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

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

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

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

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

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Here is a new paper from Imperial College , this time by a team with David Miles, Mike Stedman, and A drian Heald, looking into the implicit cost per QALY that the UK spent via lock downs and other repression policies. They use a somewhat different methodology from mine , esti...

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If you, like me, believe our collective hysteria is needlessly causing the world tens of millions of deaths and enormous unhappiness , you surely need a bit of humour to keep going. So let’s view the whole crisis via a different lens and share the brilliance of UK government c...

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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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[in progress: will add more references, links and latest numbers when I get the time] In this note, I want to deal with three related issues: the main lessons on the corona virus from the reported deaths across countries with different policies; the feasibility of different “e...

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In a week from now, UQ student leader Drew Pavlou will face an internal hearing at the University of Queensland to decide whether or not he will be expelled for having organised rallies against various pro-China organisations on campus and generally being a pain in the *rse of...

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

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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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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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The #MeToo flood of stories of women who feel abused by men – ranging from lurid stares to straightforward rape – seems like a disaster to me for the Democrats. Not because of the stories themselves, but because of how the progressive media and commentators have reacted to it....

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

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Let me indulge, purely for entertainment value, in some fan-speculation on what we will see on-screen after the Long Night is over and the final 6 episodes Of Game of Thrones are run in 2019. Let me first talk about the end-game aspects I think the books and the tv-series seem...

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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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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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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmOvEwtDycs] Here at Troppo we have referred to the 'Yes Minister series' many times because of its brilliant commentary on the timeless issues of government, exemplified in the skit above. I have gone through three phases with the serie...

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Political parties and institutions in Australia and the US are increasingly dominated by interest groups representing the few, leading to a large policy-induced increase in inequality in recent decades and a long raft of new policies favouring the few by giving them the tax re...

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

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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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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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Miles Kimball, for the uninitiated a sensible centrist commentator on economic policy is also an admirer of John Stuart Mill and has supported the case for decriminalising drugs . At the same time, since he thinks drugs - certainly recreational drugs or the new ones - are bad...

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How would you measure the safety of private motor vehicle travel? Let’s agree to focus on fatalities. Serious injuries are also important, but all the points I am going to make hold equally as well for injuries as for fatalities. Probably the silliest way to measure road fatal...

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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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Almost everyone is in favour of equality of opportunity; even free market activists from the Institute of Public Affairs . But whenever a large number of people agree on a form of words, it's a safe bet they interpret those words differently. How else could party members agree...

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In a piece for the Sunday Age , Chris Berg says progressives think conservatives are heartless because they "don't realise the right has a different and legitimate moral framework." Perhaps so, but what about libertarians ? Berg draws on Jonathan Haidt 's moral foundations res...

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Why "shouldn’t we look forward to a freer, more egalitarian world of tomorrow in which people are allowed to live where they want?" asks Matt Yglesias . If neoliberalism is about removing all barriers to market transactions then removing restrictions to migration should be top...

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Ayn Rand's 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged is so popular even Angus & Robertson stock it . And now after years of rumours , it's finally become a movie . That's odd because it's longer than Tolstoy's War and Peace and climaxes with a philosophical speech that runs for 70 pages. Most...

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

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Some things seem to need no explanation, but are not obvious at all on reflection and, if you wonder about them, suggest something of interest about the economic system. Consider the question of why the informal economy is so small, leading to the question of how much more pro...

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George Soros picked up the idea of the open society from Karl Popper at the London School of Economics and he spent a great deal of money promoting the idea through Open Society Institutes in Eastern Europe. Lately he has moved on to target market fundamantalism as the great t...

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Club 1: Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Malaysia, Mali, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Sri Lanka. Club 2: Bolivia, Brazil, Gabon, Ghana, Guatemala, In...

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Interesting to see that the ACT party , led by Rodney Hyde, has a slice of the action in New Zealand. The party is described as the most free market party to have seats in Parliament anywhere in the world. When I ran into Rodney Hide at the Mont Pelerin conference in Christchu...

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What shape is the income distribution of Andrew Leigh's dreams? Even he doesn't know. "I don’t have a strong sense of what the right level of inequality is", he writes . "Indeed, I'm not even sure I have the right intellectual framework for answering the question." The questio...

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If you've ever been quoted out of context by journalist you'll know what it's like to be a fictional character. As a therapist to troubled inhabitants of fictional works, I see what happens when authors abuse characters who are often finer human beings than themselves . The in...

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