Well my track record isn't too flash. I predicted a Collingwood win last year for the first final - and they controlled the game and used their control to kick points rather than goals and then let the Sainters back in. Then I predicted a Sainters win in the replay, more out o...
Continue reading →
Cross posted from Inside Story Australians like to think of themselves as egalitarian, and in the past Australians also liked to believe that we had a relatively equal distribution of income and wealth. As early as the 1880s, visitors to Australia apparently remarked on the gr...
Continue reading →
Spoken like a true utilitarian: "If we really want the greatest happiness of the greatest number, we should be electing psychopathic, Machiavellian misanthropes", writes Roger McShane (via Will Wilkinson ). I love you so much ... that I'm going to ruin your life: Tigtog on the...
Continue reading →
The two finals for the oval ball codes do not just share a weekend this year. Two of the finalists - Collingwood in the AFL and Manly in the NRL - have the undisputed status of being "the team everyone likes to hate" in their respective leagues. Yet they are far from similar c...
Continue reading →
I was all set to fulminate against the evils of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act in the wake of the Federal Court's verdict against Bolt and publisher News Ltd in Eatock v Bolt . And then it turns out the the Bolt case is not, after all, the perfect opportunity to...
Continue reading →
Here's the David Solomon Lecture I'll be giving at the Brisbane Museum of Modern Art in an hour's time. I Whether or not I can speak with sufficient insight to be worthy of giving the David Solomon lecture, I possess at least one qualification. I have known David for over thir...
Continue reading →
Someone familiar with Russian totalitarianism once asked how George Orwell understood it so well without ever having experienced it. It was pointed out that Orwell had been to Eton. Paul Krugman asks how could the guardians of economic orthodoxy all suddenly come out in favour...
Continue reading →
I've been struggling to articulate my objection to little strategic set pieces which appear before policy proposals. They typically take the salient challenges from conventional wisdom - for instance right now that we're facing potential environmental catastrophe, sovereign de...
Continue reading →
The devil in the title is our oldest enemy . Not the hoofed and horned one, but rent. Rent is gains in excess of what is required to mobilize a factor of production. The term comes from land as gains accrue to ownership with no relation to the merit or exertion of the owner. F...
Continue reading →
http://youtu.be/htX2usfqMEs US senate candidate Elizabeth Warren wants wealthy Americans to pay more tax . The Bush administration put the country into a hole, she says. Tax cuts for the rich, two wars it put on a credit card, and an unfunded medicare drug program that poured...
Continue reading →
Just when I'd given up trying to find the Easter eggs in Google's muppet doodle I typed 'Bill Gates' into the search box and saw this. Very amusing. Of course you don't need to type 'Bill Gates'. You don't need to type anything at all. Just select one of the two muppets on the...
Continue reading →
Is gender equality driving down the price of sex? Women trade sex for resources, argues psychologist Roy Baumeister . "Historically, women have restricted each other's sexuality in order to make the price of sex high". Roy Baumeister's bad economics: Baumeister's theory is "no...
Continue reading →
I simply can't understand the strategic or even tactical thinking (if any) behind the Gillard government's decision to pursue a legislative revival of the Malaysia Solution. Neither the Coalition nor the Greens were ever going to support it, nor were many voters going to spend...
Continue reading →
It is easy to become absorbed in particular problems and in the disaster stories that dominate the daily media. Climate change, natural disasters, wars in Africa and Asia, Financial Crises, riots and food price rises: you would be forgiven for thinking the world is going to th...
Continue reading →
By calling it the greatest moral challenge of our generation , Kevin Rudd framed climate change as a moral issue. Now as Prime Minister Julia Gillard is putting a price on carbon. So why isn't she getting credit from people who care passionately about the issue? The reason is...
Continue reading →
With the noteworthy exception of the Fairfax investigative journalists especially Kate McClymont who continue to uncover new aspects of the story, Australia's predictably groupthink-oriented political media appear to have concluded (at least temporarily) that the fact NSW Poli...
Continue reading →
After his first week of blogging back in 2002 John Quiggin observed that blogging "technology seems ideally suited for individuals and small groups, with no obvious way of scaling it up to corporate level." Maybe he's changed his mind. This week Quiggin suggests that The Austr...
Continue reading →
I grew up playing rugby union and rugby league in northern beaches Sydney. But you couldn't call rugby (union) Australia's national game, especially after tonight's depressing tryless loss by the Wallabies to Ireland. A top class rugby game exhibits all the skills, as we saw i...
Continue reading →
I've just got back from the USA and whilst there bought a SIM card for $60 which entitled me to one month's free calls throughout the US to mobiles and landlines and to landlines in other countries including Oz. Oh - and unlimited data - though not very fast after the first 10...
Continue reading →
Spoiler alert! "New research by psychologists Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt shows that people enjoy stories more when they already know the ending." Hollie Nyseth at Citings & Sightings . Will Wilkinson has a new blog: It's at Big Think and it's called The Moral S...
Continue reading →
Forty six million Americans are living in poverty but nobody seems to care. In a comment at Crooked Timber, Moe says : I had this strange evening where I watched a bit of Jackie Kennedy talking smack about people and then heard this statistic about the increase in poverty and...
Continue reading →
Will Wilkinson is unhappy about a recent article in Salon where Michael Lind denounces libertarians as enemies of democracy. One of Lind's targets is the classical liberal, Friedrich Hayek who he says preferred libertarian dictatorships to welfare state democracies. Wilkinson...
Continue reading →
The left needs utopia, says John Quiggin ; "a transformative vision to offer hope of a better life". Last year he wrote : After decades of defensive struggle, we on the left no longer know how to talk about anything bigger than the local fights in which we may hope to defend t...
Continue reading →
Even geeks need to be polite: Geeky men with poor social skills might be frustrated by their lack of success with women, but frustration is no excuse for abusing women who say no to other geeks. So if your life revolves around a geeky activity where women are scarce, Skepticla...
Continue reading →
Two diametrically opposed takes on the Australian Bureau of Statistics' newly released 2009-10 Household Expenditure Survey : Spending survey busts struggling families myth (ABC news item): Claims that many Australians are doing it tough and households are being weighed down b...
Continue reading →
On Monday, the Crawford school at the ANU ran a symposium on whether or not the government policy on carbon emissions was good policy. The video of the event should shortly appear here . The main surprise for me was to see how clearly some of the other economists speaking ther...
Continue reading →
I've been musing about the possibilities of updating Troppo's "look and feel" (although I haven't yet caucused with Nicholas and Don about it). What I have in mind is a more "newspaper-ish" arrangement, probably a bit like Larvatus Prodeo with the front page displaying a featu...
Continue reading →
A comment by Chris Lloyd on my post about last week's High Court decision brings into sharp relief why it will be a high risk strategy for the Gillard government to adopt a policy of wholly onshore processing of boat-arriving (and by definition visaless) asylum seekers. That e...
Continue reading →
In campaigning for the State election John Brumby racked his brains wondering what he could promise for the state education system and, at some cost, came up with . . . school camps. Can't say I thought it was the most important thing that could be done with a few additional m...
Continue reading →
Here is a guest post by Avi Waksberg. NG Should we pay teachers performance bonuses for teachers based on standardised testing of their pupils? The teachers I’ve spoken to about this have invariably argued that it encourages them to 'teach to the test' whilst neglecting hard t...
Continue reading →
After reading this Australian article , I looked for the relevant US diplomatic cable , largely because the paper cannot be assumed to quote things accurately or in context. I found something else that worried me though. Here's two excerpts, with my emphasis. Although the Boar...
Continue reading →
On any view yesterday's High Court decision holding the Malaysia Solution to be unlawful is a smashing blow to the Gillard government and an equally smashing win for asylum seekers and the people smugglers who capitalise on their desperation. In the slightly longer term it als...
Continue reading →
