The first of what may be quite a few articles I reproduce here which I wrote for The Mandarin from around 2016 to 2020 or thereabouts ( The Mandarin has put the articles I wrote for them behind its paywall so when people need them online, I reproduce them here). Picture: Getty...

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[caption id="attachment_36320" align="alignleft" width="1031"] Why does this graph capture the idea of the Evaluator General? All is revealed in this post .[/caption] Luke Slawomirski, a health economist I met at the OECD over a decade ago when I proposed Gruen Tenders among o...

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Share this video! Please! Well, the time has come folks. On Thursday I’ll be launching a video series that’s been over two years in the making. I could have written a book, but I made 20 short videos instead. Conner Bethune, pictured above, watched the series through and rang...

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This piece began as a lengthy comment responding to Ken Parish’s post on my proposal for a third ‘people’s chamber’ chosen by lottery. I posted it on Substack a few weeks ago, but thought it might be a worthwhile post here. I don’t support citizens’ juries as some kind of ‘hac...

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You might have seen the picture above. It’s the Tacoma Narrows bridge which collapsed a few weeks after being built. Why? Well what you can see here is the perturbations from the wind being amplified by the suspension system on the bridge - in the way that feedback amplifies w...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="457"] "Revolution Forever" mural in Cienfuegos, Cuba. Photo by Guille Álvarez on Unsplash[/caption] I remember the shock of recognition I got reading liberal Raymond Aron’s critique of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty . The ideal of a...

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I try to replicate my more substantial posts on Substack here, but forgot this from a few weeks ago. So I'm now making amends. When it comes to Magna Carta clause 39 is the one hanging in the foyer. No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or posses...

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Psychology Professor Michael Inzlicht has a confession to make . He’s been peddling shoddy wares – his words. And he's feeling quite bad about the whole thing. The work wasn’t just intellectually weak. It did real harm. Though his own proposals to popularise his ideas were kno...

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I came upon this explanation for millennials’ lack of a work ethic. I don’t want this to seem censorious of millennials. In fact I have no such complaint about millennials - but if my comments seem a little censorious of the (presumably millennial) author, I guess I’ll have to...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW_IPF2GSpw As part of a new policy, I'm going to post stuff I've published on my substack here where it's substantial enough, or where I want to be able to link to it without the distraction of all the other stuff I pack into my weekly substack...

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In the pretty likely event of a hung parliament after the next Australian election, the cross-bench becomes kingmaker. I’m hoping — and expecting — the crossbench to seek greater use of citizen assemblies in governing Australia. But what comes next is crucial. Some think it wo...

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The Gregorian revolution gave rise to a form of organisation that was gradually stamped out all over the Western world and then to its followers. Constitutional monarchy: A pyramid with a chief executive at the top with the rest of the pyramid made up of checks and balances on...

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(Not to mention Overton’s Elephant and Overton's Mouse) With inflation stuck at 4%, what a terrible problem that it will probably take a deliberately engineered recession to get it back into target. If only the optimal rate of inflation were 4%. Oh wait … No-one can be sure wh...

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I recently published this musing in my Substack newsletter. And coming across a further free kick from the policy world — something that would have negative costs and do a lot of good — I thought I'd publish both. Think of this as continuing the series begun over a decade ago...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="507"] A young Mondrian in 1908 channels an old Monet but is really thinking “I wonder if a bunch of rectangles on canvas would sell? If it did it could solve a lot of problems, perhaps not for everyone, but certainly for me.”[/caption] O...

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Adolf never had much time for planet sensible. Here he is after the Reichstag fire with fellow traveller Sefton Delmer who was Berlin correspondent for the "Daily Express" from 1928 to 1933, To the left of Hitler: August Wilhelm of Prussia. In the middle of the picture, half h...

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Right at the outset of this conflict, I worried that Israel was overestimating the strength of its hand. In the US, the Israel lobby’s lobbying has been as successful as the NRA’s lobbying. And it follows a similar strategy — zero tolerance. It holds a very tough line and then...

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https://youtube.com/shorts/_XXLgZ8rYew?si=i8EWpLRcHJ3-rpjF I recently took my son to the stage play of Yes, Prime Minister. … The decades have made a huge difference in the sensibility of the new production … . The series ran through most of the 1980s, a period that contained...

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William Hague has caught the bug for democratic lottery. And he writes about it well. This simple sentence is a nice little microcosm. “Social media companies are poisoning the democratic world with the addictive spread of narrow and intemperate opinions.” Hear hear. Writing a...

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Michael Polanyi was highly suspicious of the hyper-reductionism of neo-Darwinism. It’s reduction of the evolution of a thing so vast as life into a single causal mechanism. And it was a good call. Darwin himself had proposed that natural selection was a major mechanism of evol...

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https://youtu.be/6uPex480hRU Above is the video of a presentation I made at NESTA in London on 15th November with discussants Claire Mellior and Martin Wolf. I reproduce (AI generated) timestamps in the shownotes of the video below. 00:00 - Introduction and Overview The talk b...

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I discover that I don't seem to have cross-posted this old essay previously published in the Mandarin, and since this is my place of record (where I can make notes to myself in the comments of new sources, thoughts or developments) I am doing it now. This is part three of Nich...

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Wikipedia defines 'grey literature' thus: Materials and research produced by organizations outside of the traditional commercial or academic publishing and distribution channels. Common grey literature publication types include reports ( annual , research, technical , project,...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="506"] A brilliant illustration of the broad terrain of both concepts. It’s telling (and sad for a left leaning centrist like me) that this comes from the very right wing Claremont Institute . (Though their artist may have got it from som...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aupVJkTnIqY This is one of the best podcast interviews we’ve done. We discuss Peter Heather’s marvellous book “Christendom: the triumph of a Religion”. It covers the thousand years from the time Christianity becomes embedded in the Roman Empire,...

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https://youtu.be/aBTFQ6wwlq8 The more I've thought about sortition or as I call it "representation by sampling" the more profound I find the ways it differs from representation by election. The latter is inherently competitive and performative and both these things tend to und...

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From my Substack newsletter . Extraordinary images are being detected within the early pictures taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. As you know, the JWST went in search of exoplanets. Anyway at about the same time I was seeking an AI artist to illustrate the phenomenon of...

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https://youtu.be/DxcE_PC5rgc A while back I condensed a bunch of things I have been thinking about into four ideas which I explored with Peyton Bowman in these two discussions . In discussions with philosopher and school teacher Martin Turkis, it occurred to me it would be int...

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One of my favourite podcasts with journalist, scholar and gentleman Hugh Pope. Hugh has just brought to publication a book written by his father in 1990. But being well ahead of its time, the book was unpublishable. It pursued Aristotle's point that elections installed a gover...

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This post began as an ad for an artist with traditional and AI graphic design skills. If you want to apply, please be my guest. But the post also presents a nice simplification of a way of thinking. Right now I'm wondering how to illustrate what I call "the off-ramp from reali...

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https://youtu.be/Gb9oSVE1zNs I really enjoyed this week’s uncomfortable collision with reality with colleague Gene Tunny. We covered a lot of ground talking about the use and abuse of the wellbeing agenda. Where does it come from? Why is it taking off as an approach to policym...

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One way to get beneath the surface of what's going on is to read people who were writing about issues, as they emerged rather than in more modern times when they’d become the norm and become infused in our commonsense. I was browsing in one of the few remaining second-hand boo...

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[caption id="attachment_36685" align="alignright" width="417"] This picture makes the obvious point that if we got an extremely large person to put on extremely large rubber gloves and gave them an extremely large scalpel, there is no end to the good they could do, starting wi...

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I’ve been looking for an explainer of what’s been going on in Chile and, thanks to Brad Delong for pointing it out . Of particular interest was the way a government won 55 percent of the vote and then held a referendum on a new constitution that crashed— as in really CRASHED!...

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The only education I ever got was in history. And what history taught me is wrapped up in the story the premier English speaking philosopher of history of the 20th-century told about detecting the Albert Memorial. I wrote it up here , but the upshot is a point that’s both obvi...

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I've started posting things here that I'm drafting for my weekend newsletter — which you can subscribe to here — so here's another tidbit. This is an excellent podcast featuring an ‘industry expert’ and then someone who’s introduced as an ‘economic genius’ — Tyler Cowan. The i...

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I recommend the first 15 or 20 minutes of this podcast. Defs worth the listen as John Gray explains where he comes from — literally and intellectually and ideologically. His milieu is British working class and he got to Oxford and has been a maverick to all classes ever since....

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https://twitter.com/NGruen1/status/1627142530126184448 The first I saw or heard of Casablanca was at the beginning (and end) of Woody Allen’s “Play it again Sam”. It was many years later I saw the film. I loved it, but mainly because it’s such classic (Hollywood) movie making....

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From this week's Substack of mine. Thomas B. Edsall has an important writeup of research into reducing political polarisation. But to me it seems to be heading in an unhelpfully scientistic direction. Virtually all the researchers quoted examine the causal pathways leading to...

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A friend sent me this article documenting Sam Bankman-Fried's now well known text exchange with Vox journalist Kelsey Piper. I couldn't help but think of Alasdair MacIntyre's characters. As MacIntyre put it in After Virtue: What is specific to each culture is in large and cent...

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Here is Ross Gittin's talk to ACT Economic Society Annual Dinner, Canberra, given on Thursday 3, 2022 I’m very pleased to be invited to talk to you tonight, the biggest and best of the Economic Society’s branches. I should warn you, however, that I’m a follower of the Paddy Mc...

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Cross posted from Quillette from 16 Feb 2019, but now behind a paywall. When a conversation is not a conversation: party political discourse in the early 21st century I It looks like liberal democracy is falling apart. The chaos of Donald Trump was unimaginable just a decade a...

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https://youtu.be/ftssK9b8WFI Finding a formatting mess when I looked this up on Troppo , I've reposted it here for the record. I'm a bit embarrassed by my wooden speaking style. Here’s the David Solomon Lecture I’ll be giving at the Brisbane Museum of Modern Art in an hour’s t...

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I wrote a couple of pieces for apolitical a few years ago, but didn’t persevere. I then got an invitation to discuss my experience with the inevitable internal review and had a good discussion. Saying that apolitical seemed very optimised to its audience, which of course is it...

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https://twitter.com/abc730/status/1557673265493344259 Peter Dutton is a human being. That’s not a moral point I’m making — I’m just talking about the task of making sense of others — particularly since, if we can’t kill them, we have to live with them. (And trying to kill some...

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Like me, Leslie Cannold is deeply grateful for Liz Chaney right now — you know, the way she’s speaking truth to fruitcakery. Liz Cheney is my hero. On positions of policy, I disagree with her almost 100% of the time, but I see her as one of the first moral heroes of this mille...

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As part of my recent fascination with competitive and ‘de-competitive’ merit selection, I’ve been looking at the origins of both parliamentary and presidential elections. Intriguingly though we now associate elections with competition between candidates, in both the British pa...

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[caption id="attachment_36333" align="alignleft" width="1024"] Austro-Hungarian Economists[/caption] Below is Ross Garnaut's lecture in honour of my Dad. Economic Ideas and Policy Outcomes: Applications to Climate and Energy Fred Gruen signed up as Professor of Economics in th...

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https://youtu.be/gYKPWkvTRIg I What is it with James Burnham? I associate him — via Curtis Yarvin — with the alt-right. And Burnham is the founding text of what I call the Alt-centre (of which I am the founder and which I'm hoping to parlay into world domination if only I can...

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[caption id="attachment_36299" align="aligncenter" width="1912"] I got this list from Google Images. It's a good checklist though some may quibble with some of it.[/caption] Michael Haines, who has previously posted on Troppo , is campaigning for universal income funded from t...

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I use Troppo to make various notes for file as it were for reference in future. And on wanting to record something I found that I hadn't reproduced this post — which was originally at The Mandarin — here. So here it is, with some notes to file below. Part one. Part two is here...

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If we want politicians to actually represent their constituents, we need to free them from the pressure of toeing the party line. A week or so ago someone tweeted this to me. It was a response to my Crikey! article of February last year. I had forgotten I'd written such a conc...

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This is a piece I did for Crikey I'd forgotten I'd written and hadn't put it up here. So now I have. The article was spotted by someone who has been exposing just how much damage opening up Congressional committee deliberations to the public has done. It's a very interesting t...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n43vCEju5Ck In this discussion, Peyton Bowman and I discuss my term ‘fast-foodification’. I coined the word trying to describe modern politics. The techniques used by politicians and their professional enablers are optimised to attract votes in...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFtN1nIHXSY I really enjoyed this conversation with my friend Peyton Bowman which celebrates the possibility that Australia might be able to show the world how to push back against the Trumpian madness. We tried to turn Peyton's lack of inside k...

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As some of you may know, I am now publishing a weekly substack of articles I've found interesting on the net and in some cases offering some summary commentary. In an unprecedented move, the kind of once in a 1,000 year event that could never have been predicted, I'm now publi...

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The Sydney Book Review is my kind of book review. It's online and free. Ever since I joined the blogging revolution in 2005 it's seemed crazy to me (not to mention precious) that so many of our literary publications are locked up and sold (usually at a loss) in tiny subscripti...

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Herewith an article that was published by INET a couple of weeks ago, and Evonomics more recently. I'm republishing it here as it's my 'blog of record' as it were, but also because it enables me to make notes to file as comments. Vice always comes disguised as virtue. No excep...

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I circulated this podcast in my newsletter last week indicating that I hadn't yet listened to it. Then I did. It was a doozy. In response to the question of what the West should actually do if Russia started using nukes, the interviewee’s body language held up for a paragraph...

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Frustrating Beijing’s ambitions to create a sphere of influence is overwhelmingly a diplomatic task, not a military one. (Cross posted from The Interpreter at the Lowy Institute) There was barely concealed panic in Australia when news broke that China had struck a security agr...

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Question: Given that history repeats, what year is this? Fifteen months ago, when Donald Trump’s rag-tag militias stormed the Capitol building in Washington D.C., I thought for a moment we might be living in 1923, witnessing the rebirth of western fascism. Such were the simila...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JlLFKUF_eA This video discussion, audio downloadable here, discusses the issues raised in this post. I've previously expressed some dissatisfaction with what I might call a 'one dimensional' understanding of the idea of liberty. This post explo...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF61DWkX51U A quick browse of the self-help section of your local bookstore will show you that Stoicism has become popular in the last decade or so with a strong surge during the pandemic. In this week’s discussion, Peyton Bowman and I discuss t...

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'A wonderful, important and also a necessary book, which sets the records straight... and celebrates a remarkable quartet of women thinkers' Peter Conradi I’ve previously mentioned the two books on the Golden Age of female philosophy at Oxford and how thrilling I find the stor...

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I've spoken about what I call "strategisation" before . This involves dressing something up as particularly strategically apposite. The example I gave is this assertion: Services will continue to make a growing contribution to economic activity in Australia. It is therefore im...

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It’s a funny thing with names. Names given in jest and contempt are adopted by their targets. After over a decade of marketing consulting services as “Lateral Economics”, I decided it wasn’t so much a brand as a method and have given some talks to that effect. Anyway a new rec...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VtGYDCm-gA Another great discussion with my friend Peyton Bowman . We began with a passage from William James on faith. Though the essay does discuss religious faith, I quoted it because it starts more mundanely, speaking of the way faith makes...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31eH6ANhTcs I met Joe Trippi about a decade ago. I met him about a decade ago and was fascinated with his campaigning exploits — including taking Howard Dean from backmarker to presidential frontrunner in 2004. Many of the architects of the onli...

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https://youtu.be/CZVNmDuifes For over a year I've had something in my 'draft articles' file. It consisted of little more than a table like the one you see below. I'd love to enlighten you with an article that I'd slaved over for a few days trying to get to the bottom of things...

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My exposure to British journalism has been a bit of a culture shock. When I write for the FT there are fact checkers, who don't just check but add value with charts. The sub-editor gets back with proposed redrafts to clear them with me. Apart from picking up some spelling erro...

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This post began as a long tweet thread in response to Tim Dean's asking for my views on New Zealand's tilt toward proportional representation (PR). I've expanded it a little here, but it's still a short post. In any event it tries to crystalise something I think is important i...

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https://twitter.com/InfiniteL88ps/status/1475453302653349890 Hi All. Just to let you know of a podcast I did with Jim O'Shaugnessey's program "Infinite loops". You can download it from this link . I've also done another one with Bernard Keane (who was an excellent discussant)....

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[caption id="attachment_35800" align="alignleft" width="2560"] Geoff as I remember him[/caption] As many readers will know, Geoff Harcourt one of Australia's distinguished economists died recently aged 90. Geoff was a good friend of my father's who occasionally stayed at our f...

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In 2011 I think it was, I presented Kaggle to Tech23 an organisation that held an annual awards and rewards process for the best start-ups. It was a cool thing then and it's great that it's still going. However it runs in in Sydney so I don't get to it all that often. This yea...

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Continued from Part Two . [caption id="attachment_35753" align="alignright" width="440"] If we had an epidemic preparedness index, we could have a league ladder of epidemic preparedness. Then all we'd have to do is get to the top of the ladder and we'd be THE MOST PREPARED IN...

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This is an essay I wrote in 2005 and published in Eureka St which I don't think I've published on Troppo, and since it's my journal of record, I'm now doing so. Throughout last year we commemorated the 125th anniversary of the climax and end game of Ned Kelly’s life, from the...

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Czesław Miłosz is a Polish writer and Nobel Laureate who first came to Western attention in the early 1950s with the publication of The Captive Mind one of the earliest exposes of the nightmare of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe following WWII. He had not been in the Commu...

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Standards: continued from Part One . [caption id="attachment_35719" align="aligncenter" width="270"] Why is this man smiling?[/caption] I. Introduction Why is this man smiling? He's smiling because he is Charles Francis Richter and he came up with the Richter scale. And if you...

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I. Introduction Some prefer iPhones. Others prefer Android. These are the two standards left standing for what only old guys call smartphones. 'Standards wars' like this have arisen throughout history. No doubt readers can provide examples back to the ancient world, but the sw...

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I The university is one of the finest creations of European culture. Alas, as a troublesome fellow once said, all that is solid melts into air. I’m a bit shy of attributing things to a single cause. These things tend to built up over many, many decades. But certainly what migh...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpKGzulGikQ Reading the publicity for this new book I remembered a name — pathologist Colin Manock — thinking it had been at the centre of some deliberations here some time ago. I was right — it had . I reproduce the relevant column from the arc...

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https://youtu.be/cRhlvHQ0MWY Here's a podcast I did a few weeks ago which has garnered more reaction from people than any I’ve done before. That may just be because (as it turned out) I played cat and mouse with the listener by the podcast talking to an essay I'd written that...

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[caption id="attachment_35644" align="alignleft" width="1163"] For anyone who’s interested I recommend David Cayley’s series of CBC radio documentaries on Illich. (He’s the best broadcaster I’ve come across). The first series of five programs focuses on Illich’s social thought...

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I've recently completed an essay and like quite a few of my essays, it's not been 'optimised' for publication in a magazine, so I may not try to publish it. But in case any folks here think it's of interest, they need only put their email in comments below or email me and I'll...

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[video width="640" height="360" mp4="http://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Science-v-inhabiting-our-own-world.mp4"][/video] From a recent podcast interview with Tyson Yunkaporta This post began as a comment on David Walker's post on David Card's Nobel Prize for h...

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[caption id="attachment_35549" align="alignleft" width="700"] Michael Polanyi (L) and Karl Popper (R)[/caption] I've been working on a joint paper with someone else about blockchain. One way the paper might develop would be to argue that the discussion of DAOs (decentralized a...

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Here's a (lightly edited) exchange between me and a friend who, I'm going to assume would prefer to remain nameless. If they want to change this, they will let me know and I will change it. The exchange should be read downwards — with the first email you encounter below being...

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Australia is doing its bit to ensure that there will be a third world war and that it will be a nuclear war. The claim that the U-boats are merely nuclear propelled, not nuclear armed, is a gross deception. One of the key features of nuclear subs is that they can launch and co...

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As Troppodillians may know, I occasionally use the comments section of Troppo to minute notes to myself — often references — to which I may wish to return some day. So I can use this thread in that way, I'm reproducing something I first published a while back on the Mandarin....

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[caption id="attachment_35167" align="alignright" width="345"] The graphic from the nifty NYT review. [/caption] On the strength of nothing more than the fact that it's Audible's free book of the month, I've started listening to Midnight's library. It's fun and engaging. I'll...

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This short post grew out of a response to Paul Frijters on another thread. Naturally enough, those who don't want to lockdown are telling us about our precious liberties. You know those we fought for at Gallipoli, and Iraq and Afghanistan. In any event, I strongly agree with t...

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I thought you’d like to know of a venture I’m on the board of which is a global monthly magazine being published out of Melbourne dedicated to publishing the best podcast interviews of the month as a printed magazine for sitting back and enjoying though it’s also being distrib...

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John sent me the text below in response to reading my essay on John Macmurray . As you may know he trained as a priest and after many decades lost his faith. He is now in his nineties and must have things read to him. I presume he dictates his correspondence. I have enjoyed co...

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Below is the introduction to an essay I've written about a Scottish mid-20th-century philosopher John Macmurray. Like my essay on Polanyi, this was partly a way for me to go through his work and set it down for myself. But the interest is through the lens of aspects of Macmurr...

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[caption id="attachment_35602" align="alignright" width="421"] There's no shortage of fancy illustrations for some topics — like topics in personal finance. This is quite a cute one.[/caption] I compiled a list of thoughts about our own superannuation system in response to a j...

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[caption id="attachment_35067" align="aligncenter" width="862"] Source: Winter in Australia: Football in the Richmond Paddock (1866) is the earliest known image of a football match in Melbourne.(Supplied: State Library of Victoria (Robert Stewart 1866))[/caption] Here's a fine...

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In a Democracy it is important that the decision on any public issue, be made by a community at the appropriate level. For example; local, regional, national, continental or global. It is imperative that at each level decision on a particular matter should be decided on the sp...

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‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain Christopher Rufo https://vimeo.com/16717619 I wonder if I can keep this post short and sweet. Only by reminding myself that I’d like to write about his after much more consideration and effort. So can I keep this to a steak in the...

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Six years ago I posted the note below as part of Abbotsford Convent. I'm doing so again today to raise money again. Only there's already an offer on the table to match anyone's donation. I'm doing the same for any donation you might make, so for every dollar you donate, I dona...

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As I struggle with my ninety-fifth year, I would like to beg forgiveness from the true believers in sortition. Near forty years ago, in 1985, I published a book Is Democracy Possible? with the subtitle The Alternative to Parliamentary Democracy. The sortitionists believed that...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NCNUoY0UJA&t=20s A few weeks back I was rather taken aback to receive an email which I took to be a hoax: Hi Nicholas We would like to invite you on the Greatest Music of All Time podcast. The episodes are a good opportunity to promote upcoming...

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My father Fred was born Fritz Heinz Georg Grün to a family living at Reisnerstrasse 5, Vienna on 14th June, 1921 making today the centenary of his birth. Accordingly I'm reposging a speech I gave at the unveiling of the portrait of him by his good friend Erwin Fabian in Hay co...

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[caption id="attachment_34950" align="alignleft" width="162"] Michael Haines[/caption] Michael overheard me pontificating with a friend at my local café and we got talking. After lengthy emails on various topics including universal basic income, I invited him to post on Troppo...

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Here's some claims about recent research on fintech and AI. Berg, Burg, Gombovic, and Puri (2018) suggest that digital footprints can help boost financial inclusion, allowing unbanked consumers to have better access to finance. Similarly, Frost et al. (2019) show that fintech...

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I've quoted Zweig several times on this blog since reading his memoirs, but I was going to post this — and forgot. So, better late than never, here it is. A lovely story: One day I had an express letter from a friend in Paris, saying that an Italian lady wanted to visit me in...

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I can't stand Jordan Petersen. I can't stand his remorseless humourlessness first of all. His self-righteousness, his grandiosity and megalomania, his boastfulness about how learned he is coupled with his preparedness to wade into subjects like what he calls cultural Marxism a...

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Following a recent online conversation with Timothy Wilcox , I read Wordsworth’s extraordinary poem “We are seven” which I reproduce below. As you’ll see, it chimes with my own preoccupation with communication and mutual benefit across the chasm of difference. My own preoccupa...

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Below is a recent article of mine for the FT on a subject dear to my heart. The Chinese are trialling it. The UK Treasury and the Bank of England have a task force on it. So, after years of talk, central bank digital currency has suddenly become serious business. Think of CBDC...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6qmdqvItkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTaw6oQmRdM No folks, that is not a joke. Listening to it on occasion over the years, I've grown fond of the New Zealand National Anthem. The tune is classic national anthem. That is to say it manages...

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[caption id="attachment_34828" align="aligncenter" width="2560"] I put in "Getting to the point" on the marvellous free graphics site Unsplash , and up came this: by salvatore ventura [/caption] Just in case people aren't sick of my extracts from SZ. I liked this. It very much...

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I continue listening to Stefan Zweig's description of the disasters of the twentieth century a passage of which I'll reproduce below. My big essay on the Productivity Commission's Draft Indigenous Evaluation Strategy represented a bit of intellectual progress for me. As I wrot...

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I've been listening to The World of Yesterday , the memoirs Stefan Zweig. Zweig was probably the best-known author in 1930s Europe and produced a mountain of material. Essays, fiction, history, poetry, translations, you name it. Today few know of him, though that may be differ...

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[caption id="attachment_34804" align="alignleft" width="1920"] Thanks to @followbenwhite for making this photo available freely on @unsplash 🎁[/caption] Troppodillians will know that I organise a discount Crikey subscription every year. But this year I'm also supporting Inkl ,...

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I’d like to introduce Joy Braddish who’s studying for a Master of Journalism at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism . She’s undertaking an internship at Lateral Economics where one of the things she’s helping us with is making some explainer videos. T...

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Writing about sortition, equality and merit, I spent a good part of today reading the last chapter of a book I read a decade or so ago on the relationship John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had in their dotage – including jumping in and out of references and checking up for insta...

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This podcast is quite a lively exploration of a proposal of mine that is – frightenly – a quarter of a century old! Below is Gene Tunny's introduction to his podcast interview with me. NG Last month, in a Financial Times article , (unpaywalled pdf here ) Nicholas Gruen propose...

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I have just finished reading Tyler Stovall 's White Freedom and this post is to recommend it wholeheartedly. I first became aware of it on Marshall Poe’s excellent New Books Network via this podcast . A striking fact about the political thought in the 18 th -century is the way...

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[caption id="attachment_34756" align="alignright" width="464"] Amazing what Google Images serves up[/caption] Last week Sam Roggeveen e-mailed me asking if I'd accept a post for Troppo from him on the above subject. I said I would – any time. When he sent it to me I thought it...

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Herewith a podcast interview of me setting out my case that the New Zealand Wellbeing Budget has a relationship to wellbeing which corresponds to a Pirates Ball's relationship to pirates. It's ' themed ' as promoting wellbeing rather than being thoughtfully crafted to do so. A...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pf4u3eyTCk I thought I posted this talk from some time ago on Troppo when I gave it back in October, but I can't find it. So here it is. Apologies if it's already here. As ever, a raw machine read transcription is over the fold. In my first cal...

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[caption id="attachment_34619" align="alignleft" width="1600"] From Encyclopaedia Brittanica: " Australian ballot: Voters participating in the secret ballot, or Australian ballot, system in the British general elections of April 17, 1880. Hulton Archive[/caption] Though I have...

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Back in the day, (which is to say for most of the 20th century until things began changing in the 1980s, each of the major political parties had a few percentage points of the population as members. In addition to the intrinsic rewards of being part of one’s country’s social a...

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https://youtu.be/wUpbbK104Zg About a year ago, I happened upon the video above and it reminded me of the revelation that the Toyota production system was to me when I first encountered it in 1983. I was working for Industry Minister John Button and reviewing Australia's car in...

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I. Given its astonishing success, modern minds are mesmerised by science. So much so that various disciplines adopted certain mannerisms of science in order to make themselves more ‘scientific’. This is the intellectual sin Hayek and others called ‘scientism’. Having come to u...

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If something can happen once, it can happen again. This is the oft-ignored first lesson of history. The second lesson is that humans usually forget lesson number one. Watching the attempted coup unfold at the Capitol building, those two lessons kept working through my mind. Ne...

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Ian McAuley circulated the summary below and I asked him for permission to make it available here – which he agreed to. Piketty's books remind me of one of John Clarke's lines. Back in Fred Dagg's ten minute History of Western Civilisation, he commented that "The Russians expe...

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Filed under "Studies that confirm my priors". Long-Term Effects of Equal Sharing: Evidence from Inheritance Rules for Land Charlotte Bartels, Simon Jäger, and Natalie Obergruber #28230 Abstract: What are the long-term economic effects of a more equal distribution of wealth? We...

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[caption id="attachment_34478" align="aligncenter" width="509"] Quite a cool mural that popped up when I searched Google Images for 'neoliberalism'.[/caption] In his powerful critique of Neo-liberalism, Nicholas Gruen draws heavily on the work of Michael Polanyi. The following...

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[caption id="attachment_34474" align="aligncenter" width="750"] Wellbeing: As you can see from the picture, everyone's a winner.[/caption] I was asked to respond to this question by the Mandarin as part of their ‘select committee’ of worthies (note: the link is behind the 'Pre...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfrDNgDL1Dk Here's a presentation to the annual Communities in Control conference run by the amazing outfit Our Community established in the 1990s by Denis Moriarty who had previously been a Deputy Secretary in the Victorian bureaucracy. (If you...

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Those interested in my article on Polanyi might be interested in the chapter of Peter Drucker's memoirs on the Polanyis. An amazing lot whom he introduces thus: The Polanyis – father and children – were the most gifted family I have ever known or heard of. They were also the m...

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[caption id="attachment_34459" align="alignright" width="220"] Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, one of central Europe's brightest and best, fresh from a stint as Einstein's research assistant arrives in Manchester in 1933.[/caption] I have now finished the second draft of an essa...

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Another post from John Burnheim who wrote this following up on having received some questions from some Spaniards. (Reminding me of the title of John Lennon's book, or perhaps it was just a joke of his somewhere: A Spaniard in the works) NG Demarchy is not a comprehensive plan...

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Cross-posted from The Mandarin (and written about ten days ago, so it fails to mention Adelaide's latest snafu). Lockdowns, border closures, masks, apps and eradication. Where do you stand? One can’t sensibly address any of these issues without knowing more about context. But...

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[caption id="attachment_34406" align="alignright" width="320"] Kind of a fun graphic[/caption] Well, we look like getting a vaccine! Of course managing the policy response to the virus could know of this only as a possibility. But, looking like it is coming to pass, that possi...

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https://youtu.be/qHos8FlzMOE Here's a great lecture by Martin Wolf who's writing a book on capitalism and democracy. It's well worth watching I think. And, as is my custom, and despite Paul's thinking that the result is so buggy it may not be worth it, below the fold I append...

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[caption id="attachment_34359" align="alignright" width="460"] Yuan Yuan (YY) Liu. Doing her bit for a better world[/caption] This June I was approached by Yuan Yuan Liu who wanted to discuss funding of scholarships for disadvantaged people with me "as you are the best economi...

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Published in and edited form in The Conversation . Martin Wolf has a crisp face-to-camera opinion piece in which he points out that populism in government hasn’t lined up neatly against relative success in keeping populations safe from COVID. Thus in the Anglosphere, Donald’s...

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[caption id="attachment_34335" align="alignright" width="378"] Dan Andrews said that his 'Road Map' for easing the lockdown is not a doctoral thesis – a proposition that's hard to argue with. Further propositions will be offered at subsequent press conferences.[/caption] Life...

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I have been reading The Great Persuasion Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression by Angus Burgin (ostensibly in order to write an article on Michael Polanyi) and was taken with this Chapter on Milton Friedman . I hadn’t really crystalised for myself until the chapter poi...

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[caption id="attachment_34314" align="alignleft" width="624"] How do you do a graphic for a post-COVID world? Well I guess you have an office with everyone running around with Groucho glasses facemasks on.[/caption] The Mandarin asked me to pontificate about the budget – along...

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https://youtu.be/w5WsRmgqe_M Above is a recording of me presenting a session on How the competition delusion is ruining everything. It's the presentation of this essay "Trust and the Competition Delusion". Because it's easily done these days, I’ve recorded the video on my phon...

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I've mentioned Edward Broughton numerous times on this blog , a man of great humanity who responded to the plight of the Jewish internees who were at his command. A quick snippet from one of the grateful internees. So far I've read it on each occasion at the three dinners I’ve...

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[caption id="attachment_34260" align="alignright" width="352"] Source: Sortition in the History of Democracy , Slide 3[/caption] A lottery is a defensible way of making a decision when, and to the extent that, it is important that bad reasons be kept out of the decision. Peter...

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[caption id="attachment_34242" align="aligncenter" width="2304"] I really love this design by Casey Finley, who was kind enough to allow me to publish it here. He has a very distinctive style which is really coming into its own as he works on it. For instance, see here and her...

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In the Age of COVID chess has been reinvented. In March (I think it was) the Candidates Tournament was dramatically ended a few rounds in and everyone wondered "what next". Enter Magnus Carlsen entrepreneur. With his star power, he has been getting himself a piece of the actio...

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Below is a piece I published on the NESTA website in early 2016 which they took down in a web revamp. It's still available on archive.org , but I thought I'd also publish it here for the record. [caption id="attachment_34195" align="alignright" width="404"] Quick Troppo Quiz:...

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[caption id="attachment_34192" align="alignright" width="202"] A stupid diagram which I have made small for obvious reasons.[/caption] The Mandarin asked me to provide a summary answer to this question: What is the appropriate level of the use of consultants in the public serv...

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I've been dipping into Herbert Simon's autobiography, Models of my life . He's from an interesting time in the intellectual history of economics and the social sciences. The major contributions of his professional life began in the 1950s and, though he was part of the mainstre...

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https://youtu.be/w5WsRmgqe_M Early this year I published an essay in the Griffith Review critiquing what I called the competition delusion. I was passing by more common critiques of competition, which for instance argue that competition isn't necessarily a great idea in numero...

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Scrap attempts to reforming politics as a whole. From a practical point of view attempts to do so by legal constitutional change have no possibility of succeeding from a theoretical point of view, it is folly to assume that if we agree broadly about principle and are motivated...

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Slightly updated from its being published at the Mandarin . The catastrophe of Victoria's resurgence of COVID is a lesson in non-linearity. This reminds me of Paul Romer's recent comments to the effect that, since economists have foisted cost/benefit analysis on others as a on...

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[caption id="attachment_34150" align="alignright" width="402"] There were some pretty stupid illustrations of the post COVID economic recovery. The people in this picture are also doing something pretty stupid. But they're working for their living. They are not consultants, an...

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A couple of weeks ago, Shane Wright e-mailed me telling me that he was doing a piece for next weekend (the 18th) about the recession we're in, and how to get out of it. He was "talking to people who were at the economic policy coal face in the last recession. That means your n...

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An earlier version of this piece was published last week on the Mandarin . Because the idea I have called “the Evaluator General ” is several ideas knitted together to try to resolve a number of dilemmas, it comes with numerous implications that are often missed or misundersto...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3ZIC393egM Here's the transcript of my talk to Nudgestock which was held a few weeks ago. I was hoping to do it in London where it's normally held, but in the world of COVID it migrated online and acquired for itself an enormous audience. I was...

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Some of you may have noticed a Twitter account called ' Sarhanis '. In any event, Antonios Sarhanis is its proprietor and we got to talking on Twitter and discovered that we shared various maladies. He's interested in philosophy but pretty unimpressed with the way it's handled...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=fEHYX3J8Jm4 Note, this essay was published in three parts in the Mandarin and is published in consolidated form (complete with its footnotes) here. It is impossible to remember, until one gets in the country … that they care about th...

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Here is the second fragment on early neoliberalism. The previous post being on Hayek, this one is on Michael Polanyi. Both built their approach to the world upon their abhorrence of the Soviet Union – a position that was unfashionable among intellectuals at the time. But where...

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[caption id="attachment_34082" align="aligncenter" width="480"] The Mandarin headed this part of the essay up with a picture of a woodpecker, which seems fair enough. But such 'nuanced' imagery, as we say these days is always off-brand here at Club Pony. Where too much directn...

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Cross-posted from The Mandarin In this second instalment of his three-part series, economist and forward thinker Nicholas Gruen explains more of why it is so important to understand the 'how' of getting things done. From the commanding heights to everyday routines The big publ...

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Dear Troppodillians, please welcome Luke Slawomirski to Troppo. I first met Luke at the OECD where I gave a paper on public-private digital partnerships with a particular focus on health policy. Luke was an Australian health economist working there and he's recently returned t...

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Cross posted from The Mandarin Premium . Government leaders understanding what they need to do when faced with impending issues is one thing. But here, in the first of a three-part series, Nicholas Gruen gets into the nitty-gritty of coming to terms with the 'how' of what need...

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My essay on the Ghost of Descartes was written by cannibalising a longer, not quite finished essay entitled "Cartesian vices, Copernican moments". In writing something else, I find myself wanting to refer to another part of it, so I'm hastily topping and tailing the relevant s...

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Every now and again I'm asked to contribute to The Mandarin as part of their Brains Trust . Here's my latest contribution in seeking to answer this question: Where is the boundary between their designated public duty and the apparent expectation by some ministers that it’s ok...

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[caption id="attachment_34023" align="alignright" width="452"] Heydon Dyson Dyson Heydon is hard at work.[/caption] A quick follow up on my " May the farce be with you " article on how the oligarchy got George Pell off on charges of sexual molestation. One that Graham Young ra...

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[caption id="attachment_33982" align="aligncenter" width="593"] I don't know about this hierarchy, but I do like the idea that the most important foundation is self-honesty.[/caption] Below is an essay I wrote in late 2018 but it wasn't published on the Mandarin till a year ag...

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Herewith a weekend half-hour read. Comments and corrections appreciated. A culture survives principally, I think, by the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons that sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and i...

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https://youtu.be/fI5kCr7eIJQ I recently sent a couple of emails explaining the Evaluator General and also did an extended interview explaining the ideas in the context of Matt Jones' Public Policy class at Melbourne Uni. The first email below is the one I sent him proposing th...

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As part of the Government 2.0 Taskforce in 2009 I coined the term 'info-philanthropy' though someone may have coined it before me and the Taskforce proposed that it qualify as a head of philanthropy. I don't think any changes have been made, but there's reasonable scope to inc...

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Models, windows, reductionism and pluralism We’re familiar with the idea that thought creates ‘models’ of reality. So it’s easy to slip into thinking that our task is then to just make our models better and better, i.e. more accurate representations of reality. This leaves out...

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Well, certainly wearing a mask walking down the streets of Melbourne makes no sense at all Brendan Murphy, Australia’s Chief Medical Officer, March 9 . The philosopher Mary Midgley styles her own writing as that of a critic. She means something urgent by this – not something A...

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We're constantly in team meetings here in the underground bunker at Club Troppo working out how to tweak the linkbait. An edict has already been passed down the line from the AI that runs the place that no posts will be published on anything but Coronavirus for the next six mo...

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Well, well, well. The legal system has bungled its way to releasing a guilty man. Even if George Pell were not guilty of any acts of child molesting (as it was called during most of the time he was doing it) he'd belong in jail for his criminal disregard and wilful hostility t...

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From Twitter . Till now I’ve organisd a TROPPO GROUP CRIKEY SUBSCRIPTION for around 50 I advertised I was doing renewals on Twitter and Troppo a month ago and got about 1 or 2 takers Now someone else wants a renewal If I can get some serious buy-in I’ll rinse and repeat If not...

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This post is barely worked up from an email I wrote in response to a student in development studies. She'd been working on environmental this and that and the Sustainable Development Goals (about which I'd class myself a card-carrying member of the economists club as being hig...

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[caption id="attachment_33714" align="alignnone" width="1800"] Whoever is doing PR for this virus has certainly come up with a natty logo.[/caption] An argument someone put to me today which makes a lot of sense. In the GFC markets collapsed not just because there was too much...

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[caption id="attachment_36337" align="alignleft" width="939"] Creating and managing a high-performance knowledge-sharing network: the Toyota case [/caption] I recently reposted my old column on blogging the 2008 crisis and there's been some great blogging of this crisis. What...

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[caption id="attachment_36339" align="alignright" width="337"] Is this a bunch of black patches on a white background? It is. Of course it is. (Remember you're at Troppo now. No mucking around.) It also depicts something which you can't unsee once you've seen it. Such is the p...

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[caption id="attachment_33674" align="aligncenter" width="3840"] Not sure Winston ever said that, but it sounds like the kind of thing he might have said. Quote investigator doesn't tell me sadly. Grateful for any others' researches in comments below.[/caption] The subject of...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPHlT6LBXeo Since we're blogging the next crisis, I thought now was a good time to reheat the blogging of the last one. intriguing to think of all the changes, and in many ways how much steam has gone out of blogging, and yet how resilient it ha...

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It’s an intimidating picture. But the weaker the freeze, the more people die in overburdened hospitals — and the longer it ultimately takes for the economy to restart. Donald G. McNeil Jr in the NYT Yes folks, I normally don't go in for all that MALARKY WITH CAPITAL LETTERS IN...

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I ran into Ken Henry at a function – I think it was the terrific PM's Science Prizes in late 2008 but someone may be able to look things up and falsify this claim. In any event, I squatted at his table and had a quick chat to him about the recently announced or soon to be anno...

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This post is a direct response and rebuttal to the recent ‘Has the coronavirus panic cost us at least 10 million lives already? ’ by Paul Fritjers. Paul’s post takes the current covid-19 crisis, and uses some haphazard multiplication to create an alarming narrative, muddying t...

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This is now the whole article. Comments have been closed on the previous post . Part One To command nature, we must obey it Francis Bacon, 1624 The commitments that bind us to the social body are obligatory only because they are mutual; and their nature is such that, in fulfil...

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I congratulate you on the great success of your performance … Oscar Wilde's improptu speech to the audience at the opening of Lady Windemere's Fan [1. probably embellished apocryphally .] The current emptying of audiences offers a teachable moment about the construction of mar...

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Hats off to Joseph Walker who's podcasting up a storm at The Jolly Swagman (Yes, the title gave me the wrong idea too.) Anyway, I often find long-form podcasts rather tedious (except where I'm being interviewed in which case I find them endlessly fascinating, but others probab...

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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks The Extraordinary (Opening Night) The Extraordinary is based on the real-life figure of Stéphane Benhamou who runs an informal shelter in Paris for autistic youth who have fallen through the cracks of a system unable to care for th...

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Dr Homer Rieth, the subject of a marvellous profile by Earshot on Radio National has died. It's an amazing story of a true philosopher, at least as suggested by the etymology of the word as a lover of wisdom. He operated on the outskirts of the institutions of intellectual res...

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Initially published as Part One. Now with the final two sections added. Minds are not for thinking, traditionally conceived, but for doing, for getting things done in the world in real time Wilson and Foglia, " Embodied Cognition ", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Part On...

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https://vimeo.com/382961887 A few weeks ago I participated in a really good panel chaired by Mark Pesce for John Allsopp's renowned Web Directions conference. The subject of the panel was bitcoin and digital money. All the panellists had something useful to say for themselves....

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OK, well that heading and graphic were linkbait. I'm a firm believer in my own and everyone else's ignorance. But here's some correspondence from someone for whom I have great respect that I received this morning you may wish to ponder and/or respond to. Using various resource...

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What might have been, had we had a crack. Herewith a piece commissioned by Sam Roggeveen and appearing previously at the Lowy Institute's blog , now for the delectation of the cognoscenti here at Troppo. https://twitter.com/donattroppo/status/1229359258468147205?s=20 Clayton C...

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[caption id="attachment_35624" align="aligncenter" width="500"] If you put the golden age of female philosophy into Google Images you get this. It has accordingly been selected as the picture for this post by the Troppo Robot Barry.[/caption] I do think that in normal times a...

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I was sending this column to an ABC journo regarding the auto industry. It makes for sad reading today. From January 12, 2012 Herewith – somewhat late owing to my being out of the country – is my second column for the Age and the SMH in Ross Gittins’ place while he goes on hol...

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Well as economists and physicists have been known to say, something that cannot go on forever eventually ceases to go on. I learned last night that Erwin Fabian who was a good friend of my father in the camps from 1940 to 1944 (I think) when they were released into the 8th Emp...

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I wrote a piece on Australia's Honours system for Australia Day last year and decided this year to make it an annual event. So here's this year's column, which in the 'original' had a couple of hundred words edited out of it to meet the Conversation's arbitrary limit of 900 wo...

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The Griffith Review has just published a substantial essay of mine that I've been working on for some time. I reproduce the introductory section below after which you'll have to hightail it to their website to finish. But it would be good to see you back here for comments whic...

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https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1225553117929988097?s=20 If you know anything about the latest State of the Union Address, you know that after Donald Trump had handed Nancy Pelosi his speech as if she were his secretary when she held out her hand to him to shake han...

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The Wage Penalty of Regional Accents Jeffrey Grogger, Andreas Steinmayr, and Joachim Winter #26719 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyyT2jmVPAk Abstract: Previous work has documented that speaking one’s native language with an accent distinct from the mainstream is associated w...

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Effects of the Minimum Wage on Child Health George Wehby, Robert Kaestner, Wei Lyu, and Dhaval M. Dave #26691 Abstract: Effects of the minimum wage on labor market outcomes have been extensively debated and analyzed. Less studied, however, are other consequences of the minimum...

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These are some quick notes on listening to a Libravox recording of Chapter Three of Keynes' Economic Consequences of the Peace the text of which can be found here . I was stunned at how good it was. It was like listening to a phone message from another planet. The overarching...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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https://youtu.be/uP8juIWScH0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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