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

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If scientific fraud represents five per cent of scientific papers, surely we should expect at least as much philosophic fraud. But how can we detect philosophy's fraudsters? Here's a first attempt at some rules of thumb. This is a long post. So here's the short version: this p...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="507"] A young Mondrian in 1908 channels an old Monet but is really thinking “I wonder if a bunch of rectangles on canvas would sell? If it did it could solve a lot of problems, perhaps not for everyone, but certainly for me.”[/caption] O...

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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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Michael Polanyi was highly suspicious of the hyper-reductionism of neo-Darwinism. It’s reduction of the evolution of a thing so vast as life into a single causal mechanism. And it was a good call. Darwin himself had proposed that natural selection was a major mechanism of evol...

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The biggest winner from the referendum on the weekend is John Stuart Mill. There’s a strand of left-wing orthodoxy these days that deprecates free speech and brands opposing viewpoints as dangerous wrongthink. This firebrand mode of thinking is excellent at producing an engage...

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

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From my Substack newsletter . Extraordinary images are being detected within the early pictures taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. As you know, the JWST went in search of exoplanets. Anyway at about the same time I was seeking an AI artist to illustrate the phenomenon of...

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This post began as an ad for an artist with traditional and AI graphic design skills. If you want to apply, please be my guest. But the post also presents a nice simplification of a way of thinking. Right now I'm wondering how to illustrate what I call "the off-ramp from reali...

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From this week's Substack of mine. Thomas B. Edsall has an important writeup of research into reducing political polarisation. But to me it seems to be heading in an unhelpfully scientistic direction. Virtually all the researchers quoted examine the causal pathways leading to...

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Valiant attempts have been made to measure happiness and wellbeing. People much smarter than me have developed fancy indices, and people even smarter than that, such as our own Nicholas Gruen, has called bullshit on many of them . What I propose is something far simpler: make...

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

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

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

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https://twitter.com/abc730/status/1557673265493344259 Peter Dutton is a human being. That’s not a moral point I’m making — I’m just talking about the task of making sense of others — particularly since, if we can’t kill them, we have to live with them. (And trying to kill some...

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Like me, Leslie Cannold is deeply grateful for Liz Chaney right now — you know, the way she’s speaking truth to fruitcakery. Liz Cheney is my hero. On positions of policy, I disagree with her almost 100% of the time, but I see her as one of the first moral heroes of this mille...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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I The university is one of the finest creations of European culture. Alas, as a troublesome fellow once said, all that is solid melts into air. I’m a bit shy of attributing things to a single cause. These things tend to built up over many, many decades. But certainly what migh...

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

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One of the more curious phenomena of the last 18 months has been the fatalism on display on both sides of the lockdown divide. In the anti-lockdown brigade fatalism props up in the guise of "this was the inevitable outcome of decades of planning", a view of humanity wherein on...

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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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[caption id="attachment_35167" align="alignright" width="345"] The graphic from the nifty NYT review. [/caption] On the strength of nothing more than the fact that it's Audible's free book of the month, I've started listening to Midnight's library. It's fun and engaging. I'll...

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

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John sent me the text below in response to reading my essay on John Macmurray . As you may know he trained as a priest and after many decades lost his faith. He is now in his nineties and must have things read to him. I presume he dictates his correspondence. I have enjoyed co...

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

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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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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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As I struggle with my ninety-fifth year, I would like to beg forgiveness from the true believers in sortition. Near forty years ago, in 1985, I published a book Is Democracy Possible? with the subtitle The Alternative to Parliamentary Democracy. The sortitionists believed that...

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

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

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

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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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Back in the day, (which is to say for most of the 20th century until things began changing in the 1980s, each of the major political parties had a few percentage points of the population as members. In addition to the intrinsic rewards of being part of one’s country’s social a...

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

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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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[caption id="attachment_34398" align="aligncenter" width="736"] There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy[/caption] It’s a supreme finding of Hume’s clever reasoning that ought cannot be derived from is. The claim is so irrefutab...

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

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

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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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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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Scrap attempts to reforming politics as a whole. From a practical point of view attempts to do so by legal constitutional change have no possibility of succeeding from a theoretical point of view, it is folly to assume that if we agree broadly about principle and are motivated...

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

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

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

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

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

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There have long been scientists who were celebrities in their own time. Galileo, Keppler, Goodall, Linneus, Cousteau, Darwin, Smith, Leeuwenhoek, Da Vinci, Ibn Khaldhun, Curie, and many others in the last 800 years were followed and admired. They in many ways performed their s...

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

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

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

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Dr Homer Rieth, the subject of a marvellous profile by Earshot on Radio National has died. It's an amazing story of a true philosopher, at least as suggested by the etymology of the word as a lover of wisdom. He operated on the outskirts of the institutions of intellectual res...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Politics is about constructing those public goods that are necessary for communities, are a minimum to deal with problems that threaten life itself. In our present situation, the most serious problems are all posed on a global scale, as a result of the scale of our management...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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In many areas of policy, particularly where relatively homogeneous communities deliberate about matters within their everyday experience, the informal processes of discussion in the community can, and often do, lead to changes in public opinion that in turn lead to effective p...

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A post by John Burnheim. About ten months ago, John Burnheim wrote to me in terms I've reproduced on this blog previously. John was one of the early movers in academia exploring the limitations of electoral democracy with his book Is Democracy Possible published in 1985 and th...

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

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

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

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There seem to be more and more claims that "hate speech" should not be entitled to the normal privileges of free speech. To my surprise, one of them is George Lakoff - famed cognitive scientist, philosopher and metaphor expert. Here’s the admirably clear Lakoff writing a blog...

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People disappointed with democratic outcomes often call for better education of the citizenry. But the democracies began, and flourished, in the nineteenth century, when people were quite poorly educated. They proved resilient and backsliding only seems to occur where democrac...

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

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

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

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Choosing a Public-Spirited Leader. An experimental investigation of political selection By: Thomas Markussen (epartment of Economics, University of Copenhagen) ; Jean-Robert Tyran (Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen) In this experiment, voters select a leader wh...

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

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

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

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In part 1, I looked at whether it made sense to have random individuals inserted into parliament, or to let policies be decided by juries full of randomly chosen individuals. Both were argued to be unworkable and likely to lead to more corruption, rather than less: policies th...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWci3a0-EKM Pilate said unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and said unto them, I find in him no fault at all. The Gospel according to John 18:38 Picasso once famously opined on art and truth-tell...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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 went to see The Secret River last night - and returned from the experience underwhelmed. It tries to be a truthful depiction of one aspect of the 'frontier wars' and so it presents a bunch of Europeans setting up shop in an area that the local indigenes (surprise, surprise)...

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

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

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

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

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

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Robert Waldman has a fantastic critique of Paul Romer's recent missives on economic science. He's commenting ultimately on why Lucas's work isn't such a breakthrough. In it he highlights something of immense importance. It's hard to think of many developments in economic theor...

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I think I am in favour of gay marriage, on balance, with some reservations. I would not wave placards in the street, or even change my vote on this issue. Yet it seems that this moderate position is not considered ethical. There is almost zero tolerance among some people for a...

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My friend Martin Stewart-Weeks points me to this piece by Simon Griffiths which argues that "an engagement with Hayek does not mean a capitulation to the market". Quite. Indeed it's always struck me that it's a pity that Hayek pursued his ideas in such a tendentious way. He ha...

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I don't have much time to offer anything very considered but want to just say how bemused I am at the carryings on of Syriza. The whole sorry business has been horrible to watch with creditors showing no interest in their own self-interest let alone a little enlightenment in t...

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Paul Krugman has an interesting blog post on the extent to which there might be contagion from one area of social capital (or lack thereof) to another. He's responding to the claim CEOs made to him that they only started arcing up their pay demands when they saw sportspeople d...

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by Shamena Anwar, Patrick Bayer, Randi Hjalmarsson. Publication is available here . This paper uses data from the Gothenburg District Court in Sweden and a research design that exploits the random assignment of politically appointed jurors (termed naemndemaen) to make three co...

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

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I sent the passage below to my friend Alex Coram noting "I like this post from Brad Delong - though you may not". Alex, you see, has a deeper understanding than me of these things. I was right - he wasn't that impressed - but for reasons that I also agreed with and might have...

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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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From the latest Journal of Economic Perspectives Fair trade coffee is a cup half full, according to Raluca Dragusanu, Daniele Giovannucci, and Nathan Nunn in “The Economics of Fair Trade” (Summer 2014, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 217–36). We are not persuaded. The authors barely menti...

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

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

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

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

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

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Actually the magnitude of the effect is a bit of an eye-opener . Empirical Linkages between Good Government and National Well-being by John F. Helliwell, Haifang Huang, Shawn Grover, Shun Wang Abstract: This paper first reviews existing studies of the links between good govern...

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I'm a big, though not uncritical admirer of Paul Krugman - of his straightforwardness and his aggression in what is almost always a worthy cause. And yet, reading Martin Wolf's magnificent book rather inauspiciously titled The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned-and Have...

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Contractual Freedom and the Evolution of Corporate Control in Britain, 1862 to 1929 by Timothy W. Guinnane, Ron Harris, Naomi R. Lamoreaux - #20481 (DAE) Abstract: British general incorporation law granted companies an extraordinary degree of contractual freedom to craft their...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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https://youtu.be/-9q-sMsXLHs I was bemoaning ethics committees to someone the other day and they told me of this case in which Australian Hospitals refused a patient - a nurse who had done her homework - aggressive chemotherapy for her MS. The ethics committee knew better. So...

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I know I took the notion of optimising to heart as I learned it - implicitly - from my economist Dad. And there are those who might argue that the idea in economics came from the society around economists as the discipline came into being. But now it seems optimising as the he...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz1XBcWI6LM Above is my presentation to the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society - the background blurb of which is here . You'll find the first half of the presentation on the fractal ecology of public and private goods is effectively the sa...

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T he excesses of ethics committees are a pet hate of mine, but I'd always thought that for instance the Stanley Milgram experiment was an example of the kind of experiment where genuine ethical issues arose that might justify not going ahead. But now I read on Wikipedia that:...

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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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Prologue to a blog post: Gentle Troppodillians, as you know, we keep up with the times here at Troppo. Some people like to think just five minutes ahead. Here at Troppo we're focused on the long-term - eons are seconds in TroppoTime - or seconds are eons depending on the way y...

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

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In the middle of this year a friend who had decamped to CSIRO from government wrote to me and asked me to participate in an interview exploring the economic impact of next generation broadband in Australia. Towards the end of his email he wrote. If you are willing to take part...

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Hoist from archives for a brief re-appearance. [caption id="attachment_24972" align="alignright" width="350"] A value we hold dear at Troppo - what's there not to like about being open and authentic? A Christmas Season message from Troppo[/caption] A Troppo community service:...

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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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This piece is inspired by Paul Frijters' post titled The Benefits of Being Dumb in Politics . I don't actually think it is possible meaningfully/reliably to distinguish between politicians who are "really smart and great actors as well, who thus have no problems with telling o...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aUn-I_loNE

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by Prashant Bharadwaj, Leah K. Lakdawala, Nicholas Li - #19602 (CH DEV) Abstract: While bans against child labor are a common policy tool, there is very little empirical evidence validating their effectiveness. In this paper, we examine the consequences of India's landmark leg...

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It was quite a few years ago – last century in fact – that through Martin Gardner’s ‘Mathematical Recreations’ column in Scientific American that I first learnt of Raymond Smullyan. It was in a review of either The Lady or the Tiger or What is the Name of this Book , two of Sm...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaqpoeVgr8U One of the numerous downsides of the rise of feminism is the demise of righteous masculine anger. For the record I'm strongly supportive of the great achievements of first and second wave feminism. But just as with other great changes...

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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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For some people, other human beings are only ever a means to an end. The source of their self-esteem is their ability to realise their own personal vision. They see themselves as powerful creators and believe ideas like empathy, altruism and justice are just tricks the weak us...

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One type of news item I notice often – because it confirms a belief that I like to maintain – reports that a recent psychological study has found that the most effective way to give yourself a quick happiness fix is to do someone else a favour. The most recent I remember repor...

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Can't remember who first pointed me to ' Becks in Paris '. Whoever it was, I'm grateful. [The] blog imagines Beckham’s internal monologue as he collides with the Parisian intellectual tradition – the glittering surface of a footballing icon cracked open by existentialism. Gold...

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There have been some recent racism incidents and the awkwardness of speaking up about it. I am way ahead of them. This was written in 1991. “X” and “Y” have been substituted here for bus company names. Blacks to the Back of the Bus, Part One It is after midnight. The coach is...

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Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) is one of our more rapacious copyright maximalist organisations. It is a nice illustration of why things that sound like nice ideas don't always work out. CAL was dreamt up when it was thought that photocopiers might damage incentives to publish,...

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Institutional Quality, Culture, and Norms of Cooperation : Evidence from a Behavioral Field Experiment, Alessandra Cassar (University of San Francisco), Giovanna d'Adda (University opf Birmingham), Pauline Grosjean (School of Economics, the University of New South Wales). We d...

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As people reading this blog would know, I'm no fan of Richard Dawkins writings on God. However, having seen this video, I have to admit to preferring Dawkins to this guy, whose attack on the four horsemen of militant atheism I broadly agree with. On top of his superior manner,...

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I have just completed a lengthy answer to a very thoughtful comment on my previous post on climate change . And because the raises lots of Very Big issues about how one talks and reasons about ethics, I thought I'd exercise my prerogative and turn the exchange into a post for...

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It's always been hard to pin down who 'the elites' are why we are supposed reject them as un-Australian. A new book review by Tony Abbott offers some clues. It also hints at why attacks on 'the elites' are likely to backfire for conservatives. In the Spectator Australia , Abbo...

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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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On a previous thread, my counter-intuitive claim that verbal definitions are superfluous to science survived objections. I have been wondering if some further unconventional notions would survive a Troppodile attack. Because natural science is effective, I suggested that we sh...

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Here's Dennis Glover's go at articulating his dismay at the kinds of things I expressed dismay about here . I've always been amazed at the extent of antagonism that Labor holds towards the Greens. It seems so obvious that the right relationship between them is as occasionally...

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https://twitter.com/NGruen1/status/1529689205420720129 Herewith today's column in the Age and SMH . George Orwell was a stickler for plain and simple English in public discourse. He argued that one could escape some of “the worst follies of orthodoxy” by simplifying one’s lang...

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It's an old debate with a nice Keynes quote routinely trotted out: The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who...

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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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Normally I tuck mp3 files of radio interviews which are loosely on columns of mine at the end of the column where it's reproduced on Troppo. However here's my last interview for the year on the ecology of public and private goods and public and private motives - which relates...

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Get a load of the UK Cabinet Office Minister's delivery. http://youtu.be/o-m6l4keQc8 It's fabulously low key, informal, indeed intimate compared with the formal bullshitting mode of almost all political utterance, and straightforward. It is of course 'spin', as it couldn't be...

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Both economic pedagogy and broad political discussion are based on what I've come to think of as anorectic understanding of public and private goods - which boils down to the idea that for things to go on well (let's say in an economy) you need a mix of public and private good...

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One of the most puzzling features of the world in the aftermath of the financial crisis is that so far, populism has taken primarily a right-wing form, not a left- wing one. In the United States, for example, although the Tea Party is anti-elitist in its rhetoric, its members...

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

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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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Why hasn't (Darwinian) evolution evolved the building blocks of Lamarkian evolution? Well it has once - with us - but why hasn't it done so at the biological rather than the cultural level? Perhaps smuggled into Lamarkianism is the idea of telos, which can exist within conscio...

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In a recent book on social justice , former Labor politician Gary Johns argues for "a major reconsideration of social justice as a rationale for the welfare state". In his essay 'When too much social justice is never enough' Johns suggests that social justice is primarily abou...

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Herewith the text of my talk on Ockham's Razor this morning . It is from a longer essay which you can find here , boiled down so that it could be read in the 12 minutes or so one gets on Ockham's Razor. I. Shortly after Barack Obama became the first US president to build his c...

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This wasn't supposed to be the theme of part two (Part One is here ) but Jessica Irvine's recent and timely column on superstardom and One Direction prompted me to add my two cents' worth - well someone else's two cents' worth but at least inserted by me. First; highlights fro...

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[caption id="attachment_19320" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Peter Singer"] [/caption] Last week's ABC QandA debate between uber-atheist Richard Dawkins and Catholic archbishop George Pell generated quite a lot of blogosphere debate , not least here at Troppo . Howev...

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Troppo's patron saint Adam Smith put it thus (note the generous assumption about human nature): The liberal reward of labor, as it encourages the propagation, so it increases the industry of the common people . . .. Where wages are high, accordingly, we shall always ?nd the wo...

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No time to read the paper right now, but it looks great. Kantian Optimization, Social Ethos, and Pareto Efficiency Date: 2012-03 By: John E. Roemer (Dept. of Political Science, Yale University) Although evidence accrues in biology, anthropology and experimental economics that...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1nHNtZ148I A few weeks ago I attended the latest F.H. Gruen lecture at ANU by the terrific English economist Andrew Oswald.* He's one of those economists who, in addition to being formidable in his (many) fields within the profession, is also a...

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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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http://youtu.be/-4V40twk63A Screen tests are fun to look at, letting you peek before the actors peak, as it were (or crash). There must be some good philosophy to be written about the uncanny. (Hasn't Susan Sontag written something on this?) [On checking , it turns out that Si...

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I read an article with an attractive title recently. " Complexity and Context-Dependency ". It's not very good, but it raises an important point that is important to what I call the psycho-pathology of disciplines and it puts me in mind of something I've thought for a long tim...

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Herewith a paper about my encounter with design, on taking up the Chairmanship of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation and encountering the Family by Family program. The site where it's been published has no comments facility, so I'm opening up discussion here should an...

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Herewith my op ed from the Herald and Age today. What is the good life and are we living it? Assessing and measuring wellbeing has vexed us since ancient times. But a funny thing happened on the modern world’s way to the answer. The metric that economists used to dampen down t...

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Here's a paragraph I wrote about fifteen years ago. The culture of economic expertise places inadequate weight on integrating insights from multiple perspectives, that it frequently places an unreasonably high 'burden of proof' on heterodox views, and that it has a penchant fo...

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The latest psychology bestseller The Folly of Fools is on the triumph of deceit. It looks quite interesting. Anyway, it looked a bit too focused on the bestseller formula - which is often the book of the article formula for me to want to read it all. But I've downloaded my Kin...

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On the suggestion, some time ago, of Ian Marsh, I finally caught up with the New Democracy Foundation a few weeks ago. Not surprisingly we got on well. I've always been keen on things like consensus conferences - which bring the deliberation of a jury to wider social and polit...

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Human beings only play when they are in the full sense of the word human and they are only fully human when they play. Friedrich Shiller Games seem frivolous. They can stand as metaphors for life, but typically, the outcome of games doesn't really matter. I wanted Collingwood...

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Yesterday I followed this mellifluously titled article on why the author hadn't been able to write a best selling 'ideas book'. This is what I had to do. First, I needed to have a platform. A platform is something you stand on. It makes you taller than you are. In trade publis...

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I've been struggling to articulate my objection to little strategic set pieces which appear before policy proposals. They typically take the salient challenges from conventional wisdom - for instance right now that we're facing potential environmental catastrophe, sovereign de...

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By calling it the greatest moral challenge of our generation , Kevin Rudd framed climate change as a moral issue. Now as Prime Minister Julia Gillard is putting a price on carbon. So why isn't she getting credit from people who care passionately about the issue? The reason is...

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Will Wilkinson is unhappy about a recent article in Salon where Michael Lind denounces libertarians as enemies of democracy. One of Lind's targets is the classical liberal, Friedrich Hayek who he says preferred libertarian dictatorships to welfare state democracies. Wilkinson...

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

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

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I love finding links between equity and efficiency - there are lots around. Here's another . . . . (it seems). Early Non-marital Childbearing and the "Culture of Despair" by Melissa Schettini Kearney, Phillip B. Levine This paper borrows from the tradition of other social scie...

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Antinomies are discomforting things. If you haven't run into them before, they were a topic of debate and discussion introduced into modern philosophy by Kant (Unless he had some forebear of which I'm unaware), though you might say that they bear some resemblance to Zeno's par...

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In a very recent post I commented on the absence of the one signal in the public market for expertise that might really improve the market for expertise - from the perspective of the public and private interest in efficiency - and that was some surveillance of the extent to wh...

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It's funny. I think academia is too theoretical, and politics isn't theoretical enough. In this post I'll defend the second proposition on politics, and if I manage it, a subsequent post will defend the first. I'm also thinking particularly about the ALP. In a sense my proposi...

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Of all the right wing shock jocks, I find Andrew Bolt by far the best read. If you ignore the coat trailing and name calling - like calling 'Liberty Victoria' 'far left' (declaration of interest - I'm not sure if I'm a full paying member right now but I join it when asked) and...

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Well blow me down! In early 2009 I was invited to Beijing to participate in a 'dialogue' on 'the knowledge society' which was being run between various academic institutions in Australia and Peking University. The 'dialogue' was quite formal and diplomatic - I recognised the g...

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Ken's last post seeks to crowdsource ideas for teaching law students some of their cognitive biases. I'd been contemplating on posting on something I'd read in Supercrunchers, and this gave me the perfect opportunity. Good questions Ken. I can’t answer them very satisfactorily...

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Someone labours to fit a set of events into a 'theory' which is a restatement of the bleeding obvious: regulators and the regulated talk and this influences the evolution of regulation. Amazing really. Further there is "a circular and interactive relationship between the regul...

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Happiness is a recurrent topic in the blogosphere, not least at Troppo where several of us have posted abou t it more than once. There's even a strand of economics that focuses on studying happiness. In part that's why it struck me as a bit strange that Australian writer David...

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How did you sleep last night? Thousands of kilometers away in the cities of Japan, people are trapped under rubble crying out for help. According to recent news reports 1000 people may have died in yesterday's earthquake and the tsunami that followed. If 18th century philosoph...

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In one episode of Yes Minister Hacker says something like "It seems the civil service just prevents governments from implementing the sovereign promises the government has made to the people" to which Bernard says "Well somebody has to". I'm a bit of a promises guy - I think i...

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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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HT 3 Quarks: Perhaps rather apposite in view of some recent controversies and debates. Bhikhu Parekh in The Philosopher's Magazine: Western thought has long been dominated by the view that while error is plural, truth is singular. We can be wrong in many different ways but can...

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Christopher Joye is relaxed about income inequality. In a recent article for the Drum Unleashed he writes: I don’t think there is anything wrong at all with a rise in income inequality if one assumes that: (a) we have equality of opportunity; (b) we are committed to combating...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVDla_Ax40k&feature=player_embedded

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From Troppo's guest blogger Neal Lawson (OK I nicked his post and reproduced it here). It is so depressingly inevitable. Obama, like Clinton, Blair and Brown before him, like in Rudd in Australia, like the Swedish social democrats, like every example of centre-left government...

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"A degree from Harvard or Yale is not a pre-requisite for president", says talk show host Glenn Beck while Christine O'Donnell begins a campaign ad by disclosing " I didn't go to Yale ". If there's one thing tea party champions agree on, it's that a new elite has taken over Am...

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I've posted on this a couple of times before - arguing that the populism of the left has gone missing and wondering why. This argues the same point in a different - shall we say 'genre'. I agree with most of the first half of it, but thought it got a little complacent about it...

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This post began as a response to Julia Thornton's brief comment on a previous post in which I outed myself as a fan of the philosopher Hegel, directing me to a site where Hegelians roamed free. It's an interesting thing what we make of what we learn at uni - and to some extent...

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I'm afraid I don't have time to explain this in any detail. But Hegel is perhaps my favourite philosopher. I worked out I'd like to know more about Hegel when so many of the people who interested me seemed to somehow go back to Hegel. R.G. Collingwood is a good example, but lo...

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I recently attended the David Solomon Lecture in Brisbane as part of Right to Information Day. David Solomon designed the freedom of information architecture of Qld and Anna Bligh asked him to do it and more or less implemented what he recommended. So good on her. He is a Good...

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Since I heard of it, I've been fascinated by an idea that William Hazlitt wrote up to prosecute his case for the "natural disinterestedness of the human mind". From an early age and then until his death Hazlitt fancied himself as a philosopher even though it wasn't where he ma...

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A while back I was rung up and interviewed by a student doing a thesis on Government 2.0. She asked lots of good questions and they brought out in me a bunch of things I've been thinking about regarding Government 2.0. Since she sent me a transcript, I thought it may be useful...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMxz7rzwee8 Paddy McGuinness once opined about the chasm between consultant and academic speak in the realm of economics. I think it was in the context of the battle between the mush served up by the consultants which became BCG in Australia in t...

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Well it kept me in suspense until the last few pages. The speech is well worth reading and is here (pdf).

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Popper is often perceived as an eccentric kind of positivist who adopted a slightly different take on the demarcation of science with the criterion of falsification in place of verification. People like Habermas and the late Richard Rorty regarded Popper as a positivist for al...

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No time to say much right now, but I was intrigued to see the People's Chamber. Why wouldn't I be? And disappointed it was scorned so instantly by various operatives around the traps. Of course the atmospherics for its introduction might have been better - this is a rescue ope...

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You may need to read back over the post , which is thoroughly worthwhile in itself (for eco geeks, or anyone with an interest in social science) but I lerved this comment. There are no simple mistakes in applied macro, Nick! Unless one counts asking, on a public forum, provoca...

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I got this correspondence in my email today - last year we got a family membership to the Colliwobbles Football Club and enjoy going to most matches. I always email the words of our coach Mick Malthouse explaining the game on Saturday in hindsight on Mondays onto my son and so...

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What do you do if you’re a ‘third wayer’ and things don’t seem to be turning out all that flatteringly for your vision? You just keep talking in pretty much the same way, slap a coat of Web 2.0 paint on the vision and press on. Oh well, none of us that I know of are that cleve...

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We do have a few advantages, perhaps the greatest being that we don’t have a strategic plan Warren Buffett Obliquity . . . or indirectness of means is a subject to which it turns out I've given a lot of thought over the years going back at least to Charles Lindblom's attacks f...

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As usual I'm a year behind the publicity machine, so I missed the original reviews of this book , as well as the fanfare during the Sydney Writers' Festival, which the author Mark Rowlands attended. This post is for any reader who might have encountered The Philosopher and the...

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From the State Government that brings car racing to our most idyllic park, turns nature reserves over to shooters, refuses to cap political donations, reneges on public transport promises faster than it makes them, and philanders while its health system burns, it's nice to see...

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Interesting development! Last week a UK High Court gave the green light for a green activist to sue his employer, who had sacked him for refusing to do an errand because it conflicted with his green beliefs. For intellectual ballast, the judge quoted no less or, should I say,...

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I've never been much of a fan of Lionel Robbins 1932 Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. It smacks of what I'd call 'authoritarian methodology' which had its sterile apotheosis in Popper's efforts to demark 'science' and 'non-science'. To cut a long story...

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

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The article on Social Liberalism is: http://www.cis.org.au/Policy/winter09/links/argy.pdf Any comments welcome.

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Andrew Norton, from the Centre for Independent Studies, kindly invited me to submit an article for the Policy magazine. It relates to the choice between classical Liberalism and what I called Social Liberalism. The link to the article is : http://www.cis.org.au/Policy/winter09...

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From Usury Condemned (1643) by John Blaxton At a seminar yesterday the speaker described his project as one of discovering the conditions for an economy without interest on loans. In other words, what would the financial system of the ideal Islamic state be like? This raised a...

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

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Given the grim circumstances the world faced, I've always been queasy about being too gung ho in criticising the bombing raids of the allies in World War Two (though the allies circumstances were less and less grim, victory more and more inevitable when some of the worst raids...

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I don't have time right now to read the essay which is abstracted below . But I'd love to. And I don't really have time to defend the propositions that I'll put before you here, nor to get them into a state that I would be confident I wouldn't have to revise once I'd posted th...

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It seems incredible, hard to believe, but we've got ten double passes to give away to Highly Suss , which looks like fun. I'd go myself if I wasn't going to be overseas. If you're planning to be in Melbourne for the 4th of April, then let us know and we can send you a ticket t...

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If you go to this page on the BBC's website in the next few days, or if you arrive in the next month or so if you download this file (mp3), you will hear an extraordinary interview. It is with a softly spoken Canadian farmer. He euthanased his 12 year old daughter who suffered...

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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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For me anyway. It's on philosophy, the rights of cognitively imparied people and stuff like that. And it's long for a blog post. It might not be your cup of tea at all, but I thought it was great. It's here . For some reason unknown to me, comments are closed on the blog it's...

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The Myer Foundation's 'Cranlana' Program is named after Sidney Myer's magnificent Toorak home where the program holds a range of functions. I attended one of these when I was working at the BCA. I remember doing the reading for it before hand and thinking it was going to be aw...

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The Australian Skeptics Prize for Critical Thinking has been won this year by Peter Ellerton, a Queensland teacher who established a network promoting critical thinking in schools. The prize is worth $10,000. For a decade up to 2006 it was awarded as a part of the Australian M...

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People will recall that political economy started out as moral philosophy (a la Adam Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy) then evolved into the study of national economies, then reverted to the narrower scope of economics, focussed on the idealised "economic actor". For those...

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Many years ago, Robert M. Pirsig's hippy cult novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was one of my favourites. A few weeks ago I discovered he'd written a sequel in 1991 called Lila: An Inquiry into Morals . I've been reading it as a break from seemingly interminable...

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As a long time fan of Hegel, I remember thinking as I skimmed a book on him in a bookshop that Peter Singer would make an awful mess of him - as people like Bertrand Russell did from a similar tradition a couple of generations back. But though there were various bits of Singer...

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The following paragraph is an abstract of the paper "The Effect of Employer Access to Criminal History Data on the Labor Market Outcomes of Ex-Offenders and Non-Offenders" by Keith Finlay Since 1997, states have begun to make criminal history records publicly available over th...

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The super-rich aren't super-smart says Ezra Klein . While it might be comforting to believe that that income differences represent differences in knowledge and skill, it's just not true: The massive gains in wealth in this country are apportioning to a small slice of rich peop...

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"If everyone had enough, it would be of no moral consequence whether some had more than others", says Harry Frankfurt . Skepticlawyer agrees. In a recent post on 'progressive fusionism' she suggests combining Frankfurt's 'doctrine of sufficiency' with Amartya Sen's capabilitie...

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I have about three draft posts, all unfinished on a particular theme which I have touched on once before here . The general theme is the growing viability of doing well by doing good. One of the posts was called Googlenomics and referred to the massive amount of <jargon>consum...

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"Is equality passé " by Bowles and Gintis is a terrific essay which I thoroughly recommend to all who've not read it. It's a much stronger foundation for what has often been the flailing around of the 'third way' than some of the more widely acknowledged high priests like the...

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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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Only marginally related to the post, but a great image just the same - from turtblu on Flickr Readers with prodigious memories may recall a post I wrote a couple of years ago about the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt on the cognitive basis for human morality. Haidt has dev...

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Coming out in March 2008 I've just finished reading American Fascists , in which the famous American war correspondent Chris Hedges presents a deeply unpleasant portrait of the Christian Right. Much of the story will be unsurprising to readers who've been paying attention to t...

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A while back, I came upon Beth Noveck who is doing some interesting things in trying to bring the techniques and possibilities of Web 2.0 to government. For instance in addition to theorising at American law journal article length about ways of moving governments into the Web...

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A while back I posted a brief endorsement of a Guy Rundle piece, which brought forth a reference to another essay by Rundle . I disagree - sometimes to the point of strong irritation with some of the things he says, especially in the last half of the piece, but I recommend it...

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What a wonderful guy. Might we all have such quiet modesty, magnanimity and achievement written on our face when we're getting on a little. Heartfelt congratulations to David Bussau on his long overdue recognition - he has just been made Senior Australian of the Year. He is a...

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PPE, the combined undergraduate course of philosophy, politics and economics became popular in Oxford in the early part of the twentieth century. It acquired the name "Modern Greats" by analogy with "Greats" or classics which was ancient history, philosophy and languages which...

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Guy Rundle's op edlets in Crikey! often annoy me - they're too bombastic and self assured for my taste, though perhaps the extreme limitations of the genre - the shortness of the articles - is part of the explanation. In any event, I thought this essay from Arena was terrific...

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I heard Debra Dickerson for the first time on a summer replay of a Counterpoint program I'd not heard during the year. She wrote a book published in 2004 or thereabouts entitled The end of blackness. I wondered if Noel Pearson might have forgotten to acknowledge her in an essa...

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Via Patrick's comment on an earlier thread, and thence from Tyler Cowen's recommendation of "one of the best hour-wasters you will get this year", I happened upon a credo which I reproduce below. It's available on this page though it's amongst other posts many of which are fan...

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What are your views on compulsory voting? I think I'm in favour of it. I've always been surprised that right leaning parties don't try to get rid of it in Australia. I've always assumed that it's in their interests to have voluntary voting as I assume the left leaning parties...

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Well blow me down this is true. From this website director general of the World Trade Organization, Pascal Lamy is happy to have himself described as a Marxist. Might not be the most low key way to get his message across. Anyway, if he hadn't described himself as a Marxist, it...

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From this weekend's Financial Review Friday Review. "Labor will grapple with those choices, just as all those who triumph in the battles of politics and of power struggle with the balance between continuity and change. It is difficult to win those battles without demonising op...

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Who said this? Historically the concept of the 'real' has been formed in contradistinction to mere 'illusions' based on sense deceptions or on other experiences of purely mental origin. There is, however, no fundamental difference between such corrections of one sense experien...

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I liked the Ross Gittins speech that I posted on Troppo a week or so ago . I didn't join in comments, but had a nagging doubt. While I'm sympathetic to Ross's idea that self control is a big thing in an age of plenty, I guess I felt a little uneasy at a certain intimation in t...

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There's a bit of a thread running through three articles I've read recently. These two articles from the NYRB on Gordon Brown and Paul Krugman respectively both paint emerging responses to the excesses of yet another low dishonest decade. Brown is studied in his apparent desir...

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Puke!

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You get a lot from your parents. Money, 'human capital' as they call it these days. Language, political orientation (to a substantial extent). If your ideology is your 'values' then I'm sure that parents play a large part. But how public spirited are you? Turns out knowing how...

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I found this post from 2007 mysterious sitting deep in the bowels of the software on Club Troppo. I don't think it was published then - not that it's any great shakes. But it's published now. Tonight Alison Tate, the International Officer for the Australian Council of Trade Un...

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I recently picked up a remaindered copy of a strange and compelling book by John Lukacs the author of Five Days in London: May 1940 a gripping account of five of the first days of Winston Churchills Prime Ministership in which he faced down the defeatists and appeasers in his...

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To which organisations do these two logos belong?

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I can't. Confession 1 : American track star Marion Jones admits using performance-enhancing drugs and will almost certainly be stripped of the five medals she won at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. She will probably face a maximum of six months in jail for perjury, but that could be...

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In the last two and a half decades, the idea of economic freedom - low levels of government intervention in the economy and wide scope for individual freedom of choice -has been widely embraced by both conservative and social democratic governments. This is because of the wide...

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This article - now many years old - discloses that Peter Singer gives away one fifth of his income. That's a very very fine thing and a damn site better than me. According to his own calculations, which I have no reason to doubt, that means he's saved thousands of lives. Perha...

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According to Glenn Milne , Kevin Rudd's visit to a New York strip club gives lie to "his claims to be a churchgoing family man who counts as his hero Dietrich Bonhoeffer , the Lutheran pastor martyred by Adolf Hitler." But what would Bonhoeffer say? Dietrich Bonhoeffer took ri...

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Political thought can be classified in many different ways, having regard to ones attitudes to economic freedom, the environment, personal morality (abortion, gay rights etc), welfare, income inequality, inequality of opportunity, etc. Trying to build them all into a comprehen...

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I sometimes get into trouble for drawing sentences to the attention of Troppodillians that look too light to me. Well maybe someone can set me straight. I've not checked out the cases, but they look wrong to me. Case 1. An 11-year-old Canberra boy who sexually assaulted a 12-y...

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What is Michael Caine doing playing God? He's in the forthcoming film Sophie's World. You might wonder what they're doing turning a kids book on the history of Western philosophy into a film. But then you might have thought a similar things bout the book - which was a huge bes...

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Well that's too much to hope for. I've posted on 'he said - she said' journalism at least once before. Like reality TV 'he said - she said' journalism is the logical consequence of the economics of profit driven newspaper reporting of politics. The journalists' knowledge is ne...

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The Index of Economic freedom compiled by the Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal has come out with its 2006 index of economic freedom. It again claims that the higher the rating the better the economic performance (measured by per capita incomes). But it uses a compos...

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ECONOMIC LIBERALISM is about means to ends, the end being to increase aggregate utility of consumers (social welfare). Starting with the premise that individual consumers are able to maximize their utility or preferences (rational man) and that it is socially desirable to maxi...

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This post began as a comment on James Farrell comment on a recent thread in which I linked to a bit of dirt on Chomsky. James pulled me up twice, in each case in ways that I appreciate. He (and Paul F) suggested in his first comment that a slip-up in a quote ainât no crime and...

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Dove, no doubt for its own good commercial reasons are running a (cough) Campaign For Real Beauty which has been picked up by my daughter's school. Check out this striking video of the passage from the modelling studio to the unblemished looks of a poster.

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Setting out my response to Don Arthur's great post below sent me scurrying to a book I read a few years ago. I thought someone had thrown it out but fortunately no. The book is The Silent Woman and it's about Sylvia Plath and the biographical writings she inspired. The author,...

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In the world of the Matrix , Richard Layard would side with the machines. After all, the machines are only doing what any good government should do -- keeping people as happy as possible. During the war between humans and machines, the earth was plunged into darkness. Knowing...

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Paul Frijtersâ inaugural post last week raised several interlocking issues around the theme of growth fetish. Iâd like to revisit one of them, namely the contribution of income to happiness. The timing is good, because one of our honours students is doing a dissertation on the...

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All utopias begin in hope and end in despair. Marx's vision of a world where you could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and criticise after dinner collapsed into Orwell's image of boot stamping on a human face. At the hands of its critics,...

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Popper fans, acolytes and those less impressed might like to download the podcast of Melvin Bragg doing a show on the great man. This is on his ' In Our Time ' series on the BBC which I've found a bit disappointing. He gets three experts in and has a gasbag about some great ev...

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Hayek regarded 'social justice' as a mirage -- an unattainable ideal. Chasing this mirage would destroy the market and put society on the road to serfdom. In a 'socially just' society, the distribution of wealth and income would reflect some ideal pattern. Under egalitarian 's...

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[photopress:Hayek_Road_to_Freedom2.jpg,full,alignleft] If socialism is the road to serfdom then liberalism is the road to freedom. Friedrich Hayek is famous for defining freedom in negative terms . A person is free when they are not coerced. Left liberals define freedom in pos...

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Martin Amis arrived back in Britain to find white, middle-class demonstrators marching with " We are all Hizbullah " placards. "Well, make the most of being Hizbollah while you can," Amis writes , "As its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, famously advised the West: ' We don't want anyt...

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I've just been on hols with my kids to (aaahhh!) the Gold Coast. We visited Dreamworld, Sea World and, in the middle of the renamed 'Steve Irwin Way', the Australia Zoo where Terry Irwin impersonated the late Steve in a croc show and Bindi Irwin sang with the Crocmen and other...

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[photopress:Rand_Window3_1_2.jpg,thumb,alignleft] Ayn Rand despised Friedrich Hayek. In a letter to Rose Wilder Lane she described him as "an example of our most pernicious enemy". At Thoughts on Freedom, Andrew Russell takes issue with some of my earlier comments on the Rand/...

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I was recently talking to Dennis Glover who told me of his October op ed equating the right commentariat with old style Marxists, making the pretty obvious point that most of them began as Marxists. I'd missed it when it appeared. It's makes a large number of good points so it...

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Michael Duffy thinks we live in a meritocracy -- a society where everyone gets the income they deserve. But in the Duffyverse, evil genius Lex Luthor would be more deserving than Superman . Why? Because Luthor has a higher IQ . Duffy argues that Australia has a new upper class...

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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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"Let's not be misty-eyed about Friedrich Hayek" says Kevin Rudd , "he taught (and modern Liberals believe) that there is no such thing as social justice and that the only dignity to be delivered to human beings is through their emancipation by free markets untrammelled by the...

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There are few things we enjoy more here at Club Troppo than a good rant about morality and values. Some even think we're a bit precious about it. Anyway, I was mightily pleased to see bipartisan agreement between The Bomber and The Rodent about the desirability of making immig...

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I have a particular dislike of Richard Dawkins and enjoyed this demolition of Dawkins' latest attack on God. If you read carefully you'll notice that it's not done on behalf of religion. It does not presupose religious belief. The author - Terry Eagleton concedes, having concl...

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Liberals aren't comfortable talking about right and wrong. After all, the whole point of liberalism is to avoid arguments about morality. Rather than arguing, liberals want to establish institutions which will allow everyone to pursue their own idea of the good life. Morality...

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Who are Australia’s top libertarian identities? At Thoughts on Freedom, John Humphreys nominates Andrew Norton . That's odd because I always thought that Andrew identified as a classical liberal rather than as a libertarian. About a year ago Andrew wrote a post for Catallaxy o...

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Nothing's easier to understand than a story. It's as if human beings were hardwired for narrative -- stories with beginnings, middles and ends populated by people doing things. According to cognitive scientists Roger Schank and Robert Abelson that's not far from the truth. Bac...

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Peter Saunders likes to call himself a classical liberal . Leftist commentators prefer to call him a neoconservative . But what is neoconservatism and how does it differ from ordinary versions of conservatism? And what has he done to earn the label? Andrew Norton says that "no...

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RMIT's Rob Watts attempts to save the welfare state by attacking liberalism Neoconservatives are winning the welfare debate because they take values seriously, says RMIT's Rob Watts . In a recent paper on the welfare-to-work debate ( pdf ) he rejects the idea that the left is...

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A mate of mine made this tongue in cheek comment the other day to a Canadian fellow; Why do you hate America so much that you decided to be born somewhere else? Which is an appeal to the absurd in nationalism and the arbitrary nature with which it deals with individuals, citiz...

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It is generally accepted that Popper did not give a thorough account of the way that science actually works, and that is supposed to indicate that by the 1960s he was a bit out of things. Perhaps he did some interesting work back in the 1930s that challenged the logical positi...

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I've admired Paul Monk's writing for a while now and have linked to a particularly good essay of his in the past. In any event, he's agreed for me to post essays of his on Troppo. Over the fold is an review essay of John Armstrong's recent book on Goethe and happiness. From th...

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Even Pope Benedict now agrees that some of the words in his recent speech at the University of Regensburg were just a tad ill-chosen. His regrets, however, may not be as acute as those of the friends and family of the nun apparently murdered by Muslim thugs as a result, or eve...

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Researchers say we've never been happier -- so where's the problem? According to economist Andrew Leigh only a handful of nations outrank Australian on measures of happiness and life satisfaction. Looking back over survey data collected since the 1940s, Leigh finds that our "o...

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Invited by the indefatigable impresario of ideas Race Mathews to talk to the Fabian Society I'll be doing so this Wednesday evening. The topic is the economic and social significance of open source software as a new mode of production, and I'm still working on the slides. Plea...

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Cass Sunstein pumps out an amazing amout of stuff and yesterday I came across this brief blog post. The idea of ideological amplification rings true - though it needn't be ideological. Language itself and all use of it is an inherently co-operative exercise. Individuals use co...

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Last night's Late Night Live had a teriffic interview with David Runciman, Lecturer in politics, Cambridge University, UK. Theorising one of the most talented and in my view ultimately tragic polititians of our age Tony Blair, Runciman wrote The Politics of Good Intentions: Hi...

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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've always been interested in the motives which drive people to achievements of various kinds and of the sociological and rhetorical descriptions thereof. Keynes would have described his own motives as public spirited, though I don't think he would have denied the gratificati...

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Paul Monk's essays have been gracing the pages of the AFR friday review for a while now. I read them when I see them and am rarely disappointed. But I particularly liked this review essay on the biography of Bertrand Russell by Ray Monk (I don't konw if he's any relation). It'...

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The recent revival of popular books on philosophy is a Good Thing in my opinion. Two friends, Alain de Botton and John Armstrong are hard at it publishing a book or two every few years. I've just finished reading The Secret Power of Beauty which I enjoyed. If you're well read...

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Shaun Cronin post on The Biggest Loser raises issues that I've been thinking about for some time, and found difficult to get very far with. Sean raises the issue of the way in which the program, which is a 'reality' slimming program for those who don't know raises the issue of...

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[photopress:Tocqueville.jpg,full,pp_empty] "I would like to leave behind a legacy or a think-tank", says President Bush , "a place for people to talk about freedom and liberty, and the de Tocqueville model -- what de Tocqueville saw in America." For once I agree with the Presi...

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I mentioned to someone over a drink tonight that 'favourite passages' would be a good blog topic. Here's one of my favourite pieces of philosophical writing. Feel free to quote one of yours in the comments sections. It's the beginning of an early fragment - On Truth and Lie in...

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Check out this post on Catallaxy for a good interview with a friend and colleague of the late Paul F, philosopher of science, dadaist, man about town, opera buff and prodigious correspondent.

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Spiked Online has run quite a lot of articles about animal welfare lately. I remember how disappointed I was thirty odd years ago when I bought Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation . The case for considering animal suffering and for doing what we could to alleviate it seemed...

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(via Tim Dunlop ) Australian law academics Mirko Bagaric and Julie Clarke are apparently about to publish an article in the University of San Francisco Law Review arguing that the use of torture, even if it leads to "annihilation" of the tortured suspect, should be lawful and...

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

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Mark Bahnisch publishes a letter from neo-communist Italian intellectual Antonio Negri, which seems fairly convincingly to debunk most if not all of Keith Windschuttle's attacks on him. The failure of basic research/fact-checking in Windschuttle's Negri letter appears consider...

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Last night my kids were watching the swimming championships on the tele and the National Bank ad came on. "You said you wanted us to listen. So we listened. You said you wanted better service: We've given you better service". Or whatever it says. Then we switched to John Clark...

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"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." - George Orwell. In his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language , George Orwell wrote: In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things l...

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Fresh from a coup in snatching the free to air coverage of The Ashes series against England which Channel Nine declined and the ABC dithered over, public broadcaster SBS will tonight show highlights of the Danish Royal Wedding . I'll be watching - I still have Princess Diana's...

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My provocative post about Immanuel Wallerstein seems to have antagonised Mark Bahnisch. I devoutly hope that won't prove terminal to his participation at Troppo, partly because he's a valued blogging colleague, and partly because his prolific posting takes the pressure off me,...

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More attentive Troppo readers may have noticed occasional laudatory references (by Mark Bahnisch and others) to the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein, a lefty sociologist/political theorist whose work is currently all the rage with former Marxists who remain convinced that capi...

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Chris referred in his post on po/mo and history to right postmodernists such as Kojeve and Fukuyama. These figures - both enormously influential - and both central to my PhD thesis, would be worth a post in their own right. But I want to pick up on something said in comments b...

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In a typically sarcastic comment to my earlier post about John Howard and Straussian neoconservatism, my partner jen sardonically questioned why I hadn't included a reference to Derrida in a post that fearlessly embraced rambling irrelevance in just about every other way. Well...

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"A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work." In his recent post on postmodernism and history , Chris Sheil discussed Umberto Eco's great novel The Name of the Rose . I've just dug out my copy of his Reflections on the Name of the Rose . What he writes in the fir...

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Or, the Return of the Political While I remain disinclined to engage with the contention of some Troppo commenters that anyone who identifies with the Left or admires Eric Hobsbawm must immediately don sackcloth and walk towards the scaffold on the Place de Greve with a lighte...

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...is the title of an article by Sigmund Freud, who along with Marx and Nietzsche, has been seen as an originator of the "hermeneutics of suspicion" and thus a spiritual parent of postmodernism. In the wake of the Troppo theory wars, John Quiggin has reminded us that one of hi...

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Overlooked in the vigorous debate over postmodernism that has consumed Troppo over the past week or so is the distinction between postmodernity and postmodernism, which is one strongly established in sociology (often associated with the work of Zygmunt Bauman .) Bauman argues...

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Troppo has been filled with sometimes fairly arcane discussion about the merits or otherwise of postmodernism in recent days, sparked off by the Sawyer Affair (there are multiple posts but follow the links from the most recent one). I don't want to revisit the questions of Eng...

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There've been some interesting discussions developing on the thread about Andrew Bolt's demonisation of Desperate Housewives . If I'm reading it correctly, commenters are having difficulty agreeing to a definition of what constitutes "quality" in television, and the issue of t...

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One of the books I read over the holiday break was Helen Garner's latest, Joe Cinque's Consolation . Like Garner's previous work The First Stone , Joe Cinque's Consolation takes the form of a journalistic dissection of real life events, but becomes something much more profound...

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As Geoff observed in a previous thread, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams , wrote an op/ed piece for the UK Telegraph conceding that faith may be disturbed by the horrible disaster in Asia : The question, 'How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on thi...

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Since his death on the 8th of October, I've been planning to write something about Jacques Derrida . In particular, I want to write on his thought on politics, which has been key to my own work for some years now. But the time has not yet arrived. For the moment, The Nation ha...

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From Nietzsche's Zarathustra : State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too: and this lie crawls out of its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.' That is a lie! It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them: thus t...

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In the course of wrestling with a half-written post about the influence of neoconservative thinkers (especially Leo Strauss and Alan Bloom) on current US politics (foreshadowed here ), I've found myself being diverted onto exploring the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, not least b...

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