https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRrlkEqWpZA&t=12s Here's a presentation I gave at the anniversary of Australian Policy Online which has been cunningly rebranded under its old acronym as Analysis and Policy Observatory. I gave a similar one at Kings College London a few weeks p...

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https://youtu.be/tXlM99xPQC8 Well there's been a frisson of excitement in the chess and AI world lately with the extraordinary performance of AlphaZero – essentially the computer that mastered the game Go – a game which proved, despite the relative simplicity of its rules, a m...

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https://soundcloud.com/britishacademy/the-redescription-of-enlightenment Last night, having read a fantastic essay (pdf) by the great historian of revolutionary and pre-revolutionary America Bernard Bailyn, I made my way to the lecture series in honour of Isaiah Berlin where t...

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The extraordinary outpouring of national happiness following the passage of the same sex marriage legislation on Thursday unavoidably gives rise to the question of whether some similar community consultation/plebiscite/survey mechanism (perhaps a well-designed and secure onlin...

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The EU and the UK government have just agreed to muddle on in their negotiations. Nothing is truly decided until everything is decided, but they have adopted a position document (see here ) that details what they want the next steps to look like and what they will do in case o...

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National history is the story that binds ‘us who make up the nation’ into a single entity with a collective memory . It has a purpose and as such we can choose what historical events and realities to put into that story, whilst forgetting the rest. Of the four main current con...

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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks You're Killing Me Susana (Opening Night) You’re Killing Me Susana tells the story of Eligio, a man who wakes up one day to find out that his wife Susana has left him without warning. What follows is Eligio’s earnest quest to win hi...

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[expanded from the post on JohnMenadue] When Bitcoin went public in 2009 it introduced to the world of finance and economics the technology of blockchain. Even the many who thought Bitcoin would never make it as a major currency were intrigued by the BlockChain technology and...

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https://youtu.be/uP8juIWScH0

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Sometimes, it feels like 1910 all over again. Then, a confident Germany was the up-and-coming industrial power house, fearing an even more up-and-coming Russia, with the UK and France desperately holding on to their colonial empires. Now, a confident China is the up-and-coming...

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The following is a guest post by RHONDA PRYOR , a recently retired senior manager in the Australian aged care sector. We are hoping Rhonda may become a regular contributor to Troppo. If you woke up to read the Government had announced that they have a totally new approach to S...

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The #MeToo flood of stories of women who feel abused by men – ranging from lurid stares to straightforward rape – seems like a disaster to me for the Democrats. Not because of the stories themselves, but because of how the progressive media and commentators have reacted to it....

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As readers of my Twitter feed will know, I'm heading to London to give some seminars. One on the use and abuse of wellbeing to target policy at LSE , one on evidence-based policy at King's College London Policy Institute and a public lecture titled "Detoxing democracy: Brexit...

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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks Subdued (Opening Night) Mina, recently divorced from her husband, struggles to maintain an independent life with no supportive family. She eventually finds a job in a restaurant. A friendship between her and the manager gradually b...

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Various people like Margaret Court are stroppy that private companies like Qantas are supporting same sex marriage. I'm not too sure I can see a problem. This is largely self-interested behaviour from our corporates and the pursuit of that self-interest – sociopathic or otherw...

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There seem to be more and more claims that "hate speech" should not be entitled to the normal privileges of free speech. To my surprise, one of them is George Lakoff - famed cognitive scientist, philosopher and metaphor expert. Here’s the admirably clear Lakoff writing a blog...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A7Ef4SIQUo I wrote the following comment on Gene Tunny's blogpost on a piece documenting the last car rolling off an Australian mass production line. (We still make specialty cars in runs of a hundred or so a month). The history of automotive i...

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Cross posted at The Mandarin . "Principles are good and worth the effort only when they develop into deeds" -- Vincent Van Gogh I’ve previously critiqued the process by which a lot of organisations do strategic thinking and planning and proposed an alternative . In this series...

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I've previously commented that Brian Howe was the great, quiet achiever of the Hawke/Keating years, who then turned around out of office and, rather than burnish his own reputation, got right on with the business playing a major role in getting up the NDIS. In any event I was...

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I wrote this piece in the Guardian to keep stirring the pot on post-ideological reform, unaware that I would be outflanked and outgunned on my left by Peter Costello who wants to socialise compulsory super. #Srsly. Which bank could give Australians a better bang for their buck...

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Here at Troppo, we're not that big on inspirational videos. But, to use the immortal words of Groucho Marx, in this case the entire Troppo collective (which in this case includes me) is making an exception. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoNfszh7NxU

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[cross-posted, slightly updated, from Pearls and Limitations] Observations: About 40% of the population of Catalonia and its capital Barcelona was not born there, but largely comes from the rest of Spain. Internal migration is high , with about 0.4% of the population moving fr...

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Taxation is the potential downfall of the EU as an institution. The reason is that within the EU, several member states are making money from the tax evasion in other member states, a situation akin to having a wife slowly murdering her husband with poison. Unless this stops,...

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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks Roza Of Smyrna (Opening Night) Preparing for an exhibition in the Turkish city of Izmir (formerly known as Smyrna), a collector of historic objects and curiosities, Dimitris, finds an untold story waiting in the depths of a small a...

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[caption id="attachment_31407" align="aligncenter" width="1035"] It's pretty obvious why this picture came up forth in a Google Image Search of the expression "competitive neutrality" but if you can't figure it out for yourself frankly the Troppo collective are disgusted. We'r...

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We are accustomed to the concept of colonising the solar system and populating the universe. We think of it as a project for the distant future but perhaps we should be getting on with it. I offer three reasons, any of which might suffice, for us to begin space colonisation: m...

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A new programming approach for children today (Continued from Parts One and Two .) There is no justification for the Government to fund children’s television and media, if it is not for the clear developmental benefit of children. There are ample other opportunities for childr...

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Fredrick Hayek was onto something fundamental in stressing the centrality of information flow to economic functioning. But because his consuming passion was on the (undoubted) evils of Soviet-style central planning, 'the market' always figured as the deus ex machina, a kind of...

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[Note to self. Geeks only] Over the fold I muse on the nature of human intelligence, social intelligence, and the options for artificial intelligence to become 'smarter than humans' in the areas of social power and law-making. It is taken for granted that you accept that in ha...

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The birth of a Children’s Television industry (Continued from Part One ) No Children’s production industry in Australia can exist without a viable, film and television industry which must be sustained to tell Australian stories. That is a given. But what sits under that for ch...

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‘Tell me a story!’ What child has not expressed those words? Children find the fantasy world a story transports them into, comforting, entertaining and enlightening. As a prelude to sleep stories allow them to dream the impossible. They explain the strong emotions children exp...

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My latest column for The CEO Magazine looks at the bank regulator's latest enthusiasm: changing banks' cultures. APRA is now doing what the Dutch have done for several years now: bring in a team of organisational psychologists to work out what drives behaviours within a bank,...

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Looking at the newspapers you’d think Catholicism is having a hard time with philandering priests and cover-ups of their doings being found out on a weekly basis. In Australia, the royal commission has uncovered a lot of systematically covered-up child abuse in the Catholic Ch...

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Senator Nick Xenophon, a man of great integrity, has reportedly struck a deal with the government over media reform. One aspect of it, as reported by The West Australian , is that the the government will subsidise 200 journalism scholarships of up to $40,000 a year. (I have no...

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And sing out below if you're planning to go to a film – perhaps we could encourage some visits to the cinema by the TLA (Troppo Latte Auxiliary). Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks Let Yourself Go! (Opening Night) Dr. Elia Venezia is a psychoanalyst who is separated...

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Fiscal Stimulus and Fiscal Sustainability by Alan J. Auerbach, Yuriy Gorodnichenko - #23789 (EFG PE) Abstract: The Great Recession and the Global Financial Crisis have left many developed countries with low interest rates and high levels of public debt, thus limiting the abili...

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The Effects of Marijuana Liberalizations: Evidence from Monitoring the Future by Angela K. Dills, Sietse Goffard, Jeffrey Miron - #23779 (HE LE PE) Abstract: By the end of 2016, 28 states had liberalized their marijuana laws: by decriminalizing possession, by legalizing for me...

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This is from Ian Rogers' regular newsletter for the financial industry. There may be a dash for the exits from the rowdy sanctums of the Australian Bankers Association, with more than one bank jostling for first mover advantage and any accolades from a select set of stakeholde...

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[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="562"] These soldiers are at war. The Western Front, Christmas day, 1914.[/caption] Selection by lot is a simple idea, so it's not surprising that it can be useful in many situations. Whenever I see institutional dysfunction or idiocy,...

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It twigged with me a few years ago just how biased economic discussion is towards things economists or their audience would like to know, rather than what economists can or do know. As with those interminable pre-match footy commentaries, economists can add very little value t...

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People disappointed with democratic outcomes often call for better education of the citizenry. But the democracies began, and flourished, in the nineteenth century, when people were quite poorly educated. They proved resilient and backsliding only seems to occur where democrac...

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In Memoriam: Bill Craven [1. On Marnie Hughes-Warrington from ANU's History Department tweeting this address, I sent her an email as follows: Subject: Seeking to contact Bill Craven Hi Marnie, Thanks for your tweet to my speech on RG Collingwood. I’ve always wanted to write to...

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https://youtu.be/FX_JF8o7ca8 https://youtu.be/aILtCv_T9vI We hurtle along the conveyor belt of life just hoping not to start hearing Frank Sinatra's "I did it my way" ringing in our ears too soon. So it was with some trepidation that I arranged a 60th birthday party. I'd not h...

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Let me indulge, purely for entertainment value, in some fan-speculation on what we will see on-screen after the Long Night is over and the final 6 episodes Of Game of Thrones are run in 2019. Let me first talk about the end-game aspects I think the books and the tv-series seem...

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Troppo is getting ready for the singularity. That's the period during which Ken, Don, David and I put our feet up and Troppo just runs itself with KenBot, DonBot, DavidBot and MeBot doing all the work. Commenters put their feet up too and just pig out on scones, cream and zero...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="620"] B1 and B2, or as they're known here at Troppo, T1 and T2 "Are you thinking what I'm thinking T2?"[/caption] The contentious issue of obligatory quotas for commercial children’s television is now under review and has polarised the...

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[caption id="attachment_34256" align="alignright" width="505"] Source: Sortition in the History of Democracy , Slide 41.[/caption] Cross-posted from The Mandarin : Our world has been optimised to within an inch of its life. Usually from the top down. With the economic, social...

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[caption id="attachment_31194" align="alignleft" width="640"] Artist's incorrect impression, from the film "Minority Report". In the real future, these autonomous cars would be travelling much closer together, and there would be more of them.[/caption] This month's print and o...

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I am a big fan of the GOT books and series, loving Season 7 and salivating at Season 8 to come. Great escapism and fantastic acting and camerawork. Part of what I love about GOT is how it far more ruthlessly than, say, Lord of the Rings, describes blind ambition, lust, treache...

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Continued from Part One . The ABC and Children’s Programming - The Highs, Lows and Power-plays Part one here and part two here . The promise of the early years When ABC television first aired, on November 5, 1956, children’s programs presented a dilemma. There was no Australia...

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Many readers will have heard of Patricia Edgar who was a giant force in Australian cultural life from the 1970s. She more than anyone else was responsible for lifting the tone of children's TV in Australia. In any event I was talking to her recently about the current woes of c...

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[caption id="attachment_31109" align="alignleft" width="708"] Hat tip: Richard Halcomb[/caption] Barnaby Joyce is in the news a bit right now . Coincidentally, I wrote an assessment of his abilities in a column for The CEO Magazine way back on 31 July, before the section 44 sc...

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"Research has shown that cultures with greater gender equity have larger sex differences when it comes to job preferences, because in these societies, people are free to choose their occupations based on what they enjoy." A month ago, a Google employee wrote a memo about his t...

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[caption id="attachment_31072" align="alignleft" width="640"] Smurfing, sans cuckoos ...[/caption] There's a weird sort of dissonance in today's Australian Financial Review. On the front page, CBA CEO Ian Narev argues that CBA culture is "strong". Meanwhile, a detailed Neil Ch...

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I've known Dennis Glover since we were both staffers in Parliament during the Hawke-Keating years (I was there in 1981, 83-4 and 1991-3 until just after the 'sweetest victory of all' in 1993 which with hindsight I wish John Hewson had won as it would have kept in-tact Australi...

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[caption id="attachment_30982" align="alignleft" width="600"] The massed battalions of The Oz were quickly brought up to the front[/caption] Many hundreds of hours ago now, our foreign affairs community and parts of our media were consumed by the North Korean ICBM emergency. H...

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Does It Matter How and How Much Politicians are Paid? by Duha T. Altindag, Elif S. Filiz, Erdal Tekin - #23613 (LS POL) Abstract: An important question in representative democracies is how to ensure that politicians behave in the best interest of citizens rather than their own...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuehyRf88ac If you've got a bit of an appreciation of chess, this is a lot of fun. I've been watching it on and off today giving myself a little sugar hit by watching a game to take a break from doing other work. This is normally more a pro than...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJubuKDN7Fk Noticing my checking of vids of Wimbledon, Youtube has been serving up far too many excerpts of tennis for my own good but I've got a bit of a fascination with how the game has changed. Anyway, this is as good footage as I've seen of...

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The often good Institute for Government has added to the world's league ladders. As Woody Allen says in Annie Hall "All you people do in California is give away awards. Adolf Hitler: Greatest Fascist Dictator". Anyway, who doesn't need an effective civil service? I know Austra...

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You've heard it a million times: in developed nations, populations are ageing. But what does that mean? At the extremes, it could mean either of two quite different things. It could mean a host of frail elderly people stuck in nursing homes for 20 years, or it could mean a bun...

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[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="472"] Can't resist this incredible picture I'm afraid. Brought to you by ClubTroppo ® "At least enough part of the problem to be complaining about the solution".[/caption] I've written about the Overton window previously. [1. The previ...

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Why do the Swedes put barcodes on their ships? So they can Scandinavian. (Sorry about that). More seriously, this looks like a good haul of films. Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks The Other Side of Hope (Opening Night) Wikström is a man wanting to change his life...

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https://youtu.be/i772m4UdadE?t=32s Watch as right-wing commentators Tucker Carlson and Ralph Peters go to war over who's defending American values. Carlson suggests making common cause with Vladimir Putin; Peters says Carlson sounds like Charles Lindbergh defending Hitler in 1...

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[vimeo 224904259 w=500 h=328] Helen Parish Funeral 7Jul17 (1) from Ken Parish on Vimeo . As the first of the four offspring of Helen and Cecil Parish, my job is to deliver the first section of a two part eulogy, commemorating but most of all celebrating the life of our mother...

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Just had to put this up here, because it's wonderful: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZnBNuqqz5g[/embed] These people were waiting for a Green Day concert when Bohemian Rhapsody started playing over the speakers ...

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My latest column at The CEO Magazine asks whether Australia's 3.3 per cent minimum wage increase will cause any job losses . It focuses on a few pieces of research, including a new study of Seattle's minimum wage hike, older work by ALP frontbencher Andrew Leigh, and one of ec...

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Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men by Mark Aguiar, Mark Bils, Kerwin Kofi Charles, Erik Hurst Abstract: Younger men, ages 21 to 30, exhibited a larger decline in work hours over the last fifteen years than older men or women. Since 2004, time-use data show that...

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Have you ever reflected on what a strange concept the notion of a 'cause of death' really is? We use the term so often that it wouldn't quickly register as a cultural oddity, but it really is a quirky beast and has an odd history. I have a bit of a professional interest in thi...

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Until yesterday I had never heard of Trevor Phillips. He is a former chairman of the UK's Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which means he was in charge of enforcing British anti-discrimination laws in the Blair years. The documentary below is one of the more intere...

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The Effect of Cash Injections: Evidence from the 1980s Farm Debt Crisis by Nittai K. Bergman, Rajkamal Iyer, Richard T. Thakor Abstract: What is the effect of cash injections during financial crises? Exploiting county-level variation arising from random weather shocks during t...

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Beetles: Biased Promotions and Persistence of False Belief by George Akerlof, Pascal Michaillat - #23523 (LS PR) Abstract: This paper develops a theory of promotion based on evaluations by the already promoted. The already promoted show some favoritism toward candidates for pr...

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High School Genetic Diversity and Later-life Student Outcomes: Micro-level Evidence from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study by C. Justin Cook, Jason M. Fletcher - #23520 (EFG LS) Abstract: A novel hypothesis posits that levels of genetic diversity in a population may partially e...

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Right-to-Carry Laws and Violent Crime: A Comprehensive Assessment Using Panel Data and a State-Level Synthetic Controls Analysis by John J. Donohue, Abhay Aneja, Kyle D. Weber - #23510 (LE) Abstract: The 2004 report of the National Research Council (NRC) on Firearms and Violen...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzvOjcGifOM&t=12s&spfreload=10 My 60th Birthday party was a blast. So as not to wait another decade till the next one, I thought I’d do it annually. But to disguise the naked egotism of it I decided to raise money for a Good Cause. And the cause...

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[getty src="622166468" width="594" height="396"] What are the effects of having a US president who is diminished in stature and yet not facing imminent job loss? I try to think this through in my latest column for The CEO Magazine . One likely result: less stability in US fore...

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From Revisionist History In the middle of Los Angeles — a city with some of the most expensive real estate in the world — there are a half a dozen exclusive golf courses, massive expanses dedicated to the pleasure of a privileged few. How do private country clubs afford the pr...

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Working out why the Australian economy has left New Zealand's in the dust for the last thirty years is a bit tricky. I've had a go at it on this blog once before. Anyway, now New Zealand is coming back into fashion. They've certainly followed Charlie Munger's advice and tried...

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https://www.youtube.com/embed/s2Ybgtc7XA4 Last night I came off a series of deadlines and sat in my chair, catching up on a backlog of emails. I also watched David Stratton's series on David Stratton with some Australian Movies worked into it currently on iView (episode 2) whi...

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[getty src="171148424" width="498" height="344"] My column last week for The CEO Magazine reiterates a point made previously at Troppo : the weight of research shows decisively that high marginal tax rates have little effect on the efforts of most high-income earners. Sample q...

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[caption id="attachment_30732" align="alignright" width="373"] What is this picture doing here? It is one of the images selected by Google when I typed in "now is the time for complacency". It clearly has a deep connection with that idea. I can't comment further except to say...

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In the comments section of my earlier post about hatred of the banks , John Walker (no relation) asked: If the big four did pass on the tax to their customers, do you think the ‘non big four’ banks, building societies etc would grab the chance to be more competitive or grab th...

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Via Andrew Gelman's site , here's a TED talk by US philanthropist Laura Arnold entitled "The Four Most Dangerous Words? A New Study Shows". It details her journey through the world of social, medical, psychological and other research. It's a lively and concise summary of the d...

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And the Children Shall Lead: Gender Diversity and Performance in Venture Capital by Paul A. Gompers, Sophie Q. Wang Abstract: With an overall lack of gender and ethnic diversity in the innovation sector documented in Gompers and Wang (2017), we ask the natural next question: D...

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[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="659"] Cognitive biases: Choose your poison[/caption] Cross posted from the Mandarin . Introduction Strategy is crucial for organisations. But as I've previously argued , a great deal of what passes for strategic thinking is a kind of a...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_7h0TzqFA8 I'm a big fan of Colin Hay, whom I saw on stage for the first time about three years ago. Hilariously funny and great songs. I particularly like "It's a beautiful world". The video above is a good clip showing how funny he is. It's i...

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The Gunner Labor government came to office last August promising to restore the trust of Territorians in government, after it had been shattered by four years of chaos, division and dubious or worse ethical behaviour by various members of the Giles CLP regime. Enacting and boo...

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I've always thought that, if there's an economic driver for Australian culture it's the high demand for labour - exceeding supply a lot of the time - that applied in Australia from the convict period on and the resulting uppityness of workers - including convict workers judgin...

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Handle with Care: The Local Air Pollution Costs of Coal Storage . by Akshaya Jha, Nicholas Z. Muller - #23417 (EEE PE) Abstract: Burning coal is known to have environmental costs; this paper quantities the local environmental costs of transporting and storing coal at U.S. powe...

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Status Goods: Experimental Evidence from Platinum Credit Cards by Leonardo Bursztyn, Bruno Ferman, Stefano Fiorin, Martin Kanz, Gautam Rao - #23414 (DEV LS PE) Abstract: This paper provides novel field-experimental evidence on status goods. We work with an Indonesian bank that...

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Below is a spirited exchange between me and Barry Jones on deliberative democracy which I reproduce with his permission. He won't be participating in any online debate because as he puts it I … confess to being a total abstainer where social media is concerned. I don’t want to...

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[getty src="483245425" width="507" height="338"] With airport rail links in the news in both Sydney and Melbourne, here's my recent column for The CEO Magazine arguing that most transport systems have higher priorities . Most people seem to love the idea of airport rail links....

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There's a lot I don't understand. We don't have enough space of a proper survey but let me give you an example. Pistachios taste better than hazelnuts. Much better. And yet hazelnut ice cream and gelato are much much yummier than their pistachio equivalents. As I recall someon...

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The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms by David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence F. Katz, Christina Patterson, John Van Reenen - #23396 (LS PR) Abstract: The fall of labor's share of GDP in the United States and many other countries in recent decades is well do...

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Up from Slavery? African American Intergenerational Economic Mobility Since 1880 by William J. Collins, Marianne H. Wanamaker - #23395 (DAE LS) Abstract: We document the intergenerational mobility of black and white American men from 1880 through 2000 by building new datasets...

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My latest column for The CEO Magazine sees Scott Morrison enjoying his move to the political centre via the new bank levy . I still haven't worked out whether this particular $1.5 billion a year bank liabilities tax is actually good policy. But it has at least some policy just...

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And yes, if you've not seen it, Annie Hall really is that good. It's a four and a half from me. Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks 20th Century Women (Opening Night) Dorothea is mother to Jamie and he’s growing up fast. It’s a challenging time and Dorothea decides s...

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A long time ago I ran Windows 98 and at least every 24 hours, though often more often I had to cold reboot it to make it work properly. Now, nearly twenty years after this was largely fixed in the Windows world, I have the same problem with my MacBook Air. I bought a new one a...

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One of the privileges of access to what we cool kids call the "back end" of Troppo is that when I write a long, long comment , in an old thread that has taken a new direction, I can make it the start of a new thread. As I'm doing here. Note that the comment originally arose fr...

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[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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Festival Website | Films | Schedule The Films Atlantic Atlantic tells the story of three fishing communities in Ireland, Canada and Norway who battle big business to maintain their traditional ways of life. ☆☆☆☆ ☆ IMDB A Date For Mad Mary 'Mad’ Mary McArdle needs to find a dat...

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Direct democracy and government size: evidence from Spain By: Carlos Sanz (Banco de España) Direct democracy is spreading across the world, but little is known about its effects on policy. I provide evidence from a unique scenario. In Spain, national law determines that munici...

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Cross-posted from the Mandarin We do have a few advantages, perhaps the greatest being that we don’t have a strategic plan Warren Buffett It's a common lament that, within organisations whether in the public, private or not-for-profit sector, boards and/or senior management do...

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[getty src="579024746" width="509" height="339"] My latest column for The CEO Magazine looks at Malcolm Turnbull's recent Snowy announcement and asks: isn't there a better way to make infrastructure decisions? The particular process I'd like to see around the Snowy announcemen...

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I've weighed in previously on the relentless emphasis on symbolism in the political prosecution of aboriginal issues in Australia. This isn't necessarily a criticism of aboriginal activists because, as I argued, they're working within the rules of memefication . I can add that...

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The NT News’ front page on Saturday is a vintage piece of Murdoch tabloid journalism – aggressively funny but without any meaningful regard for fact or fairness. Of course portraying any politicians as “bastards” is bound to meet with general public approval, especially when M...

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I wrote these words just before we nearly threw away the 2010 Premiership. [I]t’s hard to figure out what exactly the plan is up forward. In the case of virtually any other club, if a mid-fielder gets the ball and their side has control, there’ll be a dangerous lead up forward...

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Travesties of the proverbial is a very occasional series one post of which began with these words. 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...

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Hans Christian Andersen’s famous story The Emperor’s New Clothes epitomises the phenomenon of the truth hiding in plain sight as a result of collective delusion or selective vision. There is just such a collective public delusion at the heart of our current understanding of Au...

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This evening I received a highly significant email. It's from National Archives with which I'm doing some minor business. I have no idea what it means, but I figure it could be of considerable use to someone. If that person is you, I commend it to you. It's certainly a relief...

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Here's a list of buzzwords. I want to make a quick point. Note that there are very few ugly neologisms there - or even expressions that don't have clear meanings. Most of the expressions have very clear meanings. Indeed, some of them are quite compelling That's their point. Th...

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Experienced Troppo readers will be aware that I fairly frequently post articles about topics relating to crime and punishment, especially crime statistics and patterns. Quite often those articles consist partly of impassioned diatribes against sensationalist tabloid crime “sho...

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I've known Victor Perton since he was a lively Liberal MP interested in approaches to regulation that were more promising than the standard reg review boilerplate of the time. Neither of us made any progress on that score and reg review remains its ineffectual self. Now comfor...

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We need leaders who get up and out, are close to global megatrends and consumer behaviour, and understand leading indicators for changes to how people will work and live. A self described "leadership consultant" Continued from Part One . Starting sometime - I'm thinking late i...

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Black to play Stefansson vs Carlsen 21. ...? See game for solution. about our puzzles

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Here is a link to a companion article to Treaty: Yeah, Nah, Maybe which I cross-posted here at Troppo from The Summit a week ago: What might a treaty look like? Another article published there a couple of days ago ( The hidden karma of Aboriginal affairs policy … ) is also rel...

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If you're at all like me, you see and hear a bunch of people complaining that with the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, the world has gone mad and anything could happen. The New York Times today published a column by a former assistant attorney general in the Geo...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="530"] Further critical discussion of a range of aspects of strategy can also be found here [/caption] Corporate strategy is a comparatively new field which, took off a decade or so after WWII. There were various technical disciplines ma...

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When Harry Fired Sally: The Double Standard in Punishing Misconduct , Mark L. Egan, Gregor Matvos, Amit Seru - #23242 (CF LS) Abstract: We examine gender discrimination in the financial advisory industry. We study a less salient mechanism for discrimination, firm discipline fo...

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Does the reliability of institutions affect public good contributions? Evidence from a laboratory experiment By: Jahnke, Björn ; Fochmann, Martin ; Wagener, Andreas Reliable institutions - i.e., institutions that live up to the norms that agents expect them to keep - foment co...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xurO_YulJ4c I was listening to a recent episode of Big Ideas featuring Steven Oliver who gave a good account of himself I think. He also recited a poem which has gone viral on YouTube. You may have read it, heard it or heard of it. I liked the p...

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Cross-posted from The Summit . It was surprising (at least to me) that there wasn't more discussion at the NT Governance Summit surrounding the question of a possible treaty between Aboriginal Territorians and the Northern Territory Government. It seemed as if most of the curr...

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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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Do Women Ask? Benjamin Artz, Amanda H. Goodall, and Andrew J. Oswald, September 2016 Abstract: Women typically earn less than men. The reasons are not fully understood. Previous studies argue that this may be because (i) women ‘don’t ask’ and (ii) the reason they fail to ask i...

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School Lunch Quality and Academic Performance , by Michael L. Anderson, Justin Gallagher, Elizabeth Ramirez Ritchie Improving the nutritional content of public school meals is a topic of intense policy interest. A main motivation is the health of school children, and, in parti...

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[caption id="attachment_30174" align="alignleft" width="600"] Melbourne from the Yarra[/caption] My latest column for The CEO Magazine extends my updated Troppo post on decentralisation . As I dug further into the issue for this column, I was startled by the extent to which go...

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Is Socially Responsible Production a Normal Good? , Jana Friedrichsen This paper uses a controlled laboratory experiment to investigate the effect of wealth on individual social responsibility (ISR), defined as choosing a more socially responsible product if a cheaper alternat...

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This is a pretty weak study, but even so, it's certainly pretty plausible that poverty depresses productivity. And the effect could be quite substantial. <irony>Which would explain why business is pretty strongly campaigning to minimise poverty in our society as part of its ov...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEjtKHxLl54&t=2s A favourite comedian of mine, Stewart Lee, seems to be getting with the program. Our extensive contacts with the Russian Embassy in Washington report that despite attempts to cover his tracks with the timestamping of the Youtube...

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An article in today’s Northern Territory News (online version marked “premium” – I read the paper version while sipping coffee at the Roma Bar) gives what the newspaper describes as a six month report card on the Gunner Labor government. It’s a peculiar article. Its principal...

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The latest National Accounts release confirms the lack of growth in Australian household incomes. Is this the start of a new era of stagnant incomes? In recent years GDP has continued to increase (save for a small drop at the end of 2016), but household incomes have hardly gro...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsbcScp9wpU When I saw Ray Martin fronting a doco on racism I expected the worst. He's so in love with schmoozing the audience with his dulcets, I expected a whitewash. There are a few bad eggs, but we're not racist. We're Aussies! The program c...

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There are also Idols formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other, which I call Idols of the Market Place, on account of the commerce and consort of men there. For it is by discourse that men associate, and words are imposed according to the apprehension of...

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ABC Radio National's The Spirit Of Things is a long-running show about spirituality presented by Dr Rachael Kohn. Its territory extends from straight interviews with interesting people to the more way-out fringes of spirituality. Kohn and co-producer Geoff Wood journeyed out o...

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Some time ago I was written to by an Australian University asking me to become an Adjunct Professor in Journalism. This is an honorary position so, (paradoxically) it's not much of an honour! In any event, this is how the letter I received begins. The University’s 2012-2016 St...

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ClubTroppo chief executive Nicholas Gruen - who was criticised by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull for his imaginary $5.6 million salary - has resigned from the job after seven years. Mr Gruen, who began the job in his own mind long, long ago, tendered his resignation to the Cl...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVRQK58jrbw You will no doubt be familiar with a fund-raising technique involving people coming to your door and asking for money for one cause or another. No matter how good the cause or how respected and established the cause, the technique se...

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Cross posted at the Mandarin There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order ofthings. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under...

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Can a democracy attract competent leaders, while attaining broad representation? Economic models suggest that free-riding incentives and lower opportunity costs give the less competent a comparative advantage at entering political life. Moreover, if elites have more human capi...

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https://vimeo.com/802540

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Crossposted from The Mandarin today where they almost never make comments :( [T]here is an Australia of the spirit, submerged and not very articulate … [b]orn of the lean loins of the country itself, of the dreams of men who came here to form a new society …. Sardonic, idealis...

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I happened upon this yesterday and thought it might be of interest to readers here. THE next few months may decide not only whether we are to survive as a nation, but whether we deserve to survive. As yet none of our achievements prove it, at anyrate in the sight of the outer...

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We use a novel method to measure racism at both the individual and the country level. We show that our measure of racism has a strong negative and significant impact on economic development, quality of institutions and education. We then test different hypotheses concerning th...

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I've written about the remarkable phenomenon of reality TV before , but just want to make a quick note of something here. The tweet above would have been unimaginable just a decade ago. I won't say reality TV caused the conditions that made it possible, but one of the things t...

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This post is based on a comment on an article promoting informed consent for experiments. I don't seem to have got a response from the author, so in case others wished to discuss, I thought I'd post it here. While most of the examples used were ones where I would have agreed w...

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By Tony Beatton ; Michael P. Kidd ; Stephen Machin ; Dipa Sarkar This paper reports new evidence on the causal link between education and male youth crime using individual level state-wide administrative data for Queensland, Australia. Enactment of the Earning or Learning educ...

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I've outlined some of the pathologies of what I call 'vox pop' democracy in various posts from time to time. As Western democracy degrades before our very eyes (President Donald Trump wasn't really imaginable a decade or so ago and is still hard to fully comprehend) we need to...

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In reciting his famous ditty, Henry Higgins offers a comical take on an ancient dilemma. This is a brief postscript to my essay on Care where I rather surprised myself by expounding my take on 'feminist economics' and the ethics of care. There's an inherent tension in feminism...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="778"] Exactly why George Pell's face should come up on Googling "Crikey" is anyone's guess, but I for one would like people to stop being mean to him. After all, he didn't ask to travel First Class representing the world's religion of po...

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Reg ular readers may know of my fondness for the recent film of Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, so I was intrigued to come upon this fantastic book on the subject. I say 'book' because in many ways this is how I think books should be written. It's written on a Wordpress bl...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMLt7bSX3iE I In writing a series of essays last year I came to an obvious conclusion. It's perhaps one that others had come to years ago, but then there's something in coming to a conclusion from a position sympathetic to its opposite.[1. As J....

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On completing a consumer survey for the Melbourne Theatre Company. I was intrigued to come upon this table. Which of the following would encourage you to attend the theatre more frequently? (Select all that apply) Free pre/post shows talks with artists Greater variety of produ...

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Do anti-poverty programs sway voters? Experimental evidence from Uganda By: Blattman, Christopher ; Emeriau, Mathilde ; Fiala, Nathan A Ugandan government program allowed groups of young people to submit proposals to start skilled enterprises. Among 535 eligible proposals, the...

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Research Design Meets Market Design: Using Centralized Assignment for Impact Evaluation Date: 2016-12 By: Abdulkadiroğlu, Atila (Duke University) ; Angrist, Joshua (MIT) ; Narita, Yusuke (Yale University) ; Pathak, Parag A. (MIT) Atmospheric pollution was an important side eff...

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An incomplete series of thoughts beginning with a couple of paragraphs suggesting something with grander aspirations - which of course may be realised some day - but not in this blog post. Still I'm heading overseas now, and I'm not sure how the aspirations can be realised, so...

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Time was (I'm guessing, if it was it didn't last long) when linkbait had standards . You (I'm obviously still guessing here) took some aspect of something and beat it up a bit. Anyway courtesy of ZergNet (who knew) I just saw this bit of linkbait. George Michael's Ex-Wham! Par...

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One of the central contemporary critiques of the industrial revolution was its undermining of crafts and craftsmanship. Today this is happening within the world of ideas. And at least right now, it's looking like this is not a very happy development. This was brought home to m...

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