Ross Gittins asked me if I'd fill in for him during his summer break, which gives me a chance to get a few things off my chest. So here's the first of four weekly columns. In 2009, I chaired the federal government's Government 2.0 Taskforce. We sketched out how government migh...
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About 8 months ago, I had a look at what was then happening in the Arab world and made predictions about what was going to happen next. Time to see what really happened and update the forecast. A minor prediction I was making was that Libya would again succumb to the resource...
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George Monbiot bells the "libertarian" cat: Freedom: who could object? Yet this word is now used to justify a thousand forms of exploitation. Throughout the rightwing press and blogosphere, among thinktanks and governments, the word excuses every assault on the lives of the po...
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The Effects of Home Computers on Educational Outcomes. Evidence from a Field Experiment with Schoolchildren Date: 2011-09 By: Robert Fairlie (Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Cruz) Jonathan Robinson (Department of Economics, University of California, Sa...
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Looks like they work . . . Inducement Prizes and Innovation. Date: 2011-12-15 By: Brunt, Liam (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration) Lerner, Josh (Harvard Business School) Nicholas, Tom (Harvard Business School) http://d.repec.org/n?u=R...
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Herewith a paper about my encounter with design, on taking up the Chairmanship of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation and encountering the Family by Family program. The site where it's been published has no comments facility, so I'm opening up discussion here should an...
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Last month, I talked about the route that Mario Monti should take with Italy if he truly wanted to get it back to a higher-growth path. My advice was to take on the rent-seekers in blitz-reforms, whilst keeping the population in a state of great anxiety about the economy in or...
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[caption id="attachment_18324" align="alignleft" width="865" caption="A cool graphic curtesy of McKinsey"] [/caption] Hard to believe we have a share of the global film industry revenue which is about a fifth of the revenue of the US industry. Anyway, it's a cute graphic.
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What is the road of least resistance scenario, and thereby the most likely scenario, for the Eurozone financial crisis? To solve this conundrum, we need to map the major elements of high resistance around which the road must navigate and the areas of low-resistance towards whi...
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Gillard government - Not a time for political point-scoring but the sinking is all that mongrel Abbott's fault for refusing to vote for our Malaysia Solution amendments. Coalition - Scott Morrison says "the tragedy confirmed the Coalition's worst fears" but restrains himself f...
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Just that - it's a windfall. Here's Henry Ergas's well considered response to the latest depredations of managerialism. Nice to be able to agree for once with someone for whose breadth of learning I have such a high regard! The bargain that matters is the lifetime return to ta...
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I posted a while back about my pet theory that the South of the US was a psychotic society, which psychosis was brought about by the politics which arose in a slave society. Anyway, I just came upon this article which looks interesting, and in the same vein. Slaves as capital...
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Missing link is taking a vacation. See you next year! The destruction of the tea: What did the original tea party patriots stand for? Alfred F. Young looks at the history behind the Boston Tea Party . Are Slaves Growing Your Fair Trade Cotton? Matthew Yglesias links to a story...
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Here are two talks I've given in the last year. One was a couple of weeks ago at a Melbourne Conversation on Big Data . I talk about the serendipity of big data and the relevance for privacy regulation. And tell a story about Kaggle. I recommend the talk before mine by David M...
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I ran into James O'Loghlin at the Innovation Awards in Brisbane last week. He MCed the awards and in introducing the evening with a 10-15 minute monologue that was sufficiently funny that I the dim dark recesses of my brain reminded me that he was a stand up comedian before he...
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[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="460" caption="Tilda and her Very Nasty Offspring wait for expert assistance"] [/caption] I went to see We need to talk about Kevin on Saturday night. It may not be universally well reviewed, but that's how it's seemed to me having spent...
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I was in a conference in Tokyo last week on the topic of advancing the use of well-being indices throughout the world, hosted by the very generous, civil, and well-organised Japanese. One of the great things about such conferences is that you get to exchange views with smart p...
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As Theodore Roosevelt finished his address to the people of Osawatomie his speechwriter leaped up and cried : "Citizens of Kansas, you have just listened to one of the greatest pronouncements made by any man. Its effect will be felt in the nation and the world for years to com...
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Brian Bahnisch over at Larvatus Prodeo has a useful summary of the state of play (such as it is) at the current Durban climate change talkfest: China, it seems, wants the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol for the developed countries, and wants them legally bound to deeper cut...
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The comment of the month award goes to Andrew Norton on Richard's latest post (which is excellent by the way). "The 1980s reform period was very controversial until about 10 years ago, when the argument that free markets aren’t working w[as] ere replaced with the argument that...
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Struggling Australians breathed a sign of relief today, when they read that the 'relentless pressure ' applied by Melbourne's Herald Sun has forced a humiliating climb-down by the big banks and delivered the full interest rate reduction passed down from on high. The paper repo...
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Ken has already linked to Possum's post on Australian Exceptionalism, but I have a distinct point I want to make about it. In a great part I agree with the sentiment, although I'd espouse most of the past 220 years rather than just the past three decades. It's far less the "Th...
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The Humbling of a Pretty Girl: When model and fashion writer Lauren Scruggs walked into a plane propeller the paramedics didn't think she'd survive . "With the lacerations on her head and the skull fracture, we thought there would be significant brain damage", said one. At Zer...
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I don't imagine we'll be running Best Blog Posts this year. Certainly I won't have time to be involved. Moreover, we never actually anointed an annual winner in any event, just an undifferentiated group of 30 or 40 of the best from the non-MSM blogosphere. However, if I WAS se...
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Herewith my op ed from the Herald and Age today. What is the good life and are we living it? Assessing and measuring wellbeing has vexed us since ancient times. But a funny thing happened on the modern world’s way to the answer. The metric that economists used to dampen down t...
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Both Judith Sloan and Ian Harper argue that Newstart Allowance is too low , particularly for recipients who are long-term unemployed. In the late 1980s, the Social Security Review also argued for an increase in unemployment payments. The review's authors wrote: ... immediate p...
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http://youtu.be/WAvf1lVbjUA
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New article by me at CDU Law and Business Online (I've written on this topic before at Troppo but this one is aimed at law students and is therefore a bit more academic though hopefully still accessible and interesting for a general audience - feedback in that regard is invited).
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Introducing Ellen Broad: Hello Troppodillians. As some of you know, I am the patron of the Australian Digital Alliance which, broadly speaking, represents users of copyright protected products. Its members include Google, Yahoo!, each of the national cultural institutions, lib...
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http://youtu.be/PEwf8e5jHTg
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A friend of mine, and a great contributor to Australian public policy, Mike Waller, a man who sketched out Australian competition policy on a single page and fed it up the line as an FAS in PM&C in the late 80s (or perhaps it was 1990), has wrenched himself from the policy sce...
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Judith Sloan surprised participants at the government's Tax Forum in October when she suggested Newstart Allowance wasn't adequate. She made the same claim in a piece for the Drum writing: "If we are to expect the unemployed to search for employment with confidence, there is n...
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[caption id="attachment_18145" align="alignright" width="200" caption="Judge Michael Finnane"] [/caption] Justice Michael Finnane of the NSW District Court has long been one of my favourite legal characters. But then I'm not a criminal defence lawyer. If I was I'd almost certa...
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Dennis Glover analyses the PM's party conference speech in a piece for the Weekend Australian . It's an interesting piece but there's one thing about it that's driving me mad. Nobody in the Labor party can open their mouth without mentioning Tony Abbott. And while it would be...
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Sometimes the words I type into Google's search box are the words I want to appear in the results. For years now I've been using the '+' operator to ensure that every result includes a particular term. But recently, without warning, it stopped working . Fortunately Google have...
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Last year French parents were outraged by an advertisement that claimed Santa Claus wasn't real. AdWeek reported : "I have some bad news for you," a father says to his (grown) son right at the beginning of the spot. "Père Noël doesn't really exist." Parents are all upset that...
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I was sent the following analysis of the NZ election yesterday. I was sent it by someone I know, but I can't possibly tell you who it was (or I'd have to kill you). Moreover the person who sent this to me, did not identify the person who sent it to him. I think that's because...
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I read Susan Johnson's memoir - A Better Woman - when it came out a few years ago. I like her writing - clear, insightful and keenly felt. The memoir is about her medical adventures when her body 'let her down' as it were after childbirth. In any event it's out as a audio book...
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Look at this graph of the great tectonic shifts brought about by the GFC. Securitisation collapsed as a form of funding, and those in the official family ran round doling out gold plated assistance like free government guarantees to our banks (and next to nothing for our secur...
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Lending is the right model for ebooks: Joshua Gans asks "If lending is the appropriate mode for books, then how would the business of publishing look if it is built around lending rather than ownership?" Why journalists need Twitter : Often maligned as quick chat for empty hea...
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