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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I paid a visit to Catallaxy earlier today after my Google reader informed me that Rafe Champion had awarded me and Jason Soon something called the HL Mencken Award . Although it's evidently not intended ironically, I was a bit taken aback given that my last interaction with Ra...

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The ABC's Australia Talks program ran a show this week about the troubles of the Australian book industry. Its starting point was that the local bookselling and book publishing industry is in a heap of trouble. Not for the first time, the program did a deal of hand-wringing ab...

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This made me laugh

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White Ribbon Day: "In an afternoon in Montreal on December 6th 1989, a man massacred 14 of his female classmates. From this horrific action, a nation was brought to the forefront of an issue that had been severely underreported for too long." Lip Magazine . "White Ribbon Day p...

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Here's a paragraph I wrote about fifteen years ago. The culture of economic expertise places inadequate weight on integrating insights from multiple perspectives, that it frequently places an unreasonably high 'burden of proof' on heterodox views, and that it has a penchant fo...

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Adelaide's "Festival of Ideas" last month featured a useful discussion of the mining industry's contribution to the economy, since replayed on the ABC program The National Interest . Towards the end there was a brief discussion of how mining damages prime farming land. Asked a...

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The ethics of the second oldest profession - new post by me at CDU Law and Business Online .

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Apparently some US journalism academic named Tanni Haas has written a book called Making it in the Political Blogosphere: The World's Top Political Bloggers Share the Secrets to Success . I'm not interested in the subject per se , because I long ago concluded that the recipe w...

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With the Media Inquiry in full swing and the Greens' Bob Brown complaining loudly about News's lack of fairness and accuracy , now might be a good time to travel back in time 20 years. Let's visit another era when a powerful paper was unashamedly boosting one side of politics...

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New post by me at CDU Law and Business Online .

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Like Paul Krugman part of what originally drew me into Economics was the premise behind Asimov's Foundation books. This premise was a far future where a discipline had managed to formalise and model human society, shed light on what would happen and create preconditions for a...

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I tend to get increasingly grumpy as I get to the fag end of final exam marking. This morning provided a classic example. I received in my email inbox a typically sanctimonious, patronising communication from someone in another School who is in the habit of sending frequent un...

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Troppodillians may recall a post of mine where I explained an avent I attended that was showcasing kids who'd undertaken exciting IT projects. Here's an extract: I got talking to Ben and Cameron. Ben had taught himself to program and been instrumental in building the app and g...

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[Cross-posted to Online Opinion ] I spend my working life running an online media firm - WorkDay Media, publisher of Banking Day - with its owner and editor-in-chief, Ian Rogers. Last month, Ian and I wrote a submission to the federal government’s Independent Media Inquiry. Yo...

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(cross-posted from Core) The Italian political scene has given rise to a phenomenon seen often in developing countries: a care-taker government run by a respected economist with an implicit mandate to ‘get the country out of the mess’. That mess, a public debt of 120% of GDP t...

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In an idle moment I read this article . It's an adversarial interview. Only it's in the lifestyle section and it's of a celebrity - Dolly Parton, who has always seemed like quite a nice sort, though you wouldn't be too surprised to find out that it wasn't so. Anyway, since it'...

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A Troppodillian referred me to this column by Paul Sheehan . It is a very truthy column. Yea verily. Your task, should you decide to accept it, is to point us to another column which is more misguided and ill-informed than it is. As you would know, the Troppo Mercedes Sports h...

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The disclaimer below the fold is used by Virgin in their lounges when you log onto their wi-fi. Yet, like so many disclaimers, although it takes a good while to read, it contains terms almost all of which would be implied in the absence of such a disclaimer. Indeed, if there a...

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"Public debate in Australia has been shaped in a profound way by astroturfing", says advertising strategist Ravi Prasad . "If you look at the debate around the carbon tax, the debate around mining supertax, and the public debate around asylum seekers, the public debates in the...

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http://youtu.be/S7ehlw_phys

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Put it up to eleven: "The entire media is shouting ALL the time because they're worried that if they pull back on their Tube Screamers their highly compressed copy won't be heard over all the other sources of distraction", says Mr Denmore . We reject your demand for demands: T...

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I cam across this post in my morning Google reader perusal: A ballot measure that StateImpact Ohio (a creation of local public media and NPR) describes as “a referendum on a constitutional amendment…aimed at keeping the national health care reform law from taking [e]ffect” won...

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One of the less significant but more entertaining aspects of yesterday's parliamentary antics surrounding passage of the carbon price legislation was Nationals Senator Ron Boswell's sledge of former colleague Tony Windsor: Nationals Senator Ron Boswell branded Mr Windsor "the...

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The latest psychology bestseller The Folly of Fools is on the triumph of deceit. It looks quite interesting. Anyway, it looked a bit too focused on the bestseller formula - which is often the book of the article formula for me to want to read it all. But I've downloaded my Kin...

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I usually disagree with recently reborn RWDB blogger Professor Bunyip, and his potshots at this week's principal witnesses in the Finkelstein Press Inquiry aren't exceptional in that regard. But I have to confess (not for the first time) to taking a certain guilty pleasure at...

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Cathy Wilkerson was ironing bed sheets when the floor collapsed under her feet. A bomb had detonated in the subbasement of her parent's Greenwich Village townhouse . Cathy and another woman walked away but their friends Teddy Gold , Terry Robbins and Diane Oughton were dead. I...

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Just in case you didn't notice it, there's been a crevice that's opened up on Tony Abbott's long road to the Lodge. A crevice that in just a few days has opened up to bloody great yawning credibility gap. It was just last week, in the wake of the Qantas fiasco, and the critisi...

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"Forecasting Private Consumption: Survey-Based Indicators vs. Google Trends", SIMEON VOSEN* AND TORSTEN SCHMIDT, RWI, Essen, Germany ABSTRACT In this study we introduce a new indicator for private consumption based on search query time series provided by Google Trends. The ind...

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On the suggestion, some time ago, of Ian Marsh, I finally caught up with the New Democracy Foundation a few weeks ago. Not surprisingly we got on well. I've always been keen on things like consensus conferences - which bring the deliberation of a jury to wider social and polit...

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My post at CDU Law and Business Online .

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Well blow me down. If it isn't Jevons in the Powerhouse Museum coming here as the son of a bankrupt family and making good as Assayer to the Sydney mint, becoming the first photojournalist in Australia, discovering the El-Nino effect, writing an ethnography of the uncouth of S...

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The Senate Economic References Committee has this week released its findings on the supermarket milk discounting war . The main findings, blessedly, were that cheaper milk really is good for consumers and that there was nothing obviously awry with the competitive market that g...

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Un-occupy: Nearly 70 students walked out of Greg Mankiw's economics class at Harvard on Wednesday afternoon. According to the Harvard Crimson's Jose Delreal , "The walkout was meant to be a show of support for the 'Occupy' movement’s principal criticism that conservative econo...

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Perhaps it's the Christian roots of our civilisation. Perhaps it's innate in many of us, but I've never understood the business about to forgive is divine. It's natural. Even if people have done really bad things, if you think they are genuinely sorry, your heart goes out to t...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PoD84TVdD-4 I know you're all on the edges of your seats about how Kaggle is going. The answer is "very well". We've just announced the closure of Series A funding. And you can read all about it in the New York Times , the...

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Human beings only play when they are in the full sense of the word human and they are only fully human when they play. Friedrich Shiller Games seem frivolous. They can stand as metaphors for life, but typically, the outcome of games doesn't really matter. I wanted Collingwood...

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Yesterday I followed this mellifluously titled article on why the author hadn't been able to write a best selling 'ideas book'. This is what I had to do. First, I needed to have a platform. A platform is something you stand on. It makes you taller than you are. In trade publis...

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Another Ignite Melbourne is on! What is that? Ignite is a format for public speaking which emerged from the tech sector. You get exactly 5 minutes to speak and you must speak to slides that move forward at a preset rate every 15 seconds. It's quite hard to do well, which is pa...

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[caption id="attachment_17826" align="alignright" width="500" caption="Photo credit: Matt McDermott"] [/caption] Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has a message for the Occupy Wall Street protesters : Keep focusing on gross inequality of outcomes and you'll get nowhere. Haidt and hi...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w833cAs9EN0 My previous post on the right led to my discovery of this great clip. Many will already have seen it. Anyway, enjoy.

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Update - Tweets placed in a more coherent context in In search of Qanilingus at CDU Law and Business Online . NB Australian Financial Review arguably has the best coverage and has no paywall for the weekend. downesy Stephen Downes by CDUlawschool Alan Joyce's secret ambition i...

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John Quiggin reprises an old theme of his - which I recall supporting previously (I'd forgotten that my post " the stupid party " was actually in response to another of John's posts/columns). In any event, I was talking to a CIS person the other day and mentioning that for me...

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Edit - I really want opposing views. Anyone who thinks there is a strong case for a concerted push for more literacy, please give it in comments At the Lowy Interpreter Andrew Carr says "One policy guaranteed to feature in the ' Australia in the Asian Century' White Paper is t...

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[caption id="attachment_17786" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Today's NT News front page (28 October) - a true classic of the genre even for that august journal of record"] [/caption]

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I didn't really expect that my recent posts about the somewhat indeterminate aims of the "Occupy ..." protest movement would result in a lively discussion thread about what I imagined was the entirely uncontroversial proposition that the limited liability corporation is by and...

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Moving backwards? Opposition leader Tony Abbott's project is "oriented to the past rather than the future, and it seeks to reinstate the past by projectively erasing the present", writes Mark Bahnisch . Bringing back tram conductors: The Greens want to bring back Melbourne's t...

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Twitter even allows you to convey complex if slightly tongue-in-cheek ideas, but possibly only to people who bother to follow the links: 11 hours ago CDUlawschool CDU Law School 1/2 Houses not o/priced tiny.cc/iwt9a but will fall over time due boomer retirement tiny.cc/2sw9b H...

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[caption id="attachment_17754" align="alignright" width="199" caption="Celebrity lawyer Chris Murphy"] [/caption] Twitter is a much more useful social media tool than I had imagined. I've been using it for several weeks now to produce the daily links to interesting legal stori...

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[caption id="attachment_17751" align="aligncenter" width="612" caption="Occupy Brisbane signage: Vaccines? And what are "chemtrails"? What about whales or nukes or live cattle exports? Must be getting old ..."] [/caption]

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Back in 2006 UK rumour-monger Guido Fawkes boasted that the news is no longer defined by big media . Laurie Oakes is afraid he's right. In his 2011 Andrew Olle Media Lecture , Oakes predicts that bloggers will soon be determining what is news. He says that political commentato...

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Now it may or may not have any connection with the debate about the pros and cons of the "Occupy ..." movement in Australia or elsewhere, but the following story by Cory Doctorow from techblog BoingBoing is both fascinating and disturbing, as much for the superb associated ima...

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A few months ago there was a blog debate about the tensions between a movement left and a wonkish left in pursuing political change, summarised neatly here by Matt Cowgill . A domestic sequel has arisen in Australia. In the United States the wonkish left, from Riksbank laureat...

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I recently decided to install an air conditioner in my study. Naturally, caring about the environment (but not enough to forego my comfort) I chose the most energy efficient model on the market (the only 6 star split system).[1] Got a phone call yesterday – the importer is out...

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I muse at CDU Law and Business Online about the broader implications of Eatock v Bolt in light of last night's Austin Asche Oration in Law and Governance by Federal Court Chief Justice Pat Keane. Discussion is solicited, there rather than here by preference.

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From today's piece for Crikey: First a declaration of interest. I’ve known Allan Asher, thought only really to say 'hello' to, since the mid 1990s. I liked him and, at least from my limited vantage point think he was shaping up to be a good Commonwealth Ombudsman. He’d also in...

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A winner-takes-all-society will fail: America's top 1 per cent might have the best educations, the best doctors and the best lifestyles, but their fate is bound up with how the other 99 per cent live, writes Joe Stiglitz . Harry Clarke agrees : "the inequality threat to the su...

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Well I can't say I really agree with the criterion of quality - but anyway, at least by our intrepid old friend Joel's lights file sharing hasn't harmed music making. Recent technological changes may have altered the balance between technology and copyright law for digital pro...

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It is by no means the first time that people blinded by faith or ideology have pursued false premises to absurd conclusions – and, like their religious and political predecessors, come to believe that those who disagree are driven by ‘woeful ignorance or intentional disregard’...

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It was a sign of things to come perhaps. As the All Blacks performed their pre-match war dance with its stamping, grunting, eye-bulging and tongue lolling, the camera cut away to a shot of Australia's Radike Samo. His face shiny with perspiration, was framed by a 'do that look...

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The Lodge in Canberra, the official residence of the Prime Minister will be closed for repairs for the next 18 months . Several figures, including Jeff Kennett , former NCDC head Tony Powell and Andrew Carr of the Lowy Institute deem this an exercise in turd polishing. A new,...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jskDDLjFvGA Ever since I've been being invited to the Prime Minister's Science Prizes I've regarded it as a great privilege to attend - even if I have to fly myself to Canberra and back. Almost invariably the people who wi...

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On my recent trip to the US it was fun that my previously measly Oz dollars bought nearly US$1.10. But another thing that illustrated was what a poor deal we get on many global goods and services. Before I went I investigated getting noise cancelling headphones. I didn't want...

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The Occupy Wall Street Movement is growing: "The challenge for those of us who believe in market economics is how to restore business legitimacy", writes Peter Shergold . The top one per cent: "One of the most striking successes of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been the...

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New post by me at CDU Law and Business Online . An extract: Moreover, yesterday’s behaviour by Murdoch’s Brisbane Courier-Mail of publishing edited extracts of a Liberal-National “dirt” file on Queensland Labor MPs rather suggests that it is high time for media behaviour to be...

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Why is tax reform so hard? Reviews such as the Henry Review often point to 'low-hanging fruit' where efficiency gains can be made without any significant equity costs. One oft-noted example is property stamp duty, where the Henry Review recommended its replacement by land taxe...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ii8m1jgn_M&feature=player_embedded

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I'm pleased to say that we have taken possession of several container loads of these items which Ken has suggested using as prizes instead of the Troppo Mercedes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=V3G1cwqYkO4

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Anne Summers' essay on Andrew Bolt in The Monthly is free access for 24 hours. A key extract: Media and politics today are less a contest of ideas and more a continuing conflict of opinion. “Bolt’s genius is that he’s always finding the fault lines and finding an argument,” La...

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The OECD are entertaining the readers of their newsletter by asking them whether the worst is over. Apparently only 10% of people don't know. That's one informed readership. Nothing like having a few clairvoyants on board. Current results Is the worst of the global economic cr...

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At CDU Law Online - Colourful lawyers, police and the media (the Adam Houda wrongful arrest saga).

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In light of Paul Frijter's sketpticism about the possibility of co-ordinated international action on carbon emissions and his recent offer of a wager on the outcome of international action, I thought I'd try to put the economic problem into some of the language of Internationa...

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Seen any great blog posts recently? Written something you want to share? I'm a bit tied up today so this week's missing link belongs to you. Post your links in the comments thread.

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From the Sydney Morning Herald this morning. Paris-style train plan for city Jacob Saulwick October 6, 2011 RAIL services on the north shore, inner west, Bankstown, Hurstville and north-west lines would operate as single-deck, high-frequency metro-style trains under a plan bei...

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I attended the Federal Government's Tax Forum in the last two days which was quite worthwhile. I was supposed to have two goes at the 'inner circle' where you got to talk, but one of these two goes was subject to Julia Gillard not wanting a go. Turned out - on the question of...

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My blogging time over the last few days has been absorbed by creating a "social media presence" for my employer CDU Law School. It involves not only a blog but also Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn facilities. It's been something of a struggle to convince the powers-tha...

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The political fight over climate change policies continues to rage in our parliament, with the shadow minister for Climate Action apparently threatening a double dissolution of parliament if that is what it would take to repeal the current policies. The deeper question for ana...

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Peach Home Loans gives part of its commission each year for each of its borrowers. Last year we gave money to an appeal for African Women as I know one of the people involved. We're likely to do the same again this year, but we're also sending out cards and one can nominate pa...

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Many things are provided as public or collective goods that don't need to be. We don't need to provide hospitals or schools as public goods. We could provided them on a full choice, fee for service basis. But once we get to providing safety nets, minimum standards or free good...

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Martin Wolf has usually managed to moderate his inner interventionist. No longer, it seems. In his most recent column , he casts caution aside: "The time has come to employ this nuclear option [the printing press] on a grand scale." Not doing so, he says, would ensure a renewe...

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I think I listened to one of Martin Rees' Reith Lectures last year, but I listened to a couple yesterday and thought they were very good. I like a public lecture where the author skilfully throws of intimations of his own perspectives on life on the way to making his central p...

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Reading Tim Harford's excellent Adapt: Why success always starts with failure an idea occurred to me. He talks of the curse of the playpump - a photogenic aid strategy that appeals to celebrities and millionaires but which doesn't work. It's obvious that information about what...

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Clive Hamilton writes : Women's morality differs from men's. Feminist philosopher Carol Gilligan argues women are motivated more by care than duty, and inclined more to emphasise responsibilities than rights. They seek reconciliation through the exercise of compassion and nego...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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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HT New Matilda .

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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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The reported death of old-time Sydney crim ''Nervous'' Norm Beves has provoked my nostalgia gland. According to the SMH : Nervous Norm's criminal ineptitude was so legendary that for years ''Norm's form'' was used as the case study on recidivism for police officers studying to...

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" Enormous Penis Located on Google Maps ". Last time I checked, Gawker's illustrated story about the huge penises drawn on school lawns in New Zealand had racked up over 46,000 views. A more recently posted story tells of how "A man in Russia broke into a hair salon and the ow...

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Disappointed Troppo readers everywhere have gradually come to a realisation - upon which I came clean on in a recent thread . Troppo is really an 'eyeballs' play as we say in the trade and things haven't been this good for eyeballs since Tim Blair sent some brownshirts our way...

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Furry Fandom: Anthrocon is the world's largest convention for people fascinated with humanlike animal characters. Held in Pittsburgh, the 2011 convention attracted more than 4,500 'furries' , some of them dressed as their favourite characters. Canadian blogger and fantasy auth...

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AirBnb is a great startup which uses the power of the net to facilitate home sharing. When travelling, rather than stay in a hotel, you pay to stay in someone's home - someone who's somewhere else enjoying the scenery in someone else's home. There are optimists and pessimists...

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I knew Rob Chalmers who worked in the press gallery for over 60 years and has just died after what they call in the media "a battle with cancer". Cancer won as it so often does. Peter Martin does the honours here including reproducing a fine letter to Rob from PM Julia Gillard...

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Skype spamming seems to be on the up and up. I had about six people yesterday telling me they wanted me to add them to their contacts. I just got my second today. When I tell them I'm busy, they all seem fine with that, and don't keep bugging me - or most don't. But most want...

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A while ago I blegged in search of a new smart phone. Well disposed to Android I thought I'd buy Samsung Gallaxy II S which had had rave reviews . Anyway, some people expressed curiosity about how things would end up, but I ended up taking Neerav Bhatt's advice on the thread a...

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(cross-posted at Core-econ) Whilst it is fairly clear that the current climate change policies of Australia and other countries will do next to nothing to avert climate change (see here for a latest update on the debate), there is a key element particular to Australia that has...

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Now that my days of writing and blogging are over, I am spending my time reading books. I have almost finished reading John Howard’s book on Lazarus Rising, which is easy to read and generally quite enjoyable (although at times self-righteous). One thing about the book struck...

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Krugman again : Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans tha...

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The right wing think tanks have been having a ball denouncing dreadful things like fiscal stimuli which saved a good hundred thousand odd jobs in Australia. Meanwhile New Matilda carries a story about life in Ladakh: Sun-drenched images of rural life in Ladakh in the 1970s whe...

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From the Atlantic Monthly . Paul Keating's line comes to mind. "Where do you people get off?"

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If it had happened in the US it is inconceivable that a great deal of the emphasis would not have been on Justice for the Killer. "We'll hunt him down . . . " Well no hunting down required in this case but you get my drift. I can't recall what we said about it in Bali, but we'...

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The COAG Reform Council wanted some lateral thinking done about cities - so who you gonna call? Being Dr Lateral can be a bit tedious from time to time. You know, spending all that time outside the square. What's wrong with being inside squares anyway? But like those birds ins...

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Around the blogosphere and the media people are trying to make sense of the bombing and massacre in Norway. At Larvatus Prodeo Mark Bahnisch offers some advice : I think there is a duty to analyse why these things happen, and why they are talked about in the way they are, but...

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When best selling German author Thilo Sarrazin arrives in Australia for the Centre for Independent Studies Big Ideas Forum his hosts will promote him as a courageous opponent of political correctness while his critics will denounce him as a racist. Sarrazin's 2010 book Deutsch...

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Don't post crap! Troppo readers were up in arms about Rafe Champion's post on the Monckton and Dennis climate change debate . Rafe wants to know "how the warming lobby and Greens managed to inflate a possible temperature increase of a degree or two over the next century into t...

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As ABC 7:30 highlighted last night , it appears that the Gillard government is about to formally sign the deal with Malaysia that will see boat-arriving asylum seekers returned to the back of the queue in that country without processing. Assuming that UNHCR accepts it (apparen...

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Fisking is "the practice of savaging an argument and scattering the tattered remnants to the four corners of the internet (named after Robert Fisk of The Independent)" who was a victim. A verbal equivalent of the process was demonstrated last night by Christopher Monckton. Per...

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Which isn't to complain. He gives a great speech. [ted id=1190]

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If anyone wants to come to an event put on by the Australian Business Foundation and Deloitte, on the new R&D Tax Credit - they can come along to an event in Melbourne this Friday. Details are below the fold. The new R&D: the future of innovation and development in Australian...

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Since some episodes are good and others bad, I could never see the point of being either a declared friend or enemy of Q&A. But the bad have so thoroughly outnumbered the good this year that I'm about ready to concede it's not worth watching. It hit rock bottom last night with...

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I don't know much about this picture except that it seems to be begging to have a caption competition about it. And here at Troppo, we're never afraid of a challenge. Nothing is too serious to trivialise. So please supply us with a caption. The winner of the comp will be flown...

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A major component of the government’s clean energy plan is a package of assistance measures to compensate households for higher prices. The government will provide assistance through increases in pensions, allowances and family payments, as well as through income tax cuts. Fro...

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At #76 on the Things Bogans Like list , McMansions are a symbol of the culture of overconsumption and a triumph of marketing over common sense. Built on the urban fringe, kilometers away from services and public transport, McMansion owners are doomed to spend hours in their ca...

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. . . [T]here has been, I have to admit, an element of comic relief — of the black-humor variety — in the spectacle of so many people who have been in denial suddenly waking up and smelling the crazy. A number of commentators seem shocked at how unreasonable Republicans are be...

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Disclaimer: This ended up roughly 4500 words longer than I expected when I sat down. A while ago, following the start of the Arab Spring, John Quiggin wrote a post declaring " Fukuyama, F*** Yeah ". Apart from showcasing an appreciation of both late 20th century political thou...

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In this week's Missing Link Friday: inequality, McMansions, education, brown coal and flaming kittens. Inequality: Why don't Australians complain more about wealth inequality? According to David Neal at The Conversation it's because most of us underestimate how unequal the dis...

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In an earlier post , and one of a series by me and subsequently Ken as well, I suggested that an important part of any professional education should be a kind of counter-narrative in which those who learn a profession are also made familiar with that profession's cognitive bia...

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Cross posted from Australian Policy Online http://inside.org.au/how-fair-is-australia%e2%80%99s-welfare-state/ IN ITS 28 May edition the Economist carried a long feature about Australia, praising our resilient economy, criticising the quality of our political discourse, and hi...

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Peter Roebuck, the Fairfax cricket writer, has joined Mike Atherton in suggesting a boycott of Sri Lanka . For England that means next year; for Australia, next month. It's good to see that someone outside the cloisters of human rights activism is prepared to make a stand agai...

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For more - here .

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I reckon this is the most succinct, accurate and balanced summary I've read of the current state of the carbon pricing debate: Pricing carbon in Australia is about pricing carbon, not saving the planet. As an insurance policy, we need to have a soft mechanism in place that can...

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No Kidding. They're making a movie of Franz Stampfl's life - a doco. Who was Franz Stampfl I hear you cry? Wikipedia says this: Stampfl was born in the capital of then Austro-Hungarian Empire . He was the son of an Austrian general. He studied writing and painting in school. A...

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From Supersizing supercenters? The impact of Walmart Supercenters on body mass index and obesity, by Charles Courtemanche and Art Carden, Journal of Urban Economics 69 (2011) 165–181 Researchers have linked the rise in obesity to technological progress reducing the opportunity...

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You'll be pleased to hear that the Mortgage Industry Association of Australia is on a campaign to ramp up the qualifications of mortgage brokers. Just because all they do is sell loans and fill out forms - and otherwise manage the process by which you apply for a loan - is no...

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I never fully understood Google Health . It seems to be a consumer product, inviting you to input your data and track your health, set health goals and so on. Certainly there could be some benefits in this and in the aggregation of information, but the amount of effort maintai...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVGcfqj04Qk&feature=related Last night Jen prevailed on me to watch an episode of the doco series The First Australians . Such programs tend towards the irritatingly sanctimonious and question-begging in my experience, and that may well be true o...

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"There was a time when Labor’s aim for the poor and disadvantaged was to end poverty and disadvantage", writes John Quiggin . "Now the best they can hope for is ' extending opportunity '." Under John Curtin and Ben Chifley , Labor was the party of work and welfare. The party s...

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Joshua Gans can't imagine how staff and students at The Spot would be blocking the toilets with paper towels. It turns out that the problem may be caused by toilet ' nesters '. As commenter Alister explains "students and/or staff are using paper towels as seat-liners." And, as...

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"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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HT New Matilda.

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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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This Internet, which any demented person, any drunk can get drunk and write in, do you believe it? The Internet is like a vacuum cleaner, it can suck anything. Any useless person; any liar; any drunkard; anyone under the influence; anyone high on drugs; can talk on the Interne...

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Having just watched Q&A on the republic (looking for my daughter who'd got herself into the audience!), I was intrigued by the post I've replicated below. I am the most luke warm republican around and have almost certainly put Chris Dillow's first argument below somewhere on T...

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Here it is folks , courtesy of Cafe Hayek.

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Ken's last post seeks to crowdsource ideas for teaching law students some of their cognitive biases. I'd been contemplating on posting on something I'd read in Supercrunchers, and this gave me the perfect opportunity. Good questions Ken. I can’t answer them very satisfactorily...

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A bunch of new rules are being introduced to Parliament today governing what is usually called the "financial planning" industry. Big new regulatory schemes often have large unintended consequences, and this one could too. But if ever an industry needed to change its behaviour...

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Nicholas Gruen's post about Einstellung (a person's predisposition to solve a given problem in a specific manner even though there are "better" or more appropriate methods of solving it) has given me an idea. I would like to devise a couple of seminars for undergraduate Law st...

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Speaking of $100 bills on the pavement , I haven't looked into this - but look forward to doing so at some stage. Given the preponderance of IT systems which generate real time data for their organisations - firms and agencies - why aren't we trying to do more of this with our...

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Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School. Niall F's website doesn't just tell uswhat a dashing fellow he is. It shows us. There he is - hair pinned back by the onru...

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Keynes famously said that the hardest part of coming up with the General Theory was not coming up with the new ideas so much as escaping from the old ones. I've just run into a great article on the implications of happiness research for making policy (and yes there are implica...

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I can attest to the truth of Krugman's claim that a zombie talking point is alive and well in the US, which hasn't really taken root here. It is that only the rich pay tax. That's roughly true here if you're looking at families (because of family payments), but it's based on a...

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Amongst developed countries, we're nothing special, ranking 51st. This is from the Yale Environmental Performance Index . Though plenty of caveats need to be kept in mind, and the report itself is full of the implicit assumption that everything is always and everywhere better...

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(memo to self) Probably the most significant geopolitical event of the last 12 months has been the regime change in the Arab world, where the 360 million Arabs [1] make up 5% of the world population . Though a small and relatively poor group in this world, they occupy the main...

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Last night's riot and torching of the Villawood Detention Centre inevitably brings the asylum seeker issue back into the political spotlight, especially on top of the similar incident at Christmas Island a few weeks ago. Some "johnny-come-lately" Troppo readers might have gain...

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This story triggered a bit of childhood reminiscence, not to mention reflection on how times have changed: A West Australian teacher who allegedly tied a five-year-old boy to a chair to punish him for misbehaving has been stood aside while the case is investigated. When I was...

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'You go with the information you had...' I'm probably almost the last person to have seen Charles Ferguson's documentary Inside Job . But the film is still showing in a few cinemas in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, so it's worth making a belated recommendation. If only for th...

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A pretty interesting article I think. Jeffrey V. Butler (Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF)), Luigi Guiso (European University Institute and EIEF), Tullio Jappelli (University of Naples Federico II, CSEF and CEPR) URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sef:csefwp:28...

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When John Quiggin accused Julia Gillard of embracing neoliberalism one of his readers suggested the PM was taking advantage of Ayn Rand's renewed popularity to chase the libertarian vote. Rand seems to be everywhere these days. With the release of movie based on her 1957 novel...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="640" caption="Cartoon purloined following Patrick's excellent advice @ comment 8. "] [/caption] As I've said at least once before, my own approach to economics could be described as looking for $100 bills on the pavement. I think they'r...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="498" caption="And what is this fetching picture doing here? Ask Google Images which popped this up when I entered the search string "the rise of science""] [/caption] In discussing 'open science' with someone today I thought I'd be able...

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In this week's Missing Link Friday: a British conservative blames women for inequality, Australia's PM celebrates the dignity of work, Americans argue about health care spending, and the Freakonomics blog reveals the damaging environmental impact of medical marijuana. Is femin...

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With miners and tobacco companies running well-funded campaigns against perectly reasonable government policies, it's hardly surprising that the licensed clubs industry is looking at similar measures to combat imposition of compulsory pre-commitment settings on poker machines...

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Fairfax columnist John Birmingham's column raises some interesting issues about the practice of tipping for provision of goods and services, especially the aggressive way tipping is pursued in the US where restaurant tips of up to 20% of the bill appear to be the norm. In Aust...

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A very reasonable request - so it seems to me - from Dave Bath who has asked me to post the guest post below. I guess there's a message there - not just for Auditors General but for all right thinking government agencies. It's bleg time... for people who'd like to get all Audi...

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Happiness and Tax Morale: an Empirical Analysis By: Diego Lubian (Department of Economics (University of Verona)), Luca Zarri (Department of Economics (University of Verona)) This paper presents empirical evidence that "tax morale" - taxpayers' intrinsic motivation to pay taxe...

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Nice to see a journalist with a memory. Not that there's much point in complaining about political actors acting like political actors - responding to the incentives they face. Business associations are into solidarity long before they're into principle. The one thing Keene le...

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It always struck me how inefficient universities were with most efforts going into lectures which were inherently a broadcast medium - so much so you could go and get the tapes of the lectures. Meanwhile, tutes were usually a bit of an afterthought and a place where grad stude...

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Someone labours to fit a set of events into a 'theory' which is a restatement of the bleeding obvious: regulators and the regulated talk and this influences the evolution of regulation. Amazing really. Further there is "a circular and interactive relationship between the regul...

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Wonderful publish. Severely, you’ve got received some excellent subject material right here and I hope to acquire again quickly to study some additional.

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In the UK, the coalition government is taking an axe to spending but it hasn't abandoned a commitment to fairness. At least that's what Nick Clegg and Iain Duncan Smith argue in a recent opinion piece for The Telegraph : Our welfare reforms are intended to help people get on,...

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Author and Fairfax columnist John Birmingham posts a truly delightful splenetic prescription for appropriate responses to the odious Andrew Bolt, in the context of current racial vilification proceedings against him by a polyglot assortment of prominent Aboriginal activists: T...

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Murdered toddler Evelyn Greenup Last night's Four Corners on the Bowraville murders of three Aboriginal children some 20 years ago in northern New South Wales made rivetting TV. It painted a picture of a dysfunctional Aboriginal community riddled with alcohol and substance abu...

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Ian Verrender in the Sydney Morning Herald recently wrote of Victoria's two oldest power stations that they were bought by their owners "when the issue of climate change was well known". Though he made that remark in the middle of a longer article focused on different issues,...

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Christopher Hitchens loves writing paragraphs like this. And it's fun when you come across them . How dispiriting to see, once again, the footage of theocratic rage in Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif. The same old dreary formula: self-righteous frenzy married to a neurotic need to...

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The Hatfield clan circa 1897 I had a long chat recently with an old mate from my politics days who I hadn't seen for some time. The conversation turned to Aboriginal affairs issues, as it does when you've both worked with and for Indigenous groups for the best part of thirty y...

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I've posted before on New Zealand's Regulatory Responsibility Bill which has become the Regulatory Standards Bill on its passage from advisory taskforce into the Parliament (and it's often referred to in this post as the Regulatory Responsibility Bill or RRB). In the spirit of...

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There's a certain macabre fascination to watching the NSW ALP's post-election recriminations , a bit like watching the aftermath of an horrific train smash. However, it's an essentially pointless exercise given that the size of the Coalition's majority means that there isn't a...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blB_X38YSxQ Feel free to share stories of good April Fools jokes in comments.

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I recently posted about the Christchurch earthquake and the way in which Crisis Commons was able to help. Here's an email exchange from someone in the crisis centre working on the government side with Tim McNamara who was doing a lot of the organising on the Crisis Commons sid...

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Two pieces of news. Best Australian Essays has published a 'best of the decade' book, and it pissed me off how closely they stuck to recognised 'names' in essay writing. I have a conflict of interest having had an essay in one of the annual collections. So take it as sour grap...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DxeCK5Ne_Q I nearly posted on this when the event occurred, though before the denouement. Australian Health Economist and bureaucrat Stephen Duckett was CEO of Alberta Health Services and, in some situation of crisis or at least heightened media...

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We examine how multitasking affects performance and check whether women are indeed better at multitasking. Subjects in our experiment perform two different tasks according to three treatments: one where they perform the tasks sequentially, one where they are forced to multitas...

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Paul Krugman looks again at the relationship between deficit reduction, wages and employment in the USA. h ttp://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/wages-and-employment-yet-again/ Yglesais says that a decline in deficit could lead to further employment expansion if it led to...

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In the conference I attended in Wellington NZ I saw a presentation by Tim McNamara a Wellington developer who spearheaded what seemed like a very successful volunteer web 2.0 effort that arose in the wake of the Christchurch earthquake. Using Ushahidi an open source package in...

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I love newspapers and read lots of them. But I don't love any one newspaper so much that I'd pay hundreds of dollars a year to read it online. The kind of package I could be persuaded to pay for would be a subscription to a bundle of my favourite newspapers and magazines. But...

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As you may know, the Dunera brought a bunch of people out to Australia who settled in very nicely and added to the place. A coach of olympic runners, numerous professors, some rich entrepreneurs. I don't know if Fred Lowen and Ernst Roedeck got rich but they founded FLER and w...

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Retired diplomat Bruce Haigh has a valid point when he refers to Gillard government threats to refuse to issue visas on "character grounds" to Christmas Island asylum seeker rioters as "revengeful". More accurately it's cynical playing to the populist gallery on a par with Ton...

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Peter Whiteford is one of my favourite commenters. He rarely joins a thread without adding useful data or some telling insight. On Monday he showed up on Matt Yglesias' blog to explain the difference between progressivity and redistribution in the tax system. The debate was ov...

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Well it's an overused word right now but have a look at this if you've not seen it before - it's lovely. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkGeOWYOFoA

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A while back I was asked if I would be the patron of the Australian Digital Alliance . Well . . . you could have knocked me down with a feather! Anyway, the ADA is a fine organisation which describes itself as follows on its website. The ADA is a non-profit coalition of public...

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A couple of months ago I read Interstate 69 , which is an unexpectedly interesting account of the advocates and opponents (neither of whom are really insiders) of an extension to the eponymous road from the American Midwest to the Mexican border and their attempts to gain the...

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Yes folks, the guy I probably very unfairly was rude about here , has done something with his life. He's lent some of his famous empirical skills to showing something we all know in our bones, namely that people are still producing records, even though the bottom has been slid...

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Just so you know, this time of year sees one of the most fun chess competitions on the calendar - that is if you don't think a fun chess competition is a contradiction in terms. The Amber Tournament pits the very top echelon of chessdom against each other with each round invol...

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One of the things I have against academics is that they are supposed to be smart. They are smart. Yet get enough of them together and you get this - from Robin Hanson . Words fail me. Once upon a time some researchers gave people diseases without their consent or knowledge. Ot...

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When the SL-1 nuclear reactor exploded in Idaho releasing a radioactive plume and killing three workers, a local paper reported the accident on page 12 . That was 1961. Today some residents of Idaho are so worried about the nuclear accident 8000 kilometers away that they're bu...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X454D3Fzwso I've spoken about it previously, but I've just found the treasure trove above of Farnarkeling reports from the Gillies Report. The form of comedy is so pure that the final song is a bit of a pity - as good as it is - compared with the...

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The crisis in Japan has dominated the media over the past week. With the earthquake and tsunami over, many bloggers turned their attention the unfolding disaster at the Japanese nuclear power plant Fukushima Daiichi and its implications for the future of nuclear energy. It's n...

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I've just finished a bit of a barnstorm tour of New Zealand giving two presentations with a similar title to that above and a talk on Govt 2.0 which funded the visit. I must say I've loved it. Having checked out Auckland and Wellington for the first time in forty years, I can...

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My first reaction to Coles' recent milk discounting was that this is good news. Milk is not a huge expense for our family; we buy all our milk at the deli. But for those doing it tough, paying $1 a litre for milk (and lower prices for several other staples) could conceivably m...

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