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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The twin threats of "hidden persuasion" and artificial intelligence have now convinced most of us that Google and its ilk are almost uniquely powerful. These threats are overrated. The digital giants can do less than we fear – and we risk regulating them where we should not. 1...

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

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

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

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

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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...

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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...

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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...

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

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

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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...

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

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

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

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

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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...

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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...

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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...

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We may be headed for a world of endless moral bubbles, where targets for outrage can be identified and turned into bogeymen in record time, with record audiences. It would be QAnon, but for anything you can think of and some stuff you can't. Author's note: What follows is spec...

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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...

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“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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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[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...

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[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...

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

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

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[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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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...

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

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

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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...

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

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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...

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

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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-...

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[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...

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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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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,...

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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...

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

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

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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...

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

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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...

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

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

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[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...

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

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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...

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

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

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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...

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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...

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

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

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

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

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

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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...

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

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

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

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

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In 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...

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

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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...

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

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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...

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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....

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

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

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

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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...

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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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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....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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...

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

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

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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...

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

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

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

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

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

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One of the privileges of access to what we cool kids call the "back end" of Troppo is that when I write a long, long comment , in an old thread that has taken a new direction, I can make it the start of a new thread. As I'm doing here. Note that the comment originally arose fr...

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An essay prompted by a friend recommending James' essay I think largely for its defence of Menzies as worthy of more respect he's been given by the left - which is a fair point. Cross posted from The Mandarin , which, to my surprise was interested in picking it up. In my view...

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The OECD is getting pretty serious about bridging divides - you know righting the world's injustices - that kind of thing. It's making a difference. It's probably thinking to itself "there's got to be change" - or thoughts to that effect. Why they even have a conference themed...

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Answer given on or about Sunday. Now available in comments

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Cross posted from the Mandarin . This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fUDIucr2eo

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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 weighed in previously on the relentless emphasis on symbolism in the political prosecution of aboriginal issues in Australia. This isn't necessarily a criticism of aboriginal activists because, as I argued, they're working within the rules of memefication . I can add that...

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Travesties of the proverbial is a very occasional series one post of which began with these words. Keen readers of this blog will know that occasionally, just occasionally I identify a saying or concept which has somehow come to signify something close to the opposite of what...

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Here's a list of buzzwords. I want to make a quick point. Note that there are very few ugly neologisms there - or even expressions that don't have clear meanings. Most of the expressions have very clear meanings. Indeed, some of them are quite compelling That's their point. Th...

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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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Does the reliability of institutions affect public good contributions? Evidence from a laboratory experiment By: Jahnke, Björn ; Fochmann, Martin ; Wagener, Andreas Reliable institutions - i.e., institutions that live up to the norms that agents expect them to keep - foment co...

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Is Socially Responsible Production a Normal Good? , Jana Friedrichsen This paper uses a controlled laboratory experiment to investigate the effect of wealth on individual social responsibility (ISR), defined as choosing a more socially responsible product if a cheaper alternat...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsbcScp9wpU When I saw Ray Martin fronting a doco on racism I expected the worst. He's so in love with schmoozing the audience with his dulcets, I expected a whitewash. There are a few bad eggs, but we're not racist. We're Aussies! The program c...

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There are also Idols formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other, which I call Idols of the Market Place, on account of the commerce and consort of men there. For it is by discourse that men associate, and words are imposed according to the apprehension of...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVRQK58jrbw You will no doubt be familiar with a fund-raising technique involving people coming to your door and asking for money for one cause or another. No matter how good the cause or how respected and established the cause, the technique se...

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We use a novel method to measure racism at both the individual and the country level. We show that our measure of racism has a strong negative and significant impact on economic development, quality of institutions and education. We then test different hypotheses concerning th...

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I've written about the remarkable phenomenon of reality TV before , but just want to make a quick note of something here. The tweet above would have been unimaginable just a decade ago. I won't say reality TV caused the conditions that made it possible, but one of the things t...

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This post is based on a comment on an article promoting informed consent for experiments. I don't seem to have got a response from the author, so in case others wished to discuss, I thought I'd post it here. While most of the examples used were ones where I would have agreed w...

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I've outlined some of the pathologies of what I call 'vox pop' democracy in various posts from time to time. As Western democracy degrades before our very eyes (President Donald Trump wasn't really imaginable a decade or so ago and is still hard to fully comprehend) we need to...

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In reciting his famous ditty, Henry Higgins offers a comical take on an ancient dilemma. This is a brief postscript to my essay on Care where I rather surprised myself by expounding my take on 'feminist economics' and the ethics of care. There's an inherent tension in feminism...

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An incomplete series of thoughts beginning with a couple of paragraphs suggesting something with grander aspirations - which of course may be realised some day - but not in this blog post. Still I'm heading overseas now, and I'm not sure how the aspirations can be realised, so...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W0d9xMhZbo I wasn't a huge fan of George Michael, though I liked his songs, but I absolutely loved this one. So good to horse around on the dance floor to. When I was in my early 20s I was greatly taken with gay culture. It was a liberation mov...

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Well I came to this passage and thought it was the first thing the World Economic Forum have said in a while that I agree with. "A significant part of the global elite lost the sense of solidarity when it was needed." But of course it was from the head of the WEF, so he couldn...

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Last Friday I attended a speech by the new ABC CEO Michelle Guthrie put on by the New News conference which is always good value and a tribute to the forward-looking energy of Margaret Simons - Melbourne Uni professor of Journalism and frequently practising journalism. Simons...

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I've just posted the first version of the introduction to this post on the first dispatch from the epistemic swamp, but I thought I'd open up the discussion again on a new thread. The tweet above surely highlights different ideas of truth and authenticity. Of course, Trump is...

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Paul Krugman has popularised the notion of the Very Serious People. Very Serious People spend a lot of their time talking about strategy. After all, strategy is the most important, most serious thing you can talk about. After all, when you've got strategy worked out, the rest...

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This essay is the third of three starting with my essay on the Evaluator General in two parts followed by an essay responding to the Productivity Commission's inquiry into competition in human services. Part One A couple of days ago I came upon care ethics via Virginia Held's...

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Part One Note: this post has been superseded by the full essay . A couple of days ago I came upon care ethics via Virginia Held's book The Ethics of Care (2006) with some excitement. The ethics of care grew out of feminism, but I think the issues it raises transcend feminism a...

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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...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="447"] What do we want? Deliberative democracy! When do we want it? NOW!![/caption] This story from this larger study speaks for itself, but is illustrative of some of the themes of my previous post on deliberative democracy. In the spri...

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I haven't read any columns on the gay marriage imbroglio so maybe people have already said all this but … it seems to me that the circumstances now provide the left of centre parties with an opportunity to humiliate their opponents. There's no bigger kill in politics than to b...

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[caption id="attachment_29384" align="alignleft" width="754"] Q: How satisfied are you with the way democracy works in Australia?[/caption] I With democracy now serving the interests of the 1%, the public are disenchanted and finally sending the elites packing - courtesy of th...

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Family Descent as a Signal of Managerial Quality: Evidence from Mutual Funds by Oleg Chuprinin, Denis Sosyura - #22517 (LS) We study the relation between mutual fund managers' family backgrounds and their professional performance. Using hand-collected data from individual Cens...

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Below is an essay by me and Chris Vanstone (Chief Innovation Officer of The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI) published in two parts by The Mandarin. Devoutly confessing that you do not know is better than prematurely claiming that you do Augustine “Mark well tha...

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Apropos of my general theory of bullshit - outlined here - here are a few more straws in the wind. Consistent with the theory, the the signal to ideological noise ratio in political speeches has been falling precipitously lately - at least in the US. This has been interpreted...

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[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...

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I'm wondering why the facts and ideas generated in the abstract below aren't higher up the order of proceedings in such things as teaching the economics of industrial organisation, the economics of information. What Hayekian has focused on this? Pathetic that I've not seen thi...

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Via this great column of Ross Douthat, I came upon this really fine essay on The New Ruling Class . On Googling the author it turned out she is an American who lives in Sydney and works for the CIS. The interview of the articles: [audio mp3="http://clubtroppo.ozblogistan.com.a...

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Effects of the Minimum Wage on Infant Health The minimum wage has increased in multiple states over the past three decades. Research has focused on effects on labor supply, but very little is known about how the minimum wage affects health, including children's health. We addr...

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To a substantial extent the 'left/right' divide is characterised by a common way of seeing the world in which there's self-interest and its opposite - altruism. But I think that impoverishes the debate. I think there's a third category far more important than 'altruism'. To ge...

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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...

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I fantasise about the day when the people who fancy themselves the champions of liberal capitalist democracy - you know the Business Class set - will realise that they are munching through the landscape and, as Schumpeter argued - following Marx - that they were undermining th...

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I just came across this abstract. I have no idea what it means. It's not a 'post-modernist' journal from what I can see, but I still don’t know what it means. I'd like to write more about this, but don't have the time right now, and am still pondering it all, but the abstracti...

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I've talked on Troppo a few times on the joys of ' theming '. Instead of organising the stimulus around a pragmatic search for all the possible ways we could expand the budget implementing all the most prospective in terms of economic expansion per dollar spent down to some le...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iISvNABkToE&feature=youtu.be Here's Paul Krugman giving a commencement address. Eschewing inspiration porn, the talk is kind of what you'd expect. He talks about what it might be like to be a young person starting out at college now compared wit...

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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...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNfGyIW7aHM From BCG's latest set of instructions : In grappling with organization design, company executives tend to draw on two venerable approaches, which can be characterized as the “hard” approach and the “soft” approach. . . . Both approac...

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[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="436"] I knew I could have responded and destroyed them – I could have said, “You’ve asked me a question that demonstrated you have not read our statute. How dare you question what I do?”[/caption] When I was on the Productivity Commissio...

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This post began as a comment on Paul's last comment on my "Mainstream Radical Centrists: Where are they? " column. Paul boiled down his response to this: If you want to have a serious debate about reforms, go to countries that are hurting and that see the need for it. Like the...

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Australia's 'economic miracle' off the back of what might be called the 'reform period' which can be dated fairly neatly from late 1983 and the floating of the dollar to mid 2001 (which, IIRC was the date the ANTS tax reform package was introduced). It came about because peopl...

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What is the meaning of the relief sculpture above? I recall when I was last on the Athenian Acropolis just over a year ago marvelling at the Parthenon, not just its emphatic and sublime beauty but also its strangeness . It's so big and so magnificent. What the hell did this ci...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Some readers will be aware of my distaste for costume drama - films about the past without any serious effort to engage with the difference of the past. It's a crime against Oscar Wilde's great admonition to Bosie. Shallowness is the supreme vice. Anyway, we have two more crim...

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David Brin offers a usefully concise means for distinguishing liberalism from what liberalism became within just a few years from Adam Smith's death - the worship of private property or as Brin puts it "today’s idolatry of personal and family wealth as the fundamental sacramen...

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Are these cartoons racist? I have little doubt they are. They're also cartoons that take a stand against violence against women. I guess they're racist (in a bad way - or in the way that we generally take to be a bad way) because they present people in a very unattractive ligh...

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There's a world of difference between (let's call it) youthful social change seeking in the sixties and immediate post-sixties social and political movements and much social change seeking today. Then the focus was largely on political activism. And 'theory' played a central r...

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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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In an earlier post I argued the case for the 'middleware of democracy' arguing for the inculcation of the (largely social) skills that help constitute collective intelligence. Skills like having some small inkling of how ignorant we all are, listening to those with different o...

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https://youtu.be/4cAHL4LMNlY This observation is hardly a blindingly new insight, but it struck me that the video above is a kind of landmark. Google was the company that was information focused, engineering focused - and pretty good at user experience (UX) and all that stuff...

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I recall when I heard one of Australia's senior economists - a Good Guy IMO - observed that Aboriginal people very rarely drive taxis. It would be easy to portray this as racist. It is racist in the sense that it's making distinctions between people and generalisations about t...

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The great thing in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy . . . A 'character,' as J.S. Mill says, "is a completely fashioned will". William James, The Laws of Habit "Taste" is a word and an idea that comes from another time. But I think it's...

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Henry Ergas offers let's say a bracing perspective on our increased refugee intake which is to say that we should profile refugees to try to screen out those with odious views - many of whom will be Muslims. It's quite compelling. Then again doing so opens a Pandora's box of c...

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https://youtu.be/QZAn7ZEvwek I know nothing of Jeremy Corbyn other than that he's reported to be about to win the leadership of the British Labour Party. The video above was literally the first I'd seen of him. But on looking at it I was struck by the similarity of his intervi...

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One vice of academic discourse is the compulsion to cite authorities for the simplest, most commonsensical banalities ( Gruen, 2010 ). Anyway, for my own notes, I record a good example of this in the opening of a paper on vocational education and training. Teaching and innovat...

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[caption id="attachment_27634" align="aligncenter" width="865"] Tips: The two most important things about a play - seriously really the most most important - are the quality of the play itself - the script - and the acting. Direction is also important. Lighting, sets, costumes...

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https://youtu.be/zs7XEEbQl_s In July last year I gave a talk to a Bitcoin conference and was whisked away (as one sometimes is) to give an interview that would be chopped up into 'grabs' for a doco on bitcoin. The 'uncut' interview (it's lightly cut, not uncut, but it's the fe...

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I followed a link on the site of a complexity theorist I know to this story by Ben Allen on this interesting site (which is mostly about complexity theory). Anyway, this story is not about complexity theory. It's about innocently dropping some kids off in a black neighbourhood...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="620"] Intriguingly there are two substantial permanent monuments to Magna Carta at Runnymede. Both are American. This one was erected by the US Bar Association in 1957.[/caption] I was recently asked to participate in a panel discussion...

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In an earlier post I've talked about how 'performing' government drives a range of pathologies - in the case of the post I was suggesting it generates a kind of soft-secrecy. But it drives other pathologies - like bullshit. I put it thus : Imagine you’re a journalist who has t...

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Hold the presses - Coal may not be good for humanity. OK that was a cheap ideological shot - the kind you might see on our rival ideologically aligned blogs but surely not here at Club Pony. In any event, the graphic above is a remarkable illustration of the long lived effect...

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I've written about the phenomenon of discursive collapse several times on Troppo. The engine behind the phenomenon is the desire of the discipline to get on with what it's been doing - filling out some well recognised and somehow aesthetically pleasing research program. So whe...

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Continued from Part One yesterday. [caption id="attachment_22531" align="alignright" width="404"] Well folks, when I put "Overton Window - Overton Juggernaut" into Google and looked for an image, this came up naturally enough. If the cap fits . . .[/caption] Over the last few...

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Adam Smith put it memorably above. I'll be forever grateful for my time at the Australian Centre for Social Innovation because it has shown me the generality of that statement. Whether Smith intended it or not, it applies not just to business people of the same trade, but to p...

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https://youtu.be/e3e2nNNJ7-4 Regular readers will know of my enthusiasm for the recent movie adaptation of Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth about the disaster that was WWI and how it blighted the lives of a generation. It's opening in Australia today - read my review on the...

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Woolies and its marketers plumb the depths of vileness. Apparently they've taken it down with a delicious non-apology. It "regretted" it had caused offence. File next to corporate pedophilia under "The banality of corporate exploitation". Anyway, it's a worthy subject for a co...

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https://youtu.be/I4dglIt77Tc I expect l ots of Troppodillians will know of Stewart Lee - the guy in the video above - given how good I reckon he is, but I'd never heard of him until, at the beginning of the Easter weekend YouTube noticed I'd been checking comedians out to deci...

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[caption id="attachment_27129" align="aligncenter" width="865"] From this link [/caption] [caption id="attachment_27128" align="aligncenter" width="865"] From this link [/caption]

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I drove for the best part of 11 hours over the last few days giving a Do Lecture (would you believe?) which was fun. In any event I listened to some seriously great radio. Inside the drug court I was riveted by three 50 minute docos on the NSW Drug Court. It really is a traged...

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We've gone from the assumption that there's a necessary tradeoff between efficiency and equity to a state in which it's almost de rigueur to point out the ways in which inequity can harm efficiency with quite some speed. Why even the OECD, while it hands homilies about how 're...

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[caption id="attachment_22531" align="alignleft" width="404"] My one remaining lobster cartoon saved from the flames[/caption] I once drew a whole book of cartoons featuring lobsters in various socially awkward situations. One of my favourites was of a lobster trying to get in...

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Some readers of this blog with know my preoccupation with the shortcomings of Vox Pop Democracy . Here are some aphorisms from David Van Reybrouck who's book Against elections does not appear to have been translated out of Dutch at this stage. They offer some interesting ways...

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HT Paul Monk who cites this as one of his favourite passages. It's now one of mine. And a nice explanation of how easy it is - whether within an organisation or the caverns of one's own riotous psyche - to slip into the pathologies of groupthink and self-deception. Somehow thi...

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Here's yesterday's op ed for the Fin published as Technology education is about more than funding : STEM is all the rage in education – that’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. Part culture war against Australian mediocrity, part cargo cult, a principal goal is more...

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The people at Abbotsford Convent asked me to pen a 'shout' for their fundraising campaign. I'd recently been on a tour of the place, and though I'd been there before and wandered around curiously, on the tour I was transported by a Big Idea, though those who've read my stuff h...

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I've occasionally raised the issue of the class people travel on planes on this blog - and business class as conspicuous consumption. Anyway, I have just been made aware that Yanis Varoufakis's shuttle diplomacy is being done economy class. Good on him. (I'm naturally disposed...

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https://youtu.be/Zw3XfwyWU14 (If this video doesn't work try this one ) When the French and Russian Revolutions occurred, the existing order asserted itself through the intervention of foreign nations. Recognising this, and decrying it is not to endorse either revolution, but...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqoXrjQQ9x8 There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives — wher...

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[O]n the behavioral side, clearly people aren’t perfectly rational — but there are lots of ways to be slightly stupid, and it’s very hard to come up with a general theory about which of these ways they will choose in any given situation. Behavioral economics is a fine thing, b...

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A brief note - with a long appendix - about my recent re-reading of Frankfurt's " On Bullshit " in the writing of a recent post . I remembered the article fondly, but on re-reading it I found it was mostly bullshit - Srsly! It wasn't the most odious of bullshit - which comes w...

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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...

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http://youtu.be/jzG293KCitk I Some readers may recall an earlier post which I christened an 'untheory' of innovation . It argued that there's not much use in 'theories' of innovation if they're taken as recipe books for senior managers to 'drive down' innovation through organi...

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This post is mostly a note to self: Like I keep saying, there's an ecology between public and private goods. This article asks whether smartphones should be used in meetings. That's a question about a cultural rule. It's a public good question. The article however seeks the an...

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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...

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Simon Heffer's High Minds presents us with a portrait of the mid-Victorians in which they consciously set about building the world which became ours. A liberal democratic world. To do so they recognised the need for all sorts of public goods. Those of education and health sure...

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[video width="480" height="360" mp4="http://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/yt1s.com-Christopher-Hitchens-Why-Women-Still-Arent-Funny_360p.mp4"][/video] I have a strange habit of looking for bargain books. Why is this a strange habit? Because it looks awfully like...

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Wendy_Bacon Talk about clamping down on Pub Servants' social media reminds me of how as journos we used to interview them before access to info stopped 10/04/2014 10:09 am This tweet reminds me of something I've pondered for some time. The modern craze for making the implicit...

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https://vimeo.com/90297488 (For the full 27 minute video from which this 6 minute video has been extracted, click here .) Family by Family about which you've heard before is spreading its wings. We've started in Mt Druitt where we've scoped the program investigating how it sho...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Yo5cKRmJaf0 I have almost certainly fulminated in various asides against TED talks on this blog, and even one full on cri de coeur against retail profundification . (I promised one on business class profundification but I...

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This doco is worth watching for its own sake. (Why are media organisations so dumb and unprepared to allow embedding of their videos - given that the vids themselves come with ads that are hard to avoid - but I digress …) What struck me is how different it would be today. The...

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Suicide and Property Rights in India by Siwan Anderson, Garance Genicot - #19978 (DEV) This paper studies the impact of female property rights on male and female suicide rates in India. Using state level variation in legal changes to women's property rights, we show that bette...

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Attentive Troppodillians will recall Rooter , one of Troppo's stable of cars, frequently flown to locations around the world in order for the winners of our comps to to take do a few doughies with it. Now comes the learned journal article on Rooter (pdf). It's a hoax generated...

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I just came across this largely trivial cultural skirmish . Obama said "I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree." In fact from the transcript you can see him, Eddie Maguire like...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNTk29zXl4A OK so you all kind of know this, but I'm going to go out on a limb and just put it out there as one younger member of my family has been heard to say. It's depressing how much stuff is sent our way which repackages what's already in...

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I wrote this column for the Fin at the end of the year only to discover that I was on leave. Anyway, i t was put in this morning's Fin in a slightly edited back form . The original is below. Blogging the Crisis: Enter the bright world ushered in by 2008 George Soros called 200...

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The story so far. Robin Dunbar is arguing that language developed amongst apes as something that could replace grooming in facilitating larger social groups than could be supported by grooming. Adam Smith is lurking in the background with the promise made that there are errie...

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I've just finished reading a book entitled " Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language " (Amazon link - but no pages to view) by Robin Dunbar a 1996 book written in a highly entertaining style for a lay audience. In my ignorance of the field, I found the book highly ente...

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The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself. Daniel Patrick Moynihan In one of my favourite quotes for me a kind of credo R...

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