"Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying" philosopher Richard Rorty once said . Earlier this week journalist Johann Hari discovered he'd made a mistake about what was true and what wasn't. Guy Beres at Larvatus Prodeo writes : "When I read an interview,...
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Tonight's 7:30 Report featured a story on gay marriage (yes, I know the "report" bit has been deleted, presumably to signal the new post-Red Kezza regime). Strangely though, it didn't even mention in passing the fact that there is significant doubt as to whether the Commonweal...
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I'm thrilled to say that we raised over $30,000 for Africa. Troppo itself initially raised a little over $2,000 to which would have been matched the contribution I'd promised, but in the last day I also said to the fund raisers that if they could get some more funds in by refe...
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I love finding links between equity and efficiency - there are lots around. Here's another . . . . (it seems). Early Non-marital Childbearing and the "Culture of Despair" by Melissa Schettini Kearney, Phillip B. Levine This paper borrows from the tradition of other social scie...
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My first smartphone was an Apple iPhone. I'm rather proud of being a technology laggard - it's nice to have others at the bleeding edge. Anyway, just before doing the Govt 2.0 Taskforce I thought I'd better get a bit hip and get a smart-phone and only one appealed - the iPhone...
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"I arrived with fellow baboon researcher Monica yesterday night, after a fairly smooth trip starting in St. Louis and passing through Atlanta and Johannesburg." That's primate biologist Kenneth Chiou writing about his trip to Pioneer Camp outside Lusaka. Chiou has been bloggin...
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Antinomies are discomforting things. If you haven't run into them before, they were a topic of debate and discussion introduced into modern philosophy by Kant (Unless he had some forebear of which I'm unaware), though you might say that they bear some resemblance to Zeno's par...
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Paul Krugman recently gave a speech, Mr Keynes and the Moderns on several aspects of the legacy of the General Theory , including both the ways it has been read, and how it has been ignored. The latter is a recurring theme after the financial crisis as it became apparent that...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIDo1Oug6JY&feature=player_embedded Last Christmas, instead of sending gifts to its clients, the multi-billion dollar conglomerate that is Peach Home Loans sent them donations to Women for Women in Africa in lieu thereof. I found out about it bec...
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How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was un...
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http://youtu.be/6uOZQkKHOFE
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As an admirer of most of the positions Paul Krugman takes, I was caught on the fence when he supported public sector union outrage over what the (I think newly elected) Republican Governor in Wisconsin proposed to do to public sector conditions. From memory the basic political...
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I've always liked these cute pictures of the light of our cities from space. It hadn't occurred to me but of course you can use them to measure economic growth. Quite accurately where you have reason to believe that the countries books are otherwise cooked. As explained in thi...
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In the first of series of posts on Marxism , John Quiggin goes in search of the revolutionary working class. It takes Professor Q an entire paragraph to establish that no such class exists and that the revolution is off. Most Marxists (and recovering Marxists) seem to have com...
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Richard Posner is puzzled by by increases in female earnings. After all: "Women are not as well suited to perform jobs requiring upper-body strength as men are, but men can perform virtually all service jobs as well as women can." Really? As developed economies move away from...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEUiJTRLG0w ATMs have been around since the early 1970s but US banks still employ hundreds of thousands of human tellers. So why is Obama blaming ATMs for persistently high levels of unemployment? From 1972 to 1980 American banks put on an additi...
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There's a disconnect between Friedrich Hayek's principles and his practical policy positions, according to Canadian scholar Andrew Lister . In a working paper for the Centre for the Study of Social Justice at Oxford Lister argues that Hayek is a closet Rawlsian -- an egalitari...
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Interesting graph from the OECD which came with this email to subscribers - I think it's to journalists, and I'm on it because I've sought various reports to write columns on. I haven't read the referenced material, but it's light and predigested so no doubt some enterprising...
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"Marian Evans was enraged by the suggestion that the scenes and characters in her early books were simply transcribed from life", writes Adair Jones . "... the assumption that the work was drawn from life was not an affirmation of her talent for realism, but a denial of her cr...
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I'm trying to find the above mentioned person for a one off consulting job - for a friend's work, not Lateral Economics. Any suggestions?
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From the General Achievement Test for the Victorian Certificate of Education sat today. The image of the Australian outback on the next page was painted by Russell Drysdale. Pamela Bell described the painting in the following terms. Man reading a Paper is one of the most surre...
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A while ago I listened to some lectures to learn a bit about neurology. One topic that came up was Source Amnesia. This describes a human tendency to remember things like statements and facts, but not the context in which one heard them and the caveats, explicit or not, that c...
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Below is my column today from Crikey. This gives me as much of a sense of satisfaction as my involvement in the Button Plan with the recipe for success following much the same formula. Get a small possie as an 'insider', get some bearings on where policy should be heading and...
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No - at least in this case. Do Illegal Copies of Movies Reduce the Revenue of Legal Products? The case of TV animation in Japan , byy Tatsuo Tanaka Whether or not illegal copies circulating on the internet reduce the sales of legal products has been a hot issue in the entertai...
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Does anyone know a place I can load a chess game (in pgn) and then embed it on a blog - for people to play?
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I couldn't help thinking that the media's obsession with presenting a superficial appearance of ideological balance might have gone a little too far when I discovered that The Age has not only a religion correspondent but an atheism columnist . The latter rather crassly bills...
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Someone in the ABC recommended the Foreign Correspondent of a couple of weeks ago which can be seen on iView - amazing scenes of the Japanese tsunami. Watch it if you can - pretty spellbinding I'd say. And I've been listening to ' First Person ' on weekday mornings, which is a...
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According to the ABC's Barrie Cassidy "even the most popular decisions taken by this government [are] essentially public relations disasters". It's one of those self-fulfilling media memes, resulting partly from Labor's deficient PR skills and partly from Tony Abbott's cynical...
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Traditional Culture and the Wellbeing of Indigenous Australians: An analysis of the 2008 NATSISS (pdf) Dr A.M. Dockery Centre for Labour Market Research, Curtin University Research based on data from the 2002 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey found e...
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Quadrant magazine kicked off in 1956-57 as a pocket-sized quarterly. James McAuley edited the first 20 issues and these have now become collectors items. I am scanning those 20 issues and the task is half done but work will have to stop while I go fishing in WA, off Carnarvon....
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Mr Denmore is unhappy about my recent post ' The blogosphere’s delusions of grandeur ' where I suggest that blogging isn't about to replace professional journalism. Mr Denmore agrees but thinks I'm attacking a straw man: ... just who is saying that blogging is intended to repl...
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Are bloggers writing better commentary and opinion than journalists? According to Troppo commenter Alex White the best blog commentary is more valuable than the best commentary in the mainstream media. In a response to my post on the blogosphere’s delusions of grandeur , he wr...
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In which the queen is sacrificed and all the remaining pieces are involved in the resulting mate. Here.
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A popular writer at leading Australian political blog The Political Sword has hit back at "pedantic" criticism of her work. Responding to a series of posts at Club Troppo (an obscure political blog frequented by boring middle-aged men) Feral Skeleton writes : Some stuffed shir...
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Remember when bloggers uncovered evidence that Reserve Bank of Australia subsidiary Securency was using money-laundering techniques to channel suspected bribe money to a company in the Seychelles? Me neither. Journalists at the Age and the ABC broke that story . Investigative...
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Does poverty deplete willpower? At This Field is Required, Pamela Stubbart muses over a recent article in the New Republic . When money isn't enough. At Larvatus Prodeo, Brian links to a recent column by Ross Gittins and starts a discussion about poverty and social exclusion....
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In a very recent post I commented on the absence of the one signal in the public market for expertise that might really improve the market for expertise - from the perspective of the public and private interest in efficiency - and that was some surveillance of the extent to wh...
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My Re-imagining Australian federalism post a couple of days ago resulted in an interesting discussion with Mike Pepperday. Mike argued that my suggestion for tweaking federal division of powers by having the States negotiate for a more adequate assured share of Commonwealth-ge...
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ABC's Alan Kohler is touting an idea I floated a few months ago , namely beefing up Infrastructure Australia's role in assessing federally funded infrastructure projects. However Kohler advocates stripping politicians of the decision-making power and vesting it entirely in IA...
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According to this article , Apple is aiming at converting computer users to using Apple's servers to store their files instead of their own computer's hard drive. It would certainly simplify mobile computing and eliminate problems with syncing between hardware platforms so you...
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ALAN JONES: Look, it's a harsh thing to say on these matters of carbon tax and global warming and carbon dioxide that your national government is telling you lies. But The Australian newspaper leads today with a story that no major coal-producing country currently imposes a di...
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The survey on economic opinions run by the Economic Society Australia is running to a close. It is your chance to register your opinions on the ERA journal rankings, the status of economists, carbon taxation, etc. The response rate so far has been surprisingly high – with abou...
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Big Tobacco has been bullying and blustering for some time about federal government plans to legislate for plain packaging of cigarettes (i.e. devoid of all branding, trademarks etc). They've threatened to challenge such legislation in the High Court as an acquisition of prope...
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A lot of research confirms one's priors. Sometimes it refutes them - or at least undermines them. Guessing what the outcome would be before I read the abstract, I would have guessed the opposite of what they found. But - hindsight being the powerful tool that it is - I can cer...
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The role of local government in Australia's federal constitutional system is one I've been thinking about while working up the People’s Northern Territory Constitutional Convention wiki. Constitutional recognition of local government was one of several seemingly innocuous and...
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In the Sydney Morning Herald of 1 June, Julie Novak of the Institute of Public Affairs criticised an article by Gavin Mooney and Alex Wodak, writing in the previous day’s Herald, which argued for higher taxes , in part based on arguments developed by Richard Wilkinson and Kate...
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There's something of interest in this piece by Cass Sunstein, Obama's chief of regulation (It has become common to call him 'Regulatory Czar' for some reason - not 'Regulatory Strongman' or 'Regulatory Hulk Hogan', but 'Regulatory Czar'). It speaks not just of the costs of reg...
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In recent years, there have been many reforms to the incentive system that social science academics (those in the fields of economics, finance, psychology, management, health, marketing, etc.) live under in Australia. There was the Research Quality Framework , then the ERA , a...
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Odd that a country like Oz in which economic reform has been such a buzzword, in which economists have, over the last generation had so much influence, have had so little impact on doing something so obviously sensible, which is to move as far as possible from the taxation of...
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Almost as depressing as the evident plagiarism in HillBillySkeleton's post-truth politics post is its unremitting, one-eyed left wing bias. The Political Sword is the ideological mirror image of Andrew Bolt's blog only much less entertaining. The most recent post there is a le...
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When I floated the idea of an infographic wiki the other day I said this. The problem of course is that infographics are created by graphic designers, who are trained to do what they do. Someone in the policy crowd might want to offer their knowledge on an issue in an infograp...
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I have distinctly ambivalent views about Statehood for the Northern Territory, as long-time readers will have noted. I even mused not so long ago about whether the existing grant of self-government should be revoked and other governance models explored instead. More recently I...
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At the Political Sword, HillbillySkeleton is basking in praise for her recent post ' Post-Truth Politics .' "Terrific Hillbilly, just terrific", writes commenter David Horton. Hillbilly's reply is all modesty: Thank you so much for your warm compliments. I am truly flattered....
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Fron Nicholas Eubank via Chris Blattman For years, studies of state formation in early and medieval Europe have argued that the modern, representative state emerged as the result of negotiations between autocratic governments in need of tax revenues and citizens who were only...
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The single thing that could possiby lower emissions in the long term is apparently off the table at present. Assuming that it really matters to lower emissions. It is possible to be skeptical about that and still be in favour of cleaner energy sources. One of the opportunity c...
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Originally posted at The Conversation by Gerry Redmond and Peter Whiteford (Disclosure: Gerry Redmond and Peter whiteford receive funding from the Australian Research Council for a project on "Supporting Families: Horizontal and Vertical Equity in the Australian Tax and Transf...
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This year is the centenary of the handover of control of the Northern Territory to the Commonwealth by South Australia in 1911. It's a fascinating but not very well known story with many dimensions. I was recently asked to deliver a paper to the Northern Territory Historical S...
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I recall my disappointment at the ALP's taking the craze for early childhood intervention in the 2007 election and turning it into a generalised promise for earlier and more kindergarten. Just think of how they could have spent that money on targeted intervention for at risk k...
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