https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFtN1nIHXSY I really enjoyed this conversation with my friend Peyton Bowman which celebrates the possibility that Australia might be able to show the world how to push back against the Trumpian madness. We tried to turn Peyton's lack of inside k...
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Continued from Part Two . [caption id="attachment_35753" align="alignright" width="440"] If we had an epidemic preparedness index, we could have a league ladder of epidemic preparedness. Then all we'd have to do is get to the top of the ladder and we'd be THE MOST PREPARED IN...
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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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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, Print media, History, Humour, Education, Literature, Society, Religion, Theatre, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, Terror, Science, Journalism, Media, Libertarian Musings, Health, Political theory, Law, Dance, Review, Bargains, Travel, WOW! - Amazing, Social, Parenting, Ethics, Medical, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Inequality, Social Policy, Democracy, Employment, Sortition and citizens’ juries, Isegoria, Coronavirus crisis
Below is the introduction to an essay I've written about a Scottish mid-20th-century philosopher John Macmurray. Like my essay on Polanyi, this was partly a way for me to go through his work and set it down for myself. But the interest is through the lens of aspects of Macmurr...
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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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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, History, Society, Theatre, Economics and public policy, Science, Health, Political theory, Social, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Social Policy, Democracy
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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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, History, Humour, Society, Libertarian Musings, Geeky Musings, Health, Dance, Innovation, Cultural Critique, Public and Private Goods, Social Policy, Coronavirus crisis
Till 20 year ago, IQ scores in the West increased about 3 points per decade ever since the 1920s, a phenomenon known as the “Flynn effect”. That rise in IQ test scores, which have an average of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, was attributed to improved schooling, improved...
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Posted in Uncategorized, History, Education, IT and Internet, Science, Gender, Media, Social, Parenting, Public and Private Goods, Inequality, Employment
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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Herewith a weekend half-hour read. Comments and corrections appreciated. A culture survives principally, I think, by the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons that sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and i...
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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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Posted in Politics - international, Life, History, Society, Religion, Economics and public policy, Terror, Science, regulation, Health, Climate Change, Political theory, Business, Social, Cultural Critique, Public and Private Goods
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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Posted in Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, History, Society, Economics and public policy, Science, Libertarian Musings, Health, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Democracy, Employment
Hats off to Joseph Walker who's podcasting up a storm at The Jolly Swagman (Yes, the title gave me the wrong idea too.) Anyway, I often find long-form podcasts rather tedious (except where I'm being interviewed in which case I find them endlessly fascinating, but others probab...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7tvauOJMHo Lateral Economics has been commissioned by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to estimate the value of the Australian Census to the Australian community. As part of that exercise we've got the go-ahead from ABS to do something...
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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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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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In all ways that we measure these things, physical violence has reduced in Western countries in the last 70 years, particularly mainland Western Europe. What about psychological violence though? Psychological violence, ie the inflicting of mental pain, takes many forms. It inc...
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Posted in Life, Philosophy, History, Miscellaneous, Humour, Education, Society, Religion, regulation, Media, Libertarian Musings, Health, Social, Parenting, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Public and Private Goods, Inequality, Personal
Using Massive Online Choice Experiments to Measure Changes in Well-being by Erik Brynjolfsson, Felix Eggers, Avinash Gannamaneni - #24514 (EFG PR) Abstract: GDP and derived metrics (e.g., productivity) have been central to understanding economic progress and well-being. In pri...
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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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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, regulation, Political theory, Law, Information, Intellectual Monopoly Privileges, Innovation, Social, Intellectual Property, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Employment
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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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Philosophy, Environment, History, Miscellaneous, Humour, Society, Religion, Sport-general, Theatre, Music, Economics and public policy, Science, regulation, Gender, Journalism, Media, Geeky Musings, Climate Change, Political theory, Business, Travel, Immigration and refugees, Information, Intellectual Monopoly Privileges, Innovation, Social, Race and indigenous, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Inequality, Social Policy, Democracy, Bullshit, Indigenous, Employment
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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Posted in Uncategorized, Uncategorised, Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, Print media, Environment, History, Miscellaneous, Humour, Education, Literature, Society, Religion, Films and TV, Sport-general, Theatre, Music, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, Food, Terror, Science, Art and Architecture, regulation, Gender, Journalism, Media, Libertarian Musings, Geeky Musings, Health, Climate Change, Political theory, Metablogging, Law, Dance, Space, Review, Startup, Products, Travel, Immigration and refugees, Information, bubble, WOW! - Amazing, Social, Parenting, Race and indigenous, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Medical, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Inequality, Personal, Social Policy, Democracy, Bullshit, Indigenous, Employment
Many readers will have heard of Patricia Edgar who was a giant force in Australian cultural life from the 1970s. She more than anyone else was responsible for lifting the tone of children's TV in Australia. In any event I was talking to her recently about the current woes of c...
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Cross posted from the Mandarin - my response to a tweet from Troppo's man in Geneva. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="550"] Is this a picture of a public good? Well not really, but then it is of the 21st century - or possibly the 22nd - it's too early to tell. I couldn'...
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Part One Note: this post has been superseded by the full essay . A couple of days ago I came upon care ethics via Virginia Held's book The Ethics of Care (2006) with some excitement. The ethics of care grew out of feminism, but I think the issues it raises transcend feminism a...
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This is a reworking of an earlier post - but reworked with Chief Innovation Officer of The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI), Chris Vanstone, there's quite a bit of new content for those who are interested. Cross posted at The Mandarin . There's also the intervie...
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The PC has a two-stage reference on increasing the application of competition, contestability and informed user choice in the provision of human services. The first stage will identify the most prospective areas for the application of such principles whilst the second will tel...
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To a substantial extent the 'left/right' divide is characterised by a common way of seeing the world in which there's self-interest and its opposite - altruism. But I think that impoverishes the debate. I think there's a third category far more important than 'altruism'. To ge...
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As a long-term resident of Darwin, where you can drive from anywhere in the metropolitan area to just about anywhere else in not much more than 25 minutes (even in the peak hour such as it is), it always takes me a couple of days to get used to the traffic snarls of Sydney and...
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Part Two of my essay on the way of looking at the world I've worked out over the last few years and published on Evonomics can be found here . So many years, so few words :( Part one of this essay showed how two dimensions of free riding define what we call “public goods” – th...
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Political parties and institutions in Australia and the US are increasingly dominated by interest groups representing the few, leading to a large policy-induced increase in inequality in recent decades and a long raft of new policies favouring the few by giving them the tax re...
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Posted in Politics - national, Life, Philosophy, History, Society, Economics and public policy, regulation, Libertarian Musings, Geeky Musings, Political theory, Law, Information, bubble, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Public and Private Goods, Social Policy
This post is a follow-up to one I wrote last week (see the latter half of it) and also a response to a more recent post by David Walker . I certainly wouldn’t argue with David’s assertion that a Sydney-Brisbane Very Fast Train route is not likely to be remotely viable even in...
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With the Internet being a regular feature of our lives for about 20 years now, what have been the related developments that were hard to pick at the outset? What are the lessons? Five thoughts: Communication and personal expression is the main business of the Internet. That wa...
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Posted in Philosophy, History, Miscellaneous, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, Science, Libertarian Musings, Geeky Musings, Political theory, Business, Information, Innovation, Best From Elsewhere, Cultural Critique, Public and Private Goods
Simon Heffer's High Minds presents us with a portrait of the mid-Victorians in which they consciously set about building the world which became ours. A liberal democratic world. To do so they recognised the need for all sorts of public goods. Those of education and health sure...
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