The Nobel Prize for Economics got announced and I was pleased to hear it went to David Card, Josh Angrist, and Guido Imbens. Among the best picks in years, I think. A lot will be written elsewhere about the many things they did, but what I want to honour them for is that I kno...

Continue reading →

Dear Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland (Scandinavia), First off, thank you for the last 18 months. Almost alone in ‘the West’ , you have either avoided covid madness completely (Sweden) or at least regained your sanity more quickly (the rest). You have not deprived...

Continue reading →

Let us look at the extraordinary non-covid changes now happening in China. The country has been reforming rapidly the last 20 months and I want to muse about the trajectory these reforms are setting China upon. Many commentators see in them the start of another Cultural Revolu...

Continue reading →

One of the more curious phenomena of the last 18 months has been the fatalism on display on both sides of the lockdown divide. In the anti-lockdown brigade fatalism props up in the guise of "this was the inevitable outcome of decades of planning", a view of humanity wherein on...

Continue reading →

A major theme in our book " the Great Covid Panic " (now also on Kindle !) is how a whole layer of politicians, medical advisers, and opportunistic business people grabbed the opportunity for more power and money during the lockdowns of 2020-2021. We detail how they did it and...

Continue reading →

It's here, the booklet I am sure you have all been waiting for. The one which Gigi Foster and Michael Baker slaved over for 10 months . It is also on Kindle . It is dedicated to all the victims of the Panic, in poor countries and rich countries. They include our children, the...

Continue reading →

Since I learned in April 2020 that transmission of covid was mainly via extremely small aerosols, I have regarded face masks as a placebo: they are to aerosols what garden gates are to mosquitoes. Yet, placebos have a role so I wasn't too against them and willing to have my as...

Continue reading →

What do you do as an Australian parliament when a foreign company censors mainstream media content in Australia, undermining free speech ? Do you organise an inquiry to hold those foreign companies to account and to see how you might prevent foreign meddling? Or do you fall in...

Continue reading →

I visited Afghanistan only once, on a brief visit in 2014. I fell off a donkey to great hilarity of the local villagers, slept in a compound with the armed owner keeping watch the whole night, heard stories of how life was in Soviet times, and got a glimpse of why the Afghan p...

Continue reading →

Let us divide the countries in Europe that have at least 1 million inhabitants into three groups: the ones that had high movement restrictions in 2020, the ones with almost no restrictions, and the ones in between. The graph below gives you the punchline that countries with mo...

Continue reading →

Societies are evolving and complex, which often makes it hard to see at any moment where things are going. It was thus with the move of Northern European countries towards democracy in the 19 th century, which seems inevitable and clear in hindsight but blurred at the time by...

Continue reading →

Consider three graphs that really on their own tell the story of the groups in the US/UK that did well and that did badly economically out of the lockdowns. On the super-rich : On the workers , particularly the bottom 25% (meaning those who in their characteristics like educat...

Continue reading →

I have been a utilitarian for about 30 years now and am seen in my academic work as an extreme version of the genre. I did my Phd on the topic . I do not merely say that governments should make policy for the benefit of the wellbeing of the population, but have spent years in...

Continue reading →

Dear Troppodillians, lend me your critical eye. I ask you to consider the system of citizen-jury appointments I have in mind, and tell me how the vested interests would try to game it, ie why it would not work and whether the system can be improved. Bear with me as I describe...

Continue reading →

Wellbeing & Policy Making Book Launch Event on 1st July 5-6.30pm London Time. Attending the Launch is Free, the book is not! [blurb from Nancy Hey, director of the WW Centre for Wellbeing]: The What Works Centre for Wellbeing , and our commissioning partners at the ESRC: Econo...

Continue reading →

Pre 2020, I considered Scott Morrison a political enemy of the policies I wanted for Australia, but since then have sympathised with every attempt he has made to get Australia out of its love-affair with covid-mania. Over the fold is my take on what I think Scott Morrison's vi...

Continue reading →

Wellbeing science has behaved very honourably during this pandemic in my opinion, particularly in the UK, where many of the best-known wellbeing researchers openly pointed to the disproportionate costs of lockdowns compared to their (dubious) benefits . Many stood up in newspa...

Continue reading →

One of the things I keep track off in covid-times is what is happening to births. Though it was initially suggested couples might use their extra lockdown-time to produce babies, it has become clear that in the Western world the opposite is true and that they reduce births by...

Continue reading →

Now and then one should look up and see if there are any trends that are not usually talked about in the media but that say something big about how humanity is going. I here want to briefly discuss the latest data on four big trends: war, food, (hunger?) deaths, and inequality...

Continue reading →

We lost David Savage this week to a heart attack at the age of 48, leaving a wife Deborah and many colleagues around the world. He was a Queensland boy who got educated in Brisbane and then quickly made it to Associate Professor in behavioural economics, teaching students in N...

Continue reading →

Ed Diener , one of the best-known scholars of happiness died this week at the age of 76. He was known as Dr Happiness in the United States, well-known for his 7-item scale on wellbeing and his constant refrain that the secret to happiness is in warm social relations. I met Ed...

Continue reading →

Martin Lally is a kiwi economist who late in 2020 decided to calculate for himself what his own country was losing by locking itself away from the world, coming to the conclusion that New Zealand was sacrificing something like 26 life-years in the future to 'save' 1 life-year....

Continue reading →

I am co-writing a book on the Great Panic to explain what happened and what can be done to avoid a repeat. In the course of our research for that book, me and co-authors are scouring websites in the rest of the world to find out how others in the Covistance have experienced th...

Continue reading →

Compared to the trends on January 2020, has Australia or Sweden lost more wellbeing in 2020? And which has seen the greater damage to expected future wellbeing years for after 2020? The Table below summarizes the answers to this. For the first calculation, let us only count th...

Continue reading →

Sometimes one has an idea that blazes into one's consciousness as a solution to one particular concern, which then starts to be something much bigger than just a solution to a problem. It becomes an interesting thing in itself and starts appearing as relevant to many different...

Continue reading →

I here want to salute the brave artists who used their talents to capture the inhumanity and essential insanity of lockdowns. My favourite is the "guerilla mask force", an artistic idea that apparently started in Switzerland but spread all over Europe. what this guerilla mask...

Continue reading →

As one the best illustrations of the way our minds deal with uncertainty, consider the following video. Please listen and watch at least 30 seconds so you can experience the three sequences of spoken words. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWGeUztTkRA[/embed] Pretty much...

Continue reading →

The essential governance problem in March 2020 in Western countries was the overwhelming demand of the vast majority of the population to do something dramatic in response to their fear. There was a clamour to be ‘led to safety’ by populations scared to death by images in the...

Continue reading →

With a recent publication in Nature that reported lockdowns have no effect on covid-cases or covid-deaths, there are now over 30 studies that fail to find any covid-reducing benefits of lockdowns. Worse, across countries and time, more severe lockdowns are just leading to more...

Continue reading →

Together with Benno Torgler and Katharina Gangl, I published a piece recently on how to tax the powerful and sophisticated. Our substantive argument on what one should do becomes relatively simple once you understand what happened in the world of Western taxation the last 50 y...

Continue reading →

Guess which crackpot started his article on covid in that notorious right-wing publication 'The Guardian' with the sentence "The virus has been used as a pretext in many countries to crush dissent, criminalise freedoms and silence reporting"? It's that obvious conspiracy-nutte...

Continue reading →

In 2005 I did my first economic projections of the major powers (published in a textbook ) and concluded from the trends then that China would have a larger economy in purchasing power terms than the US in 2017, which is exactly what happened. In 2012, I wrote about the inevit...

Continue reading →

While the hysteria marches on here in Europe, an interesting economics article came out in a decent journal on the political economy of that mass hysteria. Their abstract: In this article, we aim to develop a political economy of mass hysteria. Using the background of COVID-19...

Continue reading →

Consider the picture below of two hypothetical Accident and Emergency departments (A&E), one that has no covid-regulations and simply has the available nurses trying to help all comers as fast as possible. In the other one the nurses try to prevent mingling by testing newcomer...

Continue reading →

An important rule in politics is that you adopt the best policies and slogans of your opponent only after you have destroyed that opponent. Till that moment you pretend he is the devil, but afterwards you re-label his best ideas and call them your own. A great Australian examp...

Continue reading →

I am all for effective vaccines and have been impressed with how fast vaccines have been developed against covid, but I never expected them to be the wonder weapons some promised them to be. After all, the yearly new vaccines against the flu never eradicated the flu but reduce...

Continue reading →

“men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses more slowly, and one by one.” MacKay, 1841. Right now, London and much of Europe are in peak covid-mania, entering another two months of lockdowns on to...

Continue reading →

2020 was certainly a roller coaster for a social scientist, full of surprises. Let me not once again bemoan the increasingly coordinated attack on all sources of vitality in Western civilisation, but look ahead and openly wonder about what 2021 will bring in terms of 7 specifi...

Continue reading →

Guess which countries in Europe have had the lowest average restrictions on individual behaviour from March to December according to researchers at the Blavatnik school of government in Oxford ? Guess which countries in the world have had the most or least stringent government...

Continue reading →

Stock markets give us a glimpse what people with money have deduced about world events before they happen. Investors can make mistakes, sometimes terrible mistakes, but they are honest mistakes: you don’t buy a stock at a 100 if you actually honestly believe that same stock wi...

Continue reading →

The animosity between the Chinese and Australian authorities is heating up, so we Westerners need to understand some of Chinese culture and politics. I do not have all the answers, but some 10 years of working and teaching on China have taught me about three traits that I hope...

Continue reading →

How will Western historians in 2050 remember 2020? In scenario 1, "The Great Panic, a lost generation", I sketch my best guess. Scenario 2, "A job well done" is the one I imagine many current Western governments hope is told. Scenario 3, "The dark path of the Great Panic", is...

Continue reading →

Last week I gave a masterclass lecture at University College London on the costs and benefits of lockdowns and other covid-policies in the UK. A recording is here (Passcode: f@$?y9J9 ), and the powerpoint slides are here . A key piece of evidence was the sudden 0.7 drop in lif...

Continue reading →

How are we going to escape the authoritarian nightmare and regain our liberties and zest for life? This long read is written for organisers of new Covistance initiatives, explaining the logic of what others have done and what could further be done. So I am speaking to those of...

Continue reading →

Ramesh Thakur is one of many commentators inside the Covistance who think government public health advisers have committed crimes against humanity . His anger was raised by reports of desperate parents in India selling their children into virtual slavery, including sexual expl...

Continue reading →

Dr. Joffe just posted a new article on the many negative effects of lockdowns in Canada and in the world as a whole. He really has put in a fantastic effort to source the evidence on the negative effects of the covid-related policies, digging up and critically evaluating nearl...

Continue reading →

Sweden is a rich, spacious country famous for IKEA, ABBA, dark cold winters, and its unique covid-policies. We escaped London for a few days to see for ourselves what the deal was with this Scandinavian country of 10 million. It is as rich and well-run as the statistics say it...

Continue reading →

Those who already in March foretold the folly of lockdowns and social distancing did not dream we'd still be in the same place after 7 months. Only slowly has it dawned that the panic would become an enduring business model . For a long time, we believed sanity would soon prev...

Continue reading →

A group of senior medical scientists have gotten together to pen an open petition to governments and society, calling for a herd immunity approach to the coronavirus. Signatories already include over 3000 "Medical & Public Health Scientists", 4000 "Medical Practitioners", and...

Continue reading →

Have a look at the graph below which summarises (excess) deaths per week in 24 European regions , roughly the EU, over the last few years. Note how the vertical axis only starts at 40,000 and that hence the fluctuations relative to baseline are smaller than they seem here. The...

Continue reading →

One can tell many stories of how current times resemble some earlier historical period. The conflict between nationalism and internationalism, as personified by the controversies surrounding Brexit and Trump, has been seen as somewhat of a re-run of the conflict between fascis...

Continue reading →

Till 20 year ago, IQ scores in the West increased about 3 points per decade ever since the 1920s, a phenomenon known as the “Flynn effect”. That rise in IQ test scores, which have an average of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, was attributed to improved schooling, improved...

Continue reading →

[Bottom line: the conflicting forces now being created in the UK and Australia are truly frightening.] The UK government has just announced a nationwide return of one of the most destructive elements of lock downs: mandatory social isolation. Gatherings of more than 6 people a...

Continue reading →

[message: the "stay at home" firms will see their bored and lonely good young staff jump ship to the hip, drunk, snorting, and cavorting hard-work hard-play offices everyone loves to complain about.] The estimate from Transport for London is that 72% of workers are still not b...

Continue reading →

[micro-trigger alert: dark humour ahead] The top prize for economic winners in the covid hysteria goes to the pharmaceutical companies who were quickest to jump on the covid-vaccine business. They are already selling billions of unproven vaccines that will now clearly arrive t...

Continue reading →

[below the exact text (with different font/highlight) as Gigi Foster's submission to the Victorian parliamentary library in mid-August here . To see her health-related notes, including on topics like non-linearities and Sweden, see here , and to see all documents of that inqui...

Continue reading →

For months now, demographers and other social scientists have been predicting a covid baby bust because marriages were postponed , pubs were closed, anxiety levels were up, measured fertility intentions were down, sexual activity went down (in some reports), and economic uncer...

Continue reading →

[spoiler alert!] As a fan of the “Hunger Games”, a dystopian trilogy where teenagers are thrown into gladiatorial games to fight till the last survivor in a world that is a blend of ancient Rome and modern America, I eagerly awaited its prequel “The Ballad of Songbirds and Sna...

Continue reading →

Suppose you agree with me that containment and elimination strategies pursued regarding Covid-19 do far more harm than good. Suppose you also believe that having an open economy and a vibrant close-contact social life is vital for the long-run health of the country. You want t...

Continue reading →

The UK Office of National Statistics data on the wellbeing of the British population shows a unprecedented drop of about 10% in average wellbeing in the UK since March 2020. Anxiety levels almost doubled, slowly returning to normal, but wellbeing remains low as people are prev...

Continue reading →

There have long been scientists who were celebrities in their own time. Galileo, Keppler, Goodall, Linneus, Cousteau, Darwin, Smith, Leeuwenhoek, Da Vinci, Ibn Khaldhun, Curie, and many others in the last 800 years were followed and admired. They in many ways performed their s...

Continue reading →

Here is a new paper from Imperial College , this time by a team with David Miles, Mike Stedman, and A drian Heald, looking into the implicit cost per QALY that the UK spent via lock downs and other repression policies. They use a somewhat different methodology from mine , esti...

Continue reading →

There are 5 aspects of the covid-19 pandemic I really did not see coming, all pointing to a phenomenon that European sociologists of a century ago spent their whole lives describing, coming up with theories about crowds and their behaviour - theories now largely forgotten. Sch...

Continue reading →

If you, like me, believe our collective hysteria is needlessly causing the world tens of millions of deaths and enormous unhappiness , you surely need a bit of humour to keep going. So let’s view the whole crisis via a different lens and share the brilliance of UK government c...

Continue reading →

Find below the video of a seminar for the Australian Institute for Progress done a few weeks ago detailing the basic cost-benefit view of the current pandemic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TS2DE-D1TA The slides of this presentation are here: Presentation CBA Covid May 2020...

Continue reading →

The management of the University of Queensland, and in particular Peter Hoj and Peter Varghese, stand condemned today by the international media, by both Labor and Liberal politicians, by both left-wing and right-wing Australians, by its own students, and by the powerful pro-...

Continue reading →

Let’s talk about some of the covid policy options facing Australia in the coming months and years. It seems to me we can either grasp the nettle and accept we will get a wave of highly visible covid-19 deaths before life returns to normal, or we can try and defend ourselves ag...

Continue reading →

The economic and social damage of lock downs in Australia is starting to get noticed so much that even academic economists are paying attention. After months of resisting actual data , some Australian economists who previously refused to even contemplate the idea that an econo...

Continue reading →

[in progress: will add more references, links and latest numbers when I get the time] In this note, I want to deal with three related issues: the main lessons on the corona virus from the reported deaths across countries with different policies; the feasibility of different “e...

Continue reading →

In a week from now, UQ student leader Drew Pavlou will face an internal hearing at the University of Queensland to decide whether or not he will be expelled for having organised rallies against various pro-China organisations on campus and generally being a pain in the *rse of...

Continue reading →

There is one hell of a recession coming for Australia. Economic activity has already reduced by 20% and actual unemployment will probably peak near 20% too , and about a million businesses have already applied for some sort of assistance. The population increase of the last 20...

Continue reading →

Here at Clubtroppo, we have been saying for well over a month now that a quick look at the economic damage and the health damage of the responses to the corona virus tells you they dwarf the possible benefits of suppressing the virus, anywhere in the West. This has lead to the...

Continue reading →

Did you know that Australia has over 13,000 IVF babies born per year, the UK over 20,000 , the West as a whole (Europe+US+offshoots) over 200,000 and the world as a whole 500,000 ? And did you know that due to the corona panic these services have been halted pretty much everyw...

Continue reading →

My first prediction is an easy one: many countries are going to ease their restrictions on social isolation in the coming weeks, including many countries with an ongoing corona problem. They simply have to if they want to have any economy left. You can see this happening to di...

Continue reading →

How much unhappiness is created by the unemployment of millions of people in Western countries (mainly N-Am +Europe) caused by the corona panic? How much unhappiness has been created due to the vast expansion of loneliness and physical inactivity? And in terms of the tradeoff...

Continue reading →

The mass hysteria of the corona crisis is raging, with the resulting self-isolation of whole economies and populations. The loss seems greater with every new forecast on the economic collapse than I initially though t, and the benefit of imprisoning and terrorizing the populat...

Continue reading →

People shuffling in the street, afraid to look others in the eye, get close, and be accused. Fear as a silent ghost hovering above the city, watching us, like drones. The panic in the eye of the mother as her little toddler cycles by an older woman on the street, too close. Th...

Continue reading →

Spare a tear for millions of poor people around the world. They will no longer have good jobs, good health, or long life. Weep for the poor, the sick, and the old in our own societies. Their hopes, dignity, and pensions are gone. Light a candle for the workers in hotels, bars,...

Continue reading →

Consider the shown picture where you are the decision maker who can pull the lever of the train tracks to avoid the coming train from going straight. If you do not divert the train, one person, John, will get run over. He is elderly and suffering from many diseases. You know h...

Continue reading →

The number of people worldwide who have died from the coronavirus stands at 8,000 at the moment, equivalent to the death toll of two days of the world's traffic accidents. The fear is of course that millions more will follow. The panic over what the virus might do has now lead...

Continue reading →

They got him! It cost millions of dollars in legal fees, and involved multiple trials, settlements, and dismissal of the worst charges, but they convicted Harvey Weinstein. A bit like a buck who is taken down by a pack of wolves might receive the killing bite from a different...

Continue reading →

I have little economic insight to add to the various projections made by other economists in Britain about the Brexit scenario that follow under various outcomes of the negotiations with the EU. Like all of them, I think severing trade ties will not work out well in the short...

Continue reading →

[off the cuff research idea memo] There is an uncanny analogy between China in the 19th century and the US this very moment: in both cases a large part of the general population could not be persuaded away from drugs by morality or prison. Opium in China then, opioids in the U...

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

The EU and the UK government have just agreed to muddle on in their negotiations. Nothing is truly decided until everything is decided, but they have adopted a position document (see here ) that details what they want the next steps to look like and what they will do in case o...

Continue reading →

National history is the story that binds ‘us who make up the nation’ into a single entity with a collective memory . It has a purpose and as such we can choose what historical events and realities to put into that story, whilst forgetting the rest. Of the four main current con...

Continue reading →

[expanded from the post on JohnMenadue] When Bitcoin went public in 2009 it introduced to the world of finance and economics the technology of blockchain. Even the many who thought Bitcoin would never make it as a major currency were intrigued by the BlockChain technology and...

Continue reading →

Sometimes, it feels like 1910 all over again. Then, a confident Germany was the up-and-coming industrial power house, fearing an even more up-and-coming Russia, with the UK and France desperately holding on to their colonial empires. Now, a confident China is the up-and-coming...

Continue reading →

The #MeToo flood of stories of women who feel abused by men – ranging from lurid stares to straightforward rape – seems like a disaster to me for the Democrats. Not because of the stories themselves, but because of how the progressive media and commentators have reacted to it....

Continue reading →

[cross-posted, slightly updated, from Pearls and Limitations] Observations: About 40% of the population of Catalonia and its capital Barcelona was not born there, but largely comes from the rest of Spain. Internal migration is high , with about 0.4% of the population moving fr...

Continue reading →

Taxation is the potential downfall of the EU as an institution. The reason is that within the EU, several member states are making money from the tax evasion in other member states, a situation akin to having a wife slowly murdering her husband with poison. Unless this stops,...

Continue reading →

[Note to self. Geeks only] Over the fold I muse on the nature of human intelligence, social intelligence, and the options for artificial intelligence to become 'smarter than humans' in the areas of social power and law-making. It is taken for granted that you accept that in ha...

Continue reading →

Looking at the newspapers you’d think Catholicism is having a hard time with philandering priests and cover-ups of their doings being found out on a weekly basis. In Australia, the royal commission has uncovered a lot of systematically covered-up child abuse in the Catholic Ch...

Continue reading →

Let me indulge, purely for entertainment value, in some fan-speculation on what we will see on-screen after the Long Night is over and the final 6 episodes Of Game of Thrones are run in 2019. Let me first talk about the end-game aspects I think the books and the tv-series seem...

Continue reading →

I am a big fan of the GOT books and series, loving Season 7 and salivating at Season 8 to come. Great escapism and fantastic acting and camerawork. Part of what I love about GOT is how it far more ruthlessly than, say, Lord of the Rings, describes blind ambition, lust, treache...

Continue reading →

Have you ever reflected on what a strange concept the notion of a 'cause of death' really is? We use the term so often that it wouldn't quickly register as a cultural oddity, but it really is a quirky beast and has an odd history. I have a bit of a professional interest in thi...

Continue reading →

A persistent modern fear is that artificial intelligence and robot technology will advance so much that smart robots will soon be able to perform many of the tasks that we humans currently earn our crust with. Since they will come off the production line in a matter of minutes...

Continue reading →

It’s been a great 15 years in Australia for me and the family, so we will be leaving lots of friends and colleagues behind as we seek new adventures in London, where from next week onwards I will be part of a Wellbeing centre, pretty much the same topic as the Australian Resea...

Continue reading →

In part 1, I looked at whether it made sense to have random individuals inserted into parliament, or to let policies be decided by juries full of randomly chosen individuals. Both were argued to be unworkable and likely to lead to more corruption, rather than less: policies th...

Continue reading →

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmOvEwtDycs] Here at Troppo we have referred to the 'Yes Minister series' many times because of its brilliant commentary on the timeless issues of government, exemplified in the skit above. I have gone through three phases with the serie...

Continue reading →

I am seeking a lawyer to run an Adverse Action case connected to the recent Fair Work Commission verdict that found systematic breaches of procedures and procedural fairness in the University of Queensland's actions against me following my research on racial attitudes in Brisb...

Continue reading →

Political parties and institutions in Australia and the US are increasingly dominated by interest groups representing the few, leading to a large policy-induced increase in inequality in recent decades and a long raft of new policies favouring the few by giving them the tax re...

Continue reading →

Governments around the world have in recent years destroyed their seized stockpiles of illegal ivor y, egged on by the World Wildlife Federation which believes it sends a signal to gangs that kill Elephants and Rhinos for their tusks. In January, Sri Lanka reportedly crushed 3...

Continue reading →

The leak of 11.5 million confidential papers from the Mossack Fonseca consulting firm in Panama promises to be a major source of information on the tax avoiding shenanigan s of the elites. Already, 800 Australians are reportedly under investigation, and dozens of heads of stat...

Continue reading →

I visited Turkey in April last year, traveling through the country, witnessing the troubles of the leadership of the ruling AKP party: it had just lost a general election that left it without a workable majority in parliament and only 40% of the popular vote; it was sucked int...

Continue reading →

Following Nick and Rex's tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of the 'concept' and 'gravitational waves', news has just come in that the oath witnesses take in Australia has been sliced into its fundamental constituents: perjury, utopia, and blasphemy. 'It was quite easy to see once...

Continue reading →

Queensland boy Julian Assange seems set to walk out of the Ecuadorian embassy soon, hoping that the announcement by the UN human rights panel on the arbitrariness of his detention will protect him from being arrested. The baseline scenario is that he walks out, is quickly arre...

Continue reading →

Among Australian economists, the reform years of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating (1983-1996) have achieved near mythical status. Their governments have been credited with opening up the country to foreign competition via reductions of the tariffs, freeing industry from the shackles...

Continue reading →

With the Internet being a regular feature of our lives for about 20 years now, what have been the related developments that were hard to pick at the outset? What are the lessons? Five thoughts: Communication and personal expression is the main business of the Internet. That wa...

Continue reading →

The Germans have surprised me by eagerly welcoming a million migrants originating from Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Africa and elsewhere. They seem to invite many more to join them in years to come. Why are they doing this? From the perspective of my Dutch upbringing, the Ger...

Continue reading →

The Iranian Revolution of the late 1970s meant a huge shift in Middle-East politics and the relation between Islam and the rest. Within a period of just a few months, the ancient civilisation of Persia went from a strong ally of the West, to a committed enemy of Western intere...

Continue reading →

The deal yesterday morning between the Greek PM and the Eurozone Finance ministers is an agreement to reform before talks. By tomorrow evening, the Greek parliament has to accept 4 pieces of legislation on a large range of issues (pensions, labour markets, taxation), after whi...

Continue reading →

The Greek referendum and the hype leading up to it have gone exactly according to my script of 8 days ago , where I predicted a resounding ‘no’ vote and a Grexit to stop the bank-run, with the other European politicians too offended and belittled by Tsipras and Varoufakis to o...

Continue reading →

Greece owes the IMF 1.6 billion euro that it doesn’t have but is supposed to pay by tomorrow. Unless the ECB lends it to the Greeks, effectively converting the IMF debt into an ECB debt, Greece is bankrupt tomorrow. In months to come, much bigger debt repayments are scheduled...

Continue reading →

After two weeks of a new government in Greece, a Greek exit from the Euro (termed a ‘Grexit’) looks more and more likely. The betting markets give it about 30% to happen this year, and Greece is the out and out market favourite to exit the Euro before any other country. Though...

Continue reading →

It's the time of the mid-year Economic Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) and we're told that we're about 11 billion deeper in the red this financial year than we thought, with the treasurer blaming the dropping iron price and the reduced wage growth. I have gone over the MYEFO documents...

Continue reading →

Middle-East watchers have been surprised by the events in Syria and Egypt the last 2 years. The betting markets in 2011 and 2012 expected the collapse of the Syrian regime, but it didn’t happen. The West and most Al-Jazeera commentators thought the coup that deposed the Morsi-...

Continue reading →

Does increasing the legal drinking age reduce traffic accidents caused by young drivers? The idea is that if you increase the legal age at which people can drink, young people are going to quietly abide by the law, not do anything stupid, read the bible, contemplate their sinf...

Continue reading →

Some people engage in socially disruptive behaviour on their own, such as when they free-ride on paying taxes. Others cooperate with others though when they are socially disruptive: cronyism, corruption, nepotism, gangsterism, and favouritism are all examples of cooperative be...

Continue reading →

Geo-engineering is increasingly looking like the only politically viable way of averting temperature rises above 2 degrees in the coming century. This is for three interlocking reasons: i) Any mayor country can try geo-engineering on its own without permission from anyone else...

Continue reading →

Today the people residing in Scotland can decide whether they want to see an independent Scotland or to have Scotland remain in the UK. The betting markets concur with the opinion polls and favour the status quo: the markets give roughly 20% chance that the ‘yes’ vote will win...

Continue reading →

The latest federal budget in Australia by the Liberal Party was a real break with the recent past in which politicians were reluctant to offend any large group of voters and in which the status quo with respect to entitlements was avidly kept. There was a bit of playing around...

Continue reading →

I just came across an article in PNAS (the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) with the catchy title 'Female Hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes'. It is doing the rounds in the international media , with the explicit conclusion that our society suffers fr...

Continue reading →

The Australian government education minister Christopher Pyne has made his wishes clear for the tertiary education sector: he is following the wishes of the GO8 Vice-Chancellors and wants to remove the caps from the HECS fees asked of domestic students. This seems to fit in a...

Continue reading →

The French economists Thomas Piketty recently published a long-prepared book on the growth of inequality in the Western World over the last few centuries. His main contention, as I see it, is that wealth inequality is rising rapidly again and that we are returning to 19 th cen...

Continue reading →

With people living longer and with societies becoming more forward-looking as to how to handle the long post-retirement years, the issue of optimal pension systems is big in Australia and elsewhere. Have a look at this excellent interview between John Piggott and Jan Libich wh...

Continue reading →

My own university, the University of Queensland, has around 6 flagship courses that it puts online for free, in a deal that involves universities from around the world who put up the courses that they excel in. It typifies the current reality of online courses: it is free; it...

Continue reading →

Jan Libich recently interviewed Bruce Chapman , who was one of the main architects of the HECS scheme via which university places are financed in Australia, a system that is being copied all around the world now, making Bruce Australia's most influential international economis...

Continue reading →

Vanavil is a school for the poorest of the poor in the middle of Tamil Nadu, India. It started in 2005 as an orphanage/school for the children of two historically nomadic communities left stranded by the devastating tsunami of 2004. Many of the children of these two communitie...

Continue reading →

What's in a name? In the September 2013 round of re-shuffles , I count no less than 17 changes in names of government departments in Australia, either by some name disappearing or some name changing. This appears to be a regular game in Canberra. When I worked in Canberra in 2...

Continue reading →

A new working paper (to be found here ) by two PhD students in our school muses about whether firms optimise profits or returns-to-costs. Normally in economic papers you see the presumption that firms optimise profits, but from the point of view of investors allocating in lots...

Continue reading →

In the last 5 years, I have made a point of giving clear predictions on complex socio-economic issues. I give predictions partially to improve my own understanding of humanity: nothing sharpens the thoughts as much as having to actually predict something. Another reason is as...

Continue reading →

Last Monday I posted 4 questions to see who thought like a classic utilitarian and who adhered to a wider notion of ethics, suspecting that in the end we all subscribe to ‘more’ than classical utilitarianism. There are hence no 'right' answers, merely classic utilitarian ones...

Continue reading →

Economists are wedded to utilitarianism as their collective moral compass. This is why we speak of social planners, welfare, utility maximization, and quality of life. The essence of utilitarianism is that moral judgments are reserved for final outcomes, not the means via whic...

Continue reading →

Do countries that are already rich become even happier when they become yet richer? This was the essential question on which I entered a gentleman’s bet in 2004 with Andrew Leigh and which just recently got settled. The reason for the bet was a famous hypothesis in happiness r...

Continue reading →

Here is a puzzle for you: what is the theoretical link between bitcoins, Australian coal exports to China, and the US becoming a New Switzerland? It’s a bit of a convoluted link, so see at what stage in the story below you spot the answer. Bitcoins are all the rage at the mome...

Continue reading →

It is natural to think of our political leaders as either superhumanly clever and benevolent when we agree with them, or else dumb as dishwater and evil when we don’t agree with them. Yet, if one takes our own group-loyalty out of the picture, we can ask the simple question wh...

Continue reading →

Have a look at the beautiful graph below , which depicts the main trends in Australian emissions and its promised emission reduction targets. Australia's emissions trends, 1990 to 2020 Note : trajectories to the 2020 target range are illustrative The dotted orange line shows t...

Continue reading →

What should Australia do about a slowly warming world? Join a small group of European countries who have more permits to sell than their own industry can manage to use ? Join hands with a coalition of the desperate in enacting one of the front-runner geo-engineering solutions...

Continue reading →

I remember the great bushfire in Canberra of 2003. I had only arrived with the family a week before and had just rented a nice house near the top of Mt Cook, right in the path of an enormous bushfire that ended up destroying hundreds of homes. The heat of that day was immense:...

Continue reading →

Eugenics got a bad name after the second world war. It got associated with pseudo-scientific theories under which people at the bottom of the societal ladder were branded as hopelessly deficient for supposedly inalterable biological reasons. Societies’ less successful were, qu...

Continue reading →

For 14 months, Australia has had an electronic national health register . It has almost nothing in it, but the hope is that in years to come ( when lots of people have registered ) it will start to have all the information on someone’s health that floats around in the health i...

Continue reading →

I was looking for evidence recently that tradies in Australia have become amongst the highest paid groups, which would means a profound change in relative rewards in that it would mean that smart young men could then rationally choose not to bother with university but simply b...

Continue reading →

Is there a health-status race in Australia whereby people get joy from being healthier and fitter than others? And what are the general implications for public policy if there is? My PhD student Redzo Mujcic and myself brought out a new working paper recently on how a health s...

Continue reading →

Suppose you wanted to believe, as I do, that intelligence and vague ‘racial groups’ are, on the whole, unrelated from a long-run perspective. What would you then have to believe about genetics and IQ, as well as the long-run effects of socio-economic circumstances on IQ to rat...

Continue reading →

In previous elections, I either gave a list of mistakes I wanted the next government to avoid , or policies they could follow . Some of the mistakes I flagged in 2007 were indeed made, and about half of a preferred policy was implemented, no doubt entirely unrelated to my advi...

Continue reading →

With the coalition now promising a paid maternity leave scheme that once was championed by the Greens and the Democrats, it seems opportune to recycle a post on this topic here at troppo of 2007 called ' Should we have paid maternity leave '? All the arguments made for or agai...

Continue reading →

The tragic situation in Egypt is so complex and unpredictable that one can find many opinions on what various groups and people in Egypt should do, but precious few predictions by ‘experts’ on what is actually going to happen. You can rest assured that whatever does actually h...

Continue reading →

As you may know over the last few years I have been arguing for a reduction in the price of common generic medications in Australia. Due to policy shortcomings, Australia currently pays some of the highest prices in the world for many of its generic medications. For example, a...

Continue reading →

With the next Australian election only a few weeks away, now is a good time to say which economic micro and macro policies you think a next government can/should implement. Around and in between past elections I gave you my list of things to do and things not to do (see here a...

Continue reading →

One of the more odd rules of social interaction is that the person in pain gets to own the truth and those without pain adjust. Think for instance about the words used to describe undesired traits that some people have to bear their whole life, such as low intelligence or high...

Continue reading →

I have a dataset of about 20,000 Chinese adults, a random sample of the population in 2008-2010 from all over China. Guess how many per 1000 adult women in that dataset say they have had children without being married? If you posed the question in Australia or the US, you shou...

Continue reading →

Have a look at the graph below, taken from www.earth-policy.org , which conveys the stylised fact that greater economic development leads populations to eat more meat. The graph shows that total meat consumption in China increased from 10 million tonnes in 1980 to around 70 no...

Continue reading →

The journal 'Agenda', the policy journal of the College of Business and Economics at The Australian National University just released a piece of mine called ' Universities as Royal Courts'. One can download it free of charge (just click on the link). It continues my long-runni...

Continue reading →

“Welcome all ye listeners, today we are discussing the new ‘Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’, colloquially known as DSM-5, the sequel to the hugely influential and popular DSM-4 that really put the American Psychiatric Association on the map. We are joi...

Continue reading →

(warning: the below is a bit of a rant!) The obesity epidemic is not just one of the greatest (mental) health problems of our time, set to become a more prevalent problem than hunger and more expensive to health systems than smoking, but it is also spawning new magical beliefs...

Continue reading →

Vote buying is a recurring theme in elections in ‘emerging democracies’. There are strong allegations it happened in the 2006 and 2012 Mexican elections . US elections normally have some party accusing the other of vote-buying ( through offering free food at election stations...

Continue reading →

I was travelling through Los Angeles, New York, and Washington the last two weeks in a book-promotion tour . It was my first real visit to the US so I was collecting impressions on the people and the culture there. Some loose impressions from my egalitarian (Dutch/Australian)...

Continue reading →

The Muslim brotherhood in Egypt is currently feeling the full force of the repression apparatus of the military and economic elite. Sad to say, but the torture chambers will be busy at this very moment, demoralising the elected government and its core supporters. A sad week. I...

Continue reading →

Greetings from Washington where we did two launches on 'An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups and Networks' . The launches went very well, thanks for asking. Due to its success, the book has gone kindle. I was just alerted to the video that UNSW put out on a discussion we...

Continue reading →

I just read Andrew Leigh’s new book that he will launch July 1 st in Canberra , July 2 nd in Melbourne, and July 3 rd in Sydney. I encourage you to attend one of these because it’s a ‘good yarn’. In this new book, Andrew makes a plea for an egalitarian Australia that values ma...

Continue reading →

Scandals about politicians lying are a staple of our media, with the politician Mal Brough saga being the latest installment in Australia. At a dinner with others of his party there was a ‘mock-menu’ that included sexists jokes, made up by the restaurant owner. His protestatio...

Continue reading →

In three previous parts , I posed the puzzle of the measured increase in mental health problems (depression, anxiety, and obesity) across the Western world since the 1950s and briefly discussed the pros and cons of the main cultural explanation doing the round. Here I want to...

Continue reading →

In the two previous parts , I posed the puzzle of the measured increase in mental health problems (depression, anxiety, and obesity in particular) across the Western world since the 1950s and in Anglo-Saxon countries in particular. Here, I take it as given that this is real (a...

Continue reading →

Last week, I posed the puzzle of the decline in mental health from around 1950 till now in most Western countries (with some countries showing a plateau since the 90s). I was talking in particular about the increase in depression, anxiety, and obesity. One of the reactions (by...

Continue reading →

Here’s a true modern puzzle for you: why is the rate of mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and obesity, increasing in the US, Australia, urban China, and most Western countries? Which mental health problems again? Depression, anxiety, and obesity are the bi...

Continue reading →

As I said a few months ago , tax evasion is the big cliff in terms of the future of the EU project. It was thus fascinating to see the tax evasion games played out at the latest ‘summit’ In Brussels yesterday. To understand what really goes on at these summits, imagine yoursel...

Continue reading →

With the Gonski reforms expected to be rolled out across Australia in the coming 5 years, it is handy to reflect on what actually are the basic challenges for school reform in Australia. A view of the underlying issues helps one to judge the likely outcomes of the current refo...

Continue reading →

In an excellent recent piece on his own website , Timothy Devinney looks at how the compensation of Australian Vice Chancellors compares to those of the UK and the US. He gave me permission to re-use his calculations. Below I give you the guts of his story which, if one uses u...

Continue reading →

The book launch tour of Australia ended last week with a visit to the Melbourne Institute, where Deborah Cobb-Clark kindly hosted the last in our marathon-series of 5 launches. They all were a great success, with the publisher actually running out of books for the last one and...

Continue reading →

Tomorrow, there is a book launch of ' An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks ' at UNSW, hosted by Professor Chris Styles, Director of the Australian Graduate School of Business. It starts at 6pm and is in the JBR Theatre (AGSM building) of the Kensington Campu...

Continue reading →

In 1989, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) was created with the hope of creating a local competitor to the University of Queensland. The resources given to it by the community have been immense, with real estate and subsidies worth many billions. With its prime locatio...

Continue reading →

Imagine yourself to be in the mythical Land of Beyond where you need minions to do a dirty job that men with honour would refuse to do. A classic trick in this situation is to pick people despised by the rest of society who are thus dependent on protection and will simply do w...

Continue reading →

In the terms of reference to the recent study into the non-viability of high-speed rail from Brisbane to Melbourne it is promised that “It will draw on expertise from the public and private sectors”. So, who did this study that concluded that Australia would need 50 years and...

Continue reading →

The mythology is that Thatcher came, saw, and conquered. Her enemies credit her with destroying the public sector by privatizations. Her friends credit her with the same, but also say she championed frugal spending and was fierce when it came to British independence. She suppo...

Continue reading →

See below for how my co-author Gigi Foster has been explaining key facets of our joint book to Tim Harcourt in anticipation of launches in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. Enjoy! [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk7eac53oG4]

Continue reading →

The US Fed is printing money to get the US out of a recession. The ECB is also printing money, with the same target in mind. In limited amounts, this is a good idea, but the central banks are going about it the wrong way: they are essentially printing money for banks and polit...

Continue reading →

Let us pretend you are the benevolent elected dictator in Australia. It is 1980 and you have to decide on education and migration policy. Your wily political adviser comes to you with the following plan: he tells you it would be popular and cheap to stop inflicting difficult a...

Continue reading →

As a lifelong and warm supporter of the ideal of a United States of Europe (USE) stretching from the coast of Ireland to the Urals, I was interested to see the recent wrangling’s inside the EU about its future. The UK Prime Minister David Cameron has now promised a referendum...

Continue reading →

The smell of death, the river's breath. The cones and arms of gods, the barks of thin grey dogs. Beggar guards that corner you underneath a spire, Niggards that tell you of child beggars for hire. Students dreaming of Oxbridge, night and day, Studying books and looks the Engli...

Continue reading →

Word has just come in from Europe that there will in fact be a deal between the EU and Cyprus about keeping the banks in Cyprus alive. The basics of the deal are now that one of the two major banks (Laiki) will go bankrupt with losses to junior and senior bond holders. It is t...

Continue reading →

Is there discrimination on colour in Queensland? In order to find out if black and Indian people are a discriminated ‘out group’ in Queensland, together with Redzo Mujcic I carried out a large-scale experiment involving bus drivers in Brisbane. We sent test subjects of various...

Continue reading →

The Australian Pharmaceutical benefit scheme is a monopsony buy-in arrangement for medicines run by ministries. It currently costs tax payers about ten billion dollars per year (see page 3 here ), up from a paltry 149,000 pounds in its first year of operation, 1948! The upward...

Continue reading →

The graph below tells you the average number of hours worked in Australia from 1978 to 2013 per person per month aged 15-64. The key thing to note is that there has been remarkably little change over time in terms of the peaks of the cycle: in 1980 the average Australian betwe...

Continue reading →

The usual political debate inside our country revolves around conspicuous things concerning the top leaders, like whether someone has been overtly corrupt, promised something too loudly that they could not really deliver, is handing out money to worthy or unworthy causes, or i...

Continue reading →

In the past month, I ran posts on the limits to certainty in economics. On the theory side, I talked about how mathematical tractability limited the economic phenomena you can describe well with models. On the empirical side, the inability in social science to measure any abst...

Continue reading →

Do we know in social science what it is that we are measuring or does any bit of data we look at on closer inspection reveal more complexity, no matter how close we look, just like a fractal? Another way to put this is to ask whether anything we measure is solid, concrete and...

Continue reading →

At the moment, I am writing an empirical study into racism in Queensland, which I will report on at a later date. It made me reflect on the basic question of what racism actually is. Let me give you seven possible scenarios to help us reflect on what we think racism is, whilst...

Continue reading →

Your average workshop dinner sees 20 adults or so taken out for free food and drinks, paid for by a hosting university. They get drunk, are rowdy, eat too much, say things they normally wouldn’t, and have to carry on the next day with hangovers and smelly clothes. From a stand...

Continue reading →

What to do in a discipline once it is clear that it is impossible to base one’s knowledge on anything underlying that can be reasonably accurately measured and when you know that you cannot construct a consistent story that ties all the sub-problems in a field together? We are...

Continue reading →

Take your bog-standard first-year economics story of why money (sea shells, coins, notes, bank statements) exist. Money, you will be told, is a means of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of accounting, thoughts going back to David Hume (18th century) and earlier. When exp...

Continue reading →

In the first two parts, the readers and I looked at the long list of sectors in Australia where there is a privileged minority who, with the help of the government, is in a position to extract more than their fair share of income out of the economy. Medical specialists, GPs, b...

Continue reading →

As initially thought, the basic economic unit in Kolkata and West Bengal generally seems to be the family, not the individual. As a result, families invest in the education of their children and expect to share in the returns. Also, most businesses here are family businesses a...

Continue reading →

I am visiting Kolkata this week, the Centre for the Study of Social Science Calcutta. It is a great chance to collect observations and cross-check economic theories on India. What I tend to do when visiting a new country is to assemble lots of preliminary hypotheses I have on...

Continue reading →

In part I the question was posed to the readers which privileges bothered them most about Australia and what they thought could be done to reduce them. In this part I want to start to consider the barriers by talking about the ‘face’ of any privilege and how this creates parti...

Continue reading →

A question for you: how to combat privilege? As economists well know, we are all rent seekers who try to secure more and more privileges for ourselves and our families, be it monopoly rights (such as currently legally given to medical specialists or local pharmacies), over-pri...

Continue reading →

Have a look at this just-published article in PNAS by Jerome Dangerman and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber on the topic of climate change: Abstract The contemporary industrial metabolism is not sustainable. Critical problems arise at both the input and the output side of the complex...

Continue reading →

I regularly get asked by young Australian academics nearing the end of their PhD about the tradeoffs inherent in different positions they can apply for: post-doc or tenure-track; academia or policy land; researcher or administrator; a school of economics or a research institut...

Continue reading →

Just before Xmas, I asked the readers at Core and at Troppo what they though the best bits of news of 2012 were. Many, including myself but also David Walker, Steve Dunera, Tel and Jim Rose thought that last year was another in a long period of strong economic development in t...

Continue reading →

Here is a question to put to you over Xmas time, the season of joy and hope: what has been the best news for you this year in the sense of the most uplifting development in Australia or the world? For me, it has been the continued economic growth in India, China, and much of L...

Continue reading →

In part I and part II the question was posed what the source of the demand for apocalyptic stories was in our societies. The discussion made it plausible that there is in fact a strong cultural diversity in terms of Doomsday stories: they are prevalent in the West, where their...

Continue reading →

Last Friday, I asked the readers w hat they thought the source of the demand for apocalyptic stories was in our societies, and particularly whether there was anything new about the prevalence of apocalyptic stories. As Michael Stanley and Ian pointed out, apocalyptic stories g...

Continue reading →

Ever since the middle ages, apocalyptic visions have been a staple of Western thought. With every minor or major upheaval that came along, whether it would be the plague, Communism, or climate change, there was a large constituency receptive to the idea that the end of times w...

Continue reading →

In a previous post , I raised the question how best to measure ‘Nature’, arguing the benefits of an overall Index including biodiversity, habitat diversity, human usage value and sheer volume of living organisms, biomass. Here a look is taken at whether biomass has been increa...

Continue reading →

Last Friday, I posed the question under what definitions of Nature one can say that it is doing badly, and whether there were other ones under which it was doing fine. I was explicitly interested in how Nature is doing now relative to decades or longer periods past, though of...

Continue reading →

Another puzzle for you to pontificate on: is it really true that ‘Nature’ is suffering? For decades now, you will be hard-pressed to read a whole newspaper or magazine without someone complaining about how badly ‘Nature’ is doing. The melting glaciers, the disappearing Siberia...

Continue reading →

Queensland is shedding public workers in the health and education sectors in a bid to balance the books. There is nothing unusual about this, and there are more than enough ‘head-office’ positions that can be axed without any impact on the productivity of schools and hospitals...

Continue reading →

The Economic Society in Queensland runs a series of televised presentations whereby they get economists to talk about topical issues they are working on. Following Quiggin, Bhagwati and McKibbin, it was my turn a few weeks ago to talk about the Christian-Islamic conflict, the...

Continue reading →

Have a look the following 2010 graph produced by the University of Delaware on their college students : The key aspects to realise from this graph are that the girls who don’t drink basically don’t have (unprotected) sex, and that, more surprisingly, the boys who don’t drink d...

Continue reading →

We were all resigned to hearing that eagerly awaiting whether or not the Greeks are going to get the 2-year extension on their debt obligations or not. The announcement has just come through : the Greeks are not just getting an extension but are to get another 50 billion Euro...

Continue reading →

In part II, the barriers to reform in the university sector were discussed . It became clear that neither the governance structure nor the basic funding model was up for grabs. Also, one should not count on market forces, the unions, or the academics to be all that much help....

Continue reading →

Australian universities are admin-heavy , have high student-academic ratios and in recent years have seen a race to the bottom in standards, related to a battle over student numbers. The selling out of previously amassed reputation by reducing entry barriers most recently beca...

Continue reading →

In previous posts I talked about the immense overhead in the university sector. Some 70 cents in the commonwealth dollar aimed at universities ends up in admin and US researchers have calculated that the optimal amount of administration is so much lower than the current Austra...

Continue reading →

The question posed last week was how much of the money sent into the university sector at the point of DEEWR\DEST actually reaches the coalface in terms of teaching and research. My best guess answer is about 28 cents in the dollar, with the rest essentially going into admin....

Continue reading →

Here is a question for you: of the funds going into the university sector via the commonwealth ministries (DEST), how much actually ends up paying for research and teaching versus other uses of the money? Included in research/teaching here would also be the buildings and rooms...

Continue reading →

In his series on Australian macro-economics, Jan Libich this time has talked to Bob Gregory and Michael Knox. Bob was on the RBA board and still interacts extensively with Australian policy land. Michael is in the private sector (RBS Morgans) and as such advises firms on the m...

Continue reading →

Looking at the newspapers you’d think Catholicism is having a hard time with philandering priests and cover-ups of their doings being found out on a weekly basis. Dutch and German newspapers kept track for a while of the regional frequencies of new cases of sexual misconduct a...

Continue reading →

I was forwarded a fascinating paper on the optimal number of university administrators written by Martin and Hill who looked at public research universities in the US (the Carnegie I and II universities). The key result that they disclose in their abstract is that "the optimal...

Continue reading →

In part, I talked about how politicians were forced to lie to us because we the population are their bosses and we enjoy flattery. A nice recent example of just that was the announcement that we were going to have 10 universities in the top 100 by 2025. Yeah, sure. We demand o...

Continue reading →

In empirical economic research we live in the age of the randomistas where whole departments do nothing else but look for random events to give them some variation to identify a causal relation. Cyclone Sandy looks like providing a lot of random variation so you can bet your b...

Continue reading →

An oft-heard complaint is that politicians lie to us. They promise us 100,000 jobs, lower taxes, more generous spending, an end to poverty and inequality, economic growth, better schools, world peace, nicer climate, and victory over all our enemies. And when they do not delive...

Continue reading →

The Australian visa point-system is the envy of the world as it has ensured that Australia gets a large influx of well-educated, healthy, English-speaking migrants. How large is the free gift that comes walking into our doors this way? Conservatively, I would say 50 billion do...

Continue reading →

Radovan Karadzic is now on trial for his role in the massacre of Srebenica and general Mladic was already convicted before him for aiding and abetting this genocide as the military commander of the Serbs. The question I mainly want to pose here is whether the 450 Dutch troops...

Continue reading →

Last Thursday I posed the question of how often the water you drink has been pissed by a vertebrate already. If the number is very small, then those who baulk at drinking recycled water have more cause to complain than if the number is very high. As some commentators to that p...

Continue reading →

Yet another challenge for you: how many times has the water you drink been pissed out of a vertebrate (something with a spine) in the past? If the number is very small, then those who baulk at drinking recycled water have more cause to complain than if the number is very high....

Continue reading →

Have a look at the following picture that comes from a 2012 paper by Gotz and Hecq on forecasting growth. It tells you what the US growth rate at 3 different dates was estimated to be over time. This means that the start of the thick black line tells you what they thought in t...

Continue reading →

Last Thursday, I posed the mystery of whether there are in fact 16 million direct male descendants of Genghis Khan . This factoid came from a 2003 study of some 2000 Central Asian men, of which 8% were found to share a common male ancestor around the year 1000 AD, give or take...

Continue reading →

Here is a puzzle for you to figure out: did Genghis Khan really have 16 million direct male descendants? Note the careful wording: direct male descendants. It is a factoid that has been around since 2003 when a now famous genetic study concluded that 16 milllion men in Central...

Continue reading →

The Australian government wants us to join the Europeans in a carbon Emissions Trading Scheme. To this end they have sent legislation to the Senate who are going through the usual rigmarole of invited submissions on this topic. Together with my PhD student Cameron Murray, I ha...

Continue reading →

Last week I posed the mystery of why the Great Wall of China was so small at the top of the hills but so large at the bottom. Anyone can jump right onto it at the top. Where Europeans built castles designed to keep even a single attacker out, something else was going on with t...

Continue reading →

Here is a mystery for you. The Great Wall of China is one of the architectural wonders of the world. Apparently not quite visible from space but very impressive nonetheless. Built and rebuilt many times over many centuries and by hundreds of thousands of labourers. The picture...

Continue reading →

Is the real genius of economics our ability to see things that are impossible to objectively measure? The examples I have in mind are incentives, market failures, groups, power, and corruption. Below, I will point out just how impossible these things are to objectively measure...

Continue reading →

Jan Libich from Latrobe University is running a televised series on economics . He gets people into his TV studio to talk about some aspect of the economy and then puts it out there. Andrew Leigh, Andrew Hughes Hallett, and Eric Leeper were previous victims. Adrian Pagan and W...

Continue reading →

They are both amazing feats of human engineering? They both cost billions with little tangible benefit? They were both launched in a desert? Both mainly built by Western engineers? No, they are both good examples of status races. The moon landing was all about competition with...

Continue reading →

A vexing question for a parent, particularly an economist, is whether or not to reward your kids monetarily for higher school grades. Let me admit right here that this is how I was raised: something like 10 dollars for every subject I got an A, 5 dollars for a B and nothing fo...

Continue reading →

In part I and part II , I discussed the general geo-political implications of the rise of China, and the internal dynamics within the Chinese bureaucracy and the Party, concluding that one should not underestimate the disruption to the whole of China and its international rela...

Continue reading →

The picture below is of a mountainous area in Spain. It used to be full of small-scale farmers and is now almost deserted. Over the many centuries that farmers have tried to eek something useful out of this area, they created terraces all the way to the top of the mountains. I...

Continue reading →

It is easy to circumvent news and information written on paper entirely. I for instance solely read online foreign newspapers. My wife does the same. Until very recently, I also cut back on any subscriptions to hard copies of anything, including academic journals. The family’s...

Continue reading →

In part I , I discussed the general geo-political situation that we are moving towards in the coming decades, which is a world in which China will be the single most powerful country for a long time, constrained by a more diffuse West that is nevertheless wealthier and more po...

Continue reading →

The Italian head of the ECB, Mario Draghi, last week announced he would like to help certain countries in the south of Europe to borrow more cheaply. Subject to ‘strict conditions’, which were instantaneously refused by the Spanish prime minister, countries in Europe would now...

Continue reading →

9/11 is over ten years ago now, and after two take-overs of Islamic countries ( Iraq and Afghanistan ) and internal turmoil in the Middle East and Pakistan , the contours of where the conflict between Islamic fundamentalism and ‘the rest of the world’ is going to is becoming c...

Continue reading →

We live in an interregnum, wherein the position of most-powerful single country is going from the US to China , with all major international players knowing this and no-one is seriously hindering its occurrence. The world has learned from the disastrous attempts in the last 2...

Continue reading →

I have been part of a research group looking into Chinese migration for about 5 years now (see rumici . anu .edu.au/ ), and the main cultural difference one has to get used to as a Westerner in interactions with the East is the notion of 'face'. This Asian cultural trait has b...

Continue reading →

(re-worked from the conversation) Linking Australia to the European Union carbon emissions trading scheme by 2015 will undoubtedly affect the revenue gained from carbon trading. The question is, how much? My best guess is that it will cost around 50% less revenue than original...

Continue reading →

(cross-posted from Core) Though the Assad regime is still brutalising the Syrian population in a desperate attempt to hold onto power, the post-Spring contours of the Middle East are becoming visible. It is now clear that the Assad regime cannot hold on ( see the betting marke...

Continue reading →

By October 8 th of this year, the European Finance ministers must decide whether or not to send Greece 11.5 billion Euros in bailout funds, based on the report of the ‘Troika’ (the EU, ECB, and IMF) as to whether Greece is holding up its end of the bailout conditions. If the T...

Continue reading →

I couldn’t resist buying a copy of Daniel Kahneman’s best-seller when returning from holidays. Several friends and colleagues told me it was a great book; it got great reviews; and Kahneman’s journal articles are invariably a good read, so I was curious. Its general message is...

Continue reading →

In a recently published study withTony Beatton (QUT), I looked at how happiness changes by age. For the freely downloadable working paper version, see here. The main findings of the study can be summarised by the graph below, where you can see the way happiness changes over th...

Continue reading →

We are nearing the end of Mario Monti’s first year in office as Italian Prime Minister. As the largest of the Southern European economies experiencing difficulties paying off large public debts, Italy’s fate is crucial for the future of the European Union as a single financial...

Continue reading →

I had the pleasure this year of spending part of my holidays in northern Italy. Despite the prolonged recession that you can see the place is currently experiencing, it is still a rich country with good food, great wine, and great scenery. Indeed, there is no real feeling of g...

Continue reading →

So, Spain got another 100 billion to sort out its banks . There seem to be very few strings attached to this bailout: the money comes from the recently set-up European stability funds (EFSF and ESM). The central Spanish government gets it and its up to the Spanish to figure ou...

Continue reading →

Savvy speculators have been making billions from the European crisis by second-guessing the politics. For instance, whilst big banks were forced to take a 70% haircut on their Greek bonds in March, some savvy investors that bought them up simply refused the haircut and got pai...

Continue reading →

There are rumours in the Welt am Sonntag and the Wall Street Journal of another grand plan to save the Euro. The main outlines have already been foreshadowed in recent weeks by the main players (Draghi, van Rompuy, Barosso, Juncker): a re-focus on bailouts for banks, not gover...

Continue reading →

It has been an interesting few months in Europe. The Greeks have just had their first round of parliamentary elections and need at least another round before a government can be formed. The French have just elected a new president on an anti-austerity platform, making it a cle...

Continue reading →

Interest rates in Australia have just been reduced by 0.5% in the hope that this will stimulate the economy. Will it work? Uncertain. But will politicians say it will work in the coming federal budget? Almost undoubtedly. Perhaps displays of optimism are not such a bad thing,...

Continue reading →

(note to self) For many years now, it has been clear to the insiders that there is no hope in achieving serious reductions to greenhouse gas emission by means of international co-operation: the incentives to free ride on the efforts of others is too great and none of the big p...

Continue reading →

We are in the middle of the electoral cycle, which seems a good time to give advice on which policies make good economics in the sense of being in the interest of the long-run welfare of Australia. My top 5 of do-able economic policies, some big and some small, that a governme...

Continue reading →

Public debts in Southern Europe only grew in 2011, and they were already unsustainable in 2010. Worse, the interest rates these countries have to pay on their debts has grown as all the long-term rolled-over debt held by these countries now carries a 7% upwards interest rate....

Continue reading →

About 8 months ago, I had a look at what was then happening in the Arab world and made predictions about what was going to happen next. Time to see what really happened and update the forecast. A minor prediction I was making was that Libya would again succumb to the resource...

Continue reading →

Last month, I talked about the route that Mario Monti should take with Italy if he truly wanted to get it back to a higher-growth path. My advice was to take on the rent-seekers in blitz-reforms, whilst keeping the population in a state of great anxiety about the economy in or...

Continue reading →

What is the road of least resistance scenario, and thereby the most likely scenario, for the Eurozone financial crisis? To solve this conundrum, we need to map the major elements of high resistance around which the road must navigate and the areas of low-resistance towards whi...

Continue reading →

I was in a conference in Tokyo last week on the topic of advancing the use of well-being indices throughout the world, hosted by the very generous, civil, and well-organised Japanese. One of the great things about such conferences is that you get to exchange views with smart p...

Continue reading →

(cross-posted from Core) The Italian political scene has given rise to a phenomenon seen often in developing countries: a care-taker government run by a respected economist with an implicit mandate to ‘get the country out of the mess’. That mess, a public debt of 120% of GDP t...

Continue reading →

The political fight over climate change policies continues to rage in our parliament, with the shadow minister for Climate Action apparently threatening a double dissolution of parliament if that is what it would take to repeal the current policies. The deeper question for ana...

Continue reading →

It is easy to become absorbed in particular problems and in the disaster stories that dominate the daily media. Climate change, natural disasters, wars in Africa and Asia, Financial Crises, riots and food price rises: you would be forgiven for thinking the world is going to th...

Continue reading →

On Monday, the Crawford school at the ANU ran a symposium on whether or not the government policy on carbon emissions was good policy. The video of the event should shortly appear here . The main surprise for me was to see how clearly some of the other economists speaking ther...

Continue reading →

(note to self) Just a week ago, the betting markets still gave Gaddafi a 40% chance of remaining in charge till the end of the year but now the markets have given him up for a lost cause. The Arab Spring can hence boast another regime change, and this time one that is quite co...

Continue reading →

(see here for part one and two and here for even earlier posts) Where we economists are most useful in climate change discussions is the question of how to change the behaviour of humans and how to organise the production of public goods. Because the climate is a world public...

Continue reading →

(cross-posted at Core-econ) Whilst it is fairly clear that the current climate change policies of Australia and other countries will do next to nothing to avert climate change (see here for a latest update on the debate), there is a key element particular to Australia that has...

Continue reading →

The survey on economic opinions run by the Economic Society Australia is running to a close. It is your chance to register your opinions on the ERA journal rankings, the status of economists, carbon taxation, etc. The response rate so far has been surprisingly high – with abou...

Continue reading →

In recent years, there have been many reforms to the incentive system that social science academics (those in the fields of economics, finance, psychology, management, health, marketing, etc.) live under in Australia. There was the Research Quality Framework , then the ERA , a...

Continue reading →

The Economic Society of Australia is conducting a survey of Australian economists, seeking their opinions about a range of current policy issues, as well as on matters relating to the profession itself. The survey has been emailed to all members of the Society and to those eco...

Continue reading →

Slutwalks are coming soon all over Australia . The Brisbane variant is in 2 weeks time and the Sydney one in 3 weeks. The craze has reached us from America where the first one was held in Toronto on April 3 in protest of a local police officer who is said to have told 10 colle...

Continue reading →

A long time ago in a galaxy far away (i.e. 2007), the University of Melbourne introduced 'The Melbourne Model' in which students were supposed to do many cross-disciplinary studies during their undergraduate degree (50 unit points, i.e. one year out of three) whilst being enco...

Continue reading →

No: the betting markets at Intrade showed a steady downward movement in the 'probability that Bin Laden would be captured or neutralised before midnight June 30 2011'. On May 1, the probability was deemed to be 2.7 % (down from about 10 percent a year earlier), with the close...

Continue reading →

(memo to self) Probably the most significant geopolitical event of the last 12 months has been the regime change in the Arab world, where the 360 million Arabs [1] make up 5% of the world population . Though a small and relatively poor group in this world, they occupy the main...

Continue reading →

Of course we are, but in order to convince the outside world that we are has needed someone to collect the data on the grades given to foreign students and analyse it. Gigi Foster of UNSW has done just that in a study looking at the marks of students of different backgrounds i...

Continue reading →

{This is the original version of an article that appeared from Dec to February in two installments in the Canberra Times} Australia has an official policy, pursued by the Ministry of Finance and Deregulation, on the relationship between government and the web that attempts to...

Continue reading →

As predicted just a few days ago , Queensland-boy Julian Assange is now in police custody and has been denied bail pending his extradition to Sweden to answer allegations of having had consensual sex without a condom. In Sweden, American prosecutors will no doubt try to have h...

Continue reading →

Well, they’ve done it again. Queensland-boy Julian Assange and his band of merry journalists and IT-nerds have flooded the internet once again with sensitive information that embarrasses several governments, most notably the US, by releasing the content of several hundred thou...

Continue reading →

for some time now, I have wanted to read a short intelligible piece telling me what the US health reforms actually were about. The problem till now has been that the reforms entail 1200 pages of unreadable legal text referring to more unreadable text, and that the issue became...

Continue reading →

In 2001, Portugal decriminalized the private use of all illicit drugs, including heroin, cannabis, and cocaine. As long as a person is not found in possession of more than 10 days' worth of any of these drugs, use and possession is no longer a criminal offense. The main point...

Continue reading →

Economist Paul Frijters discusses whether the Western world will try to stop China and India's rise as the next economic super powers.

Continue reading →

Evidence-based policy is a buzzword that conjures up images of responsible government: difficult decisions taken after a careful examination of the evidence, tailored local experiments, and then implemented using the best advice available. Sounds good, no? As a buzzword, it is...

Continue reading →

Following the efforts of James Farrell as to the many different things meant by lay folk and professionals by the word ‘belief’, I wanted to try to tackle the question from an economics points of view. Given that the methods and mindsets of economists are an amalgam of other s...

Continue reading →

Economist Paul Frijters reflects on the controversial Super Profits tax and the lessons the public and the government can take from the circus that surrounded the issue.

Continue reading →

With Gillard as our new PM, a compromise has been done on the RSPT, rewarding the big mining companies for their negative campaigning. In this first post-mortem, I have some mopping up to do regarding two as yet undiscussed ‘reports’ brought out on the old RSPT, one by Ernst a...

Continue reading →

Last week, the Minerals Council Australia (MCA) came up with a KPMG report (download here ) that suggested that the newly introduced Resource Super-Profit Tax (RSPT) would lead to many future mining projects being non-viable. This is of course a cornerstone in their scare-camp...

Continue reading →

Well, the Israelis have been at it again. Boarding a humanitarian flotilla that was bringing humanitarian supplies to a besieged population on the Gaza strip, the Israeli military shot at least 9 people dead and once again displayed a worrying degree of disdain for UN resoluti...

Continue reading →

Paul Frijters analyses the topical economic issue facing Australia's resource industry and the public: the Federal Government's proposed Resource Super Profits Tax. He identifies all the key stakeholders and how the proposed legislation change will affect them.

Continue reading →

Anzac day is when Australians and New Zealanders remember their casualties of the first World War and other conflicts. It has become a defining event for the sense of nationhood of the Australians and solemn commemorations are held all over the country. Sharing the same backgr...

Continue reading →

Kopenhagen is currently witnessing two comic relief shows. One is regularly seen in the amusement area known as Tivoli, and the other is the climate change conference. The core element of pure humour in the second circus is that the actions of many governments are diametricall...

Continue reading →

Suppose you believed the world was getting warmer due to humanity's greenhouse gas emissions and you worried about it but you cant get yourself to believe that the 200-odd countries in the world are ever going to agree to drastically reduce their emissions via some joint schem...

Continue reading →

Some things seem to need no explanation, but are not obvious at all on reflection and, if you wonder about them, suggest something of interest about the economic system. Consider the question of why the informal economy is so small, leading to the question of how much more pro...

Continue reading →

In a post a few weeks back, I raised the question of what additional production factor one would have to include into the current production function framework in order to have a plausible story about the recent crisis. That post included a set of conditions any candidate woul...

Continue reading →

(cross-posted with Core Economics) There has been much talk in the last 12 months about the relationship between macro-economic theory and explanations of the current recession. Krugman essentially dismissed most current macro theory as being delusional about the workings of m...

Continue reading →

The monthly RePec rankings for Australia are in again. Always an exiting moment for the professional economists in Australia to see whether their latest publications have already been spotted by the automatic search routines, whether they have been cited as often as they deser...

Continue reading →

Time for more reflections on the financial crisis, starting with seeing whether my predictions of two months ago have come true, followed by observations on a new set of unexpected twists, and rounded off by a set of policy recommendations for how to reduce the severity of the...

Continue reading →

It has been a busy time for academic economists in the past few weeks. Every lunch break has been dominated by talk about all the goings on in the markets and the government plans that are coming thick and thin. We are trying desperately to remain more knowledgeable about the...

Continue reading →

In a speech on May 19th, Tim Flannery reportedly proposed, as a last-ditch solution, the mass depositing of sulphur into our atmosphere to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the earth, thus counter-acting the greenhouse effect of increased amounts of CO2 in the air. The spe...

Continue reading →

There was an extraordinary article in the Australian yesterday ( here ) by Vaclav Klaus. In his article, which is a condensation of a speech for a conference of climate sceptics, Vaclav makes mince meat out of the climate alarmists and accuses them of having bad intentions. He...

Continue reading →

Election campaigns are fascinating events for a social scientist. In a poor country with lots of tensions, the issues would be about survival and bitter divisions, whilst in some sedate countries with no problems election campaigns are about the length of socks. Hence the issu...

Continue reading →

Recently, we had a policy discussion forum about the issue of whether Australia should follow most of the rest of the OECD and introduce the right to paid maternity leave. For the full slides, see here . During the discussion I introduced the topic of paid maternity in the con...

Continue reading →

We had an interesting recent economic policy discussion here at QUT about the topical issue of urban water management, chaired by Clevo Wilson, a senior lecturer in environmental economics. The full presentations can be downloaded here . The essence of the debate was whether i...

Continue reading →

A befriended blogger made a careless comment recently that American newspapers (with the New York Times on top) were 'unquestionably the best in the world'. Being from European stock, and hence growing up with the equally silly idea that everything European is better than anyt...

Continue reading →

A couple of weeks back I wittnessed a discussion meeting here at QUT on whether Hedgefunds should be outlawed, or at least heavily regulated. The main speaker was Dr. Robert Bianci who has sent a large part of his PhD degree on the functioning of Hedgefunds. The PowerPoint sli...

Continue reading →

Economists spend large amounts of time evaluating existing policies or pushing for some particular new economic policy. Equally important, but less frequently done, is to say what should NOT be done and why it shouldnt be done. Of course these 'warnings' have to relate to a po...

Continue reading →

On Thursday 26th July, we had another policy discussion meeting figuring Nicholas Gruen as the introducer of a potential policy reform. The issue debated was whether we should have a national information policy. Ben Ives argued in favour, Tony Beatton argued against. The under...

Continue reading →

the BBC website alerted me today to the linked paper by my ex - Free University colleague Richard Tol, who is still an environmental economist but has become somewhat famous since. The paper and the i nterview makes fascinating and sobering reading. Let me give you some highli...

Continue reading →

In recent weeks on clubtroppo and elsewhere, there's been a lot of attention given to untruthful journalism, media bias , and lying politicians . The situation appears the same internationally, with Blair and Bush being criticised for lying about Iraq and media bias being more...

Continue reading →

Having blogged for a couple of months now, I am conscious of the lure of writing 'why dont the people in charge do as I say' pieces. As an antidote I'd like to offer 5 observations which strike a European like myself on why Australia is a great country, some of which are likel...

Continue reading →

there was a policy discussion seminar given 2 weeks days ago, headed by A/Prof Benno Torgler, on the issue of whether Australia should have a tax amnesty (see here ). For those, like myself, who know virtually nothing about this area, its handy to realise that tax amnesties ha...

Continue reading →

Every 2 weeks at QUT, we set up an economic policy discussion evening. We pick a topic for debate, have someone knowledgeable introduce it, and then let 2 students argue for or against particular policy reform proposals. We go out of our way to make the policy proposals realis...

Continue reading →

(another one of the Lost Files following the Great Server Crash) "Exempting any group of people from criticism is not a blessing but a curse. Thomas Sowell " It was reconciliation week once more last week, a good opportunity to debate some of the more thorny issues surrounding...

Continue reading →

Lets think constructively about the environment and lets try to think 10 years ahead in global environmental debates. There are many global environmental problems, and these are likely to get worse. The best known one is of course global warming likely due to greenhouse gas em...

Continue reading →

Im feeling cranky today, so readers beware. A must-read article for all those interested in global warming and CO2 emissions is the recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by our very own Michael Raupach from CSIRO and co-authors, to be found here ....

Continue reading →

What would you do with an academic economic journal if you were given control over it? What innovations would you enforce designed to make the journal more to your liking? Below I list some ideas talked about in the corridors of academia and ask you to give your opinion on the...

Continue reading →

After talking about it for years, its now official. Today's Australian announced that the University of Melbourne is going to copy the American liberal-arts style university system. They intend to do away with all specialisations and have 6 broad faculties. Students can pick a...

Continue reading →

In recent blogs on this site, especially regarding the phrase `war on terror' and the political mud slinging of recent weeks, I have frequently seen the hope expressed that the media should be free of bias and just report the truth. A praisworthy sentiment. Can you however rea...

Continue reading →

A little post in last weeks' science news said that the South Korean government was thinking about the 'golden rules' of robot-human inter-relations. They are doing this because they sincerely believe that the technology of neural networks and miniature chips will pretty soon...

Continue reading →

When I saw that Paul's post was about chicks and tuna, I had an overwhelming urge to Google "naked women + fish" ... hmmm[KP] There was a very interesting talk yesterday by prof. Sean Pascoe of CSIRO on 'chicks and chuncks: a story of tuna and birds'. It raised an unusual ethi...

Continue reading →

In situations of scarce tax resources and unlimited wants of its population, governments throughout the world have to decide whose wants are more worthy than those of others. They would ideally want to choose a more or less consistent yardstick to base those tough decisions on...

Continue reading →

To rule is to look ahead, it has been said. Let us therefore cast our eyes at the virtually universal wish of nations and their population to achieve economic growth. Jared Diamond argues in his latest book âCatastropheâ that this âgrowth fetishâ (as Clive Hamilton calls it) m...

Continue reading →