Michael Fullilove, of the Lowy Institute, last week gave a speech espousing the established (non-radical) centrist view that more immigration to Australia is highly desirable - that migration is an essential step to A Bigger Australia. I like immigration. In fact, my gut suppo...
Continue reading →
One year ago our daughter died and was born. We called her Sakura, for the cherry blossom. Sakura is a thing of beauty that does not, and cannot last, longer than a short time. But we meet its brief time in this world with joy and not sorrow. Not surprisingly, I guess, thinkin...
Continue reading →
AKA "Intellectual vanity and policy poseurs" AKA "Contorting sophistry in favour of contractionary monetary policy" AKA "The global Serious id hrumphs again". Part 3 of a series ( 1 , 2 ). Via Matt Cowgill I see weak corporate governance beneficiary [1] Richard Goyder humphs a...
Continue reading →
The Lowy Interpreter is running a series where their experts explain, in (theoretically) 100 words or less, what they regard as the most important international policy issue of this campaign. I'm intrigued enough to think that the thoughts of a interested, but non-member, of t...
Continue reading →
Here’s a simple problem. Due to tradition, law and custom about the way we deal with debt and contracts and the like, a great deal of human activity requires the transport of pieces of paper from person to person. The information on this paper does not carry the same force if...
Continue reading →
This is just some expanded and consolidated musing from Twitter. A few days ago I was thinking about The Fall of Icarus, the 16th century Dutch painting after Bruegel. It's probably most popular for near absence of the ostensible subject, Icarus, who is barely shown in the bac...
Continue reading →
This year, and the last, the lovely Lowy Institute Poll has produced a headline grabbing finding that Australians, and particularly young Australians, are ambivalent about democracy . The search for meaning was on. This year it was attributed, in part, to a generation who have...
Continue reading →
Mark Crosby hrumphs about “Abenomics”. I put “Abenomics” in quotation marks because it’s not really about the current policy direction in Japan —especially since it doesn’t the monetary policy aspects which are both the most interesting, novel and experimental part that warran...
Continue reading →
This is sort of in the vein of the intermittent series ( 1 , 2 ), its adopted sibling and an older post on "hollowing out" . But it's also much less thought out. Earlier today, following the announcement that Ford would shut its Geelong plan t, Scott Steel tweeted The lesson t...
Continue reading →
Yesterday I came across a fairly innocuous story about the seafood industry on AM . It is headlined (on the website) and introduced thus. Australia's seafood capital under pressure from imports TONY EASTLEY: Port Lincoln calls itself Australia's seafood capital. On South Austr...
Continue reading →
Tim Soutphommasane has written a defence, or more accurately, a vigourous promotion of Australian Multiculturalism. I have opinions, which, with effort, are forced into the alliterative framework in the title. Of course, by way of disclaimer, I am absurdly fond of multicultura...
Continue reading →
I held off reviewing Acemoglu and Robinson's (AR) Why Nations Fail for a long time. Despite the material's relevance to my old research interests, my love of universal history and the popularity of the book, I just couldn't face the task. Yet, because it is now appearing in so...
Continue reading →
Nearly two years I speculated on reasons why there are so few Filipino restaurants in Australia relative to the large number Filipino migrants. A secondary purpose was to discuss the uselessness of preference based explanations - not because they could not be true, but because...
Continue reading →
We've spent a long time talking about Australia's relation ship with our near North. The recent Asian Century White Paper succeeds the interminable early 90s debates about whether Australia was part of Asia, which succeeded the end of the White Australia interregnum, which suc...
Continue reading →
The white paper Australia in the Asian Century was released this week. It is as exciting as you expect white papers to be. [caption id="" align="alignright" width="170"] I am unimpressed by the arguments for increasing Asian language literacy.[/caption] As expected it is full...
Continue reading →
As in part one of this series, I'm thinking about an idea that seems very possible, extremely interesting and well accepted, but which has little going for it in terms of observed evidence. The idea today is societal collapse. The premise is simple. Human societies are very co...
Continue reading →
I don't want to overstate the case here - there are many, many more spectacular sights in nature than the tide-turn at Styx Creek - but in my world this brings me a sense of joy every time I see it. Mark MacLean Last week I was reading Why Nations Fail . The topic is of close...
Continue reading →
I once heard a person , in reference to the note at right, that you could tell a great deal about a country by who they chose to put on their notes. He felt it spoke well of Japan that Fukuzawa Yukichi, a thinker and philosopher, was chosen for their currency. I don't really b...
Continue reading →
In the comments of Paul's post on face I mentioned a hypothesis I had never published that I felt overlapped with, or at least was tangental to the ideas he was using. I'm still very unhappy with the piece and the reasoning, but I thought I may as well publish the last version...
Continue reading →
AKA, "Follow ups no-one asked for". Last year I spent some idle time doing some rough work to see if ethnic and religious populations[1] were more clustered in Sydney than in Melbourne - presumably due to geographical factors. This was done by calculating Gini coefficients and...
Continue reading →
Speaking of his attendance at a sermon by the Reverend Whitefield. He had a loud and clear voice, and articulated his words and sentences so perfectly, that he might be heard and understood at a great distance, especially as his auditories, however numerous, observ'd the most...
Continue reading →
Via Matt Yglesias , Ryan Cooper wonders why " why smaller countries are so much better at macroeconomic management ". Cooper suggests that smaller countries have smaller banks that are less able to distort policy debate. Yglesias suggests that larger countries get distracted b...
Continue reading →
Via Matt Cowgill , I was pointed to this Nick Rowe post. An exerpt 1. Watch what happens on a really steep uphill bit of road. Watch what happens when the driver puts the pedal to the metal, and holds it there. Does the car slow down? If so, ironically, that confirms the theor...
Continue reading →
At the Lowy Interpreter Sam Roggeveen speculates about the possibility of a company (particularly Apple) buying a country. There has been at least on fictional treatment of a corporation taking over a country in John Brunner's wonderful 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar . It is bas...
Continue reading →
Part one of a intermittent series on interesting ideas that might not be useful. Today I'm talking about path dependence that leaves us with second rate technology. The hypothesis is very simple, but very interesting. A society has a problem, and a number of technologies becom...
Continue reading →
Whilst making pies yesterday I happened to recall a sentence I read 7 or so years ago, which suddenly struck me as very silly. So I just looked it up to make sure I hadn't imagined it. I didn't. Here's the whole paragraph. A final point worth noting on gang wars is that their...
Continue reading →
Responding to Noah Smith , Krugman says the following about the long term effects of the "Macro Wars" . On the academic side: look, to a first approximation nobody ever admits being wrong about anything. But my sense is that a lot of younger economists are aware, even if they...
Continue reading →
Via Mark Thoma Languages di?er widely in the ways they partition time. In this paper I test the hypothesis that languages which grammatically distinguish between present and future events (what linguists call strong- FTR languages) lead their speakers to take fewer future-orie...
Continue reading →
A) Hey, you know what today is? Invasion Day! B) What? A) Invasion Day. B) Invasion Day? A) Yeah, 'cause it's the day they invaded us Kooris. B) Oh, InVASion Day A) So all those people wearing Australian flags are celebrating Invasion Day. 'cept the ones that feel sorry for us...
Continue reading →
It is, of course, the season for holiday fun times making worthless definitions. Last week my wife and I were making a rare trip into Namba, a popular entertainment and shopping district in Osaka. We happened to see a restaurant named " Blue Billabong ( Japanese )". It purport...
Continue reading →
Ken has already linked to Possum's post on Australian Exceptionalism, but I have a distinct point I want to make about it. In a great part I agree with the sentiment, although I'd espouse most of the past 220 years rather than just the past three decades. It's far less the "Th...
Continue reading →
Like Paul Krugman part of what originally drew me into Economics was the premise behind Asimov's Foundation books. This premise was a far future where a discipline had managed to formalise and model human society, shed light on what would happen and create preconditions for a...
Continue reading →
Edit - I really want opposing views. Anyone who thinks there is a strong case for a concerted push for more literacy, please give it in comments At the Lowy Interpreter Andrew Carr says "One policy guaranteed to feature in the ' Australia in the Asian Century' White Paper is t...
Continue reading →
A few months ago there was a blog debate about the tensions between a movement left and a wonkish left in pursuing political change, summarised neatly here by Matt Cowgill . A domestic sequel has arisen in Australia. In the United States the wonkish left, from Riksbank laureat...
Continue reading →
The Lodge in Canberra, the official residence of the Prime Minister will be closed for repairs for the next 18 months . Several figures, including Jeff Kennett , former NCDC head Tony Powell and Andrew Carr of the Lowy Institute deem this an exercise in turd polishing. A new,...
Continue reading →
In light of Paul Frijter's sketpticism about the possibility of co-ordinated international action on carbon emissions and his recent offer of a wager on the outcome of international action, I thought I'd try to put the economic problem into some of the language of Internationa...
Continue reading →
From the Sydney Morning Herald this morning. Paris-style train plan for city Jacob Saulwick October 6, 2011 RAIL services on the north shore, inner west, Bankstown, Hurstville and north-west lines would operate as single-deck, high-frequency metro-style trains under a plan bei...
Continue reading →
The two finals for the oval ball codes do not just share a weekend this year. Two of the finalists - Collingwood in the AFL and Manly in the NRL - have the undisputed status of being "the team everyone likes to hate" in their respective leagues. Yet they are far from similar c...
Continue reading →
The devil in the title is our oldest enemy . Not the hoofed and horned one, but rent. Rent is gains in excess of what is required to mobilize a factor of production. The term comes from land as gains accrue to ownership with no relation to the merit or exertion of the owner. F...
Continue reading →
After reading this Australian article , I looked for the relevant US diplomatic cable , largely because the paper cannot be assumed to quote things accurately or in context. I found something else that worried me though. Here's two excerpts, with my emphasis. Although the Boar...
Continue reading →
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="360" caption="Courtesy of the RBA"] [/caption] In my first year of university, in one of the earliest classes, we were shown a graph Australia's terms of trade in the 1950s. This is something I doubt would happen in economics education...
Continue reading →
Following from Ken's post the other day I spent some time in idle thought. For the moment I'll disregard my problems with aggregate productivity statistics (many of which are covered in this Grattan Inst paper). I'll also disregard my feeling that ultimately productivity growt...
Continue reading →
As you may have heard, on Friday the debt of the United States was downgraded by Standard and Poors. Subsequently everyone continued to rush to buy said debt, and the 10 yield fell to an astonishing 2.20% , and taking into account inflation, many people seem keen to pay the go...
Continue reading →
I am usually uninterested in the month to month guessing/commentary game around RBA board meetings. It's the financial market version of political race calling. However the decision on Tuesday to hold the current target rate highlighted some issues around the purposes and goal...
Continue reading →
The survey of opinion amongst Australian Economists made for some interesting reading for me. I found that I where a clear majority of respondents agreed or disagreed with a statement I did as well, and where they were divided, I also had reservations. I guess this means I 'm...
Continue reading →
Disclaimer: This ended up roughly 4500 words longer than I expected when I sat down. A while ago, following the start of the Arab Spring, John Quiggin wrote a post declaring " Fukuyama, F*** Yeah ". Apart from showcasing an appreciation of both late 20th century political thou...
Continue reading →
Paul Krugman recently gave a speech, Mr Keynes and the Moderns on several aspects of the legacy of the General Theory , including both the ways it has been read, and how it has been ignored. The latter is a recurring theme after the financial crisis as it became apparent that...
Continue reading →
A while ago I listened to some lectures to learn a bit about neurology. One topic that came up was Source Amnesia. This describes a human tendency to remember things like statements and facts, but not the context in which one heard them and the caveats, explicit or not, that c...
Continue reading →
When I floated the idea of an infographic wiki the other day I said this. The problem of course is that infographics are created by graphic designers, who are trained to do what they do. Someone in the policy crowd might want to offer their knowledge on an issue in an infograp...
Continue reading →
Fron Nicholas Eubank via Chris Blattman For years, studies of state formation in early and medieval Europe have argued that the modern, representative state emerged as the result of negotiations between autocratic governments in need of tax revenues and citizens who were only...
Continue reading →
Don asks what the policy engaged outside the Political-Journalistic complex can do to improve public debate, implicitly envoking the role of blogs and other social media. So I've decided to post some of the ideas I've had on the odd chance that one of them might prove fruitful...
Continue reading →
n.b I did the hokey pokey on this post, putting it in and taking in out because I figured it was fairly pointless. Now I'm putting it in again (and shaking it all about). The other day I was idling away some spare time by looking at roads on Google Maps. I looked at roads and...
Continue reading →
Christopher Joye rebukes John Quiggin for this post where he violates the territory of these guys . Quiggin criticises Central Bank Independence (in its strong from from the 1990s) and raises the possibility of higher inflation target to get more desired outcomes. Although fro...
Continue reading →
A warning, this is pretty much a shaggy dog story. A while ago I had an idle thought about migrant settlement patterns. If there was a slight tendency amongst Chinese Australians to settle in ways that reflected subnational cultures from China (I was prompted by the Sydney sub...
Continue reading →
A couple of months ago I read Interstate 69 , which is an unexpectedly interesting account of the advocates and opponents (neither of whom are really insiders) of an extension to the eponymous road from the American Midwest to the Mexican border and their attempts to gain the...
Continue reading →
This post is merely two additions to previous posts, neither of which warranted a post on their own. The first relates to this post from September where I talked about the idea of realtime mapping of bus services using GPS data. Better people than I had the same idea and, thro...
Continue reading →
I am overjoyed that the government has not just allowed to speak the word "Multiculturalism" but is now celebrating Australia's successful experience with it rather than sitting in silence as a disgruntled minority complain. Its not justt a feature of Australia I enjoy, but so...
Continue reading →
Parts I , II , III and IV . This post is continues directly from part IV. From part 4 - If the necessary conditions I listed in part four are valid, there is a good case to be made that Japan came very close to having the conditions to create the modernity virus in the 17th ce...
Continue reading →
Parts I , II and III . We are often in the habit of calling the modernity virus “Westernisation”, for the simple fact that it occurred first in North West Europe. From this unique spontaneous beginning it spread elsewhere, in fact nearly everywhere. Many human developments lik...
Continue reading →
Part I and II I'm anticipating some misapprehension for this post, mainly for reasons of semantics and my choice of meaning to attribute to poorly defined words. This will probably require an entire clarification post based on what misapprehensions arise in comments. In the la...
Continue reading →
Part I is here As an analogy, lets think about Modernity as a virus. By "Modernity" I mean society in which consistent growth in material living standards can occur, and where more than a small minority live above subsistence. The kind of society that was unprecedented before...
Continue reading →
A few days ago I started writing an idle thought into a short post. It turned into a long post. So I split it in two. Then I realised it was reliant on ideas I had but hadn't written down, which might confuse others. So I wrote posts on them. Then they required another post. E...
Continue reading →
Tyler Cowen's e-bookette, The Great Stagnation is being debated around the various blogospheres, even by people who haven't read it . I do dig the way it exploits the format of ebooks, being allowed to be longer than an essay, but not padded out into a book. A huge number of b...
Continue reading →
Of all the products advertisers and marketers have pitched over the years, the one most vital to their survival, and the one they have been most successful at convincing people the utility of, is marketing. Without selling advertising and marketing, there is no industry at all...
Continue reading →
It's becoming a point of distinction not to have prognosticated on the future of China, especially in Australia as China takes great significance in our region and in our economic future. A lot of this prognostication must be infuriating to veteran China Watchers, being conduc...
Continue reading →
A few months ago the Sydney Morning Herald had an article in which Mike Baird, almost certainly the next treasurer of NSW, suggested the use of Tax Increment Finance. Briefly, TIF refers to the funding of infrastructure by allocating beforehand any increase in tax revenues tha...
Continue reading →
So far in Inequalityfest 2011 we've focused largely on moral and ethical issues, as well as on the distinction (if one can be made) between inequality of opportunity and inequality of outcome. These are very important issues, but I'm interested in one that I think is overlooke...
Continue reading →
Given it's still the offseason, I thought we might want to revisit an passtime of a previous time. When I was a child in the 90s, during the Keating era, there was a fairly pointless question (they never bothered to actually debate it); Is Australia part of Asia? Whilst the qu...
Continue reading →
On Sunday I ate at a Filipino restaurant. This was a first; prior experiences of Filipino food had been solely at friends' houses. Restaurants were simply just not around. In fact, some googling seems to indicate there may be less than 10 in the entire state of NSW. Which is s...
Continue reading →
That was quick. It only took a week for media consensus on the retail campaign by Gerry Harvey and others, in contrast to the consensus on the campaign by mining companies. Both represent campaigns by established and vested interests to serve their own interests whilst claimin...
Continue reading →
As a summer exercise I've been thinking about places where more lotteries might be a good idea. By lotteries, I mean a decision maker selecting an option randomly, albeit perhaps from a selected pool, rather than using flawed criteria. After all, in a complex and uncertain wor...
Continue reading →
The other day I bought a hat. I had been intending to buy a hat for a while, but I bought this one because I happened to walk past it in the shopping centre I went to. I don't usually go to shopping centres (I don't drive much and I find them inconvenient and sterile), but thi...
Continue reading →
It's quite obvious, and has been so for a while, that the Chinese currency, the yuan, is undervalued. This is obviously of consternation to the United States, whom would desire a depreciation in their currency against the yuan - the policy is called beggar thy neighbour for a...
Continue reading →
Today is the anniversary of the battle of the Eureka Stockade. This is not a much remembered date. In fact, it was only brought to my attention by a letter in the AFR bemoaning the lack of recognition. This letter was penned by a Joseph Toscano of the Anarchist Media Institute...
Continue reading →
Early next month we'll learn whether Australia has won the hosting rights rights to the FIFA World Cup in 2022. Surprisingly, given this would entail such a large amount of government expenditure, discussion in the media relates only to the tactics of the bidding team and the...
Continue reading →
This piece suggests that the UK may i mplement quotas to increase the representation of women on FTSE companies. I appreciate the sentiment. Even though it's hard to find someone who will explicitly state that women are unsuited to positions of power, the corridors of power bo...
Continue reading →
The NSW opposition will quite certainly become the NSW Government, so any policy announcements they give should be taken as a guide to future government policy. Unfortunately, such policy is extrememely thin on the ground - sometimes to an absurd extent. In the edition changes...
Continue reading →
Over at Mr Denmore I commented on this post, which referred to an Annabelle Crabbe speech in which the the celebrated leaking of the federal budget in it's entirety is named as part of the rich experience of journalism which we should be valuing. Forgive my self indulgence as...
Continue reading →
Last week I ran a red light. I was tired. I thought it would stay yellow. I wanted to go home. In short, I was stupid. As I sailed through I saw the flash of a camera in the buildings in front of me. Today I got a warning letter. I'm happy enough about that. Fine's are expensi...
Continue reading →
Japan. (HT The Melbourne Urbanist ) What is more interesting however is the fact it looks like...a Phillips curve. This is kind of astounding. You could pick up a vintage late 60s macro textbook and it'd be struggling to explain the situation that was unfolding then, but the p...
Continue reading →
The other day I was describing my honours research to someone (namely James Farrell), which started me churning some of the frustrations I have had with the empirical institutional literature of the past 10 years and I stumbled upon another issue I hadn't considered before - i...
Continue reading →
The Monkey Cage , via Mark Thoma Does Inequality Make People More Conservative? Yes, according to some new research (pdf) from Nathan Kelly and Peter Enns . They rely on a a yearly measure of “policy mood” from 1952-2006. This is an omnibus summary of the public’s ideological...
Continue reading →
After a year of reading about relative salaries in different sports, salary cap breaches, player unrest and defections in the NSW press, I only just learned that the salary cap in the AFL is $7950000 compared to the NRL's $4100000. This set a little bell off in my head. This m...
Continue reading →
Yesterday in the post I received a copy of CAB: Collaborative Auto Biography , a series of short anecdotes and stories from residents of Cabramatta rendered as comics by Matt Huynh - a project intended in a large part to show stories about the area that don't involve heroin. I...
Continue reading →
I comments on my previous post on Metrobuses and small improvements in public transport BruceT gave a complaint about waiting and then giving up because of the uncertainty about when one would actually arrive on a weekend when the frequency was lower. This reminded me of the w...
Continue reading →
When we discuss public transport and public transport planning in the public arena we tend to either fall into whinging or into desires (or yearning) for big sexy projects. This is extremely so in Sydney. The NSW malaise has allowed it to be conventional wisdom that the public...
Continue reading →
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="220" caption="Macroeconomic swimming"] [/caption] A thought bubble from when I was in the pool. It retreads some basic ground for clarity's sake. [fn1]. Consider a typical cyclical recession driven by uncertain expectations by agents. D...
Continue reading →
This is something I was thinking of doing for a while, but since Possum has started a "What if?" over at his joint , this is as good a time as any to launch Australian Alternate History Week and hope it is taken up across a few more blogs. In short, I want participants to crea...
Continue reading →
I've thought for a while that the News Ltd stable of papers in Australia were stuck between two seperate models in the News Ltd empire when it came to political reporting. The old Murdoch model of cultivating the image of influence by backing winners, frequently supporting unp...
Continue reading →
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="249" caption="Unlike my AS peer Mr Trask, I'm unlikely to publish a book on my crippled escapades to make a living"] [/caption] Possum's recent job plea has inspired me to do an experiment. Unlike him, I'm not explicitly seeking a job (...
Continue reading →
There's been a great deal in this election that has been unprecedented, and some of the precedents it sets are good, and some less desirable. What I think is not particularly unprecedented is the swing. Quite a few commentators, have gone from the observation that first term g...
Continue reading →
I only recently became aware of the leasehold system on residential property in the Australian Capital Territory. This was an interesting attempt to create a city in which rent seekers and speculators would not prosper by allowing the increased value of land to accrue to the g...
Continue reading →
The delightfully named Ben Spies-Butcher of the CPD writes in support of the Henry Review's proposals for the income tax system as opposed to a flat tax. In a nutshell, he feels that the Henry Review's scheme offers great efficiency benefits by simplifying the tax system and r...
Continue reading →
We have competing paid parental leave schemes in this election, and voters are going to choose between them.But the kind of scheme desired depends a great deal on why you would want a paid parental scheme at all. Whilst details of the different schemes are available in the med...
Continue reading →
Here I cite this article by Annabel Crabb [fn1]. Here she defends the fact that all questions asked at press conferences are race calling in nature on the fact that policy literature isonly given to journalists at the beginning of the conference, and that the harried journos j...
Continue reading →
Noises are being made about high speed rail links in Australia again, and once again focus has begun on the Newcastle-Sydney leg of any such system. I assume this is both because of the density of the population, but also because the endless dormitory suburbs and above ground...
Continue reading →
Vietnam is the site of a rapidly emerging and evolving capitalism, something we may as well date to the introduction of Doi Moi (fn1) in the mid 80s.. Given my own interests , and continuing exposure to discussions about Adam Smith's ideas on the marketplace and sympathy , it'...
Continue reading →
I have just returned from a two week holiday in Vietnam expectedly with a wide range of observations with which to tire friends and relatives. There are a few though that relate heavily to economics and the sociology of markets and capitalism which are probably more of interes...
Continue reading →
The front page of today's Sydney Morning Herald: We have Phillip Corey describing the changes to the Rent Tax . Dwarfing this, and by far the largest story on the front page : How a $7m advertising campaign saved a fortune . Thank god that when it comes to a major issue we hav...
Continue reading →
This week at work I was discussing the throw-in in soccer with a colleague (we work at night and we were watching the World Cup) when I had a memory. Growing up in Maitland through the 1990s, when I played soccer either as a junior or at school, the throw in was invariably des...
Continue reading →
Via LP we have a piece by Laura Tingle in the AFR on Tuesday which describes efforts to create a "consumption based" rather than "production based" ETS. I held off commenting until I read the piece itself, but my confusion is still here. Take this paragraph. Charging people fo...
Continue reading →
The recent signings of Rugby League players to the expansion clubs of the AFL has me thinking about the history of football (used here generically for all codes) and just what makes Aussie Rules distinctive in the current world. Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson has a i...
Continue reading →
As the pseudo debate about the resources rent tax continues to vomit forth, it's striking how little we have changed even in the industrial age, and the challenges we have in protecting our philosophical gains. When humanity began farming we entered a world in which prosperity...
Continue reading →
This is a epoch making day. Journalism is now reaching its perfect equilibrium form which it cannot be shifted. Several portents have pointed towards this. The high priests of Journalism, the parliamentary press gallery, have long understood that race calling is not only cheap...
Continue reading →
Some time ago a coworker of mine found a file on the train and gave it to me. A thick wad of papers detailing a conspiracy against all that was good in the world: The Queen, her constitution and her mighty railways....and the writer's right to place her wheelie bin on the kerb...
Continue reading →
Shane Wright (reproduced by Peter Martin ) weighs up pros and cons (mainly cons) of WA secession from the perspective of WA. Lets ask a natural counter question: What if the rest of Australia would be better off without WA? Specifically, should Australia still have a single cu...
Continue reading →
Doctor Labyrinth, like most people who read a great deal and who have too much time on their hands, had become convinced that our civilization was going the way of Rome. He saw, I think , the same cracks forming that had sundered the ancient world, the world of Greece and Rome...
Continue reading →
Political commentary and pseudo demography speaks of a class called the latte sippers. This is a class of noisy, isolated, out of touch and elitist people; enemies of common sense and the common man. Apart from these traits they are also clearly defined by their beverage choic...
Continue reading →
Here's a quote I read today. It’s how PR (Proportional Representation) systems are meant to operate, and is far preferable to a minority government. It’s a mature and sensible approach, and a step away from the pathologies of winner-takes all so common to Westminster systems w...
Continue reading →
Recently there's arisen a debate about having a debate on immigration and also an attempt to relive the glory days of asylum seeker politics. Whilst attempts to link the two have been cynical, I believe there might be a good reason to link them. Why not draw almost all our new...
Continue reading →
I'm not very old at all, but I'm old enough to have caught the tail end of a era in playground equipment design. This period was typified by danger. Metal slippery dips that one could cook an egg (or buttocks) on and which would hurl you far into the grass or merry go rounds t...
Continue reading →
Lets imagine someone facing the end of a working career. They've built up a large jam jar of money. With these savings they can buy the goods and services they need/desire despite no longer producing anything to exchange in the market for them. Now imagine a society with a bul...
Continue reading →
One of the things I like about Journey to the West (one of the four great Chinese classics, but better known here as the basis for Monkey Magic) is the way it delves into almost every conceivable corner of Chinese cosmology. Characters venture to the courts of dragon kings, to...
Continue reading →
Gather round and listen to this tale. One of the promises made by the current government in opposition that they managed to get in place without much difficulty was the Lobbyists Register . This was to make the whole lobbying process more transparent. Any firms wanting to lobb...
Continue reading →
The other day I was at Toby's Estate's Wooloomooloo outlet when I became inordinately interested in the menu pricing. From my notes (I did mean inordinately) : Short Black/Ristretto : $2.20 Long Black/Piccolo Latte : $3.00 Latte/Flat White/Cappuccino : $3.50 Here's my puzzleme...
Continue reading →
The New Yorker has just produced this profile of Paul Krugman . In it we read the following passage. It isnt that freshwater types believe that actual people are perfectly rationalthey just believe that making that assumption enables a more rigorous economics than is possible...
Continue reading →
The Sydney Morning Herald has been trumpeting a study they supported by on the future of Sydney's public transport and urban structure. Beneath the being overly pleased with themselves, with we're above petty politics harrumphing there is a genuine effort to talk about the pol...
Continue reading →
William Hardy Wilson is a fairly well regarded Australian architect of the 20th century and is such usually afforded a few paragraphs in biographical dictionaries and encyclopaedias. These will mention in passing a few well regarded buildings and pay brief mention to an unreal...
Continue reading →
In the first post in this series I talked about recent empirical work on institutions and development and the problems I had with the use of constructed indices for measuring institutions. In the second post I talked about a particular paper I decided to retest and the alterna...
Continue reading →
In the first post of this series I described recent work in empirical institutional economics and why I thought the work pursued a virtuous end but was compromised by the use of poor institutional measures. Today I will introduce a specific paper of this type that had drawn my...
Continue reading →
How can we quantify culture? This sounds ridiculous. It sounds like a quixotic intellectual conceit. But I think the idea is important to economics because of the way we are now using the concept of institutions to explain social and economic phenomena. The fact that instituti...
Continue reading →
