Some readers will be aware of my distaste for costume drama - films about the past without any serious effort to engage with the difference of the past. It's a crime against Oscar Wilde's great admonition to Bosie. Shallowness is the supreme vice. Anyway, we have two more crim...

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David Brin offers a usefully concise means for distinguishing liberalism from what liberalism became within just a few years from Adam Smith's death - the worship of private property or as Brin puts it "today’s idolatry of personal and family wealth as the fundamental sacramen...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyfUu_fNQfM Well folks after a gruelling (if largely imaginary) 24 hour period haggling with other Troppmeisters, I'm pleased to announce Troppo's unanimous support for The Donald for President of the Greatest Country on Earth. We were locked in...

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Double for Nothing? Experimental Evidence on the Impact of an Unconditional Teacher Salary Increase on Student Performance in Indonesia by Joppe de Ree, Karthik Muralidharan, Menno Pradhan, Halsey Rogers - #21806 (CH DEV ED LS PE) Abstract: How does a large unconditional incre...

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The office of intelligence in every problem that either a person or a community meets is to effect a working connection between old habits, customs, institutions, beliefs, and new conditions. John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action , 1935 As I've argued before , our engagemen...

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Are these cartoons racist? I have little doubt they are. They're also cartoons that take a stand against violence against women. I guess they're racist (in a bad way - or in the way that we generally take to be a bad way) because they present people in a very unattractive ligh...

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The SMH points to a recent OECD report, claiming that over one-third of Australian pensioners live in poverty - with this being the second-highest rate in the OECD. Are we really that exceptional? No, we are not. Unfortunately, this is an example of analysis that undermines th...

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This post and its first part are condensed in this blog post at NESTA. “What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticew...

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There's a world of difference between (let's call it) youthful social change seeking in the sixties and immediate post-sixties social and political movements and much social change seeking today. Then the focus was largely on political activism. And 'theory' played a central r...

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