I was checking out Peter Martin's list of Seven really bright (policy) ideas for a forthcoming article currently titled "What is a policy hack?"(It's a good article which I recommend). When I noticed something. All the links to the original sources are links to articles in The...

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At a time like this, with two sleeps to go before Santa's elves hack Alexa and get it to let Santa and his reindeer shapeshift their way through your aircon duct and into your living rooms, our minds turn to the simple things that matter. Like my proposal for an Evaluator Gene...

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In the dynamic media environment we have in Australia, broadcasting regulation has become an exceptionally tricky exercise. If regulations are to work, they require creative application and on-going monitoring as commercial players will always seek to outmanoeuvre them, especi...

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Children are now on the move. Their phone is their companion for reaching out to friends, texting, referencing, looking up what they want and need to know, viewing YouTube, playing games, taking photos and videos. They can click through what’s on offer: a cornucopia from which...

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Cross posted from Pearls and Irritations The Information-technology Revolution is challenging the assumptions on which the education of children and the provision of their entertainment are based. The doomsayers argue the big companies – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, et al....

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https://youtu.be/HzeekxtyFOY Putting the grown-ups to shame without the moral vanity the grown-ups tried so hard to teach her.

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Today’s kids are way ahead of our broadcasting regulators and television producers in the way they use both television and digital media. It’s time for a radical rethink of content regulations, quotas, and subsidy for children’s media education and entertainment in their best...

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Politics is about constructing those public goods that are necessary for communities, are a minimum to deal with problems that threaten life itself. In our present situation, the most serious problems are all posed on a global scale, as a result of the scale of our management...

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Regional and Racial Inequality in Infectious Disease Mortality in U.S. Cities, 1900-1948 James J. Feigenbaum, Christopher Muller, and Elizabeth Wrigley-Field #25345 Abstract: In the first half of the twentieth century, the rate of death from infectious disease in the United St...

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A couple of weeks ago I got this email. Dear Prof. Gruen, I’m fifteen years old, I live in Memphis, Tennessee, and I’m very interested in economics. Recently I came across your interview on the Economic Rockstar podcast. I have a blog called Ceteris Numquam Paribus , where I p...

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https://youtu.be/S_SWo3Cj8Yc Herewith my presentation in London "Economic reform thinking as if we'd bothered to do it" and Martin Wolf's commentary on it beginning at around the 40 minute mark. Judging from audience comments, a good time was had by all. You can download the s...

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Cross-posted at the Mandarin . [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="530"] The first image to come up in a search for 'new professionalism'. A very nice image too, especially for Kandinsky lovers like myself.[/caption] Working in and around government for over three decade...

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[caption id="attachment_32524" align="aligncenter" width="1212"] When Ghandi was asked what he thought of Western Civilisation he said it would be a good idea. Ditto democracy.[/caption] In a recent paper , James Fishkin identifies some potential shortcomings of citizen's cham...

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We seem to have a Brexit deal today, which has two important components: free-movement between the UK and the EU ends (no single market) whilst on all matters of trade, the UK indefinitely follows the EU until a new deal is reached (a customs union). The nitty gritty has to be...

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Yes, it is a little over the top isn't it? Anyway, here's Frank's interview with me last Friday night.

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The Big Con - Reassessing the "Great" Recession and its "Fix" by Laurence J. Kotlikoff Abstract: Most economists differ, not on the causes of the Great Recession, but on their relative importance. They concur, though, on the basic problem, namely human, not market failure. Thi...

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In late June this year CEDA asked me to reprise an earlier presentation I gave to them on forecasting. They also asked for a blog post which I also reproduce below. Add one more item to the Overton Juggernaut , my term for that unstoppable agenda of things we keep doing the wa...

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The US political establishment is now firmly of the belief that the US is still the world’s dominant superpower, and that they could easily win a cold-war confrontation with China , just like it overwhelmed the Soviet Union with economic firepower. I think the Americans are ba...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sp3dIyNA2A People you don't like – they're everywhere International Competition and Adjustment: Evidence from the First Great Liberalization by Stephane Becuwe, Bertrand Blancheton, Christopher M. Meissner - #25173 (DAE ITI) Abstract: France an...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r7TzkFR7ps Konstantin Kisin is a comedian who was born in Russia and emigrated to Britain with his family when he was twelve. And he's a friend of mine whom I met at the inimitable Kilkenomics . Like most comedians he's a thoughtful guy. He's m...

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Grandparents, Moms, or Dads? Why Children of Teen Mothers Do Worse in Life by Anna Aizer, Paul J. Devereux, Kjell G. Salvanes - #25165 (CH ED HE LS) Abstract: Women who give birth as teens have worse subsequent educational and labor market outcomes than women who have first bi...

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As I predicted a few months ago , the US security apparatus is going after China relentlessly, mainly in order to have something to do. As I predicted in 2012, Australia is firmly behind the US and the wider Western alliance that will eventually form a block against China. The...

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Do Equal Employment Opportunity Statements Backfire? Evidence From A Natural Field Experiment On Job-Entry Decisions by Andreas Leibbrandt, John A. List - #25035 (LE LS) Labor force composition and the allocation of talent remain of vital import to modern economies. For their...

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Peer Advice on Financial Decisions: A case of the blind leading the blind? by Sandro Ambuehl, B. Douglas Bernheim, Fulya Ersoy, Donna Harris - #25034 (PE) Previous research shows that many people seek financial advice from non-experts, and that peer interactions influence fina...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZtT9J2vfps

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https://youtu.be/5cR96KesAMQ The AIFS puts on a mean Annual Conference. They fussed over us speakers trying to make sure we weren't just a bunch of talking heads. I would have liked to have attended more of it, but had another conference at which I had pontification duties at...

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I reproduce here a fine review of what seems like a fine book. I'm not buying the book because of the outrageous price the academic publishers are charging. It's an interesting story of practical contribution – economics as clarified policy commonsense as I like to think of it...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="423"] Cross posted from Inside Story [/caption] In 1943, back working where he’d been during the first world war, the now-famous economist John Maynard Keynes wrote to a friend: Here I am back… in the Treasury like a recurring decimal —...

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What's at stake in monetary policy? The most obvious answer is "jobs and growth" – to coin a phrase. The idea is that, by meeting its target of low and steady (2-3%) inflation, the RBA tries also to keep us as close as practicable to full employment. But, as we've realised sin...

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One of the best pieces of scientific news the last decades has been the spectacular improvements in solar energy generation. The current world price was set in 2017 when the Dubai government bought a large future solar contract for 7.3 US cents per Kilowatt Hour, a mere 1/6 th...

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[caption id="attachment_32410" align="alignright" width="458"] A particularly grotesque example of many things, only marginally related to the red tape busting agenda.[/caption] This post is worked up from a comment of mine on this Mandarin post on a new submission to the Thod...

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Some more fascinating results in the 'whodda thunk?' category. You can track down the paper in various published and pre-published forms here . Note, while I've not changed any meanings, I've occasionally shortened a sentence without horsing around too much with [square bracke...

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Cross posted from the Mandarin : https://youtu.be/Lvcnx6-0GhA I recently made a submission to the Productivity Commission's inquiry into competition in finance. I wanted to suggest a very simple idea, that I thought could make a big difference. Moreover it came straight from D...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="720"] It's funny how not-for-profit is more efficient than for profit where there's masses of opportunities to rip people off? Who'da thunk? The Industry Funds were dragged into the Royal Commission in line with the well established pri...

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One of my twenty something friends once told me of a meeting to discuss corporate social responsibility in their Big Law Firm. Along came the heavies of the firm, together with their Champions of Change. These champions of change are men who look out for women – largely by mak...

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If only I'd been alive to get to one of these events. Nelson Mandela Last year's second dinner was perhaps only matched by Lincoln's Second Inaugural. Nicholas Gruen Lying Nick Gruen is a total lightweight. TOTALLY FAKE ECONOMIST. Begged me to let him clean the ashtrays on The...

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Arguing with an American ex-Australian now resident in Canada, I contested his view that, of the three countries, America is the least and Australia the most, authoritarian. In part it was a verbal difference. I was taking “authoritarian” in the established pejorative meaning:...

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There's an amazing amount of dreck about – masquerading as the latest thinking. It's not that there isn't a lot to think about, so it's easy to think you should read this or that. How to choose? One of my filters is the first page test, or even the first paragraph test. Does t...

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There's a spectre haunting Europe … and the rest of the Western world. We have elaborate 'diversity' programs in good upper-middle-class places to prevent discrimination against all manner of minorities (and majorities like women). It's a fine thing. But there's a diversity ch...

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Leon Gettler interviewed me recently on my exchange with Krugman . As you can imagine, it's a difficult thing to explain in an interview, but I took that as a challenge – if you like to my interview 'technique'. Just as I love doing it with columns, working over what I'm sayin...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="378"] I'm not quite sure how Monash University Press has done this, but this is a high production but relatively low volume book, so I was expecting its price to be around the $60 mark. It is $39.95 in shops, but can be purchased for $3...

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A friend referred me to a relatively new site " Briefings on Brexit " yesterday which I checked out with interest. It was started by academics who were fed up with Brexit being stereotyped as mad and bad. They started the site to proselytise a reasoned and well informed case f...

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Below is my response to Krugman's comments in defence of new trade theory. It's not generated any discussion on the Mandarin or Evonomics , but perhaps it will here. Apologies for the delay in getting it onto Troppo – I've been travelling. I recently criticised contemporary ec...

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The Donald is visiting the UK and has had me in stitches a whole day. He's clearly been having a chat with Nigel Farage about how to handle the Conservatives and has shown them up in spectacular fashion. Theresa May, bless her, was of course in an impossible position. She undo...

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A number of previous researches indicate that men prefer competition over cooperation, and it is sometimes suggested that women show the opposite behavioral preference. In the current study the effects of social context on gender differences in cooperation are investigated. Fo...

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Cross posted from John Menadue's Pearls and Irritations NBN Co claims their ‘focus remains strongly on improving customer experience on the network including a smooth connection to the network.’ In fact the experience is a fiasco. Bill Shorten says the dysfunctional NBN needs...

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[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="795"] Google images selected this image as the most relevant to "ABC Trust" for obvious reasons.[/caption] Cross-posted from John Menadue's Pearls and Irritations . Trust is an interesting concept. It takes time to develop trust which...

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[caption id="attachment_32263" align="aligncenter" width="638"] This image was picked from a bunch of images on Google Image. This post is not about Canada. If you're interested in Canada, it's unlikely you'll get ANYTHING out of this post. Canada is just incidental to this po...

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Like the world today, Europe in the 19 th century witnessed major shifts in the balance of power, with new technologies changing how life was lived. Otto von Bismarck, a Prussian, saw opportunities in that chaos. He unified the warring German principalities in 1870 via an unex...

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[caption id="attachment_32251" align="aligncenter" width="1280"] Who is that man in the corner, and why is he watching you?[/caption] Well folks, as you know, Club Troppo is the only website east of the whole damn Murray Darling system that has the reputation to attract the ki...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKy7ljRr0AA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWHYJpJcLcU

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I was looking for something on economic method, and found this section of Paul Romer's "The Trouble with Macroeconomics" which I thought was worth posting. Some of the economists who agree about the state of macro in private conversations will not say so in public. This is con...

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Cross-posted from John Menadue's Pearls and Irritations . The ABC has been an extraordinarily resilient organisation. It has withstood management and Board upheavals, survived remorseless budget cuts and harassment. But the current attacks on staff and on its role are as overt...

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[caption id="attachment_32229" align="alignright" width="327"] This person wrote a whole book on Jane Austen and Adam Smith without finding my essay on the same subject – or at least judging by Amazon's search facility quoting it. As the President of the Free World is known to...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWHgoT2LfnE&feature=youtu.be I was a little crestfallen when, after my public lecture on democracy and sortition at King's College London was filmed with a few to producing a video and the contractors informed us that the recording was hopelessl...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNfGyIW7aHM Cross posted on The Mandarin . The OECD recently published this OECD report on inclusive growth. It’s certainly a Good Thing that the OECD regards alleviating inequality in the light of various things including: Sharply rising inequa...

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When the financial crisis struck, it was back to the economics Max Corden learned in the 40s and 50s -- a golden age of economics in which conceptual simplicity was a feature not a bug and the central criterion of good work was its generality and usefulness -- rather than the...

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[caption id="attachment_32201" align="alignleft" width="700"] The first time I've ever had something published with the graphic being a cockroach. And hopefully not the last. From the FT .[/caption] Bob Sleeper ( Letters , June 15) is concerned that if central banks embraced c...

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All finance requires is an upgrade for the internet age From Nicholas Gruen, VIC, Australia Given the resounding “No” from the Swiss in the Vollgeld or “sovereign money” referendum , and despite Bob Sleeper’s relief ( Letters , June 12), Martin Wolf’s central question remains...

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The God of monotheism did not die, it only left the scene for a while in order to reappear as humanity – the human species dressed up as a collective agent, pursuing its self-realization in history. But, like the God of monotheism, humanity is a work of the imagination. The on...

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[just a thought] US total fertility rates were bobbing along very placidly around 2.05 live births per woman from 1990 to 2010, when suddenly there was a clear drop to 1.8 in 2010-2017. That drop has even continued to 1.76 births per woman in 2017 . When I asked myself what co...

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With Neville having died last week, I'm reposting this to the front page on the dayof his funeral which is being held at Olympic Park where a statue of Peter Norman standing on the dais stands. NG We were thrilled at midnight last night to discover that Neville Sillitoe receiv...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LqZdkkBDas

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I've previously commented more than once on the relatively more healthy state of economic debate in the UK than here – which is not to say that the giant intellectual sucking sound that is Brexit isn't already having its own disastrous impact on debate. Meanwhile two of my fav...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="649"] Hong Kong actor Eric Tsang Chi-wa, NT Chief Minister Michael Gunner, Donghai Airlines chairman Mr.Wong Cho-Bau and Donghai Airlines Chief Executive Officer Yang Jianhong following the arrival of the first Donghai airlines flight fr...

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Long-ish article but a must-read in my humble opinion for Territorians interested in NT economic development (especially tourism). The Gunner government isn't keen to disclose the terms of its "partnering" agreement with Donghai Airlines that resulted in the airline's inaugura...

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There's been a great thinning out of our political culture. Once built up from the life-world with hundreds of thousands determining party policy feeding up from branches to politicians – though leaders obviously had quite a lot of power, particularly in the conservative parti...

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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB6V7XU5H6A] It seems like time to review progress on the Gunner government’s quest to create a vibrant Darwin CBD. They actually appointed an assistant Minister for that noble quest (Paul Kirby) on achieving government in 2016. In term...

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As far as I can tell, the position of the Australian Republic Movement ever since the failure of the 1999 Republic Referendum has effectively if tacitly been that there is no point in another referendum while the current Queen remains on the throne. Certainly the ARM’s current...

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In an exchange, John Burnheim sent me an email which seemed to me to be the effective condensation of a lot of good thinking. It certainly chimed with my own thoughts. So I suggested he clean it up and I'd reproduce it here, which I reproduce below. Because it is the conclusio...

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The OECD has joined The Movement. In a new report it's saying that plastic recycling isn't working. So we've got to make it work . Fair enough. Perhaps we should. But you'd think that reading their material on it, there might be some discussion as to whether this was the most...

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For some time now we've been 'proving up' citizens’ juries as a means of consulting the people, but generally within the context of governments being in charge. As a result they've been mostly relatively innocuous. For instance the first two in South Australia were focused on...

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Beginning tomorrow. Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks The Silent Revolution (Opening Night) It’s 1956 and during a visit to West Berlin, high school students Theo and Kurt witness dramatic footage of the Budapest uprising. Back at in Stalinstadt, they spontaneously...

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[caption id="attachment_31009" align="alignleft" width="865"] I happened upon this post in 'drafts' without my having drafted anything. Events now make that unnecessary.[/caption]

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This article is a follow-up to my recent long piece titled Northern Territory development, debt and deficit - the long and winding road . Urban development ideas are invariably bedevilled by community dissension, much of it uninformed and anything but constructive. However, pa...

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I'd like to write up some thoughts regarding Shared Value some time, but I've not had the time and there's a fair few things in front of it in the queue. So in case anyone's interested here's quite a good panel session on the subject with Pru Bennett / Managing Director and He...

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I saw this post by previous Troppo regular Richard 塚正 , the Troppo author previously known as Richard Green and tweeted a suggestion that he republish it here. To which I got the reply : "I long since lost my password and was too lazy to try and recover it. You can repost your...

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I posted the piece over the fold some time ago (early January) but the fact that the federal Parliament's Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters is about to publish its report into the ongoing legal and constitutional debacle surrounding the Parliamentary disqualificati...

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The media debate about last Monday’s NT Budget sure could do with some context and perspective. The Australian ’s Amos Aikman was an honourable exception: Everyone could see this mess coming. You can’t have a mining boom, two new gas plants, a whole lot of federal indigenous s...

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In all ways that we measure these things, physical violence has reduced in Western countries in the last 70 years, particularly mainland Western Europe. What about psychological violence though? Psychological violence, ie the inflicting of mental pain, takes many forms. It inc...

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We're nothing here at Club Pony if we're not banging on about the Issue of the Day and the Issue of the Day is Anzac Day. Owing to continuing flatlining in Troppo's celebrity endorsement and themed fluffy toy revenue and the Troppo elves striking for the right to learn to read...

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The Financial Services Royal Commission is in theory a general inquiry into the financial system. In practice, however, something else is on trial: Australian regulatory systems. As I set out in my latest column for The CEO Magazine , many of our regulators, including ASIC, AU...

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Suppose you buy the idea popular in psychology that there are stable personality types largely formed in childhood and that the population has relatively stable proportions of these personality types. The Big5 personality types are agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, con...

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The Director-General of the BBC has now conceded there is a crisis, with young people spending more time viewing Netflix and YouTube than they do BBC programs. In July 2017 he announced the broadcaster’s biggest investment in children’s services in a generation – an additional...

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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks Kiki, Love to Love (Opening Night) Through five stories, the movie addresses sex and love. Paco and Ana are a married couple looking for reactivate the passion of their sexual relations. Jose Luis tries to recover the affections of...

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Using Massive Online Choice Experiments to Measure Changes in Well-being by Erik Brynjolfsson, Felix Eggers, Avinash Gannamaneni - #24514 (EFG PR) Abstract: GDP and derived metrics (e.g., productivity) have been central to understanding economic progress and well-being. In pri...

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As I tweeted: I was gripped by this 2 hour intellectual brawl Would Ezra articulate compelling reasons for Sam Harris to rise to self-reflection? Or would Sam keep him at bay with his magic “I’m just after timeless scientific truth that scales” wand? Anyway, you may not be as...

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Setting aside the question of evidence, there’s a serious problem with the contention that Syria carried out the recent chemical attack in Douma. It requires us to accept not only that the Syrian government is evil but also that it’s comically stupid. It was on the point of li...

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Beauty, Job Tasks, and Wages: A New Conclusion about Employer Taste-Based Discrimination by Todd R. Stinebrickner, Ralph Stinebrickner, Paul J. Sullivan [I'm sceptical that there's no discrimination in jobs where beauty doesn't generate a dividend for the employer, but what wo...

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Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship , by Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin Jones, J. Daniel Kim, Javier Miranda - #24489 (PR) Abstract: Many observers, and many investors, believe that young people are especially likely to produce the most successful new firms. We use administrative d...

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[caption id="attachment_31852" align="alignleft" width="800"] Actual picture of the Universal Basic Income idea[/caption] In my latest column for The CEO Magazine I take aim at the idea of universal basic income (UBI). The column uses the insights of the always terrific Peter...

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As some of you will have noticed, the Greens released today a policy that borrows heavily on my own proposal "Central banking for all: A modest proposal for radical reform" now available in a number of versions, though this is probably one of the clearer more compelling presen...

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After exhaustive discussion, I've been deputed to inform our readers of Troppo's plastic bag policy. We're in favour of single-use plastic bags. In fact, we're making them compulsory. I was recently in Book Grocer and was refused a plastic bag, though they were prepared to giv...

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Too much wit outwits itself Folk saying quoted by Hegel [1. Quoted from memory.] I stumbled upon this extraordinary exchange between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein, late the night before last and though, I was supposed to be going to sleep, I couldn't stop till I'd finished it. I'd...

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Saving Lives by Tying Hands: The Unexpected Effects of Constraining Health Care Providers Abstract: The emergency department (ED) is a complex node of healthcare delivery that is facing market and regulatory pressure across developed economies to reduce wait times. In this pap...

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[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="504"] Can this moustache save the world?[/caption] A friend asked me on linked in for my comment on this grand lecture by Jeremy Rivkin. I reproduce my initial reaction and then a longer set of comments I offered after having listened...

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Countries increasingly rely on independent fiscal councils to constrain policymakers’ discretion and curb the bias towards excessive deficits and pro-cyclical policies. Since fiscal councils are often recent and heterogeneous across countries, assessing their impact is challen...

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From the moral panic division of ClubTroppo. Early Evidence on Recreational Marijuana Legalization and Traffic Fatalities Over the last few years, marijuana has become legally available for recreational use to roughly a quarter of Americans. Policy makers have long expressed c...

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Herewith a newspaper column on central banking for all, published in the Age and SMH today. Note: the bit in the brackets in the first paragraph is as submitted but Fairfax edited it out. They also headed the piece "One way to deal with the banks: cut them out of the equation...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpVcsRVwF8s&feature=youtu.be&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=events_2018&utm_content=randomists_event_recording Robert Solow once referred to the law and economics scholar Richard Posner as writing books the way the rest of us b...

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We examine whether exposure of men to women in a traditionally male-dominated environment can change attitudes about mixed-gender productivity, gender roles and gender identity. Our context is the military in Norway, where we randomly assigned female recruits to some squads bu...

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Brexit is the main political issue in the UK, competing with sex for the attention of the public. It is a daily gamble whether the news headline is about some politician fondling a knee 55 years ago or a row over Brexit. For the last 18 months, the debate in London has been su...

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https://youtu.be/PX4B6e0wnV8 Above is my presentation to CEDA's Outlook conference in Brisbane a couple of weeks ago. I came after a McKinsey's consultant talking about digital disruption which is always a fun thing to present or listen to because there are lots of 'wow' momen...

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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks C'est La Vie! (Opening Night) Over a career spanning more than 30 years, Max Angély has enjoyed a celebrated career as a caterer and event organiser. Today, it’s all hands on deck for Pierre and Héléna’s nuptials in a breathtaking...

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Humanity is at a high point. What our ancestors dreamed of is slowly becoming a reality: a world without hunger in which the vast majority of mankind live peaceful and long lives. We are not there yet, but in Europe, East Asia, Latin America, and even in Africa (our cradle), m...

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Below is an extract from a recent academic article setting out – rather laboriously I have to say – three 'theories' – I'd rather call them 'ways of seeing' what banks do in our financial system. One approach sees them as financial intermediators meeting the needs of those who...

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If you'd like to be in this year's submission to Crikey for a group submission, please email me on ngruen AT the domain formerly known as gmail (and still known as gmail). And please spread the news far and wide using all the means – inane and otherwise – at your disposal.

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Cross-posted on The Mandarin : To quote Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King in 2010 “of all the many ways of organising banking, the worst is the one we have today.” As I documented in part one , the Bank of England continues as a thoughtful critic to this day. And as we’ve...

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https://youtu.be/LHrvQ7qaadE If you're a chess player who's touched with the human weakness of impatience or just liked to be engaged and see things develop – as we almost all do on our smartphones, checking our emails over 100 times a day – it's hard not to be drawn to speed...

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In the engine room of nation states, ie the tax departments, the coming battle with platform providers is taking shape. Uber, airbnb, facebook, linkedin, ebay, jobseek, and a myriad of specialised platform providers facilitate micro-trades that are largely untaxed by the autho...

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Most contemporary discussions of how to improve politics focus on problems of representation and power. When I come along and want to thrust getting better decisions into the forefront and claiming that a certain sort of untried forum could get improved results even without ch...

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Anglo-Saxon countries are often heaped together as having a single culture. When it comes to migration, attitudes to sex, teenage-pregnancy, inequality, language, and bellicosity, that seems about right. At least, the UK, the US, and Australia are pretty close on those scores....

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[caption id="attachment_31685" align="aligncenter" width="1000"] "Arrival" by Brett Whiteley, painted for the Bicentennial celebrations of the arrival of the First Fleet on 26 January 1788[/caption] We’re a weird mob, we Australians, even weirder than we were in 1957 when John...

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In many areas of policy, particularly where relatively homogeneous communities deliberate about matters within their everyday experience, the informal processes of discussion in the community can, and often do, lead to changes in public opinion that in turn lead to effective p...

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A post by John Burnheim. About ten months ago, John Burnheim wrote to me in terms I've reproduced on this blog previously. John was one of the early movers in academia exploring the limitations of electoral democracy with his book Is Democracy Possible published in 1985 and th...

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* cross-posted from Screen Hub . The #MeToo sexual harassment tsunami generated by the unmasking of American screen industry heavyweights Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey has hit Australian shores with a vengeance. As an old Monty Python sketch observed: ‘Nobody expects the S...

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From today's column in the Guardian UK. There’s a chasm between the will of the British people as expressed in their 52 percent vote for Brexit and their considered will. Turns out ordinary Britons deliberating amongst their peers think things through, ‘unspinning’ much of the...

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Australia has a backlog of issues that will need to be resolved by constitutional referendum sooner or later: Indigenous recognition (especially the Voice to Parliament); resolving the problems caused by archaic and unworkable parliamentary disqualification rules in section 44...

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I was rung yesterday by Ida Argy, wife of Fred Argy and she told me that Fred had recently had a stroke from which he did not recover. Fred was rather like my Dad Fred. A Jewish immigrant – Dad was from Austria (via England) and Fred was Egyptian, though I think both were non...

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Reposted from the Mandarin I In our contemporary lexicon 'independence' – for instance of a government body – is usually a Good Thing. [1. other Good Things include 'appropriate', 'modernised', 'reform', 'enhance', 'principled' It's sobering to realise how rhetorical we are. T...

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Do black politicians matter Abstract: This paper exploits the history of Reconstruction after the American Civil War to estimate the causal effect of politician race on public finance. I overcome the endogeneity between electoral preferences and black representation using the...

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