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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Setting appointments I'll be attending in London next week on Google Calendar has reminded me of a problem that online calendars haven't sorted out - at least to my satisfaction (or perhaps knowledge); how to handle appointments when there are differences between time zones. I...

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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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As some may have noticed, I've been musing of late about the likely future social and economic effects of the increasingly rapid and interconnected development of ICT, artificial intelligence and robotics. This article is a bit silly in some respects but makes some useful poin...

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

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https://youtu.be/JIw8CQB8prg People may know of Ray Kurzweil. I first saw him at a conference in Melbourne where he was introduced as the greatest thing since sliced bread (an introduction he'd clearly had a hand in writing or authorising) and kept talking about how great he w...

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Here are a few gripes about really stupid things. I'm back to Android (the new LG built Nexus 5X) and much happier than with my iPhone. But why (oh why) when you press and hold the 'on/off' switch and the 'power off' option appears, does it appear as the only option? Why don't...

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

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https://vimeo.com/136778702 Above is a panel discussion on the sharing economy with Jim Minifie, Ian Harper and me. There was a lot of good feedback on it after the event, so I was pleased to see it up on the Grattan website.

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From a recent column for the AFR . The report can be downloaded here . Earlier this year our Treasurer, Joe Hockey, led the G20 Finance Ministers to pledge lifting GDP by 2 percent over ‘business as usual’ over the next five years. It’s a big win for the Treasurer, but how can...

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

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

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

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I'm doing some research for a talk I'm giving in New Zealand to heads of private schools - the invitation for which came from a similar talk I gave to the Australian Heads of Independent Schools Association. I'm sruiking the wonders of education 2.0 about which I've waxed and...

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

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

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

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As in part one of this series, I'm thinking about an idea that seems very possible, extremely interesting and well accepted, but which has little going for it in terms of observed evidence. The idea today is societal collapse. The premise is simple. Human societies are very co...

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

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

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AKA, "Follow ups no-one asked for". Last year I spent some idle time doing some rough work to see if ethnic and religious populations[1] were more clustered in Sydney than in Melbourne - presumably due to geographical factors. This was done by calculating Gini coefficients and...

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The 21st was supposed to be the age of flying cars, teleporters and affordable space travel, says David Graeber . But now here we are in the future still arguing about overcrowded trains and the price of petrol. David Graeber feels cheated: Where ... are the flying cars? Where...

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First it was David Brooks' Harold and Erica . Now it's the Obama campaign's Julia . Harold, Erica and Julia are all fictitious characters born into a perpetual present. They live and grow old in a world that doesn't change. As Michael Shear at the New York Times writes : At ag...

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At the Lowy Interpreter Sam Roggeveen speculates about the possibility of a company (particularly Apple) buying a country. There has been at least on fictional treatment of a corporation taking over a country in John Brunner's wonderful 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar . It is bas...

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Sometimes the words I type into Google's search box are the words I want to appear in the results. For years now I've been using the '+' operator to ensure that every result includes a particular term. But recently, without warning, it stopped working . Fortunately Google have...

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Like Paul Krugman part of what originally drew me into Economics was the premise behind Asimov's Foundation books. This premise was a far future where a discipline had managed to formalise and model human society, shed light on what would happen and create preconditions for a...

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Well the ABC God bless its cotton socks can't quite bring itself to mount videos that can be embedded elsewhere - or I can't see a way to do it, but they did a great story on Kaggle tonight - so I thought I'd post it here. Just click here and all will be revealed. Update: some...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsLBuCp23QA&feature=player_embedded

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Yes, folks it's Benford's Law - from Kaggle's website . One fun aspect of working with real data is that you get to observe real-life phenomenon. For example, Benford's Law (also known as the "first-digit law") states: "in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sou...

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Disclaimer: This ended up roughly 4500 words longer than I expected when I sat down. A while ago, following the start of the Arab Spring, John Quiggin wrote a post declaring " Fukuyama, F*** Yeah ". Apart from showcasing an appreciation of both late 20th century political thou...

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A warning, this is pretty much a shaggy dog story. A while ago I had an idle thought about migrant settlement patterns. If there was a slight tendency amongst Chinese Australians to settle in ways that reflected subnational cultures from China (I was prompted by the Sydney sub...

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This post is merely two additions to previous posts, neither of which warranted a post on their own. The first relates to this post from September where I talked about the idea of realtime mapping of bus services using GPS data. Better people than I had the same idea and, thro...

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Given it's still the offseason, I thought we might want to revisit an passtime of a previous time. When I was a child in the 90s, during the Keating era, there was a fairly pointless question (they never bothered to actually debate it); Is Australia part of Asia? Whilst the qu...

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Here is a story about the internet working the way tech utopians think it should. Technology is as good or as bad as the social conditions of which it is a part, but this is one of the good stories. It can be read either as a perfect example of self interest working well in th...

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This post is what I would have written as a comment on Nicholas’s post Listen2Learners: 1 but it got a bit big. So is this post. The following lines of his post sparked my attention I impressed upon Peter the extent to which the online world of web 2.0 is one in which people a...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHlN21ebeak

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Strange things happen when you check the links on your site. Proceeding from a nice statement of classical liberal principles to the Mont Pelerin Society we find The Winners of the 2010 Hayek Essay Contest . And the winner is...Toby Evans of Australia. Whoever he is, you can p...

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Saturday 11 to Wed 15, 10 am to 5 in the Great Hall . My treasures: all in practically "as new" condition. Peter Medawar, Pluto's Republic (not a missprint). $3. Review . The editor of the Age Monthly Review would not let me write that the cover photo depicted Medwar demonstra...

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Doctor Labyrinth, like most people who read a great deal and who have too much time on their hands, had become convinced that our civilization was going the way of Rome. He saw, I think , the same cracks forming that had sundered the ancient world, the world of Greece and Rome...

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The other day I was at Toby's Estate's Wooloomooloo outlet when I became inordinately interested in the menu pricing. From my notes (I did mean inordinately) : Short Black/Ristretto : $2.20 Long Black/Piccolo Latte : $3.00 Latte/Flat White/Cappuccino : $3.50 Here's my puzzleme...

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Toby Huff in Max Weber and the Methodology of the Social Scienes (Transaction Books, 1984) suggested that the philosophy of science that Weber was reading read at the turn of the century was in better shape than the positivism that took off later under the inspiration of Mach,...

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Mark Blaug (1937- ) was born in the Netherlands, raised in the US and became a naturalised Briton in 1982. He made far reaching contributions to a range of topics in economic thought. In addition to work on the economics of art and the economics of education, he is best known...

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Tim Blair reports on Yvonne Ridley the British journalist who converted to Islam after being kidnapped by the Taliban who has won a case for unfair dismissal against the Islam News Channel. Earlier in the year she won nearly £14,000 in damages after winning a four-year unfair...

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Peter Boettke has written a piece to introduce the main elements of Austrian economics in ten points . The Science of Economics Proposition 1: Only individuals choose. Proposition 2: The study of the market order is fundamentally about exchange behavior and the institutions wi...

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In view of the current financial crisis it may be interesting to revisit the work of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) . His first major work in 1912 was on money and credit. A sleeping giant of the 20th century, for many decades he was the spine of the Austrian school of economics...

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After the Menzies administration was voted out during World War 2 and the Curtin-led ALP took over there was a suggestion to have a Government of National Unity so the best talent on both sides of the house could be applied directly to the desperate issues at hand. Curtin reje...

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This is one for Don Arthur, maybe you can help to work out where John Gray is coming from these days and what happened since the time he was a fan of Thatcherism and the New Right. Somewhere along the road he decided that he could no longer support liberalism because it provid...

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Photo by yellowrubberduck on Flickr Nicholas Gruen mentioned many moons ago an idea for a useful feature for Club Troppo. Apparently Crikey used to run an occasional roundup of interesting publications from thinktanks and other more academic sources, but subsequently discontin...

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My daughter has a dilemma! Should she replace her aging iPod nano with a new generation iPod nano or with an iPod Touch. I'd heard that Apple were producing an iPhone without the phone but I'd not watched the promo until my anxious daughter showed it to me. Watching it you can...

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It has been over 7 years since Judge Jackson issued his order for Microsoft to be broken up into an applications and a operating system business. Due to various complications , that never came to pass. But what if it had? What would the computer world look like today? The brea...

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Compared with a few hundred years ago the world works incredibly, almost miraculously well. But do you think of something really simple that you wonder why it isn't being done? I planned to compile a list of ten really simple things that should be done which were obvious (at l...

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