I wrote this essay a few years ago as part one of a two-part article that would illustrate some parallels between intellectual authoritarianism in neo-Darwinism and in neoclassical economics. In some ways my response to Paul Krugman’s response to me was Part Two. But, wanting...

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[caption id="attachment_33337" align="alignright" width="344"] I was after one of the sillier charts to illustrate CSR. It was a tough choice, but this one hit all its KPIs. Originally worked up from the map which guided the bombing of Hamburg, all Troppodillians will join wit...

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For almost a century the royal road to becoming a top politician in Anglo-Land was to study law and/or a bit of economics. In Australia that was the ticket for Keating, Hawke, Gillard, Howard, and Turnbull. In the US, that mold fit Obama (law), Clinton (law), and both GHW and...

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Are you pro-choice or pro-life? Language like this shows us how fundamental framing has become to political combat. Political debate isn’t just ‘dumbed down’ or simplified. There’s a geography to the ground on which it’s fought and those with an eye to victory head for the hig...

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Hello, my name's David Sligar. Nicholas Gruen has kindly encouraged me to do some blogging here. I started reading this blog over a decade ago, so I'm excited to contribute. First up is a slightly modified cross post from my blog proposing a " job of last resort ". The policy...

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I have extracted below a section that took my fancy from an academic article about the economist Neild, whom I'd not heard of previously. It is an interesting story on its own terms and a nice illustration of how unhelpful the instinct to locate regimes or their functionality...

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[caption id="attachment_33290" align="aligncenter" width="1400"] I made up the term #Bossplaining. Or thought I did. Turns out it's already a thing.[/caption] The one thing I learned in my university education, the one thing that excited me, was the need for people to exercise...

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https://youtu.be/IX0dt2X5d64 Here's a presentation I gave to a recent Government Economists' Conference in Canberra. Like some other reflections of my book launching years (only some of which have been preserved for posterity),[1. I know you'll be looking for book launches at...

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[caption id="attachment_33274" align="alignright" width="278"] In good bookstores everywhere – at a very reasonable price[/caption] Cross-posted from the Lowy Institute Blog . Instead of munching popcorn at the political theatre, citizens’ assemblies would give the community a...

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Universalists dream of a world empire in which a world government works to solve global problems, enforcing the same law all over the world. There are many different ideologies that envision a world government, ranging from international socialism, to the brotherhood of Islam,...

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Something very odd happens when people get told a story of how other people with some shared characteristic have behaved in the past: they take it personal and see themselves in those ‘ancestors’, even if they share no actual family relationship to those people and even though...

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If, as I think, academia has gone from being inefficient but effective to being efficient but ineffective (a proposition I won't defend here), the mechanism for making the switch was going from embodied cognition to abstract Cartesian cognition, or to be more precise from a ri...

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Pedantry is alluring. Especially if one gets some aesthetic satisfaction from the way words are used. Take "begs the question" for instance. I love this term because it is such a simple, chummy way of naming something that's maddening in is subtlety. To beg the question in its...

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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks Military Wives (Opening Night) The life of a military wife can be thankless. Separated from loved ones, their suffering and sacrifice go unnoticed while they live with the dread of a fateful knock on the door. But Kate finds freedo...

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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks 1968 (Opening Night) April 4th, 1968: Greece is under right-wing military rule. In Athens, 80,000 people have gathered at the stadium, while millions are glued to their radios — like the tram driver who witnesses a miracle, the wid...

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Let's first agree that if Trump is a blessing in disguise for world peace, he makes an exceptionally good disguise. Trump's bark is probably the worst of any US president in living memory. He has threatened the total destruction of North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and probably a...

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Sometimes we should just be grateful in this country for the steady hand on the tiller at the very highest levels. People might mock but it's easy to mock. Philip Lowe wants us to take a bow! I don’t think we should forget that more Australians have jobs today than ever before...

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Things are shaping up for extraordinary developments in the UK, and I'm not talking about Brexit. Well, I am, but not directly. I'm talking about strategic or tactical voting. In Australia we are mightily protected from such dilemmas by preferential or instant runoff voting wh...

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Are you dismayed at getting 100 emails a day you need to wade through, disturbing your concentration? Does your administration bother you constantly with things you just ‘have to be aware of’? Are you tired of the ‘executive reports’, ‘award notices’, 'compulsory breathing tra...

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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks The Champion (Opening Night) Christian Ferro is a young superstar striker for Roma. Growing up in a rough area is a far cry from the millionaire lifestyle he is now living, which has attracted party-animal friends from home as well...

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The family cycled from Berlin to Tallinn this year, giving me an opportunity to see how Poland and the Baltics have fared after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990s. Some observations: - Poland is doing well. Agriculture there is as organised and productive as in Germany,...

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There is still, I think, not enough recognition by teachers of the fact that the desire to think – which is fundamentally a moral problem – must be induced before the power is developed. Most people, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a...

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If these kinds of things existed in my country, I wouldn’t need to be running for President to fix everything up. Elizabeth Warren The only thing that didn't leave a nasty taste in my mouth last year was the food. Barry the hypothetical troll from last year (He's been debunked...

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Delivered at Melbourne University, Friday 19th July, 2019 and cross posted at The Mandarin . Welcome to the launch of another book by Australia’s most overachieving economist. A global authority on decision theory, he also publishes in the daily press, in submissions to govern...

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Cross posted from the Mandarin There is a huge catch 22 driving impact measurement in human services. A lot of the evaluation is done because governments seek it, but then it goes nowhere – and for good reason. NGOs and others hoping to 'scale-up' innovation can’t escape this...

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[caption id="attachment_32902" align="alignright" width="381"] You might think that on a post about counterfactuals, we'd have a picture of sliding doors together with two contrasting pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow. But you'd be wrong. We're full of surprises here at Lateral Econ...

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Here's Phil Lowe reporting on the RBA's failure to meet its performance targets and refusal to do anything about it: This decision [to cut rates by 0.25%] was not in response to a deterioration in the economic outlook since the previous update was published in early May. Rathe...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7tvauOJMHo Lateral Economics has been commissioned by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to estimate the value of the Australian Census to the Australian community. As part of that exercise we've got the go-ahead from ABS to do something...

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Yesterday I was chatting online about Wednesday evening's dreadful shooting massacre in Darwin (like many shocked people here). I posted a comment listing the various murder scenes, saying: "A fourth was murdered at 18 Gardens Hill Crescent (or Gardens Rd, not sure which)." A...

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[caption id="attachment_32881" align="alignright" width="300"] An interesting graphic which the SMH thought was better presented in a form in which you can't read whatever was near the right hand margin. NG (ed)[/caption] Claims of a left-wing bias at the ABC are seldom absent...

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There is a widespread consensus in Australian policy circles that Australia should follow the US in almost any foreign adventure, though preferably on the cheap. The shining example of this was John Howard’s decision to publicly support the US in its war in Iraq in 2003, and y...

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Values are observed in actions and choices, and rather less so in words. Competition policy has been applied with great relish to the labour market – at least at the bottom end. (Subject to our relatively generous basic and award wage arrangements). So restrictive practices of...

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This is a guest post by Brian Schmidt. Actually it isn't, I've cut and pasted. I hope he doesn't mind. Important stuff. HT: John Walker Everyone in my office grew sick last week of my continual complaints about the state of the political polls. Not because of any insights into...

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I worked for the early Hawke government in 1983 and 1984 when I worked for Senator John Button. Hawke barely knew me then or later, but in 2003, I attended a dinner at Moonee Valley Racecourse in honour of the 20th anniversary of his election. Anyway, I happened to be at his t...

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Episode 5 of the final season of Game of Thrones showed us a vengeful fallen angle, Daenerys Targaryen, after whom thousands of children in the real world have been named. Even though her enemies had been defeated and surrendered, she nevertheless used her massive weapon, a fi...

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Peter Dempster asked me to post this follow-up post to an earlier one of his . Nicholas A novel voting strategy for centrists Vote 1 for your preferred party but then do something very unusual – Vote 2 for the opposing party, symbolically joining the major parties on your ball...

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<SelfIndulgenceAlert>Stuart MacIntyre was kind enough to suggest me as a discussant on a paper on financial deregulation in the 1980s in a workshop focusing on Australia and the Bretton Woods conference put on by Melbourne Uni History and Economic History. (Yes I know it's a l...

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In 1900, the modern nation states of Europe faced many challenges in terms of how they were run, with poverty and disease still prevalent. The largest problems were more or less successfully addressed by 2000. The road involved world wars and civil wars, but the essential reci...

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This recent essay in the Mandarin is a reworking of an essay I wrote in 2016 in a string of essays in which I developed the idea of the Evaluator General. I was following Gary Sturgess' suggestion that governments should not think of themselves as producing complex services in...

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Cross posted with the Mandarin Nicholas Gruen has argued that it’s much harder to realise evidence-based policy – both institutionally and intellectually – than many calling for it realise. Here he explains how putatively ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ approaches can, paradoxica...

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From around January this year I've tried to get the column below published – in the Guardian UK where my previous column was published. Unfortunately, and even after endless cajoling via the Guardian at this end, I couldn't get a reply which is piss poor but there you go. Mart...

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When policy problems are complex, we need to understand and learn from the front line. With desperately need to improve the early, middle and late stages of institutional learning and change-making, to enable successful policy development. From the recent Mandarin article . It...

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It’s impossible to avoid misjudgements in life or to get all one’s predictions right. But should economists get caught out quite so often. https://youtu.be/rWQ3jCURzy0 Paul Krugman is honest and self-critical. So he’s up for identifying what economists missed about globalisati...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="342"] Put in "Crikey" to DuckDuckGo's image search (Google is for data donating chumps) and you mostly get Steve Irwin and crocodiles. And Pauline, who, as we speak, is, between takes of Dancing with the Stars , fighting for second amen...

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[I just read a self-help book and, like Don Quixote, need to vent...] My 10 rules for becoming a successful guru: Appear popular at the start : humans are just like dogs that follow other dogs. So have a legion of disciples and followers. Make them up when you start out. Don’t...

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I've just been reading some of Tim Berners-Lee's Weaving the Web about building the World Wide Web and it put me in mind of Paul Frijters' recent post on teaching the social sciences. Paul argued that: The biggest change needed is to teach the material in terms of basic patter...

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Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline could upend our thinking about our future of planet Earth with far reaching implications for policy on climate change, immigration and border control, defence, education, child care, and jobs, to name just a few. In the face...

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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks The Trouble With You (Opening Night) Yvonne is the principled young widow of the local police chief who was killed in the line of duty. Each night she puts their young son to sleep with tales of his daring and bravery, and so natur...

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[caption id="attachment_32731" align="alignleft" width="640"] Friedrich Hayek was notoriously less savvy with photoshoots than some of his relatives.[1. Someone has since disabused me of the idea I picked up somewhere that Salma Hayek is distantly related to Friedrich.][/capti...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="740"] This essay is cross posted from Quillette [/caption] I It looks like liberal democracy is falling apart. But we can put it back together if we take democracy seriously enough—as seriously as the ancient Greeks. The chaos of Donald...

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For those of you in Melbourne, I thought I'd let you know of a public lecture I'm giving on Thursday night this coming week details below. If you'd like to come, make your free reservation on this page . Thought Leadership Series Lecture | The Public Goods of the 21st Century...

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https://youtu.be/XWwLCNgs37Q About a year ago my wife Eva and a friend of hers, Danny Finley started working on a program designed to tackle loneliness through intergenerational contact. Kids are paired with older people in their community through contact between schools and a...

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https://youtu.be/S_SWo3Cj8Yc I have posted this talk previously , but can now post the transcript, worked up from a YouTube transcript with thanks to Shruti Sekar for editing it. You can download the slides to which I was speaking from this link . There's also a written paper...

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[note to self] Economics, sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, and the other social sciences are currently taught in an unorganised manner. The undergraduate degree in any of these disciplines consists of about 20 separate courses that each differ markedly from the ot...

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Cross-posted from The Mandarin . I Since I used the term ‘policy hack’ in my presentation “What economic reform thinking might look like if we’d bothered to do it” , I’ve had a number of exchanges with Martin Wolf, my discussant that evening, about what I mean. Here’s how I de...

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[caption id="attachment_32663" align="alignleft" width="3411"] Verily this is a very nice looking AC. Made of gold I believe and sitting on maroon velvet. It's got wattle on the ribbon, is inlaid with semi-precious stones with the crown sitting at the top. Lucky we got rid of...

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The probability of a massive nuclear war the next 10 years between any of the 8 current nuclear powers (US, UK, France, Russia, India, Pakistan, NK, Israel) seems low. The bluster of the leaders is supposed to make the threat look a bit bigger than it is in order to get negoti...

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Today's Fin Review column What would Abraham Lincoln think of the Productivity Commission’s report into Australia’s super system? A funny question I know, but amongst his charms those eight-score years ago was a lively interest in economics and an original mind – seriously. He...

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Yes folks, the PC's Final Report on Super tells us that the regulation of self managed super funds (SMSFs) is "appropriate" and plumps for more attention to 'advice' in setting up SMSFs. Verily, my gob was truly smacked and smacked again. In any event, there's not much more to...

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I'm afraid this post won't live up to the title above. It has its genesis in a long email I wrote someone who told me I just had to read Jeremy Lend's critique of 'Enlightenment Now' . I've mainly just topped and tailed it and stuck it up here – very much FWIW. I’ll pass I’m a...

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As Orwell put it “there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” At least in economics one of the things that sets up intellectuals for this is the way so much of their discipline seeks to get 'below' the level of immediate intuition to something...

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There are so many pitfalls here. Mathematics enables us to construct moving pictures of almost any possible state of affairs. But no picture can say that there is a real state of affairs corresponding to it in the real world. Much less can it say the picture explains or predic...

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In the context of my writing about public goods, John Burnheim sent me the email below. (Note his use of the word 'comedy is intended as Dante meant it – as a story where things turn out in the end). The park in question is the wonderful park in which I walk every day, stretch...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9Y3YOo7G3M&t=3096s Well, Happy New Year all. Here's a post introducing you to two people I admire. At least from the little I know of each, they lead lives that exemplify the virtues I believe in. They're common virtues, lots of people have the...

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