Psychology Professor Michael Inzlicht has a confession to make . He’s been peddling shoddy wares – his words. And he's feeling quite bad about the whole thing. The work wasn’t just intellectually weak. It did real harm. Though his own proposals to popularise his ideas were kno...

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

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David Tiley was one of the early generation of bloggers in Australia, starting in 2003, approximately the same time as I started. I first met him at a blogging meet-up in St Kilda (where David lived) in about 2005. Blogging was much more social in those days, and there were fr...

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As longstanding readers will know, I was one of the founders of Troppo along with Nicholas Gruen and several others including Mark Bahnisch and Don Arthur. The latter two moved on to other things (Don was a research at the Federal Parliamentary Library last time I heard, a rol...

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Adolf never had much time for planet sensible. Here he is after the Reichstag fire with fellow traveller Sefton Delmer who was Berlin correspondent for the "Daily Express" from 1928 to 1933, To the left of Hitler: August Wilhelm of Prussia. In the middle of the picture, half h...

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https://youtube.com/shorts/_XXLgZ8rYew?si=i8EWpLRcHJ3-rpjF I recently took my son to the stage play of Yes, Prime Minister. … The decades have made a huge difference in the sensibility of the new production … . The series ran through most of the 1980s, a period that contained...

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https://youtu.be/6uPex480hRU Above is the video of a presentation I made at NESTA in London on 15th November with discussants Claire Mellior and Martin Wolf. I reproduce (AI generated) timestamps in the shownotes of the video below. 00:00 - Introduction and Overview The talk b...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aupVJkTnIqY This is one of the best podcast interviews we’ve done. We discuss Peter Heather’s marvellous book “Christendom: the triumph of a Religion”. It covers the thousand years from the time Christianity becomes embedded in the Roman Empire,...

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https://youtu.be/aBTFQ6wwlq8 The more I've thought about sortition or as I call it "representation by sampling" the more profound I find the ways it differs from representation by election. The latter is inherently competitive and performative and both these things tend to und...

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One way to get beneath the surface of what's going on is to read people who were writing about issues, as they emerged rather than in more modern times when they’d become the norm and become infused in our commonsense. I was browsing in one of the few remaining second-hand boo...

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

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As part of my recent fascination with competitive and ‘de-competitive’ merit selection, I’ve been looking at the origins of both parliamentary and presidential elections. Intriguingly though we now associate elections with competition between candidates, in both the British pa...

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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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https://youtu.be/gYKPWkvTRIg I What is it with James Burnham? I associate him — via Curtis Yarvin — with the alt-right. And Burnham is the founding text of what I call the Alt-centre (of which I am the founder and which I'm hoping to parlay into world domination if only I can...

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

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Question: Given that history repeats, what year is this? Fifteen months ago, when Donald Trump’s rag-tag militias stormed the Capitol building in Washington D.C., I thought for a moment we might be living in 1923, witnessing the rebirth of western fascism. Such were the simila...

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

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[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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This is an essay I wrote in 2005 and published in Eureka St which I don't think I've published on Troppo, and since it's my journal of record, I'm now doing so. Throughout last year we commemorated the 125th anniversary of the climax and end game of Ned Kelly’s life, from the...

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Czesław Miłosz is a Polish writer and Nobel Laureate who first came to Western attention in the early 1950s with the publication of The Captive Mind one of the earliest exposes of the nightmare of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe following WWII. He had not been in the Commu...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpKGzulGikQ Reading the publicity for this new book I remembered a name — pathologist Colin Manock — thinking it had been at the centre of some deliberations here some time ago. I was right — it had . I reproduce the relevant column from the arc...

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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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A major theme in our book " the Great Covid Panic " (now also on Kindle !) is how a whole layer of politicians, medical advisers, and opportunistic business people grabbed the opportunity for more power and money during the lockdowns of 2020-2021. We detail how they did it and...

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

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I have been a utilitarian for about 30 years now and am seen in my academic work as an extreme version of the genre. I did my Phd on the topic . I do not merely say that governments should make policy for the benefit of the wellbeing of the population, but have spent years in...

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Dear Troppodillians, lend me your critical eye. I ask you to consider the system of citizen-jury appointments I have in mind, and tell me how the vested interests would try to game it, ie why it would not work and whether the system can be improved. Bear with me as I describe...

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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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My father Fred was born Fritz Heinz Georg Grün to a family living at Reisnerstrasse 5, Vienna on 14th June, 1921 making today the centenary of his birth. Accordingly I'm reposging a speech I gave at the unveiling of the portrait of him by his good friend Erwin Fabian in Hay co...

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Wellbeing science has behaved very honourably during this pandemic in my opinion, particularly in the UK, where many of the best-known wellbeing researchers openly pointed to the disproportionate costs of lockdowns compared to their (dubious) benefits . Many stood up in newspa...

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

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

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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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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6qmdqvItkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTaw6oQmRdM No folks, that is not a joke. Listening to it on occasion over the years, I've grown fond of the New Zealand National Anthem. The tune is classic national anthem. That is to say it manages...

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I am co-writing a book on the Great Panic to explain what happened and what can be done to avoid a repeat. In the course of our research for that book, me and co-authors are scouring websites in the rest of the world to find out how others in the Covistance have experienced th...

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[caption id="attachment_34828" align="aligncenter" width="2560"] I put in "Getting to the point" on the marvellous free graphics site Unsplash , and up came this: by salvatore ventura [/caption] Just in case people aren't sick of my extracts from SZ. I liked this. It very much...

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I continue listening to Stefan Zweig's description of the disasters of the twentieth century a passage of which I'll reproduce below. My big essay on the Productivity Commission's Draft Indigenous Evaluation Strategy represented a bit of intellectual progress for me. As I wrot...

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I've been listening to The World of Yesterday , the memoirs Stefan Zweig. Zweig was probably the best-known author in 1930s Europe and produced a mountain of material. Essays, fiction, history, poetry, translations, you name it. Today few know of him, though that may be differ...

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Writing about sortition, equality and merit, I spent a good part of today reading the last chapter of a book I read a decade or so ago on the relationship John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had in their dotage – including jumping in and out of references and checking up for insta...

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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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I have just finished reading Tyler Stovall 's White Freedom and this post is to recommend it wholeheartedly. I first became aware of it on Marshall Poe’s excellent New Books Network via this podcast . A striking fact about the political thought in the 18 th -century is the way...

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Together with Benno Torgler and Katharina Gangl, I published a piece recently on how to tax the powerful and sophisticated. Our substantive argument on what one should do becomes relatively simple once you understand what happened in the world of Western taxation the last 50 y...

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Guess which crackpot started his article on covid in that notorious right-wing publication 'The Guardian' with the sentence "The virus has been used as a pretext in many countries to crush dissent, criminalise freedoms and silence reporting"? It's that obvious conspiracy-nutte...

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[caption id="attachment_34619" align="alignleft" width="1600"] From Encyclopaedia Brittanica: " Australian ballot: Voters participating in the secret ballot, or Australian ballot, system in the British general elections of April 17, 1880. Hulton Archive[/caption] Though I have...

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In 2005 I did my first economic projections of the major powers (published in a textbook ) and concluded from the trends then that China would have a larger economy in purchasing power terms than the US in 2017, which is exactly what happened. In 2012, I wrote about the inevit...

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While the hysteria marches on here in Europe, an interesting economics article came out in a decent journal on the political economy of that mass hysteria. Their abstract: In this article, we aim to develop a political economy of mass hysteria. Using the background of COVID-19...

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I am all for effective vaccines and have been impressed with how fast vaccines have been developed against covid, but I never expected them to be the wonder weapons some promised them to be. After all, the yearly new vaccines against the flu never eradicated the flu but reduce...

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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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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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Those interested in my article on Polanyi might be interested in the chapter of Peter Drucker's memoirs on the Polanyis. An amazing lot whom he introduces thus: The Polanyis – father and children – were the most gifted family I have ever known or heard of. They were also the m...

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The animosity between the Chinese and Australian authorities is heating up, so we Westerners need to understand some of Chinese culture and politics. I do not have all the answers, but some 10 years of working and teaching on China have taught me about three traits that I hope...

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

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

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A group of senior medical scientists have gotten together to pen an open petition to governments and society, calling for a herd immunity approach to the coronavirus. Signatories already include over 3000 "Medical & Public Health Scientists", 4000 "Medical Practitioners", and...

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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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I've mentioned Edward Broughton numerous times on this blog , a man of great humanity who responded to the plight of the Jewish internees who were at his command. A quick snippet from one of the grateful internees. So far I've read it on each occasion at the three dinners I’ve...

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One can tell many stories of how current times resemble some earlier historical period. The conflict between nationalism and internationalism, as personified by the controversies surrounding Brexit and Trump, has been seen as somewhat of a re-run of the conflict between fascis...

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Till 20 year ago, IQ scores in the West increased about 3 points per decade ever since the 1920s, a phenomenon known as the “Flynn effect”. That rise in IQ test scores, which have an average of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, was attributed to improved schooling, improved...

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[Bottom line: the conflicting forces now being created in the UK and Australia are truly frightening.] The UK government has just announced a nationwide return of one of the most destructive elements of lock downs: mandatory social isolation. Gatherings of more than 6 people a...

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

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

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

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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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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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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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Find below the video of a seminar for the Australian Institute for Progress done a few weeks ago detailing the basic cost-benefit view of the current pandemic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TS2DE-D1TA The slides of this presentation are here: Presentation CBA Covid May 2020...

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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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Here at Clubtroppo, we have been saying for well over a month now that a quick look at the economic damage and the health damage of the responses to the corona virus tells you they dwarf the possible benefits of suppressing the virus, anywhere in the West. This has lead to the...

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How much unhappiness is created by the unemployment of millions of people in Western countries (mainly N-Am +Europe) caused by the corona panic? How much unhappiness has been created due to the vast expansion of loneliness and physical inactivity? And in terms of the tradeoff...

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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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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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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 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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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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They got him! It cost millions of dollars in legal fees, and involved multiple trials, settlements, and dismissal of the worst charges, but they convicted Harvey Weinstein. A bit like a buck who is taken down by a pack of wolves might receive the killing bite from a different...

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[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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Well as economists and physicists have been known to say, something that cannot go on forever eventually ceases to go on. I learned last night that Erwin Fabian who was a good friend of my father in the camps from 1940 to 1944 (I think) when they were released into the 8th Emp...

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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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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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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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Universalists dream of a world empire in which a world government works to solve global problems, enforcing the same law all over the world. There are many different ideologies that envision a world government, ranging from international socialism, to the brotherhood of Islam,...

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

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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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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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There is a widespread consensus in Australian policy circles that Australia should follow the US in almost any foreign adventure, though preferably on the cheap. The shining example of this was John Howard’s decision to publicly support the US in its war in Iraq in 2003, and y...

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

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

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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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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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As I predicted a few months ago , the US security apparatus is going after China relentlessly, mainly in order to have something to do. As I predicted in 2012, Australia is firmly behind the US and the wider Western alliance that will eventually form a block against China. The...

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

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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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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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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKy7ljRr0AA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWHYJpJcLcU

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

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[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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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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[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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With Neville having died last week, I'm reposting this to the front page on the dayof his funeral which is being held at Olympic Park where a statue of Peter Norman standing on the dais stands. NG We were thrilled at midnight last night to discover that Neville Sillitoe receiv...

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In all ways that we measure these things, physical violence has reduced in Western countries in the last 70 years, particularly mainland Western Europe. What about psychological violence though? Psychological violence, ie the inflicting of mental pain, takes many forms. It inc...

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

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Humanity is at a high point. What our ancestors dreamed of is slowly becoming a reality: a world without hunger in which the vast majority of mankind live peaceful and long lives. We are not there yet, but in Europe, East Asia, Latin America, and even in Africa (our cradle), m...

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

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[caption id="attachment_31685" align="aligncenter" width="1000"] "Arrival" by Brett Whiteley, painted for the Bicentennial celebrations of the arrival of the First Fleet on 26 January 1788[/caption] We’re a weird mob, we Australians, even weirder than we were in 1957 when John...

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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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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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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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[expanded from the post on JohnMenadue] When Bitcoin went public in 2009 it introduced to the world of finance and economics the technology of blockchain. Even the many who thought Bitcoin would never make it as a major currency were intrigued by the BlockChain technology and...

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

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

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

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[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="562"] These soldiers are at war. The Western Front, Christmas day, 1914.[/caption] Selection by lot is a simple idea, so it's not surprising that it can be useful in many situations. Whenever I see institutional dysfunction or idiocy,...

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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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I've known Dennis Glover since we were both staffers in Parliament during the Hawke-Keating years (I was there in 1981, 83-4 and 1991-3 until just after the 'sweetest victory of all' in 1993 which with hindsight I wish John Hewson had won as it would have kept in-tact Australi...

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[caption id="attachment_30982" align="alignleft" width="600"] The massed battalions of The Oz were quickly brought up to the front[/caption] Many hundreds of hours ago now, our foreign affairs community and parts of our media were consumed by the North Korean ICBM emergency. H...

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

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I happened upon this yesterday and thought it might be of interest to readers here. THE next few months may decide not only whether we are to survive as a nation, but whether we deserve to survive. As yet none of our achievements prove it, at anyrate in the sight of the outer...

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Reg ular readers may know of my fondness for the recent film of Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, so I was intrigued to come upon this fantastic book on the subject. I say 'book' because in many ways this is how I think books should be written. It's written on a Wordpress bl...

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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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Ruthi, a young girl in internment: by Melinda Mockridge and Ruth Simon Ruth Simon, née Gottlieb, can still remember what it was like to live in an internment camp, behind barbed wire at Tatura during the Second World War. Ruth, now in her late 70s was transported aboard the Qu...

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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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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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Can War Foster Cooperation? by Michal Bauer, Christopher Blattman, Julie Chytilova, Joseph Henrich, Edward Miguel, Tamar Mitts - #22312 (DEV PE POL) Abstract: In the past decade, nearly 20 studies have found a strong, persistent pattern in surveys and behavioral experiments fr...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF-ejjtxpeE The biggest sporting thrill of my life came when Muhammed Ali managed to bamboozle the monster George Foreman to regain the world title that had been wrongly taken from him for his stand against the Vietnam war in the 1960s. What an...

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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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From the High Court , 2002 Barrister Geoffrey Johnson: Well, your Honour, if it is of assistance, the practice in the Federal Court…has been to call the applicant by the assigned name. Guadron, J.: The assigned name? Johnson: Well, there is an assigned, I think probably random...

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As you can see from the above image, the Daily Telegraph revived John Howard's History Wars the other day. Indeed they even disinterred Howard's favourite undead RWNJ historian Keith Windschuttle to lend an air of faux integrity to the whole unedifying clickbait exercise: Wind...

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

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I visited Turkey in April last year, traveling through the country, witnessing the troubles of the leadership of the ruling AKP party: it had just lost a general election that left it without a workable majority in parliament and only 40% of the popular vote; it was sucked int...

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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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If Rex can give us his guide to Gravitational Waves - a very impressive performance I have to say, then I can dust off an old document from my days at the ANU law school - in the late 1980s. Concept Split: Shockwaves Shock waves spread from the policy making community through...

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https://vimeo.com/131071052 As an aficionado of DOC, someone sent me this article on young Italian immigration, which I've celebrated before . Anyway enjoy the vid. It makes you feel grateful to live in such a great place.

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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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Queensland boy Julian Assange seems set to walk out of the Ecuadorian embassy soon, hoping that the announcement by the UN human rights panel on the arbitrariness of his detention will protect him from being arrested. The baseline scenario is that he walks out, is quickly arre...

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

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyfUu_fNQfM Well folks after a gruelling (if largely imaginary) 24 hour period haggling with other Troppmeisters, I'm pleased to announce Troppo's unanimous support for The Donald for President of the Greatest Country on Earth. We were locked in...

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

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

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Festival Website | Films | Melbourne Schedule Top Picks Youth (Opening Night) Two old friends vacation at a prestigious hotel in the Swiss Alps. Fred is a suave socialite and retired composer who the British royal family is pestering to play again. Mick is a film director rush...

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

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Yes, folks flying high above the Pacific Ocean (which as Woody Allen's father concedes to his mother is a worse ocean than the Atlantic Ocean) I took in the final episode of the History Chanel's "Sons of Liberty" a mini-series about the American Revolution. I go for historical...

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John Pinder , "Economic Growth, Social Justice and Political Reform," in Richard Mayne (ed.), Europe Tomorrow: Sixteen Europeans Look Ahead (1972): "... the European Community appears to be moving towards a repetition of the old centralizing errors of the nation-states, by mak...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcsg-KIdDX4 The video above is a recording of the speeches at a funeral for my mother who died at around 10.15 am on Sunday 7th June. Sadly she was far gone - not with it for several years. As her mind gradually failed her, even when she didn't...

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Someone sent me this article by Keynes celebrating the Arts Council in the Listener shortly after World War II had been won in Europe. A world away, and worth a read. JMKeynes_Listener1945

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

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

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqoXrjQQ9x8 This is a re-post of a post I did on Testament of Youth last December when the lead actress and I sat down to watch it for the first time (as you do). My excuse for reposting it is that the film has now been released in Australia and...

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

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Fellow Troppodilians, especially those resident in Canberra, may I commend this production of Black Diggers to you. I saw it last year in Sydney at a packed out matinee (only tickets available) at the Opera House on Australia Day! It was electrifying: great script drawing on e...

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Oh well I guess snark can be justified as necessary to keeping standards above some rock bottom. Anyway, I did wonder whether this article on the Renaissance and innovation was the silliest thing written on either. Even ignoring the fact that he is about half a millennium out...

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The Dunera Boys' views of their own treatment separated very broadly into two camps which also had something of a geographic dimension. Some regarded their treatment - by a sadistic captain on board the Dunera and his not much better deputy - as a scandal and their incarcerati...

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Geo-engineering is increasingly looking like the only politically viable way of averting temperature rises above 2 degrees in the coming century. This is for three interlocking reasons: i) Any mayor country can try geo-engineering on its own without permission from anyone else...

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SENDING ALIENS TO AUSTRALIA. CANBERRA, Tuesday. In the House of Representatives this afternoon Mr. Martens (Lab., Qld.), said that the Government's acquiescence in Britain's proposal to send alien internees to Australia for safe custody was causing great alarm to many people....

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http://youtu.be/0B5xPYUNGeA Scribe publishing occasionally sends me a catalogue of books it's publishing asking if I'd like to have one to review. Looking through their long list I picked my friend Tim Colebatch's biography of Rupert Hamer on which he's been working for a good...

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Monica Attard reports in The Hoopla on a very recent speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin in which he forcefully puts his country's side of the current conflict with Ukraine. I was especially struck by this observation: The US, [Putin] said, had instigated a “ coup d’eta...

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An Englishman enters a naval action with the firm conviction that his duty is to hurt his enemies and help his friends and allies without looking out for directions in the midst of the fight; and while he thus clears his mind of all subsidiary distractions, he rests in confide...

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The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of f...

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Below the fold is the Ockham's Razor lecture that went to air yesterday. Since the trolls have already come out in force on the ABC thread (The ABC's illustration doesn't help!), I've reproduced it for your delectation below. Nicholas Gruen: Both popular commonsense and econom...

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As a council member of the National Library I had the privilege of not only going to this lecture last Friday night but of having dinner with Ray, the benefactors of the lecture (John Seymour - whom I taught Legal Writing and Research alongside in 1990 or thereabouts - and his...

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By the time economic reform matured as a political project – let’s date it from Paul Keating’s announcement about its popularity with the resident galah in every pet shop – it was already on the slide into the kind of ideological formula of mercantilism that Ken Henry so power...

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Today the people residing in Scotland can decide whether they want to see an independent Scotland or to have Scotland remain in the UK. The betting markets concur with the opinion polls and favour the status quo: the markets give roughly 20% chance that the ‘yes’ vote will win...

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I recently visited the National Gallery of Victoria's exhibition of 1950s furniture . I went to see Fred Lowen's furniture. Fred was a Dunera Boy - who I became aware of towards the end of his life when he had an exhibition of drawings at Australia Galleries in Collingwood. Th...

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An excerpt from the Dunera News. (for those who don't know, the Dunera was the prison ship on which my father was deported to Australia in 1940 with the Battle of Britain raging around them). The exerpt is an autobiographical sketch by Richard Sonnenfeldt (1923–2009) I was bro...

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It's Raining Men! Hallelujah? Pauline Grosjean and Rose Khattar We document the implications of missing women in the short and long run. We exploit a natural historical experiment, which sent large numbers of male convicts and far fewer female convicts to Australia in the 18th...

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Human Capital and Industrialization: Evidence from the Age of Enlightenment by Mara P. Squicciarini, Nico Voigtlaender - #20219 (DAE EFG) Abstract: While human capital is a strong predictor of economic development today, its importance for the Industrial Revolution is typicall...

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Last night I attended the unveiling of a facsimile of a portrait of my father painted when he was fresh off the boat in 1941. Thanks go to Bruce Chapman above all, but to many others for organising. To Erwin Fabian, who pained the portrait all those years ago. It's been over 1...

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Just a note to let people know of the unveiling of a magnificent portrait of my father , discovered some years after he died. It's in Canberra on Tuesday afternoon. Here's the invitation. Perhaps I'll see you there. Professor Rabee Tourky Professor Bruce Chapman Emeritus Profe...

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I remember a long long time ago - in fact it was nearly fifty years ago I went with my family on a three week trip to Alice Springs and the Northern Territory. Dad didn't spend much time with us as he was working while Mum, David and I tried to enjoy ourselves. Mum located a r...

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Book Translations as Idea Flows: The Effects of the Collapse of Communism on the Diffusion of Knowledge by Ran Abramitzky, Isabelle Sin Abstract: We use book translations as a new measure of international idea flows and study the effects of Communism's collapse in Eastern Euro...

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

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“This hand is not the color of yours. But if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be the same color as yours. I am a man.” Standing Bear to a Nebraska court, May 1879. More here . HT Three Quarks

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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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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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In his introduction to his translation of the Analects of Confucius, Pierre Ryckmans likened that 'literary classic' to a coat hook that has over the centuries acquired so many layers of coats that it can no longer be seen-has become so big that it completely obscures the corr...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQFTCOiEFk0 Yes folks, I'm not joking.

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Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are the rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried than before - more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. I went to see Mr Pip last night. I chec...

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Schumpeter's two chapters on democracy in his great book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy provide the best framework I know of articulating the things that trouble me about the current state of democracy. The chapters assert the following propositions: Rousseau's idea of th...

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I learnt something interesting today, while I was writing up notes on legal history: Australia didn't formally achieve complete judicial and legislative independence from Old Blighty until 5.00am, Greenwich Mean Time on March 31 st 3 rd 1986. That's the precise time that the A...

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I recall about twenty years ago now, I was taking a law tute in Legal Theory. The lecturer was pretty awful and spent huge amounts of time in his lectures explaining why his side of a particular debate - with H.L.A Hart the opponent as I recall - was the right side of the deba...

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Paul Fritjers is lamenting the loss of intellectual freedom and freedom of expression produced by an odd rule of social interaction: the person in pain gets to own the truth and those without pain adjust. So for example, people with undesired traits such as low intelligence or...

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Remarkable letter written from, and about, Germany by DH Lawrence in 1928. For all the beauty of his descriptions, it feels like divination rather than reportage. Immediately you are over the Rhine, the spirit of place has changed. There is no more attempt at the bluff of geni...

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George H W Bush (father of George W, who had one less initial and a lot fewer functioning cortical neurons) divided US public opinion with this famous declaration in March 1990: I do not like broccoli and I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it...

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The journal 'Agenda', the policy journal of the College of Business and Economics at The Australian National University just released a piece of mine called ' Universities as Royal Courts'. One can download it free of charge (just click on the link). It continues my long-runni...

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Robert Waldman (who is unpleasantly aggressive and arrogant in his comments, but I digress) shows how Friedman's contribution to the idea that the Phillips curve would change as expectations changed wasn't much of a contribution at all. It was all in Samuelson and Solow - only...

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Pretty interesting stuff : In this article, we analyze the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, those who joined it, and its social and political impact by combining a wide range of archival data sources with data from the 1920 and 1930 U.S censuses. We find that individuals who joined the Kla...

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Warning: Enthusiasm Alert. I've just got home from seeing the Crucible by Arthur Miller at the Melbourne Theatre Company. I thought it was a very good production. I thought I wasn't going to like David Wenham much at the outset as he seemed a bit strained. But that's perhaps b...

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This is just some expanded and consolidated musing from Twitter. A few days ago I was thinking about The Fall of Icarus, the 16th century Dutch painting after Bruegel. It's probably most popular for near absence of the ostensible subject, Icarus, who is barely shown in the bac...

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Bowling for Fascism: Social Capital and the Rise of the Nazi Party in Weimar Germany, 1919-33 by Shanker Satyanath, Nico Voigtlaender, Hans-Joachim Voth - #19201 (DAE POL) Abstract: Social capital - a dense network of associations facilitating cooperation within a community -...

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I didn't know this - until my son told me. From this website . Sometimes it is necessary for doctors to get access to the heart either for diagnosis or treatment. The simplest way to do this might seem to be to hack open the chest and have a look at the organ itself. Obviously...

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On reading Sylvia Nasar's Grand Pursuit which I'm enjoying, I have been re-reading Keynes' fine essay on Marshall. One real mystery - at least for someone who doesn't know more like me - is Marshall's famous opposition to women's equality at Cambridge. Anyway Keynes has a sect...

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I've been in San Francisco for over a week now and have been living near Haight Ashbury which I've only driven through previously. In any event I looked it up in Wikipedia and 1967's Summer of Love was quite a production with 100,000 odd people turning up and living from hand...

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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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It takes a lot for a seasoned partisan pro like Dennis to react like this. It means he's not 'in the tent' and that's not much fun, especially if you still work for these guys on a freelance basis - though Dennis has plenty of other clients for his writing business. In any eve...

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http://youtu.be/5WCTn4FljUQ

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[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="662"] Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted this fresco on Good Government in Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. It's a famous landmark in Western painting, argued by some to herald the Renaissance. Interesting that it should be so preoccupied by public g...

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When a tennis player decides if and when to use their rights to 'video review' of points they are trying to solve cognitive and tactical problems. When a cricket captain decides to review an umpire's decision there's an additional problem. Challenges have been rationed by desi...

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I held off reviewing Acemoglu and Robinson's (AR) Why Nations Fail for a long time. Despite the material's relevance to my old research interests, my love of universal history and the popularity of the book, I just couldn't face the task. Yet, because it is now appearing in so...

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PERSECUTION PERPETUATED: THE MEDIEVAL ORIGINS OF ANTI-SEMITIC VIOLENCE IN NAZI GERMANY* Nico Voigtlander Hans-Joachim Voth How persistent are cultural traits? Using data on anti-Semitism in Germany, we ?nd local continuity over 600 years. Jews were often blamed when the Black...

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Here's a great review essay by Louis Menand on Anne Applebaum’s “Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe”. Below the fold are a few snippets of what were highlights for me, but read the whole thing if you have time - it's full of remarkable facts about the the end of WWII...

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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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Samuel Sewall (1652–1730) is the man with the bowed head in this picture. He has much to feel remorseful about. Amongst eight other judges, he's sentenced nineteen innocent people to death for being witches in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. When January 14, was established as a...

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Gentlemen, Whilst marching from Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your requests which have been sent by His Majesty’s ship from London to Lisbon and thence by dispatch to our head...

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A nice Project Syndicate column from Brad Delong . This is how it starts. When French politician and moral philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of his Democracy in America in 1835, he did so because he thought his France was in big trouble--and had lots...

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I just discovered Tom Keating, an art forger. I was reading a junky $5 book in a book remainders store on famous criminals (as you do) and as I read his story I'm afraid I liked the guy for the way in which his great skills seemed 'genuine' as it were - driven by the love of a...

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Here's a poster seeking to raise funds for the World War One effort. As you can see, the symbol chosen was a tad ahead of its time and, given that it was for the British war effort, it was so far ahead of its time that it was decided not to use the same symbol even twenty year...

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I've been reading Graham Freudenberg's Churchill and Australia which is a fine read, with a certain grandeur in the prose. In any event I came upon Chapter 10 which documents the crisis over Turkey pulling the plug on the post World War One settlement - a kind of between wars...

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Keynes. mercantilism and the Euro crisis

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The Modular Nature of Trustworthiness Detection By: Bonnefon, Jean-François (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) De Neys, Wim (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) Hopfensitz, Astrid (TSE) The capacity to trust wisely is a critical facilitator of success and...

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Finding Eldorado: Slavery and Long-run Development in Colombia , Daron Acemoglu, Camilo García-Jimeno, James A. Robinson Slavery has been a major institution of labor coercion throughout history. Colonial societies used slavery intensively across the Americas, and slavery rema...

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Like lots of people, I've always been fond of Marilyn. She was an interesting and courageous person. I liked her apparent seriousness. And the cut of her ideological jib. She was one of the few people who stood against McCarthyism. Yet I always harboured the view that this was...

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I've offered Troppodillians several of Constantine Cavafy's poems. They're magnificent. I haven't actually managed to elicit a comment on any of them, but perhaps they're being enjoyed anyway. I'm told they're of a different order in the original. But I wouldn't know. Here's o...

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The more they change Here are two facts about the world which won't return any time soon. Good facts. The first is that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a paraplegic. Now of course you knew that, but the fact associated with it is that noone knew. The mores of the time were the o...

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You heard it first on Troppo. And no Charlotte, it isn't bad that you didn't know that the Titanic was real. Philosophers have had the same trouble for years.

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Medieval Universities, Legal Institutions, and the Commercial Revolution by Davide Cantoni, Noam Yuchtman - NBER #17979 We present new data documenting medieval Europe's "Commercial Revolution'' using information on the establishment of markets in Germany. We use these data to...

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http://youtu.be/NOyx3r59L-I

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="220" caption="Tom Derrick - a good man to have on your side"] [/caption] I happened upon this on the front page of today's Wikipedia. Tom Derrick (1914–1945) was an Australian recipient of the Victoria Cross (VC) during the Second World...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8urgvC0TR8&feature=related

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJNM0C-7lPk&feature=player_embedded I bought my daughter a very enjoyable book The art of great speeches: and why we remember them by my friend Dennis Glover for Christmas. The book manages the triad of rhetorical tasks very nicely - it delights...

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From the 1891 Taranaki Herald

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Thomas Paine was a remarkable fellow who lived at a time of, and helped bring about two great revolutions of the modern age - the American and French ones. His time discovered political pamphleteering in a way that's quite similar to blogging today. People wrote pamphlets and...

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Well blow me down. If it isn't Jevons in the Powerhouse Museum coming here as the son of a bankrupt family and making good as Assayer to the Sydney mint, becoming the first photojournalist in Australia, discovering the El-Nino effect, writing an ethnography of the uncouth of S...

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Perhaps it's the Christian roots of our civilisation. Perhaps it's innate in many of us, but I've never understood the business about to forgive is divine. It's natural. Even if people have done really bad things, if you think they are genuinely sorry, your heart goes out to t...

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The two finals for the oval ball codes do not just share a weekend this year. Two of the finalists - Collingwood in the AFL and Manly in the NRL - have the undisputed status of being "the team everyone likes to hate" in their respective leagues. Yet they are far from similar c...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="470" caption="Manning and and Dymphna on the veranda of their house at Wapengo on the NSW South Coast"] [/caption] Inside Story has just published an essay by me in which I try to figure out Manning Clark. I was working on this within t...

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HT: Skeptic Lawyer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SHKhvVjLIc&feature=player_embedded

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I knew Rob Chalmers who worked in the press gallery for over 60 years and has just died after what they call in the media "a battle with cancer". Cancer won as it so often does. Peter Martin does the honours here including reproducing a fine letter to Rob from PM Julia Gillard...

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If it had happened in the US it is inconceivable that a great deal of the emphasis would not have been on Justice for the Killer. "We'll hunt him down . . . " Well no hunting down required in this case but you get my drift. I can't recall what we said about it in Bali, but we'...

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Which isn't to complain. He gives a great speech. [ted id=1190]

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. . . [T]here has been, I have to admit, an element of comic relief — of the black-humor variety — in the spectacle of so many people who have been in denial suddenly waking up and smelling the crazy. A number of commentators seem shocked at how unreasonable Republicans are be...

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No Kidding. They're making a movie of Franz Stampfl's life - a doco. Who was Franz Stampfl I hear you cry? Wikipedia says this: Stampfl was born in the capital of then Austro-Hungarian Empire . He was the son of an Austrian general. He studied writing and painting in school. A...

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How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was un...

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This year is the centenary of the handover of control of the Northern Territory to the Commonwealth by South Australia in 1911. It's a fascinating but not very well known story with many dimensions. I was recently asked to deliver a paper to the Northern Territory Historical S...

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I went to Harkaway State School in the foothills of the Dandenongs in Victoria. It was settled by Germans and apparently in WWI they rang the bell of the local church when they heard of a German victory in WWI. Probably not a good way to stay under the radar - though that was...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="498" caption="And what is this fetching picture doing here? Ask Google Images which popped this up when I entered the search string "the rise of science""] [/caption] In discussing 'open science' with someone today I thought I'd be able...

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Nice to see a journalist with a memory. Not that there's much point in complaining about political actors acting like political actors - responding to the incentives they face. Business associations are into solidarity long before they're into principle. The one thing Keene le...

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As you may know, the Dunera brought a bunch of people out to Australia who settled in very nicely and added to the place. A coach of olympic runners, numerous professors, some rich entrepreneurs. I don't know if Fred Lowen and Ernst Roedeck got rich but they founded FLER and w...

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Dunera Boy Erwin Fabian , about whom I've written at least twice before is at it again - which is to say he has another exhibition on. He's in his mid-nineties now and still working away every day in his North Melbourne studio (which is an old tin shed). I went to the opening...

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Here's a cut and pasted Amazon review of The Macrodynamics of Capitalism: Elements for a Synthesis of Marx, Keynes and Schumpeter . It's a bit heavy and I've ignored the maths so can't vouch for it. I'm basically slapping it up here for my own future reference, but Troppodilli...

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Kasparov on Fischer in the NYRB. It would be impossible for me to write dispassionately about Bobby Fischer even if I were to try. I was born the year he achieved a perfect score at the USChampionship in 1963, eleven wins with no losses or draws. He was only twenty at that poi...

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It's becoming a point of distinction not to have prognosticated on the future of China, especially in Australia as China takes great significance in our region and in our economic future. A lot of this prognostication must be infuriating to veteran China Watchers, being conduc...

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About to book United Airlines to the United States, I thought I'd let any Troppodillians who don't know of this video, that it exists, and that it's fun (and it lopped around $170 million off UA's market cap according to some factoid crazed journalists). And looking it up, I j...

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I was in John Dawkins' office when, to my amazement he decided to move the (then) Industry Commission, now Productivity Commission, to Melbourne. Anyway, with Dawkins having rebuffed attempts to dissuade him, as the move proceeded against great angst and gnashing of teeth, the...

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Today is the anniversary of the battle of the Eureka Stockade. This is not a much remembered date. In fact, it was only brought to my attention by a letter in the AFR bemoaning the lack of recognition. This letter was penned by a Joseph Toscano of the Anarchist Media Institute...

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I was browsing in borders and came upon American Essays of the Century (ie the last one) edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Which was very tempting. I would have bought it if it wasn't $45 too. But I read the essay below - full as it is of what are now cliches of the civil rights mo...

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This is something I was thinking of doing for a while, but since Possum has started a "What if?" over at his joint , this is as good a time as any to launch Australian Alternate History Week and hope it is taken up across a few more blogs. In short, I want participants to crea...

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HMS Dunera carried about three thousand 'Dunera Boys' to Australia. I received this sad email today which I reproduce for anyone who's interested below the fold. The Dunera Boys, now mostly in their late eighties are down to around 80 with around 50 remaining in Australia. Dea...

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Ed Prescott's a very clever fellow. Far cleverer than me. Then again it's pretty clear, it has been pretty clear for a long, long time, that he's crazy. But don't take my word for it. Take our friend Paul Krugman's .

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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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During the Hawke years one conservative columnist used to bemoan the lack of professionalism of the right in Australian politics. I don't much read columns of professional columnists anymore, so I don't know if this theme has recurred but somehow he seemed to become more prote...

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Even if I would have choked on my Weeties that the New Statesman presumably thought this picture looks like Adam Smith. The economist manifesto, by Amartya Sen, Commentary, New Statesman : The 18th-century philosopher Adam Smith wasn’t the free-market fundamentalist he is thou...

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I've been a fan of Warren Buffett for some time . I've been reading a big fat bio of him - The Snowball by Alice Schroeder. It's well written but the content is a bit too pedestrian to really make me think it's worth reading over 800 pages. Anyway, I've just finished the best...

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By Maggie Koerth-Baker . HT: Peter Martin

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The February edition of The Monthly is out, including Robert Manne's eagerly-awaited 'Comment' on Windschuttle . Windschuttle attacked Manne in January's Quadrant , saying that he should stand down from his position at La Trobe, then on Monday went on ABC radio's Counterpoint...

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William Hardy Wilson is a fairly well regarded Australian architect of the 20th century and is such usually afforded a few paragraphs in biographical dictionaries and encyclopaedias. These will mention in passing a few well regarded buildings and pay brief mention to an unreal...

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In the first post in this series I talked about recent empirical work on institutions and development and the problems I had with the use of constructed indices for measuring institutions. In the second post I talked about a particular paper I decided to retest and the alterna...

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Today Artworks is replaying a program from May on Erwin Fabian - possibly the oldest surviving Dunera boy who continues to sculpt every day in his studio in North Melbourne. I have posted on him a few times before . I teed up an oral history project to record Erwin's recollect...

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In the first post of this series I described recent work in empirical institutional economics and why I thought the work pursued a virtuous end but was compromised by the use of poor institutional measures. Today I will introduce a specific paper of this type that had drawn my...

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A bit of holiday trivia for you. I came upon a form of tourism I didn't quite believe. "Travelling Gentlemen" accompanied their countrymen to the Crimean War, and set up out of cannon range from the battlefields with their wives and hounds and had a jolly good time of it. Thei...

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How will Paul Samuelson be remembered? This is the positive side of the story, the glowing record of the Nobel Laureate and author of the most widely read textbook in modern times. History may be kind to Samuelson. He had the good fortune to surf three waves that carried all b...

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I appreciate that this has been posted before and nobody has to read it again, it is just for the benefit of new people and those who like to be reminded of the achievements of this remarkable man. Barzun's work represents a major and pioneering contribution to cultural studie...

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Peter Coleman described the rise and fall of the Congress for Cultural Freedom which started at one of the darkest moments of the Cold War. In the Preface to The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe he wrote In J...

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As we celebrate the Fall of the Wall 20 years ago we should remember the effort that was put in by the friends of freedom in the West during the Cold War. I am thinking of the worldwide network of groups which resisted the propaganda efforts of the communists and their fellow...

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As someone once said (was it TS Elliot?) human beings cant stand very much reality. Every now and again communities, and sometimes whole nations go potty - psychotic. Jonestown is perhaps one of the best examples, although it was a kind of concentrated community a cult which a...

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For those who've read the essay below and have no desire to re-read it, my apologies. I didn't post it at the time out of deference to the original publisher - the AFR. However with a couple of years having passed, I thought I'd post it here. It is below the fold and I occasio...

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A late call on the departure of the distinguished scholar Leszek Kolakowski. A short obituary . Starting off as an orthodox Marxist in postwar Poland, Kolakowski became progressively disenchanted and his calls for a more democratic version of socialism led him into conflicts w...

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This book sounds like a lot of fun. A history of science with a touch of humour and a good flavour of the characters involved. Reviewed here . In order to structure his big, sweeping book about such issues, Mr. Holmes uses two exploratory voyages as bookends. The first, a trip...

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Several years ago I posted a graphic plotting countrys GDP per head against mean lifetime and drawing attention to the tragic loss of life in southern Africa, mainly due to AIDS. There is a fantastic data visualisation tool called GapMinder that tells this story and other stor...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="800" caption="Will Longstaff's thoroughly spooky and fabulous Menin Gate at Midnight. If you haven't seen it in the AWM, go now, right now!"] [/caption] A very balanced and interesting article on the subject, even if it could have been...

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But then I would say that wouldn't I? Lawrence Lessig quotes an Australian economist explaining why free access to public goods isn't 'socialism', it's 'civil society'. Lessig's piece is below the fold. Et tu, KK? (aka, No, Kevin, this is not "socialism") May 28, 2009 5:57 PM...

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I put quite a bit of effort into my two pieces o n Adam Smith in Ross Gittins' column while he was on leave and got quite a lot of positive feedback about them. So when I was asked to talk to an excellent conference organised by the indefatigable Fitzgerald siblings of QUT - P...

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HT Gizmodo and Joshua Gans

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Thatcherism is just another word for neoliberalism, says Kevin Rudd . It's been almost two decades since Margaret Thatcher left office and her record has been obscured by mythology. Sure she took on the unions and sold off some public enterprises , but did she really " roll ba...

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When Ross Gittins asked me to write a couple of columns in his place as he went on leave I agreed and realised shortly afterwards that they would coincide more or less with the 250th anniversary of the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments . So I decided I'd try to wri...

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So the economy has problems. Spare a thought for the citizens of New York where the bedbug plague is reaching crisis proportions with a 34% increase in official complaints last year. There are lots and lots of people who are having a devastating experience with bedbugs," said...

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Adam Smith had this idea that 'commercial society' made a lot of things better, particularly improving the politics and mores of earlier social structures. As I outlined i n a post long ago , he was particularly keen on the way in which the nascent capitalism of his day distri...

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[caption id="attachment_7102" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Palestine-Israel Journal"] [/caption] I grew up in a household that was quietly but staunchly pro-Israel. This was of course (and still generally is) the default position in the west. Most Australians would h...

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When this was written for ABC Unleashed in June] the ALP ruled in Canberra and in all the states and territories, not necessarily wisely and well, but in some cases by wide margins. The situation in mid 1965 was very different. Menzies had been the PM for as long as many peopl...

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

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Some interesting pieces in The Australian Literary Review , 3 Dec, the insert that comes in the paper on the first Wednesday of the month. Richard Lansdowne wrote on the courage of Alexander Solzhenitsyn which he suggests made him the greatest writer of the 20th century. I am...

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

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I've been reading an interesting - and much too long - paper by Paul David on the historical origins of 'open science (pdf). It is fascinating and deserves a more serious post than this - but I don't have the time. What's prompted this rush into cyberprint is finding a skerric...

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Barrie Kosky is a big hit with people who are vastly more knowledgeable about theatre than me. He's very big in Europe. So maybe he's just the ticket. My two exposures to his theatre have been strikingly similar. At the end of something I went to at the Sydney Opera House I sn...

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A nice essay linked to from Crooked Timber. Here it is as edited on CT - but for the original go here . Via Cosma , Canadian historian Rob MacDougall on a characteristic American tendency to see radical social change as the inevitable expression of values expressed and promise...

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I find it incredible that Bletchley Park, the birthplace of modern computing, the place that won the Battle of the Atlantic without which the Allies may not have won World War II is finding the going tough to survive and thrive as a museum . I guess it's unthinkable that it wo...

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Jacques Barzun is arguably the leading commentator on education and cultural studies in the 20th century but he has a low profile since his kind of deep but ideologically disinterested scholarship went out of fashion. Born in 1907, he turns 101 in November. His reputation achi...

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In one of my interesting adventures in the markets, over ten years ago, I discovered a little fund being run out of Crows Nest in Sydney. It was called Grinham Managed Futures. I was looking to invest a bit of money in alternative investments that didn't correlate with other m...

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

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From today's AFR column. Go early, go hard, go households. This slogan, coined by Treasury Secretary Ken Henry in discussions on the fiscal stimulus takes me back. To another time long, long ago. Flashbacks are better suited to the silver screen than newspaper columns, but ima...

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The recent post on architectural delights reminded me that during the Beaconsfield mining disaster I googled Beaconsfield and turned up some pictures of the Batman Bridge nearby. That led to some more pictures of Tasmanian bridges and one of them led to some other bridges in V...

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The other day I emailed Don Arthur the url to a terrific essay by Martha Nussbaum on Roger Williams . Who is Roger Williams I hear you cry. He was an amazing and wonderful man who founded Rhode Island and who was the first to theorise the merits of radical religious tolerance....

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Good news everyone! Refreshed by a spell on the bench I have decided to line up with the Troppo team, or at least alongside the team. The major mission is to keep people up to date with developments in classical liberalism, critical rationalism and Austrian social studies. Jus...

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In an interesting post a day or so ago Ken Parish made this claim, which went largely unchallenged (though I've not read all the comments). The need to avoid stifling innovation as the primary engine of capitalisms remarkable success was Hayeks principal answer to those who ar...

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Who knows if this speculation is true, but it gives me a thrill the way the human mind can deduce things so far from its immediate knowledge by a process of inference and deduction. Just like we can know things about the universe and about what goes on inside atoms from the ti...

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I've just finished reading Dancing with Strangers, which I've read in fits and starts because of lack of time. I'm still too busy to write a decent review, but no doubt you can find them if you look. The book was showered with praise on its release a few years ago. Rightly so....

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Here's a column I've just written published today in the AFR. The Gruen Transfer Those with an unusual surname have to get used to spelling it. No its not Gluner. Not Glueball or Grewbie its Gruen G-R-U-E-N. The compensation is, your name identifies you or a family member pret...

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A few years ago I sponsored a bunch of Afghani kids on a soccer playing tour of Queensland and NSW. It was a privilege to meet some of the kids. I expected to find kids who'd grown up in a peasant culture, who would not be particularly interested in education. One tends to thi...

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Yikes? The last house that Adam Smith lived in - at Canongate - is up for sale. And the local council may let it go to developers. Oh cruel irony of ironies, the ultimate Adam Smith problem - a council that doesn't know the difference between the Theory of Moral Sentiments and...

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Hello boys and girls. See if you can work out where this picture was taken?

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The Boston Review is a good thing. I found this article on Alexander Hamilton , which is a serious debunking job on the hagiographies of Alexander Hamilton. I'm not well read enough to arbitrate between this guy and those he's taking on, but despite the occasional intemperance...

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I've just been asked by the Department of PM&C to nominate someone to go to the 202o Summit. Who should I nominate - and why? This post will be moderated strictly. Suggestions should be serious and I hope you'll provide good reasons. Of course there will be people who want to...

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To your right is an historic picture. A picture of the occasion on which Lincoln gave what he thought was his best speech. The Second Inaugural. There he is reading from his notes. In surfing around the subject when I posted my piece on Obama's rhetoric - Obama described Linco...

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In The Shock Doctrine , Naomi Klein argues that radical free market reform requires some kind of crisis . Wars, terrorist attacks and natural disasters pave the way for authoritarian reformers to impose their fundamentalist visions on an unwilling population. Critics like Tyle...

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What happened today in 2136 BC? No doubt Google will come to the rescue of those who don't know (mutters beneath his breath that the world is not what it used to be)

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To which organisations do these two logos belong?

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The Dunera association had its celebration of the 67th anniversary of the Dunera's arrival in Sydney recently. Since my daughter had recently done a major assignment on the Dunera she and I flew up and she gave a little talk on what she'd found. I always enjoy being with these...

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The emotional politics of Howard's aspirational nationalism There's a difference between guilt and shame. When you see yourself as a good person who's done a bad thing, you feel guilt. But when you see the bad thing you've done as evidence that you are a bad person, then you f...

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Nelson: "Order the signal, Hardy." Hardy: "Aye, aye sir." Nelson: "Hold on, that's not what I dictated to Flags. What's the meaning of this?" Hardy: "Sorry sir?" Nelson (reading aloud): "'England expects every person to do his or her duty, regardless of race, gender, sexual or...

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Former Territory Labor Opposition Leader and Keating government Minister Bob Collins has died in Darwin at the age of 61. Whether from the bowel cancer he had suffered over the last couple of years or from some other cause is yet to be revealed. I knew Bob Collins very well in...

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I taped last Wednesday night's LNL and only listened to it last night. Download the mp3 file and be amazed. Do it NOW! The file will disappear tomorrow night.

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Those crazy westralians. Telling us t'othersiders we would starve without them . Plains of our pastures boundless, Seas of our rainbow'd pearl, Destiny is your breezes Liberty's flag unfurl! That they supported the eastern car manufacturing with tariffs on coal and iron ore! T...

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A couple of highlights from Radio National from Troppo's resident insomniac. This ship and its sister ships were built in the first decade or two of the twentieth century in a last ditch attempt to match steam power. They eked out an existence until 1949 running grain between...

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The internees of The Dunera tend to lie on two sides of a divide over their incarceration. One lot - more self consciously Jewish and typically from the Dunera Boys who ended up in Melbourne tend to view the Dunera incident as a scandal - an outrage, perhaps even an attrocity....

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The War of Jenkin's Ear between Britain and Spain has a bizarre origin. Robert Jenkin's ship was boarded by the Spanish to determine if he was complying with the Treaty of Seville. Jenkin's claimed the Spanish cut his ear off - he pickled it, and took it to Parliament. War was...

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I vividly remember wandering round the town of Nimes in the south of France about fifteen years ago and being completely blown away by the amphitheatre there (pictured above). What blew me away was the way in which this magnificent object had gone on a two millennium journey o...

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One of my favourite quotes from World War I is John 'Jack' Wright, a flight commander with 4 Squadron Australian Flying Corps [AFC]. Like many of the AFC pilots and servicemen he came from the Lighthorse after having served in the Middle East. He missed Gallipoli as by the tim...

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On the 24th August 1987 the last volume of Manning Clark's A History of Australia was launched by David Malouf. Peter Ryan was Clarkâs publisher at Melbourne University Press and Manning thanked him generously at the launch. "Peter Ryan was an is a great publisher. . . . Thank...

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This is a question I've asked myself for a long while - with particular regard to Whitlam's outrageous behaviour on a matter that turned out to have importance which vastly overshadowed any domestic events during his Prime Ministership. Here's Former Australian Timor diplomat...

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Did any of you catch Inga Clendinnen on the Best of Late Night Live about ten days ago? I chanced upon the repeat halfway through -- more accurately I woke up at some ungodly hour after falling asleep with the radio on -- and was at once entranced by this quirky, lucid, sensuo...

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As usual a vintage performance from Krugman on Milton Friedman . Appreciative, critical, fair and informative. Enjoy.

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One of the themes of what passes for my 'professional life' in economics has been this. We're a small country and it's a big world. Now that might not be news to you, it's certainly wouldn't appear to be news to any of the politicians or officials that are endlessly intoning i...

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I meant to post a note saying that the ABC are re-running a fantastic series "Prisoners under Nippon" at 11.00 am on weekdays. Made (I think over a year or more) in the early-mid 1980s it's a remarkable piece of radio. Go check it out.

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Last night I happened upon a chapter by Murray Rothbard in a book called " Dissent on Keynes: A Critical Appraisal of Keynesian Economics . It was published in 1992 and the web version was published in 2003 and available here. The brief? Well roughly the brief Junie Morosi int...

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Here is the last post on primate sentiments - and as I said at the end of the last post, it's really a postscript. It doesn't further develop the points made in the last two posts, but tidies up some loose ends. Smith himself cooked up a theory of the evolution of language at...

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

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

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A few days after fighting between Hamas and Fatah took a dozen lives and led to the destruction of various Palestinian government buildings, the Fatah-affiliated head of Palestinian intelligence services believes Palestine is on the verge of civil war : We are already at the b...

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Surely we cannot let 11/9 pass without a single relevant post? After all, the world changed forever five years ago today. For a start, folks the globe over ( sans moi ) have now begun quoting dates backwards, like the Americans. SBS recently aired a bizarre documentary allegin...

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I'm just back from the launch at the IPA - or rather re-launch for it was first published in 1980 - of The Heart of James McAuley by Peter Coleman. It was a star studded cast of launchers. Tony's Staley and Abbott did the launching but Peter Coleman was also there to respond....

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Political debate Australia is starting to remind me of the balls that used to be held at uni halls of residence when I was a student. Rather than some kind of broad discourse we move from one topic to another with the media paying obeisance to an agenda set by the Government w...

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I've just finished reading David Days very engaging and interesting biography of Curtin. It's an enjoyable, easy, long read. Early on I ran into the ten commandments of socialism. These were taught at socialist Sunday schools just after the turn of the twentieth century. Na¯ve...

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I remember an email which Rory Robertson sent out to his mailing list a short while after the Great Event when everything changed and it became appropriate to torture and detain people for years without trial in that war we're fighting against the Geneva Conventions - sorry -...

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Anyone who missed them should try not to miss the repeats of 'Torn Curtain' the ABC Hindsight programs on the cold war. Excellent radio documentary and not too late to pick up one of the most alarming episodes. How Richard Nixon wanted the Russians to think that he was mad and...

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Visiting this site I discovered that we've missed JS Mill's 200th birthday which occured on the 20th May 2006. He was a good guy and, exemplifies much of what was uplifting about the tradition of classical economics begun by our old friend Adam Smith. Like Smith, Mill abhored...

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The man in question? Gay? There IS a faint resemblance to Oscar Wilde ... Andrew Norton asked me to write a review of a new book on Adam Smith - so here's a fairly advanced draft. I'd welcome suggestions for improvements. Postscript: I'm hoping this is a final now, and comment...

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I recently commented on John Hirst's compelling portrait "The distinctiveness of Australian Democracy". I've since gone out and bought the book Sense and Nonsense in Australian History which is a very interesting read. Robert Manne, having been ejected from Quadrant seems to b...

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[photopress:jevons1.jpg,full,alignleft] As a practiced poster, I now find myself spinning inane puns for my headlines, like any good subbie. Be that as it may, I happened upon an interesting post by our Troppodillian friend and sometime colleague Rafe Champion over at Catallax...

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There's a certain nastiness about a certain cadre of Australian expats. The big four are Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries, Clive James and Robert Hughes. They didn't like the Australia of the fifties and early sixties, and a lot of them think we're still the same. This was the...

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A little post to get the year off to an uncontroversial start! I mentioned a book I've read - "Children of the Lucky Country" below . Here is a quote from it relating to the division of labour at home between the genders (p. 83). In the past, the way society arranged for the...

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Robert Carter is the President of the Australian Society of Marine Artists. He has some paintings on show at the Mosman Art Gallery, alongside a truly spectacular selection of important works collected by Howard Hinton and donated to the Armidale Teachers College. Anyone who t...

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Albert Jacka was possibly the outstanding footsoldier and front-line leader of men in the Great War. It is possible to imagine equally impressive achievements but hard to imagine better. That is a big claim, but check out the record . It is worth reading to the end because Jac...

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On Late Night Live tonight. Should be fascinating and great fun. Paul K sat at Lang's feet when young drawing the big fella out. I'm not a big fan of Paul Keating as PM. But he was a great Treasurer, and he's great to listen to. He'll discuss Lang with Phillip Adams and histor...

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As a follow-up to the epic post on the graveyard of ideologies, here is a story about the graveyards of ideologists .

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Troppodillians have seen some of this week's Courier Mail column coming in an earlier post . This week's column is about the strange way in which Great Britain snapped out of the 'low dishonest decade' of appeasement. It seems to me that there is something remarkable about the...

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We've been celebrating the 60th anniversary of various events towards the end of the Second World War in the last few months, like V(E) day and the liberation of Auschwitz-Burkenau. We can also celebrate the 65th anniversary of the landmarks of the first years of the war. I've...