In the last 5 years, I have made a point of giving clear predictions on complex socio-economic issues. I give predictions partially to improve my own understanding of humanity: nothing sharpens the thoughts as much as having to actually predict something. Another reason is as...

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I know three people who say they're quite strongly affected by the weather. They dislike rainy, overcast or muggy days and like fine ones that are not too hot or cold. Me? Well I agree, but while I can enjoy a nice day, I have no feeling of a bad day weighing me down. I've jus...

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https://soundcloud.com/zekejmiller/new-recording-68 Read more here .

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgdtS765Zrs

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Awareness Reduces Racial Bias by Devin G. Pope, Joseph Price, Justin Wolfers - #19765 (LS PE) Abstract: Can raising awareness of racial bias subsequently reduce that bias? We address this question by exploiting the widespread media attention highlighting racial bias among prof...

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Prologue to a blog post: Gentle Troppodillians, as you know, we keep up with the times here at Troppo. Some people like to think just five minutes ahead. Here at Troppo we're focused on the long-term - eons are seconds in TroppoTime - or seconds are eons depending on the way y...

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I'm a fan of Angel-list and have invested in two companies already over the platform (as trustee for Club Troppo's 4.7 billion self-managed super fund). Here's the disclaimer which you verify before you get to invest. I like it, though even here I'd rather just one or two clea...

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By clicking on the image you will be taken to the full demonstration of Brand *Santa* which has certainly impressed us here at Troppo. And I would like to take this opportunity on everyone's behalf to offer everyone else Seasons Greetings.

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We are off to the Badja. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3tMPfeI1w Dear Troppos, merry Christmas, have a good and happy time! John Walker and Anne E Sanders

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https://vimeo.com/82254326 I recently gave a presentation in Adelaide at the Australian Centre for Social Innovation which I chair. As you'll see, and perhaps to your surprise, there's a continuity between the way I've been thinking about the online world and social innovation...

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Last Monday I posted 4 questions to see who thought like a classic utilitarian and who adhered to a wider notion of ethics, suspecting that in the end we all subscribe to ‘more’ than classical utilitarianism. There are hence no 'right' answers, merely classic utilitarian ones...

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Abstract: We estimate habit formation in voting--the effect of past on current turnout--by exploiting transitory voting cost shocks. Using county-level data on U.S. presidential elections from 1952-2012, we find that precipitation on current and past election days reduces vote...

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Economists are wedded to utilitarianism as their collective moral compass. This is why we speak of social planners, welfare, utility maximization, and quality of life. The essence of utilitarianism is that moral judgments are reserved for final outcomes, not the means via whic...

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In the middle of this year a friend who had decamped to CSIRO from government wrote to me and asked me to participate in an interview exploring the economic impact of next generation broadband in Australia. Towards the end of his email he wrote. If you are willing to take part...

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In my last post on Troppo I raised this question: ...who’s actually running [Australia’s] foreign policy these days? Is it Julie Bishop, as Minister for Foreign Affairs, is it Scott Morrison as Minister for Immigration or is it some other bugger? The answer, it turns out, is ‘...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="406"] Emotiv Insight & Google Glass on Emotiv CTO, Dr Geoffrey Mackellar.[/caption]

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Now that Holden is to stop making cars in Australia, we're already hearing about the impending death of Australian manufacturing . Before you descend into gloom, take a look at this manufacturing data from the World Bank . It sets out how manufacturing value-added has been mov...

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Here are some headlines marking various milestones of progress and regress in the Government 2.0 agenda. As we recommended in the Cutler Report donations to the global commons are growing apace. Meanwhile it's not surprising that the Scandinavians, who are some of the most imp...

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Hoist from archives for a brief re-appearance. [caption id="attachment_24972" align="alignright" width="350"] A value we hold dear at Troppo - what's there not to like about being open and authentic? A Christmas Season message from Troppo[/caption] A Troppo community service:...

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One of the big problems with public goods is choosing which to build. The goods themselves are joint in consumption but the community may not know, indeed is unlikely to know, how much to spend on one pubic good compared with the next. How much should be spent on guide dogs an...

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Do countries that are already rich become even happier when they become yet richer? This was the essential question on which I entered a gentleman’s bet in 2004 with Andrew Leigh and which just recently got settled. The reason for the bet was a famous hypothesis in happiness r...

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Scott Morrison was on RN Breakfast on Monday 25 November , hosing down the idea that the diplomatic row with Indonesia over past spying on the Indonesian President and his wife might impede Operation Sovereign Borders. That was the day before we embarked on the whole ‘Gonski i...

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When political parties want to convey vision they typically reach for slogans packed with values words like 'fairness' and 'strength'. But according to Ben Shimshon of BritainThinks : "Those grand vision words are almost always taken as a signal that what’s being said is just...

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I'm heading off overseas with my 15 year old son. Turns out the cheapest way to get to the US, where we're spending most of our time is via China. And, in case you're interested and didn't know of it, Flightfox is a great way to pay people who know what they're doing to do lot...

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This piece is inspired by Paul Frijters' post titled The Benefits of Being Dumb in Politics . I don't actually think it is possible meaningfully/reliably to distinguish between politicians who are "really smart and great actors as well, who thus have no problems with telling o...

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[caption id="attachment_24901" align="alignright" width="584"] In the grain fields near Horsham[/caption] Joe Hockey has just announced he is blocking the foreign takeover of Graincorp by Illinois-based Archer Daniels Midland. It's a lousy decision. But it at least has the vir...

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Here is a puzzle for you: what is the theoretical link between bitcoins, Australian coal exports to China, and the US becoming a New Switzerland? It’s a bit of a convoluted link, so see at what stage in the story below you spot the answer. Bitcoins are all the rage at the mome...

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It is natural to think of our political leaders as either superhumanly clever and benevolent when we agree with them, or else dumb as dishwater and evil when we don’t agree with them. Yet, if one takes our own group-loyalty out of the picture, we can ask the simple question wh...

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In his introduction to his translation of the Analects of Confucius, Pierre Ryckmans likened that 'literary classic' to a coat hook that has over the centuries acquired so many layers of coats that it can no longer be seen-has become so big that it completely obscures the corr...

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People talk many many times over about the world is getting smaller. About communications technology how it crosses the gulf between here and there. I have seen this in abundance with my own eyes and you too. The new ways of offshoring the jobs and work, like call centre, that...

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The most interesting aspect of the reaction to the governor-general's last Boyer lecture , with its last-sentence support for abolishing the monarchy, is the thinness of the opposition from the left to her expression of her political views. As the events of the past few days h...

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Black to play M Ortueta vs J Sanz 31. ...? See game for solution. If you can't see the move - click through to the game and see how many things had to work out for the tricks to be worth playing.

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Some memories fade too slowly. I was reminded of one such memory by the TV advertisement being aired in the lead up to White Ribbon Day tomorrow (Monday 25 November). It was late morning on Friday, 20 September and I was at the local Magistrate’s Court on a court visit for the...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_8WbDD2mmkw Rating: 2872. Closest behind, Garry Kasparov on 2851. Table of highest rated players ever, with date their best ratings were first achieve d Rank Rating Player Year-month 1 2872 Magnus Carlsen 2013-02 2 2851 Ga...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aUn-I_loNE

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Campaigners seem to be having some success in raising the profile of writers and others giving away the product of their labour for free. The first time I ran into this issue in any big way was in launching the Government 2.0 Taskforce with a design competition. The prize? The...

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To defend free speech does not mean you cannot criticise how others exercise it. The very opposite, if anything. With weaker legal restrictions on, say, racist insults there should be stronger social sanctions - criticism, debate, counter-arguments. It’s called manners, and wh...

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[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="557"] This image came up on a Google search for "What's On". It's from The Central Tavern at Springfield Lakes , wherever that is. Seems nice enough, the cocktails can be very red by the looks of things, though there does seem to be qu...

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Dear President Yudhoyono Or can I call you Susilo? We like to use first names here in Australia. It’s a sign of informality. It indicates that you’re not wanting to be stand-offish. If you like we can go with middle names so that’d be Bang Bang right? You can call me Tone, or...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQFTCOiEFk0 Yes folks, I'm not joking.

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[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="630"] OK, so this is José Raúl Capablanca v Alexander Alekhine a few years later, but that's blogging for you - no fact checkers, no pay, no responsibility. Not like the MSM[/caption] This is perhaps the most storied chess game in hist...

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The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer came back into the news on Monday (11 November), with reports [i] on a paper published in Nature Geoscience which finds that reductions in chlorinated fluorocarbon (CFC) emissions achieved under the Montreal Prot...

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I've often considered this distinction at the back of my mind, but never really given it much explicit thought. While actively hostile discrimination - for instance on the basis of race of gender - is still around, there's not much of it about. On the other hand people not onl...

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Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are the rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried than before - more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. I went to see Mr Pip last night. I chec...

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I am no bearded Dumbledore, but it was impossible not to see Magnus as a type of Harry Potter, a super-talent destined to become one the greatest and to leave a deep mark (a lightning bolt?) on our ancient game. Gary Kasparov Well folks, this just wouldn't be Troppo if I didn'...

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"MIT's Openness to Jewish Economists" , E. Roy Weintraub MIT emerged from “nowhere” in the 1930s to its place as one of the three or four most important sites for economic research by the mid-1950s. A conference held at Duke University in April 2013 examined how this occurred....

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As conversational topics go, productivity is hardly a barbecue stopper. Nevertheless, adopting policies that boost national productivity is really the only way for Australia to avoid a slide into national penury as our population ages and the Chinese mineral boom ends. That's...

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How do health and wellbeing correlate, and how do they correlate across countries? No problem, check out this interesting graph which I found in this OECD report on wellbeing through the crisis. I wonder how New Zealand does it - all that equity of health outcomes? Perhaps it'...

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by Prashant Bharadwaj, Leah K. Lakdawala, Nicholas Li - #19602 (CH DEV) Abstract: While bans against child labor are a common policy tool, there is very little empirical evidence validating their effectiveness. In this paper, we examine the consequences of India's landmark leg...

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Schumpeter's two chapters on democracy in his great book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy provide the best framework I know of articulating the things that trouble me about the current state of democracy. The chapters assert the following propositions: Rousseau's idea of th...

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Have a look at the beautiful graph below , which depicts the main trends in Australian emissions and its promised emission reduction targets. Australia's emissions trends, 1990 to 2020 Note : trajectories to the 2020 target range are illustrative The dotted orange line shows t...

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The Australian stock market opened lower this morning on the back of Rupert Murdoch’s speech to the Lowy Institute last night. A senior analyst, interviewed by this correspondent attributed the fall in the Australian share price to the “transparent and misguided attempt at nat...

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What should Australia do about a slowly warming world? Join a small group of European countries who have more permits to sell than their own industry can manage to use ? Join hands with a coalition of the desperate in enacting one of the front-runner geo-engineering solutions...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=S7QxOllK0VU

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I remember the great bushfire in Canberra of 2003. I had only arrived with the family a week before and had just rented a nice house near the top of Mt Cook, right in the path of an enormous bushfire that ended up destroying hundreds of homes. The heat of that day was immense:...

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Eugenics got a bad name after the second world war. It got associated with pseudo-scientific theories under which people at the bottom of the societal ladder were branded as hopelessly deficient for supposedly inalterable biological reasons. Societies’ less successful were, qu...

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Tabloid TV – it’s one of modern life’s little irritations but, thankfully, one that’s easily avoided – unlike Melbourne’s Myki system, the rococo convolutions of bus routes in Melbourn's outer suburbs and numb-nuts who conduct loud conversations on their mobile phones while yo...

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A tweet took me to this article from Time World . And it had a panel of articles 'from the web' at the bottom, each with nice little illustrations making it look like content of sister magazines or at the very least content the selection of which had been 'curated' by Time. Af...

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Brands, brands, brands! Teams, Teams, teams! They infest Australian political commentary these days the way gondolas infest Venice . Right now, for example, the challenge for ALP members is to get in behind Bill Shorten and rebuild the Labor brand while Tony Abbott’s ascension...

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For 14 months, Australia has had an electronic national health register . It has almost nothing in it, but the hope is that in years to come ( when lots of people have registered ) it will start to have all the information on someone’s health that floats around in the health i...

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Think tank scholars and policy wonks strive to be both practical and clever. Being practical means proposing policies that have a good chance of getting taken up by government in the short term. And being clever means policies that generate big benefits at little or no cost. B...

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It was quite a few years ago – last century in fact – that through Martin Gardner’s ‘Mathematical Recreations’ column in Scientific American that I first learnt of Raymond Smullyan. It was in a review of either The Lady or the Tiger or What is the Name of this Book , two of Sm...

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The following quote is from an article published in London's Financial Times on October 4. The article is further confirmation that the previous Labor government's gratuitous interference in the art market has had a devastating effect on sales and its legacy is continuing to p...

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The sight of the raw institutional dysfunction in the US government at the moment provides a useful reminder to Australians that we should both treasure and encourage the respect that Australians have for our federal government institutions. By "government institutions", I'm p...

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I was looking for evidence recently that tradies in Australia have become amongst the highest paid groups, which would means a profound change in relative rewards in that it would mean that smart young men could then rationally choose not to bother with university but simply b...

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Well this joke probably doesn't really qualify as one such joke about which I've spoken in the past , but anyway I came upon it today and it made me laugh much more than when I first ran into it - though who knows why. Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies Ste...

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From the ever-wonderful XKCD , seeming to comment on current US governance: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="381"] XKCD: world's sharpest comic?[/caption]

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Dear Nokia, I hear you have fallen on hard times. I have two product suggestions: 1. Make a mobile that is purely a telephone 2. Make a phone in the shape of a pen The two could well be combined. 1. Pure phone There are countless millions of older people who would appreciate a...

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I love accents. I love pretty much everything about them. I love the way in which they actually convey things - sincerity, guile, sneering, superiority and their opposites and complements - all surreptitiously; all in a way that is at the same time so compelling to our intuiti...

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I don't often agree with Greg Sheridan, and I certainly don't agree with the whole of his article on asylum seeker policy in today's Weekend Australian . But he certainly says a lot that is worth thinking about and makes numerous points similar to things that I've been saying...

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Is there a health-status race in Australia whereby people get joy from being healthier and fitter than others? And what are the general implications for public policy if there is? My PhD student Redzo Mujcic and myself brought out a new working paper recently on how a health s...

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Seems Tony Abbott finally headed off to Indonesia today to have some talks. Not about the boats – he wants the focus to be on building a constructive relationship and of course building trade opportunities. Well good luck with that one mate. For the past three years you’ve spe...

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http://vimeo.com/75482401 Here's a presentation I gave to a conference called - unhelpfully - Art for Art's Sake. It was actually about new approaches to participation in the arts, about finding ways of connecting people to the arts - and the arts to people - which go beyond t...

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Annabel Crabb wants us to get real about women in politics. The current carry-on is "all very interesting and thought-provoking and no doubt useful to a certain degree" but there's an elephant in the room: [F]or chicks, you can choose politics or you can choose having children...

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Kevin Rudd got elected in 2007 by convincing people that he was a slightly younger and more vigorous version of nerdy John Howard, with similar conservative policies except that he would abolish that nasty Work Choices legislation and introduce some fairly meaningless warm and...

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Suppose you wanted to believe, as I do, that intelligence and vague ‘racial groups’ are, on the whole, unrelated from a long-run perspective. What would you then have to believe about genetics and IQ, as well as the long-run effects of socio-economic circumstances on IQ to rat...

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According to Mike Seccombe, at the Global Mail , under the Abbott government, Australia will be open not just for business, but open to costly multi-national law-suits: On the eve of the election, the Coalition released its trade policy , which includes a commitment to “remain...

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AKA "Intellectual vanity and policy poseurs" AKA "Contorting sophistry in favour of contractionary monetary policy" AKA "The global Serious id hrumphs again". Part 3 of a series ( 1 , 2 ). Via Matt Cowgill I see weak corporate governance beneficiary [1] Richard Goyder humphs a...

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It was around six thirty on a cold wet Melbourne Day. A long day for me, including a mid-morning appointment with a new psychologist. First appointments are all about background – what your condition is, personal and family history and all that other stuff that they need to kn...

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I learnt something interesting today, while I was writing up notes on legal history: Australia didn't formally achieve complete judicial and legislative independence from Old Blighty until 5.00am, Greenwich Mean Time on March 31 st 3 rd 1986. That's the precise time that the A...

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High profile climate un-changer Professor Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun School of Thought Homogeneity, is well known for his contention that the temperature rise of the planet has stopped. He’s been saying it for years. Today, Professor Bolt wrote that a leaked IPCC report con...

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by David N. Figlio, Morton O. Schapiro, Kevin B. Soter - #19406 (CH ED LS) Abstract: This study makes use of detailed student-level data from eight cohorts of first-year students at Northwestern University to investigate the relative effects of tenure track/tenured versus non-...

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The excitement is palpable, the atmosphere is electric, the game is in motion as media attention quickly turns away from the dull low-wattage reality of the Coalition win, to the contest that really matters – The leadership of Labor in opposition. Bill “Spud” Shorten has alrea...

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Remarkable article about how our social experience and the way we come to frame our lives influences gene-expression. I would’ve bet my eyeteeth that we’d get a lot of noisy results that are inconsistent from one realm to another. And at the level of individual genes that’s ki...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ihi0MnK0Q4 The Liberal Democrats look set to take a Senate seat in NSW after the party scored the best spot on the ballot paper . A libertarian party, the LDP's website describes it as a "a serious, progressive, small-government alternative." Th...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaqpoeVgr8U One of the numerous downsides of the rise of feminism is the demise of righteous masculine anger. For the record I'm strongly supportive of the great achievements of first and second wave feminism. But just as with other great changes...

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According to the ABC's Senate Election calculator , these are the seven 'others' who will be joining the Greens and Senator John Madigan of the DLP on the Senate cross-benches in the new parliament . Party Candidate & State 1st Preferences (%) Quotas i Counts ii Australian Mot...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=03l8VcSvyBU A nice visual illustration of the idea of institutions as public goods. Note the word 'institution' is here used to mean more than formal organisations. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy provides this...

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I am taking this opportunity to launch me own website : johnrwalker.com.au. Hope you enjoy. I would like to thank Andrew Hunter of KeyChange Solutions for his patience and terrific design input.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NluKzkEuo3A As part of its Gruen Nation show, an ad was produced which Clive Palmer wanted to use in his campaign. Well it was public money that produced it, so why shouldn't he be able to use it? Now in fact there may be complications. Gruen Nat...

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In previous elections, I either gave a list of mistakes I wanted the next government to avoid , or policies they could follow . Some of the mistakes I flagged in 2007 were indeed made, and about half of a preferred policy was implemented, no doubt entirely unrelated to my advi...

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MEMORANDUM FOR: General Martin Dempsey, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity [1] SUBJECT: Syria and Our Oath to Defend the Constitution Dear Gen. Dempsey: Summary: We refer to your acknowledgment, in your letter of July 19 to Sen....

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Simply bombing Damascus or Aleppo to assuage the conscience of the West that they 'did something' seems like the worst form of symbolic politics. It's not the only sensible thing Matthew Fitzpatrick had to say in an article at The Drum today. He also argued the appropriate for...

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I recall about twenty years ago now, I was taking a law tute in Legal Theory. The lecturer was pretty awful and spent huge amounts of time in his lectures explaining why his side of a particular debate - with H.L.A Hart the opponent as I recall - was the right side of the deba...

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With the coalition now promising a paid maternity leave scheme that once was championed by the Greens and the Democrats, it seems opportune to recycle a post on this topic here at troppo of 2007 called ' Should we have paid maternity leave '? All the arguments made for or agai...

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“This is not an equity argument” said Tony Abbott on this morning’s Chat n’ Chew with Fran . “Its’ a watershed social reform, it’s an idea whose time has come?” This was in answer to the first ever half-serious line of questioning on his justification the Coalition’s controver...

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Investigative journalism and the secret state are natural enemies. Even with an enlightened government and relatively untroubled times, their relationship will be uneasy at best. Today, they're in a state of undeclared war. Surveillance states and most of their fellow travelle...

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Malware is slowing down my Mac :( For a month or so I had a small Bing sponsored magnifying glass appear over all graphics. Then it went. But now, whenever I'm on a news-site I get a 'Discovery Bar' appearing at the bottom of my screen. It only appears in Chrome which I use as...

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Just as the Coalition surges ahead to the lead in this election and Mr. Rudd's increasing signs of rude ill-health are threatening to burst out from his rapidly expanding jowls, fitness freakoid and PM apparent Tony Abbott, who has been restraining his normally excessive over-...

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This TED talk from 2008 was recommended to me by my piano teacher. If you haven't already seen it it's well worth taking a look. If you have seen it, a second look wouldn't be wasted. [ted id=286] After watching it I realised I had a considerable challenge in front of me - to...

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Krugman periodically goes into bat for maths in economics and invariably trivialises the concerns of critics. He says that maths helps focus arguments and weed out error. Too right it does. And so do words. So shouldn't we be using each to their best effect and not give oursel...

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To an even greater extent than previous election campaigns, this one seems to consist almost entirely of lies and grossly misleading mischaracterisations of opponents' policies and performance. Kevin Rudd's claim of a $70 billion Coalition black hole, his claim that Abbott has...

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The tragic situation in Egypt is so complex and unpredictable that one can find many opinions on what various groups and people in Egypt should do, but precious few predictions by ‘experts’ on what is actually going to happen. You can rest assured that whatever does actually h...

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As you may know over the last few years I have been arguing for a reduction in the price of common generic medications in Australia. Due to policy shortcomings, Australia currently pays some of the highest prices in the world for many of its generic medications. For example, a...

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Make of it what you will. HT: Deloitte Access Economics' David Rumbens . And yet aggregate consumer sentiment is not much affected by a change of government: Typically the data hasn’t shown big changes in sentiment in the lead up to an election. Instead, a switch in who is hap...

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With the next Australian election only a few weeks away, now is a good time to say which economic micro and macro policies you think a next government can/should implement. Around and in between past elections I gave you my list of things to do and things not to do (see here a...

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Paul Fritjers is lamenting the loss of intellectual freedom and freedom of expression produced by an odd rule of social interaction: the person in pain gets to own the truth and those without pain adjust. So for example, people with undesired traits such as low intelligence or...

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For some people, other human beings are only ever a means to an end. The source of their self-esteem is their ability to realise their own personal vision. They see themselves as powerful creators and believe ideas like empathy, altruism and justice are just tricks the weak us...

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Adam Smith's theory of the market was a theory of human connection - which I tried to bring out in this essay. Anyway, it's not surprising that with the passage of over a quarter of a millennium, that connection is becoming closer or at least developing new facets. Or perhaps...

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Troppo readers who have followed my meanderings about asylum seeker policy over the years will realise that I have some fairly basic differences with the Greens on that issue ((although not on the fundamental fact that many if not most of them need our compassion and support –...

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Much as I prefer to ignore the current session of our great national game of Politics, the Rigmarole I haven't managed to shut out all of the media kibbitzing. One little item of gaming news that slipped past my mental guard was the fact that Tony Abbott has picked up an exten...

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Kevin Rudd's announcement yesterday of a Special Economic Zone in the Northern Territory surely comes very close to the silliest election promise of the last decade, matched only by Tony Abbott's almost identical promise a couple of months ago. The only positive aspect of eith...

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All the kings horses and all the kings men were still trying to put Humpty together again.

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One of the more odd rules of social interaction is that the person in pain gets to own the truth and those without pain adjust. Think for instance about the words used to describe undesired traits that some people have to bear their whole life, such as low intelligence or high...

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In Part I of this article I outlined the major shortcomings of the Refugees Convention and traced the ways it was contributing to the current influx of boat-borne asylum seekers to Australia and the ongoing political controversy that has engendered. ((I am not suggesting that...

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On Friday 9th August Nicolas Rothwell published this article in The Australian on the state of indigenous art in Australia. Nicolas's article details how, over the past 6 years, the old free market indigenous art sector has largely been replaced by a state backed official Indi...

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I have a dataset of about 20,000 Chinese adults, a random sample of the population in 2008-2010 from all over China. Guess how many per 1000 adult women in that dataset say they have had children without being married? If you posed the question in Australia or the US, you shou...

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On Thursday 8th august the Australian ran this article by Nicolas Rothwell about the toxic debacle that is the reality of the governments Artists Resale Royalty scheme. The article concluded with an examination of the circular nature of the government funded lobbyists for ARR:...

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Liberal Catholic priest and legal academic Father Frank Brennan thinks Australia's current asylum seeker policies, which are effectively bipartisan despite the electorally-driven sound and fury, exhibit a disturbing "race to the bottom" tendency. Sydney Morning Herald columnis...

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That power must reside elsewhere, with the best and brightest, with those who have surveyed the perils of the world and know what it takes to meet them. Those deep within the security apparatus, within the charmed circle, must therefore make the decision, on America's behalf,...

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Remarkable letter written from, and about, Germany by DH Lawrence in 1928. For all the beauty of his descriptions, it feels like divination rather than reportage. Immediately you are over the Rhine, the spirit of place has changed. There is no more attempt at the bluff of geni...

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George H W Bush (father of George W, who had one less initial and a lot fewer functioning cortical neurons) divided US public opinion with this famous declaration in March 1990: I do not like broccoli and I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it...

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The Lowy Interpreter is running a series where their experts explain, in (theoretically) 100 words or less, what they regard as the most important international policy issue of this campaign. I'm intrigued enough to think that the thoughts of a interested, but non-member, of t...

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Have a look at the graph below, taken from www.earth-policy.org , which conveys the stylised fact that greater economic development leads populations to eat more meat. The graph shows that total meat consumption in China increased from 10 million tonnes in 1980 to around 70 no...

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Here’s a simple problem. Due to tradition, law and custom about the way we deal with debt and contracts and the like, a great deal of human activity requires the transport of pieces of paper from person to person. The information on this paper does not carry the same force if...

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Nearly "every problem with the Republican Party today could be cured by a neocon revival", says David Brooks . Brooks isn't talking about the hawkish approach to foriegn policy that urged US military involvement in the middle east, he's talking about the domestic policy ideas...

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One type of news item I notice often – because it confirms a belief that I like to maintain – reports that a recent psychological study has found that the most effective way to give yourself a quick happiness fix is to do someone else a favour. The most recent I remember repor...

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Felix Barbalet is a data scientist and economist working in Canberra who has recently launched http://www.APSindex.com and https://www.APSjobs.info . He is a good fellow and on discussing his new websites with him, I suggested that he give us a post about the remarkable produc...

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There are always more books to read than time to read them. But Paul Frijters' and Gigi Foster's An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks is on my shortlist. Foster's preface is personal and captivating: A longer-term cost that has come from working on this book...

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The journal 'Agenda', the policy journal of the College of Business and Economics at The Australian National University just released a piece of mine called ' Universities as Royal Courts'. One can download it free of charge (just click on the link). It continues my long-runni...

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One of the popular economic memes of the 2000s has been that Australian needs more infrastructure. It has filled out many a think-tank report . In the form of the National Broadband Network , it helped Labor win government in 2007. It has led to a current crop of serious propo...

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Don’t worry, I’m not after a date or anything. I won’t be stalking you round the hills of New England. It’s more the sort of crush I had on James Stewart after I saw The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, or Yves Montand whenever he played a resistance fighter. It’s a political kin...

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Like many, I was puzzled by the transformation in Gillard's public persona post-2010. The warmth, humour and sparkle she'd often displayed in parliament and elsewhere vanished. What remained was wooden, distant, usually dull and often irritating. Judith Brett recently made som...

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For decades the gun lobby has told us that guns don't kill people. If only people would stop pointing them at themselves and each other, guns would be completely harmless. It's not the availability of guns that's the problem, they say it's the individual's decision to pull the...

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I recall going to a lecture by Naomi Wolf at the Australian National Gallery in Canberra when she burst onto the scene as the author of The Beauty Myth which seemed to promise some new beginning after the sixties' and seventies' 'second wave' feminism. The obsession with women...

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Last week a prostitute was murdered on the streets of St Kilda in Melbourne, where I am currently living part of the time. Journalist Wendy Squires yesterday drew parallels between that crime and the horrific rape and murder of ABC employee Jill Meagher by serial rapist Adryan...

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Luddites have been with us from the start and always been proven wrong. New types of jobs invariably emerged to make up for those lost through technology, and our standard of living climbed ever higher. No surprise, really. Markets, providing they're relatively unhindered, are...

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I was visiting Wikipedia a couple of days ago when I happened upon the image to the right. "Ah, a new feature, how nice." I thought. Then a click took me to a dead standard Bing search. The "What's this?" text didn't activate anything. I thought "well that is odd, Wikipedia is...

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“Welcome all ye listeners, today we are discussing the new ‘Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’, colloquially known as DSM-5, the sequel to the hugely influential and popular DSM-4 that really put the American Psychiatric Association on the map. We are joi...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kFTtNKUivKk Well there I was, minding my own business - which as you know all too well is my wont, nay my metier, when what should I happen upon on the wires but the Flinders St Railway Station Redevelopment Competition si...

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Can't remember who first pointed me to ' Becks in Paris '. Whoever it was, I'm grateful. [The] blog imagines Beckham’s internal monologue as he collides with the Parisian intellectual tradition – the glittering surface of a footballing icon cracked open by existentialism. Gold...

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There are parallel conversations going on in social policy, says Matt Cowgill , "Values on one level, data another". How values and data interact is an interesting question. A decade ago, I was researching the debate over poverty. In 2003 the Senate Standing Committee on Commu...

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Today's Banking Day has the story of how Aussie John Symond avoided nearly $6 m in tax through an artificial arrangement which the Tax Office 'looked through' to send him a bill for the money. In 2004, the Australian Taxation Office started looking into Symond's tax affairs, a...

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(warning: the below is a bit of a rant!) The obesity epidemic is not just one of the greatest (mental) health problems of our time, set to become a more prevalent problem than hunger and more expensive to health systems than smoking, but it is also spawning new magical beliefs...

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“ they exert every variety of talent on a lower ground…and may be said to live and act in a submind”...... VS Naipaul “The Air Conditioned Bubble" Writing in 1984 about the republican convention of 1984 (the triumphant beginning of Ronald Regans second term), V S Naipaul wrote...

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Today was a pleasant day, right up until I came home and caught the news on ABC 24: Kevin Rudd has come up with the penultimate solution to the asylum seeker problem : Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says asylum seekers who arrive by boat will have no chance of being settled in Aust...

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Vote buying is a recurring theme in elections in ‘emerging democracies’. There are strong allegations it happened in the 2006 and 2012 Mexican elections . US elections normally have some party accusing the other of vote-buying ( through offering free food at election stations...

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Jon Altman is a Professor at the ANU Center for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research. His submission to the review is long and deeply grounded in long-term, first-hand knowledge of the indigenous art sector and remote area indigenous affairs more generally. It is a must read ....

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That Government bureaucracies at times create 'phantom employees' to publicly argue the 'public' interest-need for.... more bureaucrats, is a well known historical truth. What follows is what Paul Frijters called: A classic case of what Niskanen spoke about. The review has fin...

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I've written frequently on Troppo about the many ways in which equity and efficiency are friends , rather than enemies, although of course it depends on context. There are some ways and circumstances in which the two are in tension with one another. In any event, here's a fasc...

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Robert Waldman (who is unpleasantly aggressive and arrogant in his comments, but I digress) shows how Friedman's contribution to the idea that the Phillips curve would change as expectations changed wasn't much of a contribution at all. It was all in Samuelson and Solow - only...

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Pretty interesting stuff : In this article, we analyze the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, those who joined it, and its social and political impact by combining a wide range of archival data sources with data from the 1920 and 1930 U.S censuses. We find that individuals who joined the Kla...

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I was travelling through Los Angeles, New York, and Washington the last two weeks in a book-promotion tour . It was my first real visit to the US so I was collecting impressions on the people and the culture there. Some loose impressions from my egalitarian (Dutch/Australian)...

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Parts I & II our review of the Review. As of Monday 15 July the web page for Office Of The Arts review of its Artists Resale Royalty scheme lists 40 submissions. All but a few of these submissions are unfavorable to the scheme. In his submission , Ben Quilty, Australian War ar...

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http://youtu.be/ge7i60GuNRg

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Warning: Enthusiasm Alert. I've just got home from seeing the Crucible by Arthur Miller at the Melbourne Theatre Company. I thought it was a very good production. I thought I wasn't going to like David Wenham much at the outset as he seemed a bit strained. But that's perhaps b...

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"Welcome to the era of hedged bets and lowered expectations", says the cover story of Time Magazine . A poll of 18 to 29-year olds, found 65 per cent agreed that it will be harder for their group to live as comfortably as previous generations. But despite the lowered expectati...

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For 20 years some Australian school systems have been world leaders in giving schools more autonomy, and in trying to increase competition among them. Many countries are following suit, in the hope that policies to increase school competition will improve student performance....

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This is just some expanded and consolidated musing from Twitter. A few days ago I was thinking about The Fall of Icarus, the 16th century Dutch painting after Bruegel. It's probably most popular for near absence of the ostensible subject, Icarus, who is barely shown in the bac...

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Hugh White on Rudd and foreign policy : All this should make Rudd overwhelmingly the better choice as Prime Minister as far as foreign policy is concerned. But with Rudd nothing is ever that simple. Back in 2007 he came to office with lots of fresh ideas about how to position...

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The adoption of ARR as policy for governments (in about 2002) was driven by a small cluster of publicly funded, 'arts societies' management representatives, that were/are closely linked to a global network of copyright collection societies managements. The real aim of these lo...

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Bowling for Fascism: Social Capital and the Rise of the Nazi Party in Weimar Germany, 1919-33 by Shanker Satyanath, Nico Voigtlaender, Hans-Joachim Voth - #19201 (DAE POL) Abstract: Social capital - a dense network of associations facilitating cooperation within a community -...

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Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies th...

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The Muslim brotherhood in Egypt is currently feeling the full force of the repression apparatus of the military and economic elite. Sad to say, but the torture chambers will be busy at this very moment, demoralising the elected government and its core supporters. A sad week. I...

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I first got to know Tom Watson. OK I've never met him but we've corresponded when he'd just resigned as a Minister in Gordon Brown's Government doing many things to promote open government and I was doing the government 2.0 Taskforce. In any event, I've marvelled at Tom's morp...

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Greetings from Washington where we did two launches on 'An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups and Networks' . The launches went very well, thanks for asking. Due to its success, the book has gone kindle. I was just alerted to the video that UNSW put out on a discussion we...

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Cooperation under Democracy and Authoritarian Norms By: Björn Vollan, Yexin Zhou, Andreas Landmann, Biliang Hu, Carsten Herrmann-Pillath There is ample evidence for a “democracy premium”. Laws that have been implemented via election lead to a more cooperative behavior compared...

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Behind the contrived fluoro-jacketed appearances at workplaces, behind the simplistic sloganeering, is someone with a far more considered view of the world than his critics suppose. Abbott is comprehensible, but only on his own terms. You don’t have to like those terms, but it...

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Iwrote a report, much as set out in Part 1 , and sent it to the WA Equal Opportunity Commission and other people at the end of January, 1990. The Human Rights Commission in Sydney phoned in February to say they were very concerned and would be interested to see what the WA EO...

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"For too long, progressives have been scared off issues of family structure and parenting by a fear of being misinterpreted as blaming some of the hardest-working people in society", says Andrew Leigh . But for many of today's progressives, raising issues about single parentho...

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I just read Andrew Leigh’s new book that he will launch July 1 st in Canberra , July 2 nd in Melbourne, and July 3 rd in Sydney. I encourage you to attend one of these because it’s a ‘good yarn’. In this new book, Andrew makes a plea for an egalitarian Australia that values ma...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="460"] Balls around the world[/caption] Like Adam Smith said "In civilized society [man] stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship...

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There have been some recent racism incidents and the awkwardness of speaking up about it. I am way ahead of them. This was written in 1991. “X” and “Y” have been substituted here for bus company names. Blacks to the Back of the Bus, Part One It is after midnight. The coach is...

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I didn't know this - until my son told me. From this website . Sometimes it is necessary for doctors to get access to the heart either for diagnosis or treatment. The simplest way to do this might seem to be to hack open the chest and have a look at the organ itself. Obviously...

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This year, and the last, the lovely Lowy Institute Poll has produced a headline grabbing finding that Australians, and particularly young Australians, are ambivalent about democracy . The search for meaning was on. This year it was attributed, in part, to a generation who have...

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Fallout from the Snowden saga continues to spread. Take Hong Kong's press release on Sunday: Mr Edward Snowden left Hong Kong today (June 23) on his own accord for a third country through a lawful and normal channel. The US Government earlier on made a request to the HKSAR Gov...

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Does the Market Value Value-Added? Evidence from Housing Prices After a Public Release of School and Teacher Value-Added by Scott A. Imberman, Michael F. Lovenheim - #19157 (ED PE) Value-added data are an increasingly common evaluation tool for schools and teachers. Many schoo...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1uyQZNg2vE

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I'm doing some research for a talk I'm giving in New Zealand to heads of private schools - the invitation for which came from a similar talk I gave to the Australian Heads of Independent Schools Association. I'm sruiking the wonders of education 2.0 about which I've waxed and...

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The PC has just published and sent me a nice little booklet called the PC Productivity Update . It's the first of its kind and the new chair Peter Harris tells us in his Foreword that "Despite the best efforts of statisticians and economists, the measurement and interpretation...

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OK, well that heading was a little extreme but one thing that's been increasingly giving me the hebes is the extent to which those organising 'think' sessions focus on profile. I recently attended one such roundtable attended by all sorts of worthies, but it was pretty hard to...

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Scandals about politicians lying are a staple of our media, with the politician Mal Brough saga being the latest installment in Australia. At a dinner with others of his party there was a ‘mock-menu’ that included sexists jokes, made up by the restaurant owner. His protestatio...

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As Troppodillians may know, I don't follow the daily political chit chat unless I somehow get inveigled into it which I usually do at election time and also when debates seem to carry electric cultural significance about something that I have some particular interest in. I was...

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Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) is one of our more rapacious copyright maximalist organisations. It is a nice illustration of why things that sound like nice ideas don't always work out. CAL was dreamt up when it was thought that photocopiers might damage incentives to publish,...

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Institutional Quality, Culture, and Norms of Cooperation : Evidence from a Behavioral Field Experiment, Alessandra Cassar (University of San Francisco), Giovanna d'Adda (University opf Birmingham), Pauline Grosjean (School of Economics, the University of New South Wales). We d...

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Recently I published a post suggesting that the performance of the Rudd/Gillard governments in policy terms was actually quite impressive . On the other hand, Julia Gillard's ability to sell that message has been spectacularly poor, for a variety of reasons some of which I don...

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I wrote a good while ago about the economics of doing well by doing good on the internet and when I received a curious email from someone with whom I was conducting a correspondence I decided to write the column below. I've just tried to find it on Google, and it seems I didn'...

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http://youtu.be/Lzi4o6cXilo Attentive Troppodillians will be aware of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation which I chair. After looking awfully like our 'runway' was coming to an end (as we stay in startup land) our first and still flagship program is growing strongly ....

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After decades of listening to jingles, slogans, and scare campaigns, it's odd to hear a political campaign strategist complain about short attention spans. But in Monday's Financial Review Mark Textor grumbled that the "the collective attention deficit disorder of those online...

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In three previous parts , I posed the puzzle of the measured increase in mental health problems (depression, anxiety, and obesity) across the Western world since the 1950s and briefly discussed the pros and cons of the main cultural explanation doing the round. Here I want to...

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Do Stimulant Medications Improve Educational and Behavioral Outcomes for Children with ADHD? by Janet Currie, Mark Stabile, Lauren E. Jones http://papers.nber.org/papers/W19105?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ntw Abstract: We examine the effects of a policy change...

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This is a guest post by Rob Bray, economist and research fellow in the School of Business and Economics, Australian National University. Thanks to Rob for his contribution to an important conversation. [caption id="attachment_23392" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Courtesy Ma...

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Two major changes happened in my life on Thursday, one pleasant the other not so. The pleasant change was the arrival of my Yamaha P35 Digital Piano in the house. The other change was the departure of RB, one of my fellow boarders here in my present sanctuary and sacred place...

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As people reading this blog would know, I'm no fan of Richard Dawkins writings on God. However, having seen this video, I have to admit to preferring Dawkins to this guy, whose attack on the four horsemen of militant atheism I broadly agree with. On top of his superior manner,...

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In the two previous parts , I posed the puzzle of the measured increase in mental health problems (depression, anxiety, and obesity in particular) across the Western world since the 1950s and in Anglo-Saxon countries in particular. Here, I take it as given that this is real (a...

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Mark Crosby hrumphs about “Abenomics”. I put “Abenomics” in quotation marks because it’s not really about the current policy direction in Japan —especially since it doesn’t the monetary policy aspects which are both the most interesting, novel and experimental part that warran...

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Long after Ken Parish published his post You Can Survive on Newstart But You Can't Live On It on January 6th it's still attracting a steady daily trickle of readers. It also attracts the occasional comment describing survival on Newstart, most recently this one from Brenton: B...

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The most striking thing I found about watching the ABC docudrama Whitlam: The Power and the Passion over the last two weeks was the extent of the parallels between Gough's crew and the current Gillard government. We (or at least I) often think that the Internet and the general...

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I've always thought that there were strong positive externalities in home ownership. As John Hewson got into trouble for saying all those years ago, which houses and neighbourhoods will be better looked after those where people have a strong pecuniary stake or those where they...

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With racism and racially-charged language much in the news right now, we're getting some interesting signals about people's beliefs. One of the most interesting popped up again in this Mama Mia article by The Project's Charlie Pickering, titled " I know nothing about racism in...

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Last week, I posed the puzzle of the decline in mental health from around 1950 till now in most Western countries (with some countries showing a plateau since the 90s). I was talking in particular about the increase in depression, anxiety, and obesity. One of the reactions (by...

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I concluded my last post on this topic with asking rhetorically whether I was optimistic that we'll find our way through, and what measures might be taken to maximise our chances of a happy ending. Here's the second part of the argument which was published in an edited form on...

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Nick Cater is sensitive about accusations of racism. In his book The Lucky Culture he writes: To judge someone as prejudiced is character assessment; to call them racist or, even worse, a racist, is character assassination. One can be a little bit prejudiced or a little bit ig...

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http://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water-1 http://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water-2 HT Brainpickings from a while ago. [H]ere's something . . . that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is a...

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I have just completed a lengthy answer to a very thoughtful comment on my previous post on climate change . And because the raises lots of Very Big issues about how one talks and reasons about ethics, I thought I'd exercise my prerogative and turn the exchange into a post for...

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Prelude: Lento It's after midnight and the other members of the household are either asleep or pursuing their own consolations in the silence of their own rooms. So, much as I might desire the consolation of recorded orchestral music played at concert hall volume, it just woul...

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http://youtu.be/nuIiqKytvnU I saw a preview tonight. Incredible, fabulous stuff. Go if you can.

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Interlude: Ruminations on 'the costs of speech', monkeys and Dexter In The 2013 PEN Free Voices lecture, reproduced on the ABC's Religion and Ethics web site , Waleed Aly makes the following observations on Freedom of Speech: … let us grind this out, beginning with a trite obs...

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Here’s a true modern puzzle for you: why is the rate of mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and obesity, increasing in the US, Australia, urban China, and most Western countries? Which mental health problems again? Depression, anxiety, and obesity are the bi...

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Simply Delightful : Conservative billionaire Gina Rinehart called for the sterilization of the poor today, arguing that the only way to alleviate poverty is to stop the "underclasses" from multiplying. In a video uploaded to her official YouTube account, the Australian mining...

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Stepping out in her new role for the Guardian, Katharine Murphy contacted me and asked me for an economic question to put to the PM. It was nice of her to ask, and I thought it a worthy challenge, but couldn't really come up with much for a day or so. I didn't want it to be a...

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Cross posted from the Lowy Interpreter Blog .* I was contemplating writing a post on Martin Wolf's latest Jeremiad on climate change when Sam Roggeveen sent me a link to his own post asking for my response to his musings on the same subject. So here's my response – or the firs...

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A Peculiarly Australian Cause Celebre In one of the less nebulous sections of the Liberals' curiously fisk-resistant manifesto i , you'll find this special promise for Andrew Bolt and his fans and supporters: Protecting freedom of speech – supporting an open media We will prot...

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In Saturday's Australian , Rebecca Weisser argues that the ABC is biased. To fix the problem she suggests creating "a commission of inquiry to rework the charter so that it stipulates that balance in programming is fundamental to the operation of the ABC". For political elites...

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On reading Sylvia Nasar's Grand Pursuit which I'm enjoying, I have been re-reading Keynes' fine essay on Marshall. One real mystery - at least for someone who doesn't know more like me - is Marshall's famous opposition to women's equality at Cambridge. Anyway Keynes has a sect...

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VIDEO: Goodes gutted by girl’s name-calling In the absence of Jacques intervention, Wordpress's coding interferes with my ability to 'embed' this video on Troppo but I recommend it. Funny how my team and those around it can be depended on to play the role of baddie - though of...

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Once again we're arranging ourselves into our usual trenches. Are you a free trader or a protectionist? And so we get the usual rehearsal of lessons from our recent experience as Ford closes. Fair enough. If you have to consume the lesson in a single slogan I guess "don't assi...

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This is sort of in the vein of the intermittent series ( 1 , 2 ), its adopted sibling and an older post on "hollowing out" . But it's also much less thought out. Earlier today, following the announcement that Ford would shut its Geelong plan t, Scott Steel tweeted The lesson t...

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As I said a few months ago , tax evasion is the big cliff in terms of the future of the EU project. It was thus fascinating to see the tax evasion games played out at the latest ‘summit’ In Brussels yesterday. To understand what really goes on at these summits, imagine yoursel...

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Well, as Ned Kelly may have said on the scaffold, "I suppose it had to come to this". Ford has been prosecuting a strategy of risk minimisation which has principally been about investment minimisation in Australia for at least a decade and naturally enough, if you don't invest...

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O ne of the most successful memes of the right in the last decade or so is that redistribution is the politics of envy. Of course politicians have to appeal to the emotions, and they have to appeal to all denominators including the lowest common ones. Well they don't have to a...

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Something I picked up recently in San Francisco. OK I don't own it, but got to play with one waiting in a queue and talking to a developer waiting to get into a function at the conference I was attending. I was impressed. It looks a bit weird, but you ignore it until you want...

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Jeff Sparrow on 'the Imbecilic Andrew Bolt' and Unseen Academicals : ...“My problem is not,” [writes Alecia Simmonds], "that our public sphere harbours ill-educated members (like the imbecilic Andrew Bolt who never made it past first-year uni)." Sorry? Anyone who doesn’t posse...

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With the Gonski reforms expected to be rolled out across Australia in the coming 5 years, it is handy to reflect on what actually are the basic challenges for school reform in Australia. A view of the underlying issues helps one to judge the likely outcomes of the current refo...

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Thanks to commenter Sancho for alerting me to the following post, by Sarah Kliff, at the Washington Post's Wonkblog (via Reading is for Snobs ). It had me chuckling all the way to the bottle-o and back on this dreary, rainy Melbourne morning: Readers ask, we answer! What happe...

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http://youtu.be/C8IlMYeS23w

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In an excellent recent piece on his own website , Timothy Devinney looks at how the compensation of Australian Vice Chancellors compares to those of the UK and the US. He gave me permission to re-use his calculations. Below I give you the guts of his story which, if one uses u...

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From the Bank of Canada's Financial Stability Review - Dec 2012 .

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Meanwhile political correctness idiocy proceeds apace. Here's an email I received today. Your expertise and experience . . . makes you ideally placed to inform this research. We would appreciate the opportunity to capture your thoughts . . . . The interviews will be carried ou...

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The book launch tour of Australia ended last week with a visit to the Melbourne Institute, where Deborah Cobb-Clark kindly hosted the last in our marathon-series of 5 launches. They all were a great success, with the publisher actually running out of books for the last one and...

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(You can catch up with Part I here .) One thing that's become obvious as I've read through the CIS's corporatist manifesto is that their TARGET30 campaign is very much a moral crusade with two goals. First, to reduce the burden (of taxation) on future generations. Second, to e...

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One of the peculiar features of debates about big monolithic infrastructure projects, such as universal broadband networks and high-speed rail lines, is the way their supporters talk about them in public. To advocates, the wisdom of these projects is obvious. You can never hav...

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By: Philipp Ager (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hes:wpaper:0038&r=his Wealthy elites may end up retarding economic development for their own interests. This paper examines how the historical planter elite of the Southern US affected economic devel...

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A Spectre is Haunting Australia: the spectre of Corporatism. Since March this year the Centre for Independent Studies has been promoting its new manifesto ' TARGET30 - towards smaller government and future prosperity '. TARGET30's stated goal is to get Australia's total govern...

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Australia needs intellectuals, says Nick Cater. In his new book The Lucky Culture he writes: A nation is entitled to look to its intellectuals to articulate its common purpose, to pull together loose strands and write a narrative that says where it has come from and where it i...

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Economic Conditions and Child Abuse by Jason M. Lindo, Jessamyn Schaller, Benjamin Hansen - #18994 (CH HE LE LS) Abstract: Although a huge literature spanning several disciplines documents an association between poverty and child abuse, researchers have not found persuasive ev...

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*Guest post by Paul "Gummo Trotsky" Bamford (I've invited Paul to join the Troppo stable/pony club, and am pleased to advise that he's accepted. So expect more from Paul very soon). The mythical – or legendary if you so prefer – figure of the dole bludger has haunted our polit...

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Tomorrow, there is a book launch of ' An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks ' at UNSW, hosted by Professor Chris Styles, Director of the Australian Graduate School of Business. It starts at 6pm and is in the JBR Theatre (AGSM building) of the Kensington Campu...

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Two years ago, I wrote a Troppo post on Coles' decision to sell milk for a dollar a litre . I took particular aim at the claim by consumer group Choice that regulators should investigate whether Coles is engaged in predatory pricing . Said Choice: “It is difficult to see why a...

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It's always been hard to pin down who 'the elites' are why we are supposed reject them as un-Australian. A new book review by Tony Abbott offers some clues. It also hints at why attacks on 'the elites' are likely to backfire for conservatives. In the Spectator Australia , Abbo...

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I've been in San Francisco for over a week now and have been living near Haight Ashbury which I've only driven through previously. In any event I looked it up in Wikipedia and 1967's Summer of Love was quite a production with 100,000 odd people turning up and living from hand...

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(Cross-posted at shorewalker.com ) I like trains. For a while when I was a kid, I spent Saturdays clambering around Adelaide's Mile End Railway Museum and most of my pocket money buying items for an elaborate train set. Which may explain how I found myself today reading KPMG's...

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In 1989, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) was created with the hope of creating a local competitor to the University of Queensland. The resources given to it by the community have been immense, with real estate and subsidies worth many billions. With its prime locatio...

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Imagine yourself to be in the mythical Land of Beyond where you need minions to do a dirty job that men with honour would refuse to do. A classic trick in this situation is to pick people despised by the rest of society who are thus dependent on protection and will simply do w...

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In the terms of reference to the recent study into the non-viability of high-speed rail from Brisbane to Melbourne it is promised that “It will draw on expertise from the public and private sectors”. So, who did this study that concluded that Australia would need 50 years and...

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The mythology is that Thatcher came, saw, and conquered. Her enemies credit her with destroying the public sector by privatizations. Her friends credit her with the same, but also say she championed frugal spending and was fierce when it came to British independence. She suppo...

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During the mid 1970s Thatcher was listening to a member of the Conservative Research Department staff explain why the party should take a pragmatic 'middle way ' between left and right. But before he could finish Thatcher reached into her briefcase and pulled out a copy of Fri...

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See below for how my co-author Gigi Foster has been explaining key facets of our joint book to Tim Harcourt in anticipation of launches in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. Enjoy! [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk7eac53oG4]

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"Hostility towards benefit claimants is founded upon a moral instinct", says Chris Dillow . The instinct is the norm of reciprocity. According to this norm, people are entitled to the community's help when they need it, but must also contribute in return. According to Dillow,...

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From its beginnings 70 years ago, the Institute of Public Affairs has struggled against class war. According to a 1948 issue of the IPA Review , the post war period saw a "revolutionary change" in the distribution of income: "The lower incomes are now enjoying a much larger sh...

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The US Fed is printing money to get the US out of a recession. The ECB is also printing money, with the same target in mind. In limited amounts, this is a good idea, but the central banks are going about it the wrong way: they are essentially printing money for banks and polit...

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Let us pretend you are the benevolent elected dictator in Australia. It is 1980 and you have to decide on education and migration policy. Your wily political adviser comes to you with the following plan: he tells you it would be popular and cheap to stop inflicting difficult a...

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Today's column in the Age and SMH Public private partnerships (PPPs) haven't been such a happy experiment. Using private money to build arterial roads just increases their cost because private capital requires much higher returns than government borrowing. But I've long wonder...

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As a lifelong and warm supporter of the ideal of a United States of Europe (USE) stretching from the coast of Ireland to the Urals, I was interested to see the recent wrangling’s inside the EU about its future. The UK Prime Minister David Cameron has now promised a referendum...

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The smell of death, the river's breath. The cones and arms of gods, the barks of thin grey dogs. Beggar guards that corner you underneath a spire, Niggards that tell you of child beggars for hire. Students dreaming of Oxbridge, night and day, Studying books and looks the Engli...

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Word has just come in from Europe that there will in fact be a deal between the EU and Cyprus about keeping the banks in Cyprus alive. The basics of the deal are now that one of the two major banks (Laiki) will go bankrupt with losses to junior and senior bond holders. It is t...

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It takes a lot for a seasoned partisan pro like Dennis to react like this. It means he's not 'in the tent' and that's not much fun, especially if you still work for these guys on a freelance basis - though Dennis has plenty of other clients for his writing business. In any eve...

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On a previous thread, my counter-intuitive claim that verbal definitions are superfluous to science survived objections. I have been wondering if some further unconventional notions would survive a Troppodile attack. Because natural science is effective, I suggested that we sh...

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Is there discrimination on colour in Queensland? In order to find out if black and Indian people are a discriminated ‘out group’ in Queensland, together with Redzo Mujcic I carried out a large-scale experiment involving bus drivers in Brisbane. We sent test subjects of various...

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The Australian Pharmaceutical benefit scheme is a monopsony buy-in arrangement for medicines run by ministries. It currently costs tax payers about ten billion dollars per year (see page 3 here ), up from a paltry 149,000 pounds in its first year of operation, 1948! The upward...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="284"] White to play and win: Click on the image to play the game.[/caption] Meanwhile, in case you're interested, the Candidates matches have begun. We are two rounds in with the four strongest players in the world in an eight man (yes,...

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The graph below tells you the average number of hours worked in Australia from 1978 to 2013 per person per month aged 15-64. The key thing to note is that there has been remarkably little change over time in terms of the peaks of the cycle: in 1980 the average Australian betwe...

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Here's a paper that may appeal to some people's priors, and might have appealed to my priors before I got some experience on this. Most of my attempts to generate telework for workers have failed, not for lack of decency on their behalf but for their lack of motivation and org...

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As opposition leader Mark Latham vowed to wage war on poverty . It's an idea he revives for his latest Quarterly Essay, Not Dead Yet: Labor's Post-Left Future . According to Latham, poverty isn't about a lack of money. The dole is generous enough to cover people's basic needs,...

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The usual political debate inside our country revolves around conspicuous things concerning the top leaders, like whether someone has been overtly corrupt, promised something too loudly that they could not really deliver, is handing out money to worthy or unworthy causes, or i...

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Is Economics a House Divided? Analysis of Citation Networks Date: 2013-02-13 By: Sina Önder, Ali (Uppsala Center for Fiscal Studies) Terviö, Marko (Aalto University and HECER) We investigate divisions within the citation network in economics using citation data between 1990 an...

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Click on the image for the website from which it comes. Detail on the makeup of the index in the legend at bottom of the graphic. While unusually low female labour force participation sounds like bad news, I'm not sure that the higher the female labour-force participation the...

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The platform this is from has an 'embed' function but Wordpress has it's own, which, unless you're as clever as Jacques means you can't embed anything other than those sites they have programmed for. In any event you can click here .

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I heard that the South Australian Government had released a new logo on the radio. It was a bit of a talking point. So I wondered about it. Wondered if I wouldn't like it much and get to like it - like the Commonwealth Bank's one, or would just think it was a silly waste of ti...

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As I've argued on this blog before, standards are an important public good - and in the age of information, an increasingly important public good. Here's some good evidence of the value of high quality standards. The nascent market for “green” real estate in Beijing , by Siqi...

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The Decline of the Self-Employment Rate in Australia,Atalay, Kadir, Kim, Woo-Yung, Whelan, Stephen URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:syd:wpaper:2123/8925&r=ent This paper using the Australian panel data(HILDA) investigates the declining trend of self-employment rate in Austral...

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These two images dominate a marketing email that's just arrived in my in tray from Olsen Irwin Galleries. Guy Maestri Ball's Pyramid No.10 oil on linen 183 x 152cm 2013 Click to view details Emma Van Leest Ingenue archival paper, foamcore and glue 51 x 31.5cm 2013 Click to vie...

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In the past month, I ran posts on the limits to certainty in economics. On the theory side, I talked about how mathematical tractability limited the economic phenomena you can describe well with models. On the empirical side, the inability in social science to measure any abst...

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People of Groupon, After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding - I was fired today. If you're wondering why ... you haven't been paying attention. From controversial metrics in...

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Well everyone in my family and extended family are proud of Angus Gruen, my nephew who left Paris (thus avoiding dinner with his uncle and a burn under the seine in the Troppo Mercedes Sports 350 SE), turned up jetlagged and sick at Monash Uni to participate in the Physics Oly...

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You're invited to view more works here . Alas, there are no more works - at least on the page where they say you can "view all works". But I like this one.

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In this OECD report of falling investment, the culprits are "international uncertainty", "the euro crisis" and catchall "a deepening mistrust in the global state of affairs". Inadequate demand? Well it doesn't rate a mention.

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Here's Dennis Glover's go at articulating his dismay at the kinds of things I expressed dismay about here . I've always been amazed at the extent of antagonism that Labor holds towards the Greens. It seems so obvious that the right relationship between them is as occasionally...

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The prisoner's dilemma is a simple and famous illustration of a problem that's very common. One of the areas in which it is common is the arms race where two parties competing with each other each invest to outdo the other. This is visible in lots of situations. In some areas...

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Do we know in social science what it is that we are measuring or does any bit of data we look at on closer inspection reveal more complexity, no matter how close we look, just like a fractal? Another way to put this is to ask whether anything we measure is solid, concrete and...

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https://twitter.com/NGruen1/status/1529689205420720129 Herewith today's column in the Age and SMH . George Orwell was a stickler for plain and simple English in public discourse. He argued that one could escape some of “the worst follies of orthodoxy” by simplifying one’s lang...

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I went to see Lincoln last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. The first five minutes was pretty dreadful with Lincoln meeting a couple of black soldiers who repeated the various lines of the Gettysburg Address to him. Ugggghhh. Death by anachronism. But the film gets down to the...

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I enjoyed Waleed Aly's latest National Times column . But the more I read it, the more I wonder what he means. "Labor has lost the plot, and the narrative" says the headline in the Age . According to Aly, Governments thrive on narrative and Labor doesn't have one. It's a famil...

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At the moment, I am writing an empirical study into racism in Queensland, which I will report on at a later date. It made me reflect on the basic question of what racism actually is. Let me give you seven possible scenarios to help us reflect on what we think racism is, whilst...

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Yesterday I came across a fairly innocuous story about the seafood industry on AM . It is headlined (on the website) and introduced thus. Australia's seafood capital under pressure from imports TONY EASTLEY: Port Lincoln calls itself Australia's seafood capital. On South Austr...

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Does The John Bates Clark Medal Boost Subsequent Productivity And Citation Success? , Ho Fai Chan, Bruno S. Frey, Jana Gallus, Benno Torgler Despite the social importance of awards, they have been largely disregarded by academic research in economics. This paper investigates w...

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http://youtu.be/5WCTn4FljUQ

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A video and an essay all on the same subject: measurement in the social sciences. Summary: It's really worth doing and doing better, even though it's really hard. First, health statistician and visualisation expert Hans Rosling, co-founder of Gapminder and justly famous for hi...

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It's an old debate with a nice Keynes quote routinely trotted out: The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who...

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Facts are no match for a compelling narrative, says Jonathan Green . Despite the efforts of left leaning bloggers, conservatives are winning arguments and elections because they have better stories. Voters see themselves as struggling with an ever rising cost of living, the fe...

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When I first joined the mortgage broking industry I was struck by all the calls the industry itself made for regulation. Mostly this was not out of some evil scheme that would be easily predicted by Chicago inspired public choice theory. Brokers weren't particularly in favour...

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We empirically test the relationship between hiring discrimination and labour market tightness at the level of the occupation. To this end, we conduct a correspondence test in the youth labour market. In line with theoretical expectations, we find that, compared to natives, ca...

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Your average workshop dinner sees 20 adults or so taken out for free food and drinks, paid for by a hosting university. They get drunk, are rowdy, eat too much, say things they normally wouldn’t, and have to carry on the next day with hangovers and smelly clothes. From a stand...

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Minami Minegishi was in tears . After being caught spending the night at Generations boy-band member Alan Shirahama, the J-pop idol lost her place in AKB48 's Team B and was demoted to 'trainee'. Shortly afterwards she appeared on YouTube, her head shaved, begging the fans for...

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I had the good fortune to see this remarkable thing recently. And I thought as I was in the Sistine Chapel something I've thought before and have probably pontificated about here at pontification central. (Checking I find this post for instance). Why are there not more facsimi...

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What to do in a discipline once it is clear that it is impossible to base one’s knowledge on anything underlying that can be reasonably accurately measured and when you know that you cannot construct a consistent story that ties all the sub-problems in a field together? We are...

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From today's Age and SMH column: A pillar of economic reform is competitive neutrality. We strip government utilities of tax and regulatory advantages over private competitors because we want the best to win, not the most favoured. But banking is a different country. They do t...

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Our language is changing all the time and is probably changing faster than at any time in its history. We now tweet things and Google them and have LOLs AFAIK. In any event there are some things our language is stubborn about. It doesn't like innovation deep in its operating s...

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OK, this post will stick, irritatingly, to the top of the front page for this week to let you all know that I'll be sending off the Crikey subs soon. One reason for the reminder is that I'm surprised that I've received less interest this year - is Crikey sliding in popularity?...

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Nobody knows exactly how much it costs to administer Income Management. But government estimates suggest that it could be as high as $150 a week per person in remote areas. According a recent report from the Australian National Audit Office : ... departments were aware that pr...

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http://youtu.be/0YM9Ereg2Zo

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Osper is a smart new London startup. Here's its pitch to Angel investors . Osper is a cash card for young people with a mobile banking app with login for mum and dad (with parental controls) and login for young people (which teaches responsible money management). The cash card...

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As I've said before, the PM's Science Prize is a blast . And they're now taking nominations . So if you have or had a great science teacher, or know or are a great Australian scientist. Now's the time to nominate.

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Take your bog-standard first-year economics story of why money (sea shells, coins, notes, bank statements) exist. Money, you will be told, is a means of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of accounting, thoughts going back to David Hume (18th century) and earlier. When exp...

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I've never heard of EDwin Tanner, but he does a cute line in pictures if this is anything to go by. It went under the hammer at 45K (I think plus 20 odd per cent buyer's premium) last Dec. Details here .

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In the first two parts, the readers and I looked at the long list of sectors in Australia where there is a privileged minority who, with the help of the government, is in a position to extract more than their fair share of income out of the economy. Medical specialists, GPs, b...

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American blogger Matt Bruenig sparked an interesting debate recently with his claim that conservatives are better organised and less ideologically diverse than those on the left . This is a response. To those on the left, the American conservative movement appears as a leviath...

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http://youtu.be/CrczSkNSQR4 http://youtu.be/vo3pY_jmn2w

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As initially thought, the basic economic unit in Kolkata and West Bengal generally seems to be the family, not the individual. As a result, families invest in the education of their children and expect to share in the returns. Also, most businesses here are family businesses a...

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[caption id="attachment_33459" align="alignleft" width="646"] Why is this man trying to annoy Republicans?[/caption] Here's an extract from a recent article from the AFR which seems to be parading its private sector ideological friendliness in the way that the Oz started doing...

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We analyze patterns of bilateral financial investment using data on US investors' holdings of foreign bonds. We document a "history effect" in which the pattern of holdings seven decades ago continues to influence holdings today. 10 to 15% of the cross-country variation in US...

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I am visiting Kolkata this week, the Centre for the Study of Social Science Calcutta. It is a great chance to collect observations and cross-check economic theories on India. What I tend to do when visiting a new country is to assemble lots of preliminary hypotheses I have on...

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Marian Borges of The Age recently wrote seeking comment on an article on fire prevention which was subsequently written up by her and Peter Martin here . I didn't have time to really check out the article but sent her a response in which I expressed a kind of generalised scept...

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In part I the question was posed to the readers which privileges bothered them most about Australia and what they thought could be done to reduce them. In this part I want to start to consider the barriers by talking about the ‘face’ of any privilege and how this creates parti...

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[caption id="attachment_22323" align="alignright" width="307"] The 1947 Grand Ozzie winner holds our restrained Austin Holmes Memorial Trophy.[/caption] The Ozzies are, of course, Club Troppo's annual awards for think-tankery. Handed out ever since Troppo's founding in 1863, t...

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A question for you: how to combat privilege? As economists well know, we are all rent seekers who try to secure more and more privileges for ourselves and our families, be it monopoly rights (such as currently legally given to medical specialists or local pharmacies), over-pri...

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Have a look at this just-published article in PNAS by Jerome Dangerman and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber on the topic of climate change: Abstract The contemporary industrial metabolism is not sustainable. Critical problems arise at both the input and the output side of the complex...

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[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="662"] Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted this fresco on Good Government in Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. It's a famous landmark in Western painting, argued by some to herald the Renaissance. Interesting that it should be so preoccupied by public g...

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Well I’m overseas at present but I’ve received my first request for a renewal of the annual Crikey subscription. And in these days of email it can all be done with very little work, so I’m opening subscriptions for a record breaking, seventh year. (I have no idea how long I’ve...

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I regularly get asked by young Australian academics nearing the end of their PhD about the tradeoffs inherent in different positions they can apply for: post-doc or tenure-track; academia or policy land; researcher or administrator; a school of economics or a research institut...

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Just before Xmas, I asked the readers at Core and at Troppo what they though the best bits of news of 2012 were. Many, including myself but also David Walker, Steve Dunera, Tel and Jim Rose thought that last year was another in a long period of strong economic development in t...

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Tim Soutphommasane has written a defence, or more accurately, a vigourous promotion of Australian Multiculturalism. I have opinions, which, with effort, are forced into the alliterative framework in the title. Of course, by way of disclaimer, I am absurdly fond of multicultura...

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Troppo readers may have noticed a Christmas "silly season" debate about an ill-advised assertion by Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs Jenny Macklin to the effect that she could live on Newstart Allowance (aka "the dole") if she had to. T...

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Jacqueline Maley has an article in today's Fairfax media musing about who might succeed Julia Gillard as Labor leader after an election loss later this year. It seems a tad premature in the circumstances, though only slightly more so than the subject of this post, which addres...

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