A friend sent me this article documenting Sam Bankman-Fried's now well known text exchange with Vox journalist Kelsey Piper. I couldn't help but think of Alasdair MacIntyre's characters. As MacIntyre put it in After Virtue: What is specific to each culture is in large and cent...
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Here is Ross Gittin's talk to ACT Economic Society Annual Dinner, Canberra, given on Thursday 3, 2022 I’m very pleased to be invited to talk to you tonight, the biggest and best of the Economic Society’s branches. I should warn you, however, that I’m a follower of the Paddy Mc...
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Australia punches above its weight in the medical research space. The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) is the main government granting agency in the field of medical research. On October 16 th , it was announced that future mid-level and senior grants will...
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Cross posted from Quillette from 16 Feb 2019, but now behind a paywall. When a conversation is not a conversation: party political discourse in the early 21st century I It looks like liberal democracy is falling apart. The chaos of Donald Trump was unimaginable just a decade a...
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https://youtu.be/ftssK9b8WFI Finding a formatting mess when I looked this up on Troppo , I've reposted it here for the record. I'm a bit embarrassed by my wooden speaking style. Here’s the David Solomon Lecture I’ll be giving at the Brisbane Museum of Modern Art in an hour’s t...
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I always say that political economy is the best (or least worst) lens through which to examine how health systems work. This goes for Medicare, which is far more than a service delivery model and has massive institutional and political import. The recently established 'Strengt...
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I wrote a couple of pieces for apolitical a few years ago, but didn’t persevere. I then got an invitation to discuss my experience with the inevitable internal review and had a good discussion. Saying that apolitical seemed very optimised to its audience, which of course is it...
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Scott Morrison's "secret powers" are being heralded in much of the media as proof that he was up to no good. The simpler explanation is that on governance issues, he was often just not much good. "No worries, mate; I'm just nominating us both for Australia's official list of b...
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https://twitter.com/abc730/status/1557673265493344259 Peter Dutton is a human being. That’s not a moral point I’m making — I’m just talking about the task of making sense of others — particularly since, if we can’t kill them, we have to live with them. (And trying to kill some...
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Like me, Leslie Cannold is deeply grateful for Liz Chaney right now — you know, the way she’s speaking truth to fruitcakery. Liz Cheney is my hero. On positions of policy, I disagree with her almost 100% of the time, but I see her as one of the first moral heroes of this mille...
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As part of my recent fascination with competitive and ‘de-competitive’ merit selection, I’ve been looking at the origins of both parliamentary and presidential elections. Intriguingly though we now associate elections with competition between candidates, in both the British pa...
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[caption id="attachment_36333" align="alignleft" width="1024"] Austro-Hungarian Economists[/caption] Below is Ross Garnaut's lecture in honour of my Dad. Economic Ideas and Policy Outcomes: Applications to Climate and Energy Fred Gruen signed up as Professor of Economics in th...
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https://youtu.be/gYKPWkvTRIg I What is it with James Burnham? I associate him — via Curtis Yarvin — with the alt-right. And Burnham is the founding text of what I call the Alt-centre (of which I am the founder and which I'm hoping to parlay into world domination if only I can...
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[caption id="attachment_36299" align="aligncenter" width="1912"] I got this list from Google Images. It's a good checklist though some may quibble with some of it.[/caption] Michael Haines, who has previously posted on Troppo , is campaigning for universal income funded from t...
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I use Troppo to make various notes for file as it were for reference in future. And on wanting to record something I found that I hadn't reproduced this post — which was originally at The Mandarin — here. So here it is, with some notes to file below. Part one. Part two is here...
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This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in Crikey on 3 June 2022. As I see it, the four most pressing challenges for the new Minister for health and ageing concern: 1. promoting health (not just treating disease); 2. addressing the disconnect between care s...
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If we want politicians to actually represent their constituents, we need to free them from the pressure of toeing the party line. A week or so ago someone tweeted this to me. It was a response to my Crikey! article of February last year. I had forgotten I'd written such a conc...
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This is a piece I did for Crikey I'd forgotten I'd written and hadn't put it up here. So now I have. The article was spotted by someone who has been exposing just how much damage opening up Congressional committee deliberations to the public has done. It's a very interesting t...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n43vCEju5Ck In this discussion, Peyton Bowman and I discuss my term ‘fast-foodification’. I coined the word trying to describe modern politics. The techniques used by politicians and their professional enablers are optimised to attract votes in...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFtN1nIHXSY I really enjoyed this conversation with my friend Peyton Bowman which celebrates the possibility that Australia might be able to show the world how to push back against the Trumpian madness. We tried to turn Peyton's lack of inside k...
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As some of you may know, I am now publishing a weekly substack of articles I've found interesting on the net and in some cases offering some summary commentary. In an unprecedented move, the kind of once in a 1,000 year event that could never have been predicted, I'm now publi...
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Originally published on The Interpreter . Two federal elections ago, in 2016, the primary vote for the Labor Party and the Liberal-Nationals coalition reached record lows, while the number of voters who put an independent or minor party first on their ballot paper reached new...
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Labor's May 2022 federal election win seems to confirm the approach taken by US political analyst David Shor. The 1 in 20: Paul Fletcher will become the sole remaining Liberal member in the 20 federal seats with the highest number of people holding postgraduate degrees. I don'...
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The Sydney Book Review is my kind of book review. It's online and free. Ever since I joined the blogging revolution in 2005 it's seemed crazy to me (not to mention precious) that so many of our literary publications are locked up and sold (usually at a loss) in tiny subscripti...
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Herewith an article that was published by INET a couple of weeks ago, and Evonomics more recently. I'm republishing it here as it's my 'blog of record' as it were, but also because it enables me to make notes to file as comments. Vice always comes disguised as virtue. No excep...
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I circulated this podcast in my newsletter last week indicating that I hadn't yet listened to it. Then I did. It was a doozy. In response to the question of what the West should actually do if Russia started using nukes, the interviewee’s body language held up for a paragraph...
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Frustrating Beijing’s ambitions to create a sphere of influence is overwhelmingly a diplomatic task, not a military one. (Cross posted from The Interpreter at the Lowy Institute) There was barely concealed panic in Australia when news broke that China had struck a security agr...
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I’m a Labor voter and I'll do as I've always done at the upcoming election by voting Labor again. Nonetheless… I think there are at least three Labor Party policy pillars that made sense once upon a time but now need overhauling due to their turning counterproductive to labour...
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Question: Given that history repeats, what year is this? Fifteen months ago, when Donald Trump’s rag-tag militias stormed the Capitol building in Washington D.C., I thought for a moment we might be living in 1923, witnessing the rebirth of western fascism. Such were the simila...
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Looking at Australian politics right now, one thing stands out: the federal ALP has become a little Shorist. That seems like a good idea. The federal ALP has gone a bit Shorist. I don't know how long it will last, or whether it's even a conscious strategy. But it's definitely...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JlLFKUF_eA This video discussion, audio downloadable here, discusses the issues raised in this post. I've previously expressed some dissatisfaction with what I might call a 'one dimensional' understanding of the idea of liberty. This post explo...
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The international reaction to Russia's invasion of Ukraine is delivering China a message: its current approach to the world won't keep working much longer. Does that title above seem odd? Surely it's Russia that's losing in Ukraine – in May of 2022, anyway. China hasn't been d...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF61DWkX51U A quick browse of the self-help section of your local bookstore will show you that Stoicism has become popular in the last decade or so with a strong surge during the pandemic. In this week’s discussion, Peyton Bowman and I discuss t...
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'A wonderful, important and also a necessary book, which sets the records straight... and celebrates a remarkable quartet of women thinkers' Peter Conradi I’ve previously mentioned the two books on the Golden Age of female philosophy at Oxford and how thrilling I find the stor...
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I've spoken about what I call "strategisation" before . This involves dressing something up as particularly strategically apposite. The example I gave is this assertion: Services will continue to make a growing contribution to economic activity in Australia. It is therefore im...
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It’s a funny thing with names. Names given in jest and contempt are adopted by their targets. After over a decade of marketing consulting services as “Lateral Economics”, I decided it wasn’t so much a brand as a method and have given some talks to that effect. Anyway a new rec...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VtGYDCm-gA Another great discussion with my friend Peyton Bowman . We began with a passage from William James on faith. Though the essay does discuss religious faith, I quoted it because it starts more mundanely, speaking of the way faith makes...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31eH6ANhTcs I met Joe Trippi about a decade ago. I met him about a decade ago and was fascinated with his campaigning exploits — including taking Howard Dean from backmarker to presidential frontrunner in 2004. Many of the architects of the onli...
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https://youtu.be/CZVNmDuifes For over a year I've had something in my 'draft articles' file. It consisted of little more than a table like the one you see below. I'd love to enlighten you with an article that I'd slaved over for a few days trying to get to the bottom of things...
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My exposure to British journalism has been a bit of a culture shock. When I write for the FT there are fact checkers, who don't just check but add value with charts. The sub-editor gets back with proposed redrafts to clear them with me. Apart from picking up some spelling erro...
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This post began as a long tweet thread in response to Tim Dean's asking for my views on New Zealand's tilt toward proportional representation (PR). I've expanded it a little here, but it's still a short post. In any event it tries to crystalise something I think is important i...
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The twin threats of "hidden persuasion" and artificial intelligence have now convinced most of us that Google and its ilk are almost uniquely powerful. These threats are overrated. The digital giants can do less than we fear – and we risk regulating them where we should not. 1...
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