This paper estimates the large array of long-run benefits of an influential early childhood program targeted to disadvantaged children and their families. It is evaluated by random assignment and follows participants through their mid-30s. The program is a prototype for numero...

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Foreign Competition and Domestic Innovation: Evidence from U.S. P atents by David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon H. Hanson, Pian Shu, Gary Pisano Manufacturing is the locus of U.S. innovation, accounting for more than three quarters of U.S. corporate patents. The rise of import com...

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In a recent speech "Who owns a company?", Andy Haldane has this to say: In the earlier period, dividends decreased as often as they increased. This is as we would expect if profits fluctuate both up and down. After 1980, however, we see a one-way street. Dividend payout ratios...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W0d9xMhZbo I wasn't a huge fan of George Michael, though I liked his songs, but I absolutely loved this one. So good to horse around on the dance floor to. When I was in my early 20s I was greatly taken with gay culture. It was a liberation mov...

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Well I came to this passage and thought it was the first thing the World Economic Forum have said in a while that I agree with. "A significant part of the global elite lost the sense of solidarity when it was needed." But of course it was from the head of the WEF, so he couldn...

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Sky News' Matt Cunningham is unimpressed by the actions of the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory, in restricting cross-examination of detainees, failing to proceed with hearings before Christmas, and obtaining a five month...

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It’s been a great 15 years in Australia for me and the family, so we will be leaving lots of friends and colleagues behind as we seek new adventures in London, where from next week onwards I will be part of a Wellbeing centre, pretty much the same topic as the Australian Resea...

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The Effect of Early Education on Social Preferences by Alexander W. Cappelen, John A. List, Anya Samek, Bertil Tungodden We present results from the first study to examine the causal impact of early childhood education on social preferences of children. We compare children who...

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The well-being or 'happiness' push has been rolling for more than a decade now. Though there were plenty of other voices like Bruno Frey , I date its take-off from around the turn of the 21st century when Richard Layard started cranking up the issue and invoking the ghost of B...

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Cross posted from the Mandarin It is six years since Australia’s Artist Resale Royalty scheme (ARR) commenced and three years since submissions to its Post Implementation Review (PIR) closed, though the review itself has never been published. However, in the absence of a healt...

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After a very gruelling 11 rounds of classical chess which produced nine draws and one win for either side, Magnus Carlsen surprised most people by not trying very hard for a win in his final 'classical' game with challenger Sergey Karjakin. He was biding his time for the playo...

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The intimidatingly well informed Brad Delong used the following quote from Rosa Luxemburg to bid "good riddance" to Fidel Castro. I don't know enough to agree or disagree, but as I read Luxemburg's words, I wasn't thinking of communism. I was thinking of managerialism. I'm not...

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Minister Dutton says that 2/3 of people recently charged with terrorism in Australia have Lebanese Muslim backgrounds. However, the first rule when considering dramatic statistics should be to think “compared to what”. In this case, where else might we expect Islamic extremist...

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Ruthi, a young girl in internment: by Melinda Mockridge and Ruth Simon Ruth Simon, née Gottlieb, can still remember what it was like to live in an internment camp, behind barbed wire at Tatura during the Second World War. Ruth, now in her late 70s was transported aboard the Qu...

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Last Friday I attended a speech by the new ABC CEO Michelle Guthrie put on by the New News conference which is always good value and a tribute to the forward-looking energy of Margaret Simons - Melbourne Uni professor of Journalism and frequently practising journalism. Simons...

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Setting appointments I'll be attending in London next week on Google Calendar has reminded me of a problem that online calendars haven't sorted out - at least to my satisfaction (or perhaps knowledge); how to handle appointments when there are differences between time zones. I...

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I've just posted the first version of the introduction to this post on the first dispatch from the epistemic swamp, but I thought I'd open up the discussion again on a new thread. The tweet above surely highlights different ideas of truth and authenticity. Of course, Trump is...

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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks Denial (Opening Night) In the 1990s, an impassioned and articulate American Professor Deborah Lipstadt publishes a book titled 'Denying The Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory'. Soon after, a prominent 'denier' refer...

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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks Life and a Day (Opening Night) Somayeh is at a loss. Her only desire is to leave her family and take her destiny in hand, yet the love of her sick mother holds her back. Her elder brother, introduces her to an Afghan who wants to m...

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I gave a talk at the Lowy Institute last Wednesday to which I initially gave a long-winded title "Intellectual Property- Economics, Diplomacy and Australia’s strategic interests" but managed to get more cut-through under the pressure of Twitters 140 character limit "DFAT goes...

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[caption id="attachment_29556" align="alignright" width="300"] Yingiya Mark Guyula and other newly elected Independent NT MLAs[/caption] In contrast to the almost continual chaos and dysfunction that marked the former unlamented Giles CLP government, the period of almost 2 mon...

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Paul Krugman has popularised the notion of the Very Serious People. Very Serious People spend a lot of their time talking about strategy. After all, strategy is the most important, most serious thing you can talk about. After all, when you've got strategy worked out, the rest...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC9DhD0lxCo I expect I'm not the only one to be rather dazzled by Kellyanne Conway's ability to defend the indefensible Donald Trump with sweet reason itself. Here she is more coherent, more compelling, more forensic than pretty much anyone on m...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_tZ73VbqCQ&feature=youtu.be Just listen to the list of this guy's activities. Donate here should you wish.

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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks Chevalier Six average guys are on a private yacht in the Aegean Sea for who-really-knows-what reason. When a mechanical hiccup leaves them marooned at sea, they choose to wile away the time playing a game of one-upmanship called ‘C...

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Black to play N Batsiashvili vs N Zhukova 22. ...? See game for solution. This may be a two star puzzle, but I couldn't get it out. Can you? Click through to the game for the answer.

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Valuing Alternative Work Arrangements by Alexandre Mas, Amanda Pallais - #22708 (LS) Abstract: We use a field experiment to study how workers value alternative work arrangements. During the application process to staff a national call center, we randomly offered applicants cho...

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This essay is the third of three starting with my essay on the Evaluator General in two parts followed by an essay responding to the Productivity Commission's inquiry into competition in human services. Part One A couple of days ago I came upon care ethics via Virginia Held's...

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Part One Note: this post has been superseded by the full essay . A couple of days ago I came upon care ethics via Virginia Held's book The Ethics of Care (2006) with some excitement. The ethics of care grew out of feminism, but I think the issues it raises transcend feminism a...

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Looks quite interesting Is American Pet Health Care (Also) Uniquely Inefficient? by Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Atul Gupta - #22669 (AG HC PE) Abstract: We document four similarities between American human healthcare and American pet care: (i) rapid growth in spending as a s...

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Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act (Cth) is a perennial favourite topic for right wing politicians, and conservative pundit Andrew Bolt has never stopped moaning about it ever since he ended up on the wrong side of a Federal Court decision Eatock v Bolt in 2011. But...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqihQNBRsKc Here's a skilful pitch for government dollars. Why shouldn't online appointments with medical health people be funded under Medicare. Why indeed? It's all slickly done as you'd expect from Change.org. These guys have optimised social...

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A quick placeholder for something more substantial hopefully soon. Have a look at this ridiculous letter in response to a request to see a copy of the independent scoping study into future ownership options for the ASIC Registry. Judging by other experiences I'm aware of - at...

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In part 1, I looked at whether it made sense to have random individuals inserted into parliament, or to let policies be decided by juries full of randomly chosen individuals. Both were argued to be unworkable and likely to lead to more corruption, rather than less: policies th...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWci3a0-EKM Pilate said unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and said unto them, I find in him no fault at all. The Gospel according to John 18:38 Picasso once famously opined on art and truth-tell...

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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks Perfect Strangers (Opening Night) Fueled by a fiendishly clever screenplay and an all-star cast, Perfect Strangers gathers a group of good friends around the dining table-three thirty something couples and a bachelor-where one sugg...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="447"] What do we want? Deliberative democracy! When do we want it? NOW!![/caption] This story from this larger study speaks for itself, but is illustrative of some of the themes of my previous post on deliberative democracy. In the spri...

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I haven't read any columns on the gay marriage imbroglio so maybe people have already said all this but … it seems to me that the circumstances now provide the left of centre parties with an opportunity to humiliate their opponents. There's no bigger kill in politics than to b...

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Like quite a few other despairing commentators, I have on occasions referred to the Northern Territory as a "failed state", most recently here : Until now, although holding grave fears about the quality of Northern Territory political governance under both the previous Labor g...

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[caption id="attachment_29384" align="alignleft" width="754"] Q: How satisfied are you with the way democracy works in Australia?[/caption] I With democracy now serving the interests of the 1%, the public are disenchanted and finally sending the elites packing - courtesy of th...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf6z5gkv3Ls Anton Smirnov, who turned 15 this year even if he looks a fair bit younger than that, has been playing in the Australian team in the Chess Olympiad. He's been playing at a rating strength of 2710 which places him 37th in the world gi...

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I've been arguing that our current approach to efficient regulation is blockheaded for as long as I can remember. I've even pointed out how one might possibly do quite a lot better with a less ideologically Manichean approach in which regulatory policy is a battle between Good...

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Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles by Ozkan Eren, Naci Mocan - #22611 (CH HE LE LS) Abstract: Employing the universe of juvenile court decisions in a U.S. state between 1996 and 2012, we analyze the effects of emotional shocks associated with unexpected outcomes of footbal...

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by Samuel R. Bondurant, Jason M. Lindo, Isaac D. Swensen - #22610 (HC HE PE) Abstract: In this paper we estimate the effects of expanding access to substance-abuse treatment on local crime. We do so using an identification strategy that leverages variation driven by substance-...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=56&v=ELmoNHljCKk Australian Chess Grandmaster and one time Treasury economist David Smerdon is at the Chess Olympiad in Baku and managed to get Magnus Carlsen into a fair bit of trouble, before settling for an easy draw. Here's the g...

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A friend of mine Ian Marsh sent me this op ed which one of the papers said it would publish last week. Personally, I'm not surprised that they didn't. They're waiting for it to be validated by being put through its paces here at the Troppo Grinder first. No change there. Over...

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I went to this opening because I know the artist's sister from The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI). Like sister like brother, some pretty interesting, reflective and classy stuff. If you're in Melbourne go check them out for yourself. More here .

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This is a reworking of an earlier post - but reworked with Chief Innovation Officer of The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI), Chris Vanstone, there's quite a bit of new content for those who are interested. Cross posted at The Mandarin . There's also the intervie...

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It appears that the newly dominant Labor Party in the Northern Territory may be contemplating a legal challenge to the validity of the election of former CLP Chief Minister Terry Mills as an Independent MLA in his former seat of Blain. Labor will likely hold 18 of the 25 Legis...

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Who Should Own and Control Urban Water Systems? Historical Evidence from England and Wales by Brian Beach, Werner Troesken, Nicola Tynan - #22553 (DAE HE PE) Abstract: Nearly 40% of England's privately built waterworks were municipalised in the late 19th century. We examine ho...

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https://vimeo.com/178401582 Readers of this blog will be familiar with Family by Family , the service which matches families up with other families in coached, mentoring relationships to help families through tough times and lower the risk of them falling into crisis with all...

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Growing Apart, Losing Trust? The Impact of Inequality on Social Capital There is a widespread perception that trust and social capital have declined in United States as well as other advanced economies, while income inequality has tended to increase. While previous research ha...

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Unintended Consequences of Rewards for Student Attendance: Results from a Field Experiment in Indian Classrooms by Sujata Visaria, Rajeev Dehejia, Melody M. Chao, Anirban Mukhopadhyay - #22528 (CH DEV ED) In an experiment in non-formal schools in Indian slums, a reward scheme...

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Family Descent as a Signal of Managerial Quality: Evidence from Mutual Funds by Oleg Chuprinin, Denis Sosyura - #22517 (LS) We study the relation between mutual fund managers' family backgrounds and their professional performance. Using hand-collected data from individual Cens...

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Available here . by David Figlio, Paola Giuliano, Umut Ozek, Paola Sapienza - #22541 (CH ED LS POL) We use remarkable population-level administrative education and birth records from Florida to study the role of Long-Term Orientation on the educational attainment of immigrant...

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I'm pleased to see Jason Potts tweeting "Blogs are still a thing. This one I just came across is the thingest. It's like @slatestarcodex, but for econ & tech artir.wordpress.com". As a result of tweeting back my 2009 post on Blogging the crisis , I re-read it. Sometimes I'm su...

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Below is an essay by me and Chris Vanstone (Chief Innovation Officer of The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI) published in two parts by The Mandarin. Devoutly confessing that you do not know is better than prematurely claiming that you do Augustine “Mark well tha...

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It's not often that I agree with hyper-ventilating Murdoch columnist Andrew Bolt, but his column this week on the Don Dale Centre juvenile detention controversy is a useful antidote to the equally hyperbolic reactions of most commentators to ABC journalist Caro Meldrum-Hanna's...

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One for the Clever Country culture warriors The Economic Impact of Universities: Evidence from Across the Globe by Anna Valero, John Van Reenen - #22501 (ED LS) Abstract: We develop a new dataset using UNESCO source materials on the location of nearly 15,000 universities in ab...

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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks Neruda (Opening Night) Neruda is a lavishly-mounted re-imagining of the Nobel Prize-winning poet’s pursuit into political exile. It’s 1948, and the Cold War has reached Chile. In Congress, Neruda accuses the left-wing government of...

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The PC has a two-stage reference on increasing the application of competition, contestability and informed user choice in the provision of human services. The first stage will identify the most prospective areas for the application of such principles whilst the second will tel...

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Apropos of my general theory of bullshit - outlined here - here are a few more straws in the wind. Consistent with the theory, the the signal to ideological noise ratio in political speeches has been falling precipitously lately - at least in the US. This has been interpreted...

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Income inequality is associated with stronger social comparison effects: The effect of relative income on life satisfaction , Cheung, Felix; Lucas, Richard E. Abstract Previous research has shown that having rich neighbors is associated with reduced levels of subjective well-b...

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Persistent Social Networks: Civil War Veterans who Fought Together Co-Locate in Later Life by Dora L. Costa, Matthew E. Kahn, Christopher Roudiez, Sven Wilson - #22397 (AG DAE HE) Abstract: At the end of the U.S Civil War, veterans had to choose whether to return to their prew...

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmOvEwtDycs] Here at Troppo we have referred to the 'Yes Minister series' many times because of its brilliant commentary on the timeless issues of government, exemplified in the skit above. I have gone through three phases with the serie...

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The following is a guest post by David Morris, Principal Lawyer of the Environmental Defenders Office (NT). The Northern Territory already carries a 1 billion dollar burden for legacy mines. These are mine sites where the company has walked away and left ongoing environmental...

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Economics is famous for its idea - it's better to call it a methodological assumption of some economics - that self-interest is what drives people. But something just as evident about people - and much more unique to our species - is people's tendencies to form stable patterns...

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I'm wondering why the facts and ideas generated in the abstract below aren't higher up the order of proceedings in such things as teaching the economics of industrial organisation, the economics of information. What Hayekian has focused on this? Pathetic that I've not seen thi...

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Via this great column of Ross Douthat, I came upon this really fine essay on The New Ruling Class . On Googling the author it turned out she is an American who lives in Sydney and works for the CIS. The interview of the articles: [audio mp3="http://clubtroppo.ozblogistan.com.a...

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Will the Coalition get to 76 seats? The ABC's Barry Cassidy 'can't see that happening'. But is the prospect of minority government really as horrific as much of the media is portraying? The only real problem (for both Malcolm Turnbull and Australia) with a Coalition minority g...

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In the last post ,Paul Frijters dismissed my proposal that deliberative democracy mechanisms should have had some role in the Brexit decision. I don’t think sortition makes any sense in the case of something like Brexit. The notion that a jury of randomly chosen citizens would...

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Effects of the Minimum Wage on Infant Health The minimum wage has increased in multiple states over the past three decades. Research has focused on effects on labor supply, but very little is known about how the minimum wage affects health, including children's health. We addr...

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There's a reason that the UK's vote on EU departure seems so strange, and it applies regardless of whether you like Brexit or not. It's this: the UK has made what might be a very substantial change to its own nature based on a simple majority vote – and such changes should be...

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I fantasise about the day when the people who fancy themselves the champions of liberal capitalist democracy - you know the Business Class set - will realise that they are munching through the landscape and, as Schumpeter argued - following Marx - that they were undermining th...

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To a substantial extent the 'left/right' divide is characterised by a common way of seeing the world in which there's self-interest and its opposite - altruism. But I think that impoverishes the debate. I think there's a third category far more important than 'altruism'. To ge...

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Sanjiv Erat1, Uri Gneezy1 We investigate whether piece-rate and competitive incentives affect creativity, and if so, how the incentive effect depends on the form of the incentives. We find that while both piece-rate and competitive incentives lead to greater effort relative to...

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I am seeking a lawyer to run an Adverse Action case connected to the recent Fair Work Commission verdict that found systematic breaches of procedures and procedural fairness in the University of Queensland's actions against me following my research on racial attitudes in Brisb...

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I fantasise about the day when the people who fancy themselves the champions of liberal capitalist democracy - you know the Business Class set - will realise that they are munching through the landscape and, as Schumpeter argued - following Marx - that they were undermining th...

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I just came across this abstract. I have no idea what it means. It's not a 'post-modernist' journal from what I can see, but I still don’t know what it means. I'd like to write more about this, but don't have the time right now, and am still pondering it all, but the abstracti...

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I've talked on Troppo a few times on the joys of ' theming '. Instead of organising the stimulus around a pragmatic search for all the possible ways we could expand the budget implementing all the most prospective in terms of economic expansion per dollar spent down to some le...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iISvNABkToE&feature=youtu.be Here's Paul Krugman giving a commencement address. Eschewing inspiration porn, the talk is kind of what you'd expect. He talks about what it might be like to be a young person starting out at college now compared wit...

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It's well past time to reconsider our communal attitude towards professional sport. We're subjected almost daily to scandals about drug cheating, gross and usually drunken behaviour by sports people, rorted salary caps and match-fixing by players colluding with bookmakers and...

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Can War Foster Cooperation? by Michal Bauer, Christopher Blattman, Julie Chytilova, Joseph Henrich, Edward Miguel, Tamar Mitts - #22312 (DEV PE POL) Abstract: In the past decade, nearly 20 studies have found a strong, persistent pattern in surveys and behavioral experiments fr...

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At the end of 1850, the UK's patent system and law was a 'exclusive law ' and it had been so for centuries. Within 18 months things had changed. The July 1, 1852 "Patent Law Amendment Act" meant that getting a patent was no longer the exclusive preserve of those with quite a l...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF-ejjtxpeE The biggest sporting thrill of my life came when Muhammed Ali managed to bamboozle the monster George Foreman to regain the world title that had been wrongly taken from him for his stand against the Vietnam war in the 1960s. What an...

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La Trobe University has now retreated from acting against academic Roz Ward (as I suggest below that it should). However I concluded it was still worth publishing this post, because it analyses important constitutional and legal issues that arise repeatedly in cases where an e...

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From a quick squiz at their report, the PC seems to have done an excellent job on the question of IP. It didn't put too much effort distorting its recommendations to somehow second guess what was politically palatable and just set out the appropriate principles and their upsho...

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As some may have noticed, I've been musing of late about the likely future social and economic effects of the increasingly rapid and interconnected development of ICT, artificial intelligence and robotics. This article is a bit silly in some respects but makes some useful poin...

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Preselecting Nova Peris as a "Captain's Pick" for Labor senator for the Northern Territory must have seemed like a good idea at the time in early 2013 to then Prime Minister Julia Gillard. The election of Ken Wyatt as a Liberal federal MHR from Western Australia in 2010 had sp...

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As a long-term resident of Darwin, where you can drive from anywhere in the metropolitan area to just about anywhere else in not much more than 25 minutes (even in the peak hour such as it is), it always takes me a couple of days to get used to the traffic snarls of Sydney and...

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Part Two of my essay on the way of looking at the world I've worked out over the last few years and published on Evonomics can be found here . So many years, so few words :( Part one of this essay showed how two dimensions of free riding define what we call “public goods” – th...

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Chris Lloyd's comment on my previous Uber post prompt some further thoughts that I think merit a separate post. Chris said: “If you want to make a living off of Uber, you’re going to have to drive an insane number of hours.” I am surprised that Uber cannot offer cheaper fares...

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A story in this morning's media highlights the vulnerable position of pseudo self-employed "independent" contractors under Australian law: A Perth-based Uber driver is suing the Silicon Valley giant for terminating him without notice, leaving him with $80,000 worth of car loan...

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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks Time Out of Mind (Opening Night) George seeks refuge at Bellevue Hospital, a Manhattan intake center for homeless men, where his friendship with a fellow client helps him try to repair his relationship with his estranged daughter....

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Lateral Economics has had occasion to compile a list of free, freemium and cheap services to help run your one person micro or several person small business. I post it here for your interest and because it may be useful to you. The latest service I discovered to my delight was...

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It looks like we may be getting a six star hotel across the road from our place at Cullen Bay. A proposal by Paspaley the Pearl King has been shortlisted by the Giles government along with two others. Apparently the winner will receive unspecified government largesse to kickst...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM With the ongoing partisan squabbling about tax accompanying the imminent federal election, I thought it might be worth setting out my own “wish list” for an ideal tax system. As readers know, I am not an economist or accountant, and...

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Political parties and institutions in Australia and the US are increasingly dominated by interest groups representing the few, leading to a large policy-induced increase in inequality in recent decades and a long raft of new policies favouring the few by giving them the tax re...

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"There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them." George Orwell Paul Krugman as ever had the right expression. An intellectual crackup. Just in the 1930s when it was becoming obvious that communism, if it was to liberate humanity was certainly goin...

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The Effect of Single-Sex Education on Academic Outcomes and Crime: Fresh Evidence from Low-Performing Schools in Trinidad and Tobago by C. Kirabo Jackson Abstract: In 2010, the Ministry of Education in Trinidad and Tobago converted 20 low-performing pilot secondary schools fro...

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Cross posted at The Mandarin In the first part of this essay , I elaborated on evidence-based policymaking and service delivery, pointing to all manner of pathologies that must be dealt with to deliver something effective. The way in which KPIs distort reporting and can perver...

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Here's the first of a two part essay on evidence based policy published today in the Mandarin . This part is a slightly gussied up version of a Troppo post from a month ago . The long-awaited second part will follow. Calling for policy to be more ‘‘evidence-based” rolls off th...

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The Coalition government’s Budget plan for internships for the long-term unemployed was instantly condemned by the trade union movement and the ALP, but given qualified support by at least some social welfare groups. Internships potentially provide a path for the long-term une...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-4FQAov2xI Being a 'young country' as we keep congratulating ourselves, we seem free of some of the greater absurdities of the Old World. Then again there's at least something to be said for them. Having a kind of Monty Python show as your Head...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNfGyIW7aHM From BCG's latest set of instructions : In grappling with organization design, company executives tend to draw on two venerable approaches, which can be characterized as the “hard” approach and the “soft” approach. . . . Both approac...

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Former ABC Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes has predictably been pilloried on social media over the last few days for an article about asylum seeker policy that repeats some themes I have discussed here at Troppo over the years. Holmes picks up especially on suggestions that p...

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Prime Minister Turnbull and Treasurer Morrison are currently refusing to admit the cost to revenue of the Coalition’s ten-year corporate tax cut plan which will reduce company tax for all corporations to 25% by 2025-26. Chris Richardson of Access Economics estimates that the c...

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[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="436"] I knew I could have responded and destroyed them – I could have said, “You’ve asked me a question that demonstrated you have not read our statute. How dare you question what I do?”[/caption] When I was on the Productivity Commissio...

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Academic publishing keeps you on the straight and narrow of everyone else's ideas? Who'da thunk? Bias against Novelty in Science: A Cautionary Tale for Users of Bibliometric Indicators by Jian Wang, Reinhilde Veugelers, Paula Stephan - #22180 (LS PR) Abstract: Research which e...

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The Long-term Consequences of Teacher Discretion in Grading of High-stakes Tests by Rebecca Diamond, Petra Persson This paper analyzes the long-term consequences of teacher discretion in grading of high-stakes tests. Evidence is currently lacking, both on which students receiv...

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Following innovations in the UK and New Zealand, some of Australia's more forward looking State governments are looking at two related innovations. The first is 'social investment' with social impact bonds leading the vanguard. Social impact bonds As Wikipedia tells us, a soci...

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Below is a link to my first article on a new alternative economics website - Evonomics - which has only been going fror a short period of time. It's pretty nicely set out and emerged out of the evolution institute . The guy who started it - Robert Kadar - is intellectually gre...

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Though wildly tendentious, this piece by Monbiot is an excellent spray against neoliberalism, a subject with which your correspondent has a vexed relation. I used to describe myself as a neoliberal, but now I'm afraid due to a mixture of distaste at its excesses and the extent...

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Last night I attended the launch of Creative State which was the culmination of over a year of engagement between the Victorian Government and the arts community. It involved a taskforce or some such and an Expert Reference Group - on which I sat. Anyway the Minister was very...

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The starter’s gun has almost been fired on the forthcoming Federal election which will almost certainly now be held on 2 July. However, there is also another Australian election due to take place soon after that: the Northern Territory election due on 27 August under the fixed...

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This post is a follow-up to one I wrote last week (see the latter half of it) and also a response to a more recent post by David Walker . I certainly wouldn’t argue with David’s assertion that a Sydney-Brisbane Very Fast Train route is not likely to be remotely viable even in...

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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks Spanish Affair 2 (Opening Night) Returning from months at sea, Koldo is met by his beloved Merche, who is less than impressed with him after his long absence. With her head held high, she storms away in a huff leaving him with an e...

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For mainstream and social media partisans the current prolonged election campaign is an essential life or death struggle for premiership victory by one's chosen team. But to my way of thinking it doesn't really matter very much which team wins. The two major parties are Tweedl...

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Super-high-speed version: Australia has better things to do with $100 billion than building a high-speed rail line. It's all summed up in this exchange from the ABC TV series Utopia : A new high speed rail proposal is being put to Malcolm Turnbull, and already Rhonda is excite...

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Governments around the world have in recent years destroyed their seized stockpiles of illegal ivor y, egged on by the World Wildlife Federation which believes it sends a signal to gangs that kill Elephants and Rhinos for their tusks. In January, Sri Lanka reportedly crushed 3...

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Apparently Labor doesn't intend reverting to the full Fibre to the Premises ("FTP") version of the National Broadband Network it previously championed if returned to government later this year: The opposition leader admitted that he would not unpick all of the Coalition’s chan...

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Below the introduction to a piece in The Mandarin today . We shoot the breeze about who’ll win the next election or footy match. Virtually none of it helps predict the future. But we’re driven on … as if somehow it will. We do it with the economy. People ask economists how the...

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From the High Court , 2002 Barrister Geoffrey Johnson: Well, your Honour, if it is of assistance, the practice in the Federal Court…has been to call the applicant by the assigned name. Guadron, J.: The assigned name? Johnson: Well, there is an assigned, I think probably random...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="400"] A stupid diagram - the kind of thing we can't get enough of here at ClubTroppo. And remember "Reflect, revise and Improve". That's RRI - capiche?. In short, you can't get enough RRI. In fact you should be doing it now! Reflect, Re...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo2cP0j5lYk Your correspondent was once very rude about one of Australia's better institutions though now rather complacent - the Reserve Bank - pointing out in 2012 that making it's most important decisions (to set the overnight cash rate) each...

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Last week’s adventure in federalism by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, in which he proposed fleetingly that the states be given back their own income taxing power including (after a transitional period) the ability to either raise or lower the tax rates, has attracted various...

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The leak of 11.5 million confidential papers from the Mossack Fonseca consulting firm in Panama promises to be a major source of information on the tax avoiding shenanigan s of the elites. Already, 800 Australians are reportedly under investigation, and dozens of heads of stat...

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As you can see from the above image, the Daily Telegraph revived John Howard's History Wars the other day. Indeed they even disinterred Howard's favourite undead RWNJ historian Keith Windschuttle to lend an air of faux integrity to the whole unedifying clickbait exercise: Wind...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzvOjcGifOM The post below is a guest post from a fine person who is a friend of mine. Sonia Ben Ali,, Co-founder and Executive Director of the international NGO, Urban Refugees. It's a pretty fledgeling organisation with a remarkably important...

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This post began as a comment on Paul's last comment on my "Mainstream Radical Centrists: Where are they? " column. Paul boiled down his response to this: If you want to have a serious debate about reforms, go to countries that are hurting and that see the need for it. Like the...

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Australia's 'economic miracle' off the back of what might be called the 'reform period' which can be dated fairly neatly from late 1983 and the floating of the dollar to mid 2001 (which, IIRC was the date the ANTS tax reform package was introduced). It came about because peopl...

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What is the meaning of the relief sculpture above? I recall when I was last on the Athenian Acropolis just over a year ago marvelling at the Parthenon, not just its emphatic and sublime beauty but also its strangeness . It's so big and so magnificent. What the hell did this ci...

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With Fairfax culling 120 journalists (in the wake of previous mass redundancies), Murdoch/News apparently contemplating more cuts, and newspapers in general losing money hand over fist, some pundits are suggesting that Fairfax at least is likely to stop publishing the Monday t...

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Keen readers of this blog will know that occasionally, just occasionally I identify a saying or concept which has somehow come to signify something close to the opposite of what its progenitor had intended. Examples include the theory of the second best, the central point of w...

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I was at a PC function yesterday on 'disruptive technology' and said, in a rather crabby way, that I'd been talking about the significance of informing consumers about the quality of products for a long, long time and now, it's only when people can actually see Uber and Airbnb...

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It appears clear that the Governor-General (acting on the advice of the Prime Minister as per Westminster convention) can under Constitution section 5 prorogue the current Parliament and then appoint a new session to commence on 18 April. Presumably that is what occurred this...

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Some interesting constitutional questions seem to have arisen in the wake of Thursday/Friday's marathon Senate sitting which passed voting reforms for that House. Both Independent Senator Bob Day and veteran psephologist Malcolm Mackerras are threatening to launch High Court c...

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I went to see The Secret River last night - and returned from the experience underwhelmed. It tries to be a truthful depiction of one aspect of the 'frontier wars' and so it presents a bunch of Europeans setting up shop in an area that the local indigenes (surprise, surprise)...

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Bargaining over Babies: Theory, Evidence, and Policy Implications by Matthias Doepke, Fabian Kindermann - #22072 (CH EFG) It takes a woman and a man to make a baby. This fact suggests that for a birth to take place, the parents should first agree on wanting a child. Using newl...

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Racial Sorting and the Emergence of Segregation in American Cities by Allison Shertzer, Randall P. Walsh - #22077 (DAE LE) Abstract: Residential segregation by race grew sharply in the United States as black migrants from the South arrived in northern cities during the early t...

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Disruptive Change in the Taxi Business: The Case of Uber Abstract In most cities, the taxi industry is highly regulated and utilizes technology developed in the 1940s. Ride sharing services such as Uber and Lyft, which use modern internet-based mobile technology to connect pas...

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[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500"] This chart is for the UK though the graph for the whole of the developed countries looks similar. If updated for the most recent times it would be gradually trending up by now, but not in any danger of returning to anywhere near...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDZadLhTMoc I recall when working as a staffer for the Hawke/Keating government, how Labor staffers wore their disdain - bordering on contempt - for the Democrats with the same kind of pride that economic rationalists had for their own disdain f...

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Paul Frijters' fascinating post analysing Turkey's successful employment of ruthless realpolitik tactics is fairly depressing. But maybe there's some qualified good news hidden amongst all the cynical manoeuvres. Reported arrangements between the EU and Turkey for dealing with...

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I visited Turkey in April last year, traveling through the country, witnessing the troubles of the leadership of the ruling AKP party: it had just lost a general election that left it without a workable majority in parliament and only 40% of the popular vote; it was sucked int...

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I don't stay on top of many of the latest issues. After all, they're complicated, time is limited, so I'll just satisfy myself with starting, largely ideological reactions (and of course not opine too strongly given my state of ignorance) about any number of public issues. Is...

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Abstract : National policies take varied approaches to encouraging university-based innovation. This paper studies a natural experiment: the end of the "professor's privilege" in Norway, where university researchers previously enjoyed full rights to their innovations. Upon the...

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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks Rosalie Blum (Opening Night) Thirty-something Vincent Machot is a hairdresser, like his father before him. Life rotates around work, his overbearing mother who lives in the apartment upstairs, and a womanising cousin constantly try...

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This week's announcement by Pangaea Resources that it is suspending its NT onshore gas exploration drilling program and laying off 140 workers, following the Labor Opposition's indication that it will impose an indefinite moratorium on fracking, has provoked predictable respon...

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This is a note to myself. It's from the report of the NDIS Citizen's Jury Scorecard . However, in a way that speaks for itself, it may be of interest to Troppodillians. It's an illustration of professional obfuscation and indifference to those in their care. (Of course lots of...

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Way back in the 1980s and 90s when I was a Labor "apparatchik" and then for a short time a local politician in the Northern Territory, the Opposition of which I was a part was for a time led by Brian Ede. He married Anne Walsh a daughter of arch neoliberal Federal Labor Minist...

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What strange times we live in! The Red Star Line's passenger cruise freighter SS Labor, despite a seemingly lacklustre captain with a mutinous history, is sailing full steam ahead for port carrying an impressive cargo of solid policies and fiscal measures to fund them. Meanwhi...

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Federal Liberal backbencher Dr Dennis Jensen is a right wing MP with views not unlike those of his colleague Corey Bernardi. He "distinguished" himself this week in Parliament with a diatribe about Indigenous communities supposedly living a ‘noble savage’ lifestyle: “I put it...

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Peter Shergold's report on learning from mistakes is out. It advises on how to avoid the mistakes of the Pink Batts fiasco (He was asked to do this by a government that, pretty obviously, wasn't the slightest bit interested in learning from its or anyone else's mistakes. I exp...

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I don't understand why Prime Minister Turnbull and Treasurer ScoMo are busily demonising Labor's entirely sensible announced policies in relation to negative gearing and Capital Gains Tax for residential rental properties. I can only assume that the politician's instinct to co...

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Following Nick and Rex's tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of the 'concept' and 'gravitational waves', news has just come in that the oath witnesses take in Australia has been sliced into its fundamental constituents: perjury, utopia, and blasphemy. 'It was quite easy to see once...

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If Rex can give us his guide to Gravitational Waves - a very impressive performance I have to say, then I can dust off an old document from my days at the ANU law school - in the late 1980s. Concept Split: Shockwaves Shock waves spread from the policy making community through...

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Last Friday the world woke up to the announcement that scientists had made an extraordinary discovery concerning gravity waves. It received a great deal of press and interest on places as diverse as The Daily Mail and others. Ever since that bombshell I’ve had ordinary Austral...

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The Giles Country Liberal NT government managed to ram through legislation this week which not only implements optional preferential voting for Territory elections but also prohibits handing out of "how to vote" and other candidate materials to voters on polling day within 100...

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https://vimeo.com/131071052 As an aficionado of DOC, someone sent me this article on young Italian immigration, which I've celebrated before . Anyway enjoy the vid. It makes you feel grateful to live in such a great place.

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This is commonsense, but fortunately less crude economic methodology than has been pursued hitherto seems to be uncovering it: Abstract : A strong tradition in economic history, which primarily relies on qualitative evidence and statistical correlations, has emphasized the imp...

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https://youtu.be/JIw8CQB8prg People may know of Ray Kurzweil. I first saw him at a conference in Melbourne where he was introduced as the greatest thing since sliced bread (an introduction he'd clearly had a hand in writing or authorising) and kept talking about how great he w...

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Regulation has a special place in the heart of this blog and superannuation is a particular fave. I've offered some connoisseurship of Self Managed Super Fund regulation in the past . I could say that this takes the cake, but really it's just pretty par for the course. It's ce...

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Queensland boy Julian Assange seems set to walk out of the Ecuadorian embassy soon, hoping that the announcement by the UN human rights panel on the arbitrariness of his detention will protect him from being arrested. The baseline scenario is that he walks out, is quickly arre...

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[caption id="attachment_31159" align="alignright" width="444"] A nice illustration of how the economy is for Dad. Google for images of "the economy" and see how many women turn up.[/caption] I haven't the time to write this up, right now, though I'd like to, but here's my firs...

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Childhood Environment and Gender Gaps in Adulthood by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Frina Lin, Jeremy Majerovitz, Benjamin Scuderi - #21936 (CH ED LS PE) We show that differences in childhood environments play an important role in shaping gender gaps in adulthood by documenti...

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My forward to Deloitte's second report on digital money - The future of exchanging value: Cryptocurrencies and the trust economy. Exchanging value Ice becomes water when warmed. Only familiarity prevents us from marvelling at the mysteriousness of this ‘phase change’, as physi...

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Yes folks, the Crikey subscription is back at the top of Troppo for ONE WEEK ONLY as we've just been issued with the link - which will enable you to sign up. It's here! . As aficionados will be aware, Troppo funds its entire garage of imaginary vehicles (including the latest a...

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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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