Recent NT News discussion on the perennial topic of crime and punishment seems to have generated more heat than light. Chief Justice Trevor Riley wrote an excellent piece pointing out basic facts about the NT criminal justice system, not least the fact that NT judges and magis...
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Those are the words that the sub-editor of the Australian - I presume that is who wrote them - used to describe these comments from Warwick McKibbin. "It is more important to have independent voices (on the bank board) than ever, because the policies being proposed in recent y...
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This week we're stealing a few links from the Profligate Promiscuous Strumpet before moving on to a couple of stories from the US blogosphere. The theme is motherhood. So that's what they're for! "Why does a woman breastfeeding in public cause such alarm among some people", as...
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I might have preferred for the Government to take a risk with the surplus in 2012/13, and perhaps to have a go at middle-class welfare, but that would have been politically too hard. It has been seen as “an intellectual defeat” to the Coalition – but is it not a fact of life w...
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When conservative commentator Tucker Carlson launched the Daily Caller last year he promised readers original reporting on US politics. As he told the Columbia Journalism Review : "our view is that people want reliable information they’re not getting other places". When journa...
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The cold shower effect is a dangerous beast. It supports free market types in supporting trade liberalisation. When last seen , the cold shower effect was explaining why trade liberalisation is even better for you than you thought. If there's a cold shower effect it means that...
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It's becoming a point of distinction not to have prognosticated on the future of China, especially in Australia as China takes great significance in our region and in our economic future. A lot of this prognostication must be infuriating to veteran China Watchers, being conduc...
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At Larvatus Prodeo, Kim writes about The great American neoliberal liberal blog kerfuffle where blogger Freddie deBoer claims that "almost anything resembling an actual left wing has been systematically written out of the conversation within the political blogosphere". Accordi...
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Many of the agendas associated with economic reform have been big successes. Deregulation of things that shouldn't have been regulated, like trade, shopping hours, airlines, you name it has worked well. Financial regulation . . . ehem not so well. Indeed, in terms of the wellb...
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Why do all the spam comments say the same thing? Is it really that hard to think up template comments that I might let through when looking at the detritus our spam checker leaves for me to check. This one is specially silly, but otherwise conforms to the standard formula. I a...
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A few months ago the Sydney Morning Herald had an article in which Mike Baird, almost certainly the next treasurer of NSW, suggested the use of Tax Increment Finance. Briefly, TIF refers to the funding of infrastructure by allocating beforehand any increase in tax revenues tha...
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Are older women a threat to productivity? Does higher education educate? Can you trust Google's ngram viewer? And why are there so few Filipino restaurants? These are just a few of the questions raised in this week's links. Food Last week Richard Tsukamasa Green wondered Why a...
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Albert Hirschman called it the perversity thesis -- the claim that an " attempt to push society in a certain direction will result in its moving all right, but in the opposite direction ". The best example of thesis is in arguments against cash-transfer programs for the non-wo...
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Methodology and what in disciplines other than economics is called 'theory' has always interested me - so long as it remains at the level that can be understood by my tiny brain and does not waft off into structuralism, deconstruction, critical theory or other strange activiti...
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So far in Inequalityfest 2011 we've focused largely on moral and ethical issues, as well as on the distinction (if one can be made) between inequality of opportunity and inequality of outcome. These are very important issues, but I'm interested in one that I think is overlooke...
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Yes folks, Julia Gillard is softening that story about how she's gonna achieve a budget surplus by 2012/13. Arguably it makes sense if there's a huge bill from the floods, but now the fun starts. A bit like the anxious months when we waited for Wayne, Lindsay, Julia or Kevin t...
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About to book United Airlines to the United States, I thought I'd let any Troppodillians who don't know of this video, that it exists, and that it's fun (and it lopped around $170 million off UA's market cap according to some factoid crazed journalists). And looking it up, I j...
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If only we could persuade poor people to adopt the values and behaviours of their rich neighbours we could end poverty in a generation. Or at least that's the impression you'd get from reading the never ending stream of books and articles about the culture of poverty, the unde...
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Christopher Joye is relaxed about income inequality. In a recent article for the Drum Unleashed he writes: I don’t think there is anything wrong at all with a rise in income inequality if one assumes that: (a) we have equality of opportunity; (b) we are committed to combating...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVDla_Ax40k&feature=player_embedded
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You've read about the floods , you've given to the flood relief appeal and now you need a break. So instead of talking about the distribution of water, let's talk about the distribution of income. Thanks to Christopher Joye it's been a hot topic over the past week. People are...
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Given it's still the offseason, I thought we might want to revisit an passtime of a previous time. When I was a child in the 90s, during the Keating era, there was a fairly pointless question (they never bothered to actually debate it); Is Australia part of Asia? Whilst the qu...
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On Sunday I ate at a Filipino restaurant. This was a first; prior experiences of Filipino food had been solely at friends' houses. Restaurants were simply just not around. In fact, some googling seems to indicate there may be less than 10 in the entire state of NSW. Which is s...
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I think Adam Smith thought of modern commercial society as gradually diffusing power throughout the society and both creating and enabling a world in which decision making became more decentralised and people's autonomy, productivity and virtue grew together. In average and in...
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I’ve had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach ever since the final stages of the 2008 campaign. I remembered the upsurge in political hatred after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 — an upsurge that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. And you could see, just by watching...
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Not two weeks gone - and this: Labor needs a comeback. Fast. Julia Gillard's dogged insistence she will return the budget to surplus in 2012-13 is growing old. So she should tighten fiscal policy. You wouldn't want a policy with a three year horizon to 'grow old' now would we?...
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As I sometimes do I was tapping away on a blog post and then thought I'd like to give it greater exposure. So I didn't press 'publish' and then pitched it to the Age who liked the idea. So I worked away to convert the post into a column - they're fairly different things (for m...
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That was quick. It only took a week for media consensus on the retail campaign by Gerry Harvey and others, in contrast to the consensus on the campaign by mining companies. Both represent campaigns by established and vested interests to serve their own interests whilst claimin...
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Missing Link Friday is back. And to start off the new year, here's a short quiz. Follow the links to check your answers. 1. When the Japanese look at the moon, they don't see a man, writes Catallaxy's Ken Nielsen . According to Nielsen what do they see? A. A lotus root B. A ra...
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So now we have to take it seriously! Well I doubt any study can prove something like that, but there you go. Causation could go in both directions, but either way, we told you so . Public policy, trust and growth: disclosure of government information in Japan. Date: 2010-12-20...
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I was in John Dawkins' office when, to my amazement he decided to move the (then) Industry Commission, now Productivity Commission, to Melbourne. Anyway, with Dawkins having rebuffed attempts to dissuade him, as the move proceeded against great angst and gnashing of teeth, the...
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I was talking to my wife today about an alternative form of reverse discrimination and came home to find something else I'd said about it linked to by Richard Green . To introduce the issue, here was my comment. I’ve always thought that the absence of women in politics is in f...
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A while ago Paul Montgomery, whom I didn't know, tweeted that he had wanted to set up a blog of the radical centre. His tweet was about his crestfallen discovery that we beat him to it. Anyway, my handle @nichlasgruen was in this tweet so I saw it and suggested that Paul submi...
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The rough beast is slouching towards Bethlehem again. In the latest issue of Quadrant Rob Nugent warns that young people are losing their connection with history and culture. Literary reading is in decline and postmodernism is to blame. According to Nugent, our intellectual el...
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