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

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

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There’s a strong gerontocratic tinge to US politics of late — the youngest of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren and Mitch McConnel is Chuck at 73. Many a theory has been propounded to explain this phenomenon, but a simple on...

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As I argued in a recent article, the election of Donald Trump as President would be disastrous for climate change compared with the current Democrat administration of President Biden. The situation is quite different in Australia. The election of a Coalition government federal...

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Most people throughout the world (except dedicated right wing American Republicans) are contemplating with horror the very real possibility of Donald Trump being re-elected as American President next week. I share that horror, but not to the rather extreme extent being asserte...

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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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Right at the outset of this conflict, I worried that Israel was overestimating the strength of its hand. In the US, the Israel lobby’s lobbying has been as successful as the NRA’s lobbying. And it follows a similar strategy — zero tolerance. It holds a very tough line and then...

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

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

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

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I recommend the first 15 or 20 minutes of this podcast. Defs worth the listen as John Gray explains where he comes from — literally and intellectually and ideologically. His milieu is British working class and he got to Oxford and has been a maverick to all classes ever since....

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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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Cross posted from Quillette from 16 Feb 2019, but now behind a paywall. When a conversation is not a conversation: party political discourse in the early 21st century I It looks like liberal democracy is falling apart. The chaos of Donald Trump was unimaginable just a decade a...

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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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I use Troppo to make various notes for file as it were for reference in future. And on wanting to record something I found that I hadn't reproduced this post — which was originally at The Mandarin — here. So here it is, with some notes to file below. Part one. Part two is here...

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Frustrating Beijing’s ambitions to create a sphere of influence is overwhelmingly a diplomatic task, not a military one. (Cross posted from The Interpreter at the Lowy Institute) There was barely concealed panic in Australia when news broke that China had struck a security agr...

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

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The international reaction to Russia's invasion of Ukraine is delivering China a message: its current approach to the world won't keep working much longer. Does that title above seem odd? Surely it's Russia that's losing in Ukraine – in May of 2022, anyway. China hasn't been d...

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

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31eH6ANhTcs I met Joe Trippi about a decade ago. I met him about a decade ago and was fascinated with his campaigning exploits — including taking Howard Dean from backmarker to presidential frontrunner in 2004. Many of the architects of the onli...

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Australia is doing its bit to ensure that there will be a third world war and that it will be a nuclear war. The claim that the U-boats are merely nuclear propelled, not nuclear armed, is a gross deception. One of the key features of nuclear subs is that they can launch and co...

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Let us look at the extraordinary non-covid changes now happening in China. The country has been reforming rapidly the last 20 months and I want to muse about the trajectory these reforms are setting China upon. Many commentators see in them the start of another Cultural Revolu...

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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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What do you do as an Australian parliament when a foreign company censors mainstream media content in Australia, undermining free speech ? Do you organise an inquiry to hold those foreign companies to account and to see how you might prevent foreign meddling? Or do you fall in...

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I visited Afghanistan only once, on a brief visit in 2014. I fell off a donkey to great hilarity of the local villagers, slept in a compound with the armed owner keeping watch the whole night, heard stories of how life was in Soviet times, and got a glimpse of why the Afghan p...

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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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Pre 2020, I considered Scott Morrison a political enemy of the policies I wanted for Australia, but since then have sympathised with every attempt he has made to get Australia out of its love-affair with covid-mania. Over the fold is my take on what I think Scott Morrison's vi...

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Now and then one should look up and see if there are any trends that are not usually talked about in the media but that say something big about how humanity is going. I here want to briefly discuss the latest data on four big trends: war, food, (hunger?) deaths, and inequality...

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Compared to the trends on January 2020, has Australia or Sweden lost more wellbeing in 2020? And which has seen the greater damage to expected future wellbeing years for after 2020? The Table below summarizes the answers to this. For the first calculation, let us only count th...

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The essential governance problem in March 2020 in Western countries was the overwhelming demand of the vast majority of the population to do something dramatic in response to their fear. There was a clamour to be ‘led to safety’ by populations scared to death by images in the...

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With a recent publication in Nature that reported lockdowns have no effect on covid-cases or covid-deaths, there are now over 30 studies that fail to find any covid-reducing benefits of lockdowns. Worse, across countries and time, more severe lockdowns are just leading to more...

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

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

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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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An important rule in politics is that you adopt the best policies and slogans of your opponent only after you have destroyed that opponent. Till that moment you pretend he is the devil, but afterwards you re-label his best ideas and call them your own. A great Australian examp...

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

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

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“men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses more slowly, and one by one.” MacKay, 1841. Right now, London and much of Europe are in peak covid-mania, entering another two months of lockdowns on to...

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2020 was certainly a roller coaster for a social scientist, full of surprises. Let me not once again bemoan the increasingly coordinated attack on all sources of vitality in Western civilisation, but look ahead and openly wonder about what 2021 will bring in terms of 7 specifi...

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Guess which countries in Europe have had the lowest average restrictions on individual behaviour from March to December according to researchers at the Blavatnik school of government in Oxford ? Guess which countries in the world have had the most or least stringent government...

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Stock markets give us a glimpse what people with money have deduced about world events before they happen. Investors can make mistakes, sometimes terrible mistakes, but they are honest mistakes: you don’t buy a stock at a 100 if you actually honestly believe that same stock wi...

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

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

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

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

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Sweden is a rich, spacious country famous for IKEA, ABBA, dark cold winters, and its unique covid-policies. We escaped London for a few days to see for ourselves what the deal was with this Scandinavian country of 10 million. It is as rich and well-run as the statistics say it...

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Published in and edited form in The Conversation . Martin Wolf has a crisp face-to-camera opinion piece in which he points out that populism in government hasn’t lined up neatly against relative success in keeping populations safe from COVID. Thus in the Anglosphere, Donald’s...

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

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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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The UK Office of National Statistics data on the wellbeing of the British population shows a unprecedented drop of about 10% in average wellbeing in the UK since March 2020. Anxiety levels almost doubled, slowly returning to normal, but wellbeing remains low as people are prev...

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[caption id="attachment_34097" align="aligncenter" width="900"] King Lear and Cordelia's Rejection[/caption] Welcome to Antonios Sarhani' s first post. I've got a brief post welcoming him aboard immediately above this post. Nicholas Gruen The ceremony and the circumlocutions o...

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There are 5 aspects of the covid-19 pandemic I really did not see coming, all pointing to a phenomenon that European sociologists of a century ago spent their whole lives describing, coming up with theories about crowds and their behaviour - theories now largely forgotten. Sch...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The mass hysteria of the corona crisis is raging, with the resulting self-isolation of whole economies and populations. The loss seems greater with every new forecast on the economic collapse than I initially though t, and the benefit of imprisoning and terrorizing the populat...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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In the context of my writing about public goods, John Burnheim sent me the email below. (Note his use of the word 'comedy is intended as Dante meant it – as a story where things turn out in the end). The park in question is the wonderful park in which I walk every day, stretch...

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

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

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

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

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

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[caption id="attachment_32263" align="aligncenter" width="638"] This image was picked from a bunch of images on Google Image. This post is not about Canada. If you're interested in Canada, it's unlikely you'll get ANYTHING out of this post. Canada is just incidental to this po...

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Like the world today, Europe in the 19 th century witnessed major shifts in the balance of power, with new technologies changing how life was lived. Otto von Bismarck, a Prussian, saw opportunities in that chaos. He unified the warring German principalities in 1870 via an unex...

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[caption id="attachment_32251" align="aligncenter" width="1280"] Who is that man in the corner, and why is he watching you?[/caption] Well folks, as you know, Club Troppo is the only website east of the whole damn Murray Darling system that has the reputation to attract the ki...

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For some time now we've been 'proving up' citizens’ juries as a means of consulting the people, but generally within the context of governments being in charge. As a result they've been mostly relatively innocuous. For instance the first two in South Australia were focused on...

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Setting aside the question of evidence, there’s a serious problem with the contention that Syria carried out the recent chemical attack in Douma. It requires us to accept not only that the Syrian government is evil but also that it’s comically stupid. It was on the point of li...

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

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

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

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

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https://youtu.be/uP8juIWScH0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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https://youtu.be/i772m4UdadE?t=32s Watch as right-wing commentators Tucker Carlson and Ralph Peters go to war over who's defending American values. Carlson suggests making common cause with Vladimir Putin; Peters says Carlson sounds like Charles Lindbergh defending Hitler in 1...

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Until yesterday I had never heard of Trevor Phillips. He is a former chairman of the UK's Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which means he was in charge of enforcing British anti-discrimination laws in the Blair years. The documentary below is one of the more intere...

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[getty src="622166468" width="594" height="396"] What are the effects of having a US president who is diminished in stature and yet not facing imminent job loss? I try to think this through in my latest column for The CEO Magazine . One likely result: less stability in US fore...

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There's a lot I don't understand. We don't have enough space of a proper survey but let me give you an example. Pistachios taste better than hazelnuts. Much better. And yet hazelnut ice cream and gelato are much much yummier than their pistachio equivalents. As I recall someon...

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If you're at all like me, you see and hear a bunch of people complaining that with the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, the world has gone mad and anything could happen. The New York Times today published a column by a former assistant attorney general in the Geo...

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Can a democracy attract competent leaders, while attaining broad representation? Economic models suggest that free-riding incentives and lower opportunity costs give the less competent a comparative advantage at entering political life. Moreover, if elites have more human capi...

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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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I've just posted the first version of the introduction to this post on the first dispatch from the epistemic swamp, but I thought I'd open up the discussion again on a new thread. The tweet above surely highlights different ideas of truth and authenticity. Of course, Trump is...

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

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Paul Krugman has popularised the notion of the Very Serious People. Very Serious People spend a lot of their time talking about strategy. After all, strategy is the most important, most serious thing you can talk about. After all, when you've got strategy worked out, the rest...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=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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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="447"] What do we want? Deliberative democracy! When do we want it? NOW!![/caption] This story from this larger study speaks for itself, but is illustrative of some of the themes of my previous post on deliberative democracy. In the spri...

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A friend of mine Ian Marsh sent me this op ed which one of the papers said it would publish last week. Personally, I'm not surprised that they didn't. They're waiting for it to be validated by being put through its paces here at the Troppo Grinder first. No change there. Over...

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In the last post ,Paul Frijters dismissed my proposal that deliberative democracy mechanisms should have had some role in the Brexit decision. I don’t think sortition makes any sense in the case of something like Brexit. The notion that a jury of randomly chosen citizens would...

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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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There's a reason that the UK's vote on EU departure seems so strange, and it applies regardless of whether you like Brexit or not. It's this: the UK has made what might be a very substantial change to its own nature based on a simple majority vote – and such changes should be...

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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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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-4FQAov2xI Being a 'young country' as we keep congratulating ourselves, we seem free of some of the greater absurdities of the Old World. Then again there's at least something to be said for them. Having a kind of Monty Python show as your Head...

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

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

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

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

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The Twittersphere was abuzz with pointless debate a couple of weeks ago when Annabel Crabb had a televisual meal with Coalition hardman Scott Morrison on her perniciously vacuous program Kitchen Cabinet . My own views about that controversy are well encapsulated by Jennifer "N...

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Henry Ergas offers let's say a bracing perspective on our increased refugee intake which is to say that we should profile refugees to try to screen out those with odious views - many of whom will be Muslims. It's quite compelling. Then again doing so opens a Pandora's box of c...

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

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There are reports today (12 November 2014) from Fairfax and News Ltd that Prime Minister Abbott is urging Vladimir Putin to follow the example of the US government after the Iran Air Flight 655 shootdown — and that he has said the US both paid compensation and apologised. In p...

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

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

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As we head back to Iraq, I'm struck by the way in which those making the case both for and against are avoiding certain ideas which seem to me to be true: This is not 2003 all over again . At least on a moral level, and at least as far as action in Iraq goes. We have been invi...

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In this marvellous essay , Jesse McCarthy puzzles over why there is "a bloody knot in the social fabric that is as vivid in Ferguson, Missouri today as it was in Baldwin's Harlem half a century ago." He starts with "Fifth Avenue, Uptown: a Letter from Harlem", James Baldwin's...

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A question for Troppodillians: does anyone have a record of the Australian Government's response to 1988's accidental US shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655? I ask because the parallels with the MH17 shootdown are so clear. At a political level the government's response has so fa...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZwFaSpca_3Q

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The noise and drama surrounding Putin, Russia and the Ukraine obscure crucial foreign policy principles. In "Lord Salisbury's Lessons for Great Powers" , Robert Merry takes a closer look at what they might be. First, avoid promiscuous jingoism of the kind that Salisbury despis...

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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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Abstract: We estimate habit formation in voting--the effect of past on current turnout--by exploiting transitory voting cost shocks. Using county-level data on U.S. presidential elections from 1952-2012, we find that precipitation on current and past election days reduces vote...

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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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The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer came back into the news on Monday (11 November), with reports [i] on a paper published in Nature Geoscience which finds that reductions in chlorinated fluorocarbon (CFC) emissions achieved under the Montreal Prot...

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

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Think tank scholars and policy wonks strive to be both practical and clever. Being practical means proposing policies that have a good chance of getting taken up by government in the short term. And being clever means policies that generate big benefits at little or no cost. B...

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MEMORANDUM FOR: General Martin Dempsey, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity [1] SUBJECT: Syria and Our Oath to Defend the Constitution Dear Gen. Dempsey: Summary: We refer to your acknowledgment, in your letter of July 19 to Sen....

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Simply bombing Damascus or Aleppo to assuage the conscience of the West that they 'did something' seems like the worst form of symbolic politics. It's not the only sensible thing Matthew Fitzpatrick had to say in an article at The Drum today. He also argued the appropriate for...

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That power must reside elsewhere, with the best and brightest, with those who have surveyed the perils of the world and know what it takes to meet them. Those deep within the security apparatus, within the charmed circle, must therefore make the decision, on America's behalf,...

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

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Nearly "every problem with the Republican Party today could be cured by a neocon revival", says David Brooks . Brooks isn't talking about the hawkish approach to foriegn policy that urged US military involvement in the middle east, he's talking about the domestic policy ideas...

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

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

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I first got to know Tom Watson. OK I've never met him but we've corresponded when he'd just resigned as a Minister in Gordon Brown's Government doing many things to promote open government and I was doing the government 2.0 Taskforce. In any event, I've marvelled at Tom's morp...

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Cooperation under Democracy and Authoritarian Norms By: Björn Vollan, Yexin Zhou, Andreas Landmann, Biliang Hu, Carsten Herrmann-Pillath There is ample evidence for a “democracy premium”. Laws that have been implemented via election lead to a more cooperative behavior compared...

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Fallout from the Snowden saga continues to spread. Take Hong Kong's press release on Sunday: Mr Edward Snowden left Hong Kong today (June 23) on his own accord for a third country through a lawful and normal channel. The US Government earlier on made a request to the HKSAR Gov...

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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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Thanks to commenter Sancho for alerting me to the following post, by Sarah Kliff, at the Washington Post's Wonkblog (via Reading is for Snobs ). It had me chuckling all the way to the bottle-o and back on this dreary, rainy Melbourne morning: Readers ask, we answer! What happe...

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By: Philipp Ager (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hes:wpaper:0038&r=his Wealthy elites may end up retarding economic development for their own interests. This paper examines how the historical planter elite of the Southern US affected economic devel...

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During the mid 1970s Thatcher was listening to a member of the Conservative Research Department staff explain why the party should take a pragmatic 'middle way ' between left and right. But before he could finish Thatcher reached into her briefcase and pulled out a copy of Fri...

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"Hostility towards benefit claimants is founded upon a moral instinct", says Chris Dillow . The instinct is the norm of reciprocity. According to this norm, people are entitled to the community's help when they need it, but must also contribute in return. According to Dillow,...

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As opposition leader Mark Latham vowed to wage war on poverty . It's an idea he revives for his latest Quarterly Essay, Not Dead Yet: Labor's Post-Left Future . According to Latham, poverty isn't about a lack of money. The dole is generous enough to cover people's basic needs,...

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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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Facts are no match for a compelling narrative, says Jonathan Green . Despite the efforts of left leaning bloggers, conservatives are winning arguments and elections because they have better stories. Voters see themselves as struggling with an ever rising cost of living, the fe...

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American blogger Matt Bruenig sparked an interesting debate recently with his claim that conservatives are better organised and less ideologically diverse than those on the left . This is a response. To those on the left, the American conservative movement appears as a leviath...

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

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We've spent a long time talking about Australia's relation ship with our near North. The recent Asian Century White Paper succeeds the interminable early 90s debates about whether Australia was part of Asia, which succeeded the end of the White Australia interregnum, which suc...

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Troppo author and prominent academic economist Paul Frijters has been banging away for years about how current climate change policies (including carbon pricing) are doomed to failure. The sincere (and entirely well founded) concerns of scientists and environmentalists about t...

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A conservative conspiracy to make government bigger, bury retailers in red tape and tell people how to live their lives, or just another example of populist grandstanding? The young man wanted a pack of cigarettes but when he pulled out his welfare card to pay, 65 year old cas...

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I've been thinking about writing something in the wake of Don Arthur's Nanny and the Libertarians post, but until now I haven't had the heart. Discussion threads on posts dealing with such issues always seem instantly to degenerate into a slanging match between, on the one han...

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Keynes. mercantilism and the Euro crisis

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

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

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In 1992 Bill Clinton campaigned on ideal : "The ideal that if you work hard and play by the rules you'll be rewarded, you'll do a little better next year than you did last year, your kids will do better than you." This was the American dream. With the economy in recession, man...

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http://youtu.be/NOyx3r59L-I

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Even Andrew Bolt is shocked . On Tuesday mining magnate Clive Palmer fronted the media and announced that the US Central Intelligence Agency is using the Rockefeller Foundation to fund a campaign to undermine Australia's coal industry. Palmer appeared in front of the cameras b...

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When the Koch vs Cato controversy erupted blogger Skip Oliva was all over it . Now he's just over it : When you cut through all the bullshit—90% of which is coming from the Cato side—what you’re left with is two old men who simply refuse to compromise. Charles Koch signed an a...

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According to most commentators, it was French politician René Lenoir who coined the term 'social exclusion' (l’exclusion sociale). But the idea that there is a disparate group of disadvantaged citizens who are excluded from economic, social and political participation is nothi...

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A few months ago, Sam Roggeveen from the Lowy Institute asked me to talk at a function the Institute was holding on secrecy. I said I wasn't particularly well qualified to talk directly on secrecy regarding national security and foreign affairs, but I was happy to speak about...

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A lawsuit by the Koch brothers threatens the Cato Institute's reputation for independence When scholars at the libertarian Cato Institute came out against the Gulf War, Olin Foundation president William E Simon was outraged. The foundation ended up withdrawing its support and,...

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Inaugurated on this day in 1861 , Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, is as popular as ever. Movies: America's 16th president features in two movies to be released this year. The first is a serious bio-pic by Steven Spielberg while the second is based on...

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A tough-talking, motorcycle-riding Texan, sociologist C Wright Mills is about as far from today's stereotype of the latte-sipping left-wing intellectual as you're likely to find. But even though he's been dead for 50 years, you can still see his influence in the intellectual l...

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In 2007 Greece spent 9.9% of GDP on age pensions. This was the fourth highest level of spending on pensions in the OECD (after Austria, Spain and Italy). Australia spent 3.2% of GDP, the fifth lowest level of spending in the OECD (ahead of Iceland, Ireland, Korea and Mexico)....

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And by “internal”, I mean in the same paragraph : “This week, President Obama will release a budget that won’t take any meaningful steps toward solving our entitlement crisis,” Romney said in a statement e-mailed to reporters. “The president has failed to offer a single seriou...

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As a regular reader of Brad DeLong I was slightly alarmed at a recent post reporting an outbreak of unpleasantness about which OECD country has the most progressive tax system. Brad DeLong linked to an article by Jonathan Chait which rather sharply criticised Veronique de Rugy...

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We are all in Tom Watson's debt for pursuing the corruption of the Murdoch press as vigorously as he has - and continues to. I have had some dealings with Tom arising from my involvement in the Government 2.0 Taskforce. In any event, in addition to continuing his pursuit of th...

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British Leyland devoured billions pounds of taxpayer's money before it was finally broken up and sold off. According to New York Times journalist Nelson Schwartz the Thatcher government's bailout "remains the classic example of a futile government intervention." Mrs Thatcher w...

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“Oh, my goodness, the John Birch Society! ... Is that bad? I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society" ( Texas congressman Ron Paul ). In Tuesday's Sydney Morning Herald , Tom Switzer describes presidential hopeful Ron Paul as a socially tolerant free-market crusader wh...

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"Capitalism made America great - free markets, innovation, hard work - the building blocks of the American Dream. But in the wrong hands some of those dreams can turn into nightmares." 'When Mitt Romney Came to Town' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLWnB9FGmWE Promoted by Winni...

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Mitt Romney takes a tough line on welfare. In 2008 Republicans cheered when he said that America's culture was threatened by welfare payments to poor people . Asked how tax reform plan would help Americans on low incomes he said his plan was "primarily based on trying to creat...

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At the Economist's Democracy in America blog, Erica Grieder suspects that "the biggest untapped constituency is people who are fiscally conservative and socially moderate or liberal." Grieder links to a post by former Cato research fellow Will Wilkinson where he explains why h...

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Judith Sloan wants the term banned , the editors of the Australian think it's bureaucratic gibberish and even the new minister for social inclusion seems unsure about what it means. So what is social inclusion? For the New Labour politicians who popularised the term social exc...

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I posted a while back about my pet theory that the South of the US was a psychotic society, which psychosis was brought about by the politics which arose in a slave society. Anyway, I just came upon this article which looks interesting, and in the same vein. Slaves as capital...

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As Theodore Roosevelt finished his address to the people of Osawatomie his speechwriter leaped up and cried : "Citizens of Kansas, you have just listened to one of the greatest pronouncements made by any man. Its effect will be felt in the nation and the world for years to com...

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I was sent the following analysis of the NZ election yesterday. I was sent it by someone I know, but I can't possibly tell you who it was (or I'd have to kill you). Moreover the person who sent this to me, did not identify the person who sent it to him. I think that's because...

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

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"Public debate in Australia has been shaped in a profound way by astroturfing", says advertising strategist Ravi Prasad . "If you look at the debate around the carbon tax, the debate around mining supertax, and the public debate around asylum seekers, the public debates in the...

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I cam across this post in my morning Google reader perusal: A ballot measure that StateImpact Ohio (a creation of local public media and NPR) describes as “a referendum on a constitutional amendment…aimed at keeping the national health care reform law from taking [e]ffect” won...

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Cathy Wilkerson was ironing bed sheets when the floor collapsed under her feet. A bomb had detonated in the subbasement of her parent's Greenwich Village townhouse . Cathy and another woman walked away but their friends Teddy Gold , Terry Robbins and Diane Oughton were dead. I...

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Edit - I really want opposing views. Anyone who thinks there is a strong case for a concerted push for more literacy, please give it in comments At the Lowy Interpreter Andrew Carr says "One policy guaranteed to feature in the ' Australia in the Asian Century' White Paper is t...

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Now it may or may not have any connection with the debate about the pros and cons of the "Occupy ..." movement in Australia or elsewhere, but the following story by Cory Doctorow from techblog BoingBoing is both fascinating and disturbing, as much for the superb associated ima...

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A few months ago there was a blog debate about the tensions between a movement left and a wonkish left in pursuing political change, summarised neatly here by Matt Cowgill . A domestic sequel has arisen in Australia. In the United States the wonkish left, from Riksbank laureat...

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The Lodge in Canberra, the official residence of the Prime Minister will be closed for repairs for the next 18 months . Several figures, including Jeff Kennett , former NCDC head Tony Powell and Andrew Carr of the Lowy Institute deem this an exercise in turd polishing. A new,...

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In light of Paul Frijter's sketpticism about the possibility of co-ordinated international action on carbon emissions and his recent offer of a wager on the outcome of international action, I thought I'd try to put the economic problem into some of the language of Internationa...

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http://youtu.be/htX2usfqMEs US senate candidate Elizabeth Warren wants wealthy Americans to pay more tax . The Bush administration put the country into a hole, she says. Tax cuts for the rich, two wars it put on a credit card, and an unfunded medicare drug program that poured...

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Forty six million Americans are living in poverty but nobody seems to care. In a comment at Crooked Timber, Moe says : I had this strange evening where I watched a bit of Jackie Kennedy talking smack about people and then heard this statistic about the increase in poverty and...

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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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The left needs utopia, says John Quiggin ; "a transformative vision to offer hope of a better life". Last year he wrote : After decades of defensive struggle, we on the left no longer know how to talk about anything bigger than the local fights in which we may hope to defend t...

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The ABC has made a documentary about David Hicks and screened it in an double episode of Australian Story. It's still on iView and I suggest you go check it out if you've not seen it. It went to some lengths to be 'balanced' but somehow the balance seems to me to tilt too far...

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Women are "working fewer hours, in lower-paid industries and in lower-status jobs" than men, writes Jessica Irvine . Despite decades of feminism, women are still doing most of the unpaid cooking, cleaning and caring for children. They are still struggling to break into senior,...

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

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In the American Scholar, George Watson writes about the forgotten Churchill -- the Liberal who helped lay the foundations for Britain's welfare state. Churchill was president of the Board of Trade in the Asquith government -- a Liberal government that favoured free trade, a mo...

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

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Televisions, DVD players and mobile phones have become so cheap that even poor third world families can own them. In Foreign Policy , Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo write : In rural Morocco, Oucha Mbarbk and his two neighbors told us they had worked about 70 days in agricul...

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On the other side of the Pacific, bloggers are arguing over something called 'left neoliberalism'. What began as a dispute over monetary policy between Yglesias and Doug Henwood quickly widened into a debate over political philosophy and strategies to rebuild the American left...

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HT New Matilda .

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From the Atlantic Monthly . Paul Keating's line comes to mind. "Where do you people get off?"

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When best selling German author Thilo Sarrazin arrives in Australia for the Centre for Independent Studies Big Ideas Forum his hosts will promote him as a courageous opponent of political correctness while his critics will denounce him as a racist. Sarrazin's 2010 book Deutsch...

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

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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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Peter Roebuck, the Fairfax cricket writer, has joined Mike Atherton in suggesting a boycott of Sri Lanka . For England that means next year; for Australia, next month. It's good to see that someone outside the cloisters of human rights activism is prepared to make a stand agai...

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Freedom is a keyword in American politics, writes Corey Robin in the Nation . It lies at the centre of every successful political movement from the abolition of slavery, to civil rights and feminism. The secret of conservatism's success is that it identifies freedom with marke...

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OK - so I just read it from a link on a Krugman blog post , but it's worth repeating. An example of fad economics occurred in 1980, when a small group fo economists advised presidential candidate Ronald Reagan that an across-the-board cut in income tax rates would raise tax re...

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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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Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School. Niall F's website doesn't just tell uswhat a dashing fellow he is. It shows us. There he is - hair pinned back by the onru...

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Fairfax columnist John Birmingham's column raises some interesting issues about the practice of tipping for provision of goods and services, especially the aggressive way tipping is pursued in the US where restaurant tips of up to 20% of the bill appear to be the norm. In Aust...

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Author and Fairfax columnist John Birmingham posts a truly delightful splenetic prescription for appropriate responses to the odious Andrew Bolt, in the context of current racial vilification proceedings against him by a polyglot assortment of prominent Aboriginal activists: T...

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I've just finished a bit of a barnstorm tour of New Zealand giving two presentations with a similar title to that above and a talk on Govt 2.0 which funded the visit. I must say I've loved it. Having checked out Auckland and Wellington for the first time in forty years, I can...

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I liked this brief piece from Peter Drysdale introducing a recent East Asia Forum Weekly Digest and asked if I could reproduce it here and he agreed. 'Be not afraid of greatness,' wrote William Shakespeare in Twelfth Night. 'Some men are born great, some achieve greatness and...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMe5dOgbu40&feature=player_embedded Christopher Monckton feels we could benefit from a few thoughts of his . . .

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At Larvatus Prodeo, Kim writes about The great American neoliberal liberal blog kerfuffle where blogger Freddie deBoer claims that "almost anything resembling an actual left wing has been systematically written out of the conversation within the political blogosphere". Accordi...

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If only we could persuade poor people to adopt the values and behaviours of their rich neighbours we could end poverty in a generation. Or at least that's the impression you'd get from reading the never ending stream of books and articles about the culture of poverty, the unde...

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

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

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I’ve had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach ever since the final stages of the 2008 campaign. I remembered the upsurge in political hatred after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 — an upsurge that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. And you could see, just by watching...

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American conservatives hate welfare. But under President Bush, they willingly expanded food stamps -- a program that hands out over than 64 billion of dollars worth of assistance a year to low-income Americans and legal immigrants. The reason? Many conservatives don't think th...

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In a piece of news some will regard as predictably disappointing, the Cancun Climate Conference has reached an agreement , but its targets are both non-binding and fairly modest (reputedly a [combined] reduction in emissions of 13-16% by 2020), and include both developed and d...

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Anyone looking for a link between my post earlier today on the future of Fairfax and Paul Frijter's two posts on the Wikileaks saga need go no further than a story just published on both Fairfax sites: Rudd's revenge on US Kevin Rudd retaliates after diplomatic revelations abo...

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There are some common elements between my recent post , which suggested a new asylum seeker assessment regime to take the place of universal mandatory detention during assessment, and proposals outlined last week by the Coalition Immigration spokesperson Scott Morrison in an a...

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I couldn't agree more with FOI expert Peter Timmins about the latest Wikileaks "disclosures". I have no idea whether Assange is a rapist or not, but he's certainly succeeded in setting the cause of public sector whistleblowing back by a decade or more. The documents so far dis...

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The publication of an edited version of my Troppo post about abolition of mandatory universal detention of asylum seekers at the ABC Unleashed site has certainly been an interesting experience. Fairly predictably it attracted the sort of polarised "howling into the darkness" c...

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It always seems to be two steps forward and then two back with Australia's asylum seeker policy. In the wake of the High Court's M61/M69 decision, DIAC has apparently begun offering all offshore asylum seeker s who have been refused refugee status a renewed assessment and pres...

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What Australia needs is a "genuine grassroots free market advocacy organisaiton [sic]", writes Tim Andrews . And he's convinced he's the man to make it happen. Andrews is currently in the US equipping himself with the training and experience he'll need to create an Australian...

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

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Apart from the issues canvassed in my previous post about yesterday's High Court judgment on the validity of aspects of the Commonwealth's offshore "boat people" asylum seeker processes, the sixty four million dollar question now is whether it will affect any attempt by the Gi...

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In a fairly desultory post , Helen 'Skepticlawyer' Dale presents the right wing de rigueur view that the United Nations is a waste of space dominated by corrupt third world regimes and should be abolished. Her pretext is the imminent establishment of a new UN agency for women'...

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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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Nicholas Nassim Taleb of Black Swans fame calls it the narrative fallacy. In narrating the way something happens, one convinces oneself that it was inevitable, that it happened for good reasons. A nice illustration of it is the way in which Tom Peters' In search of excellence...

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We've just had an election in Australia which was basically very clean, at least as far as one can tell. It was negative. It was empty but there was nothing illegitimate about what either party did or said about the other. Over the pond it isn't so. The Republicans are revolut...

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Readers of this blog will know that I share Paul Krugman's view that the US Republicans are a crazy, scary bunch. And during the Howard years there were lots of people who argued that Howard was the same. Which is ridiculous. He was sympathetic to the Crazy Party of the United...

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Immigration: America's nineteenth century "law and order problem"? by Howard Bodenhorn, Carolyn M. Moehling, Anne Morrison Piehl Abstract: Past studies of the empirical relationship between immigration and crime during the first major wave of immigration have focused on violen...

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The floods in Pakistan have resulted in about 1,600 deaths, with many more expected (even disregarding the possibility of a cholera outbreak), and have stranded or displaced about 12 million people. The worst aspect seems to be that this is just a taste of what's to come, if t...

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I don't have time to make the point I want to make at any length, but Chris Berg reminds us that dynamic tension can be a good thing in government and is, I think absolutely necessary to really good government. He is optimistic about Clegg and Cameron in the UK and in their ab...

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Paul Krugman asked the New York Times if he could publish today's column on Troppo. We have of course licensed the content to the NYT. In fact, ironically, owing to an administrative oversight, the column appeared on the NYT website before it was hoisted here. Recessions are c...

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Professor Peter Drysdale of the ANU's East Asia Forum, veteran of Australia's foreign economic relations with the region, outlined the demise of Rudd to the readers of the Forum's weekly digest. It kind of helps to remind us how strange this would look to foreigners. Many of o...

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

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

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President Obama's 'Wall Street' speech on Thursday was good news for the future of capitalism and for civilisation as we know it. He seems to mean business, urging finance leaders and their Republican servants to accept the main elements of the bill now being prepared for the...

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My observation that the US is a normal sane country harbouring a crazy one inside it (that for all my admiration for him, Abraham really should have let the South slough themselves off into oblivion without polluting the Great Republic) has served inadvertently as linkbait and...

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A little more grist to my mill identifying just which are the craziest states of the United States of America.

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Here's an email I received from the Brotherhood of St Lawrence, disclosing an event that I'd like to go to, but won't be able to. But some Troppodillian may wish to go. ‘War Child’ film tells the story of Emmanuel Jal: a child of war in Sudan, a boy soldier, a survivor, a refu...

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From Mark Thoma's blog: David Frum and the Closing of the Conservative Mind, by Bruce Bartlett : As some readers of this blog may know, I was fired by a right wing think tank Called the National Center for Policy Analysis in 2005 for writing a book critical of George W. Bush's...

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This column makes me think of the craziness of the South - which while building a slave based economy also built a terrorist society in which people got bumped off for having the wrong political views, a society that was crazy in its refusal to compromise - all the North was s...

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(Originally published in the business pages of the Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald, 24th March 2010) When I first began writing about the global economy, more than twenty-five years ago, what would be considered a reasonably comprehensive coverage for an Australian aud...

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So Obama got his modest and compromised health care bill through Congress. For those who are more interested in policy than process, there's a pretty helpful summary of the legislation here . However, I hold the desirabilty of the reforms to be self-evident. The only serious i...

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Fear Strikes Out, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times The day before Sunday’s health care vote, President Obama gave an unscripted talk to House Democrats. Near the end, he spoke about why his party should pass reform: “Every once in a while a moment comes where you have a c...

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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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Regarding the Australian government's attitude to the war in Afghanistan, Hugh White had this to say on Lateline last night: I think they understand perfectly well that continuing to support the United States there is fairly important for our alliance management, but I don't d...

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I have been arguing here that America is different to other countries, and in particular that the right wing party (one can hardly call it conservative) is different. Here's some hard evidence. It is as Markos Moulitsas says, tragic. These are the attitudes of self identified...

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

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

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

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The chances of the forthcoming UN Climate Change Conference actually reaching a workable global agreement to reduce greenhouse emissions sufficiently to make a major impact on warming are remote. In an article at Online Opinion , three academics from the Centre for Global Stud...

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

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Krugman wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine last week entitled "How Did Economists Get It so Wrong?". This is unlikely to be news to anyone interested in economics. As usual with any of his efforts, it's received a lot of attention, most of it favourable. He's always...

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What is the probability your vote will make a difference? Andrew Gelman , Nate Silver , Aaron Edlin NBER Working Paper No. 15220 Issued in August 2009 NBER Program(s): LE PE Abstract One of the motivations for voting is that one vote can make a difference. In a presidential el...

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Republican Death Trip By PAUL KRUGMAN I am in this race because I dont want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I dont want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America. So declared Barack Obama i...

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Yes, it's true folks. But there is a catch. You have to be between 18-28. And you have to be 'progressive'. Me? I cover the field , so I can do progressive, but I can't do 28 anymore. So I'm out. But you - you may be in. So get those skates on and get over to the Australian Fa...

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You've got to hand it to them. What a great range of opinion they bring us on Fox News.

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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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From Crooked Timber Jon Mandle On her show last night, Rachel Maddow provided a genuine service. [tip: TPM ] She reviewed Bush Administration claims about the link between al-Qaeda and Iraq (with clips) and ran that alongside a time line concerning the use of torture. This too...

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Peter Thiel is a super-smart, super-successful businessman and libertarian activist. He co-founded PayPal , invested in Facebook and has pledged three and half million dollars to a project searching for the key to human immortality . He also thinks it was a bad idea to give wo...

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"I must admit to having no compence in economics whatsoever" wrote Robert Manne in the Introduction to The New Conservatism in Australia (1982). He proceeded to demonstrate the truth of that admission by turning his face against economic reform and advocating the kind of polic...

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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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There's lots of crowing by opponents of the right in both Australia and the US that the right are in grave trouble. It always looks that way. And in Australia it does look like oppositions spend a lot of time out of power. But there's always a lot of luck involved. Howard was...

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

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From the US General Accountability Office. HT - an email from David Lian. The federal governments financial condition and fiscal outlook are worse than many may understand. Despite an increase in revenues in fiscal year 2006 of about $255 billion, the federal government report...

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From Dani Rodrik's blog . Macroeconomics doesn't get much plaudits around now, but here is a real-life story that should hearten those who think the field is really broken. It concerns Andres Velasco, a distinguished macroeconomist who is currently the minister of finance in C...

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Reclaiming Americas Soul, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times : Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. So declared President Obama, after his commendable decision to release the legal memos that his predecessor used to justify tortu...

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Occasional visitor "Edward Carson" wrote a somewhat cynical comment on my previous post about asylum seekers : Does this mean that if they fill out the appropriate forms in duplicate, we are then obliged to accept them all into our country? Although I strongly suspect "Edward"...

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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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"Jihad" Jack Thomas I've been meaning for ages to write about the High Court's 2007 decision in Thomas v Mowbray , in fact ever since it was handed down. Complex constitutional decisions are really difficult to write about in a way that's accessible and interesting to a genera...

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President Iloilo [ Cross-posted from the blog I run for CDU public law students ] There doesn't seem to be anything especially remarkable about the current (2009) Fiji coup whereby Fiji's ageing and ailing President Josefa Iloilo sacked the Fiji Court of Appeal which only last...

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Richard Ackland has an enjoyable rant this week about an upcoming UN talkfest in Geneva known as Durban II. It's organised by the UN Human Rights Council, which in a delightful (but typical of the UN) irony is chaired by Libya. As Ackland points out: The Human Rights Council i...

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Fiji's president takes charge (SMH) Fiji is in a state of political flux after President President Ratu Josefa Iloilo announced he had repealed the country's constitution, appointed himself head of state and set a 2014 election deadline. He said on Friday he had also sacked al...

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

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[caption id="attachment_34331" align="alignleft" width="347"] The earth: it's all about YOU![/caption] Hayek argued that were were naturally selfish. In fact he proposed the opposite - that human beings are naturally solidaristic, by the 'natural morality' that evolved in preh...

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In the February issue of Quadrant , Steven Kates laments the resurrection of Keynes , and warns his readers not to fall for the doctrines of a man who denied one of the key laws of economics. According to Kates, Say's Law is a proposition that since 1936 every economist has be...

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Keating: a chance to remake the global financial system Global financial confidence, once destroyed, requires myr­iad positive events and a heavy convergence of them to counter ambient pessimism and gloom. The recent series of government packages, notwithstanding their scale a...

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HT: 3Quarks . FORMER GITMO GUARD TELLS ALL Scott Horton in Harper's : Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo in the first years the facility was in operation. With the Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him, now gone, Nee...

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

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One of Nicholas Gruen's favorite people, William Easterly has joined the blogosphere to keep the Aid bastards honest. Today, I foist a new blog called Aid Watch on the blogosphere. The objective is to be brutally honest when aid is not helping the poor, but also praising it wh...

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Fancy a little time travel? This time eight years ago, satirical magazine The Onion reported on the new Bush presidency. Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over' It may have been a joke, but reading it now, it comes across as historical fact....

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

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Since I lived in a group house with him, I've stayed in touch with David Evans and discussed various issues - mostly economic - via email with him. As a result I get the odd group email from him setting out his views on greenhouse in which he argues that an ETS is a stupid ide...

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Time for more reflections on the financial crisis, starting with seeing whether my predictions of two months ago have come true, followed by observations on a new set of unexpected twists, and rounded off by a set of policy recommendations for how to reduce the severity of the...

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Panic seized markets this week. Just one asset class is deemed safe: the liabilities of highly-rated governments. The price of a barrel of oil is below $50. The dividend yield on the S&P 500 is higher than the yield on US 10-year treasuries. The yield on short-dated US inflati...

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As Krugman points out , the situation in the US is a pretty sad sight, with the lamest of lame duck presidents fiddling while the economy burns. This is a pretty ridiculous situation. Why not do what they do with buildings and start using them before they are officially opened...

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It seemed like a nice idea to me, but I got talked out of it - by Clive Crook - whose explanation of the problem I rather enjoyed. I think choosing Hillary would be a mistake. Not because of Bill. . . . they are not exactly chained together. Equally, if Hillary were the best c...

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Why Obama Should Copy Bush (Really!) By Jonathon Cohn You hear lots of talk about which former president Barack Obama should use as a model. Bill Clinton comes up regularly. Franklin Roosevelt, too. But what about the guy in the White House now? I know, President Bushs approva...

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

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Paul Krugman was always critical of Obama for not being more partisan. We'll see what happens. In my ignorance I'm expecting Obama to be like Clinton - a pro when it comes to policy who hires the best advice he can get unlike Republicans who haven't done that since - well perh...

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

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Peter Beinart sees the rejection of Sarah Palin as the death knell of ratbag right-wing ideology as the Republicans' key to success in US politics. I hope he's right, and I'm going to propose a dialectical explanation for the demise of the Karl Rove Era. I was struck at the ti...

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This interview from The Daily Show is a few days old, and probably nothing new to Troppo's tuned-in readers. But it's too delightful to let anyone miss. John Stewart: Are you concerned, in some respects, that you may go in the voting booth, and your white half will suddenly de...

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It has been a busy time for academic economists in the past few weeks. Every lunch break has been dominated by talk about all the goings on in the markets and the government plans that are coming thick and thin. We are trying desperately to remain more knowledgeable about the...

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This is an invite to an exhibition at the Jewish Museum by someone who is pondering his roots as a descendant of those who experienced the holocaust. I was sent it as someone on the Dunera News mailing list. I think about this myself, not so much in relation to myself, but rat...

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[caption id="attachment_6120" align="alignleft" width="330" caption="Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan leaves the Treasury Building. Courtesy Bloomberg"] [/caption] It doesn't get any easier to give this administration the benefit of the doubt. For a fleeting moment in recent days, it...

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It's long seemed obvious to me that without large injections of fresh capital, all the other efforts to deal with the ever unfolding financial crisis would prove inadequate. Or even counterproductive . The official debate has finally swung in this direction but the question of...

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A subject that has mystified me as it's mystified pretty much everyone. I've always guessed he felt it was the best he could get out of Paulson with whom he had to come up with a joint plan. That's what Steve Randy Waldman thinks too - though he suggests a bit more detail - ov...

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I was reading this post by a favourite lefty last night and getting pretty depressed at the US's massively greater propensity for hysteria than our own political culture - maybe it goes back to the witch trials in Salem, or perhaps the madness the South pre and post Civil War...

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[caption id="attachment_6021" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Clearwater, Fla (6th October)"] [/caption] Conservative commentators* piled on after the vice presidential debate last week. Greg Sheridan made no attempt to hide his pleasure: "Sarah Palin, the pitbull in li...

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I'm thinking about Aussie Mac again. The Federal Government has been led to water but only wants a sip - it's investing $4 billion of its surplus in buying mortgages when the credit that was taken out by the collapse of the residential mortgage backed securities market was aro...

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From The Melbourne Age on 1st October 2008 Monday nights rejection by the US House of Representatives of the US Treasury Secretary Paulsons Troubled Assets Recovery Plan, which had been modified to accommodate the concerns of Congressional leaders, has propelled the financial...

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In a recent post , Rafe quoted Frank Shostak as one of the dissenters who are critical of the bailout proposal, not only in its particulars, but in principle. Shostak sees all interventions of this kind as economically damaging as well as adding to the already existing mountai...

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An article of mine - for today's Crikey! It was written yesterday morning and so doesn't consider the latest developments. Thanks to Ingolf for some suggestions. (Which reminds me, on a couple of columns recently, I should have mentioned several people who've helped out includ...

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Here's a YouTube of a Keith Olbermann show. KO isn't my favourite kind of guy - a kind of leftish of centre Bill O'Reilly from what I've seen - though nowhere near as obnoxious as BO. Anyway, this has an interesting interview with Paul Krugman but what got my interest is a gra...

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The atmosphere in Washington is all too redolent of 2001. Swept up in the turbulent aftermath of 9/11, legislators were easily stampeded into passing the Patriot Act. F ew, as it turned out, had even read it, much less thought carefully about its implications. [caption id="att...

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From the invariably thoughtful Steve Randy Waldman . Rather than a bail-out, Congress should pass an "ARISE act". ARISE would stand for Automatic Reorganization of Insolvent Systemically-important Enterprises. It could be very simple. The Secretary of the Treasury, in consulta...

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Statement from Frank Raines released an hour after the ad above was released: "I am not an adviser to Barack Obama, nor have I provided his campaign with advice on housing or economic matters." "This is another flat-out lie from a dishonorable campaign that is increasingly inc...

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This is the latest feed from Eddie Cross , a white MP in the MDC party that is now sharing power with Mugabe. Eddie explains how the power-sharing arrangement has a strong resemblance to the traditional governance of the Shona tribe.

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Speaking of that fine subject, this proposal is not exactly audacious ( HT Kathy G ), just a illustration of how Obama might go on the front foot on behalf of issues based politics (as opposed to lipstick based politics) - an illustration of how propitous the times could be fo...

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Nicholas disapproved of Charlie Gibson's 'trick question' to Sarah Palin about the Bush Doctrine. He was especially struck that the question 'was asked by an interviewer who then went on to demonstrate that he didnt know what it was'. The question was only a trick insofar as i...

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They look like banks (as they borrow short, are highly leveraged and lend and invest long and in illiquid ways) and thus are highly vulnerable to bank like runs. But unlike banks, they are not properly regulated or supervised and dont have access to deposit insurance or the le...

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There's been a lot of excitement about how terrible the Democrats are being to Sarah Palin and how it's hurting them etc etc. It's all a bit strange. What's strange is that the main guy - Obama - reacted to her appointment in a dignified way. So did Hilary Clinton. But Democra...

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I'm gonna have to cut Obama some slack on that one. I do not think he was referring to Sarah Palin, he didn't reference her. Mike Huckabee McCain's ads have gone one step too far in sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100% truth test. Karl Rove I...

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Yesterday, Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Governor Sarah Palin, or the Palinator as some of her more excitable fans have taken to calling her, took to the stage in Minnesota to make her pitch. There must have been some trepidation in Republican ranks. She is to most af...

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"Over the past five years, a group of young and unpredictable rightward-leaning writers has emerged on the scene", writes David Brooks in the New York Times . Instead of rising through the official channels of the movement, he says, "they found their voices while blogging. The...

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From Paul Krugman Its just a glancing mention in this Times piece on how Fannie Mae won friends and influenced people: Fannies board once included Frederic V. Malek, a longtime friend of the Bush family and a former business partner of the current President Bush. Theres a bit...

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One particularly lamentable aspect of 'he said - she said' reporting (and this is in an all lamentable range of phenomena) is that things don't exist for the media until they've been mentioned by someone sufficiently senior in a mainstream political hierarchy. Thus journalists...

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It's a little surprising that, outside the RWDB blogs, virtually no attention has so far been paid to the current trial of Canadian right wing pundit Mark Steyn on (effectively) religious vilification proceedings by the British Columbia Human Rights Commission. Admittedly it's...

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On my way through page three of Gintis's reviews I came across a fascinating and disgruntled review of Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal . What's interesting is that as Gintis subsequently makes clear in comments, he's an ideological friend of Krugman's who nevertheless thinks...

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I haven't paid much attention to Telstra's participation in the public policy debate. It usually manages to get itself seen in a fairly poor light at least if one is not paying much attention as I haven't been. Even so, I've just read this speech by Phil Burgess (pdf), and I'm...

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I've been puzzling about international humanitarian interventions lately, in part because my daughter Bec is in the middle of a uni assignment on the subject, but mostly because as I write this Robert Mugabe continues to terrorise and impoverish his own people in Zimbabwe whil...

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I was more than a little surprised when what I thought was a reasonably uncontroversial item in yesterday's Missing Link elicited a heated response from frequent Troppo commenter and erudite legal eagle Patrick Fitzgerald. The item concerned arch-conservative US Supreme Court...

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Is this a joke?

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I am not a greedy man. Ever since it was announced that the London Mayoral elections would be a contest between Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson, I have had to confront the fact that I would not be that happy with whoever ended up as mayor. Ken, in fairness, has done a good j...

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Well he doesn't actually. I've just copied and pasted a post of his on his blog - below the fold. The contrasting characters (this is not just a matter of style) of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been prominently on display since the Pennsylvania results came in. Her ki...

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It seemed like a reasonable enough idea. Responding to fears of a terrorist attack by ' dirty bomb ' or nuclear weapon , US Customs and Border Protection installed hundreds of radiation portal monitors at seaports, land border ports of entry and crossings across the United Sta...

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Hillary Clinton is a strange female politician. Politicians have to play to their strengths, and some of those are gendered. I argued in this post that it would surely be very difficult for Hillary Clinton to win by being aggressive. I think that's a taboo with women politicia...

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In the furore that has broken out over Chinas crackdown in Tibet, Ive been surprised that so little has been said about President Hu Jintaos previous administration of Tibet as a rising communist party cadre. After all, it was Hus iron fisted handling of the last riot in Tibet...

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This post began as a comment on my previous Obama post which consisted of a trivial post by me followed by some great content from commenters. I was thanking Tim Lambert for his comments and the links he provided - to Charles Murray of all people, but it all got away from me s...

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If you haven't seen or read Obama's speech on the Reverend White, you should. Or if you're stretched for time, Clive Crook edits it down to the best bits - which are still pretty extensive. He really isn't just a pretty face.

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Everyone knows by the now that Bear Stearns the venerable, bulge bracket, but not white shoe Wall Street firm basically went under earlier this week. For those who prefer a more redistribution leaning economic system you love this story. When Wall Street goes into redistributi...

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Jonathan Powell, Tony Blairs former chief of staff, has given his first interview about life inside No.10 during the Blair government. For those unfamiliar with him, Powell (pronounced Pole) was amongst the former PMs longest standing consiglieres; he was there the day Blair e...

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Clive Crook defends Obama's oratory from accusations that it's vapid and empty. "Of course it is" he insists. And when you think about it, he has a point. The great speeches, however uniquely crafted are usually simple exhortations. "We shall fight them on the beaches and all...

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Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams on the result of the Wyoming caucuses - which split 61% to Obama and 38% Clinton. "We are thrilled with this near-split in delegates and are grateful to the people of Wyoming for their support." Wyoming's 12 delegates go 7 to Obama and...

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Hillary is hopping into Obama any way she knows how. Jonathon Chait takes up the story. The morning after Tuesday's primaries, Hillary Clinton's campaign released a memo titled "The Path to the Presidency." I eagerly dug into the paper, figuring it would explain how Clinton wo...

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Paul Krugman's theory is that the Bush administration and the Replublican Party are so bad, so partisan, that the Democrats should be unafraid of a little populism of their own to knock them off. No objections there. They're a very special breed, US Republicans. But then they...

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" Now listen, you queer . Stop calling me a crypto Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered..." Everyone agreed that William F Buckley was good television. When the American Broadcasting Company were looking for a conservative commentator for the 19...

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I'm a fan. He was the editor of The Economist's excellent "Economics Focus" for a good while. He may even have been nice enough to have been the person who decided to write up some of my work for the world. Anyway he went off to Atlantic Monthly where I think he still writes s...

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"At a personal level, few people are as charismatic, capable and ruthless as this mixed-race political phenomenon." Read all about it .

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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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Nice of you to join us Mr Stalin .

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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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Here's a nice decoding of those cadences in Obama's speeches. " In his speeches, Obama pretends to be a hero out of Joseph Campbell. He talks about being on a journey that is about more than just hope and change . If you want to walk together down his American road , he wants...

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Well, Gideon Haigh may be the embodiment of "self-loathing leftism", but at least he's been known to buckle on the pads - photo by Rae Allen on Flickr ...goes to Gideon Haigh. Last Sunday was the first episode of Outsiders on ABC and of course the first topic of discussion was...

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Horta in happier times - from reesa lee at Flickr Poor East Timor. Its President Jose Ramos-Horta lies in a serious but stable condition in Royal Darwin Hospital just across the creek from where I'm writing this, having been operated on for 2 1/2 hours last night to remove 3 b...

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In the light of Obama's latest wins , here's Gary Hart arguing for Obama in much the same terms I would . Hart was the 'Obama' candidate against Mondale in 1984 and the Democrats showed their now famous ability to pick a loser. Whether Obama will be much good or not is anyone'...

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