The ABC has made a documentary about David Hicks and screened it in an double episode of Australian Story. It's still on iView and I suggest you go check it out if you've not seen it. It went to some lengths to be 'balanced' but somehow the balance seems to me to tilt too far...
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What with the sheer number of journalistic political pundits churning out daily "footie commentary" columns to fill the voracious maw of the media cycle, you'd imagine that no possible play would be left unanalysed. Instead we get a curious brand of groupthink where they all w...
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I am about to make a trans-Pacific flight. Moreover I am doing this on a third world American Airlines plane that I am reliably informed does not have individual movies on demand. This is a fairly serious problem but of course to any Troppodillian it is more of an opportunity...
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I'm doing a few presentations in the next week or so and have been hit by an avalanche of bureaucracy. I try to minimise costs for my clients and book the cheapest airfares possible (usually booking them late in the piece to preserve some flexibility). One of my government cli...
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Women are "working fewer hours, in lower-paid industries and in lower-status jobs" than men, writes Jessica Irvine . Despite decades of feminism, women are still doing most of the unpaid cooking, cleaning and caring for children. They are still struggling to break into senior,...
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Since a recent visit to San Francisco catching up with a cousin of mine I'd last met forty years ago, I've been receiving an email once a week. It is written by Raymond (using a French pronunciation of the word long before Stephen Colbert took to this trick). It is sent to any...
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Steven Jobs is perhaps the best CEO of the last hundred years. This may reflect my ignorance of other CEOs - which is bordering on the comprehensive - but my reasoning goes like this this: In identifying extraordinary talent, one has to guard against luck. How do we decide bet...
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Why "shouldn’t we look forward to a freer, more egalitarian world of tomorrow in which people are allowed to live where they want?" asks Matt Yglesias . If neoliberalism is about removing all barriers to market transactions then removing restrictions to migration should be top...
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Beer: Who has the best beer? Chris Bertram isn't sure ... but it's not the Welsh. The fatosphere: Fat acceptance blogs can improve health outcomes according to a recent study. Sunanda Creagh reports . Why inequality is like cholesterol: Matt Cowgill and Mark Bahnisch discuss a...
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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="470" caption="Manning and and Dymphna on the veranda of their house at Wapengo on the NSW South Coast"] [/caption] Inside Story has just published an essay by me in which I try to figure out Manning Clark. I was working on this within t...
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Mick Malthouse, " latter optionist " and coach of Collingwood Football Club had some insights to share with club tragics such as me in his latest video . Regarding the Brisbane Lions he feels that The more they become less reliant on thinking about people who aren't in the sid...
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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="220" caption=" Prize-winning nature and wildlife photographer, paleontological impressario, molecular gourmet and Dark Lord of IP trolling: Nathan Myhrvold, Founder of Intellectual Ventures"] [/caption] The Economist blog 'Democracy in...
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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="360" caption="Courtesy of the RBA"] [/caption] In my first year of university, in one of the earliest classes, we were shown a graph Australia's terms of trade in the 1950s. This is something I doubt would happen in economics education...
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(note to self) Just a week ago, the betting markets still gave Gaddafi a 40% chance of remaining in charge till the end of the year but now the markets have given him up for a lost cause. The Arab Spring can hence boast another regime change, and this time one that is quite co...
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Paul Krugman has lamented the lack of incentives in US political life to make sense. There are no sanctions, he argues , against politicians saying and standing for completely crazy things - like that tax cuts generate more revenue. Anyway, I thought about this looking at this...
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Following from Ken's post the other day I spent some time in idle thought. For the moment I'll disregard my problems with aggregate productivity statistics (many of which are covered in this Grattan Inst paper). I'll also disregard my feeling that ultimately productivity growt...
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Paul Lockyer & quality journalism: Paul Lockyer's "documentary on the Queensland floods this year was just simply outstanding", said Laura Tingle last month . The veteran ABC journalist was part of her top 10 quality journalism sources in Australia. In April Alan Knight wrote...
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Well the ABC God bless its cotton socks can't quite bring itself to mount videos that can be embedded elsewhere - or I can't see a way to do it, but they did a great story on Kaggle tonight - so I thought I'd post it here. Just click here and all will be revealed. Update: some...
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Yesterday's gathering of angry redneck opponents of the Gillard carbon tax on the lawns of Parliament House scored the sort of blanket MSM coverage its organisers wanted. Actual political significance appears to have little connection with electronic media decisions on what st...
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In the American Scholar, George Watson writes about the forgotten Churchill -- the Liberal who helped lay the foundations for Britain's welfare state. Churchill was president of the Board of Trade in the Asquith government -- a Liberal government that favoured free trade, a mo...
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I ran into this excerpt from Q&A a day or so ago and it struck me. I'm actually not sympathetic to the general wailing and gnashing of teeth from the left about how right wing terrorists come out of intemperate language on the right. On the other hand Alan Jones did actually i...
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Most 'shouts' for movies - those quotes you see promoting movies have the quoted person saying something like "plumbs the depths of human emotion" or whatever. A 1974 film by left wing Italian feminist Lina Wertmulla, had this 'shout' on the Walhalla poster that hung in our li...
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The recent debate over Matt Yglesias' 'left neoliberalism' reminded me what an ambiguous term neoliberalism is. There are at least five political movements or schools of thought that are called neoliberal. While they are distinguishable, they are not entirely separate. Accordi...
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HT: Skeptic Lawyer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SHKhvVjLIc&feature=player_embedded
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ASIC, one of our main financial markets regulators, has today declared that short-selling is a "legitimate business in the market" . Good on them. Markets need short-sellers, far more than most people realise. The reason is that financial markets are markets in ideas - ideas a...
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A modest proposal for debt ceiling reform: It's spending on Medicare that's driving up the deficit, writes Noah Millman. So at the American Scene he suggests replacing the debt ceiling with a ceiling on Medicare spending . Austerity and Social Protest: Governments might not be...
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I don't generally take much notice of Henry Ergas's op-ed pieces in the Oz, but even one-eyed Coalition shills sometimes have important things to say. So it was with Ergas's article this morning drawing attention to actions by the Gillard government to diminish the role and ef...
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Adam Smith recognised that a well-ordered society can never develop "when a sizeable number of its members are miserable and, as a consequence, dangerous", writes Mary Riddell in the Telegraph . She argues that "social democracy, with its safety nets, costly education and heal...
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Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy has a post musing about whether carbon emissions trading permits would be regarded as property rights which would entitle the holder to compensation if abolished by a future federal government. The obvious context is the fact that Tony Abbott has...
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I have written a few posts about education. But I'd not seen this presentation by Conrad Wolfram - brother of someone who may be one of the intellectual giants of our time - Stephen. (Since Stephen is a good deal older - born in 1959 with Conrad born in 1970 - perhaps one migh...
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As you may have heard, on Friday the debt of the United States was downgraded by Standard and Poors. Subsequently everyone continued to rush to buy said debt, and the 10 yield fell to an astonishing 2.20% , and taking into account inflation, many people seem keen to pay the go...
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I've long been puzzled why Michelle Grattan is seen as an eminence grise of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. Unlike her corpulent male counterpart Laurie Oakes, who still occasionally produces major scoops and penetrating political analyses, I can't remember the last time Grat...
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Televisions, DVD players and mobile phones have become so cheap that even poor third world families can own them. In Foreign Policy , Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo write : In rural Morocco, Oucha Mbarbk and his two neighbors told us they had worked about 70 days in agricul...
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Reviving an old Troppo tradition - and you can cheat if you want to by following the picture's url. And what's causing the dark streaks?
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On the other side of the Pacific, bloggers are arguing over something called 'left neoliberalism'. What began as a dispute over monetary policy between Yglesias and Doug Henwood quickly widened into a debate over political philosophy and strategies to rebuild the American left...
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Here's an open thread for all those ideas, links and arguments that don't fit anywhere else.
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White to play Zimmermann vs Huebner 18. ? See game for solution. about our puzzles
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I am usually uninterested in the month to month guessing/commentary game around RBA board meetings. It's the financial market version of political race calling. However the decision on Tuesday to hold the current target rate highlighted some issues around the purposes and goal...
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Progressive politics without unions? "If you want progressive policies, the comparative historical evidence suggests it’s very helpful to have a strong labor movement" writes Lane Kenworthy . But in the US unions are weak and getting weaker. Is there an alternative strategy? N...
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One of the heroes of ferreting out the routine criminality at the News of the World is the former Grandiosely titled Minister for Transformational Government, Tom Watson who's been on this case longer than just about anyone and a genuine champion of open government with whom I...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsLBuCp23QA&feature=player_embedded
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Me in today's Crikey It’s a dirty business but someone has to do it. Selling home loans that is. Now after a lifetime of howling protest about the commissions mortgage brokers make, the Australian Consumer Association – AKA Choice – is helping itself to some of those commissio...
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Do women behave more reciprocally than men? Gender differences in real effort dictator games Heinz, Matthias, Rau, Holger A., and Juranek, Steffen Abstract: We analyze dictator allocation decisions in an experiment where the recipients have to earn the pot to be divided with a...
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Yes, folks it's Benford's Law - from Kaggle's website . One fun aspect of working with real data is that you get to observe real-life phenomenon. For example, Benford's Law (also known as the "first-digit law") states: "in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sou...
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As thousands of Norwegians poured into Oslo's streets singing, hugging and waving flowers , Queensland academic Merv Bendle sat at his computer fixated on how leftists and Islamists would try to exploit this latest act of mass murder. Maybe the attacks in Oslo an on the island...
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(see here for part one and two and here for even earlier posts) Where we economists are most useful in climate change discussions is the question of how to change the behaviour of humans and how to organise the production of public goods. Because the climate is a world public...
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The survey of opinion amongst Australian Economists made for some interesting reading for me. I found that I where a clear majority of respondents agreed or disagreed with a statement I did as well, and where they were divided, I also had reservations. I guess this means I 'm...
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