Assange. My inexpert take on the law of rape is that the ordeal to which women were subjected before the...

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I'm hunting round for a Canberra gerontologist for my 88 year old Mum. Any suggestions and reasons for those suggestions would be gratefully received. Very gratefully received.

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I've asked this question of people who know lots more than me about telecommunications economics. And they say 'double marginalisation'. Anyway, David Levine is a clever fellow and he's had a crack at answering this. It's an outrage of course. And is so egregious the Gupment s...

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Here's a proposal for another one. The governance of financial regulation: reform lessons from the recent crisis Date: 2010-12 By: Ross Levine URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bis:biswps:329&r=reg There was a systemic failure of financial regulation: senior policymakers repea...

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By now you've probably heard about social media and how it's making celebrities out of mild mannered public servants and chirpy journalists who think in 140 character bursts . Maybe you're wondering whether a witty and intelligent person like yourself could also become an inte...

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Adobe and me only barely get on. Their readers keep crashing. Anyway they've recently upgraded their reader and in chrome it displays pdf files very much as if they are html files - rather than bringing up the clunky old reader within the browser. All very nice. But there's a...

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In this week's Missing Link Friday -- a former Costello adviser compares Australia's tax and welfare system to a platypus (follow the links to find out why), Tyler Cowen starts a debate about inequality in America, bloggers worry about the demise of serious political journalis...

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ABC The Drum/Unleashed editor Jonathan Green a couple of days ago: Waiting until just after 3.30 this afternoon before fronting the media and addressing today's asylum seeker tragedy made Opposition spokesman Scott Morrison look the model of restraint. "A day of sadness as wor...

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For five 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 2010?. On Lin...

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Last of the year. We're going into recess until after New Year. BTW We'll be doing Best Blog Posts again in conjunction with Online Opinion. I'll post a more detailed notice later today. Sinclair Davidson on Oakeshott's peddling "rumour" that govt colluded in sinking Xmas Isla...

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During the Government 2.0 inquiry a Web 2.0 enthusiast in the Qld police force wrote me an email suggesting that life wasn't easy for web 2.0 inside his agency. I stayed in touch but wasn't really able to do much other than encourage in various ways. Anyway, he says that thing...

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A recent Op Ed originally published in the business pages of the Melbourne Age, 15th December 2010. The re-emergence of the mining boom, temporarily de-railed by the global financial crisis, as a key driver of Australia’s economic prospects has been accompanied by a revival of...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF0USo9vaGw I've decided to start posting the Missing Link Daily Twitter production here as a daily digest. Note that I cover "alternative media" (non-MSM fairly loosely defined) as well as blogs. Feedback welcome. Anyway I'll be suspending it fo...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiuQDyGrp-g Apparently thirty or more asylum seekers drowned as SIEV sinks under Christmas Island cliffs. It's bound to have huge domestic political ramifications. Andrew Bolt is already fulminating and demanding Gillard's resignation. He's an od...

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Yes folks, progress might be painfully slow, but we're gradually moving the idea of independent fiscal policy from "you dreamers just don't understand the real world" category to the "you've gotta get hip, you've gotta get real reform" category. The OECD has published another...

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Not so long ago economist Paul Frijters mused about drug legalisation here at Troppo. It seems that Paul is an international trendsetter. Now economist elder statesman Gary Becker and the world's most prolific judge/legal academic Richard Posner are musing on the same topic at...

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Nicholas Gruen posted on the weekend about a South Australian defamation matter called Manock v Channel Seven Adelaide Pty Ltd which has been going for almost 7 years and still hasn't even reached trial. Nicholas quite rightly cited the case as a good example of the deplorable...

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Fatuous Sydney 2UE radio reporter Latika M Bourke not only won the 2010 Walkley Young Australian Journalist of the Year award but has now been employed by the ABC as its Social Media Reporter . I've unwillingly been inflicted with Ms Bourke's vacuous style of "journalism" whil...

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American conservatives hate welfare. But under President Bush, they willingly expanded food stamps -- a program that hands out over than 64 billion of dollars worth of assistance a year to low-income Americans and legal immigrants. The reason? Many conservatives don't think th...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT6n1S-xBhY&feature=player_embedded

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I guess the coming of Master Chef was 9 parts good and one part bad. Great that people got into cooking, but all that stuff about 'plating up' was a bit much for me. A nicely presented meal is nice of course, but 'plating up'? A tad overblown methinks. Anyway, I just thought I...

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In a piece of news some will regard as predictably disappointing, the Cancun Climate Conference has reached an agreement , but its targets are both non-binding and fairly modest (reputedly a [combined] reduction in emissions of 13-16% by 2020), and include both developed and d...

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Canberra Times readers were left to think up their own 5 deck headline for this story by AAP medical writer Danny Rose.

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Here is the first paragraph of a recent interlocutory judgement. Check out the dates. The judgement is dated 22nd November 2010. Six years and there's no sign of a trial. Not much more need be said really. I'd add that litigating defamation ought to be a relatively straightfor...

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This week at Missing Link Friday -- bloggers tangle with the Wikileaks story, Ad Astra expresses his disappointment in Tony Abbott, Mr Punch falls victim to political correctness and the War on Christmas continues. Tangling with the cables guy A lot of bloggers are writing abo...

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One of the more surprising newspaper stories of recent times was Peter Martin’s article of November 15 on OECD takes aim at Labor policies which quoted the OECD Economic Survey of Australia as saying that Australia’s unemployment benefits are too low. Along with a number of ot...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8y-_vaf6iY&feature=player_embedded Current developments in e-books and e-readers may end up having dramatic effects on the mainstream newspaper industry, about whose future I've been musing in recent days . A significant part of the problems bei...

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Anyone looking for a link between my post earlier today on the future of Fairfax and Paul Frijter's two posts on the Wikileaks saga need go no further than a story just published on both Fairfax sites: Rudd's revenge on US Kevin Rudd retaliates after diplomatic revelations abo...

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As predicted just a few days ago , Queensland-boy Julian Assange is now in police custody and has been denied bail pending his extradition to Sweden to answer allegations of having had consensual sex without a condom. In Sweden, American prosecutors will no doubt try to have h...

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Crikey boss and former Fairfax editor Eric Beecher published a scathing opinion piece about his former employer in yesterday's newsletter, in the wake of the sudden departure of Fairfax CEO Brian McCarthy . Of course, as a direct Fairfax competitor, we should take Beecher's op...

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There are some common elements between my recent post , which suggested a new asylum seeker assessment regime to take the place of universal mandatory detention during assessment, and proposals outlined last week by the Coalition Immigration spokesperson Scott Morrison in an a...

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John Foster has asked that I post a link to a paper he's recently co-authored (pdf) arguing for a different carbon regulatory regime to promote carbon abatement. I'm travelling and unable to subject the paper to any analysis, but it looks interesting. I hope you'll check it ou...

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Some readers may have noticed from the "sticky" permanent post at the top of Troppo's front page that we've revived the old Missing Link feature in two separate forms: a weekly themed digest by Don Arthur; a daily Twitter-based service compiled mostly by me and delivered via N...

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It's quite obvious, and has been so for a while, that the Chinese currency, the yuan, is undervalued. This is obviously of consternation to the United States, whom would desire a depreciation in their currency against the yuan - the policy is called beggar thy neighbour for a...

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It was billed as a debate over the size of government . But within the first few minutes Congressman Paul Ryan had changed the subject. Focusing "just on size entirely misses the point", he said, "We should not be asking how big should our government be, we should be asking wh...

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In this week's Missing Link Friday -- a brilliant idea for reforming the education system, old people, advice about grey hair and the need for teeth 2.0. Skinner Box kids "I was just thinking about schooling and I had a most brilliant idea", writes Joseph Clark . "If students...

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An article by David Mallard at New Matilda reflects on some observations (canards?) by the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Judge (!!) about the allegedly malign influence of the Internet generally and social media in particular on the integrity of jury deliberati...

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Peter Timmins reviews the progress through the Senate (or rather lack of same) of a proposed limited "shield" law to protect the confidentiality of journalists' sources. As Peter noted, I gave evidence and made a submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Committee on t...

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Today is the anniversary of the battle of the Eureka Stockade. This is not a much remembered date. In fact, it was only brought to my attention by a letter in the AFR bemoaning the lack of recognition. This letter was penned by a Joseph Toscano of the Anarchist Media Institute...

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Letter to the Editor NT News: I don’t hold any brief for the CLP, or Labor for that matter (although I did a long time ago). However I have strong moral objections when I see someone’s reputation trashed unfairly. That especially includes politicians, a human sub-species about...

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As I've said before , if you want to understand Hegel, for goodness sake don't read what he wrote. You've got to find another way in. So I'm pleased to say that Alan Saunders has featured Hegel in his latest two Philosophers' Zones . I've not yet listened to last week's one ,...

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This is an article of mine that was originally published in the Melbourne Age on 29th November 2010. Saturday’s election of a Coalition government is unlikely to have much impact on Victoria’s economic direction. As The Age’s economics editor Tim Colebatch noted last Friday, t...

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Well, they’ve done it again. Queensland-boy Julian Assange and his band of merry journalists and IT-nerds have flooded the internet once again with sensitive information that embarrasses several governments, most notably the US, by releasing the content of several hundred thou...

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I couldn't agree more with FOI expert Peter Timmins about the latest Wikileaks "disclosures". I have no idea whether Assange is a rapist or not, but he's certainly succeeded in setting the cause of public sector whistleblowing back by a decade or more. The documents so far dis...

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Saul's recent column in the Age - I'm responsible for the headline (NG). For a country which accounts for less than 0.25 per cent (that is, less than one four-hundredth) of the world economy, Ireland has attracted a disproportionately large share of world attention over the pa...

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Here are a few of the links I've been clicking over the past few days: When is economic growth good for the poor? At Consider the Evidence Lane Kenworthy reveals the awful truth -- governments can make poor people better off by giving them money. Money and happiness . When peo...

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Orpheus and Eurydice by Carlo Cignani (1628-1719) O everlasting gods! I see your lovely eyes and your beautiful face, and yet I cannot believe my own eyes! These are the sentiments of Orpheus on being reunited with Eurydice in Hades, but they are also the standard reaction to...

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The publication of an edited version of my Troppo post about abolition of mandatory universal detention of asylum seekers at the ABC Unleashed site has certainly been an interesting experience. Fairly predictably it attracted the sort of polarised "howling into the darkness" c...

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I'm looking for a good web designer who can integrate a web presence with Facebook and Twitter and who also has a working familiarity with higher education learning management systems and in particular Blackboard. Can someone point me towards a suitable candidate?

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RBA governor Glenn Stevens always goes to the big issues. His latest speech notes that we are becoming more dependent on China and India buying our resources, and adds that these countries will probably have their ups and downs over the next quarter-century. So then he asks: h...

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Occasionally a report comes along which should give people a whole new way of looking at a public policy debate. A new report on universal high-speed broadband (UHSB) via fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP), titled "Superfast: Is It Really Worth a Subsidy?" , does just that. Written...

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From: Nicholas Gruen (Lateral Economics) Sent: Saturday, 20 November 2010 3:12 PM To: Assistant Subject: Qantas Booking Hi there, I purchased the ticket with details below at Mascot Airport and they said they'd send me my invoice by e-mail, but they've not done so. Can you che...

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In a recent post, Troppo's Ken Parish suggested that quality newspapers serve a gatekeeping role, ensuring "at least some measure of quality assurance". So what's happening at the Australian? In a recent piece on wind farms, environment editor Graham Lloyd attempted to explain...

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If you regularly copy and paste headlines or paragraphs from newspapers, you'll have run into Tynt Insight . It's the software that inserts the irritating "Read More" URL into your blog posts, emails and documents. As John Gruber at Daring Fireball writes , Insight "is a servi...

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There's more to reporting than quoting from media releases or explaining statistics you've downloaded from the ABS -- or at least there ought to be. And that's why it's so worrying to read this from Alan Kohler : It is now possible for anyone to find out almost anything. Someo...

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Journalists love nothing better than to navel gaze about the future of newspapers and the mainstream media in the Age of Social Media. Some journalists even see social media as threatening their long-term career prospects. It's probably inevitable given the struggle newspapers...

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This NT story might bear watching for its possible national implications: The Northern Territory's attorney-general is seeking an investigation into claims Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and his NT counterpart tried to bribe a candidate not to run in the 2010 federal el...

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This week's Missing Link Friday looks at who's to blame for the toxic waste in your garage, asks whether car drivers and Tasmanians are paying their way and investigates the latest public policy fad -- social investment bonds. Help! Rich guys in top hats are filling my garage...

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This afternoon I returned home from a day out doing various things Kaggle , and on the stairwell was a fancy black, clear wrapped package. I thought it was some fancy bit of nonsense for their frequent fliers points. Well it kind of was. It was their latest special card. I'd b...

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Well it's not a new topic for me, but if anyone's interested Lateral Economics got quite a bit of coverage for a study for Western Sydney showing that had the toll roads of Sydney been funded by governments rather than the private sector the NSW public sector would be worth ov...

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The release in federal Parliament yesterday of the report into last year's Montara oil spill off Australia's north-west coast is just the latest chapter in a saga of NT government incompetence: "Industry, government and regulators must be absolutely committed to a culture of h...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-3hL9FfQFc&feature=player_embedded Well, North Korea, this is stemming from I think, a greater problem when we’re all, you know, sittin’ around askin’, ‘Oh, no, what are we gonna do,’ and we’re not having a lotta faith that the White House is go...

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http://vimeo.com/16917950

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(Hat-tip Dale from Faith in Honest Doubt ) Although I intensely dislike the rabid intolerant atheism of people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, it's certainly no worse than the propaganda of some of the more cretinous American God-botherers: http://www.youtube.co...

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At last count eight people had been seriously injured and seven arrested after an extended family group returned to the Central Australian remote Indigenous community of Yuendumu, having earlier fled to Adelaide to escape "payback violence" after a stabbing murder in Alice Spr...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cAFf_UDj9Y&feature=player_embedded

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And yes, if you want you can do some sleuthing from the url of the picture.

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Early next month we'll learn whether Australia has won the hosting rights rights to the FIFA World Cup in 2022. Surprisingly, given this would entail such a large amount of government expenditure, discussion in the media relates only to the tactics of the bidding team and the...

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It always seems to be two steps forward and then two back with Australia's asylum seeker policy. In the wake of the High Court's M61/M69 decision, DIAC has apparently begun offering all offshore asylum seeker s who have been refused refugee status a renewed assessment and pres...

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How do people respond to evidence of their own privilege? Some will deny it. They'll try to tell you that earning $90,000+ per year makes them a middle income earner. Others will ignore it. And others still will try to justify it -- they'll say they deserve to be better off th...

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A fertile collaboration A brief reflection, albeit belated, on the passing of Henryk Górecki won't be out of place in such a hive as ours of classical music enthusiasts. The Polish composer secured immortality with his Third Symphony. It's a shame the expression 'achingly beau...

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Cheating students, immortal hamburgers, housing nutters and a cunning plan to improve the affordability of Grange Hermitage, all feature in this week's Missing Link Friday. Lies, lies and more lies Joe Hockey is an expert at deception, writes Ad astra at The Political Sword ....

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I have a dim recollection that somewhere someone has done a set of graphs of the rapidly contracting time horizons of scientists’ and economists’ predictions of environmental and economic problems arising from climate change, biodiversity reduction, risk to food supply and ene...

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I can finally see the point of Twitter. It lets you inflict isolated thoughts on people that are too trivial or even self-indulgent to merit a full blog post but that you need to share. The Librarians is the best Australian TV sit-com. Ever. Discuss. My ideal final episode: Oi...

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Well folks, some of you may not be chess fiends. But tonight and for the next two nights even you may be intrigued to pop in and watch world championship blitz tourney. Players have 3 minutes plus 2 seconds per move each. So they've got to get a wriggle on. And they are stupen...

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There is growing recognition that the dispersion of credit risk by banks to a broader and more diverse group of investors, rather than warehousing such risk on their balance sheets, has helped to make the banking and overall financial system more resilient. The IMF, 2006 (pdf)...

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Don't diss economies of scale in finance. Well I do actually. There's lots of evidence that, beyond a certain modest size, dis-economies of scale come to dominate economies of scale. And now it looks like those areas of finance that are not simple commodities that anyone can d...

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Under the wonderful post title " Copyright Infringement And A Medieval Apple Pie ”, the blogger Jane Smith (not her real name, one would guess) has documented the history of an online copyright infringement. Hardly unusual, you would think, indeed the internet is supposed to b...

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It's wrong to tell children that Santa Claus is real, argues Edward Feser : Parents who do this certainly mean well, but they do not do well, because lying is always wrong. Not always gravely wrong, to be sure, but still wrong. That is bad enough. But there is also the bad les...

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As Jason Kuznicki writes at Cato@Liberty , there's "a game lately played in the bookish corners of the left side of American politics" that you might call the "We Know Hayek Better Than You" game. It sounded fun, so I thought I'd have a go. Many self-styled classical liberals...

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Troppo co-host Nicholas Gruen made an impressively well-groomed appearance on Alan Kohler's Inside Business program on ABC TV this morning. Nicholas canvassed a really interesting idea I don't immediately recall his having yet ventilated here at Troppo. It's the concept of por...

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The thought hadn't occurred to me until I read this . The Impact of Income Distribution on the Length of Retirement By: Dean Baker David Rosnick Social Security has made it possible for the vast majority of workers to enjoy a period of retirement in at least modest comfort wit...

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What Australia needs is a "genuine grassroots free market advocacy organisaiton [sic]", writes Tim Andrews . And he's convinced he's the man to make it happen. Andrews is currently in the US equipping himself with the training and experience he'll need to create an Australian...

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I was browsing in borders and came upon American Essays of the Century (ie the last one) edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Which was very tempting. I would have bought it if it wasn't $45 too. But I read the essay below - full as it is of what are now cliches of the civil rights mo...

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Around here at Troppo we've been musing for a while about how Labor in general and Julia Gillard in particular need to connect the government's derailed policy agenda to some overarching vision or set of values likely to inspire commitment and enthusiasm from the erstwhile sup...

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There's been a lot written about what's wrong with modern macro. But this quite quiet methodological discussion by Colander is well worth the read - including I think for non-economists. It's quite rich in descriptive detail about what policy economics was like - and still is...

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Apart from the issues canvassed in my previous post about yesterday's High Court judgment on the validity of aspects of the Commonwealth's offshore "boat people" asylum seeker processes, the sixty four million dollar question now is whether it will affect any attempt by the Gi...

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It's Friday. And that means it's time for another Missing Link Friday. This week Bill Muelenberg explains why letting teenage girls bring other girls to school formals may encourage bestiality, an Australian conservative argues that female empowerment is a plot to disempower m...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfFMIhMEyYY&feature=player_profilepage I was pleased to be asked to speak at the Queensland's Right Information Day. In my speech I wanted to speak a little against the grain. The language used by Web 2.0, Gov 2.0 aficionados has a particular qua...

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Like David Marr , I've been waiting for a while for the High Court's decision in the M61 and M69 case. The applicant's arguments challenge on various constitutional and statutory interpretation grounds the legal validity of the current asylum seeker processing regime, and in p...

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High profile constitutional law academic George Williams argues in today's SMH that the federal laws prohibiting self-governing Commonwealth territories (NT, ACT and Norfolk Island) from legalising voluntary euthanasia should be repealed. As a Territorian and public law academ...

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for some time now, I have wanted to read a short intelligible piece telling me what the US health reforms actually were about. The problem till now has been that the reforms entail 1200 pages of unreadable legal text referring to more unreadable text, and that the issue became...

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This piece suggests that the UK may i mplement quotas to increase the representation of women on FTSE companies. I appreciate the sentiment. Even though it's hard to find someone who will explicitly state that women are unsuited to positions of power, the corridors of power bo...

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Australia's pro- and anti-population growth advocates seem to be competing with each other to see who can produce the most glib, fact-free piece of propaganda. Dick Smith's entertaining anti-growth advocacy-doco Dick Smith's Population Puzzle , screened in the lead-up to the r...

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In a fairly desultory post , Helen 'Skepticlawyer' Dale presents the right wing de rigueur view that the United Nations is a waste of space dominated by corrupt third world regimes and should be abolished. Her pretext is the imminent establishment of a new UN agency for women'...

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From Troppo's guest blogger Neal Lawson (OK I nicked his post and reproduced it here). It is so depressingly inevitable. Obama, like Clinton, Blair and Brown before him, like in Rudd in Australia, like the Swedish social democrats, like every example of centre-left government...

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HT Three Quarks, I enjoyed this wander around the James Bond genre. How can we take such pleasure from such bad movies. It's a mystery. I liked the essay and don't dismiss the author's principal explanation which is Freudian fantasy for boys. But I'm in the demographic he's wr...

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Here's this week's Missing Link Friday. One for the country Don't stop at two, says Mark Richardson. "to have stable population growth you need a large percentage of couples to have 3 children to make up for those having none. Limiting families to 2 children won't work." At Oz...

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This is an EconTalk interview by Russ Roberts, with links to relevant readings. You can download to listen or you can read the dialogue, which is a bit hard because you have to work out who is talking (maybe not hard if you pay attention, but you can't tell at a glance). The b...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OLP4nbAVA4&feature=player_embedded

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AT the peak of the recent housing boom, subprime mortgage companies were loaning $600 billion per year to homebuyers with poor credit histories. In The Political Economy of the Subprime Mortgage Credit Expansion (NBER Working Paper No.16107), co-authors Atif Mian, Amir Sufi, a...

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Here is a story about the internet working the way tech utopians think it should. Technology is as good or as bad as the social conditions of which it is a part, but this is one of the good stories. It can be read either as a perfect example of self interest working well in th...

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In 2001, Portugal decriminalized the private use of all illicit drugs, including heroin, cannabis, and cocaine. As long as a person is not found in possession of more than 10 days' worth of any of these drugs, use and possession is no longer a criminal offense. The main point...

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The NSW opposition will quite certainly become the NSW Government, so any policy announcements they give should be taken as a guide to future government policy. Unfortunately, such policy is extrememely thin on the ground - sometimes to an absurd extent. In the edition changes...

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"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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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[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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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http://vimeo.com/15978330

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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...

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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...

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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.

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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One word would be OK too - Tragedy. HT Lord Turner (again).

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHlN21ebeak

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SBL6dgBBak

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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A while ago, I was rung by Richard Letts of the Music Council of Australia , a kind of peak body of music organisations asking - to my amazement - if I would give the Annual address at their annual conference. Robyn Homes of the National Library of Australia had seen me speak...

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Contemplating recent nominations for the Prestigious Critical Rationalist Scholar award. Terence Kealey , Barry Smith , the late Sir Donald Bradman and Ronald Dale Barassi . The criteria for the PCR Scholar are identical to the four that are used for the Rhodes Scholarship, co...

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This is a guest post from Julia Thornton an occasional commenter on Troppo. Nicholas Gruen’s Government 2.0 taskforce left us a treasure trove of a report, but when the nerds, hackers and policy wonks had gone home, in amongst the half eaten pizza and empty Coke bottles there...

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After a year of reading about relative salaries in different sports, salary cap breaches, player unrest and defections in the NSW press, I only just learned that the salary cap in the AFL is $7950000 compared to the NRL's $4100000. This set a little bell off in my head. This m...

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I was a bit disappointed when we were in front and looked like winning by a point - at around the 25 minute mark? Why? Because my son was overseas on a school trip and he would have loved to have been at the Grand Final. So I was hoping St Kilda would have a Barry Breen to kic...

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Well whether they win or not the 'Colliwobbles' come from another time, long, long ago in the late sixties and early seventies when the Collies used to finish first and then not win, either through some bad luck (64, 66, 70) or through peaking a bit early or going into the fin...

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When I hear that anything is 'committed' to something I reach for my gun. It's an almost certain signifier of insincerity. As a donor I receive bumph from the Brotherhood of St Laurence. The latest newsletter I got told me that "The Brotherhood is committed to ensuring that ev...

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Extracting some arguments from the critique of Marxism in the second volume of The Open Society and its Enemies . This is concerned with the Marx/Engels doctrine on the possible need for a violent revolution. Popper argued that the ambiguities of violence and of power-conquest...

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Yesterday in the post I received a copy of CAB: Collaborative Auto Biography , a series of short anecdotes and stories from residents of Cabramatta rendered as comics by Matt Huynh - a project intended in a large part to show stories about the area that don't involve heroin. I...

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Strange things happen when you check the links on your site. Proceeding from a nice statement of classical liberal principles to the Mont Pelerin Society we find The Winners of the 2010 Hayek Essay Contest . And the winner is...Toby Evans of Australia. Whoever he is, you can p...

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Who is this man? And why should you care? He is a Portuguese physicist, Filipe Maia, a PhD student at Janos Hajdu Molecular Biophysics group at Uppsala University and he's designed the best chess rating system the world has ever seen. Who knew he had it in him? Maybe him. Almo...

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This is a belated report on a debate on Islam versus Atheism at my campus. It was part of Islamic Awareness Week , orgainsed by the Muslim Students' Association. The official question for debate was 'Should God have a place in the 21st Century?', and the format was pretty stan...

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I was unaware of "doors duty" as recently outlined by Annabel Crabb , but, I can't say I'm surprised. Anyway here's her explanation of what it is. I remember having a conversation last year with a Labor backbencher who had been on "doors duty" during a sitting week. You know t...

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By: Li King King (Strategic Interaction Group, Max Planck Institute of Economics, Jena) This paper investigates whether language priming activates different cultural identities and norms associated with the language communicated; bilingual subjects are given Chinese instructio...

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I comments on my previous post on Metrobuses and small improvements in public transport BruceT gave a complaint about waiting and then giving up because of the uncertainty about when one would actually arrive on a weekend when the frequency was lower. This reminded me of the w...

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http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_how_web_video_powers_global_innovation.html

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Enough of critique already. During the election I started a campaign to try to mix a little activism into the numerous well founded critiques of the truly crapulous quality of our media. I figured in this day and age it might be possible to ignite something via some consciousn...

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Or two. Well folks, here's my report from the Preliminary Final hot from comments on my last post; Dr Peach will commentate for food, or at least for tickets to the Grand Final. It was a crushing win. The Pies took the game to a new place as they say. On the other hand one cou...

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Well that's the question for us long suffering Collingwood supporters. Who will we maul, and will it be ourselves. For the uninitiated Collingwood finished at the top of the ladder at the end of home and away matches for the first time since . . . well I've read it somewhere,...

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Judging by this afternoon's headlines , PM Gillard may be taking seriously Independent Rob Oakeshott's bid to be appointed Speaker of the House of Representatives. I tend to agree with Dolly Downer's observation that Oakeshott just doesn't have the maturity or parliamentary ex...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqrr6Aiaqlk&feature=youtu.be Here's my presentation at the O'Reilly Government 2.0 Summit last week. And a copy edited transcript is below the fold. Good afternoon everyone! I’m going to talk to you about public goods. Informally we all have the...

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Alex Stewart has had his 15 minutes of fame, but may live to regret it. Earlier this week he posted a video on Youtube. It showed him smoking lawn-clipping cigarettes that were fashioned out of pages torn from the Bible and the Koran. He compared the taste “scientifically” and...

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When we discuss public transport and public transport planning in the public arena we tend to either fall into whinging or into desires (or yearning) for big sexy projects. This is extremely so in Sydney. The NSW malaise has allowed it to be conventional wisdom that the public...

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Urban legend has it that the hemline is correlated with the economy. In times of decline, the hemline moves towards the floor (decreases), and when the economy is booming, skirts get shorter and the hemline increases. We collected monthly data on the hemline, for 1921-2009, an...

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Readers will know that I'm not a big fan of Tiger Airlines . Still, sometimes they offer the best time of travel or such large savings that you are tempted. And tempted I've been to travel back from Canberra to Melbourne tomorrow night. Having reflected on how stupid it if of...

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It won't get published because it's too long, but worth saying just the same: Dear Sir, Peter Murphy's always entertaining pro-CLP spin doctoring column sometimes obscures issues that really warrant more serious reflection. This week's column (12 September) blaming Warren Snow...

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A late call on the passing of Sol Encel, a tireless writer and public intellectual, acknowledged as the father of Australian sociology. He died suddenly and peacefully at home, aged 84, still engaged in a range of writing and research projects. He came from Poland at the age o...

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Saturday 11 to Wed 15, 10 am to 5 in the Great Hall . My treasures: all in practically "as new" condition. Peter Medawar, Pluto's Republic (not a missprint). $3. Review . The editor of the Age Monthly Review would not let me write that the cover photo depicted Medwar demonstra...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMxz7rzwee8 Paddy McGuinness once opined about the chasm between consultant and academic speak in the realm of economics. I think it was in the context of the battle between the mush served up by the consultants which became BCG in Australia in t...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="220" caption="Macroeconomic swimming"] [/caption] A thought bubble from when I was in the pool. It retreads some basic ground for clarity's sake. [fn1]. Consider a typical cyclical recession driven by uncertain expectations by agents. D...

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According to the logic of my last post on the political situation, when Andrew Wilkie declared his intention to support Labor, the other three independents should have followed suit after a dignified interval. I think the analysis was mostly right, except that, as Ken predicte...

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Nicholas Nassim Taleb of Black Swans fame calls it the narrative fallacy. In narrating the way something happens, one convinces oneself that it was inevitable, that it happened for good reasons. A nice illustration of it is the way in which Tom Peters' In search of excellence...

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Having encouraged Sustainability Victoria to blog, I discovered reading for a board meeting that they'd been doing just that for a few months. They didn't get precious and needlessly delay action by insisting on having it within their own domain. They just went to Wordpress an...

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This is something I was thinking of doing for a while, but since Possum has started a "What if?" over at his joint , this is as good a time as any to launch Australian Alternate History Week and hope it is taken up across a few more blogs. In short, I want participants to crea...

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Well it kept me in suspense until the last few pages. The speech is well worth reading and is here (pdf).

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The world's most inscrutable man? I'm probably completely wrong about this, so please help me improve on the analysis. 1. Windsor, Oakeshott and Katter do not want another election. They mean to enjoy the leverage the election outcome has given them. 2. They have consistently...

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Here's my article from last week's Fin which it placed below the headline "ALP sold itself short instead of selling its strengths". I've also done an interview with Michael Duffy on Counterpoint which was recorded last Thursday, but went to air last night. How did it come to t...

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I have often worried about whether promoting ‘efficiency” – in the economic sense – ensures maximum well being where it makes some people better off but others worse off - even if the Kaldor-Hicks criterion is fully met e.g. by ensuring those who gain from the policy could pot...

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We've just had an election in Australia which was basically very clean, at least as far as one can tell. It was negative. It was empty but there was nothing illegitimate about what either party did or said about the other. Over the pond it isn't so. The Republicans are revolut...

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One of the more extraordinary things in life is the amount you can be charged by your mobile carrier on 'international roaming'. It's completely extraordinary with amazing stories of people downloading serious amounts of data - eg for a movie and getting back to find bills for...

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It's time libertarians ditched their alliance with conservatives and Republicans, writes Brink Lindsey . In a piece for Reason magazine , Lindsey argues that libertarians should stake their claim at the centre of American politics and imagines a new swing constituency animated...

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It's easier to declare a film a work of genius than to figure out its secret. But I think in the case of Boy , it's balance. This film tempts you at the start to expect a feel-good movie, but ends up steering clear of sentimentality. There's menace and heartbreak, but it doesn...

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"Oil and coal? Of course, it's a fungible commodity and they don't flag, you know, the molecules, where it's going and where it's not . . . So, I believe that what congress is going to do, also, is not to allow export bans to such a degree that it's Americans that get stuck to...

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Here's the breakdown of a Canb-Melb flight I just booked on the to be avoided at (almost) any cost Tiger Airlines. Ticket Fare AU 12.85 23% Airport Charges, AU 31.65 56% GST (if applicable) AU 4.45 8% Service Fees inclusive of Tax AU 7.2 13% Total Cost AU 56.15 100% Now 'airpo...

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I've thought for a while that the News Ltd stable of papers in Australia were stuck between two seperate models in the News Ltd empire when it came to political reporting. The old Murdoch model of cultivating the image of influence by backing winners, frequently supporting unp...

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Here are all the sponsors for the Australian Conference of Economists this year. All public sector agencies. Now economics is a discipline fundamentally about policy - or I think it is - so it's no scandal, but it's still pretty striking that there's not a private sector spons...

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As part of my duties as CDU's designated political analyst/commentator for NT electoral purposes, I've been delving into the interstices of the booth by booth results in the NT seats of Solomon and Lingiari . The results are quite fascinating, especially in Lingiari. Starting...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="249" caption="Unlike my AS peer Mr Trask, I'm unlikely to publish a book on my crippled escapades to make a living"] [/caption] Possum's recent job plea has inspired me to do an experiment. Unlike him, I'm not explicitly seeking a job (...

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In The New Republic this week Richard Just shines the spotlight on Barack Obama's hopelessly contradictory position on gay marriage. He compares it to Woodrow Wilson's pathetic attempts to dodge the issue of women's suffrage by claiming it was an issue for the states. The issu...

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I recall having lunch with the late great John Patterson about fifteen years ago and amongst the things he said was if you get to choose where you work, always base your choice on the quality of the people you'll be working with. Which brings me to Andrew Leigh who has just be...

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. . . quoting us ;) Kaggle has a couple of competitions running right now which are generating their usual stellar results. From Andrew Gelman quoting our blog : The Elo rating system is now in 47th position (team Elo Benchmark on the leaderboard). Team Intuition submitted usi...

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If you look at this presentation I gave just after releasing the draft report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce, you'll see me (at around the seventh minute) talking about how Web 2.0 turbocharges the ecology of reputation. As I did in this column of mine (one of my best IMO) I...

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Readers of this blog will know that I share Paul Krugman's view that the US Republicans are a crazy, scary bunch. And during the Howard years there were lots of people who argued that Howard was the same. Which is ridiculous. He was sympathetic to the Crazy Party of the United...

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When the boss wins the Christmas raffle it's customary to draw again, and I wish I could think of an excuse to offer the prize in the election tipping contest to someone else. But you have to hand it to Nicholas for getting the House of Representatives result spot on . Even if...

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The regulation requiring medicines to be sold with consumer product information guides is a good idea in principle. But in the attempt to find out a little more about an over-the-counter pill I sometimes take to get to sleep - Restavit - I found myself reading one. It's got so...

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From today's Fin: “He [Tony Abbott] has undermined and potentially destroyed a first-term Labor government.” This eulogy to Abbott from former prime minister, John Howard, captures all that is bad about the coalition’s approach to opposition. Oppositions do not have to be dest...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roIeVEf5alk In politics you need a narrative about what you stand for, but you also need one – an ugly one – about the perfidy of your political opponents. As we can now see, the Coalition’s narrative of perfidy is in very good shape. In fact it’...

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There's been a great deal in this election that has been unprecedented, and some of the precedents it sets are good, and some less desirable. What I think is not particularly unprecedented is the swing. Quite a few commentators, have gone from the observation that first term g...

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Based on a good thread over at LP, I watched the Kerry O'Brien interview with Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott and Bob Katter. Remarkable. I can't remember the last time I so enjoyed watching politicians. Perhaps never. Intelligence, humour, apparent integrity and, more than anythi...

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What if the Greens make amending the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 to provide for at least some measure of proportional representation in the House of Representatives? Should Bob Brown do so? Should either major party agree? The Greens would have to be tempted to use this po...

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Dated but you get the picture ... Given that the most likely state of play in the House of Reps after distribution of postal and prepoll votes is 73 Coalition and 72 ALP or vice versa, we might yet witness a Labor minority government . The Greens' Adam Bandt and independent/Gr...

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Extraordinary: just extraordinary. Courtesy of the AEC , these are the seats in Australia with the most informal votes. I had no idea the informal vote could be so high. All from NSW. Division State Formal Informal Total Informal % Informal Swing % Blaxland NSW 61,996 10,276 7...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTl3U6aSd2w&feature=player_embedded

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Here's Annabel Crabb reporting on negative campaigning. Fear Is The Winner Of the 30 TV ads commissioned and aired by the Coalition, 29 attack Labor, and only 6 offer any positive reason to vote Liberal (thanks to Gruen Nation's hardworking research bunnies Xtreme Info, for th...

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One of the drivers of our modern world is the way in which public and private interest are being reconfigured. In many ways it's analogous to the rise of science. As Paul David’s history of the emergence of open science argues, the precondition for ‘take-off’ in modern science...

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The Australian fiscal stimulus package has been controversial, with some Australian economists and visiting UK historian Niall Ferguson arguing that it was unnecessarily large or wasteful, and other Australian economists and visiting US economist Joseph Stiglitz arguing that i...

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I'm quite puzzled by the negative, disillusioned tone of much of the blogosphere and MSM commentariat coverage of the federal election campaign. I've actually been quite heartened, almost inspired, by it. The advent of 21st century versions of old-fashioned "town hall" partici...

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A media release that's just been put out. Over a quarter of the debt from the fiscal stimulus will be repaid from the taxes of those who would otherwise have been unemployed. As our economy turned down in late 2008, Australians’ spending kept other Australians in work. And tho...

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I only recently became aware of the leasehold system on residential property in the Australian Capital Territory. This was an interesting attempt to create a city in which rent seekers and speculators would not prosper by allowing the increased value of land to accrue to the g...

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Immigration: America's nineteenth century "law and order problem"? by Howard Bodenhorn, Carolyn M. Moehling, Anne Morrison Piehl Abstract: Past studies of the empirical relationship between immigration and crime during the first major wave of immigration have focused on violen...

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As you've never seen them seriously - here .

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I thought I saw the fallacy of the excluded middle. I did. I did see the fallacy of the excluded middle, or perhaps I should say the fallacy of pre-prepared thinking iSnack processed food for thought 2.0. In a story on Mark Latham's call for us all to vote informal , we have t...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM_dOoUXgLE&feature=related

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Some great graphics from Tom Scott. I think the warning signs make most impact on their own, but Tom has annotated them on his site . Below, your opportunity to win the coveted Troppo Mercedes Sports and dinner with Nelson Mandela Warnings I'd like to see include: Warning: no...

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I know how powerful internet and Web 2.0 technologies are, so I don't need any convincing. If this study had not confirmed my prejudices I would have retained the prejudices (Why? Because it's obvious that sophisticated knowledge management capabilities have the capacity to gr...

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HMS Dunera carried about three thousand 'Dunera Boys' to Australia. I received this sad email today which I reproduce for anyone who's interested below the fold. The Dunera Boys, now mostly in their late eighties are down to around 80 with around 50 remaining in Australia. Dea...

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I have no doubt about it. Labor will be returned with an increased majority. With one week to go, the election campaign has descended to a level of debate at which rational argument is irrelevant. There's little point in having a reasoned position on greenhouse policy, offshor...

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The delightfully named Ben Spies-Butcher of the CPD writes in support of the Henry Review's proposals for the income tax system as opposed to a flat tax. In a nutshell, he feels that the Henry Review's scheme offers great efficiency benefits by simplifying the tax system and r...

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Books at 30% off in Borders - here .

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The floods in Pakistan have resulted in about 1,600 deaths, with many more expected (even disregarding the possibility of a cholera outbreak), and have stranded or displaced about 12 million people. The worst aspect seems to be that this is just a taste of what's to come, if t...

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I was asked at a Departmental seminar today whether the eleciton of a Coalition Government would set back Government 2.0. I said I didn't know, but that even if it did not have as much support from an incoming government as it has had in this term, the main tasks ahead of us w...

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We have competing paid parental leave schemes in this election, and voters are going to choose between them.But the kind of scheme desired depends a great deal on why you would want a paid parental scheme at all. Whilst details of the different schemes are available in the med...

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I'm in broad agreement with this piece by Chris Dillow. Jonathan Calder asks a good question: why has political radicalism become synonymous with wanting to see a permanent and massive public debt? Let me deepen the puzzle. In three ways, the left should be more concerned abou...

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Given the massive ignorance, not just of you're average Joe (Sorry I think that's now 'Joe Six-pack') but of experts, I think we should be particularly on the lookout for 'no-brainer' reforms. Simple things that we can do than generate gains and for which it's very difficult t...

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Here I cite this article by Annabel Crabb [fn1]. Here she defends the fact that all questions asked at press conferences are race calling in nature on the fact that policy literature isonly given to journalists at the beginning of the conference, and that the harried journos j...

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Noises are being made about high speed rail links in Australia again, and once again focus has begun on the Newcastle-Sydney leg of any such system. I assume this is both because of the density of the population, but also because the endless dormitory suburbs and above ground...

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Well folks, that's how your mad as hell correspondent feels. I'm refining the #HeSaidSheSaid campaign. After posting it I realised that we really needed a more general term as the pathologies of modern media - what Tim Watts calls souffle journalism - comprehend quite a few mo...

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The most common defence of 'he said she said' journalism is that reporting both sides with wide-eyed ignorance about the merits of their claims is at least 'objective' and it's true in a way. I remember having dinner with some relatives in Italy when a heated argument broke ou...

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A guest post by Conrad Perry: It looks like the new Julia being the real Julia campaign has kicked off with a bit of good old fashioned teacher bashing. This reminds me of one of the things that seems really ingrained in many people’s minds, and an assumption which a lot of th...

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In case you're interested, there are some great election haikus circulating with the hastag above. Here are a few chosen pretty quickly. Feel free to offer your own here, or on Twitter. Labour it campaigns / Five weeks in a leaky boat? / Waterfalls await. All day winter winds/...

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Elo ratings involve a system whereby your 'rating' is a function of who you beat or lose to and their rating. The 'future of the species' business is a reference to the fact that this manoeuvre of bootstrapping meaning from the record has become more important to the world rec...

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Julia is now 'being Julia' - complete with a big announcement - by her - that she's going to be the new 'real' Julia prompting the opposition and media into the obvious riposte 'then who was the old Julia?'. Might it have been a bit wiser to have been the real Julia for a few...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBmavNoChZc#t=6m25s

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This was the theme of a talk by Andrew Moore at the Blackheath History Forum yesterday. Blackheath is in the Blue Mountains out of Sydney and it has a lot of semi-retired academics and the like who support a thriving intellectual subculture of bookshops, galleries and action g...

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I've thought this for yonks: Few mainstream therapists would contemplate trying to persuade a gay man or lesbian to "grow up, get real, and stop being gay." But most insist that long-term sexual monogamy is "normal". This doesn't mean I'm throwing the switch to polygamy or wif...

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I went to see this movie owing to a misunderstanding. I heard that the director had directed Love Serenade and having enjoyed that, and hearing that this movie was good, and wanting to see a movie, I went along. The premise is, well, dull. A woman and her uncle settle into a b...

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subito constitit ante eltum tegumentum ferreum corporis tam occupatus fuerat in effugiendo e biblioghecca ut non animadvertisset quo iret. fortisan quod tenedbrae erant, haudquaquam agnovit ubi esset sciebat tegumentum ferreum corporis esse prope culina, sed debebat eesse quin...

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Well I can complain about the media till I'm blue in the face, they're after ratings, entertainment and so on. Anyway, I said to one journalist that it was 'crazy' that public servants who I knew read Troppo didn't comment, not because I don't understand that they don't want t...

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Economist Paul Frijters discusses whether the Western world will try to stop China and India's rise as the next economic super powers.

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It's pretty obvious that if science involves standing on the shoulders of giants (and the odd pygmy) then exclusive rights to ideas can slow down innovation. Still it's quite hard to demonstrate this. Some econometric studies are persuasive that it does. But there are presumab...

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Vietnam is the site of a rapidly emerging and evolving capitalism, something we may as well date to the introduction of Doi Moi (fn1) in the mid 80s.. Given my own interests , and continuing exposure to discussions about Adam Smith's ideas on the marketplace and sympathy , it'...

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Iris Murdoch and her very literary husband John Bayley had a term for going to literary festivals and talking on panels with names like "whither the novel". They called it 'whithering'. The Sydney Morning Herald asked for 1,500 words of withering on the tax system, which I str...

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Yes Troppodillians, you know what I think about this. So you may want to skip it, but I thought it worth putting my oar in on the subject. It seems so sad, with all the elements in place to blow the idiocy of fiscal populism away - to the enduring advantage of the ALP Governme...

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I have it under control. I flatter myself I can judge a film from the trailer, but I got it wrong in this case. It looked like a bunch of fancy special effects strung together with some half-baked premise about hacking people's dreams. I expected tedious chase scenes, endless...

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Popper is often perceived as an eccentric kind of positivist who adopted a slightly different take on the demarcation of science with the criterion of falsification in place of verification. People like Habermas and the late Richard Rorty regarded Popper as a positivist for al...

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Dear editor I wonder how many of the 84% of NT News respondents who think NT courts are too soft on criminals are aware of any of the following indisputable facts: NT judges and magistrates are tougher on crime than other states and territories. The NT has an imprisonment rate...

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I have just returned from a two week holiday in Vietnam expectedly with a wide range of observations with which to tire friends and relatives. There are a few though that relate heavily to economics and the sociology of markets and capitalism which are probably more of interes...

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Evidence-based policy is a buzzword that conjures up images of responsible government: difficult decisions taken after a careful examination of the evidence, tailored local experiments, and then implemented using the best advice available. Sounds good, no? As a buzzword, it is...

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White to play A Volokitin vs Rublevsky 16. ? See game for solution. about our puzzles

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Shrinking suburbs in growing cities "Lunchtime midweek in Campbelltown's main street in the heart of western Sydney is a slow-moving affair", writes the Australian's Jennifer Hewet t. "Cars drive in and out of the one-way street at a leisurely pace. Business is not exactly boo...

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The centrist and left-leaning commentariat have unanimously condemned Julia Gillard's (non) stance on climate change policy, an exercise in groupthink that would be stunning if it wasn't so predictable. Ben Cubby , Peter Hartcher , Lenore Taylor and Shaun Carne y all think Gil...

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I knew Neil Bessell at Burgmann College in the 1970s though I was not a good friend. I was shocked to hear that he'd died and asked Hugh Borrowman who is a friend of mine and who was also a good friend of Neil to send me the speech he gave at Neil's funeral. For those who knew...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM No doubt some have already seen this vid. I only just discovered it. Pretty gripping I think you'll agree.

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A nice story available in this article. HT: Serge Soudoplatoff A tramp passes by a restaurant, but does not enter, as he has too little money. The cook is furious to see a tramp in front of his place, rushes him, starts fighting with him, and eventually asks him for some money...

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No time to say much right now, but I was intrigued to see the People's Chamber. Why wouldn't I be? And disappointed it was scorned so instantly by various operatives around the traps. Of course the atmospherics for its introduction might have been better - this is a rescue ope...

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The editorial in the Herald hit the nail on the head this morning. Julia Gillard's population comments are purely symbolic. She advocates a 'sustainable population' but won't say what she means by that, and in any case has ruled out both avenues by which population growth migh...

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Following the efforts of James Farrell as to the many different things meant by lay folk and professionals by the word ‘belief’, I wanted to try to tackle the question from an economics points of view. Given that the methods and mindsets of economists are an amalgam of other s...

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One of the things I'd like to do in this election campaign is to draw attention to all the (most egregious) cases where the press engage in the mindlessness of "he said - she said" journalism. That is where they report various sides accusations of the other as if that then fin...

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I got this email from someone with whom I've been having an enjoyable correspondence for the last few months (though I've never physically met him). He's an Australian, living overseas, in his twenties or perhaps early thirties (I'm guessing) and is ideologically predisposed r...

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Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey must be hoping that very few voters have any understanding of the basic principles of statutory interpretation. Any who did would instantly realise that the Coalition's promise to amend the Electoral Act to force unions to repay the Australian Electo...

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Economist Paul Frijters reflects on the controversial Super Profits tax and the lessons the public and the government can take from the circus that surrounded the issue.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0_avwKo4S0&feature=youtu.be&a

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I recall when on the Cutler Panel into innovation being presented with lots of 'sentiment analysis' on the content of submissions - all 700 of them! I was rather sceptical of what could be got out of them. But I expect this is a more legitimate use of such techniques - which i...

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An honours student approached me to interview me on an interesting thesis she is writing currently entitled "The conceptualization of political participation by advocates of Government 2.0". Naturally enough I agreed to what turned out to be an excellent interview (I do like i...

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HT Michael Neilsen Tweet via one of my favourite websites .

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Ghana's New Patriotic Party went to the 2008 presidential election with a new slogan : "Moving Forward". Christiana Love's song ' Moving forward ' was played at party events and there was a dance that might be oddly familiar to Australians: Look at the way the New Patriotic Pa...

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The publication of Peter Coleman's collection of essays with some memories and reflections is a reminder of his remarkably productive career as a public intellectual. Those who do not share his politics should note that his first book in 1974 was a scathing critique of Austral...

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Here's a chart that appeared recently on the net - so you may be able to go find it or have already seen it. If you haven't, can you figure out what it might be of? The prize for winning is the usual (a Mercedes Sports).

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Hi all, I'm occasionally after people to help me make diagrams look flasher or more compelling than I have the talent, tools or time to do. I have one such task right now. It's probably not more than an hour's work right now but if you can do a good job of it I'm bound to have...

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Having visited the OECD and observed the strange way in which views are arrived at and prosecuted, I read all OECD commentary with a grain of salt. The OECD staff spotted my stuff for the BCA on independent fiscal policy in 1999 and flew me to Paris to present to a Senior Fina...

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Pretty interesting . . . Going Soft: How the Rise of Software Based Innovation Led to the Decline of Japan's IT Industry and the Resurgence of Silicon Valle y by Ashish Arora, Lee G. Branstetter, Matej Drev - #16156 (ITI PR) Abstract: This paper documents a shift in the nature...

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I don't have time to make the point I want to make at any length, but Chris Berg reminds us that dynamic tension can be a good thing in government and is, I think absolutely necessary to really good government. He is optimistic about Clegg and Cameron in the UK and in their ab...

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Jorg Guido Hulsmann, professor of economics at the University of Angers in France has written a magesterial biography of Ludwig von Mises , running over 1100 pages. This allows sufficient space to permit generous coverage of the historical and intellectual background with clos...

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Ed Prescott's a very clever fellow. Far cleverer than me. Then again it's pretty clear, it has been pretty clear for a long, long time, that he's crazy. But don't take my word for it. Take our friend Paul Krugman's .

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Yes folks, it's on again! Well it's probably not on, but someone wants me to pontificate on tax reform as one of a range of issues in some 'vision' pieces. I get to paint my own picture. But I wanted to throw things out to the crowd. What things did Henry get right, what wrong...

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From the NBER digest. U.S. hospitals were excluded from collective bargaining laws for three decades longer than other sectors because of fears that strikes by nurses might imperil patients' health. Today, while unionization has been declining in general, it is growing rapidly...

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One of the exciting things about Web 2.0 is the many ways in which it can cut through the rigidities and plain dysfunctional aspects of existing institutions. In this post on the Kaggle website, Anthony Goldbloom draws attention to the many ways in which Web 2.0 'marketplaces'...

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Amazing picture. HT Alan Davies at The Melbourne Urbanist This photograph, via Paul Romer , shows students in Guinea who go to the airport to study for exams because they don’t have electricity at home. The BBC reports that petrol stations, airports and even spaces under secur...

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I wrote up my own views about the power of 'consensus politics' here . Specifically I suggested that three aspects of a leader's performance involve whether: unity or division is emphasised there is a cult of the strong leader as opposed to the leader being seen as an orchestr...

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With Gillard as our new PM, a compromise has been done on the RSPT, rewarding the big mining companies for their negative campaigning. In this first post-mortem, I have some mopping up to do regarding two as yet undiscussed ‘reports’ brought out on the old RSPT, one by Ernst a...

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At Foreign Policy's Passport blog , Joshua Keating writes: "In a too-good-to-check item , the Daily Mirror reports that rapper Snoop Dogg recently attempted to rent the entire nation of Liechtenstein for a music video". Anyone prepared to do a bit of Googling will find the ren...

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Ayn Rand denounced social work as "monstrously evil". In a letter to philosopher John Hospers she declared that to "choose social work as a profession is to choose to be a professional parasite ." Ed Kilgore of the Progressive Policy Institute sees a Rand-like hostility bubbli...

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In a delightful doco, "In the Hands of the Gods", Diego's injunction is to "Love the ball, love the game". I love the sentiment and its simplicity. And I love the fact that he can still say it after all the game has brought him, and wrought upon him. Now on the sidelines, he i...

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At Catallaxy , Rafe pings Club Troppo for getting "excited by a report from the US which suggested that a large proportion of Republican voters have really silly ideas, indeed they are practically insane. Interesting to read that this result came from a survey commissioned by...

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From my recent Fin Column. Recent articles in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age - sister publications of the AFR - told us that Warwick McKibbin has concerns about the Labor government’s stimulus programs. As those newspapers say, McKibbin is a prominent economist: he is t...

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I don't doubt Krugman's right to suggest we're in the early stages of a Third Depression . The last few years have been a first instalment in what will prove to be a drawnout, volatile and painful downturn. I also agree it's "primarily [about] a failure of policy". Where we di...

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The front page of today's Sydney Morning Herald: We have Phillip Corey describing the changes to the Rent Tax . Dwarfing this, and by far the largest story on the front page : How a $7m advertising campaign saved a fortune . Thank god that when it comes to a major issue we hav...

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Alekhine was one of the greatest chess players that ever lived (I guess this is as opposed to those who haven't lived, but I digress). In WWI in 1916 he was wounded. I don't know if he was blinded by the war, but he played this blindfold game of chess. With a comical start, it...

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In a new high watermark in he said she said journalism the ABC news tonight had a story of a school that 'someone said' had been "paid off" to keep silent about education spending overruns. The story seemed to be this: Some school community had complained that they couldn't ge...

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I hate to say this but all my forecasts over recent months seem to be proving right. First, we have over-done monetary policy (see my contributions in Club Troppo, January 29 and February 4th 2010). Second, our expansionary fiscal policy was on the right scale (although misman...

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Grossly unfair but wickedly funny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PE_vr0t3FA

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Paul Krugman asked the New York Times if he could publish today's column on Troppo. We have of course licensed the content to the NYT. In fact, ironically, owing to an administrative oversight, the column appeared on the NYT website before it was hoisted here. Recessions are c...

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Professor Peter Drysdale of the ANU's East Asia Forum, veteran of Australia's foreign economic relations with the region, outlined the demise of Rudd to the readers of the Forum's weekly digest. It kind of helps to remind us how strange this would look to foreigners. Many of o...

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Are you tired of separating the recycling and having to put your underpants in the laundry basket? Are you sick of watching your wife's vampire shows on tv? Chrysler knows how you feel. Last year the struggling US auto company filed for bankruptcy protection and was forced int...

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I won't shed any tears for Kevin Rudd. He was an irritating smooth talker, incapable of commanding much personal affection. Julia Gillard seems a nicer person, conveys a deeper sense of commitment to social democratic values in contrast to Rudd's technocratic rhetoric, and is...

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Magnus Carlsen, 2813 Wang Yue, 2752 Boris Gelfand, 2741 Teimour Radjabov, 2740 Ruslan Ponomariov, 2733 Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu, 2672 Yes folks, he's on the rampage again. And this time there's a new toy - which has probably been available for quite some time, but it's the first...

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This week at work I was discussing the throw-in in soccer with a colleague (we work at night and we were watching the World Cup) when I had a memory. Growing up in Maitland through the 1990s, when I played soccer either as a junior or at school, the throw in was invariably des...

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The standard result in the econometric literature on social diversity is that it leads to lower levels of trust in the community and lower provision of public goods. The experiment below confirms the former result in the short run, but not in the long run. This conforms with m...

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I've just looked at the top four apps on Victoria's AppMyState comp - the winners were announced tonight - and they're marvellous. Really natty, fresh and (it seems well done, though I've not put them through any very rigorous testing.) What's happening here is something a lit...

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This is how you do it! From the Master. Courtesy of You Tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGTOGG4o_eU&NR=1

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In the 1960 s and 70s Palmolive ran a series of tv ads warning men that body odour could hurt their career prospects. "Don't wait to be told", said the jingle. And the reason was obvious -- it's awkward to talk to someone about how they smell . But body odour isn't the only as...

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HT Freakonomics blog .

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Australia vs Ghana: “Tactics? Tactics?...I thought they were a type of mint!”... So Ally Maclleod, manager of Scotland’s shambolic team in the 1978 World Cup, was reputed to have said. But let’s remember that that Scotand did give us Archie Gemmil’s lovely solo goal, and celeb...

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Thoughts on reading this psychologist's write up of the Gulf of Mexico disaster: A long time ago I stopped calling my Mum a Labor supporter and called her a Labor barracker. She's disdainful of my interest in football - a thoroughly trivial activity which is arresting for thos...

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In a memorable moment in the 1983 election Malcolm Fraser, suggested that if people got a Labor Government they’d have to keep their savings under their bed. Bob Hawke responded that the commies were already under the bed. Back then Hawke could tap into a collective consciousn...

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Via LP we have a piece by Laura Tingle in the AFR on Tuesday which describes efforts to create a "consumption based" rather than "production based" ETS. I held off commenting until I read the piece itself, but my confusion is still here. Take this paragraph. Charging people fo...

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Over a third of British men with no qualifications are economically inactive -- neither working nor looking for work. Even those with basic qualifications of ( NVQ level 1 and below ) have less than half this rate of inactivity. According to official statistics the major reaso...

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Yep, its getting yucky down there in the Gulf. From Nasa's Earth Observatory . On June 12, 2010, oil from the still-leaking Deepwater Horizon well was particularly visible across the northern Gulf of Mexico when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA...

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Australia's unemployment rate may be back to where it was in the late 1970s but the structure of our labour market and our society is very different. For example, in the late 1970s almost 70 per cent of men aged 25 to 34 were married and working full-time. Today it's less than...

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James Farrell has very kindly asked me to post my thoughts on the Australia vs Germany World Cup Finals tie to be played tomorrow morning. So far, for me, the tournament has got off to a relatively entertaining start. The opening game between South Africa and Mexico was a prom...

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On today's RN News, the ABC reported that Lindsay Tanner had told the Insiders program that Kevin Rudd would lead the ALP to the next election. This was one of the six most important things to tell us at 10.00 am this morning. Why is that news? What was he supposed to say? "Ac...

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The case for more independent fiscal policy has always struck me as bleedingly obvious. I still think it is kind of inevitable but we're certainly taking our time. The adventures of the last decade both here and in most other developed countries are a nice illustration of why...

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Several nations -- including Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, and Colombia -- have used subsidized programs to get personal computers into poor households. Governments have promulgated such programs despite little credible evidence that the technology improves children's academic perfor...

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According to Will Wilkinson , "the U.S. welfare system is very generous". And compared to the welfare states of most African countries, that's obviously true. But Wilkinson is comparing the US to the Nordic nations. So what's going on? It all starts with a Freakonomics post by...

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Last week, the Minerals Council Australia (MCA) came up with a KPMG report (download here ) that suggested that the newly introduced Resource Super-Profit Tax (RSPT) would lead to many future mining projects being non-viable. This is of course a cornerstone in their scare-camp...

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This film won both the Palme D'Or and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film last year. Paul Martin endorsed it a couple of months ago, but since it's approaching the end of its run in Australian cinemas, I thought one last recommendation wouldn't hurt. I find myself in comple...

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Here are the first three dot points in the UK Coalition's new agreed policy document (pdf) on "Business". We will cut red tape by introducing a ‘one-in, one-out’ rule whereby no new regulation is brought in without other regulation being cut by a greater amount. We will end th...

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Paul Bloom raises a fascinating question in his recent essay The Pleasures of Imagination : Do we enjoy imaginative experiences because at some level we don't distinguish them from real ones? Bloom's question makes me wonder about the way politicians harness the imaginative te...

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Arthur C Brooks launches a creative defence of small government in the National Review . He argues that people value money because it is a symbol of earned success. And because it is earned success rather than money that makes people happy, redistributing income from the rich...

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Andrew Leigh has posted on what a good idea it would be to do some random tax audits. "Don't they already do this", I hear you cry. No they don't, not in Australia. As part of our 'we know what we're doing' approach, the ATO pursues people whom it's modelling, and perhaps its...

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Well, after a week and a half of our HIV progression comp we beat the best available model of HIV progression. Now the best entry in our Eurovision comp picked the winner. That's not so amazing because it was a pretty one sided affair. What was worthy of note is that Kaggle 's...

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Yes folks. I've mentioned this before on Troppo. Having read of this bout , I can see how it could be quite exciting. Strange business. Play through the game here and the commentary has a little spice to it - as the two players get up from the board and try to beat each other...

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On a recent visit to Washington, or 'D.C.' as our aficionados (and efficionados) call it, I had my iPhone stolen. So I need a new smart phone. Here are my impressions of the market and I'd be happy to be corrected and/or have my knowledge extended with a view to deciding what...

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Sinclair Davidson has extracted a concession from David Gruen at the Treasury regarding some purported evidence for the efficacy of recent fiscal policy, that appeared in the Budget Papers. But before we consider the specifics, it's worth thinking through how one would discove...

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The recent signings of Rugby League players to the expansion clubs of the AFL has me thinking about the history of football (used here generically for all codes) and just what makes Aussie Rules distinctive in the current world. Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson has a i...

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Well, the Israelis have been at it again. Boarding a humanitarian flotilla that was bringing humanitarian supplies to a besieged population on the Gaza strip, the Israeli military shot at least 9 people dead and once again displayed a worrying degree of disdain for UN resoluti...

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This is a note to myself, which I hope to come back to. The internet has the power to revolutionise a lot of industries. Print and software are two that have been revolutionised - and, in areas that could be 'commoditised' have led to plummeting costs. In health and finance, t...

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For years I've watched people poke and prod at the internet, trying to get it to cough up enough cash to support careers in professional journalism. But in a world where even Rupert Murdoch complains about not getting paid, it's no surprise that most fail. At Crikey Margaret S...

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Yep. Ned is back for another crack at internet stardom.

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You may need to read back over the post , which is thoroughly worthwhile in itself (for eco geeks, or anyone with an interest in social science) but I lerved this comment. There are no simple mistakes in applied macro, Nick! Unless one counts asking, on a public forum, provoca...

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Paul Frijters analyses the topical economic issue facing Australia's resource industry and the public: the Federal Government's proposed Resource Super Profits Tax. He identifies all the key stakeholders and how the proposed legislation change will affect them.

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It's been raining on and off just about every day in Darwin for more than two weeks. Who cares you might ask? Well, it's the dry season. You get the occasional shower in the dry season but not rain for weeks on end. It's certainly never happened before in the 27 years I've liv...

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I discover, that while I'm on the other side of the world, the Age and SMH have published a column they asked me to write on the new resource rent tax. They've published it, but edited and garbled various bits of it. Anyway, for better or worse, here's the original. It’s stran...

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So asks Don of Ed . It's sufficiently off-topic to warrant its own thread. Here's my own first stab at the question, but it's doubtless very unsophisticated, and sure to be substantially revised after a robust discussion. Belief has a wide variety of meanings connected by fami...

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As the pseudo debate about the resources rent tax continues to vomit forth, it's striking how little we have changed even in the industrial age, and the challenges we have in protecting our philosophical gains. When humanity began farming we entered a world in which prosperity...

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Evolutionary psychologists have been busy proposing explanations for religiosity . Belief in transcendent conscious beings might promote survival, they argue, by instilling hope and optimism. Or it might be a by-product of other naturally selected susceptibilities, such as inf...

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A "lot of opinion polling is useless because it doesn’t understand its limitations" writes Graham Young . One of the major limitations of polling is the tendency of respondents to answer questions about things they know nothing about. A series of studies have shown how respond...

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White to play Smyslov vs Oll 29. ? See game for solution. And this is a cute game too.

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Courtesy of your local Republican candidate .

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I'd be surprised if any of the recommendations in Henry generate a higher internal rate of return, greater efficiency gains per unit of effort than the recommendation to simplify tax returns for five odd million Australians, something that can be done simply by offering tax cu...

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This is a quick post, I'd like to make it longer but won't have the time. It's worked up from a comment on a post by Kate Lundy which articulates why e-literacy of various kinds should be part of the national curriculum. Couldn't agree more. But a couple of things occur to me....

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"How much attention did you pay to this week’s Federal Budget?" For many respondents to this week's Essential Research Poll , the answer was not much -- 44 per cent said that they paid little or no attention to the budget. But in the same survey, 80 per cent were able to expre...

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It was always going to be a problem. What do you call your new improved version of Labour when the 'New Labour' brand has become stale and discredited? David Miliband is backing 'Next Labour', a tag coined by the New Statesman's James Macintyre in March this year . In an inter...

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With Gordon Brown gone, the Labour leadership contest was on. The first candidate to announce was former foreign secretary David Miliband . Then a few days later his brother, former energy secretary Ed, announced that he would also stand . It's a contest that's been brewing fo...

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This is a epoch making day. Journalism is now reaching its perfect equilibrium form which it cannot be shifted. Several portents have pointed towards this. The high priests of Journalism, the parliamentary press gallery, have long understood that race calling is not only cheap...

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Rob Bray sent us this guest post. He added this to the email he sent to Jacques making contact with Troppo "I am a recently retired public servant from FaHCSIA who is now working part-time as Research Fellow at SPEAR in the RSE (old RSSS bit) at the ANU, who for years has been...

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Warren Buffett when asked to sum up the basic point of life went for this formulation. The purpose of life is to be loved by as many people as possible among those you want to have love you. Remarkably similar to Adam Smith's formulation actually - that what we crave most is d...

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Budget Week should in principle be a great opportunity for an educated national discussion about issues of public finance and macroeconomic management. But unfortunately the budget debate is always shrouded in such a thick fog of political rhetoric and misinformation that it t...

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It's three in the morning here in Canberra. The BBC is reporting that the Labour-Lib Dem negotiations have collapsed while George Pascoe-Watson , former political editor for the Sun, is tweeting about a Lib-Conservative coalition with cabinet posts for the Lib Dems . The IEA's...

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From Stumbling and Mumbling In one respect, the Left should be a little worried by the Conservatives’ failure. To see what I mean, consider John Kay’s claim that there’s an intellectual vacuum” on the Left: The search for a practical political philosophy for the left in Europe...

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Joseph Agassi Liberal Nationalism for Israel: Towards an Israeli National Identity . Gefen, Jerusalem, 1999. This book is a passionate call for a public debate in Israel and elsewhere to resolve some fundamental and crippling disabilities in Israeli politics. It first appeared...

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There are lots of explanations for why economics has become so excessively formalised. Because much of its subject matter is readily quantify able - because it deals with money and the creation and distribution of standardised things it is certainly possible, and beneficial to...

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"Why is everyone voting Conservative?" tweeted an exasperated Holly Hawthorn , "VOTE LIB DEMS!!" But it was already too late. By the time the votes were counted the Liberal Democrats had lost thirteen seats and picked up only eight. And most of the seats they lost went to the...

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Some time ago a coworker of mine found a file on the train and gave it to me. A thick wad of papers detailing a conspiracy against all that was good in the world: The Queen, her constitution and her mighty railways....and the writer's right to place her wheelie bin on the kerb...

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One of the catchiest phrases doing the rounds on Twitter as the UK election results come in is "Activate the Queen". It all started with a BBC radio interview with Professor Peter Hennessey of the University of London back in March. Here's a quick transcript: Hennessey: "The u...

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It's official, the UK has a hung paliament . With Labour's Teresa Pearce holding Erith and Thamesmead the BBC is reporting that "There is now no chance of the Conservatives winning a Commons majority." Since the result gives nobody any satisfaction , a quick witted commentator...

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For years policy experts from free market think tanks have been arguing that charter schools and vouchers boost test scores. Last year Julie Novack's report for the Institute of Public Affairs insisted that: "Voucher programs around the world have been shown to improve the aca...

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The Henry Review is an ambitious document, conceived early in the life of a new government at a time when budget surpluses stretched as far as the eye could see, surpluses which could be used to ease the tensions between winners and losers that are the inevitable consequence o...

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“I’ve just felt I was living and breathing a George Orwell novel..." Update: JQ lists the pros (several) and cons (none). The reporting of the resource rent tax plan has been poor, and last night's ABC television coverage was a good example. In his 'Finance' segment of the New...

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Anzac day is when Australians and New Zealanders remember their casualties of the first World War and other conflicts. It has become a defining event for the sense of nationhood of the Australians and solemn commemorations are held all over the country. Sharing the same backgr...

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Rudd has back-flipped on a number of government policies – the ditching of the insulation rebate scheme, junking the promise to build 260 childcare centres, the ETS decision (now postponed) and perhaps some wasteful spending on education. He has also had to toughen the asylum...

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Shane Wright (reproduced by Peter Martin ) weighs up pros and cons (mainly cons) of WA secession from the perspective of WA. Lets ask a natural counter question: What if the rest of Australia would be better off without WA? Specifically, should Australia still have a single cu...

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Andy Foulds is obviously a clever fellow. This image of economists is not new. I don't know when he did it but it's been doing the rounds for ages. Yesterday I had a great lunch with an economist and was amazed to be told that he didn't know of it. So for those who don't know...

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Troppodillians will want to know - OK, some will want to know that the chess world championship is currently underway. Topalov, swashbuckling, highly strung, nasty piece of work is challenger to Anand who is a calmer, probably nicer and a tad more consistent player - and the W...

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Here's my article for yesterday's Crikey. The media inform us that the Rudd Government is adopting the world's most draconian cigarette packaging regulation and requiring cigarettes to be sold in plain packages from January 2012. Good on it. When I was on the Productivity Comm...

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Doctor Labyrinth, like most people who read a great deal and who have too much time on their hands, had become convinced that our civilization was going the way of Rome. He saw, I think , the same cracks forming that had sundered the ancient world, the world of Greece and Rome...

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My article for yesterday's Crikey! It's been clear for a long while that we've picked a lot of the low hanging fruit available in traditional economic reform. Once tariffs get down below 10% not only are the gains from cutting them painfully slim compared with the gains from c...

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From the NBER Digest: Calorie Posting in Chain Restaurants , Bryan Bollinger, Phillip Leslie, and Alan Sorensen "Mandatory calorie posting influenced consumer behavior at Starbucks in New York City, causing average calories per transaction to drop by 6 percent." Nutrition labe...

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And why not? I wonder what his golf handicap is.

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Political commentary and pseudo demography speaks of a class called the latte sippers. This is a class of noisy, isolated, out of touch and elitist people; enemies of common sense and the common man. Apart from these traits they are also clearly defined by their beverage choic...

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I've never seen an aurora, but I'd love to. HT Three Quarks

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It's been a Fatih Akin blitz this week, having watched his new comedy and two older films - a music documentary and his dramatic feature debut. I've also revisited The White Ribbon , the must-see film of the festival (though it has a cinematic release just after). All up, ther...

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