No more singing unless you are as good as this. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44wDwMQVqCc&w=560&h=315] Happy new year

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Australia is one of the most prosperous and best-governed nations on earth. Our politicians, at least at national level, are mostly competent, honest and hard-working. And yet our mainstream media conveys an almost opposite impression, and the blogosphere and twitterverse proj...

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Authors: Dawes, Christopher T. (Department of Politics) Johannesson, Magnus (Stockholm School of Economics), Lindqvist, Erik (Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN)), Loewen, Peter (Department of Political Science), Östling, Robert (Institute for International Econom...

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Dumbing down budget policy As a temporary member of the press gallery I had my ‘gotcha’ question ready for Wayne Swan, but alas didn’t join the shouting match to get my question in. But I can share it with you gentle reader – a little esprit de l'escalier a few hours later. Tr...

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Here is a question to put to you over Xmas time, the season of joy and hope: what has been the best news for you this year in the sense of the most uplifting development in Australia or the world? For me, it has been the continued economic growth in India, China, and much of L...

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When a tennis player decides if and when to use their rights to 'video review' of points they are trying to solve cognitive and tactical problems. When a cricket captain decides to review an umpire's decision there's an additional problem. Challenges have been rationed by desi...

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In part I and part II the question was posed what the source of the demand for apocalyptic stories was in our societies. The discussion made it plausible that there is in fact a strong cultural diversity in terms of Doomsday stories: they are prevalent in the West, where their...

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More here if you're interested.

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Last Friday, I asked the readers w hat they thought the source of the demand for apocalyptic stories was in our societies, and particularly whether there was anything new about the prevalence of apocalyptic stories. As Michael Stanley and Ian pointed out, apocalyptic stories g...

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There has now been quite a bit of discussion about this week's dismissal of James Ashby's sexual harassment proceedings against former Speaker of the House of Representatives Peter Slipper for abuse of process (although nowhere near as much as the salacious coverage when Ashby...

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This post is a very slightly scrubbed up comment on Paul Frijters' comment on my recent column on regulation review and DIY super. I have no silver bullets, but I think the whole area is dominated by a kind of category mistake. It has been assumed - by the reg review crowd and...

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Ever since the middle ages, apocalyptic visions have been a staple of Western thought. With every minor or major upheaval that came along, whether it would be the plague, Communism, or climate change, there was a large constituency receptive to the idea that the end of times w...

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Here's this Wednesday's Age and SMH column . [caption id="attachment_36877" align="aligncenter" width="620"] Illustration: John Spooner[/caption] In the last fortnight the Government has ticked one of its boxes for next year’s election, launching policies to tackle over-regula...

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In a previous post , I raised the question how best to measure ‘Nature’, arguing the benefits of an overall Index including biodiversity, habitat diversity, human usage value and sheer volume of living organisms, biomass. Here a look is taken at whether biomass has been increa...

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I think my mother once told me that there was a Jewish proverb that when a child dies before it's parent, even God weeps. (She isn't Jewish by the way). Anyway, here's the data . (pdf) The death of a child is one of the most traumatic experiences that a parent can experience....

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My post on the Territory's recent mini-budget has resulted in an interesting comment box discussion about Darwin property prices. At first blush general Troppo readers might not find it all that absorbing, but in fact the dynamics of Darwin's property market provide an instruc...

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Last Friday, I posed the question under what definitions of Nature one can say that it is doing badly, and whether there were other ones under which it was doing fine. I was explicitly interested in how Nature is doing now relative to decades or longer periods past, though of...

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I held off reviewing Acemoglu and Robinson's (AR) Why Nations Fail for a long time. Despite the material's relevance to my old research interests, my love of universal history and the popularity of the book, I just couldn't face the task. Yet, because it is now appearing in so...

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Here's a short note to everyone I know in the print media industry; Please, when you bemoan the state of media today, do not tell me that it's "management" that has got the industry where it is. I hear this all the time, particularly from Fairfax staffers and ex-staffers. If o...

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Another puzzle for you to pontificate on: is it really true that ‘Nature’ is suffering? For decades now, you will be hard-pressed to read a whole newspaper or magazine without someone complaining about how badly ‘Nature’ is doing. The melting glaciers, the disappearing Siberia...

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I haven't been posting on Troppo much lately, mostly because I'm pretty fully occupied establishing with partners a new private legal practice in Darwin, Melbourne and Adelaide by early January. However I haven't been able to restrain myself from indulging in the first sign of...

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Normally I tuck mp3 files of radio interviews which are loosely on columns of mine at the end of the column where it's reproduced on Troppo. However here's my last interview for the year on the ecology of public and private goods and public and private motives - which relates...

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Queensland is shedding public workers in the health and education sectors in a bid to balance the books. There is nothing unusual about this, and there are more than enough ‘head-office’ positions that can be axed without any impact on the productivity of schools and hospitals...

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This is an email I received earlier today from Karen Mahlab - and I offered to reproduce it here for the delectation and contribution of Troppodillians everywhere. The winner of the competition will be flown steerage to London for a weekend at Buckingham Palace with the royal...

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The Economic Society in Queensland runs a series of televised presentations whereby they get economists to talk about topical issues they are working on. Following Quiggin, Bhagwati and McKibbin, it was my turn a few weeks ago to talk about the Christian-Islamic conflict, the...

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Get a load of the UK Cabinet Office Minister's delivery. http://youtu.be/o-m6l4keQc8 It's fabulously low key, informal, indeed intimate compared with the formal bullshitting mode of almost all political utterance, and straightforward. It is of course 'spin', as it couldn't be...

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ASIDE from war, corruption is probably the biggest obstacle to economic and social development in poor countries. But it's best we see ourselves as being on a continuum with them, rather than as having solved the problem. Even if no law was broken, Wall Street financiers impos...

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Have a look the following 2010 graph produced by the University of Delaware on their college students : The key aspects to realise from this graph are that the girls who don’t drink basically don’t have (unprotected) sex, and that, more surprisingly, the boys who don’t drink d...

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We were all resigned to hearing that eagerly awaiting whether or not the Greeks are going to get the 2-year extension on their debt obligations or not. The announcement has just come through : the Greeks are not just getting an extension but are to get another 50 billion Euro...

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In part II, the barriers to reform in the university sector were discussed . It became clear that neither the governance structure nor the basic funding model was up for grabs. Also, one should not count on market forces, the unions, or the academics to be all that much help....

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Mosman is failing the nation, says Miranda Devine . The residents of Australia's richest suburb might be honest, hard working and committed to their families but they're failing to demand the same behaviour from the lower classes. As a result, social norms are collapsing in lo...

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Economists love tradeoffs. Indeed, their basic model of the world breaks down where such tradeoffs don't occur. Lucky for them since the world really is full of tradeoffs. If you want more carrots, you'll have to do with fewer of something else. Here they're substitutes. But,...

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PERSECUTION PERPETUATED: THE MEDIEVAL ORIGINS OF ANTI-SEMITIC VIOLENCE IN NAZI GERMANY* Nico Voigtlander Hans-Joachim Voth How persistent are cultural traits? Using data on anti-Semitism in Germany, we ?nd local continuity over 600 years. Jews were often blamed when the Black...

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Australian universities are admin-heavy , have high student-academic ratios and in recent years have seen a race to the bottom in standards, related to a battle over student numbers. The selling out of previously amassed reputation by reducing entry barriers most recently beca...

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In previous posts I talked about the immense overhead in the university sector. Some 70 cents in the commonwealth dollar aimed at universities ends up in admin and US researchers have calculated that the optimal amount of administration is so much lower than the current Austra...

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Nearly two years I speculated on reasons why there are so few Filipino restaurants in Australia relative to the large number Filipino migrants. A secondary purpose was to discuss the uselessness of preference based explanations - not because they could not be true, but because...

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The question posed last week was how much of the money sent into the university sector at the point of DEEWR\DEST actually reaches the coalface in terms of teaching and research. My best guess answer is about 28 cents in the dollar, with the rest essentially going into admin....

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Here's a great review essay by Louis Menand on Anne Applebaum’s “Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe”. Below the fold are a few snippets of what were highlights for me, but read the whole thing if you have time - it's full of remarkable facts about the the end of WWII...

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Amid all the praise for the Daniel Craig era of Bond films, it's time for all patriotic Aussies to understand the case for the only home-grown James Bond, George Lazenby. I am not especially a Bond fan, but I've long maintained that his sole Bond film, 1969's On Her Majesty's...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YabrOlqiQng&feature=plcp Though it goes against my contrarian grain, I'm a huge fan of Steve Jobs. (Call it contrarianism squared). This is a relatively new malady which has been produced by watching quite a few videos of him and reading a bit ab...

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http://youtu.be/TxMD02zU9SE Apparently not. In any event, I found this an engaging conversation - even if it's about cult beliefs. I wouldn't have expected it, but I found Mitt Romney arguing for his cult more engaging than most of the rest of Mitt's campaigning. Pity he walke...

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We've spent a long time talking about Australia's relation ship with our near North. The recent Asian Century White Paper succeeds the interminable early 90s debates about whether Australia was part of Asia, which succeeded the end of the White Australia interregnum, which suc...

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There's a beauty to cover songs. The musician, free from obligation to be new, hip commercial or even original, has simply to play homage to the songs that they love. When some people, not big stars, just talented people with some recording gear and the desire to have a crack...

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Click on the player's names to play the game to yourself and find out the solution. White to play F J Sanchez Guirado vs Ponomariov 21. ? See game for solution.

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The very sharp Waleed Aly has joined the debate over whether Catholic child abuse justifies a legal requirement for priests to break the confessional seal . Aly's take: it's an argument with almost no practical consequences, because most priests see excommunication as a far wo...

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Here is a question for you: of the funds going into the university sector via the commonwealth ministries (DEST), how much actually ends up paying for research and teaching versus other uses of the money? Included in research/teaching here would also be the buildings and rooms...

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In physics we're used to the idea that at different scales and at different stages of some process, very different things happen. We inhabit Newton's world of medium sized things and speeds - planets, trees, footballs and travel at walking, driving or flying speed - even space...

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To my astonishment, Catholic Archbishop of Sydney George Pell spent part of a press conference today claiming that the news media are exaggerating the scandal of Catholic Church child abuse in Australia . There was "a persistent press campaign against the Catholic Church's ade...

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Reuters' Counterparties blog assembles Marcos-like numbers for China : "The perception that China is ruled by wise leaders adhering to neo-Confucian ideals has been contradicted by revelations of the massive wealth accumulated by its elite: an estimated $2.7 billion by the fam...

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In his series on Australian macro-economics, Jan Libich this time has talked to Bob Gregory and Michael Knox. Bob was on the RBA board and still interacts extensively with Australian policy land. Michael is in the private sector (RBS Morgans) and as such advises firms on the m...

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Looking at the newspapers you’d think Catholicism is having a hard time with philandering priests and cover-ups of their doings being found out on a weekly basis. Dutch and German newspapers kept track for a while of the regional frequencies of new cases of sexual misconduct a...

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US election-watching is a great spectator sport for many Australian politics-watchers. As Bob Carr says, it's The Greatest Show On Earth. But in the actual real lives of Australians, the dull reality is that US elections generally have big direct effects on just one issue: the...

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I've been talking about this kind of stuff for a fair while in presentations and intimated similar things in some longer pieces and a column or two on Adam Smith and Web 2.0, but I've not done a column on Web 2.0 as public goods privately built. But I have now . THERE'S a revo...

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My daughter alerted me to this very cute video of little kids in the US and their comprehension of the election. "There's the 'white house' and the 'black house'. . . " It's worth watching just for a bit of diversion. But I couldn't embed it so have just copied a still from it...

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I was forwarded a fascinating paper on the optimal number of university administrators written by Martin and Hill who looked at public research universities in the US (the Carnegie I and II universities). The key result that they disclose in their abstract is that "the optimal...

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Both economic pedagogy and broad political discussion are based on what I've come to think of as anorectic understanding of public and private goods - which boils down to the idea that for things to go on well (let's say in an economy) you need a mix of public and private good...

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In part, I talked about how politicians were forced to lie to us because we the population are their bosses and we enjoy flattery. A nice recent example of just that was the announcement that we were going to have 10 universities in the top 100 by 2025. Yeah, sure. We demand o...

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In empirical economic research we live in the age of the randomistas where whole departments do nothing else but look for random events to give them some variation to identify a causal relation. Cyclone Sandy looks like providing a lot of random variation so you can bet your b...

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The white paper Australia in the Asian Century was released this week. It is as exciting as you expect white papers to be. [caption id="" align="alignright" width="170"] I am unimpressed by the arguments for increasing Asian language literacy.[/caption] As expected it is full...

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An oft-heard complaint is that politicians lie to us. They promise us 100,000 jobs, lower taxes, more generous spending, an end to poverty and inequality, economic growth, better schools, world peace, nicer climate, and victory over all our enemies. And when they do not delive...

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Samuel Sewall (1652–1730) is the man with the bowed head in this picture. He has much to feel remorseful about. Amongst eight other judges, he's sentenced nineteen innocent people to death for being witches in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. When January 14, was established as a...

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The Australian visa point-system is the envy of the world as it has ensured that Australia gets a large influx of well-educated, healthy, English-speaking migrants. How large is the free gift that comes walking into our doors this way? Conservatively, I would say 50 billion do...

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Radovan Karadzic is now on trial for his role in the massacre of Srebenica and general Mladic was already convicted before him for aiding and abetting this genocide as the military commander of the Serbs. The question I mainly want to pose here is whether the 450 Dutch troops...

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I've just finished listening to the ABC's Waleed Aly interviewing Jock Laurie, president of the National Farmers' Federation, on the newly-announced register of foreign investment in agricultural land. (You can listen to it too, here .) Laurie's position was effectively: "We k...

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Last Thursday I posed the question of how often the water you drink has been pissed by a vertebrate already. If the number is very small, then those who baulk at drinking recycled water have more cause to complain than if the number is very high. As some commentators to that p...

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Yet another challenge for you: how many times has the water you drink been pissed out of a vertebrate (something with a spine) in the past? If the number is very small, then those who baulk at drinking recycled water have more cause to complain than if the number is very high....

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Have a look at the following picture that comes from a 2012 paper by Gotz and Hecq on forecasting growth. It tells you what the US growth rate at 3 different dates was estimated to be over time. This means that the start of the thick black line tells you what they thought in t...

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[caption id="attachment_21735" align="alignright" width="300"] You have to wonder why even a young-ish Julia Gillard didn't smell a rat given Bruce Wilson's eyes ...[/caption] The hive-mind that is the Canberra Press Gallery has apparently decided that PM Julia Gillard's activ...

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Last Thursday, I posed the mystery of whether there are in fact 16 million direct male descendants of Genghis Khan . This factoid came from a 2003 study of some 2000 Central Asian men, of which 8% were found to share a common male ancestor around the year 1000 AD, give or take...

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Winter in the Fire Forest 20 October - 17 November 2012 Troppos are very welcome to join us at the opening Saturday 20 October 3pm-5 pm Utopia Art Sydney 2 Danks St Waterloo 02 9699 2900 exhibition catalogue Winter in the Fire Forest , 2005, archival oil on board, 60 x 80cm. C...

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As in part one of this series, I'm thinking about an idea that seems very possible, extremely interesting and well accepted, but which has little going for it in terms of observed evidence. The idea today is societal collapse. The premise is simple. Human societies are very co...

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Too many political commentators think about social media users as voters who don't matter when they should be thinking about them as an audience that does When Julia Gillard ripped into opposition leader Tony Abbott accusing him of sexism and misogyny, the YouTube video of the...

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Here is a puzzle for you to figure out: did Genghis Khan really have 16 million direct male descendants? Note the careful wording: direct male descendants. It is a factoid that has been around since 2003 when a now famous genetic study concluded that 16 milllion men in Central...

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The Australian government wants us to join the Europeans in a carbon Emissions Trading Scheme. To this end they have sent legislation to the Senate who are going through the usual rigmarole of invited submissions on this topic. Together with my PhD student Cameron Murray, I ha...

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Poverty programs have become cash cows for powerful corporate interests, says Peter Schweizer at the Daily Beast . In the US, state governments increasingly rely on electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards to distribute social assistance. And around the world, financial service...

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Last week I posed the mystery of why the Great Wall of China was so small at the top of the hills but so large at the bottom. Anyone can jump right onto it at the top. Where Europeans built castles designed to keep even a single attacker out, something else was going on with t...

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Interesting piece by well-known IT figure Jeff Atwood: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/09/computer-crime-then-and-now.html On one level, this piece is a terrific summary of how hacking is done. It's mostly not about messing with computers; it's about messing with people....

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"The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date" was released a last week. It's dedicated to the idea that knowledge not only changes, but changes in a systematic way. From the blurb: Just as we know that a chunk of uranium can break down in a measurable...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wz9CbuC--w Enthusiasm alert: Well folks, some of you are aware that I suffer from bouts of enthusiasm. In the cold light of day, perhaps things don’t look so good. So here I am blown away by something I’ve just seen. But then I’m on a plane tra...

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Here is a mystery for you. The Great Wall of China is one of the architectural wonders of the world. Apparently not quite visible from space but very impressive nonetheless. Built and rebuilt many times over many centuries and by hundreds of thousands of labourers. The picture...

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https://youtu.be/x6f4ZB2xnF8 (Four minutes of extracts from a 27 minute video which can be watched here .) Here's today's column from the Age and SMH . MASS production and professionalised services built modern prosperity. But in welfare their legacy provides one of the great...

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Is the real genius of economics our ability to see things that are impossible to objectively measure? The examples I have in mind are incentives, market failures, groups, power, and corruption. Below, I will point out just how impossible these things are to objectively measure...

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I don't want to overstate the case here - there are many, many more spectacular sights in nature than the tide-turn at Styx Creek - but in my world this brings me a sense of joy every time I see it. Mark MacLean Last week I was reading Why Nations Fail . The topic is of close...

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It was around four in morning when I pulled the car over to the side of the road and switched off the engine. I was a hundred or so kilometres out of Perth and when I killed the lights everything went black. When I stepped out of the car I was afraid I might not find my way ba...

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Jan Libich from Latrobe University is running a televised series on economics . He gets people into his TV studio to talk about some aspect of the economy and then puts it out there. Andrew Leigh, Andrew Hughes Hallett, and Eric Leeper were previous victims. Adrian Pagan and W...

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This an opinion piece, my effort to entertain or provoke you while I make an important point. In this paragraph I should start making an argument for the Important Point but, I'm off to bad start. My title should have included some clever figure of speech like a pun or literar...

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You're looking at two Segues ® converted by Marathon Targets in Sydney into a moving target for the training of our military. The input segues cost a few thousand and after Marathon Targets have armour plated the moving parts, and built software and various controls to turn th...

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They are both amazing feats of human engineering? They both cost billions with little tangible benefit? They were both launched in a desert? Both mainly built by Western engineers? No, they are both good examples of status races. The moon landing was all about competition with...

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Gentlemen, Whilst marching from Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your requests which have been sent by His Majesty’s ship from London to Lisbon and thence by dispatch to our head...

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A vexing question for a parent, particularly an economist, is whether or not to reward your kids monetarily for higher school grades. Let me admit right here that this is how I was raised: something like 10 dollars for every subject I got an A, 5 dollars for a B and nothing fo...

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The Band, Old Rocking Chair c.1970 [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9M4azk6-GM&w=420&h=315]

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I once heard a person , in reference to the note at right, that you could tell a great deal about a country by who they chose to put on their notes. He felt it spoke well of Japan that Fukuzawa Yukichi, a thinker and philosopher, was chosen for their currency. I don't really b...

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In part I and part II , I discussed the general geo-political implications of the rise of China, and the internal dynamics within the Chinese bureaucracy and the Party, concluding that one should not underestimate the disruption to the whole of China and its international rela...

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Well I'm not the first to the party - 26 million late in fact, but it's fun nevertheless. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX1YVzdnpEc]

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As some readers may have noticed (assuming you can access us at all), the performance of Troppo is still distinctly dodgy despite Jacques shifting from his original choice of Wordpress web host. Its name was WpEngine and it provided next to no service during the day in Austral...

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The picture below is of a mountainous area in Spain. It used to be full of small-scale farmers and is now almost deserted. Over the many centuries that farmers have tried to eek something useful out of this area, they created terraces all the way to the top of the mountains. I...

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The graphic below comes from the University of Michigan's Professor Mark Perry, who runs a libertarian and market-oriented blog called Carpe Diem . It shows, essentially, the collapse of the advertising revenue stream in US newspapers. Adjusted for inflation, US newspapers wil...

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Today's Age and SMH column - on the great business tax mix switch - imputation for a 19% company tax rate. REMEMBER Kevin Rudd's mining tax? It needed some tweaking in industry's favour, but even then it would have hauled in massive revenue without harming investment, which is...

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It is easy to circumvent news and information written on paper entirely. I for instance solely read online foreign newspapers. My wife does the same. Until very recently, I also cut back on any subscriptions to hard copies of anything, including academic journals. The family’s...

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[caption id="attachment_21438" align="alignnone" width="500"] What do you reckon this is? The first correct entry will be flown first class to the uprising of their choice with the Troppo Mercedes waiting on the tarmac on their arrival.[/caption]

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In part I , I discussed the general geo-political situation that we are moving towards in the coming decades, which is a world in which China will be the single most powerful country for a long time, constrained by a more diffuse West that is nevertheless wealthier and more po...

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Herewith the column of two reports for the Australian Digital Alliance on copyright exceptions. Sounds abstruse but it's quite engaging methinks. On December 17, 1903, after years of tinkering with his brother Wilbur, Orville Wright took to the skies at Kitty Hawk, North Carol...

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One of the most puzzling features of the world in the aftermath of the financial crisis is that so far, populism has taken primarily a right-wing form, not a left- wing one. In the United States, for example, although the Tea Party is anti-elitist in its rhetoric, its members...

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Quite an interesting finding - which also roughly confirms what I would have guessed before I saw the data. The returns to education for opportunity entrepreneurs, necessity entrepreneurs, and paid employees Date: 2012 By: Fossen, Frank M. Büttner, Tobias J. M. URL: http://d.r...

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The Italian head of the ECB, Mario Draghi, last week announced he would like to help certain countries in the south of Europe to borrow more cheaply. Subject to ‘strict conditions’, which were instantaneously refused by the Spanish prime minister, countries in Europe would now...

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Fairfax asked for an op ed on the Herald/Age Lateral Economics Index of Wellbeing (the HALE) one year on from its launch and that's what appears below and, in a slightly edited form in the SMH . There’s plenty wrong with GDP as a measure of national wellbeing. As Bobby Kennedy...

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9/11 is over ten years ago now, and after two take-overs of Islamic countries ( Iraq and Afghanistan ) and internal turmoil in the Middle East and Pakistan , the contours of where the conflict between Islamic fundamentalism and ‘the rest of the world’ is going to is becoming c...

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A good while back I wrote about carve-outs or exceptions - and how they're made. It's an important, if much ignored topic. One area I didn't mention was exceptions for the powerful. Like those queues at the airport where 'VIPs' and those flying business and first get to go ahe...

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In the comments of Paul's post on face I mentioned a hypothesis I had never published that I felt overlapped with, or at least was tangental to the ideas he was using. I'm still very unhappy with the piece and the reasoning, but I thought I may as well publish the last version...

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Well it's off to the footy tonight. Wish me (and outsider Collingwood) luck. Do we have a chance against the mighty Hawks? Not much. Why? Let me count the ways! We seem to have been down on form lately - but that might turn round in a final. We are surprisingly low on skill. W...

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We live in an interregnum, wherein the position of most-powerful single country is going from the US to China , with all major international players knowing this and no-one is seriously hindering its occurrence. The world has learned from the disastrous attempts in the last 2...

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Here's my column in response to the Manufacturing Industry Taskforce's proposal for 'smarter workplaces' - some transparency to enable us to determine what workplaces are - at least in the opinion of their workforce engaging places to work. AMID the endless alarums and excursi...

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I have been part of a research group looking into Chinese migration for about 5 years now (see rumici . anu .edu.au/ ), and the main cultural difference one has to get used to as a Westerner in interactions with the East is the notion of 'face'. This Asian cultural trait has b...

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I just came across an impressive philanthropic venture that nevertheless felt the need to articulate its 'values'. I won't go into it at any length here, but the more I think of formal articulations of values the less impressed I am. So many organisations do it that perhaps it...

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(re-worked from the conversation) Linking Australia to the European Union carbon emissions trading scheme by 2015 will undoubtedly affect the revenue gained from carbon trading. The question is, how much? My best guess is that it will cost around 50% less revenue than original...

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(cross-posted from Core) Though the Assad regime is still brutalising the Syrian population in a desperate attempt to hold onto power, the post-Spring contours of the Middle East are becoming visible. It is now clear that the Assad regime cannot hold on ( see the betting marke...

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http://youtu.be/hOI7G2j_pRM

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A nice Project Syndicate column from Brad Delong . This is how it starts. When French politician and moral philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of his Democracy in America in 1835, he did so because he thought his France was in big trouble--and had lots...

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This NYT article highlights something I've long gone on about - the serendipity of information. Dr. Arul Chinnaiyan stared at a printout of gene sequences from a man with cancer , a subject in one of his studies. There, along with the man’s cancer genes, was something unexpect...

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[ This was written on Sunday. An edited version was published at the G8 universities site The Conversation late this afternoon. ] The Northern Territory's Labor government led by Chief Minister Paul Henderson was swept from power at yesterday's election by Terry Mills' Country...

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By October 8 th of this year, the European Finance ministers must decide whether or not to send Greece 11.5 billion Euros in bailout funds, based on the report of the ‘Troika’ (the EU, ECB, and IMF) as to whether Greece is holding up its end of the bailout conditions. If the T...

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I just discovered Tom Keating, an art forger. I was reading a junky $5 book in a book remainders store on famous criminals (as you do) and as I read his story I'm afraid I liked the guy for the way in which his great skills seemed 'genuine' as it were - driven by the love of a...

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I couldn’t resist buying a copy of Daniel Kahneman’s best-seller when returning from holidays. Several friends and colleagues told me it was a great book; it got great reviews; and Kahneman’s journal articles are invariably a good read, so I was curious. Its general message is...

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Some readers may remember this blog post . Here's an update from today's Age/ SMH column. IN 2010 the energetic and forward-looking (then) secretary of Victoria's Education Department invited me to discuss educational innovation and Web 2.0 with senior departmental managers. W...

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By sheer chance, on Sunday I found myself listening on ABC Classic FM to part of the 18th century opera ' The Good-Hearted Curmudgeon '. In her inimitable way, Jen couldn't help suggesting that the opera might have been named after me. Little did I know that within an hour or...

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AKA, "Follow ups no-one asked for". Last year I spent some idle time doing some rough work to see if ethnic and religious populations[1] were more clustered in Sydney than in Melbourne - presumably due to geographical factors. This was done by calculating Gini coefficients and...

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I haven't got time for much of a post, but here's a marker in the sand. There's an interesting conversation going on at Mainly Macro on the Lucas Critique . Amid much discussion about the merits of internal consistency (pretty much everyone thinks it's great. In a messy scienc...

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In a recently published study withTony Beatton (QUT), I looked at how happiness changes by age. For the freely downloadable working paper version, see here. The main findings of the study can be summarised by the graph below, where you can see the way happiness changes over th...

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We are nearing the end of Mario Monti’s first year in office as Italian Prime Minister. As the largest of the Southern European economies experiencing difficulties paying off large public debts, Italy’s fate is crucial for the future of the European Union as a single financial...

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I wrote recently about the prevalence of personal smear tactics by both major parties in the current NT election campaign. It is one of the more repugnant aspects of modern politics, exemplified at federal level by the current Ashby v Slipper shenanigans. Last week the tactics...

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One of Australia's more enterprising journalists, Michael Short asked me to feature 'In The Zone' in the Age a media 'package' he developed and curates for The Age and the SMH. One does a fairly lengthy interview and a short video and then he writes it up for the paper and the...

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A gusty performance by Ecuador, granting asylum to Julian Assange. Assange's claim that he faces further extradition to the US from a disingenuous Sweden, appears to be borne out by the Ecuadorian behind-the-scenes investigations. A simple assurance from the Swedes that furthe...

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I had the pleasure this year of spending part of my holidays in northern Italy. Despite the prolonged recession that you can see the place is currently experiencing, it is still a rich country with good food, great wine, and great scenery. Indeed, there is no real feeling of g...

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http://vimeo.com/28413747

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The 1950s saw Australia's Italian Renaissance which now leaves its traces in the tourist traps of Lygon St. Well they're not too bad, but if you wanted to go to a good Italian Restaurant you'd have to know what you were doing to get a really good one in Lygon St. But things ha...

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[caption id="attachment_21240" align="alignright" width="200"] Socrates Plato Paris Aristotle (it's all Greek to me - sorry couldn't help it)[/caption] Today's report on asylum seeker policy by Prime Minister Gillard's Expert Panel seems so far to have received a more positive...

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Debates over income support are never ending. And part of the reason is that people have different ideas about what they want the income support system to achieve. When it comes to income support payments for people below retirement age who are capable of paid work, there are...

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Here's a poster seeking to raise funds for the World War One effort. As you can see, the symbol chosen was a tad ahead of its time and, given that it was for the British war effort, it was so far ahead of its time that it was decided not to use the same symbol even twenty year...

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I've always liked badminton - to play and to watch, though I do almost none of either . . . Strange. http://youtu.be/0kTxTWwkY6k

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[caption id="attachment_21207" align="alignright" width="231"] Charmanjot Singh[/caption] Not before time, a NSW Legislative Council committee is considering the possible abolition of the provocation partial defence to murder. If the defence is successful it reduces murder to...

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One of the more fascinating aspects of the current NT election campaign from an afficionado's viewpoint is the phenomenon of intersecting and overlapping fear campaigns by the two major parties. Spin doctors take exactly the same set of facts (in this case NT net debt and defi...

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Speaking of his attendance at a sermon by the Reverend Whitefield. He had a loud and clear voice, and articulated his words and sentences so perfectly, that he might be heard and understood at a great distance, especially as his auditories, however numerous, observ'd the most...

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"One punch" or "king hit" homicides have been in the news recently, especially since the killing of young Thomas Kelly in Kings Cross in Sydney a couple of weeks ago. In the Northern Territory dreadful events of that sort have been frequently discussed ever since the killing o...

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Today's Age and SMH Column. GLOBAL downturns are the fault lines around which our automotive industry has always reinvented itself. In theory, managers should restructure their businesses and businesses should change hands whenever it improves productivity. Alas human nature i...

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http://www.youtube.com/v/zmaF7Pys7OI I looked up an old post of mine tonight - and happened upon this post which had the video above embedded in it. It refused to play because NineMSM has asserted its copyright in the clip. Well it's true. NineMSN has copyright in the clip. Bu...

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Hard to Forget: Long-lasting Effects of Social Capital Accumulation Shocks By: Amodio, Francesco (Associazione Italiana per la Cultura della Cooperazione e del Non Profit) Very few contributions have dealt with the analysis of specific determinants of social capital accumulati...

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Law and order themes are always popular in NT election campaigns, even more so than other parts of Australia. It's hardly surprising given that violent crime rates are more than twice as high as the Australian average. Almost 6% of Territorians experience a violent crime every...

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Via Matt Yglesias , Ryan Cooper wonders why " why smaller countries are so much better at macroeconomic management ". Cooper suggests that smaller countries have smaller banks that are less able to distort policy debate. Yglesias suggests that larger countries get distracted b...

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Every now and again, someone resigns in a position in which someone figures out a cute way to draw. Bobby Fischer may have resigned in his first (played) game in his famous match with Boris Spassky in Reykjavik. But a few years later in Reykjavik Jaukur Angantysson who had a r...

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It wasn't enough that we were all recently exposed to the unbelievably tone-deaf talents of Craig Emerson. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1pEt7bgY2U Before that there was former Senator Mary Jo Fisher's very strange spoken rendition of the Rocky Horror Timewarp number, eerily...

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Maybe it's time for Labor and Julia Gillard to start thinking about their legacy rather than retaining government.((Note the supposedly incompetent Whitlam government's enduring legacy: - ending conscription and getting out of Vietnam, recognition of China, legal aid, Medicare...

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Social Incentives Matter: Evidence from an Online Real Effort Experiment , Tonin, Mirco (University of Southampton), Vlassopoulos, Michael (University of Southampton) Contributing to a social cause can be an important driver for workers in the public and non-profit sector as w...

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Via Matt Cowgill , I was pointed to this Nick Rowe post. An exerpt 1. Watch what happens on a really steep uphill bit of road. Watch what happens when the driver puts the pedal to the metal, and holds it there. Does the car slow down? If so, ironically, that confirms the theor...

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Dani Rodrik is one of the most interesting and fruitful economists of trade and development around. He's just put out a new paper on convergence in manufacturing. Not so long ago most people imagined that poor countries would converge towards the wealth of rich countries. In f...

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Here's a nice painting - which will be auctioned at Southerby's in Melbourne on the 14th Aug. More nice things to look at are here .

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New scientists Feedback page, 18th July issue, reports some recent research that has produced results so obvious that they might be brilliant. Why is it that Nigerian emails are so unbelievable ? The answer is that the extreme unbelievability of these messages automatically fi...

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The left-leaning twitterverse went into predictable convulsions of outrage yesterday when it emerged that (equally predictably) the four Coalition States had declined to pony up dollars for the 4 year trial phase of the proposed national disability insurance scheme. However th...

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[caption id="attachment_21086" align="alignright" width="300"] Debt was a very popular theme with Malcolm as well ...[/caption] Like Tony Abbott at a federal level, NT Country Liberals leader Terry Mills has been trying to fan the flames of a shock-horror theme on government d...

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Rules are thought to persist to the extent that the direct benefits of having them (e.g. reduced transactions costs) exceed the costs of enforcement and of occasional misapplications. We argue that a second crucial role of rules is as screening mechanisms for identifying coope...

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I've been reading Graham Freudenberg's Churchill and Australia which is a fine read, with a certain grandeur in the prose. In any event I came upon Chapter 10 which documents the crisis over Turkey pulling the plug on the post World War One settlement - a kind of between wars...

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[caption id="attachment_21050" align="alignright" width="300"] Gerry Wood[/caption] On the surface at least, nothing much has changed since my first two reports on the forthcoming Northern Territory election. The mainstream media campaign is very quiet indeed, even though it's...

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From the Journal of Economic Perspectives Why is the rate of teen childbearing is so unusually high in the United States as a whole, and in some U.S. states in particular? U.S. teens are two and a half times as likely to give birth as compared to teens in Canada, around four t...

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Troppo author and prominent academic economist Paul Frijters has been banging away for years about how current climate change policies (including carbon pricing) are doomed to failure. The sincere (and entirely well founded) concerns of scientists and environmentalists about t...

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My son came home from last night's and this morning's hockey matches with a rainbow coloured band round his wrist with which he was playing on which were printed the words "Fair go, sport!" This is a pilot campaign launched last year by Sports Minister Mark Arbib and it's some...

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I've written before on the cancer of vox pop democracy , where all matters of policy must run the gauntlet of the vox pop test - which is to say that it must instantly appeal to a majority of shoppers at Fountain Gate who have a microphone shoved into their face and asked some...

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A conservative conspiracy to make government bigger, bury retailers in red tape and tell people how to live their lives, or just another example of populist grandstanding? The young man wanted a pack of cigarettes but when he pulled out his welfare card to pay, 65 year old cas...

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I've been thinking about writing something in the wake of Don Arthur's Nanny and the Libertarians post, but until now I haven't had the heart. Discussion threads on posts dealing with such issues always seem instantly to degenerate into a slanging match between, on the one han...

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Incentivizing Calculated Risk-Taking: Evidence from an Experiment with Commercial Bank Loan Officers By: Shawn Cole (Harvard Business School, Finance Unit), Martin Kanz (World Bank) and Leora Klapper (World Bank) URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hbs:wpaper:13-002&r=exp This p...

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Here's my column from today's SMH, Age and Brisbane Times. WHAT are Australia's strategic interests when negotiating with other countries on the extent of intellectual property (IP) rights - for instance, the duration and strength of patents and copyright? It's no Mickey Mouse...

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[gallery columns="1"] (Click on image to enlarge)

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Flash mob Barcelona style Annie I'm not your Daddy ,will put a spring in your day

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Almost everyone is in favour of equality of opportunity; even free market activists from the Institute of Public Affairs . But whenever a large number of people agree on a form of words, it's a safe bet they interpret those words differently. How else could party members agree...

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http://youtu.be/PUSdjfh2YjM

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[caption id="attachment_20927" align="alignright" width="300"] Father Frank Flynn (left)[/caption] I was deeply disturbed by Monday's Four Corners program on child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, not because it's any news as such but because very little seems to have changed...

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(Mike Pepperday has an edited version of the very interesting essay below in the AFR today. But Troppodillians expect only the unexpurgated, and so, in keeping with Troppo's tag line "What do we want - the unexpurgated. When do we want it - Now!" here it is. . Nicholas.) Austr...

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"In 2008-09, DEWHA was assessed as non-compliant for the Resale Royalty Right for Visual Artists Act 2009 and a post-implementation review is required to commence within one to two years of implementation."¹ The reason why the Artist Resale Royalty Act was assessed as non-comp...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVp8UGjECt4&feature=player_detailpage#t=320s Well folks, Yoram Bauman the stand-up economist whom you can see above and at his website is heading for Singapore in September and Tim Harcourt and I have been trying to get him to Australia. But to d...

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Well this confirms my own prejudices, and it may even be right! The Cost of Friendship Date: 2012-06 By: Paul Gompers Vladimir Mukharlyamov Yuhai Xuan This paper explores two broad questions on collaboration between individuals. First, we investigate what personal characterist...

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I stumbled upon this piece and voted in this online poll. I said I wasn't making any changes to my behaviour as a result of the carbon tax. But most people are! So far so good!

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The ABC has broadcast a two part doco on Woody Allen's life which I really loved. He's a remarkable person, and just keeps churning out films, great, good, bad and indifferent. In any event by the end of watching this documentary I was an admirer of his, not just of his films,...

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The 21st was supposed to be the age of flying cars, teleporters and affordable space travel, says David Graeber . But now here we are in the future still arguing about overcrowded trains and the price of petrol. David Graeber feels cheated: Where ... are the flying cars? Where...

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Amidst all the kerfuffle about asylum seeker policy over the last week, it probably escaped most people's attention that the Gillard government's Orwellian Newspeak-rebadged version of the Northern Territory Emergency Intervention, called " Stronger Futures ", passed through P...

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The Coalition is engaged in further hypocrisy. 1. The Coalition (both under Howard and more recently through Morrison’s own words) has supported Nairu as an appropriate venue well before Nairu had signed the UN Convention on Refugees. 2. The current Abbott policy still does no...

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http://youtu.be/xlIrI80og8c I didn't know I was a fan of Karl's till this. (Apologies if you've seen it before - like our tagline says - Troppo, proudly a few months behind the cutting edge of popular culture)

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Erstwhile econoblogger and now federal Labor MP Andrew Leigh has been unjustly traduced by the dastardly Liberals and has complained about it on Twitter. Somewhat uncharitably some might think, I couldn't resist a gentle return poke: As media analyst Andrew Catsaras pointed ou...

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It seems intuitive that other things (which means total wealth) being equal, the more equally income is distributed, the more utility gets squeezed out of it. Of course at the limit there's a tension between equality and efficiency - but then at the limit there's also a tensio...

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Keynes. mercantilism and the Euro crisis

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[caption id="attachment_20702" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Sri Lankan asylum seekers in Nauru detention in 2007"] [/caption] Why doesn't the Gillard Labor government swallow its pride and simply accept the Coalition's latest compromise proposal on asylum seeker pol...

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The Modular Nature of Trustworthiness Detection By: Bonnefon, Jean-François (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) De Neys, Wim (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) Hopfensitz, Astrid (TSE) The capacity to trust wisely is a critical facilitator of success and...

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Regular Troppodillians will have observed occasional attempts by me to get something regular going on Troppo regarding films. None have come to anything. Anyway, I've just completed a couple of deadlines and have a couple of free film passes obtained last year which only last...

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Stand Your Ground Laws and Homicides , Chandler B. McClellan, Erdal Tekin Since 2005, eighteen states have passed legislation that has extended the right to self-defense, with no duty to retreat, to places a person has a legal right to be, and several other states are debating...

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Finding Eldorado: Slavery and Long-run Development in Colombia , Daron Acemoglu, Camilo García-Jimeno, James A. Robinson Slavery has been a major institution of labor coercion throughout history. Colonial societies used slavery intensively across the Americas, and slavery rema...

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[caption id="attachment_20699" align="alignright" width="300"] Ceci n'est pas un Duchamp[/caption] I once overheard a serious conversation between two curators as to whether the urinal they were looking at was a genuine Duchamp or an unauthorised urinal. Strange loops involve...

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In the torrent of words over the job cuts at Fairfax and News Ltd, not many people seem to have noticed that these events also further undermine the already teetering argument of the Finkelstein Review for a new system of media regulation. How's that? Recall that the Finkelste...

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"All I want to do is go to the movies, have a soda and popcorn" says Michael Graham . But with New York mayor Michael Bloomberg banning supersized sodas and officials talking about extending the regulations to popcorn , conservatives like Graham are feeling nanny's hot breath...

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[caption id="attachment_20629" align="aligncenter" width="525" caption="I (KP) couldn't find a cartoon satirising the absurdity of the apparently dominant American attitude to Obamacare, except this one that does so unintentionally ..."] [/caption] No time to write a considere...

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This week's dramatic events in the Australian media have underscored the Schumpeterian "creative destruction" being wrought before our eyes by the Internet and associated technologies and cultures: Fairfax's announcement of the sacking of 1900 staff, closure of print facilitie...

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by Maria Popova - capacity to “learn, unlearn, and relearn” emotional behaviors and psychological patterns is a form of existential literacy.

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Why hasn't (Darwinian) evolution evolved the building blocks of Lamarkian evolution? Well it has once - with us - but why hasn't it done so at the biological rather than the cultural level? Perhaps smuggled into Lamarkianism is the idea of telos, which can exist within conscio...

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[caption id="attachment_20414" align="alignright" width="316" caption="NT government croc catcher Tommy Nichols"] [/caption] News Ltd polling guru Peter "Mumble" Brent disagrees with my assessment of the likely state of play in the run-up to the NT election on 25 August: I don...

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by Anne Twomey - Parliament's abject surrender of its powers of financial scrutiny to the Executive, just to save a few school chaplains.

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http://youtu.be/uiyMuHuCFo4 HT Brad Delong

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This was the best bit in the essay that Ken quoted recently . Care is impliedly conceptualised as resulting from poor fortune, to be provided for as a ‘service’ rather than something essential to realising our humanity. Incapacity is spoken of as a ‘risk’, as if it were someho...

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Bill Easterly thinks colonialism is not all bad. The European Origins of Economic Development by William Easterly, Ross Levine. A large literature suggests that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and economic outco...

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As Ken Parish's post below shows, there is now a widespread view that Gina Rinehart will win control of Fairfax , publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and then seek to move their editorial stances well to the right. From people who believe that, you hear both wa...

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From @danilic (zoom in to read some of the smaller text)

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[caption id="attachment_20275" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Hendo"] [/caption] The Northern Territory is facing an imminent general election, on 25 August to be precise. We know this because the Henderson Labor government introduced fixed four year terms after rushi...

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[caption id="attachment_20266" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Federal Attorney-General Nicola Roxon"] [/caption] Federal Attorney-General Nicola Roxon's media intervention into the Ashby v Slipper case provoked a Twitter discussion that's worth recording and then musi...

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by Sarah Joseph - considers the moral and practical dilemmas of Australia's asylum seeker policy

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by Jeremy Waldron - some reasons for regulating hate speech are bad ones but some (like protecting dignity) are not.

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Here's a great picture of the sub-assemblies of the Boeing 787 (Dreamliner - ok it's a silly name, but it's somehow fun to say). Its touted by Deloitte as an example of how disaggregated industries are. But looking at it I wondered, might it tell us something else. What (the h...

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by Anne Twomey - Politicians may be more likely to funnel pre-election and other funding through properly legislated and overseen programs.

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by David Ritter - The reality for today's Australians is material abundance, accompanied by tiredness, time-poverty, jadedness and anxiety.

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by Gabrielle Appleby - States may have more to lose than money on legal bills if they join "Twiggy" Forrest in opposing Labor's mining tax.

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My previous post - ' With friends like this’: Labor policies and the commercial, independent visual arts sector - was kindly posted by Ken Parish, 6 June. In many ways, artist resale royalties are intrinsically a throwback to the pre-reform days of the 1970s and '80s. The roya...

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For quite a few years Club Troppo has had a self-appointed mission to bring the best of blogosphere writing to a wider audience. There’s a lot of rich, diverse, high quality material out there, much more so than in the mainstream “print” media, degraded as it is by competitive...

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I have a running conversation with Henry Ergas in which I argue that one could get a long way in economics just by not doing silly things - ie there are plenty of $100 bills on the pavement. He doesn't seem to agree. But here's a $100 bill on the pavement. From today's column...

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I've been asked to pontificate on this subject on national radio on Sunday night. My main message will be that yes, manufacturing will be smaller than now and will generally follow the trend it's been following and that that's fine. There's not much that's special about manufa...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnsGc2r0m4k Coroner Elizabeth Morris's findings 1987 Royal Commission (Justice Trevor Morling) Coroner Barrtt's original findings (1981) [caption id="attachment_20121" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Doesn't Colin Wicking have a patent o...

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White to play D Tomic vs F Winzbeck 44. ? See game for solution. about our puzzles Still, perhaps not so tricky if you're used to solving these puzzles.

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Right now, for those that are interested, there's a Big Chess Tournament on. The Tal Memorial (which you can follow as the games are played here ) in which ten of the top fifteen players in the world are competing, including three rated over 2,800. Luke McShane is the only one...

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So, Spain got another 100 billion to sort out its banks . There seem to be very few strings attached to this bailout: the money comes from the recently set-up European stability funds (EFSF and ESM). The central Spanish government gets it and its up to the Spanish to figure ou...

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I see John Quiggin is touting Thursday (give or take a few days) as the tenth anniversary of the birth of his blog. I can't be even that precise, because this blog has been through several iterations, and the early days coincided with my marriage breakup so events tend to be a...

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The grand nephew of the Belanglo murderer has conducted a kind of ecstasy killing - which is to say he and another person dragged someone into the Belanglo forest and humiliated and terrified the victim before executing him with an axe, recording the incident and boasting abou...

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Like lots of people, I've always been fond of Marilyn. She was an interesting and courageous person. I liked her apparent seriousness. And the cut of her ideological jib. She was one of the few people who stood against McCarthyism. Yet I always harboured the view that this was...

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I could have made this a comment to yesterday's dodgy asylum seeker dilemma post, but I thnk it deserves a thread all on its own. One of the more interesting but largely unexamined aspects of statistics about asylum seekers in Australia is the stark disparity between success/a...

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Savvy speculators have been making billions from the European crisis by second-guessing the politics. For instance, whilst big banks were forced to take a 70% haircut on their Greek bonds in March, some savvy investors that bought them up simply refused the haircut and got pai...

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by Jonah Lehrer - Smarter people are even more vulnerable to basic thinking errors than less intelligent ones.

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These articles might be a week or two old, but they're well worth reading if you haven't done so already ...

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[caption id="attachment_20019" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Australian Aboriginal Art is much sought after internationally, but Australians overall and Aborigines themselves benefit little from it (and even less since Labor's Resale Royalty Scheme which is the subje...

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Monday evening's Four Corners program about people smugglers gaining fraudulent entry to Australia didn't derail the Refugee Action Coalition Sydney's propaganda campaign even for a moment: The Four Corners’ people smuggling program has only added to the demonisation that surr...

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[ first published at Prawfsblawg by Paul Horwitz. ] Jeffrey Rosen has a new piece at TNR about what he calls "The New Textualism" -- originalism for political liberals, in other words. It argues that liberals have failed by making non-originalist arguments for their desired re...

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[ first published at The Failed Estate by Mr Denmore. ] The debate over media regulation has reached an impasse: In the one corner, the unrepresentative left-liberal academic elitist swill seeking to silence free media with their jackbooted authoritarianism; in the other, the...

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[ first published at OpenDemocracy by Leanne Weber. ] Since 1993 a staggering 16,136 deaths ? at the borders of Europe have been recorded by the activist network UNITED ? . This will be a considerable under-estimate of the true death toll, since many deaths at sea - which acco...

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[ first published at Curl by Kate Galloway. ] First year law students are invariably regaled with the mantra of learning to think like a lawyer: that law school is all about developing this skill. As some have identified , 'thinking like a lawyer' is a nebulous concept at best...

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[ first published at Normblog by philosopher Norman Geras. ] There's a column by Simon Armitage here headed 'Poetry should be subversive'. I started reading the piece thinking 'No, it shouldn't', because I don't believe there's anything (in the way of political direction or ch...

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There are rumours in the Welt am Sonntag and the Wall Street Journal of another grand plan to save the Euro. The main outlines have already been foreshadowed in recent weeks by the main players (Draghi, van Rompuy, Barosso, Juncker): a re-focus on bailouts for banks, not gover...

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It's a pity Twitter doesn't allow slightly longer threads. Otherwise I'd post this there. I just ran across it in a John Kay book and I think it's delightful. It's the introduction to a section on Advertising. My uncle was a Scottish pharmacist of scrupulous integrity. When as...

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More evidence that groupthink is one of the biggest enemies of organisations. Ingratiation and Favoritism: Experimental Evidence Date: 2012-05-03 By: Stéphane Robin and Agnieszka Rusinowska, Marie-Claire Villeval at http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-00694160&r=exp...

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I've offered Troppodillians several of Constantine Cavafy's poems. They're magnificent. I haven't actually managed to elicit a comment on any of them, but perhaps they're being enjoyed anyway. I'm told they're of a different order in the original. But I wouldn't know. Here's o...

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The more they change Here are two facts about the world which won't return any time soon. Good facts. The first is that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a paraplegic. Now of course you knew that, but the fact associated with it is that noone knew. The mores of the time were the o...

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It has been an interesting few months in Europe. The Greeks have just had their first round of parliamentary elections and need at least another round before a government can be formed. The French have just elected a new president on an anti-austerity platform, making it a cle...

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I wonder how much, if any of our aid budget is going into stuff like this . . (video over fold): http://youtu.be/dWdy_BmleJ0 .

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Well folks, the World Chess Title is being decided right now. I didn't want to bug you as the players played the first twelve games - each taking several hours. The score after those games is 6 Anand (Reigning world champion) and 6 Gefland (Challenger). It hasn't been the best...

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On all recent polls, it appears that the Coalition is still unbeatable. But Newspoll suggests that Abbott’s leadership of the Liberal party is viewed with suspicion by the electorate – for good reasons. First, Abbott has still to reveal how he is going to close the budget blac...

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Today's column is pretty self-explanatory. I would have liked to say a fair bit more about the system and how it works, but there's a haiku like pleasure in getting it down to 800 words (OK well, that's not haiku, but you get my meaning). Here it is: I FIRST came upon the rema...

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http://youtu.be/FF-tKLISfPE Steve is all the rage. Run your company like Steve Jobs. Do nuclear physics like Einstein. I doubt anyone should try to run their company like Steve Jobs. But that doesn't stop it being interesting to listen to things he says. In any event, I ran in...

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http://youtu.be/lU-Uwl7AZ7o

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E-gad it's hard to keep those heterodox ideas from popping out - especially if they're the plainest commonsense. Brad Delong quotes Matthew Yglesias: Mitt Romney on Fiscal Policy : The GOP candidate sounds like Paul Krugman except without the qualifications about the zero lowe...

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[caption id="attachment_19919" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Bob Collins"] [/caption] I had a bit of a cyber-chinwag on Twitter this morning with a couple of other legal academics about the rather obscure topic of the torts of maintenance and champerty. Melissa Casta...

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Just as almost anyone has a near veto power in a bureaucracy even if they don't have much power, so the street theatre of outrage can have a powerful effect on politics even if the majority of people think that the minority putting on some show are way out of line. When things...

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Seems like an important paper - which I've not read yet. Trustworthy by Convention, By: M. Bigoni, S. Bortolotti, M. Casari, D. Gambetta, URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp827&r=evo Social life offers innumerable instances in which trust relations involve multiple...

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Having promised myself that I'd buy a Mac when they brought out a netbook sized MacBook Air, I did just that about nine months ago. I got forced out of Macdom many yearsafter I began on a Mac in 1986 I've been meaning to write a review of my experience FWIW but haven't got rou...

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http://youtu.be/9fXuREZu_BQ Well humans are still competitive - for now.

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[caption id="attachment_19887" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Craig Thomson addresses Parliament (note Andrew Wilkie's expression)"] [/caption] More often than not these days, even day-to-day political "footie commentary" is purveyed with greater depth and perceptiven...

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If Don McLean could write a smash hit about the death of Buddy Holly , I can at least do a blog post about the death this morning of Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees. The Bee Gees were hardly the most fashionable of pop groups among the cool kids, either at the time or now. But I re...

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Access to justice should be a big issue in Australia, as my Introduction to Public Law class explored yesterday in the context of discussing administrative law merits review.As commenter wilful observed on my last post about lawyers : I can reflect on my sister’s recent experi...

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There is quite a bit of current public controversy over refugees indefinitely held in immigration detention as a result of adverse ASIO security assessments which they cannot effectively challenge. Secret evidence provisions in ASIO regulations mean they can be denied all know...

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With low unemployment, low inflation and 20 straight years of economic growth, the Sydney Morning Herald's Jessica Irvine is astounded at how so many Australians are carrying on as if they live in a debt-wracked European basket case. Younger Australians have never seen a reces...

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[caption id="attachment_19809" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Rose Ashton-Weir and her mum"] [/caption] The twitterverse erupted in response to this story in yesterday's papers about a student suing her former school Geelong Grammar for compensation, saying that it pr...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKkgcKoPa9I&feature=channel&list=UL I've been having to go further and further in the world to get anyone to listen to me. But in any event, I enjoyed this breakfast radio interview in Regina Saskatchewan.

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http://youtu.be/TuIbEJz23uY I've often thought that in politics, the signature of honesty is not lack of dishonesty - an impossibility in party politics - but a certain discomfort with the the lies you have to tell. I'm giving Joe the benefit of the doubt on this one. And good...

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I'm doing a fortnightly column for the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald and here is the first column . Of course the thing that's missing from the column is how I think they should have handled fiscal policy - which would have involved not just more straightforward and confid...

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This year my accountant got sent accounts which as far as I could see involved writing the totals of a spreadsheet into the tax return and pressing 'send'. OK, it might have been a bit more than that, I don't really know, but what bugs me is that the documents she got indicate...

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Pseudonymous blogging lawyer Private Law Tutor confesses her occasional feelings of "shame" at being a lawyer: I’ve thought and talked and written about the deep discomfort that ebbs and flows in me with my work. Well, not my work as such, but the work that I do. The industry...

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In a piece for the Sunday Age , Chris Berg says progressives think conservatives are heartless because they "don't realise the right has a different and legitimate moral framework." Perhaps so, but what about libertarians ? Berg draws on Jonathan Haidt 's moral foundations res...

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I just happened upon this story in which Mike Rann who served SA as Premier for about a decade has been given a driver, an office and staff in a policy which provides such things to Premiers who have served for longer than four years. Other than the car - I don't know what's w...

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In a recent book on social justice , former Labor politician Gary Johns argues for "a major reconsideration of social justice as a rationale for the welfare state". In his essay 'When too much social justice is never enough' Johns suggests that social justice is primarily abou...

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Having recently congratulated John Quiggin on his many translations of his Zombie book, I was informed by a Korean today that the Government 2.0 Taskforce was translated into Korean here . Which, since it was written with a wider set of circumstances than just those appertaini...

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After I posted a comment on Ken's recent post about swimmer Nick D'Arcy and his decision to file a debtor's petition in bankruptcy, he graciously invited me to contribute a post if I am insistent on disagreeing with his take. Ken argues that there is something that doesn't see...

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Here's a picture of the moon and the sun juxtaposed. They cycle between being the same size in our heavens and being a bit bigger or smaller than each other. It's spooky. Just the right size to deliver a total eclipse, or an annular one, depending on how they are feeling at th...

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Want to save time and identify the best in Australian blogosphere writing? See these features built into the recently re-designed Troppo front page. If you can't find several excellent articles every day of the week among that lot, you're very hard to please: "Blog reading sel...

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[caption id="attachment_19655" align="alignright" class="pull alignright" width="262" caption="Swimmer Simon Cowley"] [/caption] There's been lots of media coverage of the washup of swimmer Nick D'Arcy's bashing of fellow swimmer Simon Cowley in a bar some 4 years ago. Underst...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e1xvyTdBZI Readers as geriatric as me will probably remember British comedian Benny Hill's famous spoof song Ernie (He drove the fastest milk cart in the west). It topped the UK Singles Chart in 1971, reaching the Christmas number one spot, and...

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I offered this comment in a LinkedIn discussion, and thought I might 'put it out there' as my daughter says. In the process I edited and played around with it a little. One of the things that the last few years have shown I think is that rank cynicism plays much worse for the...

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First it was David Brooks' Harold and Erica . Now it's the Obama campaign's Julia . Harold, Erica and Julia are all fictitious characters born into a perpetual present. They live and grow old in a world that doesn't change. As Michael Shear at the New York Times writes : At ag...

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Your editorial ( Politics of envy threatens our economy and ethos , 2 May) claims that “Research by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling has shown that all income levels prospered in the Howard years and that under the Rudd-Gillard governments the gap between...

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At the Lowy Interpreter Sam Roggeveen speculates about the possibility of a company (particularly Apple) buying a country. There has been at least on fictional treatment of a corporation taking over a country in John Brunner's wonderful 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar . It is bas...

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A while back I blogged about the spate of mandated product information when one buys medicine. I just got a scrip from the chemist with a new format consumer information in it and I'm afraid I'm pretty pissed off with what an organised piece of stupidity it really is. Previous...

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I'm not much of a fan of giving to wealthy causes. Like private schools for the well healed. I was asked to attend an interview to see if I'd go on the Council of my daughter's private school - which I said I would. I was then asked if I was Jewish (it's an Anglican School) an...

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Interest rates in Australia have just been reduced by 0.5% in the hope that this will stimulate the economy. Will it work? Uncertain. But will politicians say it will work in the coming federal budget? Almost undoubtedly. Perhaps displays of optimism are not such a bad thing,...

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Measuring the Effects of the 1991 Federal Alcohol Tax Increase , Philip J. Cook and Christine Piette Durrance "[A tax induced increase of 6 percent in alcohol prices] resulted in a reduction of 4.7 percent in injury deaths nationwide." ecause consumers reduce alcohol consumpti...

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Though our fiscal stimulus was exemplary (except by the standards of The Australian Newspaper which requires 20,000 investments to all go off without a hitch), there was one area where I argued at the time , that could have been improved. For reasons that are a tad mysterious...

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Debt Overhangs: Past and Present by Carmen M. Reinhart, Vincent R. Reinhart, Kenneth S. Rogoff Abstract: We identify the major public debt overhang episodes in the advanced economies since the early 1800s, characterized by public debt to GDP levels exceeding 90% for at least f...

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Herewith the text of my talk on Ockham's Razor this morning . It is from a longer essay which you can find here , boiled down so that it could be read in the 12 minutes or so one gets on Ockham's Razor. I. Shortly after Barack Obama became the first US president to build his c...

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Recovering journalist Mr Denmore succinctly summarises the response of the media (at least the Murdoch portion of it) to the Peter Slipper controversy: [T]he Tory regime changers of News Ltd could spin the Peter Slipper story into an imagined constitutional crisis and provide...

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[caption id="attachment_19526" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Magistrate Pat O'Shane"] [/caption] Cross-posted from CDU Law and Business Online With CDU Introduction to Public Law students due to study the topic judicial independence next week, it is an opportune time...

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How aged care reform slipped off the media agenda: "Confronted with a major policy initiative that, while affecting millions, offered little potential for partisanship or prurience, the media was a little flummoxed". Mr Denmore, The Failed Estate . The limits of citizen journa...

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They played the studio version of this song by Colin Hay on the day that we learned that Greg Ham had died. It was a good choice. I saw Colin Hay play this song back in 2002 at Woodford. Back then it was just him, a guitar and his gorgeous wife. Here he is playing it at the Co...

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Part one of a intermittent series on interesting ideas that might not be useful. Today I'm talking about path dependence that leaves us with second rate technology. The hypothesis is very simple, but very interesting. A society has a problem, and a number of technologies becom...

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Anzac Day. A day for reminiscing. A day for remembering great deeds, and the heroic words that were written about them .

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In 1992 Bill Clinton campaigned on ideal : "The ideal that if you work hard and play by the rules you'll be rewarded, you'll do a little better next year than you did last year, your kids will do better than you." This was the American dream. With the economy in recession, man...

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http://youtu.be/fWNaR-rxAic I heard this song for the first time this evening. No doubt I'm one of the last to hear it - I certainly come after nearly 30 million YouTube plays. Anyway, it's a great song. What's nice is that it seems like a throwback to the time when women pop...

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(note to self) For many years now, it has been clear to the insiders that there is no hope in achieving serious reductions to greenhouse gas emission by means of international co-operation: the incentives to free ride on the efforts of others is too great and none of the big p...

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In a speech at the Institute of Economic Affairs , Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey announced the the end of the age of entitlement. He followed up the speech with an interview for the ABC's Lateline . At Billablog, Hockey's speech inspires a song while Patricia at Cafe Whispers pe...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRhs26o03ok In the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty Friedrich Hayek explained that he saw little point in engaging with Rawls' Theory of Justice since "the differences between us seemed more verbal than substantial..." Many of his su...

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This wasn't supposed to be the theme of part two (Part One is here ) but Jessica Irvine's recent and timely column on superstardom and One Direction prompted me to add my two cents' worth - well someone else's two cents' worth but at least inserted by me. First; highlights fro...

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You heard it first on Troppo. And no Charlotte, it isn't bad that you didn't know that the Titanic was real. Philosophers have had the same trouble for years.

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I'll be making a few overseas trips in the next little while so will be catching up on some movie watching. I've just discovered 475 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc. so that's been a boon. However unfortunately a lot of them are on YouTube and/o...

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Whilst making pies yesterday I happened to recall a sentence I read 7 or so years ago, which suddenly struck me as very silly. So I just looked it up to make sure I hadn't imagined it. I didn't. Here's the whole paragraph. A final point worth noting on gang wars is that their...

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Journalism academic Terry Flew blogs about a recent paper by a UK colleague: Recently published on Open Democracy has been an influential paper by Angela Phillips on “ The Future of Journalism “. The paper was presented at the Media, Power and Revolution: Making the 21st Centu...

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[caption id="attachment_19320" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Peter Singer"] [/caption] Last week's ABC QandA debate between uber-atheist Richard Dawkins and Catholic archbishop George Pell generated quite a lot of blogosphere debate , not least here at Troppo . Howev...

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Twitter's a great medium for sharing links and short comments. And since that's pretty much what I've been doing with Missing Link Friday it raises an obvious question -- why not take Missing Link to Twitter? So I thought I'd give it a go: @donattroppo. Let me know what you th...

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HT Possum .

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Classical liberals and social justice: "many defenders of private economic liberty suffer from a malady that I shall call social justicitis . Social justicitis , as I use that term, refers to a strongly negative, even allergic , reaction to the idea of social or distributive j...

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God speechless at outrageous Atheistic slurs It was billed at the debate to end all debates. The one where the big questions would be finally resolved. Renowned God scoffer, Richard Dawkins verses Australian stuffed-shirt-in-chief Cardinal George Pell were to have it out on th...

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Some of you may know that Kaggle's motto is "We’re making data science a sport.™". Now we're publishing a leaderboard of our top ten performers . And it's quite an eye opener. There's not a professor there. Indeed there's not a person from a top university there. Just ten of t...

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Regular readers will be familiar with my dismay at the kind of bumph that passes for strategic planning . I recall as 'thinker in residence' at a one of the major departments in Canberra having a discussion with senior management about Web 2.0 and innovation in government. The...

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Here's an extract from a book on fair trade that I had occasion to look up. In what circumstances is fair trade a good thing? If we dig into our pockets to buy something at a higher price than necessary in order to engage in 'fair trade', then we know a few things. The sacrifi...

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It's a sad day in the Aus blogosphere. Leading left-leaning group blog Larvatus Prodeo has folded its capacious tent and joined the ranks of ex- parrots blogs. Supremo senior commissar Mark Bahnisch explains the public rationale: We collectively feel seven years is enough. I t...

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Medieval Universities, Legal Institutions, and the Commercial Revolution by Davide Cantoni, Noam Yuchtman - NBER #17979 We present new data documenting medieval Europe's "Commercial Revolution'' using information on the establishment of markets in Germany. We use these data to...

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Social Identity and Inequality: The Impact of China's Hukou System Date: 2012-03 By: Afridi, Farzana (Indian Statistical Institute) Li, Sherry Xin (University of Texas at Dallas) Ren, Yufei (Union College) URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp6417&r=exp We conduct an...

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Troppo's patron saint Adam Smith put it thus (note the generous assumption about human nature): The liberal reward of labor, as it encourages the propagation, so it increases the industry of the common people . . .. Where wages are high, accordingly, we shall always ?nd the wo...

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http://youtu.be/NOyx3r59L-I

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I just came across this MPI speech by Andrew Leigh. Damn fine job. Straightforward, informed, powerful. In a world in which people somehow get divided into subject wonks and sliver-tongues, it's amazing how much actually knowing stuff and having a perspective on things gives y...

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In the spirit of an earlier post addressing the French Film Festival, I'm now repeating my bleg, this time for the German Film Festival . Just to recap, this is an extract of what I said there . Film festivals are great things. Yet in my case I see them come, think “I’d like t...

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Gillard is still the best person to lead the ALP (there is no one else). How deal with the loss of trust following her broken promise on carbon tax? This is a difficult question but it must be resolved. Abbott keeps making stupid remarks and then saying “it was an inappropriat...

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The reason that you can't get many books back to the 1920s and then suddenly can? Copyright. Someone owns the copyright in the US if the book came out after 1923. Economics 101 teaches that the existence of the property right should enhance the availability of books. After all...

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Someone who emailed me saying he was coming to my presentation at Sydney Uni tomorrow night suggested we catch up for dinner. Which I'll be doing. Then I suggested to him that I'd invite anyone who was at the presentation who wanted to come along to come along. Not sure how th...

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No time to read the paper right now, but it looks great. Kantian Optimization, Social Ethos, and Pareto Efficiency Date: 2012-03 By: John E. Roemer (Dept. of Political Science, Yale University) Although evidence accrues in biology, anthropology and experimental economics that...

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Last year I did a presentation on Government 2.0 to Masters Government Students at Sydney Uni and it was lots of fun. So they invited me back. I suggested that this time we do it using the web properly, so I'll do a presentation but it will be filmed so that it can be hoisted...

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If you discovered that you had cancer would you (a) find a doctor who is an expert in treating your disease and follow their advice, or (b) attempt to devise your own treatment by reading about cancer on the internet? According to some sources, Apple founder Steve Jobs may hav...

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A Club Troppo Research Project In the Melbourne telephone directory, there are: 89 Head(s) 5 Neck(s) 13 Body(s) 1 Shoulder 14 Arms 69 Hand(s) 35 Finger(s) 52 Legg(s) 27 Foot(s) 1 Feet 6 Toe(s) 2 Heart(s) - A Time Lord? 22 Lung(s) 13 Kidney(s) No Stomach 1 Bowels No Penis, but...

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Responding to Noah Smith , Krugman says the following about the long term effects of the "Macro Wars" . On the academic side: look, to a first approximation nobody ever admits being wrong about anything. But my sense is that a lot of younger economists are aware, even if they...

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Risk theories typically assume individuals make risky choices using probability weights that differ from objective probabilities. Recent theories suggest that probability weights vary depending on which portion of a risky environment is made salient. Using experimental data we...

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Lawyers like their evidence to be nice and straightforward. Not to statistical. This is a real problem in some negligence cases. A surgeon might be a good surgeon, might have well below average adverse events, but if something screws up, doctrines like res ipsa loquitur - " th...

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Why don’t women patent? "In Why Don’t Women Patent? , a recent NBER paper, Jennifer Hunt et al. present a stark fact: Only 5.5% of the holders of commercialized patents are women." Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution . Innovation and inequality: What effect do now products and...

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In the USA (a presidential election year), there is a considerable debate on how much emphasis government policy should assign to economic growth (properly interpreted to encompass all externalities and market failures) and how much to income and welfare distribution. The argu...

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I tend to avoid business class even when entitled to it except for overnight flights, but being entitled to business class travel on a government board the computer always requires me to explain myself. And though it has an option where you can say that you're entitled to fly...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="220" caption="Tom Derrick - a good man to have on your side"] [/caption] I happened upon this on the front page of today's Wikipedia. Tom Derrick (1914–1945) was an Australian recipient of the Victoria Cross (VC) during the Second World...

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A a recent function I had the privilege to listen to David Halpern who heads up the 'Nudge unit' in the UK Cabinet Office. The "Applying Behavioural Insights" unit led by the aforementioned Halpern seeks to apply the insights of behavioural economics/psychology to public polic...

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Even Andrew Bolt is shocked . On Tuesday mining magnate Clive Palmer fronted the media and announced that the US Central Intelligence Agency is using the Rockefeller Foundation to fund a campaign to undermine Australia's coal industry. Palmer appeared in front of the cameras b...

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This lovely painting goes on sale this Thursday night at Menzies Auctioneers . An artist friend of mine isn't too impressed with Lin Onus, but then I think his work is lovely. So there. This painting will go for an estimated $150-200,000 plus buyers' fee plus GST, which is one...

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When the Koch vs Cato controversy erupted blogger Skip Oliva was all over it . Now he's just over it : When you cut through all the bullshit—90% of which is coming from the Cato side—what you’re left with is two old men who simply refuse to compromise. Charles Koch signed an a...

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This immortal line - the key to the Republican nomination (With Mitt Romney having to play along to try to win the nomination) is from a column by Richard Cohen. It captures the spirit of the times, which I have said before is like the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Czechoslov...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1nHNtZ148I A few weeks ago I attended the latest F.H. Gruen lecture at ANU by the terrific English economist Andrew Oswald.* He's one of those economists who, in addition to being formidable in his (many) fields within the profession, is also a...

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According to most commentators, it was French politician René Lenoir who coined the term 'social exclusion' (l’exclusion sociale). But the idea that there is a disparate group of disadvantaged citizens who are excluded from economic, social and political participation is nothi...

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Herewith Bob McDonald's third instalment. As readers will note, I published the first instalment saying that at a superficial level Bob's argument seemed interesting and indeed persuasive. Since then people who've taken a closer interest in the debate and the issues have been...

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A commodities boom can temporarily boost government revenue, says Malcolm Turnbull . Mostly that's a good thing. But when governments respond by making non-temporary changes to the budget, we have a problem: If, rolling in a big cyclical surplus, a government were to cut incom...

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Herewith Bob McDonald's second post on fisheries economics. With Australia being the last 'settled' continent, the flattest and driest and without reliable streamflow from snow melt it is not outrageous to suggest its fisheries are unique. Until WW2 Australian commercial fish...

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We are in the middle of the electoral cycle, which seems a good time to give advice on which policies make good economics in the sense of being in the interest of the long-run welfare of Australia. My top 5 of do-able economic policies, some big and some small, that a governme...

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On a Background Briefing program on micro-targeting of political campaigning and advertising, I was being pressed by the interviewer. If people hate negative ads, if they degrade the reputation of politicians, why do they do it? I likened it to over-fishing where each fisher p...

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A few months ago, Sam Roggeveen from the Lowy Institute asked me to talk at a function the Institute was holding on secrecy. I said I wasn't particularly well qualified to talk directly on secrecy regarding national security and foreign affairs, but I was happy to speak about...

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A lawsuit by the Koch brothers threatens the Cato Institute's reputation for independence When scholars at the libertarian Cato Institute came out against the Gulf War, Olin Foundation president William E Simon was outraged. The foundation ended up withdrawing its support and,...

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The Lord's Resistance Army and its leader Joseph Kony have been in the news for years (here's a 2006 story from the ABC's Foreign Correspondent ). But this week the issue went viral thanks to a video by advocacy group Invisible Children . With help from celebrities like Rihann...

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Many years ago my father used to respond to some of my wilder claims or flights of fancy by asking "if you're so smart how come you're not rich?" This amused him but I didn't find it very funny - and not just because it deflated my pretentions. I appreciate it more and more wi...

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"Make the media more accountable for their sins, and worry less about new technologies and freedom of speech". That's a one-line summary of Ray Finkelstein's Independent Media Inquiry . It argues for a new system of media regulation to apply to journalists, commentators and mo...

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Inaugurated on this day in 1861 , Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, is as popular as ever. Movies: America's 16th president features in two movies to be released this year. The first is a serious bio-pic by Steven Spielberg while the second is based on...

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A failure in the realm of ideas: It's crisis as usual for the left. Despite the global financial crisis, left of centre parties are struggling in the polls. Francis Fukuyama puts it down to a "a failure in the realm of ideas" arguing that: "The left has not been able to make a...

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A voice of reason from way out West speaks clear unvarnished truth. That the minerals Mother Nature once laid down in her youth, are the hope of teeming millions seeking sanctuary and jobs. Free Enterprise the means by which we’ll fill their starving gobs. We hear the message...

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Well not bird flu actually, but decoupling of median incomes and productivity growth. About as nasty an economic development as one could imagine. FROM THE OECD INSIGHTS BLOG Do workers reap the benefits of productivity growth? In the last twenty years of the 20th century, eac...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8urgvC0TR8&feature=related

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http://youtu.be/UmW1o6rzI7g The Canadians, who have a very strong IP regime have been put on the American's USTR Special 301 Priority Watch List. So they're getting going tightening up their IP for the delectation of the IP boosters. The Spaniards have already passed a SOPA st...

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I see there's a US nationwide campaign against private for-profit prisons. Maybe the campaigners are right. It's certainly easy to imagine ways in which the profit motive would work against the interests of prison inmates and the public interest in lower recidivism rates and s...

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This Thursday, behind closed doors in Melbourne, representatives from nine countries including Australia will take up discussions once again on an ambitious, comprehensive trade agreement for the Asia-Pacific region. Negotiators from Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Vietnam, Malaysia...

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We keep reading claims that Tony Abbott is a low-grade politician who would be wiped off the face of Australian politics if the ALP could only get its act together . Since Abbott has already knocked off one of Australia's most popular prime ministers and taken another to withi...

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Alvy Singer : What's with all these awards? They're always giving out awards. Best Fascist Dictator: Adolf Hitler. Annie Hall It was with great excitement that I read my alumni news for ANU this month . Extraordinary things are happening. KPIs are being broken through all over...

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The picture of Kevin Rudd's prime ministership painted over the weekend by former speechwriter Jamie Button ought to be fatal to Rudd's leadership bid. It jibes with a number of other assessments , including some just this week by senior Cabinet ministers like Nicola Roxon . T...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtGSXMuWMR4

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The view from America: "the plot has thickened like barbie sauce and Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott is the happiest man in Australia." Aaron Goldstein, The Spectacle Blog . Gillard government a policy free zone: "Now that the Rudd agenda has mostly been passed or abandoned,...

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Via Mark Thoma Languages di?er widely in the ways they partition time. In this paper I test the hypothesis that languages which grammatically distinguish between present and future events (what linguists call strong- FTR languages) lead their speakers to take fewer future-orie...

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A small plea to Kevin Rudd and everyone else in the country: can we restrict the term "faceless men" to people who are actually unknown? Today I see a reference to "Crean and other faceless men". For pity's sake, Simon Crean has been in public life since 1979 and in Parliament...

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The Anglophone countries often cluster together on various measures of national greatness or depravity - such as household savings (we haven't been doing much of it - until recently). But it's quite dramatic how much worse we're doing on obesity than anyone else. And boy do th...

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For discussion: one of the far right's greatest achievements in the past decade has been to show post-modernists how wrong they were. Let me explain. In a famous 2004 article on the Iraq War, the New York Times journalist Ron Suskind quotes an aide to George W. Bush (possibly...

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Last week I was ready to write off ABC Melbourne interviewer Jon Faine for ill-judged rudeness and inadequate research . Now he's gone and redeemed himself with a Tony Abbott interview . Faine at his best is smartly, aggressively prosecutorial without actually being rude. Abbo...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJNM0C-7lPk&feature=player_embedded I bought my daughter a very enjoyable book The art of great speeches: and why we remember them by my friend Dennis Glover for Christmas. The book manages the triad of rhetorical tasks very nicely - it delights...

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A tough-talking, motorcycle-riding Texan, sociologist C Wright Mills is about as far from today's stereotype of the latte-sipping left-wing intellectual as you're likely to find. But even though he's been dead for 50 years, you can still see his influence in the intellectual l...

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In 2007 Greece spent 9.9% of GDP on age pensions. This was the fourth highest level of spending on pensions in the OECD (after Austria, Spain and Italy). Australia spent 3.2% of GDP, the fifth lowest level of spending in the OECD (ahead of Iceland, Ireland, Korea and Mexico)....

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We save for the future by building things: "As a society, we save for the future by channeling resources—steel, electricity, human labor power—into the production of things that last a long time rather than things that are more perishable." Matthew Yglesias, Moneybox . Investi...

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And by “internal”, I mean in the same paragraph : “This week, President Obama will release a budget that won’t take any meaningful steps toward solving our entitlement crisis,” Romney said in a statement e-mailed to reporters. “The president has failed to offer a single seriou...

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The bank debate now seems officially out of control. Increasingly foolish notions about banking are being served up day after day. One example: the developing meme that claims the banks have decided they will no longer be bound by official interest rate policy. One morning las...

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James O'Loghlin had me on his Sunday night show which was broadcast on ABC local radio tonight. In fact it would have been, but because of the cricket only went out via live feed on the net. Anyway, it was quite a long interview - went for 20 odd minutes so we got through quit...

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http://youtu.be/-4V40twk63A Screen tests are fun to look at, letting you peek before the actors peak, as it were (or crash). There must be some good philosophy to be written about the uncanny. (Hasn't Susan Sontag written something on this?) [On checking , it turns out that Si...

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As a regular reader of Brad DeLong I was slightly alarmed at a recent post reporting an outbreak of unpleasantness about which OECD country has the most progressive tax system. Brad DeLong linked to an article by Jonathan Chait which rather sharply criticised Veronique de Rugy...

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From the 1891 Taranaki Herald

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Conservatism "thrives on low intelligence and poor information", writes George Monbiot who reports the results of, a recent study showing that "prejudice tends not to arise directly from low intelligence, but from the conservative ideologies to which people of low intelligence...

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I was rung today for a comment on second hand car imports by the Global Mail . Here's a Guardian blog about it. I didn't know what it was, but that just shows how out of touch I am here at my terminal. It's a philanthropically funded newspaper. And it's philanthropically funde...

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We are all in Tom Watson's debt for pursuing the corruption of the Murdoch press as vigorously as he has - and continues to. I have had some dealings with Tom arising from my involvement in the Government 2.0 Taskforce. In any event, in addition to continuing his pursuit of th...

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It's a strange thing. Film festivals are great things. Yet in my case I see them come, think "I'd like to go to some of those movies" and an awful lot of the time I don't manage to make it. We have two sectors - the commercial sector that advertises its little head off and ser...

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Public debts in Southern Europe only grew in 2011, and they were already unsustainable in 2010. Worse, the interest rates these countries have to pay on their debts has grown as all the long-term rolled-over debt held by these countries now carries a 7% upwards interest rate....

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Right now Ray Finkelstein and Matthew Ricketson, the two members of the federal government's Independent Media Inquiry , are trying to finish off their report to the government. It's due by 28 February. Writing these reports is frequently difficult, but Finkelstein and Rickets...

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Next month I'm doing a gig for Rotary where I'm going to be on a panel with a demographer and a climatologist and they're going to ask us to say what will happen in the next 20 years. In five minutes. That's five minutes each - so there's plenty of time. I get to talk about th...

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http://youtu.be/YQIMGV5vtd4

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http://youtu.be/x7M47ITv8iQ One thing I think about whenever I sit in a tram waiting for cars that shouldn't be holding up the tram to stop holding up the tram is that trams should have a video cam on them and drivers could have a button that either activates the cam or marks...

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I've been counting those I know who are highly energetic, positive people and who are naturally excited by the possibilities of the web, who have been leaving government employ. I can think of Darren Whitelaw in Victoria, Mia Garlick in the Commonwealth service (though based i...

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Occasionally I get so distracted by the way someone writes that I can't concentrate on what they're saying. Here's John Howard in today's Financial Review : To adopt Shakespeare, Meryl Streep came to bury Margaret Thatcher, not to praise her. This was attempted -- in the film...

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Bad back, sad sack. Yes, folks that's an inane family saying. Which brings me to the point of this post which is to say that my back is killing me. I have a bit of a scoleosis but am told by those in the know that it isn't a big problem or explanation for my back ache - which,...

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[slideshare id=4858111&doc=ourfuturelibrary3-100728100555-phpapp02] Tim O'Reilly proposed the slogan "Government as a platform" for his Government 2.0 activities which he's heavily scaled back in favour of more lucrative opportunities. But there was always a problem. That prob...

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A Twitter randomised trial: "I have a confession to make", writes Andrew Leigh , "I’m a twitter-sceptic." But in keeping with his evidence-based approach to decision making, Andrew Leigh MP is embarking on a one month randomised trial. @aleighmp Why libertarians need to talk w...

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Here is this pesky subscription drive at the top of Troppo again. I'll pull it down in the next few days. But OFFERS END FRIDAY 17th Feb!! It's on again folks. Crikey subscribers on the group subscription I organise have begun getting presubscription emails. Whether you are a...

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Not so long ago ALP politicians controlled the governments of every state. I think they still did at the end of 07, though I may be wrong. In any event, it was an obvious opportunity an amazingly rare opportunity. For that reason I spent a bit of time on this blog and on the p...

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I've always thought that institutions that are set up at arms length from government to offer independent advice to governments would be an excellent venue for online discussions to start taking place. An easy opportunity, pretty comprehensively passed up was the Public Servic...

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I read an article with an attractive title recently. " Complexity and Context-Dependency ". It's not very good, but it raises an important point that is important to what I call the psycho-pathology of disciplines and it puts me in mind of something I've thought for a long tim...

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A highlight of my calendar I have to say - since I inadvertently morphed into Mr Innovation and they started inviting me. Did you have an absolutely fantastic science teacher? Now's the time to get them some recognition. NOMINATION CALL 2012 PRIME MINISTER’S PRIZES FOR SCIENCE...

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When I did the Government 2.0 Taskforce, one of the subjects that was earnestly discussed was archiving of government sites. It's a big problem in government. I could never see why it should be a big problem. After all you can look at anything written on ClubTroppo since it st...

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I remember being at a wedding reception talking to someone who was 70 odd. I asked them whether in their day it was normal for the bride and groom to put the tip of the knife in the cake and then beam at the cameras for two or three minutes - celebrities on their special day....

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Katie's Australia Day - Brazilian style! Food blogger Katie Quinn Davies' Australia Day recipes. Australia Day from afar: "One of the most surprising things for me to experience out of Australia was people saying–even in the American South!–Australia’s really racist, isn’t it?...

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A) Hey, you know what today is? Invasion Day! B) What? A) Invasion Day. B) Invasion Day? A) Yeah, 'cause it's the day they invaded us Kooris. B) Oh, InVASion Day A) So all those people wearing Australian flags are celebrating Invasion Day. 'cept the ones that feel sorry for us...

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What a load of old sensationalist nonsense. I'm seriously starting to worry about Giz. If I want to search anonymously there is a thing called an anonymous tab. And I don't log into my Google account outside work because why would I? - My phone is logged in. That's how the fir...

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British Leyland devoured billions pounds of taxpayer's money before it was finally broken up and sold off. According to New York Times journalist Nelson Schwartz the Thatcher government's bailout "remains the classic example of a futile government intervention." Mrs Thatcher w...

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Quite funny http://youtu.be/1p-TV4jaCMk

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https://youtu.be/x6f4ZB2xnF8 (Four minutes of extracts from a 27 minute video which can be watched here .) Herewith my column for the SMH and Age in Ross Gittins' spot while he's on vacation. It's the column of the essay which is here . As he was wheeled around on the emergenc...

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White to play Vidmar vs Euwe 34. ? See game for solution. As Troppodillians know my definition of an immortal game is one that involves some serious sacrificing and that the only pieces of the winners side that are left on the board have a role in the final checkmate. Click th...

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I wouldn't be expecting the New Zealand economy starts catching up to Australia any time soon. While they have their usual ideological stoushes there's something that sticks out like a ham sandwich at a bar-mitzvah. NZ is capital starved. Owing it seems to our compulsory super...

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The Jericho amendments: At Grog's Gamut Greg Jericho checks out the Australian Public Service Commission's new guidelines for public servants engaging in public comment. Some of the principles are "so obvious or dumb as could only be written by a public servant", says Jericho,...

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The way the world of copyright is set up to gouge each individual market separately is growing costlier and costlier particularly for small far away markets like our own. I'd love to buy an Amazon Kindle Fire and subscribe to Amazon Prime . But there's not much point doing the...

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Restructuring and productivity growth in uk manufacturing We analyse productivity growth in UK manufacturing 1980-92 using the newly available ARD panel of establishments drawn from the Census of Production. We examine the contribution to productivity growth of 'internal' rest...

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Tell me about it! From Bloomberg View . Academic economists have recently become the unaccustomed subjects of intense scrutiny. The 2010 documentary “ Inside Job ” drew public attention to the board seats, consulting gigs and sponsored research that tie many of them to Wall St...

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“Oh, my goodness, the John Birch Society! ... Is that bad? I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society" ( Texas congressman Ron Paul ). In Tuesday's Sydney Morning Herald , Tom Switzer describes presidential hopeful Ron Paul as a socially tolerant free-market crusader wh...

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Does Linking Worker Pay to Firm Performance Help the Best Firms Do Even Better? This paper analyzes the linkages among group incentive methods of compensation, labor practices, worker assessments of workplace culture, turnover, and firm performance in a non-representative samp...

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Thomas Paine was a remarkable fellow who lived at a time of, and helped bring about two great revolutions of the modern age - the American and French ones. His time discovered political pamphleteering in a way that's quite similar to blogging today. People wrote pamphlets and...

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Herewith, a few days late, is my column in Ross Gittins' place from last weekend. There are a couple of things I would have liked to have covered in the column but didn't for lack of time. The first is that I suspect the biggest payoff in the area of law is not liberalisation...

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When New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane asked whether Times reporters should challenge the 'facts' asserted by the newsmakers they write about a large majority of readers responded : "yes, you moron, The Times should check facts and print the truth." That's pretty mu...

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"Capitalism made America great - free markets, innovation, hard work - the building blocks of the American Dream. But in the wrong hands some of those dreams can turn into nightmares." 'When Mitt Romney Came to Town' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLWnB9FGmWE Promoted by Winni...

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Mitt Romney takes a tough line on welfare. In 2008 Republicans cheered when he said that America's culture was threatened by welfare payments to poor people . Asked how tax reform plan would help Americans on low incomes he said his plan was "primarily based on trying to creat...

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The missing liberals: Why is there no liberal party? Because there are so few people who support both economic and social liberal causes, says Andrew Norton . Andrew cites data from the 2010 Australian Election Survey. Dr Watson vs Dr Ludd: With access to huge databases, exper...

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Herewith - somewhat late owing to my being out of the country - is my second column for the Age and the SMH in Ross Gittins' place while he goes on hols. It seems there is further news - that we're disgorging some more money to the mendicant car companies. I am not close enoug...

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It is, of course, the season for holiday fun times making worthless definitions. Last week my wife and I were making a rare trip into Namba, a popular entertainment and shopping district in Osaka. We happened to see a restaurant named " Blue Billabong ( Japanese )". It purport...

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Treasury's mission is broad -- to improve the wellbeing of the Australian people. And according to Peter Martin its wellbeing framework empowers it "to fight homelessness just as much as it empowers it to fight inflation". As Martin explained back in 2008 the framework goes we...

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At the Economist's Democracy in America blog, Erica Grieder suspects that "the biggest untapped constituency is people who are fiscally conservative and socially moderate or liberal." Grieder links to a post by former Cato research fellow Will Wilkinson where he explains why h...

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Beyond soundbites: "There’s so much potential for political parties, who are more and more thought to be hollow, soulless things, to allow their MPs to show what they actually believe in and engage with people. Soundbites were useful when someone else controlled how much time...

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Of the many policy debates in Federal Parliament in 2011, one which gathered support from both major parties was the proposal to lift the superannuation guarantee employer contribution from 9 to 12 per cent. Not surprisingly, this was wholeheartedly endorsed by the superannuat...

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Judith Sloan wants the term banned , the editors of the Australian think it's bureaucratic gibberish and even the new minister for social inclusion seems unsure about what it means. So what is social inclusion? For the New Labour politicians who popularised the term social exc...

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