When The Australian published Gary Johns' opinion piece ' No contraception, no dole ' nobody should have been surprised by what happened next. On 7's Sunrise program commentators described Johns' proposal as "off the planet" and "outrageous and backwards" while One Nation foun...

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In a submission to the Forrest Review of Indigenous jobs and training , the Australian Bankers’ Association (ABA) rejects Andrew Forrest's Healthy Welfare Card proposal. The card was one of the review's key recommendations and is meant to be cheaper and easier to administer th...

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It may be devoted to 70's nostalgia, but Björn Ulvaeus sees Stockholm's ABBA The Museum as a harbinger of the future. The museum doesn't accept cash . Since his son's home was burgled a while ago, the former ABBA member has been campaigning for a cash-free future arguing that...

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Employers are prevented by law from subjecting workers to income management. What if they weren't? Libertarians favour freedom of contract. They believe the government's role is to enforce contracts not tell people what should be in them. One way governments have interfered wi...

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Equality of opportunity was one of the big themes of Gough Whitlam's 1969 and 1972 campaigns. His 1972 policy speech promised "a new drive for equality of opportunities" through reforms to education, health and urban planning. He argued that opportunity depends on the kind of...

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A decent society is one whose institutions do not humiliate people - Avishai Margalit The Great Depression stripped many Australian workers of their dignity. For many, applying for government relief was like begging for charity. Instead of giving unemployed workers cash, state...

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According to the Australian , the Abbott government's first budget will include tough new "learn or earn" Measures designed to force young people off the dole and into education, training or work. "One thing the government doesn’t want to do is to continue to pay people to sta...

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Many people say the best way to influence government is to give policymakers practical solutions to problems they care about. According to this perspective, academics and think tanks scholars can get it wrong by spending too much time analysing problems and their causes. Polic...

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Researchers warn that substance abuse among the elderly will double by 2020 , but few journalists or policymakers worry about age pensioners squandering welfare money on alcohol and drugs. Things were different in 1905–6 when a royal commission looked at establishing a Commonw...

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Work for the Dole doesn't work, says economist Jeff Borland . Citing a study he and Yi-Ping Tseng carried out using data from the late 1990s, he argues that it does nothing to create long-term employment opportunities and too little to build skills. But maybe Borland is missin...

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A recent Swiss proposal for a basic income guarantee has sparked interest from commentators on both the left and right. In a discussion of libertarian arguments for the proposal, Bleeding Heart Libertarians blogger Matt Zwolinski suggests that the classical liberal economist F...

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When political parties want to convey vision they typically reach for slogans packed with values words like 'fairness' and 'strength'. But according to Ben Shimshon of BritainThinks : "Those grand vision words are almost always taken as a signal that what’s being said is just...

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Think tank scholars and policy wonks strive to be both practical and clever. Being practical means proposing policies that have a good chance of getting taken up by government in the short term. And being clever means policies that generate big benefits at little or no cost. B...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ihi0MnK0Q4 The Liberal Democrats look set to take a Senate seat in NSW after the party scored the best spot on the ballot paper . A libertarian party, the LDP's website describes it as a "a serious, progressive, small-government alternative." Th...

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For some people, other human beings are only ever a means to an end. The source of their self-esteem is their ability to realise their own personal vision. They see themselves as powerful creators and believe ideas like empathy, altruism and justice are just tricks the weak us...

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Nearly "every problem with the Republican Party today could be cured by a neocon revival", says David Brooks . Brooks isn't talking about the hawkish approach to foriegn policy that urged US military involvement in the middle east, he's talking about the domestic policy ideas...

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There are always more books to read than time to read them. But Paul Frijters' and Gigi Foster's An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks is on my shortlist. Foster's preface is personal and captivating: A longer-term cost that has come from working on this book...

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For decades the gun lobby has told us that guns don't kill people. If only people would stop pointing them at themselves and each other, guns would be completely harmless. It's not the availability of guns that's the problem, they say it's the individual's decision to pull the...

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There are parallel conversations going on in social policy, says Matt Cowgill , "Values on one level, data another". How values and data interact is an interesting question. A decade ago, I was researching the debate over poverty. In 2003 the Senate Standing Committee on Commu...

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"Welcome to the era of hedged bets and lowered expectations", says the cover story of Time Magazine . A poll of 18 to 29-year olds, found 65 per cent agreed that it will be harder for their group to live as comfortably as previous generations. But despite the lowered expectati...

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"For too long, progressives have been scared off issues of family structure and parenting by a fear of being misinterpreted as blaming some of the hardest-working people in society", says Andrew Leigh . But for many of today's progressives, raising issues about single parentho...

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After decades of listening to jingles, slogans, and scare campaigns, it's odd to hear a political campaign strategist complain about short attention spans. But in Monday's Financial Review Mark Textor grumbled that the "the collective attention deficit disorder of those online...

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Nick Cater is sensitive about accusations of racism. In his book The Lucky Culture he writes: To judge someone as prejudiced is character assessment; to call them racist or, even worse, a racist, is character assassination. One can be a little bit prejudiced or a little bit ig...

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In Saturday's Australian , Rebecca Weisser argues that the ABC is biased. To fix the problem she suggests creating "a commission of inquiry to rework the charter so that it stipulates that balance in programming is fundamental to the operation of the ABC". For political elites...

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Australia needs intellectuals, says Nick Cater. In his new book The Lucky Culture he writes: A nation is entitled to look to its intellectuals to articulate its common purpose, to pull together loose strands and write a narrative that says where it has come from and where it i...

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It's always been hard to pin down who 'the elites' are why we are supposed reject them as un-Australian. A new book review by Tony Abbott offers some clues. It also hints at why attacks on 'the elites' are likely to backfire for conservatives. In the Spectator Australia , Abbo...

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During the mid 1970s Thatcher was listening to a member of the Conservative Research Department staff explain why the party should take a pragmatic 'middle way ' between left and right. But before he could finish Thatcher reached into her briefcase and pulled out a copy of Fri...

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"Hostility towards benefit claimants is founded upon a moral instinct", says Chris Dillow . The instinct is the norm of reciprocity. According to this norm, people are entitled to the community's help when they need it, but must also contribute in return. According to Dillow,...

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From its beginnings 70 years ago, the Institute of Public Affairs has struggled against class war. According to a 1948 issue of the IPA Review , the post war period saw a "revolutionary change" in the distribution of income: "The lower incomes are now enjoying a much larger sh...

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As opposition leader Mark Latham vowed to wage war on poverty . It's an idea he revives for his latest Quarterly Essay, Not Dead Yet: Labor's Post-Left Future . According to Latham, poverty isn't about a lack of money. The dole is generous enough to cover people's basic needs,...

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I enjoyed Waleed Aly's latest National Times column . But the more I read it, the more I wonder what he means. "Labor has lost the plot, and the narrative" says the headline in the Age . According to Aly, Governments thrive on narrative and Labor doesn't have one. It's a famil...

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Facts are no match for a compelling narrative, says Jonathan Green . Despite the efforts of left leaning bloggers, conservatives are winning arguments and elections because they have better stories. Voters see themselves as struggling with an ever rising cost of living, the fe...

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Minami Minegishi was in tears . After being caught spending the night at Generations boy-band member Alan Shirahama, the J-pop idol lost her place in AKB48 's Team B and was demoted to 'trainee'. Shortly afterwards she appeared on YouTube, her head shaved, begging the fans for...

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Nobody knows exactly how much it costs to administer Income Management. But government estimates suggest that it could be as high as $150 a week per person in remote areas. According a recent report from the Australian National Audit Office : ... departments were aware that pr...

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American blogger Matt Bruenig sparked an interesting debate recently with his claim that conservatives are better organised and less ideologically diverse than those on the left . This is a response. To those on the left, the American conservative movement appears as a leviath...

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Mosman is failing the nation, says Miranda Devine . The residents of Australia's richest suburb might be honest, hard working and committed to their families but they're failing to demand the same behaviour from the lower classes. As a result, social norms are collapsing in lo...

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Too many political commentators think about social media users as voters who don't matter when they should be thinking about them as an audience that does When Julia Gillard ripped into opposition leader Tony Abbott accusing him of sexism and misogyny, the YouTube video of the...

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Poverty programs have become cash cows for powerful corporate interests, says Peter Schweizer at the Daily Beast . In the US, state governments increasingly rely on electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards to distribute social assistance. And around the world, financial service...

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It was around four in morning when I pulled the car over to the side of the road and switched off the engine. I was a hundred or so kilometres out of Perth and when I killed the lights everything went black. When I stepped out of the car I was afraid I might not find my way ba...

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This an opinion piece, my effort to entertain or provoke you while I make an important point. In this paragraph I should start making an argument for the Important Point but, I'm off to bad start. My title should have included some clever figure of speech like a pun or literar...

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Debates over income support are never ending. And part of the reason is that people have different ideas about what they want the income support system to achieve. When it comes to income support payments for people below retirement age who are capable of paid work, there are...

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A conservative conspiracy to make government bigger, bury retailers in red tape and tell people how to live their lives, or just another example of populist grandstanding? The young man wanted a pack of cigarettes but when he pulled out his welfare card to pay, 65 year old cas...

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Almost everyone is in favour of equality of opportunity; even free market activists from the Institute of Public Affairs . But whenever a large number of people agree on a form of words, it's a safe bet they interpret those words differently. How else could party members agree...

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The 21st was supposed to be the age of flying cars, teleporters and affordable space travel, says David Graeber . But now here we are in the future still arguing about overcrowded trains and the price of petrol. David Graeber feels cheated: Where ... are the flying cars? Where...

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"All I want to do is go to the movies, have a soda and popcorn" says Michael Graham . But with New York mayor Michael Bloomberg banning supersized sodas and officials talking about extending the regulations to popcorn , conservatives like Graham are feeling nanny's hot breath...

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With low unemployment, low inflation and 20 straight years of economic growth, the Sydney Morning Herald's Jessica Irvine is astounded at how so many Australians are carrying on as if they live in a debt-wracked European basket case. Younger Australians have never seen a reces...

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In a piece for the Sunday Age , Chris Berg says progressives think conservatives are heartless because they "don't realise the right has a different and legitimate moral framework." Perhaps so, but what about libertarians ? Berg draws on Jonathan Haidt 's moral foundations res...

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In a recent book on social justice , former Labor politician Gary Johns argues for "a major reconsideration of social justice as a rationale for the welfare state". In his essay 'When too much social justice is never enough' Johns suggests that social justice is primarily abou...

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First it was David Brooks' Harold and Erica . Now it's the Obama campaign's Julia . Harold, Erica and Julia are all fictitious characters born into a perpetual present. They live and grow old in a world that doesn't change. As Michael Shear at the New York Times writes : At ag...

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How aged care reform slipped off the media agenda: "Confronted with a major policy initiative that, while affecting millions, offered little potential for partisanship or prurience, the media was a little flummoxed". Mr Denmore, The Failed Estate . The limits of citizen journa...

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In 1992 Bill Clinton campaigned on ideal : "The ideal that if you work hard and play by the rules you'll be rewarded, you'll do a little better next year than you did last year, your kids will do better than you." This was the American dream. With the economy in recession, man...

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In a speech at the Institute of Economic Affairs , Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey announced the the end of the age of entitlement. He followed up the speech with an interview for the ABC's Lateline . At Billablog, Hockey's speech inspires a song while Patricia at Cafe Whispers pe...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRhs26o03ok In the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty Friedrich Hayek explained that he saw little point in engaging with Rawls' Theory of Justice since "the differences between us seemed more verbal than substantial..." Many of his su...

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Twitter's a great medium for sharing links and short comments. And since that's pretty much what I've been doing with Missing Link Friday it raises an obvious question -- why not take Missing Link to Twitter? So I thought I'd give it a go: @donattroppo. Let me know what you th...

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Classical liberals and social justice: "many defenders of private economic liberty suffer from a malady that I shall call social justicitis . Social justicitis , as I use that term, refers to a strongly negative, even allergic , reaction to the idea of social or distributive j...

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If you discovered that you had cancer would you (a) find a doctor who is an expert in treating your disease and follow their advice, or (b) attempt to devise your own treatment by reading about cancer on the internet? According to some sources, Apple founder Steve Jobs may hav...

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Why don’t women patent? "In Why Don’t Women Patent? , a recent NBER paper, Jennifer Hunt et al. present a stark fact: Only 5.5% of the holders of commercialized patents are women." Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution . Innovation and inequality: What effect do now products and...

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Even Andrew Bolt is shocked . On Tuesday mining magnate Clive Palmer fronted the media and announced that the US Central Intelligence Agency is using the Rockefeller Foundation to fund a campaign to undermine Australia's coal industry. Palmer appeared in front of the cameras b...

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When the Koch vs Cato controversy erupted blogger Skip Oliva was all over it . Now he's just over it : When you cut through all the bullshit—90% of which is coming from the Cato side—what you’re left with is two old men who simply refuse to compromise. Charles Koch signed an a...

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According to most commentators, it was French politician René Lenoir who coined the term 'social exclusion' (l’exclusion sociale). But the idea that there is a disparate group of disadvantaged citizens who are excluded from economic, social and political participation is nothi...

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A commodities boom can temporarily boost government revenue, says Malcolm Turnbull . Mostly that's a good thing. But when governments respond by making non-temporary changes to the budget, we have a problem: If, rolling in a big cyclical surplus, a government were to cut incom...

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A lawsuit by the Koch brothers threatens the Cato Institute's reputation for independence When scholars at the libertarian Cato Institute came out against the Gulf War, Olin Foundation president William E Simon was outraged. The foundation ended up withdrawing its support and,...

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The Lord's Resistance Army and its leader Joseph Kony have been in the news for years (here's a 2006 story from the ABC's Foreign Correspondent ). But this week the issue went viral thanks to a video by advocacy group Invisible Children . With help from celebrities like Rihann...

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Inaugurated on this day in 1861 , Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, is as popular as ever. Movies: America's 16th president features in two movies to be released this year. The first is a serious bio-pic by Steven Spielberg while the second is based on...

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A failure in the realm of ideas: It's crisis as usual for the left. Despite the global financial crisis, left of centre parties are struggling in the polls. Francis Fukuyama puts it down to a "a failure in the realm of ideas" arguing that: "The left has not been able to make a...

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The view from America: "the plot has thickened like barbie sauce and Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott is the happiest man in Australia." Aaron Goldstein, The Spectacle Blog . Gillard government a policy free zone: "Now that the Rudd agenda has mostly been passed or abandoned,...

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A tough-talking, motorcycle-riding Texan, sociologist C Wright Mills is about as far from today's stereotype of the latte-sipping left-wing intellectual as you're likely to find. But even though he's been dead for 50 years, you can still see his influence in the intellectual l...

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We save for the future by building things: "As a society, we save for the future by channeling resources—steel, electricity, human labor power—into the production of things that last a long time rather than things that are more perishable." Matthew Yglesias, Moneybox . Investi...

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Conservatism "thrives on low intelligence and poor information", writes George Monbiot who reports the results of, a recent study showing that "prejudice tends not to arise directly from low intelligence, but from the conservative ideologies to which people of low intelligence...

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Occasionally I get so distracted by the way someone writes that I can't concentrate on what they're saying. Here's John Howard in today's Financial Review : To adopt Shakespeare, Meryl Streep came to bury Margaret Thatcher, not to praise her. This was attempted -- in the film...

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A Twitter randomised trial: "I have a confession to make", writes Andrew Leigh , "I’m a twitter-sceptic." But in keeping with his evidence-based approach to decision making, Andrew Leigh MP is embarking on a one month randomised trial. @aleighmp Why libertarians need to talk w...

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Katie's Australia Day - Brazilian style! Food blogger Katie Quinn Davies' Australia Day recipes. Australia Day from afar: "One of the most surprising things for me to experience out of Australia was people saying–even in the American South!–Australia’s really racist, isn’t it?...

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British Leyland devoured billions pounds of taxpayer's money before it was finally broken up and sold off. According to New York Times journalist Nelson Schwartz the Thatcher government's bailout "remains the classic example of a futile government intervention." Mrs Thatcher w...

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The Jericho amendments: At Grog's Gamut Greg Jericho checks out the Australian Public Service Commission's new guidelines for public servants engaging in public comment. Some of the principles are "so obvious or dumb as could only be written by a public servant", says Jericho,...

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“Oh, my goodness, the John Birch Society! ... Is that bad? I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society" ( Texas congressman Ron Paul ). In Tuesday's Sydney Morning Herald , Tom Switzer describes presidential hopeful Ron Paul as a socially tolerant free-market crusader wh...

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When New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane asked whether Times reporters should challenge the 'facts' asserted by the newsmakers they write about a large majority of readers responded : "yes, you moron, The Times should check facts and print the truth." That's pretty mu...

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"Capitalism made America great - free markets, innovation, hard work - the building blocks of the American Dream. But in the wrong hands some of those dreams can turn into nightmares." 'When Mitt Romney Came to Town' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLWnB9FGmWE Promoted by Winni...

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Mitt Romney takes a tough line on welfare. In 2008 Republicans cheered when he said that America's culture was threatened by welfare payments to poor people . Asked how tax reform plan would help Americans on low incomes he said his plan was "primarily based on trying to creat...

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The missing liberals: Why is there no liberal party? Because there are so few people who support both economic and social liberal causes, says Andrew Norton . Andrew cites data from the 2010 Australian Election Survey. Dr Watson vs Dr Ludd: With access to huge databases, exper...

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Treasury's mission is broad -- to improve the wellbeing of the Australian people. And according to Peter Martin its wellbeing framework empowers it "to fight homelessness just as much as it empowers it to fight inflation". As Martin explained back in 2008 the framework goes we...

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At the Economist's Democracy in America blog, Erica Grieder suspects that "the biggest untapped constituency is people who are fiscally conservative and socially moderate or liberal." Grieder links to a post by former Cato research fellow Will Wilkinson where he explains why h...

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Beyond soundbites: "There’s so much potential for political parties, who are more and more thought to be hollow, soulless things, to allow their MPs to show what they actually believe in and engage with people. Soundbites were useful when someone else controlled how much time...

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Judith Sloan wants the term banned , the editors of the Australian think it's bureaucratic gibberish and even the new minister for social inclusion seems unsure about what it means. So what is social inclusion? For the New Labour politicians who popularised the term social exc...

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Missing link is taking a vacation. See you next year! The destruction of the tea: What did the original tea party patriots stand for? Alfred F. Young looks at the history behind the Boston Tea Party . Are Slaves Growing Your Fair Trade Cotton? Matthew Yglesias links to a story...

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As Theodore Roosevelt finished his address to the people of Osawatomie his speechwriter leaped up and cried : "Citizens of Kansas, you have just listened to one of the greatest pronouncements made by any man. Its effect will be felt in the nation and the world for years to com...

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The Humbling of a Pretty Girl: When model and fashion writer Lauren Scruggs walked into a plane propeller the paramedics didn't think she'd survive . "With the lacerations on her head and the skull fracture, we thought there would be significant brain damage", said one. At Zer...

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Both Judith Sloan and Ian Harper argue that Newstart Allowance is too low , particularly for recipients who are long-term unemployed. In the late 1980s, the Social Security Review also argued for an increase in unemployment payments. The review's authors wrote: ... immediate p...

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http://youtu.be/WAvf1lVbjUA

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Judith Sloan surprised participants at the government's Tax Forum in October when she suggested Newstart Allowance wasn't adequate. She made the same claim in a piece for the Drum writing: "If we are to expect the unemployed to search for employment with confidence, there is n...

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Dennis Glover analyses the PM's party conference speech in a piece for the Weekend Australian . It's an interesting piece but there's one thing about it that's driving me mad. Nobody in the Labor party can open their mouth without mentioning Tony Abbott. And while it would be...

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Sometimes the words I type into Google's search box are the words I want to appear in the results. For years now I've been using the '+' operator to ensure that every result includes a particular term. But recently, without warning, it stopped working . Fortunately Google have...

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Last year French parents were outraged by an advertisement that claimed Santa Claus wasn't real. AdWeek reported : "I have some bad news for you," a father says to his (grown) son right at the beginning of the spot. "Père Noël doesn't really exist." Parents are all upset that...

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Lending is the right model for ebooks: Joshua Gans asks "If lending is the appropriate mode for books, then how would the business of publishing look if it is built around lending rather than ownership?" Why journalists need Twitter : Often maligned as quick chat for empty hea...

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White Ribbon Day: "In an afternoon in Montreal on December 6th 1989, a man massacred 14 of his female classmates. From this horrific action, a nation was brought to the forefront of an issue that had been severely underreported for too long." Lip Magazine . "White Ribbon Day p...

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"Public debate in Australia has been shaped in a profound way by astroturfing", says advertising strategist Ravi Prasad . "If you look at the debate around the carbon tax, the debate around mining supertax, and the public debate around asylum seekers, the public debates in the...

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Put it up to eleven: "The entire media is shouting ALL the time because they're worried that if they pull back on their Tube Screamers their highly compressed copy won't be heard over all the other sources of distraction", says Mr Denmore . We reject your demand for demands: T...

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Cathy Wilkerson was ironing bed sheets when the floor collapsed under her feet. A bomb had detonated in the subbasement of her parent's Greenwich Village townhouse . Cathy and another woman walked away but their friends Teddy Gold , Terry Robbins and Diane Oughton were dead. I...

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Un-occupy: Nearly 70 students walked out of Greg Mankiw's economics class at Harvard on Wednesday afternoon. According to the Harvard Crimson's Jose Delreal , "The walkout was meant to be a show of support for the 'Occupy' movement’s principal criticism that conservative econo...

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[caption id="attachment_17826" align="alignright" width="500" caption="Photo credit: Matt McDermott"] [/caption] Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has a message for the Occupy Wall Street protesters : Keep focusing on gross inequality of outcomes and you'll get nowhere. Haidt and hi...

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Moving backwards? Opposition leader Tony Abbott's project is "oriented to the past rather than the future, and it seeks to reinstate the past by projectively erasing the present", writes Mark Bahnisch . Bringing back tram conductors: The Greens want to bring back Melbourne's t...

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Back in 2006 UK rumour-monger Guido Fawkes boasted that the news is no longer defined by big media . Laurie Oakes is afraid he's right. In his 2011 Andrew Olle Media Lecture , Oakes predicts that bloggers will soon be determining what is news. He says that political commentato...

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A winner-takes-all-society will fail: America's top 1 per cent might have the best educations, the best doctors and the best lifestyles, but their fate is bound up with how the other 99 per cent live, writes Joe Stiglitz . Harry Clarke agrees : "the inequality threat to the su...

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The Occupy Wall Street Movement is growing: "The challenge for those of us who believe in market economics is how to restore business legitimacy", writes Peter Shergold . The top one per cent: "One of the most striking successes of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been the...

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Seen any great blog posts recently? Written something you want to share? I'm a bit tied up today so this week's missing link belongs to you. Post your links in the comments thread.

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Clive Hamilton writes : Women's morality differs from men's. Feminist philosopher Carol Gilligan argues women are motivated more by care than duty, and inclined more to emphasise responsibilities than rights. They seek reconciliation through the exercise of compassion and nego...

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Spoken like a true utilitarian: "If we really want the greatest happiness of the greatest number, we should be electing psychopathic, Machiavellian misanthropes", writes Roger McShane (via Will Wilkinson ). I love you so much ... that I'm going to ruin your life: Tigtog on the...

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http://youtu.be/htX2usfqMEs US senate candidate Elizabeth Warren wants wealthy Americans to pay more tax . The Bush administration put the country into a hole, she says. Tax cuts for the rich, two wars it put on a credit card, and an unfunded medicare drug program that poured...

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Just when I'd given up trying to find the Easter eggs in Google's muppet doodle I typed 'Bill Gates' into the search box and saw this. Very amusing. Of course you don't need to type 'Bill Gates'. You don't need to type anything at all. Just select one of the two muppets on the...

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Is gender equality driving down the price of sex? Women trade sex for resources, argues psychologist Roy Baumeister . "Historically, women have restricted each other's sexuality in order to make the price of sex high". Roy Baumeister's bad economics: Baumeister's theory is "no...

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By calling it the greatest moral challenge of our generation , Kevin Rudd framed climate change as a moral issue. Now as Prime Minister Julia Gillard is putting a price on carbon. So why isn't she getting credit from people who care passionately about the issue? The reason is...

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After his first week of blogging back in 2002 John Quiggin observed that blogging "technology seems ideally suited for individuals and small groups, with no obvious way of scaling it up to corporate level." Maybe he's changed his mind. This week Quiggin suggests that The Austr...

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Spoiler alert! "New research by psychologists Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt shows that people enjoy stories more when they already know the ending." Hollie Nyseth at Citings & Sightings . Will Wilkinson has a new blog: It's at Big Think and it's called The Moral S...

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Forty six million Americans are living in poverty but nobody seems to care. In a comment at Crooked Timber, Moe says : I had this strange evening where I watched a bit of Jackie Kennedy talking smack about people and then heard this statistic about the increase in poverty and...

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Will Wilkinson is unhappy about a recent article in Salon where Michael Lind denounces libertarians as enemies of democracy. One of Lind's targets is the classical liberal, Friedrich Hayek who he says preferred libertarian dictatorships to welfare state democracies. Wilkinson...

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The left needs utopia, says John Quiggin ; "a transformative vision to offer hope of a better life". Last year he wrote : After decades of defensive struggle, we on the left no longer know how to talk about anything bigger than the local fights in which we may hope to defend t...

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Even geeks need to be polite: Geeky men with poor social skills might be frustrated by their lack of success with women, but frustration is no excuse for abusing women who say no to other geeks. So if your life revolves around a geeky activity where women are scarce, Skepticla...

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Women are "working fewer hours, in lower-paid industries and in lower-status jobs" than men, writes Jessica Irvine . Despite decades of feminism, women are still doing most of the unpaid cooking, cleaning and caring for children. They are still struggling to break into senior,...

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Why "shouldn’t we look forward to a freer, more egalitarian world of tomorrow in which people are allowed to live where they want?" asks Matt Yglesias . If neoliberalism is about removing all barriers to market transactions then removing restrictions to migration should be top...

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Beer: Who has the best beer? Chris Bertram isn't sure ... but it's not the Welsh. The fatosphere: Fat acceptance blogs can improve health outcomes according to a recent study. Sunanda Creagh reports . Why inequality is like cholesterol: Matt Cowgill and Mark Bahnisch discuss a...

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Paul Lockyer & quality journalism: Paul Lockyer's "documentary on the Queensland floods this year was just simply outstanding", said Laura Tingle last month . The veteran ABC journalist was part of her top 10 quality journalism sources in Australia. In April Alan Knight wrote...

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In the American Scholar, George Watson writes about the forgotten Churchill -- the Liberal who helped lay the foundations for Britain's welfare state. Churchill was president of the Board of Trade in the Asquith government -- a Liberal government that favoured free trade, a mo...

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The recent debate over Matt Yglesias' 'left neoliberalism' reminded me what an ambiguous term neoliberalism is. There are at least five political movements or schools of thought that are called neoliberal. While they are distinguishable, they are not entirely separate. Accordi...

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A modest proposal for debt ceiling reform: It's spending on Medicare that's driving up the deficit, writes Noah Millman. So at the American Scene he suggests replacing the debt ceiling with a ceiling on Medicare spending . Austerity and Social Protest: Governments might not be...

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Adam Smith recognised that a well-ordered society can never develop "when a sizeable number of its members are miserable and, as a consequence, dangerous", writes Mary Riddell in the Telegraph . She argues that "social democracy, with its safety nets, costly education and heal...

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Televisions, DVD players and mobile phones have become so cheap that even poor third world families can own them. In Foreign Policy , Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo write : In rural Morocco, Oucha Mbarbk and his two neighbors told us they had worked about 70 days in agricul...

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On the other side of the Pacific, bloggers are arguing over something called 'left neoliberalism'. What began as a dispute over monetary policy between Yglesias and Doug Henwood quickly widened into a debate over political philosophy and strategies to rebuild the American left...

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Here's an open thread for all those ideas, links and arguments that don't fit anywhere else.

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Progressive politics without unions? "If you want progressive policies, the comparative historical evidence suggests it’s very helpful to have a strong labor movement" writes Lane Kenworthy . But in the US unions are weak and getting weaker. Is there an alternative strategy? N...

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As thousands of Norwegians poured into Oslo's streets singing, hugging and waving flowers , Queensland academic Merv Bendle sat at his computer fixated on how leftists and Islamists would try to exploit this latest act of mass murder. Maybe the attacks in Oslo an on the island...

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" Enormous Penis Located on Google Maps ". Last time I checked, Gawker's illustrated story about the huge penises drawn on school lawns in New Zealand had racked up over 46,000 views. A more recently posted story tells of how "A man in Russia broke into a hair salon and the ow...

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Furry Fandom: Anthrocon is the world's largest convention for people fascinated with humanlike animal characters. Held in Pittsburgh, the 2011 convention attracted more than 4,500 'furries' , some of them dressed as their favourite characters. Canadian blogger and fantasy auth...

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Around the blogosphere and the media people are trying to make sense of the bombing and massacre in Norway. At Larvatus Prodeo Mark Bahnisch offers some advice : I think there is a duty to analyse why these things happen, and why they are talked about in the way they are, but...

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When best selling German author Thilo Sarrazin arrives in Australia for the Centre for Independent Studies Big Ideas Forum his hosts will promote him as a courageous opponent of political correctness while his critics will denounce him as a racist. Sarrazin's 2010 book Deutsch...

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Don't post crap! Troppo readers were up in arms about Rafe Champion's post on the Monckton and Dennis climate change debate . Rafe wants to know "how the warming lobby and Greens managed to inflate a possible temperature increase of a degree or two over the next century into t...

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At #76 on the Things Bogans Like list , McMansions are a symbol of the culture of overconsumption and a triumph of marketing over common sense. Built on the urban fringe, kilometers away from services and public transport, McMansion owners are doomed to spend hours in their ca...

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In this week's Missing Link Friday: inequality, McMansions, education, brown coal and flaming kittens. Inequality: Why don't Australians complain more about wealth inequality? According to David Neal at The Conversation it's because most of us underestimate how unequal the dis...

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"There was a time when Labor’s aim for the poor and disadvantaged was to end poverty and disadvantage", writes John Quiggin . "Now the best they can hope for is ' extending opportunity '." Under John Curtin and Ben Chifley , Labor was the party of work and welfare. The party s...

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Joshua Gans can't imagine how staff and students at The Spot would be blocking the toilets with paper towels. It turns out that the problem may be caused by toilet ' nesters '. As commenter Alister explains "students and/or staff are using paper towels as seat-liners." And, as...

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"Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying" philosopher Richard Rorty once said . Earlier this week journalist Johann Hari discovered he'd made a mistake about what was true and what wasn't. Guy Beres at Larvatus Prodeo writes : "When I read an interview,...

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"I arrived with fellow baboon researcher Monica yesterday night, after a fairly smooth trip starting in St. Louis and passing through Atlanta and Johannesburg." That's primate biologist Kenneth Chiou writing about his trip to Pioneer Camp outside Lusaka. Chiou has been bloggin...

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In the first of series of posts on Marxism , John Quiggin goes in search of the revolutionary working class. It takes Professor Q an entire paragraph to establish that no such class exists and that the revolution is off. Most Marxists (and recovering Marxists) seem to have com...

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Richard Posner is puzzled by by increases in female earnings. After all: "Women are not as well suited to perform jobs requiring upper-body strength as men are, but men can perform virtually all service jobs as well as women can." Really? As developed economies move away from...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEUiJTRLG0w ATMs have been around since the early 1970s but US banks still employ hundreds of thousands of human tellers. So why is Obama blaming ATMs for persistently high levels of unemployment? From 1972 to 1980 American banks put on an additi...

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There's a disconnect between Friedrich Hayek's principles and his practical policy positions, according to Canadian scholar Andrew Lister . In a working paper for the Centre for the Study of Social Justice at Oxford Lister argues that Hayek is a closet Rawlsian -- an egalitari...

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"Marian Evans was enraged by the suggestion that the scenes and characters in her early books were simply transcribed from life", writes Adair Jones . "... the assumption that the work was drawn from life was not an affirmation of her talent for realism, but a denial of her cr...

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Mr Denmore is unhappy about my recent post ' The blogosphere’s delusions of grandeur ' where I suggest that blogging isn't about to replace professional journalism. Mr Denmore agrees but thinks I'm attacking a straw man: ... just who is saying that blogging is intended to repl...

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Are bloggers writing better commentary and opinion than journalists? According to Troppo commenter Alex White the best blog commentary is more valuable than the best commentary in the mainstream media. In a response to my post on the blogosphere’s delusions of grandeur , he wr...

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A popular writer at leading Australian political blog The Political Sword has hit back at "pedantic" criticism of her work. Responding to a series of posts at Club Troppo (an obscure political blog frequented by boring middle-aged men) Feral Skeleton writes : Some stuffed shir...

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Remember when bloggers uncovered evidence that Reserve Bank of Australia subsidiary Securency was using money-laundering techniques to channel suspected bribe money to a company in the Seychelles? Me neither. Journalists at the Age and the ABC broke that story . Investigative...

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Does poverty deplete willpower? At This Field is Required, Pamela Stubbart muses over a recent article in the New Republic . When money isn't enough. At Larvatus Prodeo, Brian links to a recent column by Ross Gittins and starts a discussion about poverty and social exclusion....

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At the Political Sword, HillbillySkeleton is basking in praise for her recent post ' Post-Truth Politics .' "Terrific Hillbilly, just terrific", writes commenter David Horton. Hillbilly's reply is all modesty: Thank you so much for your warm compliments. I am truly flattered....

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While she admired Winston Churchill, his resistance to conditional welfare was exasperating. For years Beatrice Webb had been arguing with Churchill and other Liberals about social insurance and she was getting nowhere. She insisted that: "Doling out weekly allowances, and wit...

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It's a rainy night and an inexperienced young driver speeds into a sweeping bend. Well over the speed limit he loses control, wrapping his car around a tree. When the ambulance arrives it's touch and go. Unless the paramedics cut him out the wreck and get him to hospital, he'l...

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Government regulation of the media acts like a public subsidy, argues Mr Denmore . It makes it difficult for new players to get a foothold and "encourages monopolistic behaviour that circumvents reasoned debate." So what is to be done? One possibility is to hope a white knight...

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Everyone's talking about evidence-based policy. And since gathering evidence is their job, you might think this would give academic researchers a more important role in the policy process. But as Peter Shergold writes in the Australian Literary Review , academics have little i...

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Freedom is a keyword in American politics, writes Corey Robin in the Nation . It lies at the centre of every successful political movement from the abolition of slavery, to civil rights and feminism. The secret of conservatism's success is that it identifies freedom with marke...

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Everyone agrees that the quality of public discourse in Australia is dismal. Most of us blame politicians and the media. But the constant carping is getting tedious and irritating. Isn't it time the rest of us thought about what we can do to lift the quality of public debate?...

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In this week's Missing Link Friday, bloggers remember Sydney book seller Bob Gould, US blogger Mark Perry explains what's up with manufacturing, Andrew Norton examines a new poll on attitudes to welfare, and various writers complain about the dismal state of politics today. Re...

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US congressman Paul Ryan wants to "strengthen welfare for those who need it" and "end it for those who don't". And to hard working Americans that sounded reasonable enough ... until some of them realised he might be talking about Medicare and Social Security . How could benefi...

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Who wrote this? ... we will have true reconciliation when millions of Australians speak our Australian languages from coast to coast. It is then that we will have the keys to our landscape, our history, our art, our stories. The Australian languages, and the literatures and cu...

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Judith Sloan vs the environment. If you're trying to reach Judith Sloan and she won't pick up the phone it's probably because she's still in the shower . Blue Milk writes : "Last week I had to compose an embarrassing email to the library explaining that I had lost their copy o...

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In January this year a Toronto police officer suggested that women could avoid sexual assault by not dressing like 'sluts'. Made during a safety information session at York University, the officer's remark provoked a storm of protest . By May the protests had spread as far as...

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As the graph below shows, the proportion of men in full-time work has fallen over time. Every recession the proportion falls sharply and in each recovery it fails to bounce back to its pre-recession level. When I show people this graph they often offer explanations -- it's pop...

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In this week's Missing Link Friday bloggers discuss slutwalking, teenage pregnancy, the demise of the book, typical Australian incomes and the problem of men who don't work. Sex, lies and slutwalking . Slutwalking is what happens when "when the political passions of the second...

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In this week's Missing Link Friday: fat, feminism, fair pay, philosophy and more. The death of Obama? Catallaxy's Samuel J spots an unfortunate typo at the Australian . The dogs of war: "We sent 79 commandos to get Osama bin Laden — and one dog", writes Ezra Klein . Cutting th...

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When John Quiggin accused Julia Gillard of embracing neoliberalism one of his readers suggested the PM was taking advantage of Ayn Rand's renewed popularity to chase the libertarian vote. Rand seems to be everywhere these days. With the release of movie based on her 1957 novel...

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In this week's Missing Link Friday: a British conservative blames women for inequality, Australia's PM celebrates the dignity of work, Americans argue about health care spending, and the Freakonomics blog reveals the damaging environmental impact of medical marijuana. Is femin...

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In the UK, the coalition government is taking an axe to spending but it hasn't abandoned a commitment to fairness. At least that's what Nick Clegg and Iain Duncan Smith argue in a recent opinion piece for The Telegraph : Our welfare reforms are intended to help people get on,...

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I love newspapers and read lots of them. But I don't love any one newspaper so much that I'd pay hundreds of dollars a year to read it online. The kind of package I could be persuaded to pay for would be a subscription to a bundle of my favourite newspapers and magazines. But...

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Peter Whiteford is one of my favourite commenters. He rarely joins a thread without adding useful data or some telling insight. On Monday he showed up on Matt Yglesias' blog to explain the difference between progressivity and redistribution in the tax system. The debate was ov...

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When the SL-1 nuclear reactor exploded in Idaho releasing a radioactive plume and killing three workers, a local paper reported the accident on page 12 . That was 1961. Today some residents of Idaho are so worried about the nuclear accident 8000 kilometers away that they're bu...

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The crisis in Japan has dominated the media over the past week. With the earthquake and tsunami over, many bloggers turned their attention the unfolding disaster at the Japanese nuclear power plant Fukushima Daiichi and its implications for the future of nuclear energy. It's n...

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According to recent media reports an explosion has blown the roof off an unstable reactor north of Tokyo. The reactor is Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station's unit no 1. World Nuclear News reports : Television cameras trained on the plant captured a dramatic explosion surr...

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How did you sleep last night? Thousands of kilometers away in the cities of Japan, people are trapped under rubble crying out for help. According to recent news reports 1000 people may have died in yesterday's earthquake and the tsunami that followed. If 18th century philosoph...

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I haven't had time to put together the usual Missing Link post today. So I'll turn it over to you. If you've read something enlightening, thought provoking, amusing or annoying that you'd like share then go right ahead. The comments thread is open.

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Ayn Rand's 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged is so popular even Angus & Robertson stock it . And now after years of rumours , it's finally become a movie . That's odd because it's longer than Tolstoy's War and Peace and climaxes with a philosophical speech that runs for 70 pages. Most...

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In this week's Missing Link Friday: bloggers complain about talkback radio; Andrew Bolt shares a bizarre political fantasy; and, tacked on the end, the usual list of other interesting stuff. Angry radio The whole point of talkback radio is to get the audience emotionally engag...

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In this week's Missing Link Friday: Why Ross Gittins doesn't want to hear you complaining about the high cost of living. Is there a connection between free trade and disability? Just how deluded are Americans about inequality? Who's to blame for American ignorance about climat...

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Last year Mayhill Fowler, one of the Huffington Post 's citizen journalists, threatened to stop blogging unless the Post started paying her . After a brief exchange of emails where Fowler explained she was no longer prepared to do her reporting for free, the Post' s founding e...

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In this week's Missing Link Friday: Are conservative Christians the only oppressed minority not protected by university diversity policies? Bill Muehlenberg thinks so. An anonymous poster to Menzies House risks a Joe Klein experience . And Ayn Rand's sacred text, Atlas Shrugge...

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Bill Muehlenberg is outraged at reports that villagers in Surrey and Kent have been told to remove wire mesh from their garden shed windows because it might injure burglars. It's just one more idiotic example of political correctness, writes Muehlenberg ... or perhaps it's jus...

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At Menzies House , Tim Andrews argues that "we should have public debate free from fear of attack, and free from fear of retaliation." According to Andrews, it's not acceptable for activists to try to influence a media outlet's editorial policy by targeting its advertisers. An...

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Psychologist Jonathan Haidt shares this story written by a young gay woman in 1985: Until about a year ago, I was very quiet about my sexual orientation... I often didn't understand the sexual jokes made by my colleagues… the people making the jokes thought that we all felt th...

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It's easy to miss the point in the debate about Online Opinion 's loss of advertising revenue. As Kim at Larvatus Prodeo points out , the debate isn't really about free speech -- it's not as if publishers have a right to corporate funding. The important point is about how onli...

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This week's Missing Link features reactions to John Birmingham's column: Why is fat such a fractious issue? Then there's a miscellaneous collection of links on topics like the flood levy, the property market, inequality and race. The F word John Birmingham sees himself as a to...

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This week we're stealing a few links from the Profligate Promiscuous Strumpet before moving on to a couple of stories from the US blogosphere. The theme is motherhood. So that's what they're for! "Why does a woman breastfeeding in public cause such alarm among some people", as...

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When conservative commentator Tucker Carlson launched the Daily Caller last year he promised readers original reporting on US politics. As he told the Columbia Journalism Review : "our view is that people want reliable information they’re not getting other places". When journa...

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At Larvatus Prodeo, Kim writes about The great American neoliberal liberal blog kerfuffle where blogger Freddie deBoer claims that "almost anything resembling an actual left wing has been systematically written out of the conversation within the political blogosphere". Accordi...

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Are older women a threat to productivity? Does higher education educate? Can you trust Google's ngram viewer? And why are there so few Filipino restaurants? These are just a few of the questions raised in this week's links. Food Last week Richard Tsukamasa Green wondered Why a...

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Albert Hirschman called it the perversity thesis -- the claim that an " attempt to push society in a certain direction will result in its moving all right, but in the opposite direction ". The best example of thesis is in arguments against cash-transfer programs for the non-wo...

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If only we could persuade poor people to adopt the values and behaviours of their rich neighbours we could end poverty in a generation. Or at least that's the impression you'd get from reading the never ending stream of books and articles about the culture of poverty, the unde...

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Christopher Joye is relaxed about income inequality. In a recent article for the Drum Unleashed he writes: I don’t think there is anything wrong at all with a rise in income inequality if one assumes that: (a) we have equality of opportunity; (b) we are committed to combating...

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You've read about the floods , you've given to the flood relief appeal and now you need a break. So instead of talking about the distribution of water, let's talk about the distribution of income. Thanks to Christopher Joye it's been a hot topic over the past week. People are...

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Missing Link Friday is back. And to start off the new year, here's a short quiz. Follow the links to check your answers. 1. When the Japanese look at the moon, they don't see a man, writes Catallaxy's Ken Nielsen . According to Nielsen what do they see? A. A lotus root B. A ra...

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The rough beast is slouching towards Bethlehem again. In the latest issue of Quadrant Rob Nugent warns that young people are losing their connection with history and culture. Literary reading is in decline and postmodernism is to blame. According to Nugent, our intellectual el...

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In this week's Missing Link Friday -- a former Costello adviser compares Australia's tax and welfare system to a platypus (follow the links to find out why), Tyler Cowen starts a debate about inequality in America, bloggers worry about the demise of serious political journalis...

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American conservatives hate welfare. But under President Bush, they willingly expanded food stamps -- a program that hands out over than 64 billion of dollars worth of assistance a year to low-income Americans and legal immigrants. The reason? Many conservatives don't think th...

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Canberra Times readers were left to think up their own 5 deck headline for this story by AAP medical writer Danny Rose.

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This week at Missing Link Friday -- bloggers tangle with the Wikileaks story, Ad Astra expresses his disappointment in Tony Abbott, Mr Punch falls victim to political correctness and the War on Christmas continues. Tangling with the cables guy A lot of bloggers are writing abo...

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It was billed as a debate over the size of government . But within the first few minutes Congressman Paul Ryan had changed the subject. Focusing "just on size entirely misses the point", he said, "We should not be asking how big should our government be, we should be asking wh...

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In this week's Missing Link Friday -- a brilliant idea for reforming the education system, old people, advice about grey hair and the need for teeth 2.0. Skinner Box kids "I was just thinking about schooling and I had a most brilliant idea", writes Joseph Clark . "If students...

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Here are a few of the links I've been clicking over the past few days: When is economic growth good for the poor? At Consider the Evidence Lane Kenworthy reveals the awful truth -- governments can make poor people better off by giving them money. Money and happiness . When peo...

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In a recent post, Troppo's Ken Parish suggested that quality newspapers serve a gatekeeping role, ensuring "at least some measure of quality assurance". So what's happening at the Australian? In a recent piece on wind farms, environment editor Graham Lloyd attempted to explain...

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If you regularly copy and paste headlines or paragraphs from newspapers, you'll have run into Tynt Insight . It's the software that inserts the irritating "Read More" URL into your blog posts, emails and documents. As John Gruber at Daring Fireball writes , Insight "is a servi...

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There's more to reporting than quoting from media releases or explaining statistics you've downloaded from the ABS -- or at least there ought to be. And that's why it's so worrying to read this from Alan Kohler : It is now possible for anyone to find out almost anything. Someo...

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This week's Missing Link Friday looks at who's to blame for the toxic waste in your garage, asks whether car drivers and Tasmanians are paying their way and investigates the latest public policy fad -- social investment bonds. Help! Rich guys in top hats are filling my garage...

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How do people respond to evidence of their own privilege? Some will deny it. They'll try to tell you that earning $90,000+ per year makes them a middle income earner. Others will ignore it. And others still will try to justify it -- they'll say they deserve to be better off th...

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Cheating students, immortal hamburgers, housing nutters and a cunning plan to improve the affordability of Grange Hermitage, all feature in this week's Missing Link Friday. Lies, lies and more lies Joe Hockey is an expert at deception, writes Ad astra at The Political Sword ....

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It's wrong to tell children that Santa Claus is real, argues Edward Feser : Parents who do this certainly mean well, but they do not do well, because lying is always wrong. Not always gravely wrong, to be sure, but still wrong. That is bad enough. But there is also the bad les...

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As Jason Kuznicki writes at Cato@Liberty , there's "a game lately played in the bookish corners of the left side of American politics" that you might call the "We Know Hayek Better Than You" game. It sounded fun, so I thought I'd have a go. Many self-styled classical liberals...

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What Australia needs is a "genuine grassroots free market advocacy organisaiton [sic]", writes Tim Andrews . And he's convinced he's the man to make it happen. Andrews is currently in the US equipping himself with the training and experience he'll need to create an Australian...

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It's Friday. And that means it's time for another Missing Link Friday. This week Bill Muelenberg explains why letting teenage girls bring other girls to school formals may encourage bestiality, an Australian conservative argues that female empowerment is a plot to disempower m...

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Here's this week's Missing Link Friday. One for the country Don't stop at two, says Mark Richardson. "to have stable population growth you need a large percentage of couples to have 3 children to make up for those having none. Limiting families to 2 children won't work." At Oz...

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"A degree from Harvard or Yale is not a pre-requisite for president", says talk show host Glenn Beck while Christine O'Donnell begins a campaign ad by disclosing " I didn't go to Yale ". If there's one thing tea party champions agree on, it's that a new elite has taken over Am...

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Welcome to Missing Link Friday -- a quick tour of a few of the issues Australian bloggers have been following during the week. Will it become a regular feature? Let's see. I'll be running this alongside Ken Parish's new reader-driven Missing Link where you get to share your fa...

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It's time libertarians ditched their alliance with conservatives and Republicans, writes Brink Lindsey . In a piece for Reason magazine , Lindsey argues that libertarians should stake their claim at the centre of American politics and imagines a new swing constituency animated...

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Shrinking suburbs in growing cities "Lunchtime midweek in Campbelltown's main street in the heart of western Sydney is a slow-moving affair", writes the Australian's Jennifer Hewet t. "Cars drive in and out of the one-way street at a leisurely pace. Business is not exactly boo...

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Ghana's New Patriotic Party went to the 2008 presidential election with a new slogan : "Moving Forward". Christiana Love's song ' Moving forward ' was played at party events and there was a dance that might be oddly familiar to Australians: Look at the way the New Patriotic Pa...

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At Foreign Policy's Passport blog , Joshua Keating writes: "In a too-good-to-check item , the Daily Mirror reports that rapper Snoop Dogg recently attempted to rent the entire nation of Liechtenstein for a music video". Anyone prepared to do a bit of Googling will find the ren...

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Ayn Rand denounced social work as "monstrously evil". In a letter to philosopher John Hospers she declared that to "choose social work as a profession is to choose to be a professional parasite ." Ed Kilgore of the Progressive Policy Institute sees a Rand-like hostility bubbli...

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At Catallaxy , Rafe pings Club Troppo for getting "excited by a report from the US which suggested that a large proportion of Republican voters have really silly ideas, indeed they are practically insane. Interesting to read that this result came from a survey commissioned by...

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Are you tired of separating the recycling and having to put your underpants in the laundry basket? Are you sick of watching your wife's vampire shows on tv? Chrysler knows how you feel. Last year the struggling US auto company filed for bankruptcy protection and was forced int...

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In the 1960 s and 70s Palmolive ran a series of tv ads warning men that body odour could hurt their career prospects. "Don't wait to be told", said the jingle. And the reason was obvious -- it's awkward to talk to someone about how they smell . But body odour isn't the only as...

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Over a third of British men with no qualifications are economically inactive -- neither working nor looking for work. Even those with basic qualifications of ( NVQ level 1 and below ) have less than half this rate of inactivity. According to official statistics the major reaso...

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Australia's unemployment rate may be back to where it was in the late 1970s but the structure of our labour market and our society is very different. For example, in the late 1970s almost 70 per cent of men aged 25 to 34 were married and working full-time. Today it's less than...

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According to Will Wilkinson , "the U.S. welfare system is very generous". And compared to the welfare states of most African countries, that's obviously true. But Wilkinson is comparing the US to the Nordic nations. So what's going on? It all starts with a Freakonomics post by...

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Paul Bloom raises a fascinating question in his recent essay The Pleasures of Imagination : Do we enjoy imaginative experiences because at some level we don't distinguish them from real ones? Bloom's question makes me wonder about the way politicians harness the imaginative te...

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Arthur C Brooks launches a creative defence of small government in the National Review . He argues that people value money because it is a symbol of earned success. And because it is earned success rather than money that makes people happy, redistributing income from the rich...

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For years I've watched people poke and prod at the internet, trying to get it to cough up enough cash to support careers in professional journalism. But in a world where even Rupert Murdoch complains about not getting paid, it's no surprise that most fail. At Crikey Margaret S...

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A "lot of opinion polling is useless because it doesn’t understand its limitations" writes Graham Young . One of the major limitations of polling is the tendency of respondents to answer questions about things they know nothing about. A series of studies have shown how respond...

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"How much attention did you pay to this week’s Federal Budget?" For many respondents to this week's Essential Research Poll , the answer was not much -- 44 per cent said that they paid little or no attention to the budget. But in the same survey, 80 per cent were able to expre...

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It was always going to be a problem. What do you call your new improved version of Labour when the 'New Labour' brand has become stale and discredited? David Miliband is backing 'Next Labour', a tag coined by the New Statesman's James Macintyre in March this year . In an inter...

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With Gordon Brown gone, the Labour leadership contest was on. The first candidate to announce was former foreign secretary David Miliband . Then a few days later his brother, former energy secretary Ed, announced that he would also stand . It's a contest that's been brewing fo...

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It's three in the morning here in Canberra. The BBC is reporting that the Labour-Lib Dem negotiations have collapsed while George Pascoe-Watson , former political editor for the Sun, is tweeting about a Lib-Conservative coalition with cabinet posts for the Lib Dems . The IEA's...

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"Why is everyone voting Conservative?" tweeted an exasperated Holly Hawthorn , "VOTE LIB DEMS!!" But it was already too late. By the time the votes were counted the Liberal Democrats had lost thirteen seats and picked up only eight. And most of the seats they lost went to the...

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One of the catchiest phrases doing the rounds on Twitter as the UK election results come in is "Activate the Queen". It all started with a BBC radio interview with Professor Peter Hennessey of the University of London back in March. Here's a quick transcript: Hennessey: "The u...

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It's official, the UK has a hung paliament . With Labour's Teresa Pearce holding Erith and Thamesmead the BBC is reporting that "There is now no chance of the Conservatives winning a Commons majority." Since the result gives nobody any satisfaction , a quick witted commentator...

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For years policy experts from free market think tanks have been arguing that charter schools and vouchers boost test scores. Last year Julie Novack's report for the Institute of Public Affairs insisted that: "Voucher programs around the world have been shown to improve the aca...

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Economist and blogger Andrew Leigh has won preselection as Labor's candidate for Fraser . Saturday saw preselections for both ACT federal electorates -- Fraser and Canberra, with Canberra going to communications consultant Gai Brodtmann . According to the Canberra Times ' Jess...

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Tory leader David Cameron says he's " fighting this election for the great ignored ": Young, old, rich, poor, black, white, gay, straight. They start our businesses, operate our factories, teach our children, clean our streets, grow our food, keep us safe. They work hard, pay...

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What will Der Spiegel's German readers make of Kevin Rudd's dispute with comedian Robin Williams? In an interview with David Letterman Williams jokingly said that Australians were "basically English rednecks". And in a later radio interview the PM hit back ( video ). But the G...

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"Lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds". Miranda Devine opens yesterday's column with a quote from Shakespeare's Sonnet 94 . Apparently National Party leader Warren Truss has been quoting Shakespeare to make a point about the Prime Minister's declining popularity. A s...

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"Hug a hoodie" -- For years Conservative leader David Cameron has struggled to live down the catchphrase. In 2006 he made a speech about crime and young people in "hoodies" . While bad behaviour must be punished, he insisted, we also need to show a lot more love and understand...

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On Sunday I wrote: " It’s never been easier to check quotations ". It's time for an update. While checking some of my own words on Monday, I discovered that many of my old blog posts had been attributed to Danger Mouse and Admin . A part of my online identity had been sucked d...

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It's never been easier to check quotations. With tools like Google Books and the Yale Book of Quotations there's no need to publish spurious or out of context quotes. But even today, books, newspapers and academic papers are full of quotes that are just wrong. Here's an exampl...

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Google removes Aboriginal flag from winning Doodle 4 Google entry Last year 11 year old Jessie Du won Google's Doodle 4 Google competition with her entry 'Australia Forever'. Displayed on Google's homepage for Australia Day, the doodle features Australian animals formed into t...

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"I expected it to taste greasy and salty;" writes Clay Risen , "instead it was dry and smoky, with a hint of meat." Across America cocktail bars are serving up bourbon cocktails flavoured with bacon . In the Atlantic Risen explains the process: First, you fry up several thick...

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"Eat our weiners and gorge", says the sign on this Los Angeles fast food joint. Every time I look at this photo I wonder what that means. Is it an invitation to overeat? Is gorge the name of some American fast food delicacy? I took this photo in early 1987. From memory, it was...

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"The concept of utility in economics refers to the pleasure, or relief of pain, associated with the consumption of goods and services" writes economist John Quiggin . Another economist, Robert Frank, suggests that it is closer to the idea of satisfaction. In Luxury Fever he wr...

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It seemed like a simple enough question. What do economists mean by 'utility'? But after scouring the literature I'm more confused than when I began. The Penguin Dictionary of Economics defines it as: "The pleasure or satisfaction derived by an individual from being in a parti...

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Australia is in the midst of a flat-screen TV crisis, says Clive Hamilton . Driven by an insatiable desire for "stuff", we spend more time chasing money and less doing the kinds of things that would really make us happier and more fulfilled -- spending time with friends and fa...

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Not everyone enjoyed my recent post about PoMas -- post-materialist consumers who live modestly but spend up big. Some readers were particularly irritated by the comment about food intolerances. For example, Galaca says : I can’t help feeling this is yet another article sneeri...

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Why does Toyota's humble hybrid drive some people into a rage? Around 2005-2006, journalists started writing about " Prius rage ", " Prius envy " and "hybrid hatred". According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , it started in California where the state allowed solo Prius drivers...

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Are you appalled by McMansions, $4000 barbeques and luxury four wheel drives that never leave the bitumen? Does Clive Hamilton's book Affluenza strike a chord with you? Do you dream of downshifting to simpler lifestyle but feel you can't afford it? If so, you could be a PoMa -...

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"Australia has very few anarcho-capitalist bloggers like Paul Staines of Guido Falkes [sic] fame, reformed raver libertarians with an eye for scandal (and another on the latest market moves)" writes Christian Kerr . Instead of breaking stories, he says Australia's political bl...

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Andrew Leigh asks : "are smokers more likely to vote for parties of the right (because they believe in individual liberty) or parties of the left (because they tend to be poorer than non-smokers)?" The answer in the United States is that smokers are more likely to vote Democra...

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Peter Thiel is a super-smart, super-successful businessman and libertarian activist. He co-founded PayPal , invested in Facebook and has pledged three and half million dollars to a project searching for the key to human immortality . He also thinks it was a bad idea to give wo...

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Remember how Luke Skywalker destroyed the Death Star ? At the crucial moment, the young Jedi switched off his targeting computer and used the Force to aim his laser torpedoes. It was one of the most important decisions of his life, and he made it, not on the numbers, but on in...

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Thatcherism is just another word for neoliberalism, says Kevin Rudd . It's been almost two decades since Margaret Thatcher left office and her record has been obscured by mythology. Sure she took on the unions and sold off some public enterprises , but did she really " roll ba...

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Andrew Norton wonders how the term 'neoliberalism' came to Australia . After searching the literature, he thinks it "probably started in Latin America, and came to Australia via US academia". Andrew's probably right. There's some evidence that, during the 1960s, free market su...

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The police have been dusting for prints. There are dark smudges on the laundry door around the handle and locks. The forensics officer suggested I wipe it off with a dry cloth. It turns black if gets wet, she said. The powder is surprisingly difficult to remove and seems to ha...

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"The hallmark of economics," writes Geoffrey Luck , "is not its ability to forecast the future but to explain things." So when economists or others offer advice about the future of the housing market, is it best to ignore them? In 1995 economists Steven Bourassa and Patric Hen...

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Andrew Leigh links argues that social policy makers should use an evidence hierarchy to sift through policy relevant research. The idea of a hierarchy of evidence (or ' levels of evidence ') comes from the evidence based medicine movement. As Andrew explains, there are thousan...

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Yesterday Nicholas Gruen asked : What single book is the best introduction to your field your field for lay people? In the field of welfare reform I'd recommend Thomas Fowle's 1898 book The Poor Law . Progress comes slowly in social policy. Much of what passes for innovation i...

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Across Latin America, governments are turning to conditional cash transfers to overcome poverty and inequality. In a recent post, Andrew Leigh asks whether we should trial the approach in Australia. Conditional cash transfer programs attack poverty in two ways. Like income sup...

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Journalists are ranked as the least trustworthy profession according to a recent UK poll by Ipsos MORI . While 92% of respondents said that they generally trusted doctors to tell the truth, only 19% said that they trusted journalists. At 60%, even the "ordinary man or woman in...

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Economic conservatives never really trusted Richard Nixon. Faced with rising inflation the president resorted to price and income controls declaring: " I am now a Keynesian in economics ". Almost everyone agrees that his timing was terrible. As Keynesians struggled to make sen...

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It's pretty easy to touch a nerve with bloggers, says cartoonist Gary Trudeau . Since most of them are not getting paid, he says that narcissism is the only explanation for what they do. Trudeau is the creator of Doonesbury , a popular syndicated comic strip. And last year his...

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By reaching out to neoconservatives Obama could "fracture the opposition's idea machine and help turn the Republicans back into the stupid party for years to come", writes Gabriel Schoenfeld . This isn't as far fetched as it sounds. The first wave of neoconservatives were disi...

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When Barack Obama chose pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration it sent ripples of disapproval through liberal ranks. Salon's Joan Walsh , for example, attacked Warren as "a poster boy for kinder, gentler 21st century bigotry". An evangelical Christian...

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Quadrant's editor Keith Windschuttle has been held up to ridicule . Despite efforts to defend himself, the Sharon Gould hoax has damaged his reputation. But, strangely, some people seem to think the hoaxer's reputation has suffered too. Like the authors of the Ern Malley hoax...

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Thousands of birds collide with aircraft every year but in most cases there is little or no damage to the plane. However in a small proportion of cases aircraft have been destroyed as result of bird strike. In 1988, 35 people died when an Ethiopian Airlines 737 crash landed an...

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Due to the motion of Mercury , my horoscope advises me to "run any really audacious ideas through a sanity filter." So I ran the idea of consulting astrologers through the filter and straight away I had a problem. I decided to turn the filter off before typing " Ayn Rand " int...

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In a recent ranking of the world's top think tanks , only two Australian institutions make the cut. The Lowy Institute for International Policy is ranked fourteen in a list of the top think tanks in Asia while the Centre for Independent Studies ties with seven other organisati...

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The global conservative movement is not a conspiracy, argues Mark Davis . Instead it is loose-knit and decentralised. "Ultimately what unites radical conservatives", he writes, "is the power of belief and the pursuit of common objectives, not the conspiratorial activities of s...

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Keith Windschuttle has been hoaxed. In a post for Quadrant Online he writes: "An author calling herself 'Sharon Gould' has tricked Quadrant into publishing in its January-February edition an article about popular scares on biotechnology issues ." As Crikey's Margaret Simons pu...

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In affluent societies, consumption is about creating identity rather than meeting human needs, argues Clive Hamilton. And to reinforce the point, he invites us to " consider the semiotics of the potato today ". According to Hamilton, today's shoppers can choose from 15 varieti...

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In the days before the Americans turned him into a cuddly economic stimulus package, Santa led a much more exciting life. Today he lets even the naughtiest children sit on his lap and demand Nintendos, ipods and mobile phones. He listens politely and promises to do what he can...

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For decades SNOOTS have been hunting down whiches and replacing them with thats . Whenever a SNOOT discovers the relative pronoun which introducing a restrictive clause, the writer responsible will drop several notches in her esteem. For a SNOOT , knowing which relative pronou...

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When Hunter S. Thompson returned to Louisville in the early 1960s, he found a city proud of its progress on race relations . "Racial segregation has been abolished in nearly all white public places", he wrote. But even though many of the legal barriers to desegregation had bee...

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By the end of the 1950s American car makers were losing market share to cheap European imports. Volkswagen's Beetle , Renault's Dauphine and the Fiat 600 were all cheaper, more fuel efficient and easier to park than full-sized American cars. By 1959 imports had captured almost...

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"People who talk about a bubble are blowing smoke,'' said real estate economist Michael Carney. It was February 2005 and Carney was confident that house prices in California wouldn't fall. But by the end of the year the market turned. And between August 2007 and August 2008, C...

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Every night while we sleep, the Wealth Fairy flits from home to home stuffing riches into the magical savings accounts Australians call 'housing equity'. In the morning, newly renovated kitchens buzz with activity as mums and dads get the kids off to school. Coffee mugs clink...

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It was just how Don Watson said it should be -- an act of seduction. "A good speech is a lover's embrace," he wrote. "You want to sit on the metaphorical mountain and with an arm sneaking round their shoulder speak of things you have in common -- your love of trees or cows, th...

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George Osborne gave a surprising speech earlier this month. The Shadow Chancellor spoke about the egalitarian philosopher John Rawls and called for greater equality of opportunity. He praised Swedish educational reforms and argued that parents should be able to choose a school...

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It was an innocent age where the major threats to freedom were mustachioed men with hydrogen bombs and the monopolistic tendencies of big business. In the paradoxical world of Clive Hamilton , the free market liberals of the 1950s never realised that the most serious threat to...

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When Margaret Thatcher said that there was no such thing as society , her enemies were delighted . Here, in a single phrase, was her heartless philosophy of individualism -- a philosophy which abandoned vulnerable people to the competitive violence of the marketplace and celeb...

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Is the New York Philharmonic just a cover band? After all, rather than writing and performing their own material, aren't they just rehashing old tunes by Mozart, Stravinsky and Beethoven ? One of the conceits of underground music scenes, is that the performers are genuine crea...

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Nothing seems to excite conservatives as much as the spectre of moral relativism. For conservatives, relativism is one of the great errors of the postmodernist left. If it is allowed to spread through the classrooms, lecture theatres and legal system, Western civilization will...

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When the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer threw his neighbour down a flight of stairs he said it was because she was making too much noise. He couldn't stand noise and once wrote that "when a great mind is interrupted, disturbed and distracted it is capable of no more than a co...

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Everyone knows that egalitarians believe in equality . But what does that mean? If the core egalitarian idea is that all human beings have equal moral worth, then even Friedrich Hayek is an egalitarian . But if, as Rafe Champion insists , egalitarianism means "equal material r...

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Why are left-wingers less happy than right-wingers? According to psychologists Jaime Napier and John Jost , it's because of the way they interpret inequality. American right-wingers are more likely to believe that hard work leads to success. As a result, they find inequality l...

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Support for the welfare state is often based more on chauvinism than a desire for justice, says Will Wilkinson. He argues that if first-worlders really care about improving the lot of the poor we should open up our economies to trade and allow more poor foreigners to cross our...

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"Over the past five years, a group of young and unpredictable rightward-leaning writers has emerged on the scene", writes David Brooks in the New York Times . Instead of rising through the official channels of the movement, he says, "they found their voices while blogging. The...

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Barry Jones is a human search engine. Crawling over thousands of pages of words and numbers, he commits the data to memory and indexes it for regurgitation on demand. "When Mozart's name is mentioned", he says "a detailed entry appears in the screen in my head, Mozart, Wolfgan...

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There's a dark side to the internet, says David Burchell , an eerie parallel universe that spreads across the web "like green moss on a neglected lawn." And here you are, right in the middle of it. The parallel universe Burchell is writing about is "the world of the political...

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Well-being isn't just about our relationship with things, it's also about our relationships with each other. Poverty hurts, not just because it can leave you feeling hungry, cold and sick, but because it can also leave you feeling ignored, excluded and ashamed. In The Theory o...

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If you're interested in social policy and have a strong commitment to social justice then here's a job you might be interested in. Catholic Social Services Australia is looking for a new policy officer . CSSA is looking for an appropriately qualified and experienced person to:...

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The super-rich aren't super-smart says Ezra Klein . While it might be comforting to believe that that income differences represent differences in knowledge and skill, it's just not true: The massive gains in wealth in this country are apportioning to a small slice of rich peop...

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Three quarters of America's wealth is invested in its people, writes Gary Becker . He argues that while physical capital is still matters, human capital now matters more. Where once a nation's wealth lay in the fertility of its soil, today it lies in the knowledge, skills and...

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"If everyone had enough, it would be of no moral consequence whether some had more than others", says Harry Frankfurt . Skepticlawyer agrees. In a recent post on 'progressive fusionism' she suggests combining Frankfurt's 'doctrine of sufficiency' with Amartya Sen's capabilitie...

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"The phrase is suddenly everywhere", said the New York Times' Katharine Seelye . It was 2000 and Al Gore was running for president. In his acceptance speech , Gore used the phrase 'working families' at least eight times. In Australia, Wayne Swan and Kevin Rudd seem equally kee...

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What shape is the income distribution of Andrew Leigh's dreams? Even he doesn't know. "I don’t have a strong sense of what the right level of inequality is", he writes . "Indeed, I'm not even sure I have the right intellectual framework for answering the question." The questio...

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Under John Howard, the Liberal Party embraced a form of big-spending conservative social democracy, says Andrew Norton . The most formidable opponents of limited government are conservatives. In a comment on Andrew's blog , Winton Bates wonders whether this might lead to a rea...

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It seemed like a reasonable enough idea. Responding to fears of a terrorist attack by ' dirty bomb ' or nuclear weapon , US Customs and Border Protection installed hundreds of radiation portal monitors at seaports, land border ports of entry and crossings across the United Sta...

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" Now listen, you queer . Stop calling me a crypto Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered..." Everyone agreed that William F Buckley was good television. When the American Broadcasting Company were looking for a conservative commentator for the 19...

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This time last year the British media was buzzing with stories about the demise of marmalade . In January, The Grocer reported that sales of marmalade fell by 4.4% in the year to 4 November 2006 . Worse still, most marmalade consumers have their best toast munching years behin...

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"The Monkees are too hip for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ", writes Robert Forster . Is he right? Hired as actors for a TV series, Michael Nesmith , Peter Tork , Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones went on to feature in one of the most successful American pop bands of the 1960s. The...

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The Cato Institute strives to be the respectable face of American libertarianism. It's a difficult role to maintain in a movement with more than its fair share of eccentrics, extremists and conspiracy theorists. Earlier this month Dom Armentano , a Cato adjunct scholar, sugges...

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Andrew Norton mourns the passing of the Bulletin : The Bulletin hasn't had a niche for a long time now. While it still occasionally broke stories, on a week-by-week basis it wasn't providing much you could not find more promptly and at lower cost in the newspapers. I haven’t b...

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Where did all those "extraordinarily, unbelievably, stunningly gorgeous" Russian women come from, asks Anne Applebaum . If you walked into any "well-appointed drawing room, dining room, or restaurant in London" around 1995 there they were, she says. But in the 1970s and 80s, t...

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Juno is a great movie -- but there's something a little odd about the music. So you haven't seen the film? It's about a 16 year old girl called Juno who gets herself pregnant. And yes ... I can hear you. You're saying, "Gets HERSELF pregnant! Isn't there some male person who's...

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In the latest edition of Dissent , Jesse Larner has a leftist take on libertarian icon Friedrich Hayek . He " talks about what Hayek gets right, what he gets wrong, and where he is just a crackpot ". Larner joins a growing list of leftist writers and thinkers who share Hayek's...

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Paddy McGuinness died this morning . He was 69. As a columnist and editor McGuinness thrived on controversy. As Matthew Ricketson wrote , he was "loved and loathed in roughly equal measure, and that is the point -- and the trick -- with such columnists." At Catallaxy, Jason So...

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In The Shock Doctrine , Naomi Klein argues that radical free market reform requires some kind of crisis . Wars, terrorist attacks and natural disasters pave the way for authoritarian reformers to impose their fundamentalist visions on an unwilling population. Critics like Tyle...

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Andrew Leigh and Joshua Gans' latest attack on the Howard Government is causing collateral damage. According to Helen Smart , the publicity surrounding their latest Baby Bonus paper "spawned a disgusting hatefest on news.com.au and similar forums, with all the usual suspects g...

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As America entered the 1990s, Republican speaker Newt Gingrich was busy making plans for the nation's future. " I keep reminding my friends we've entered the decade of the teenage mutant ninja turtle ," he wrote. His plans for the decade of the TMNT included "transforming the...

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Bicycles for carrying stuff Most Australians think of bicycles as children's toys or sporting equipment. The typical suburban bike shop is packed with full-suspension mountain bikes , lightweight road bikes and fat-tired retro cruisers . And as wonderful as these machines are,...

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"It's like the Ferrari of bikes" says photographer Sam Ash. In Friday's Financial Review Magazine Ash is pictured standing next to his red Tommasini fixie -- a bike with one gear and no brakes . Given that the average age of AFR Magazine readers is 46 this doesn't bode well fo...

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The emotional politics of Howard's aspirational nationalism There's a difference between guilt and shame. When you see yourself as a good person who's done a bad thing, you feel guilt. But when you see the bad thing you've done as evidence that you are a bad person, then you f...

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Two of the most fashionable ideas in social policy thinking are coming together -- conditional welfare and early childhood intervention. Together they'll create a new supernanny state that fights crime, prevents teenage pregnancy, lifts employment and leaps rigorous cost-benef...

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"Michael Gerson never wrote a single speech by himself for President Bush", writes former colleague Matthew Scully . Along with Gerson and John McConnell, Scully was part of the team that crafted some of George W Bush's best known speeches. In a bitchy article for the Atlantic...

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Forget about strippers, the greatest menace on the campaign trail is food. Birthday cakes, pizza, cheesesteak sandwiches, or pork chops -- they can all stop a campaign dead in its tracks. Remember the unlosable election of 1993? Everything was going well for John Hewson until...

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Megan McArdle asks : "Did John Quiggin just write that it doesn't matter whether the New Republic ran a false story?" The short answer is 'no'. The long answer is over the fold. The whole thing starts with a story about dogs dying in Baghdad. What false story? Last month The N...

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"Australia is working again - moving ahead after decades of falling behind," says John Howard in his speech to the Millennium Forum . At the Sydney Morning Herald, Phillip Coorey thinks he hears echoes of Ronald Reagan's " It's morning again in America " campaign theme. And he...

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According to Glenn Milne , Kevin Rudd's visit to a New York strip club gives lie to "his claims to be a churchgoing family man who counts as his hero Dietrich Bonhoeffer , the Lutheran pastor martyred by Adolf Hitler." But what would Bonhoeffer say? Dietrich Bonhoeffer took ri...

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The Government Giveth and the Government Taketh Away is 'bad' Peter Saunders' latest book. He argues that the welfare state once supported the poor by taxing the rich. Today it attempts to support the non-poor with their own taxes. He calls this 'tax-welfare churning': Churnin...

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Has the electorate's hip pocket nerve finally gone numb? In today's Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Hartcher writes , "we are beneficiaries of the most successful macroeconomic management in the developed world, yet we seem ripe for a government that might want to promise to supp...

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"Australia's online news commentariat that has found passing endless comment on other people's work preferable to breaking real stories and adding to society's pool of knowledge", says the Australian . I can understand that when you've tracked down sources for interviews or pa...

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The plight of children is one of the most compelling arguments for government activism, say Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray . But in their 1994 book The Bell Curve , they argue that governments should resist the urge to intervene in dysfunctional families and communities...

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"It really is social science pornography," says Murray, as he pulls income and IQ statistics off his laptop computer. In a 1994 interview with New York Times reporter Jason DeParle , the think tank researcher talks about race, intelligence, poverty and Thai bar girls. Murray i...

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July 24, 1959 , the American National Exhibition, Moscow. Vice President Richard Nixon gently steered Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev towards the model kitchen . He wanted to show him a brand new washing machine . We want to make the lives of our housewives easier, said Nixon...

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To free the market classical liberals need to help break the nexus between income and status. The more strongly the two are connected, the more the left will try to regulate the economy to prevent the growth of income inequality. This is because the left's concern over income...

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Just when Tony Abbott thought he had found his adopted son, Hunter S Thompson put a gun to his own head and pulled the trigger. Perhaps Thompson burned his way into Abbott's mind that day -- the emotion of the time made everything that happened then seem more intense and signi...

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On Saturday the Prime Minister was Wile E Coyote -- the hungry predator whose cunning plans are never quite cunning enough to catch the Roadrunner. But with the results of the latest Galaxy poll , commentators might wonder whether the campaign is going to become a tortoise and...

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If human behaviour is about maximising utility from a stable set of preferences, why assume that a rational actor will accumulate true beliefs? What if the most efficient way of satisfying an individual's preferences involves false beliefs? If theorists like Gary Becker are ri...

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"I don’t think of myself as a ‘heterodox’ economist," writes John Quiggin . Despite his left wing views, Quiggin defends the methods and assumptions of mainstream economics. As he sees it, the mainstream is broader than most people think. In a recent article for The Nation , C...

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The mailing costs of small US magazines like Mother Jones , The Nation and National Review will rise sharply after July 15. The United States Postal Service is set to adopt a new rate formula based on proposals by Time Warner -- the publishers of mass circulation magazines lik...

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Political movements develop around policies rather than belief systems. And as support for the Bush administration's policy agenda crumbles, so too does America's conservative movement -- an unstable alliance of conservatives and libertarians. In the Wall Street Journal Peter...

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When a generation of activists, writers and artists rallies around slogans like " never trust anyone over 30 " and " hope I die before I get old " a book like Mark Davis ' gangland is almost inevitable. But Davis always knew that generationalism was a cheap shot -- a way of gr...

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A "dozen or so pages of ignorance and silliness". That's how Andrew Norton describes Christine Wallace's recent article for the Griffith Review -- 'Libertarian nation by stealth'. Wallace's major offence is to confuse Robert Bork's moralistic conservatism with libertarianism....

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Does relative poverty matter? If differences in income just mean that some people have bigger, shinier barbeques then probably not. Big shiny propane guzzling barbeques are nice but, as Clive Hamilton says , living without one doesn't amount to hardship. To many people it seem...

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The teachers were becoming concerned. Week by week, the kids at the Hilltop Children's Center were building a city out of LEGO . And as the city emerged, so too did the children's assumptions about private property and power -- assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based...

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Hayek was an an activist liberal rather than a conservative, writes Roger Kimball . And now that the struggle against socialist planning is over, the important question is where Hayek thought we should go from here. What was his vision for a liberal Utopia? In his essay 'The I...

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"People get on welfare because they are lazy PERIOD" says an anonymous commenter to a Wisconsin newspaper article. Last week the La Crosse Tribune ran an article about welfare reform which provoked the usual hostile sentiments. The commenter went on to complain about left wing...

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"Kill kill kill kill kill the poor tonight," sang the Dead Kennedys as they imagined slashing the welfare rolls by dropping neutron bombs on crime-ridden urban ghettos. The late-70s, early 80s punk band saw themselves as giving voice to a right wing fantasy -- ridding the worl...

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Libertarianism is in crisis because it refuses to accept big government, says Tyler Cowen . As governments turn away from central planning and embrace free markets, their societies grow wealthier. And wealthier societies can afford bigger governments. According to Cowen, it's...

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He lost his father to a car accident and his mother retrained as a nurse so that she could earn a living and support her family. It was a narrative that told voters who he was and why they should trust him to lead the country. Scenes from his childhood were woven into a video...

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American conservatism is as much about rhetoric as it is about policy, says Sam Tanenhaus . Few conservative leaders are as revered as Ronald Reagan, but his supporters often forget that he made government bigger rather than smaller. They forgive him because he believed what t...

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Is John Howard a strong father or just an annoying older brother? Voters see their nation as a family and its leaders as parents, says cognitive linguist George Lakoff . In the US, voters often see their leaders as the world's parents -- as if it was their job to protect small...

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If John Howard could beat Mark Latham , then Gordon Brown can beat David Cameron , says Third Way architect Anthony Giddens . In a recent piece for the Guardian , Giddens writes: Look what happened in Australia. The prime minister, John Howard, is ageing, and he does not exact...

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Chris Young didn't feel cared about . The food was good, the service was better than usual but it wasn't enough -- he wanted more from his waitress: I didn't feel like she really cared. Sure, she was attentive, but I didn't feel cared about. And I didn't feel like she was bein...

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In the world of the Matrix , Richard Layard would side with the machines. After all, the machines are only doing what any good government should do -- keeping people as happy as possible. During the war between humans and machines, the earth was plunged into darkness. Knowing...

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All utopias begin in hope and end in despair. Marx's vision of a world where you could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and criticise after dinner collapsed into Orwell's image of boot stamping on a human face. At the hands of its critics,...

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Hayek regarded 'social justice' as a mirage -- an unattainable ideal. Chasing this mirage would destroy the market and put society on the road to serfdom. In a 'socially just' society, the distribution of wealth and income would reflect some ideal pattern. Under egalitarian 's...

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[photopress:Hayek_Road_to_Freedom2.jpg,full,alignleft] If socialism is the road to serfdom then liberalism is the road to freedom. Friedrich Hayek is famous for defining freedom in negative terms . A person is free when they are not coerced. Left liberals define freedom in pos...

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Martin Amis arrived back in Britain to find white, middle-class demonstrators marching with " We are all Hizbullah " placards. "Well, make the most of being Hizbollah while you can," Amis writes , "As its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, famously advised the West: ' We don't want anyt...

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You're a sensible person. I can tell. You're smart, well informed and decent . When you take a stand on an issue you've got good reasons. If only everyone was like you . But sadly, no matter how patiently you explain yourself, some people can't or won't see the light. It's lik...

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Big business lobbyists and greedy foreigners are turning Sydney into an overcrowded hell hole, says Clive Hamilton . In Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald Hamilton draws on John Calhoun's famous rat experiments to argue that Sydney risks becoming a ' behavioural sink ' -- a city...

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[photopress:Rand_Window3_1_2.jpg,thumb,alignleft] Ayn Rand despised Friedrich Hayek. In a letter to Rose Wilder Lane she described him as "an example of our most pernicious enemy". At Thoughts on Freedom, Andrew Russell takes issue with some of my earlier comments on the Rand/...

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According to ex-Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, there is no reason to disbelieve in the existence of Santa. Please pass this message on to sceptical children. Dear Mr Rumsfeld, I am 8 years old. Some of my liberal friends say there is no Santa Claus. Daddy says "If Donal...

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[photopress:OneWay.jpg,full,centered] At Larvatus Prodeo Mark Bahnisch argues that Team Rudd is blurring the differences between Labor and the Coalition and driving left-leaning voters back towards the Greens, Democrats and independents: So much for product differentiation, Ru...

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Would you vote for this woman? Or read her column? Don Arthur did (the latter anyway) ... I wonder why Miranda hasn't lectured Julia Gillard on her hairstyle yet? Why bother with scholarly research when you have television? In a recent study , Amy King and Andrew Leigh found t...

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Some people are little grumpy before they've had their first cup of coffee. And maybe that's why Sunrise co-host David Koch got so many complaints when he repeated this joke at 6:50am. But how risqué can a joke be if versions of it have appeared in respectable magazines like t...

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Michael Duffy thinks we live in a meritocracy -- a society where everyone gets the income they deserve. But in the Duffyverse, evil genius Lex Luthor would be more deserving than Superman . Why? Because Luthor has a higher IQ . Duffy argues that Australia has a new upper class...

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Andrew Leigh wonders why Labor performs so well in state and territory elections but so poorly in national elections. His favourite theory is one Andrew Norton floated a while ago -- voters think of the nation as a family where Labor is mum and the Coalition is dad . State and...

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Do we really want political leaders with vision? Now that it's leadership speculation season again, every speech or media appearance by a Labor politician is seen as an audition for the leadership. Supporters are looking for someone with big ideas, passion, and a vision for ou...

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While Blair's New Labour remains mired in the war in Iraq, Cameron's new-look Conservative Party declares war on poverty and makes peace with Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee . In a recent article, Tory front bencher Greg Clark , says that : Ignoring the reality of relative po...

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Lindsay Tanner says that Australians are anti-intellectual , but has anyone told the Daily Telegraph's Simon Benson ? Today he's casually quoting 19th century German philosophy : OBVIOUSLY, Peter Debnam hasn't read Nietzsche. If he had, he would know that while madness might b...

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Hayek enthusiasts were up in arms when Jeffrey Sachs wrote, "Austrian-born free-market economist Friedrich August von Hayek suggested in the 1940s that high taxation would be a 'road to serfdom,' a threat to freedom itself" ( pdf ). Hayek's supporters were quick to point out t...

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[photopress:Horned_Hayek.jpg,full,alignleft] Kevin Rudd is starting to remind me of Buffy the Vampire Slayer . In season three Buffy battled the Mayor of Sunnydale , a polite, quietly spoken politician who formed a pact with demons to ensure his own survival. Rudd also has dem...

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Disclosure: This is not a paid review Helen Dale (aka skepticlawyer ) has signed Catallaxy up with ReviewMe, a service that makes it easier for businesses to pay bloggers to review their products. Critics call it pimping , Sam Ward at A Yobbo's View calls it an antidote for wr...

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When Milton Friedman visited Australia in 1975 the Institute of Public Affairs declared it "a breath of fresh air." But their enthusiasm had limits. "Friedman is a proponent of the free market doctrine in its purest form" said the IPA Review (vol 29 No 2). And for an organisat...

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Economist Milton Friedman died today in San Francisco . Friedman was not just a Nobel Prize winning economist, he was a celebrity. He wrote for Newsweek and the New York Times Magazine and was interviewed by Playboy . In 1980 he and his wife Rose produced a television series f...

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Jason Soon has more on the debate over Nordic social democracy and Friedrich Hayek's road to serfdom thesis. It began with an article in the Scientific American where Jeffrey Sachs annoyed Hayek fans by saying: Von Hayek was wrong. In strong and vibrant democracies, a generous...

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"Hayek was wrong" says Jeffrey Sachs . For decades classical liberals have relied on Friedrich Hayek's 1944 book The Road to Serfdom to warn that tax increases lead to tyranny. But in a recent article for the Scientific American , Sachs argues that high taxing Nordic countries...

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[photopress:Weiners_and_gorge.jpg,full,centered] The prospect of Nancy Pelosi capturing the top spot in Congress and the continued rise of Hilary Clinton has unleashed a masculinity crisis according to Texas blogger Amanda Marcotte : The asswipes are relentless. Fear-mongering...

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Who is Nancy Pelosi ? I wondered. It was 1987 and a long haired guy was photographing a doctored Pelosi campaign poster in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district . The poster originally said, "Nancy Pelosi, a voice that will be heard." Now it read "Nancy Pelosi, a voice that...

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Why is Christopher Pearson promoting a book by a Derrida scholar and an academic who writes about Indigenous issues ? Well... because it includes an entire chapter on him. Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler's new book, The War on Democracy Conservative Opinion in the Australian Pres...

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Ever dreamed about blogging for living? Earlier this week The Road to Surfdom 's Tim Dunlop made the move to news.com.au. Tim is now firmly established at Blogocracy one of News' growing stable of blogs . The opportunity didn't just fall into his lap. Tim's PhD thesis was on d...

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If there really is a vast right wing conspiracy, perhaps it's a conspiracy against the Republican Party Choice quotes from right leaning American magazines: "Republicans must be punished" Ronald Bailey, Reason Magazine "GOP Must Go" The American Conservative "Republicans have...

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"Let's not be misty-eyed about Friedrich Hayek" says Kevin Rudd , "he taught (and modern Liberals believe) that there is no such thing as social justice and that the only dignity to be delivered to human beings is through their emancipation by free markets untrammelled by the...

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Theos -- Britain's new public theology think tank " We don't do God " said the PM's spin doctor. When Vanity Fair's David Margolick tried to steer Tony Blair into a conversation about his religious beliefs, his director of strategy and communications, Alastair Campbell, butted...

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[photopress:Clive_Hamilton.jpg,full,pp_empty] The left got into trouble when it lost its ethical moorings, said Tony Blair. Influenced by the Christian socialism of John Macmurray , Blair saw New Labour as heir to the communitarian traditions of ethical socialism and New Liber...

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Why Rudd is wrong about Hayek Friedrich Hayek argued that human beings are "almost exclusively self-regarding", says Kevin Rudd . In contrast, modern Labor "argues that human beings are both 'self-regarding' and 'other-regarding'." But what Hayek actually argued was that human...

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If you've been having trouble connecting to Jason Soon's group weblog Catallaxy then maybe you've been looking in the wrong place. If you bookmarked the old site at badanalysis.com then it's time to update -- you won't be automatically redirected anymore. Catallaxy is fast eme...

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The Pew Charitable Trusts are spending $2.2 million to start a national discussion on income mobility in America. The initiative attempts to raise the profile of income mobility by forging consensus on the issue with leading thinkers representing a broad spectrum of think tank...

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"Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you're half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose and teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you're going a hundred miles an hour down a suburban side street....

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Liberals aren't comfortable talking about right and wrong. After all, the whole point of liberalism is to avoid arguments about morality. Rather than arguing, liberals want to establish institutions which will allow everyone to pursue their own idea of the good life. Morality...

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It all started with Barbie , "the vampy fashion doll" that "helped to bring about the sexualization of childhood." At least that's how the Manhattan Institute's Kay Hymowitz remembers it. According to Hymowitz , Barbie is "not-so-spiritual godmother of Britney Spears" and a si...

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Who are Australia’s top libertarian identities? At Thoughts on Freedom, John Humphreys nominates Andrew Norton . That's odd because I always thought that Andrew identified as a classical liberal rather than as a libertarian. About a year ago Andrew wrote a post for Catallaxy o...

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In his 1984 book Losing Ground , Charles Murray argued that welfare hurt poor families by creating incentives for self-defeating behaviour. Last month, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed that poor families ought to be rewarded for making the right decisions: "This polic...

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[photopress:Australian_Intellectual.jpg,full,pp_empty] Australians love a good competition. We can turn anything into sport. So if shows like Australian Idol can give young singers a chance to crack into the music business why not have an Australian Idol for public intellectua...

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Nothing's easier to understand than a story. It's as if human beings were hardwired for narrative -- stories with beginnings, middles and ends populated by people doing things. According to cognitive scientists Roger Schank and Robert Abelson that's not far from the truth. Bac...

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Peter Saunders likes to call himself a classical liberal . Leftist commentators prefer to call him a neoconservative . But what is neoconservatism and how does it differ from ordinary versions of conservatism? And what has he done to earn the label? Andrew Norton says that "no...

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RMIT's Rob Watts attempts to save the welfare state by attacking liberalism Neoconservatives are winning the welfare debate because they take values seriously, says RMIT's Rob Watts . In a recent paper on the welfare-to-work debate ( pdf ) he rejects the idea that the left is...

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Researchers say we've never been happier -- so where's the problem? According to economist Andrew Leigh only a handful of nations outrank Australian on measures of happiness and life satisfaction. Looking back over survey data collected since the 1940s, Leigh finds that our "o...

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Is the childhood obesity epidemic caused by irresponsible fast food chains or by lax parenting and lazy kids ? Is poverty caused by a lack of opportunity or by the behaviour of poor people ? Is global warming caused by suburban energy gluttons or is the sun to blame ? The war...

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Imagine super-nanny on crystal meth. That's how Lawrence Mead 's ideal case manager deals with recalcitrant welfare recipients: One man I know in Milwaukee, who works for a private employment program ... summarized his message to his male clients this way: “I’ll do anything to...

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"One of the best public intellectuals on the conservative side of politics" says ANU's Andrew Leigh . "A very thoughtful writer on the liberal side" says Mark Bahnisch at LP . A "radical neoliberal" says the University of Wollongong's Damien Cahill . Earlier this week Andrew N...

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In Jason Soon's capitalist utopia you can hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon , rear cattle in the evening and criticise after dinner . It's a world where the welfare state has withered away and in its place is an unconditional basic income paid to each adult citizen to...

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Charles Murray and Peter Saunders both want to dismantle the welfare state -- they just have different strategies for doing it. Murray's plan is to convert current welfare state spending into cash grants for every adult American (except those in prison) while Saunders' plan is...

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Jason Soon thinks welfare payments should be replaced by a guaranteed minimum income scheme . Rather than subjecting welfare recipients to a regime of case management and workfare, Soon thinks they should be free to make their own decisions about work and lifestyle. ' Bad ' Pe...

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[photopress:Bookshelf.jpg,full,pp_empty] Carmen Lawrence's Fear and Politics Lawrence's central argument is that we need to get rid of the Howard government. We need to get rid of the Howard government because terrible things will happen to our nation if we don't. These terrib...

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The Bush administration has returned to the covert propaganda tactics of the Cold War, says Matt Welch . And In the process they've "forgotten one of their most potent weapons: the truth." In a recent essay for Reason Welch writes: ...the CIA served as what the foreign policy...

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[photopress:Rollins_bomb.jpg,full,pp_empty] Henry Rollins says he was reported to the Australian government's National Security hotline for reading a book about jihad. Is this for real? On Thursday the Daily Telegraph reported that "US rocker and writer Henry Rollins was repor...

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Should op-ed writers be forced to tell readers if they're taking money in return for supporting a cause or interest? The Competitive Enterprise Institute's Iain Murray says no. In an article for the American Spectator , Iain Murray argues that readers should focus on the quali...

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Writers should keep it short and get to the point, says Julia Baird. Text messaging shows that the Sesame Street generation and generation Y get this . That's the gist of Julia Baird's latest Good Weekend column -- 'Brief Encounters'. What a pity there was so much space on the...

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The Sydney Morning Herald has an odd story about a woman with a worm in her eye . Doctors at a clinic in Kragujevac, central Serbia, have removed an 11 centimetre-long intestinal worm from a woman's eye socket. According to preliminary results, the worm taken from the 37-year-...

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Massachusetts Board of Pharmacy orders Wal-Mart to stock morning after pills Last year the Washington Post reported that "pharmacists across the country are refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control and morning-after pills, saying that dispensing the medications violate...

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[photopress:Rollins.jpg,full,pp_empty] Calls to the government's National Security hotline are confidential aren't they? Well... maybe not . Performer Henry Rollins says that he's been reported to the hotline for reading a suspicious book . But if the service is confidential t...

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It's not just western cartoons causing protests abroad. In India Hindu activists are protesting against Valentine's Day. According to Asian News International Valentine's Day has become increasingly popular in India in recent years with retailers doing a brisk trade in heart-s...

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[photopress:Graffiti.jpg,full,pp_empty] A civilized society is one whose members do not humiliate each other... Avishai Margalit The Centre for Independent Studies is arguing for incivility. In a recent paper Nicole Billante and Peter Saunders say: Excessive civility threatens...

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[photopress:St_Evil.jpg,full,pp_empty] " Help! Help! I'm being repressed !" squealed LP commenter Evil Pundit . That was September last year. Before long Evil found himself banned from the purple blog . Appealing the ban one commenter said : Maybe we should do a democracy thin...

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[photopress:Tocqueville.jpg,full,pp_empty] "I would like to leave behind a legacy or a think-tank", says President Bush , "a place for people to talk about freedom and liberty, and the de Tocqueville model -- what de Tocqueville saw in America." For once I agree with the Presi...

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[photopress:Matt_Welch.jpg,full,pp_empty] I ain't gonna piss in no jar. Them evil peckerheads they done gone too far (Mojo Nixon) It was early 1987 when I touched down in LA. Evidence of the Reagan administration's war on drugs was everywhere -- on the walls, on billboards and...

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[photopress:Stoddard.jpg,full,pp_empty] Political correctness is a kind of covert censorship which silences ideas which are unacceptable to the ruling elite. But if this is true, then the ideas which are being suppressed can't be the ones we're reading in newspapers like the T...

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[photopress:Grogblogging.jpg,full,pp_empty] In case you missed it, bloggers from around Australia met up on Saturday night for Grogblogging III. And yes, they're just as opinionated in person as they are on screen. Flashman from Electron Soup was chatting with Jozef Imrich of...

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Greens risk being seen as 'watermelons' -- green on the outside but red on the inside -- says David McKnight . By attaching themselves to the struggle for trade union rights and radical egalitarianism they are playing into the hands of critics who see them as just another bran...

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The Washington Post's George Will calls it "Something not easily distinguished from theft" . Maryland legislators passed a law this month which requires employers with 10,000 or more workers to spend at least 8% of payroll on employee health benefits. How many employers are af...

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America spends more on social benefits that Denmark, says Jacob Hacker . The difference is that the retirement pensions and healthcare benefits many Americans rely on are funded through tax breaks and employer contributions rather than the welfare state -- welfare comes as an...

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When two men kiss, is it ideologically offensive? News Limited columnist Paul Gray thinks so : My young family were among the viewers. At Christmas, they all sat down to watch the Spicks and Specks yuletide special, A Very Specky Christmas. Despite my often caustic anti-ABC co...

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I don't often violently disagree with Nicholas Gruen. But in a recent Troppo post he argues that disadvantaged groups like America's black population are held back by their culture not just by a lack of opportunity. As evidence of this Nicholas points to a recent NBER paper by...

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In 1959 Michael Harrington shocked America with the claim that 50 million of its citizens were living in poverty. His magazine article turned into a book and by 1964 President Johnson was standing outside a shack in Kentucky announcing that the nation was at war with poverty....

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Sixty percent of a rabbit's meat is in its hind legs. That's why it's so difficult to make one rabbit into a meal for four people. If you need some ideas on how to do it, then Anthony Georgeff's Spiceblog is the place for you. Georgeff's blog has the most amazing food pictures...

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If beer isn't good for you why are they selling it in chemist shops Germans are drinking less beer . Part of the reason is that beer isn't cool anymore but perhaps the major cause is the country's ageing population. Older consumers are becoming more health conscious and are tu...

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Most Americans leave high school knowing little about their nation's history . The latest Zorro film isn't going to help. According to Eric Cox in The American Enterprise , the latest Zorro sequel -- The Legend of Zorro attempts "to reconcile Latino identity politics with Amer...

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When Coca Cola distributors in Mexico City tried to persuade Raquel Ch¡vez to stop selling a rival brand of cola the shopkeeper complained to Mexico's Federal Competition Commission. The result was $15 million fine for the distributors, a moral victory for Ch¡vez , and an unex...

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The Australian Red Cross will be accepting online donations to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina as as soon as they have clearance to issue tax deductible receipts. If getting a tax deduction isn't your first concern you can make a donation to the American Red Cross . Othe...

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"What was John Brogden thinking"? asked Miranda Devine , "Bob Carr's resignation had just handed the NSW Opposition Leader the greatest gift of his career. But instead of capitalising on this stroke of luck, J-Bro let his hair down in rather exuberant style in front of a room...

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" A long time ago in a far away land reigned the establishment Kingo's Club Chaos, sometimes now referred to as Ye Olde Webdiary ." Back in 2001 Sydney Morning Herald journalist Margo Kingston set up an online diary at the Herald's web site. Margo's Webdiary soon turned into a...

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Does the Centre for Independent Studies' Peter Saunders want you to believe something he thinks isn't true? Peter Saunders says that " we should endeavour to make the meritocratic principle work ". At the same time, however, he argues that we should roll back government involv...

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In an article for Policy , Peter Saunders of the Centre for Independent Studies compares life to a game of Monopoly. But over at Tug Boat Potemkin , Gummo Trotsky is unconvinced. The aim of Monopoly is to drive your opponents into bankruptcy. For decades arrogant older brother...

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