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...

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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...

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News Corp is telling us what Google should really pay for linking to its sites. It's telling us in code – HTML code. And the answer is ... $0.00. What is an Internet link worth to the linker? For most of the Internet's life, this question has been pointless. On the Internet, l...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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[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...

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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...

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[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...

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[caption id="attachment_31072" align="alignleft" width="640"] Smurfing, sans cuckoos ...[/caption] There's a weird sort of dissonance in today's Australian Financial Review. On the front page, CBA CEO Ian Narev argues that CBA culture is "strong". Meanwhile, a detailed Neil Ch...

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

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

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Cross-posted from the Mandarin We do have a few advantages, perhaps the greatest being that we don’t have a strategic plan Warren Buffett It's a common lament that, within organisations whether in the public, private or not-for-profit sector, boards and/or senior management do...

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I've known Victor Perton since he was a lively Liberal MP interested in approaches to regulation that were more promising than the standard reg review boilerplate of the time. Neither of us made any progress on that score and reg review remains its ineffectual self. Now comfor...

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We need leaders who get up and out, are close to global megatrends and consumer behaviour, and understand leading indicators for changes to how people will work and live. A self described "leadership consultant" Continued from Part One . Starting sometime - I'm thinking late i...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="530"] Further critical discussion of a range of aspects of strategy can also be found here [/caption] Corporate strategy is a comparatively new field which, took off a decade or so after WWII. There were various technical disciplines ma...

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ClubTroppo chief executive Nicholas Gruen - who was criticised by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull for his imaginary $5.6 million salary - has resigned from the job after seven years. Mr Gruen, who began the job in his own mind long, long ago, tendered his resignation to the Cl...

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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...

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As Greece's situation has gone in recent days from bad to worse to worser to even-worserer-than-that, I've seen a lot of claims that the European authorities treated Greece's private creditors too generously back in 2010-2012. My natural tendency was to accept those claims, pa...

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I've written about what I call irreducibility at least twice before . Then along comes this nice article in the excellent new publication The Mandarin on the " 19 reasons why agencies find it hard to hire technologists ". It's a classic case of how top down systems don't manag...

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If you want to understand what bank regulators were doing in 2008, and what people like APRA and the Reserve Bank worry about here, try reading Matt Levine's latest column . Leviine's piece is nominally about a weird court case involving AIG, the insurance behemoth which almos...

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http://vimeo.com/75482401 Here's a presentation I gave to a conference called - unhelpfully - Art for Art's Sake. It was actually about new approaches to participation in the arts, about finding ways of connecting people to the arts - and the arts to people - which go beyond t...

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According to Mike Seccombe, at the Global Mail , under the Abbott government, Australia will be open not just for business, but open to costly multi-national law-suits: On the eve of the election, the Coalition released its trade policy , which includes a commitment to “remain...

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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...

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People of Groupon, After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding - I was fired today. If you're wondering why ... you haven't been paying attention. From controversial metrics in...

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When I first joined the mortgage broking industry I was struck by all the calls the industry itself made for regulation. Mostly this was not out of some evil scheme that would be easily predicted by Chicago inspired public choice theory. Brokers weren't particularly in favour...

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The bank debate now seems officially out of control. Increasingly foolish notions about banking are being served up day after day. One example: the developing meme that claims the banks have decided they will no longer be bound by official interest rate policy. One morning las...

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Twitter even allows you to convey complex if slightly tongue-in-cheek ideas, but possibly only to people who bother to follow the links: 11 hours ago CDUlawschool CDU Law School 1/2 Houses not o/priced tiny.cc/iwt9a but will fall over time due boomer retirement tiny.cc/2sw9b H...

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ASIC, one of our main financial markets regulators, has today declared that short-selling is a "legitimate business in the market" . Good on them. Markets need short-sellers, far more than most people realise. The reason is that financial markets are markets in ideas - ideas a...

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Ian Verrender in the Sydney Morning Herald recently wrote of Victoria's two oldest power stations that they were bought by their owners "when the issue of climate change was well known". Though he made that remark in the middle of a longer article focused on different issues,...

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One needs a full cost-benefit analysis (including all externalities such as secondary effects n health premiums) to form an intelligent view on whether to sell Medibank Private. In the meantime, it makes no sense to say that reducing the level of government debt quickly is ess...

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Last week the Prime Minister made a plea to the House, for the members to vote in the national interest, not their party interest. Where are the members of the ALP who are voting in the national interest?

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The High Court has ruled that people serving alcohol are not at risk of of massive claims for damages if a drinker comes to grief on the way home. One would hope that commonsense will prevail and folk will conform with responsible serving guidelines. Some of the claims were a...

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British Airways chair Willie Walsh has asked the company's 40,000 employees to work unpaid for a month to save the company and their jobs. The airline made a £401 million loss for the year ending in March. This seems to be due primarily to higher fuel prices, but partly to dec...

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Australia's economy may be officially in recession, but Lateral Economics at least is doing its bit to reduce the effects. In addition to the research assistant Nicholas advertised for earlier this week, we also need someone with some web design and Wordpress backend experienc...

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Peter Klein at Organizations and Markets offers some calming thoughts on the AIG bonus debate . 1. The main lesson is that AIG should never, ever have been bailed out with taxpayer dollars. I said that at the beginning, and I stand by it even more today. AIG should have declar...

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A rather amusing ranking of jobs in the US . The rationale is explained, if you really want to know, with a mix of remuneration and working conditions. To quantify the many facets of the 200 jobs included in our report, we determined and reviewed various critical aspects of al...

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A wry look at the arguments that are mounted to defend the bailout of the US car industry. Strictly speaking, a part of the US car industry that is failing, not the robust part that is doing OK. "Too big, too important to lose". The same could have been said of the US piano in...

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A good while back I put up a post on all the ways I liked Platinum Capital . I hope some of you were suitably convinced to have invested. Just as Kier Neilson (the firm's founder) made his name in the 1987 crash, this is how Platinum international fund has performed recently....

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Declaration of interest, the artist is my spouse, but don't let that prejudice you! Kilmeny Niland has produced a prequel to the best selling Aussie Night Before Christmas. The Aussie Day Before Christmas hot off the press, following two other books earlier in the year, Two To...

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

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The question arose on Organizations and Markets , which industries will be next to hold out their hands for bailout money? Will the massage and sexual favours industry be there in line? A column in Slate shed some light on this topic . It seems that the high end of the industr...

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Peter Boettke makes a point about the role of tariff protection in the US leading the transition from the Great Crash to the Great Depression. In the context of the Great Depression, one has to remember that after the stock market crash in 1929 market corrections were set in m...

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There are important lessons to be learned from the Great Depression but I have the impression that the left emerged with the view that the New Deal was required to save the US from rampant capitalism. There is an alternative account . For an MP3 version of the story . The New...

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"Goodbye and f.... you!" A hemp-inspired comment maybe? This came out of the farewell letter from Andrew Lahde, manager of a small California hedge fund, Lahde Capital, which recentlyreturned 866 percent betting against the subprime collapse. He has retired to live the good li...

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I was sufficiently taken with this piece in the Fin that I asked it's author Peter Cebon of the Melbourne Uni Business School if I could republish it here. Were told that the root cause of the current financial crisis is a few regional financiers selling dodgy mortgages to poo...

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On this analysis two major factors in the train wreck were the regulations that pushed lenders to water down prudent criteria for lending and the flight of speculators from the housing market when prices ceased to rise. A nuance in this analysis is to point out that it was not...

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I recently received an offer to buy some David Jones shares of mine - bought for the discount that I think they're in the process of phasing out. The offer is to buy the shares for $2.04 per share when their market value - at the time the letter was sent was $4.08. All this is...

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Fortunately executives of 'rescued' outfits realise how important it is for them to reassure the rest of us by showing us that life goes on and we should continue to lead it (as best we can in our newly straitened circumstances) as usual. Thus for instance the Washington Post...

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The way the proposed bailout is being talked up, you get the impression that the whole world depends on the Bush administration and the Fed coming to the party with the best part of a trillion dollars. The US economy depends on it, our economy depends on it, the capacity of th...

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The travails of the financial markets have triggered a degree of jubilation among the usual left-leaning suspects, as though this episode reflects badly on "neoliberalism", deregulation and the free market order. This view is not sustainable because the problems can be traced...

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Tyler Cowen challenges the idea that the finance markets have failed due to lack of regulation. Not a lack of government intervention , too much, done badly. THERE is a misconception that President Bushs years in office have been characterized by a hands-off approach to regula...

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Steven Long It's hard to escape the irony. Two decades ago, the historian Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history with the triumph of American capitalism. But Socialism, for Wall Street, is alive and well. After the bail-outs AIG, and the mortgage companies Freddie Mac...

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They look like banks (as they borrow short, are highly leveraged and lend and invest long and in illiquid ways) and thus are highly vulnerable to bank like runs. But unlike banks, they are not properly regulated or supervised and dont have access to deposit insurance or the le...

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