[caption id="" align="alignright" width="490"] Rene Descartes eat your heart out: The diagram that changed the world.[/caption] A friend wondered aloud on Facebook what I thought of Doughnut economics pointing me to this article by George Monbiot. My reply is reproduced below,...

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An essay prompted by a friend recommending James' essay I think largely for its defence of Menzies as worthy of more respect he's been given by the left - which is a fair point. Cross posted from The Mandarin , which, to my surprise was interested in picking it up. In my view...

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An Economic Approach to Alleviate the Crises of Confidence in Science: With an Application to the Public Goods Game by Luigi Butera, John A. List - #23335 (PE) Novel empirical insights by their very nature tend to be unanticipated, and in some cases at odds with the current st...

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The OECD is getting pretty serious about bridging divides - you know righting the world's injustices - that kind of thing. It's making a difference. It's probably thinking to itself "there's got to be change" - or thoughts to that effect. Why they even have a conference themed...

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Answer given on or about Sunday. Now available in comments

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Some of you will have seen my article in the Saturday Paper. I can only tease you with 150 words from it here. Then you'll need to read it on the Saturday Paper's site. As the financial crisis continued wreaking its havoc in late 2010, Mervyn King, who, as Governor of the Bank...

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As you know, despite spending millions on marketing to get the word out, our arts industry, for easily understood commercial reasons , doesn’t effectively get the word out about whether their products are any good or not. So for the cost of an hour or so’s outsourced, offshore...

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I'm no fan of moral rights, but there you are. Artists are, so perhaps I should change my tune. The Valuation of Moral Rights: A Field Experiment By: Stefan Bechtold (ETH Zürich) ; Christoph Engel (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods) U.S. intellectual proper...

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On the assumption that everyone in the online universe has now viewed the video of a plain-clothes policeman dragging a United Airlines passenger off his flight (see below), a few brief observations about United's deeply evil nature failure of problem-solving skills. [youtube...

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A persistent modern fear is that artificial intelligence and robot technology will advance so much that smart robots will soon be able to perform many of the tasks that we humans currently earn our crust with. Since they will come off the production line in a matter of minutes...

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John Clark died yesterday, a very sad day, he will be greatly missed RIP. This is my all time favorite piece of satire. Am sure that troppo can come up with more. https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM

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Well I've been going on and on about it , but here's an academic paper contrasting the free rider problem and opportunity. Knowledge Properties and Economic Policy: A New Look By Antonelli, Cristiano (University of Turin) This paper explores the full range of effects of knowle...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="395"] Themed pre-performance dinner The chefs at Arts Centre Melbourne have created a three-course meal and carefully chosen matching wines themed around Carmen ($75pp). It's easy to add a dinner when you book your opera tickets on our w...

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Cross posted from the Mandarin . This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fUDIucr2eo

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Choosing a Public-Spirited Leader. An experimental investigation of political selection By: Thomas Markussen (epartment of Economics, University of Copenhagen) ; Jean-Robert Tyran (Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen) In this experiment, voters select a leader wh...

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It's been true for some time that all that 'flexibility' everyone said was so important in the labour market was mostly flexibility for bosses. And it was flexibility that raised risks and inconvenience for workers. That's not a knockdown argument against it of course, but it...

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Cross posted from the Mandarin - my response to a tweet from Troppo's man in Geneva. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="550"] Is this a picture of a public good? Well not really, but then it is of the 21st century - or possibly the 22nd - it's too early to tell. I couldn'...

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[getty src="527045000" width="508" height="339"] My latest column for The CEO Magazine looks at how the automation deal is breaking down . Normally the deal in modern economies is that we accept that technological change and automation will screw up a bunch of people's lives,...

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Both of the players of this game are pretty good. In the illustrated position it's black's move. Black won the game, but only because white managed to resign in a won position. You can see the game here .

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