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

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No-one really knows the most cost-effective treatments for mental ill-health. But among the most promising options right now: take the dog for a walk. Illustration: A cost-effective mental resource takes a break from promoting healthy exercise and lifting spirits ... Meet Otis...

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Most credible researchers believe immigration affects house prices. The questions are: how much, and at what cost? This post aims to establish some baseline facts on the basis of which sensible arguments can be made about immigration and housing. Key points: Academic research...

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Advice for homebuyers and citizens: home-deductibility and housing guarantee schemes both deserve your derisive laughter, whoever backs them. Introductory note: Things move fast in the race to sway the aspiring Australian homebuyer. A few minutes after publishing the first ver...

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Donald Trump is still trying to slash his nation's trade deficit. Australians may recognise this task: we tackled it in the late 1980s, failed, and found that it mattered less than we thought. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7st2oG5AwU?si=7N7nfVCxlmkOcf7D] Video: Don...

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What if we held an Australian broadband crisis and nobody came? That's pretty much what happened in Australian broadband policy over the decade to 2025. Governments, forecasters and the media can all learn lessons from this episode. Illustration: Fibre optic cable in a Telstra...

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As the US presidential election count continues, it becomes increasingly likely that Donald Trump will win. It appears that the majority of Americans believe that Trump is more trustworthy than Kamala Harris on economic issues, and they say that the economy is their principal...

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Cameron Murray’s The Great Housing Hijack is self-recommending. You certainly don’t need a review of any sort to tell you to go read it if you have any interest in the peculiar case of the housing market. Nevertheless, here I supply my own review of sorts and extrapolate on wh...

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

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

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Just a decade ago, Australian labour was easy to find and infrastructure projects were often no-brainers. Now our economic times seem to have changed, resources are constantly sucked up – and policymakers may need to adjust to a new set of rules. The world is always changing,...

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

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

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

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

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

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I always say that political economy is the best (or least worst) lens through which to examine how health systems work. This goes for Medicare, which is far more than a service delivery model and has massive institutional and political import. The recently established 'Strengt...

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

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

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

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

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I’m a Labor voter and I'll do as I've always done at the upcoming election by voting Labor again. Nonetheless… I think there are at least three Labor Party policy pillars that made sense once upon a time but now need overhauling due to their turning counterproductive to labour...

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Looking at Australian politics right now, one thing stands out: the federal ALP has become a little Shorist. That seems like a good idea. The federal ALP has gone a bit Shorist. I don't know how long it will last, or whether it's even a conscious strategy. But it's definitely...

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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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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_35800" align="alignleft" width="2560"] Geoff as I remember him[/caption] As many readers will know, Geoff Harcourt one of Australia's distinguished economists died recently aged 90. Geoff was a good friend of my father's who occasionally stayed at our f...

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

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

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We have a broken process for evaluating costly government investments. The evolving plan for an underground railway through Melbourne's middle suburbs reminds us that we need something better. The Victoria government is currently in the early stages of building what would like...

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

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

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

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

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

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One of economics’ most famous papers – the 1994 minimum wage study by David Card and Alan Krueger – has just won David Card (pictured) half of a Nobel Prize in Economics. The overall reasons for Card's award are well explored here and here and here , and by Card himself here ....

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We've just had an economic experiment of epic proportions and there's really only one conclusion: on house prices, Cameron Murray is as correct as anybody can be about a contested economic issue. Cameron Murray is an all-round interesting thinker whose views at least on some t...

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

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[caption id="attachment_35117" align="alignleft" width="1024"] Melbourne Suburban Rail Link preliminary route[/caption] I spent some time last year planning a piece for a commercial media client about the Melbourne Suburban Rail Loop, a planned underground rail tunnel through...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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The legislated "bargaining" process between Google and News Corp is unmoored from reality. Its "final offer arbitration" is unsuited to the task. [caption id="attachment_34634" align="alignleft" width="300"] He's loaded the gun. (Photo provided by Eva Rinaldi on Flickr; CC BY-...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Note: This post was original published on 6 July 2015; I've updated it several times because both parties keep revisiting a decentralisation agenda. [getty src="587183652" width="509" height="339"] Once again we're hearing the argument that Australia would be a much better pla...

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

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Note: Article expanded on 24 April and again on 27 April. The middle now has more meat. So you can read it again! As Paul Frijters has recently said on this site, many countries will soon ease their restrictions on social isolation. As Paul has been pointing out , we pay a hig...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This article is a follow-up to my recent long piece titled Northern Territory development, debt and deficit - the long and winding road . Urban development ideas are invariably bedevilled by community dissension, much of it uninformed and anything but constructive. However, pa...

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The media debate about last Monday’s NT Budget sure could do with some context and perspective. The Australian ’s Amos Aikman was an honourable exception: Everyone could see this mess coming. You can’t have a mining boom, two new gas plants, a whole lot of federal indigenous s...

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The Financial Services Royal Commission is in theory a general inquiry into the financial system. In practice, however, something else is on trial: Australian regulatory systems. As I set out in my latest column for The CEO Magazine , many of our regulators, including ASIC, AU...

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

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

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

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[caption id="attachment_31852" align="alignleft" width="800"] Actual picture of the Universal Basic Income idea[/caption] In my latest column for The CEO Magazine I take aim at the idea of universal basic income (UBI). The column uses the insights of the always terrific Peter...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The extraordinary outpouring of national happiness following the passage of the same sex marriage legislation on Thursday unavoidably gives rise to the question of whether some similar community consultation/plebiscite/survey mechanism (perhaps a well-designed and secure onlin...

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

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https://youtu.be/uP8juIWScH0

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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 following is a guest post by RHONDA PRYOR , a recently retired senior manager in the Australian aged care sector. We are hoping Rhonda may become a regular contributor to Troppo. If you woke up to read the Government had announced that they have a totally new approach to S...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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[caption id="attachment_31194" align="alignleft" width="640"] Artist's incorrect impression, from the film "Minority Report". In the real future, these autonomous cars would be travelling much closer together, and there would be more of them.[/caption] This month's print and o...

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

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

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

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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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You've heard it a million times: in developed nations, populations are ageing. But what does that mean? At the extremes, it could mean either of two quite different things. It could mean a host of frail elderly people stuck in nursing homes for 20 years, or it could mean a bun...

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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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My latest column at The CEO Magazine asks whether Australia's 3.3 per cent minimum wage increase will cause any job losses . It focuses on a few pieces of research, including a new study of Seattle's minimum wage hike, older work by ALP frontbencher Andrew Leigh, and one of ec...

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

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

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

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

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[getty src="171148424" width="498" height="344"] My column last week for The CEO Magazine reiterates a point made previously at Troppo : the weight of research shows decisively that high marginal tax rates have little effect on the efforts of most high-income earners. Sample q...

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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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In the comments section of my earlier post about hatred of the banks , John Walker (no relation) asked: If the big four did pass on the tax to their customers, do you think the ‘non big four’ banks, building societies etc would grab the chance to be more competitive or grab th...

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Via Andrew Gelman's site , here's a TED talk by US philanthropist Laura Arnold entitled "The Four Most Dangerous Words? A New Study Shows". It details her journey through the world of social, medical, psychological and other research. It's a lively and concise summary of the d...

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

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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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[getty src="483245425" width="507" height="338"] With airport rail links in the news in both Sydney and Melbourne, here's my recent column for The CEO Magazine arguing that most transport systems have higher priorities . Most people seem to love the idea of airport rail links....

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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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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="490"] Rene Descartes eat your heart out: The diagram that changed the world.[/caption] A friend wondered aloud on Facebook what I thought of Doughnut economics pointing me to this article by George Monbiot. My reply is reproduced below,...

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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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An Economic Approach to Alleviate the Crises of Confidence in Science: With an Application to the Public Goods Game by Luigi Butera, John A. List - #23335 (PE) Novel empirical insights by their very nature tend to be unanticipated, and in some cases at odds with the current st...

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Some of you will have seen my article in the Saturday Paper. I can only tease you with 150 words from it here. Then you'll need to read it on the Saturday Paper's site. As the financial crisis continued wreaking its havoc in late 2010, Mervyn King, who, as Governor of the Bank...

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John Clark died yesterday, a very sad day, he will be greatly missed RIP. This is my all time favorite piece of satire. Am sure that troppo can come up with more. https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM

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Well I've been going on and on about it , but here's an academic paper contrasting the free rider problem and opportunity. Knowledge Properties and Economic Policy: A New Look By Antonelli, Cristiano (University of Turin) This paper explores the full range of effects of knowle...

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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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It's been true for some time that all that 'flexibility' everyone said was so important in the labour market was mostly flexibility for bosses. And it was flexibility that raised risks and inconvenience for workers. That's not a knockdown argument against it of course, but it...

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Cross posted from the Mandarin - my response to a tweet from Troppo's man in Geneva. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="550"] Is this a picture of a public good? Well not really, but then it is of the 21st century - or possibly the 22nd - it's too early to tell. I couldn'...

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[getty src="527045000" width="508" height="339"] My latest column for The CEO Magazine looks at how the automation deal is breaking down . Normally the deal in modern economies is that we accept that technological change and automation will screw up a bunch of people's lives,...

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Direct democracy and government size: evidence from Spain By: Carlos Sanz (Banco de España) Direct democracy is spreading across the world, but little is known about its effects on policy. I provide evidence from a unique scenario. In Spain, national law determines that munici...

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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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[getty src="579024746" width="509" height="339"] My latest column for The CEO Magazine looks at Malcolm Turnbull's recent Snowy announcement and asks: isn't there a better way to make infrastructure decisions? The particular process I'd like to see around the Snowy announcemen...

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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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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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When Harry Fired Sally: The Double Standard in Punishing Misconduct , Mark L. Egan, Gregor Matvos, Amit Seru - #23242 (CF LS) Abstract: We examine gender discrimination in the financial advisory industry. We study a less salient mechanism for discrimination, firm discipline fo...

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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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Do Women Ask? Benjamin Artz, Amanda H. Goodall, and Andrew J. Oswald, September 2016 Abstract: Women typically earn less than men. The reasons are not fully understood. Previous studies argue that this may be because (i) women ‘don’t ask’ and (ii) the reason they fail to ask i...

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[caption id="attachment_30174" align="alignleft" width="600"] Melbourne from the Yarra[/caption] My latest column for The CEO Magazine extends my updated Troppo post on decentralisation . As I dug further into the issue for this column, I was startled by the extent to which go...

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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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This is a pretty weak study, but even so, it's certainly pretty plausible that poverty depresses productivity. And the effect could be quite substantial. <irony>Which would explain why business is pretty strongly campaigning to minimise poverty in our society as part of its ov...

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The latest National Accounts release confirms the lack of growth in Australian household incomes. Is this the start of a new era of stagnant incomes? In recent years GDP has continued to increase (save for a small drop at the end of 2016), but household incomes have hardly gro...

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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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Cross posted at the Mandarin There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order ofthings. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under...

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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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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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By Tony Beatton ; Michael P. Kidd ; Stephen Machin ; Dipa Sarkar This paper reports new evidence on the causal link between education and male youth crime using individual level state-wide administrative data for Queensland, Australia. Enactment of the Earning or Learning educ...

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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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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMLt7bSX3iE I In writing a series of essays last year I came to an obvious conclusion. It's perhaps one that others had come to years ago, but then there's something in coming to a conclusion from a position sympathetic to its opposite.[1. As J....

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On completing a consumer survey for the Melbourne Theatre Company. I was intrigued to come upon this table. Which of the following would encourage you to attend the theatre more frequently? (Select all that apply) Free pre/post shows talks with artists Greater variety of produ...

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Do anti-poverty programs sway voters? Experimental evidence from Uganda By: Blattman, Christopher ; Emeriau, Mathilde ; Fiala, Nathan A Ugandan government program allowed groups of young people to submit proposals to start skilled enterprises. Among 535 eligible proposals, the...

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Research Design Meets Market Design: Using Centralized Assignment for Impact Evaluation Date: 2016-12 By: Abdulkadiroğlu, Atila (Duke University) ; Angrist, Joshua (MIT) ; Narita, Yusuke (Yale University) ; Pathak, Parag A. (MIT) Atmospheric pollution was an important side eff...

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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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One of the central contemporary critiques of the industrial revolution was its undermining of crafts and craftsmanship. Today this is happening within the world of ideas. And at least right now, it's looking like this is not a very happy development. This was brought home to m...

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This paper estimates the large array of long-run benefits of an influential early childhood program targeted to disadvantaged children and their families. It is evaluated by random assignment and follows participants through their mid-30s. The program is a prototype for numero...

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Foreign Competition and Domestic Innovation: Evidence from U.S. P atents by David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon H. Hanson, Pian Shu, Gary Pisano Manufacturing is the locus of U.S. innovation, accounting for more than three quarters of U.S. corporate patents. The rise of import com...

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In a recent speech "Who owns a company?", Andy Haldane has this to say: In the earlier period, dividends decreased as often as they increased. This is as we would expect if profits fluctuate both up and down. After 1980, however, we see a one-way street. Dividend payout ratios...

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The Effect of Early Education on Social Preferences by Alexander W. Cappelen, John A. List, Anya Samek, Bertil Tungodden We present results from the first study to examine the causal impact of early childhood education on social preferences of children. We compare children who...

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The well-being or 'happiness' push has been rolling for more than a decade now. Though there were plenty of other voices like Bruno Frey , I date its take-off from around the turn of the 21st century when Richard Layard started cranking up the issue and invoking the ghost of B...

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Cross posted from the Mandarin It is six years since Australia’s Artist Resale Royalty scheme (ARR) commenced and three years since submissions to its Post Implementation Review (PIR) closed, though the review itself has never been published. However, in the absence of a healt...

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The intimidatingly well informed Brad Delong used the following quote from Rosa Luxemburg to bid "good riddance" to Fidel Castro. I don't know enough to agree or disagree, but as I read Luxemburg's words, I wasn't thinking of communism. I was thinking of managerialism. I'm not...

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I gave a talk at the Lowy Institute last Wednesday to which I initially gave a long-winded title "Intellectual Property- Economics, Diplomacy and Australia’s strategic interests" but managed to get more cut-through under the pressure of Twitters 140 character limit "DFAT goes...

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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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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_tZ73VbqCQ&feature=youtu.be Just listen to the list of this guy's activities. Donate here should you wish.

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Valuing Alternative Work Arrangements by Alexandre Mas, Amanda Pallais - #22708 (LS) Abstract: We use a field experiment to study how workers value alternative work arrangements. During the application process to staff a national call center, we randomly offered applicants cho...

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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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Looks quite interesting Is American Pet Health Care (Also) Uniquely Inefficient? by Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Atul Gupta - #22669 (AG HC PE) Abstract: We document four similarities between American human healthcare and American pet care: (i) rapid growth in spending as a s...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqihQNBRsKc Here's a skilful pitch for government dollars. Why shouldn't online appointments with medical health people be funded under Medicare. Why indeed? It's all slickly done as you'd expect from Change.org. These guys have optimised social...

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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="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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I've been arguing that our current approach to efficient regulation is blockheaded for as long as I can remember. I've even pointed out how one might possibly do quite a lot better with a less ideologically Manichean approach in which regulatory policy is a battle between Good...

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This is a reworking of an earlier post - but reworked with Chief Innovation Officer of The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI), Chris Vanstone, there's quite a bit of new content for those who are interested. Cross posted at The Mandarin . There's also the intervie...

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Who Should Own and Control Urban Water Systems? Historical Evidence from England and Wales by Brian Beach, Werner Troesken, Nicola Tynan - #22553 (DAE HE PE) Abstract: Nearly 40% of England's privately built waterworks were municipalised in the late 19th century. We examine ho...

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Growing Apart, Losing Trust? The Impact of Inequality on Social Capital There is a widespread perception that trust and social capital have declined in United States as well as other advanced economies, while income inequality has tended to increase. While previous research ha...

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Unintended Consequences of Rewards for Student Attendance: Results from a Field Experiment in Indian Classrooms by Sujata Visaria, Rajeev Dehejia, Melody M. Chao, Anirban Mukhopadhyay - #22528 (CH DEV ED) In an experiment in non-formal schools in Indian slums, a reward scheme...

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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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Available here . by David Figlio, Paola Giuliano, Umut Ozek, Paola Sapienza - #22541 (CH ED LS POL) We use remarkable population-level administrative education and birth records from Florida to study the role of Long-Term Orientation on the educational attainment of immigrant...

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I'm pleased to see Jason Potts tweeting "Blogs are still a thing. This one I just came across is the thingest. It's like @slatestarcodex, but for econ & tech artir.wordpress.com". As a result of tweeting back my 2009 post on Blogging the crisis , I re-read it. Sometimes I'm su...

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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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One for the Clever Country culture warriors The Economic Impact of Universities: Evidence from Across the Globe by Anna Valero, John Van Reenen - #22501 (ED LS) Abstract: We develop a new dataset using UNESCO source materials on the location of nearly 15,000 universities in ab...

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The PC has a two-stage reference on increasing the application of competition, contestability and informed user choice in the provision of human services. The first stage will identify the most prospective areas for the application of such principles whilst the second will tel...

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Income inequality is associated with stronger social comparison effects: The effect of relative income on life satisfaction , Cheung, Felix; Lucas, Richard E. Abstract Previous research has shown that having rich neighbors is associated with reduced levels of subjective well-b...

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Persistent Social Networks: Civil War Veterans who Fought Together Co-Locate in Later Life by Dora L. Costa, Matthew E. Kahn, Christopher Roudiez, Sven Wilson - #22397 (AG DAE HE) Abstract: At the end of the U.S Civil War, veterans had to choose whether to return to their prew...

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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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Economics is famous for its idea - it's better to call it a methodological assumption of some economics - that self-interest is what drives people. But something just as evident about people - and much more unique to our species - is people's tendencies to form stable patterns...

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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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Sanjiv Erat1, Uri Gneezy1 We investigate whether piece-rate and competitive incentives affect creativity, and if so, how the incentive effect depends on the form of the incentives. We find that while both piece-rate and competitive incentives lead to greater effort relative to...

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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'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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From a quick squiz at their report, the PC seems to have done an excellent job on the question of IP. It didn't put too much effort distorting its recommendations to somehow second guess what was politically palatable and just set out the appropriate principles and their upsho...

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As a long-term resident of Darwin, where you can drive from anywhere in the metropolitan area to just about anywhere else in not much more than 25 minutes (even in the peak hour such as it is), it always takes me a couple of days to get used to the traffic snarls of Sydney and...

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Part Two of my essay on the way of looking at the world I've worked out over the last few years and published on Evonomics can be found here . So many years, so few words :( Part one of this essay showed how two dimensions of free riding define what we call “public goods” – th...

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Chris Lloyd's comment on my previous Uber post prompt some further thoughts that I think merit a separate post. Chris said: “If you want to make a living off of Uber, you’re going to have to drive an insane number of hours.” I am surprised that Uber cannot offer cheaper fares...

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Lateral Economics has had occasion to compile a list of free, freemium and cheap services to help run your one person micro or several person small business. I post it here for your interest and because it may be useful to you. The latest service I discovered to my delight was...

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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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"There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them." George Orwell Paul Krugman as ever had the right expression. An intellectual crackup. Just in the 1930s when it was becoming obvious that communism, if it was to liberate humanity was certainly goin...

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The Effect of Single-Sex Education on Academic Outcomes and Crime: Fresh Evidence from Low-Performing Schools in Trinidad and Tobago by C. Kirabo Jackson Abstract: In 2010, the Ministry of Education in Trinidad and Tobago converted 20 low-performing pilot secondary schools fro...

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Cross posted at The Mandarin In the first part of this essay , I elaborated on evidence-based policymaking and service delivery, pointing to all manner of pathologies that must be dealt with to deliver something effective. The way in which KPIs distort reporting and can perver...

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Here's the first of a two part essay on evidence based policy published today in the Mandarin . This part is a slightly gussied up version of a Troppo post from a month ago . The long-awaited second part will follow. Calling for policy to be more ‘‘evidence-based” rolls off th...

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The Coalition government’s Budget plan for internships for the long-term unemployed was instantly condemned by the trade union movement and the ALP, but given qualified support by at least some social welfare groups. Internships potentially provide a path for the long-term une...

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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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The Long-term Consequences of Teacher Discretion in Grading of High-stakes Tests by Rebecca Diamond, Petra Persson This paper analyzes the long-term consequences of teacher discretion in grading of high-stakes tests. Evidence is currently lacking, both on which students receiv...

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Following innovations in the UK and New Zealand, some of Australia's more forward looking State governments are looking at two related innovations. The first is 'social investment' with social impact bonds leading the vanguard. Social impact bonds As Wikipedia tells us, a soci...

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Below is a link to my first article on a new alternative economics website - Evonomics - which has only been going fror a short period of time. It's pretty nicely set out and emerged out of the evolution institute . The guy who started it - Robert Kadar - is intellectually gre...

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Though wildly tendentious, this piece by Monbiot is an excellent spray against neoliberalism, a subject with which your correspondent has a vexed relation. I used to describe myself as a neoliberal, but now I'm afraid due to a mixture of distaste at its excesses and the extent...

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Last night I attended the launch of Creative State which was the culmination of over a year of engagement between the Victorian Government and the arts community. It involved a taskforce or some such and an Expert Reference Group - on which I sat. Anyway the Minister was very...

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

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Below the introduction to a piece in The Mandarin today . We shoot the breeze about who’ll win the next election or footy match. Virtually none of it helps predict the future. But we’re driven on … as if somehow it will. We do it with the economy. People ask economists how the...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="400"] A stupid diagram - the kind of thing we can't get enough of here at ClubTroppo. And remember "Reflect, revise and Improve". That's RRI - capiche?. In short, you can't get enough RRI. In fact you should be doing it now! Reflect, Re...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo2cP0j5lYk Your correspondent was once very rude about one of Australia's better institutions though now rather complacent - the Reserve Bank - pointing out in 2012 that making it's most important decisions (to set the overnight cash rate) each...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzvOjcGifOM The post below is a guest post from a fine person who is a friend of mine. Sonia Ben Ali,, Co-founder and Executive Director of the international NGO, Urban Refugees. It's a pretty fledgeling organisation with a remarkably important...

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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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I was at a PC function yesterday on 'disruptive technology' and said, in a rather crabby way, that I'd been talking about the significance of informing consumers about the quality of products for a long, long time and now, it's only when people can actually see Uber and Airbnb...

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Bargaining over Babies: Theory, Evidence, and Policy Implications by Matthias Doepke, Fabian Kindermann - #22072 (CH EFG) It takes a woman and a man to make a baby. This fact suggests that for a birth to take place, the parents should first agree on wanting a child. Using newl...

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Racial Sorting and the Emergence of Segregation in American Cities by Allison Shertzer, Randall P. Walsh - #22077 (DAE LE) Abstract: Residential segregation by race grew sharply in the United States as black migrants from the South arrived in northern cities during the early t...

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Disruptive Change in the Taxi Business: The Case of Uber Abstract In most cities, the taxi industry is highly regulated and utilizes technology developed in the 1940s. Ride sharing services such as Uber and Lyft, which use modern internet-based mobile technology to connect pas...

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[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500"] This chart is for the UK though the graph for the whole of the developed countries looks similar. If updated for the most recent times it would be gradually trending up by now, but not in any danger of returning to anywhere near...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDZadLhTMoc I recall when working as a staffer for the Hawke/Keating government, how Labor staffers wore their disdain - bordering on contempt - for the Democrats with the same kind of pride that economic rationalists had for their own disdain f...

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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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I don't stay on top of many of the latest issues. After all, they're complicated, time is limited, so I'll just satisfy myself with starting, largely ideological reactions (and of course not opine too strongly given my state of ignorance) about any number of public issues. Is...

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Abstract : National policies take varied approaches to encouraging university-based innovation. This paper studies a natural experiment: the end of the "professor's privilege" in Norway, where university researchers previously enjoyed full rights to their innovations. Upon the...

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This is a note to myself. It's from the report of the NDIS Citizen's Jury Scorecard . However, in a way that speaks for itself, it may be of interest to Troppodillians. It's an illustration of professional obfuscation and indifference to those in their care. (Of course lots of...

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Way back in the 1980s and 90s when I was a Labor "apparatchik" and then for a short time a local politician in the Northern Territory, the Opposition of which I was a part was for a time led by Brian Ede. He married Anne Walsh a daughter of arch neoliberal Federal Labor Minist...

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Federal Liberal backbencher Dr Dennis Jensen is a right wing MP with views not unlike those of his colleague Corey Bernardi. He "distinguished" himself this week in Parliament with a diatribe about Indigenous communities supposedly living a ‘noble savage’ lifestyle: “I put it...

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Peter Shergold's report on learning from mistakes is out. It advises on how to avoid the mistakes of the Pink Batts fiasco (He was asked to do this by a government that, pretty obviously, wasn't the slightest bit interested in learning from its or anyone else's mistakes. I exp...

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This is commonsense, but fortunately less crude economic methodology than has been pursued hitherto seems to be uncovering it: Abstract : A strong tradition in economic history, which primarily relies on qualitative evidence and statistical correlations, has emphasized the imp...

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Regulation has a special place in the heart of this blog and superannuation is a particular fave. I've offered some connoisseurship of Self Managed Super Fund regulation in the past . I could say that this takes the cake, but really it's just pretty par for the course. It's ce...

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[caption id="attachment_31159" align="alignright" width="444"] A nice illustration of how the economy is for Dad. Google for images of "the economy" and see how many women turn up.[/caption] I haven't the time to write this up, right now, though I'd like to, but here's my firs...

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Childhood Environment and Gender Gaps in Adulthood by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Frina Lin, Jeremy Majerovitz, Benjamin Scuderi - #21936 (CH ED LS PE) We show that differences in childhood environments play an important role in shaping gender gaps in adulthood by documenti...

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My forward to Deloitte's second report on digital money - The future of exchanging value: Cryptocurrencies and the trust economy. Exchanging value Ice becomes water when warmed. Only familiarity prevents us from marvelling at the mysteriousness of this ‘phase change’, as physi...

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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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Double for Nothing? Experimental Evidence on the Impact of an Unconditional Teacher Salary Increase on Student Performance in Indonesia by Joppe de Ree, Karthik Muralidharan, Menno Pradhan, Halsey Rogers - #21806 (CH DEV ED LS PE) Abstract: How does a large unconditional incre...

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