While she admired Winston Churchill, his resistance to conditional welfare was exasperating. For years Beatrice Webb had been arguing with Churchill and other Liberals about social insurance and she was getting nowhere. She insisted that: "Doling out weekly allowances, and wit...
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"States that require dental hygienists to be supervised by dentists suffer a 1 percent annual reduction in the output of dental services." The Effect of Licensing on Dentists and Hygienists by Morris M. Kleiner and Kyoung Won Park, NBER working paper No. 16560. As states requi...
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The Economic Society of Australia is conducting a survey of Australian economists, seeking their opinions about a range of current policy issues, as well as on matters relating to the profession itself. The survey has been emailed to all members of the Society and to those eco...
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If you look at the picture on the left, you'll see a ladder on the upper right window looking at the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. You may not believe it, but there's more chance than is usually the case with relics that the church is on the right spot. It's lo...
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It's a rainy night and an inexperienced young driver speeds into a sweeping bend. Well over the speed limit he loses control, wrapping his car around a tree. When the ambulance arrives it's touch and go. Unless the paramedics cut him out the wreck and get him to hospital, he'l...
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I am hoping one or more of the economics and public policy gurus who read and write for Troppo might be be able to help me with the following question: Does the Commonwealth Grants Commission analyse and report on the way States and Territories actually spend their untied gran...
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This is a page of links to pdf files of press cuttings from the mid 1980s when the debate about economic reform started to get really vigorous. Some of these are slow to load, so be patient. This is the list of links. It is pretty scary stuff. Have we progressed? Alan Ashbolt,...
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Government regulation of the media acts like a public subsidy, argues Mr Denmore . It makes it difficult for new players to get a foothold and "encourages monopolistic behaviour that circumvents reasoned debate." So what is to be done? One possibility is to hope a white knight...
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Don asks what the policy engaged outside the Political-Journalistic complex can do to improve public debate, implicitly envoking the role of blogs and other social media. So I've decided to post some of the ideas I've had on the odd chance that one of them might prove fruitful...
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Everyone's talking about evidence-based policy. And since gathering evidence is their job, you might think this would give academic researchers a more important role in the policy process. But as Peter Shergold writes in the Australian Literary Review , academics have little i...
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Freedom is a keyword in American politics, writes Corey Robin in the Nation . It lies at the centre of every successful political movement from the abolition of slavery, to civil rights and feminism. The secret of conservatism's success is that it identifies freedom with marke...
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Everyone agrees that the quality of public discourse in Australia is dismal. Most of us blame politicians and the media. But the constant carping is getting tedious and irritating. Isn't it time the rest of us thought about what we can do to lift the quality of public debate?...
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In this week's Missing Link Friday, bloggers remember Sydney book seller Bob Gould, US blogger Mark Perry explains what's up with manufacturing, Andrew Norton examines a new poll on attitudes to welfare, and various writers complain about the dismal state of politics today. Re...
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I've written a few times on measures of wellbeing on Troppo. For instance here and here . (In fact, reviewing it, I can't find both of my articles for New Matilda on the Australia Institute's GPI, so here they both are (pdf).) As ever Troppo was hip before the world caught up,...
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Forced board changes: Evidence from Norway (pdf). By: Nygaard, Knut (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration) The recently introduced gender quota on Norwegian corporate boards dramatically increased the share of female directors. This ref...
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Doesn't matter how much I look at this picture, I can't figure it out.
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I heartily agree with Ross Gittins' assessment of Tony Abbott, and I also tend to agree with Harry Clarke about the respective current merits of Labor and the Coalition, although I'm not quite as scathing about Labor and certainly not a long-time Liberal supporter: Because of...
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As Philip Tetlock so powerfully showed, most expertise isn't worth nix if the criterion of expertise is whether you can demonstrate superior predictions about what will happen in the future. As he showed, most experts can't predict any better than tolerably informed non-expert...
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n.b I did the hokey pokey on this post, putting it in and taking in out because I figured it was fairly pointless. Now I'm putting it in again (and shaking it all about). The other day I was idling away some spare time by looking at roads on Google Maps. I looked at roads and...
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At exactly the time late last year when the Wikileaks saga was occupying seemingly endless media column centimetres, important amendments were implemented to the Commonwealth's Freedom of Information regime. They flowed from a reform process implemented by Senator John Faulkne...
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Andrew Norton has some interesting posts distinguishing between classical liberalism (to which he regards himself as an adherent) and libertarianism (to which he doesn't). His explanation of the distinction - at least skimming his posts again quickly - is that libertarianism i...
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I notice that a UK MP has just "outed" soccer player Ryan Giggs as the prominent sportsman who had a well-publicised extra-marital affair. His identity was (and remains) the subject of a "super-injunction" issued by the UK High Court and based on rights to privacy in the Human...
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US congressman Paul Ryan wants to "strengthen welfare for those who need it" and "end it for those who don't". And to hard working Americans that sounded reasonable enough ... until some of them realised he might be talking about Medicare and Social Security . How could benefi...
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It's funny. I think academia is too theoretical, and politics isn't theoretical enough. In this post I'll defend the second proposition on politics, and if I manage it, a subsequent post will defend the first. I'm also thinking particularly about the ALP. In a sense my proposi...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE8qRDHfA5Y&feature=related When I was in the market for young kids music entertainment, my favourite entertainer was Peter Combe (pronounced Coom). The Wiggles were nice enough but very anodyne - so much so that, when Disney took them up they ne...
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OK - so I just read it from a link on a Krugman blog post , but it's worth repeating. An example of fad economics occurred in 1980, when a small group fo economists advised presidential candidate Ronald Reagan that an across-the-board cut in income tax rates would raise tax re...
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(did Marx appreciate that his capitalist nightmare of complete separation of labor and capital would actually come to fruition in local government?)
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Who wrote this? ... we will have true reconciliation when millions of Australians speak our Australian languages from coast to coast. It is then that we will have the keys to our landscape, our history, our art, our stories. The Australian languages, and the literatures and cu...
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Certainly Korea has. The US, not so much! As usual, Canada does very well - they do well on lots of measures of good public policy. [caption id="attachment_15822" align="alignleft" width="609" caption="Source: OECD"] [/caption]
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Christopher Joye rebukes John Quiggin for this post where he violates the territory of these guys . Quiggin criticises Central Bank Independence (in its strong from from the 1990s) and raises the possibility of higher inflation target to get more desired outcomes. Although fro...
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Judith Sloan vs the environment. If you're trying to reach Judith Sloan and she won't pick up the phone it's probably because she's still in the shower . Blue Milk writes : "Last week I had to compose an embarrassing email to the library explaining that I had lost their copy o...
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TONY JONES: The obvious takeaway, political takeaway in Australia, is that you don't believe your leader, Tony Abbott, your party, your conservative party, has vision. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Oh, no, I think there is a lot of vision. It's just a question of whether you agree with it...
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In case you care, here's the podcast of the column of the paper . Here's the iTunes version.
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Of all the right wing shock jocks, I find Andrew Bolt by far the best read. If you ignore the coat trailing and name calling - like calling 'Liberty Victoria' 'far left' (declaration of interest - I'm not sure if I'm a full paying member right now but I join it when asked) and...
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In January this year a Toronto police officer suggested that women could avoid sexual assault by not dressing like 'sluts'. Made during a safety information session at York University, the officer's remark provoked a storm of protest . By May the protests had spread as far as...
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I wanted to comment on Nicholas Gruen's recent post titled the future of tertiary education , but I didn't have time and there was too much I wanted to say. Hence this post. I agree with most of Nicholas's points (some with qualifications) but there's much more that needs sayi...
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Originally posted at APO (Australian Policy Online) Last week's Budget Speech by the Treasurer announced a package of reforms designed to help people receiving a Disability Support Pension to get into work. The package includes a range of measures : • New participation require...
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Broadband Internet: An Information Superhighway to Sex Crime? Date: 2011-04 By: Bhuller, Manudeep (Statistics Norway) Havnes, Tarjei (University of Oslo) Leuven, Edwin (CREST (ENSAE)) Mogstad, Magne (Statistics Norway) Does internet use trigger sex crime? We use unique Norwegi...
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As the graph below shows, the proportion of men in full-time work has fallen over time. Every recession the proportion falls sharply and in each recovery it fails to bounce back to its pre-recession level. When I show people this graph they often offer explanations -- it's pop...
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Freedom of expression in Australia is arguably freer than it has ever been, both legally and practically. Oppressive censorship of art and literature is largely a dim memory from the distant past (leaving aside infrequent moral panics like the Henson naked kiddie pic affair)....
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In this week's Missing Link Friday bloggers discuss slutwalking, teenage pregnancy, the demise of the book, typical Australian incomes and the problem of men who don't work. Sex, lies and slutwalking . Slutwalking is what happens when "when the political passions of the second...
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Slutwalks are coming soon all over Australia . The Brisbane variant is in 2 weeks time and the Sydney one in 3 weeks. The craze has reached us from America where the first one was held in Toronto on April 3 in protest of a local police officer who is said to have told 10 colle...
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Here's one of the three pieces I contributed to Crikey as a correspondent from the lockup. I'd not done the lockup for over a decade - and it's very like sitting an exam, including the relief and relaxation when it's finished after a hard slog and you can catch up with people...
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It's hard to deny that the Gillard government's emerging new asylum seeker policy represents a thinly disguised reversion to Howard's Pacific Solution, although both Gillard and Stephen Smith are giving denial a good shot. The thing is that I suspect most "punters" will neithe...
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A warning, this is pretty much a shaggy dog story. A while ago I had an idle thought about migrant settlement patterns. If there was a slight tendency amongst Chinese Australians to settle in ways that reflected subnational cultures from China (I was prompted by the Sydney sub...
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Now I realise I'm courting extreme feminist abuse by this post, but so be it. Australian popular culture always seems to follow North American examples no matter how silly e.g. "gangsta rap". So I suppose it was inevitable that the phenomenon of the " slutwalk " would rapidly...
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Are nurses more altruistic than real estate brokers? Find out here . But if you don't have time, here's the abstract. We report results from a dictator game experiment with nurse students and real estate broker students as dictators, and Amnesty International as the recipient....
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The great Scottish philosopher David Hume, friend of other great Scottish philosopher Adam Smith was 300 the other day. Crooked Timber is inviting favourite Hume quotes and Paul Krugman offers this . I have long entertained a suspicion, with regard to the decisions of philosop...
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White to play A H Wohl vs Gipslis 23. ? See game for solution. Just solve this puzzle. And here's another really amazing game .
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The rules and norms that allow markets to function effectively are public or collective goods. That's something to which internet entrepreneurs turn their attention when setting up 'two sided markets' like Kaggle . At Kaggle we are always asking 'what would make this an even b...
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If Julia Gillard is known for one policy direction, it is her advocacy of making educational opportunities available to all. Her passion for this idea is clearly genuine, and has survived her move from Minister of Education to Prime Minister. It is also personal. She enjoyed h...
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One of the most famous passages in economics writing — at least if you’re an economist, as opposed to a policy maker — is the conclusion of Keynes’s General Theory , on the importance of economic ideas: But apart from this contemporary mood, the ideas of economists and politic...
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I'm preparing to do a bit of whithering on tertiary education next week at a strategy retreat or some such for a university - and wanted to ask Troppodillians for any sources they think I should consult. I want to bang my drum about the ways in which education at all levels (w...
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In this week's Missing Link Friday: fat, feminism, fair pay, philosophy and more. The death of Obama? Catallaxy's Samuel J spots an unfortunate typo at the Australian . The dogs of war: "We sent 79 commandos to get Osama bin Laden — and one dog", writes Ezra Klein . Cutting th...
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Herewith my column for Today's Fin on the Government's proposed new R&D Tax Credit. The paper on which it is based is on the Lateral Economics Website . The politics of compromise can work to solve problems by taking everyone’s needs into account. But sometimes we just get cau...
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The Candidates is on! The Candidates is a tournament of the highest ranking chess players in the world (other than the world champion) and the prize is the right to challenge the champ in this case Vishy Anand. The guy on the left right is Aronian who's expected to win. And th...
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A long time ago in a galaxy far away (i.e. 2007), the University of Melbourne introduced 'The Melbourne Model' in which students were supposed to do many cross-disciplinary studies during their undergraduate degree (50 unit points, i.e. one year out of three) whilst being enco...
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I went to Harkaway State School in the foothills of the Dandenongs in Victoria. It was settled by Germans and apparently in WWI they rang the bell of the local church when they heard of a German victory in WWI. Probably not a good way to stay under the radar - though that was...
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Well blow me down! In early 2009 I was invited to Beijing to participate in a 'dialogue' on 'the knowledge society' which was being run between various academic institutions in Australia and Peking University. The 'dialogue' was quite formal and diplomatic - I recognised the g...
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No: the betting markets at Intrade showed a steady downward movement in the 'probability that Bin Laden would be captured or neutralised before midnight June 30 2011'. On May 1, the probability was deemed to be 2.7 % (down from about 10 percent a year earlier), with the close...
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