Monthly Archives: 2011-02

44 published posts from 2011-02.

A tough one

White to play G Grigore vs Holzke 25. ? See game for solution. about our puzzles

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Posted in Chess

Superstar CEOs: It doesn't surprise me and I doubt it surprises you . . .

From the NBER Reporter . One example of compensation data enabling much broader research is my research on "Superstar CEOs" with Tate. 3 The title refers to the fact that, in terms of compensation, but also in terms of status and press coverage, managers in the United States f...

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Posted in Education

To price but not to tax

In one episode of Yes Minister Hacker says something like "It seems the civil service just prevents governments from implementing the sovereign promises the government has made to the people" to which Bernard says "Well somebody has to". I'm a bit of a promises guy - I think i...

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Posted in Politics - national, Philosophy, Economics and public policy, Political theory

Missing Link Friday - 25 Feb 2011

In this week's Missing Link Friday: Why Ross Gittins doesn't want to hear you complaining about the high cost of living. Is there a connection between free trade and disability? Just how deluded are Americans about inequality? Who's to blame for American ignorance about climat...

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Posted in Missing Link

Why governments should not insure against disasters

I admire SA independent senator Nick Xenophon hugely. He's a rare combination of brains, enterprise and principle. I knew him at Adelaide University; he had all those qualities then, and he seems to have kept them intact over the quarter-century since. But I have wondered for...

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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - Northern Territory, Economics and public policy

Rupert's war on truth

Veteran econoblogger John Quiggin is the blogosphere's pitbull terrier. Once he gets his teeth into an issue he just won't let go. One of JQ's current worthy obsessions is the utter untrustworthiness of Murdoch's flagship newspaper The Australian (see here , here and here ): A...

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Posted in Politics - national, Media

Keynes, Smith and the positivists (Benthamites) and hyper-positivists (Neoclassicals)

Here's a cut and pasted Amazon review of The Macrodynamics of Capitalism: Elements for a Synthesis of Marx, Keynes and Schumpeter . It's a bit heavy and I've ignored the maths so can't vouch for it. I'm basically slapping it up here for my own future reference, but Troppodilli...

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Posted in Philosophy, History, Economics and public policy, Political theory

Chinese adding value to their exports

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Posted in Economics and public policy

Constraining infrastructure boondoggles

I was reading an article the other day that I can't now find, by a pollster whose name I can't remember (increasing age is like that). It dealt with Coalition strategist Mark Textor's highly successful four part 2010 campaign theme for Tony Abbott: stop the boats, no big new t...

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Posted in Politics - national, regulation

Useable knowledge in the army: The best comment I've read in ages

Foreword: I discovered this post - which I'd entirely forgotten about - the other day. It's a cracker, and because I wrote a comment on it, it's received some further comments on account of turning up in the 'recently commented on threads' list. So I'm sticking it on the front...

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Posted in Economics and public policy, regulation, Political theory

Meanwhile while we're minding our own business here on planet earth . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMe5dOgbu40&feature=player_embedded Christopher Monckton feels we could benefit from a few thoughts of his . . .

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Posted in Politics - international, Economics and public policy, Climate Change, Political theory

The double blind sector of the economy

Steve Randy Waldman is onto something in this post . In the previous post , I identified government, health care, education, and finance as the “asymmetric information industry”. Arnold Kling makes an important point : [I]nformation asymmetry is that the sellers know what they...

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Posted in Economics and public policy

Huffing and puffing ... but still not getting paid

Last year Mayhill Fowler, one of the Huffington Post 's citizen journalists, threatened to stop blogging unless the Post started paying her . After a brief exchange of emails where Fowler explained she was no longer prepared to do her reporting for free, the Post' s founding e...

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Posted in Journalism, Media, Metablogging

John Kay on PPPs (or PFI's where he comes from)

Tony Blair was a classy politician when it came to the level of political talent he seemed capable of. How sad that like his political counterparts in Australian State Labor governments he and his Chancellor Gordon Brown established the kind of spiv financing that saw Greece g...

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Posted in Economics and public policy

Tolerance, acceptance and civility in the immigration debate

The ABC's Chris Uhlmann is undoubtedly correct in detecting in the actions of Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison a clear intent on the part of the Coalition to play the race/immigration/asylum card against Labor. It's a recurrent gambit in Australian politics, played successfully...

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Posted in Politics - national, Political theory

Missing link Friday - diversity, anonymity and libertarian train spotting

In this week's Missing Link Friday: Are conservative Christians the only oppressed minority not protected by university diversity policies? Bill Muehlenberg thinks so. An anonymous poster to Menzies House risks a Joe Klein experience . And Ayn Rand's sacred text, Atlas Shrugge...

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Posted in Missing Link

Asylum seekers and "hospital passes"

Jon Faine - the Alan Jones of the Left? In a Coalition government the Immigration portfolio can be a career-enhancing opportunity. A Minister with a bleeding heart reputation like Philip Ruddock can prove that he's just as capable of ruthlessly opportunistic bastardry as anyon...

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Posted in Politics - national, Law

Multiculturalism and Conservatism

I am overjoyed that the government has not just allowed to speak the word "Multiculturalism" but is now celebrating Australia's successful experience with it rather than sitting in silence as a disgruntled minority complain. Its not justt a feature of Australia I enjoy, but so...

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Posted in Uncategorized

Political correctness gone mad ... or just poor fact checking?

Bill Muehlenberg is outraged at reports that villagers in Surrey and Kent have been told to remove wire mesh from their garden shed windows because it might injure burglars. It's just one more idiotic example of political correctness, writes Muehlenberg ... or perhaps it's jus...

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Posted in Uncategorized

The greatest chess player of all time on the most remarkable chess player of all time

Kasparov on Fischer in the NYRB. It would be impossible for me to write dispassionately about Bobby Fischer even if I were to try. I was born the year he achieved a perfect score at the USChampionship in 1963, eleven wins with no losses or draws. He was only twenty at that poi...

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Posted in History, Chess

V - Easternisation

Parts I , II , III and IV . This post is continues directly from part IV. From part 4 - If the necessary conditions I listed in part four are valid, there is a good case to be made that Japan came very close to having the conditions to create the modernity virus in the 17th ce...

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Posted in Uncategorized

Julia the Quiet Achiever

As PollBludger notes , the latest numbers present conflicting stories of the state of play in federal politics. Essential Research shows Labor and the Coalition still neck and neck as they were at the election and have been ever since. Nielsen on the other hand shows the Coali...

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Posted in Politics - national

IV - Necessary conditions

Parts I , II and III . We are often in the habit of calling the modernity virus “Westernisation”, for the simple fact that it occurred first in North West Europe. From this unique spontaneous beginning it spread elsewhere, in fact nearly everywhere. Many human developments lik...

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Posted in Uncategorized

Top End Politics goes troppo again

I should concede that the analogy drawn in this post between Dave Tollner and Tony Abbott is an imperfect one (image from NT News ) Northern Territory politics is nearly always very silly but equally unfailingly highly entertaining. It was the inspiration for the "Troppo" in t...

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Posted in Politics - Northern Territory

Who's responsible for keeping speech free?

At Menzies House , Tim Andrews argues that "we should have public debate free from fear of attack, and free from fear of retaliation." According to Andrews, it's not acceptable for activists to try to influence a media outlet's editorial policy by targeting its advertisers. An...

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Posted in Political theory, Metablogging

LAST DAY - 104 SUBSCRIPTIONS ACHIEVED:Crikey group subscription

Yes, folks. It's that time again. Crikey are reminding me that it's time for your group subscriptions. If you've already got one through me, I'll be shooting you an email to find out if you want to repeat the dose. We got sixty subscriptions last year so got to the maximum dis...

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Posted in Bargains

III - The role of "reason"

Part I and II I'm anticipating some misapprehension for this post, mainly for reasons of semantics and my choice of meaning to attribute to poorly defined words. This will probably require an entire clarification post based on what misapprehensions arise in comments. In the la...

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Posted in Uncategorized

Missing Link Friday - 'Coming out of the closet' edition

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt shares this story written by a young gay woman in 1985: Until about a year ago, I was very quiet about my sexual orientation... I often didn't understand the sexual jokes made by my colleagues… the people making the jokes thought that we all felt th...

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Posted in Missing Link

Troppo withdraws from "The Domain"

Observant Media watchers might have noticed a story on the ABC The Drum site this morning to the effect that Club Troppo and Larvatus Prodeo had quit the Domain blog group headed by Graham Young's Online Opinion . LP's letter to Graham was apparently leaked by person/s unknown...

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Posted in Media, Metablogging

Cultural pluralism

HT 3 Quarks: Perhaps rather apposite in view of some recent controversies and debates. Bhikhu Parekh in The Philosopher's Magazine: Western thought has long been dominated by the view that while error is plural, truth is singular. We can be wrong in many different ways but can...

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Posted in Philosophy, Political theory

II - Modernity as a virus

Part I is here As an analogy, lets think about Modernity as a virus. By "Modernity" I mean society in which consistent growth in material living standards can occur, and where more than a small minority live above subsistence. The kind of society that was unprecedented before...

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Posted in Uncategorized

How welfare impacts on the poor

Attached is a post by James Kwak . It strongly rejects a comment by Caplan and Beaulier that Behavioral Economics will Undermine the welfare state by expanding the set of choices. Caplan and Beaulier believe that poor people are more inclined to make irrational judgments becau...

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Posted in Uncategorized

Online Opinion and the norms of debate

It's easy to miss the point in the debate about Online Opinion 's loss of advertising revenue. As Kim at Larvatus Prodeo points out , the debate isn't really about free speech -- it's not as if publishers have a right to corporate funding. The important point is about how onli...

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Posted in Metablogging

Unpacking the Yasi hype

* Below is a guest post written by Ken G, a long-time Darwin resident and media/IT professional. Ken discussed his ideas not only with Darwin "storm chaser" enthusiasts but with Darwin residents who went through Cyclone Tracy. It's a keen amateur perspective on a frightening w...

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Posted in Environment, Science

Troppo bullied by corporate thugs

Christopher Pearson writes in the Weekend Australian about a current situation involving Club Troppo and other prominent oz political blogs: GRAHAM Young is the founding editor of a well-regarded e-journal called On Line Opinion, and is a regular contributor to The Australian....

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Posted in Politics - national, Metablogging, Law

I. What is the question?

A few days ago I started writing an idle thought into a short post. It turned into a long post. So I split it in two. Then I realised it was reliant on ideas I had but hadn't written down, which might confuse others. So I wrote posts on them. Then they required another post. E...

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Posted in Uncategorized

A short history of red tape and efforts to bust it (Part II)

In Part I of this post I explored factors that might account for the massive proliferation in the volume of legislation and subordinate regulation in Australia over the last 30 years or so. The post was prompted by an article by the IPA's Chris Berg. In the previous part I sug...

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Posted in Politics - national, regulation, Law

A short history of red tape and efforts to bust it (Part I)

Salma Hayek, who is apparently unrelated to Friedrich and may well be totally uninterested in either rule of law or regulatory reform ... That isn't gratuitous , is it? Chris Berg of the conservative thinktank Institute of Public Affairs takes aim at the proliferation of regul...

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Posted in Politics - national, regulation, Law

Missing Link Friday - Plus-size edition

This week's Missing Link features reactions to John Birmingham's column: Why is fat such a fractious issue? Then there's a miscellaneous collection of links on topics like the flood levy, the property market, inequality and race. The F word John Birmingham sees himself as a to...

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Posted in Missing Link

"The Great Stagnation" may have a flawed premise

Tyler Cowen's e-bookette, The Great Stagnation is being debated around the various blogospheres, even by people who haven't read it . I do dig the way it exploits the format of ebooks, being allowed to be longer than an essay, but not padded out into a book. A huge number of b...

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Posted in Uncategorized

Same old schtick still rakes in the bucks

I wonder why oz theatre icon David Williamson reacted with complacent high dudgeon to a bitchy review on Crikey of his latest turgid thespian offering Don Parties On ? After all, the Murdoch and Fairfax reviews were almost as negative, and redoubtable blogging theatre critic A...

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Posted in Theatre

Waiting for Yasi

Links to follow developments : BOM map and updates ; Yasi Twitter feed compiled by ABC The frightening power of even a modest cyclone has to be experienced to really understand just how big a threat such a weather event poses. Having been through a couple of small-ish cyclones...

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Posted in Politics - national, Environment

An outbreak of positive thinking on new media and the future of journalism

Not so long ago I published a post titled: The future of journalism and blogging – chapter 957 . Essentially I argued that, despite all the despairing navel-gazing and prognostications of doom for MSM news and political journalism posed by free content on the Internet, especia...

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Posted in Journalism, Media, Metablogging

Our faith in marketing.

Of all the products advertisers and marketers have pitched over the years, the one most vital to their survival, and the one they have been most successful at convincing people the utility of, is marketing. Without selling advertising and marketing, there is no industry at all...

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Posted in Uncategorized, Economics and public policy, Media