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

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

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

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The twin threats of "hidden persuasion" and artificial intelligence have now convinced most of us that Google and its ilk are almost uniquely powerful. These threats are overrated. The digital giants can do less than we fear – and we risk regulating them where we should not. 1...

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

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

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

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Wellbeing & Policy Making Book Launch Event on 1st July 5-6.30pm London Time. Attending the Launch is Free, the book is not! [blurb from Nancy Hey, director of the WW Centre for Wellbeing]: The What Works Centre for Wellbeing , and our commissioning partners at the ESRC: Econo...

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

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One of the things I keep track off in covid-times is what is happening to births. Though it was initially suggested couples might use their extra lockdown-time to produce babies, it has become clear that in the Western world the opposite is true and that they reduce births by...

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

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I here want to salute the brave artists who used their talents to capture the inhumanity and essential insanity of lockdowns. My favourite is the "guerilla mask force", an artistic idea that apparently started in Switzerland but spread all over Europe. what this guerilla mask...

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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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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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Consider the picture below of two hypothetical Accident and Emergency departments (A&E), one that has no covid-regulations and simply has the available nurses trying to help all comers as fast as possible. In the other one the nurses try to prevent mingling by testing newcomer...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Suppose you agree with me that containment and elimination strategies pursued regarding Covid-19 do far more harm than good. Suppose you also believe that having an open economy and a vibrant close-contact social life is vital for the long-run health of the country. You want t...

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

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

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

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Did you know that Australia has over 13,000 IVF babies born per year, the UK over 20,000 , the West as a whole (Europe+US+offshoots) over 200,000 and the world as a whole 500,000 ? And did you know that due to the corona panic these services have been halted pretty much everyw...

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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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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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People shuffling in the street, afraid to look others in the eye, get close, and be accused. Fear as a silent ghost hovering above the city, watching us, like drones. The panic in the eye of the mother as her little toddler cycles by an older woman on the street, too close. Th...

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

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

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

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

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Are you dismayed at getting 100 emails a day you need to wade through, disturbing your concentration? Does your administration bother you constantly with things you just ‘have to be aware of’? Are you tired of the ‘executive reports’, ‘award notices’, 'compulsory breathing tra...

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Episode 5 of the final season of Game of Thrones showed us a vengeful fallen angle, Daenerys Targaryen, after whom thousands of children in the real world have been named. Even though her enemies had been defeated and surrendered, she nevertheless used her massive weapon, a fi...

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

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

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[note to self] Economics, sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, and the other social sciences are currently taught in an unorganised manner. The undergraduate degree in any of these disciplines consists of about 20 separate courses that each differ markedly from the ot...

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

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

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

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National history is the story that binds ‘us who make up the nation’ into a single entity with a collective memory . It has a purpose and as such we can choose what historical events and realities to put into that story, whilst forgetting the rest. Of the four main current con...

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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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The Effects of Marijuana Liberalizations: Evidence from Monitoring the Future by Angela K. Dills, Sietse Goffard, Jeffrey Miron - #23779 (HE LE PE) Abstract: By the end of 2016, 28 states had liberalized their marijuana laws: by decriminalizing possession, by legalizing for me...

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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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"Research has shown that cultures with greater gender equity have larger sex differences when it comes to job preferences, because in these societies, people are free to choose their occupations based on what they enjoy." A month ago, a Google employee wrote a memo about his t...

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Via Andrew Gelman's site , here's a TED talk by US philanthropist Laura Arnold entitled "The Four Most Dangerous Words? A New Study Shows". It details her journey through the world of social, medical, psychological and other research. It's a lively and concise summary of the d...

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Minister Dutton says that 2/3 of people recently charged with terrorism in Australia have Lebanese Muslim backgrounds. However, the first rule when considering dramatic statistics should be to think “compared to what”. In this case, where else might we expect Islamic extremist...

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

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

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

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

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Here's something I only noticed while writing a short piece for INTHEBLACK magazine : the rise of globalisation is not only slowing down almost to a halt, but in some places (like the Netherlands) may have been slowing down since around the turn of the century. That's well bef...

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In answer to my post earlier today about the data retention bill, frequent commenter Patrick Fitzgerald made a rather important point about the data retention zeitgeist: Embrace the panopticon Ken, buy yourself a webcam, attach it to your head and stream live 24×7. Plus for go...

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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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Ross Douthat in the New York Times presents a compelling theory about the waves of sexual abuse scandals , from Roman Catholicism to Rolf Harris to Rotherham. Remember that these scandals are scandalous precisely because their perpetrators all got away with rape and abuse for...

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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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The current inquiry into institutional child abuse holds some interesting lessons about the nature of religion, which I'll stay clear of here. But it also holds a larger lesson about the ability of organisations to act morally and to act properly in the absence of external reg...

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

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"as much as I don’t understand it, Jeffrey Sachs really, really, really doesn’t understand it." Nina Monk, author of The Idealist "I don’t want to argue with you Jeff, because I don’t want to be called ignorant or unprofessional. I have worked in Africa for 30 years. My collea...

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

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

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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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Scott Morrison was on RN Breakfast on Monday 25 November , hosing down the idea that the diplomatic row with Indonesia over past spying on the Indonesian President and his wife might impede Operation Sovereign Borders. That was the day before we embarked on the whole ‘Gonski i...

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Some memories fade too slowly. I was reminded of one such memory by the TV advertisement being aired in the lead up to White Ribbon Day tomorrow (Monday 25 November). It was late morning on Friday, 20 September and I was at the local Magistrate’s Court on a court visit for the...

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Tabloid TV – it’s one of modern life’s little irritations but, thankfully, one that’s easily avoided – unlike Melbourne’s Myki system, the rococo convolutions of bus routes in Melbourn's outer suburbs and numb-nuts who conduct loud conversations on their mobile phones while yo...

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From the ever-wonderful XKCD , seeming to comment on current US governance: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="381"] XKCD: world's sharpest comic?[/caption]

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Seems Tony Abbott finally headed off to Indonesia today to have some talks. Not about the boats – he wants the focus to be on building a constructive relationship and of course building trade opportunities. Well good luck with that one mate. For the past three years you’ve spe...

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It was around six thirty on a cold wet Melbourne Day. A long day for me, including a mid-morning appointment with a new psychologist. First appointments are all about background – what your condition is, personal and family history and all that other stuff that they need to kn...

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

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

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

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“ they exert every variety of talent on a lower ground…and may be said to live and act in a submind”...... VS Naipaul “The Air Conditioned Bubble" Writing in 1984 about the republican convention of 1984 (the triumphant beginning of Ronald Regans second term), V S Naipaul wrote...

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Today was a pleasant day, right up until I came home and caught the news on ABC 24: Kevin Rudd has come up with the penultimate solution to the asylum seeker problem : Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says asylum seekers who arrive by boat will have no chance of being settled in Aust...

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http://youtu.be/ge7i60GuNRg

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"For too long, progressives have been scared off issues of family structure and parenting by a fear of being misinterpreted as blaming some of the hardest-working people in society", says Andrew Leigh . But for many of today's progressives, raising issues about single parentho...

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Long after Ken Parish published his post You Can Survive on Newstart But You Can't Live On It on January 6th it's still attracting a steady daily trickle of readers. It also attracts the occasional comment describing survival on Newstart, most recently this one from Brenton: B...

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Nick Cater is sensitive about accusations of racism. In his book The Lucky Culture he writes: To judge someone as prejudiced is character assessment; to call them racist or, even worse, a racist, is character assassination. One can be a little bit prejudiced or a little bit ig...

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Prelude: Lento It's after midnight and the other members of the household are either asleep or pursuing their own consolations in the silence of their own rooms. So, much as I might desire the consolation of recorded orchestral music played at concert hall volume, it just woul...

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Interlude: Ruminations on 'the costs of speech', monkeys and Dexter In The 2013 PEN Free Voices lecture, reproduced on the ABC's Religion and Ethics web site , Waleed Aly makes the following observations on Freedom of Speech: … let us grind this out, beginning with a trite obs...

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A Peculiarly Australian Cause Celebre In one of the less nebulous sections of the Liberals' curiously fisk-resistant manifesto i , you'll find this special promise for Andrew Bolt and his fans and supporters: Protecting freedom of speech – supporting an open media We will prot...

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Jeff Sparrow on 'the Imbecilic Andrew Bolt' and Unseen Academicals : ...“My problem is not,” [writes Alecia Simmonds], "that our public sphere harbours ill-educated members (like the imbecilic Andrew Bolt who never made it past first-year uni)." Sorry? Anyone who doesn’t posse...

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A Spectre is Haunting Australia: the spectre of Corporatism. Since March this year the Centre for Independent Studies has been promoting its new manifesto ' TARGET30 - towards smaller government and future prosperity '. TARGET30's stated goal is to get Australia's total govern...

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Australia needs intellectuals, says Nick Cater. In his new book The Lucky Culture he writes: A nation is entitled to look to its intellectuals to articulate its common purpose, to pull together loose strands and write a narrative that says where it has come from and where it i...

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Economic Conditions and Child Abuse by Jason M. Lindo, Jessamyn Schaller, Benjamin Hansen - #18994 (CH HE LE LS) Abstract: Although a huge literature spanning several disciplines documents an association between poverty and child abuse, researchers have not found persuasive ev...

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

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Imagine yourself to be in the mythical Land of Beyond where you need minions to do a dirty job that men with honour would refuse to do. A classic trick in this situation is to pick people despised by the rest of society who are thus dependent on protection and will simply do w...

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

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

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Economists love tradeoffs. Indeed, their basic model of the world breaks down where such tradeoffs don't occur. Lucky for them since the world really is full of tradeoffs. If you want more carrots, you'll have to do with fewer of something else. Here they're substitutes. But,...

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Looking at the newspapers you’d think Catholicism is having a hard time with philandering priests and cover-ups of their doings being found out on a weekly basis. Dutch and German newspapers kept track for a while of the regional frequencies of new cases of sexual misconduct a...

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Is the real genius of economics our ability to see things that are impossible to objectively measure? The examples I have in mind are incentives, market failures, groups, power, and corruption. Below, I will point out just how impossible these things are to objectively measure...

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

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Debates over income support are never ending. And part of the reason is that people have different ideas about what they want the income support system to achieve. When it comes to income support payments for people below retirement age who are capable of paid work, there are...

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

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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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I remember being at a wedding reception talking to someone who was 70 odd. I asked them whether in their day it was normal for the bride and groom to put the tip of the knife in the cake and then beam at the cameras for two or three minutes - celebrities on their special day....

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Last year French parents were outraged by an advertisement that claimed Santa Claus wasn't real. AdWeek reported : "I have some bad news for you," a father says to his (grown) son right at the beginning of the spot. "Père Noël doesn't really exist." Parents are all upset that...

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Clive Hamilton writes : Women's morality differs from men's. Feminist philosopher Carol Gilligan argues women are motivated more by care than duty, and inclined more to emphasise responsibilities than rights. They seek reconciliation through the exercise of compassion and nego...

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At #76 on the Things Bogans Like list , McMansions are a symbol of the culture of overconsumption and a triumph of marketing over common sense. Built on the urban fringe, kilometers away from services and public transport, McMansion owners are doomed to spend hours in their ca...

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Richard Posner is puzzled by by increases in female earnings. After all: "Women are not as well suited to perform jobs requiring upper-body strength as men are, but men can perform virtually all service jobs as well as women can." Really? As developed economies move away from...

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In the Sydney Morning Herald of 1 June, Julie Novak of the Institute of Public Affairs criticised an article by Gavin Mooney and Alex Wodak, writing in the previous day’s Herald, which argued for higher taxes , in part based on arguments developed by Richard Wilkinson and Kate...

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While she admired Winston Churchill, his resistance to conditional welfare was exasperating. For years Beatrice Webb had been arguing with Churchill and other Liberals about social insurance and she was getting nowhere. She insisted that: "Doling out weekly allowances, and wit...

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Now I realise I'm courting extreme feminist abuse by this post, but so be it. Australian popular culture always seems to follow North American examples no matter how silly e.g. "gangsta rap". So I suppose it was inevitable that the phenomenon of the " slutwalk " would rapidly...

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When the SL-1 nuclear reactor exploded in Idaho releasing a radioactive plume and killing three workers, a local paper reported the accident on page 12 . That was 1961. Today some residents of Idaho are so worried about the nuclear accident 8000 kilometers away that they're bu...

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Recent NT News discussion on the perennial topic of crime and punishment seems to have generated more heat than light. Chief Justice Trevor Riley wrote an excellent piece pointing out basic facts about the NT criminal justice system, not least the fact that NT judges and magis...

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One of the more surprising newspaper stories of recent times was Peter Martin’s article of November 15 on OECD takes aim at Labor policies which quoted the OECD Economic Survey of Australia as saying that Australia’s unemployment benefits are too low. Along with a number of ot...

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Under the wonderful post title " Copyright Infringement And A Medieval Apple Pie ”, the blogger Jane Smith (not her real name, one would guess) has documented the history of an online copyright infringement. Hardly unusual, you would think, indeed the internet is supposed to b...

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Here is a story about the internet working the way tech utopians think it should. Technology is as good or as bad as the social conditions of which it is a part, but this is one of the good stories. It can be read either as a perfect example of self interest working well in th...

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This is a belated report on a debate on Islam versus Atheism at my campus. It was part of Islamic Awareness Week , orgainsed by the Muslim Students' Association. The official question for debate was 'Should God have a place in the 21st Century?', and the format was pretty stan...

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Alex Stewart has had his 15 minutes of fame, but may live to regret it. Earlier this week he posted a video on Youtube. It showed him smoking lawn-clipping cigarettes that were fashioned out of pages torn from the Bible and the Koran. He compared the taste “scientifically” and...

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Saturday 11 to Wed 15, 10 am to 5 in the Great Hall . My treasures: all in practically "as new" condition. Peter Medawar, Pluto's Republic (not a missprint). $3. Review . The editor of the Age Monthly Review would not let me write that the cover photo depicted Medwar demonstra...

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In The New Republic this week Richard Just shines the spotlight on Barack Obama's hopelessly contradictory position on gay marriage. He compares it to Woodrow Wilson's pathetic attempts to dodge the issue of women's suffrage by claiming it was an issue for the states. The issu...

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Evolutionary psychologists have been busy proposing explanations for religiosity . Belief in transcendent conscious beings might promote survival, they argue, by instilling hope and optimism. Or it might be a by-product of other naturally selected susceptibilities, such as inf...

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Some time ago a coworker of mine found a file on the train and gave it to me. A thick wad of papers detailing a conspiracy against all that was good in the world: The Queen, her constitution and her mighty railways....and the writer's right to place her wheelie bin on the kerb...

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I have long viewed sporadically gifted journalist Christopher Hitchens as a caricatured bullying buffoon, but until quite recently I admired Richard Dawkins . Years ago I read The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker with fascination, along with the works of fellow biological...

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It's always nice to get a name for something that is rummaging round in one's mind. Autoantonymy has - believe it or not been doing that in my tiny brain for many years. So I'm greatful to the great Three Quarks website for giving me the word (and grateful to Ingolf for tellin...

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The Atlantic Monthly writes up Facebook's happiness index - they call it Gross National Happiness, but it's not - it's net of unhappiness - at least as measured. I'm a sceptic as to what conclusions one can draw from this, but one can see that killing some pirates rates as the...

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Steve Horwitz at The Austrian Economists is running a series of posts to show how the poor in the US have become better off over the last thirty years or so. This table shows how real wages have improved to shorten the time required to pay for some household goods. He notes th...

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Tomorrow evening, as I've done on this date for the last two years, I'll put this sign on the front door: Trick-or-treaters: If you've come in a scary costume, please ring the bell. Otherwise, try again next year! It worked last year and the year before. In the preceding years...

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For economists and other social scientists who read this blog but don't pop over to the Government 2.0 Taskforce website, you should - there's m oney to be made serving the public interest - never a bad thing.

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

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I cannot really understand how such a talentless and unlikable person as Kyle Sandilands ends up earning m$4 per year . But then, I am not part of the Idol or 2dayfm demographic. I would rather listen to the ABC or watch the SciFi channel. I am also the kind of person who like...

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Australia is in the midst of a flat-screen TV crisis, says Clive Hamilton . Driven by an insatiable desire for "stuff", we spend more time chasing money and less doing the kinds of things that would really make us happier and more fulfilled -- spending time with friends and fa...

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I attended a graduation last week, and submitted to my usual ritual of explaining, to everyone who asked, why I sat in the stalls in mufti rather than on the dais in academic regalia. Some of my colleagues inform me that they hate graduations, either because they are bored by...

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Recently, Jeremy Sammut of the Centre for Independent Studies has had a number of opinion pieces published in the Australian Welfare saps the will to save on March 5 and "Welfare killed saving" (December 18) and a longer paper published by CIS - A Streak of Hypocrisy: Reaction...

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A rather amusing ranking of jobs in the US . The rationale is explained, if you really want to know, with a mix of remuneration and working conditions. To quantify the many facets of the 200 jobs included in our report, we determined and reviewed various critical aspects of al...

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

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Like Oscar Wilde said (I think), "I can resist anything except temptation". More here . A long literature in psychology, as well as a more recent theory literature in economics, suggests that prolonged exposure to a tempting stimulus can eventually lead people to ¨Dsuccumb¡¬ t...

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

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by Edward L. Glaeser, Matthew G. Resseger, Kristina Tobio - #14419 (PE) Abstract: What impact does inequality have on metropolitan areas? Crime rates are higher in places with more inequality, and people in unequal cities are more likely to say that they are unhappy. There is...

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Andrew Leigh writes to me and through to me to you gentle Troppodillians: With my ANU colleague Alison Booth, I'm presently doing some research on racial attitudes in Australia. As part of that, Alison and I are hoping to get a sample of Australians to do an Implicit Associati...

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Is it just me or do other Troppo readers appreciate the irony (or rank hypocrisy depending on your level of cynicism) of the main exponents and proselytisers of fairness and equality in our society apparently applying a completely double standard, when it comes to their own re...

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'One of my closest friends is Turkish, and she won't have anything to do with Muslims, OK?' Camden Council has finally voted on the Quranic Society's development application, and has unanimously voted against it . We now have to wait and see whether the applicants will appeal,...

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In the recent mega blog discussion kicked off by Don Arthur, I ventured the opinion that "the truly remarkable thing is that the Gini coefficient of equivalised disposable income has only increased from 0.28 to 0.31 in the last 30 years of so." Given the underwhelming response...

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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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In the latest edition of Dissent , Jesse Larner has a leftist take on libertarian icon Friedrich Hayek . He " talks about what Hayek gets right, what he gets wrong, and where he is just a crackpot ". Larner joins a growing list of leftist writers and thinkers who share Hayek's...

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I travelled overseas a while back. I was tasked with an important mission for private enterprise so I flew Business Class. Business Class Travel has a lot to offer the practiced observer of the human condition. Just arriving at the airport for example offers an appreciation of...

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

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The Long-Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades by Nathan Nunn Abstract: Can part of Africa's current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct...

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Andrew Inglis Clark This is the first of several intended posts about Australian federalism. Federalism doesn't seem to have very many supporters in early twenty-first century Australia, at least judging by the fact that both our current Prime Minister and Opposition Leader ar...

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Two of the most fashionable ideas in social policy thinking are coming together -- conditional welfare and early childhood intervention. Together they'll create a new supernanny state that fights crime, prevents teenage pregnancy, lifts employment and leaps rigorous cost-benef...

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Many years ago I used to donate quite a bit of the money I donate to charity to Community Aid Abroad. It seemed like a good idea to try to combine charity and aid with some attempt to address some of the political causes of poverty. Empowering poor communities seemed like a go...

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Backroom Girl was nice enough to tell me of a paper being given by one of the world's experts on the tax and welfare systems of the world in Melbourne yesterday. Australian Peter Whiteford was out from his current headquarters at OECD Paris and was giving a talk to the Brother...

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The Government Giveth and the Government Taketh Away is 'bad' Peter Saunders' latest book. He argues that the welfare state once supported the poor by taxing the rich. Today it attempts to support the non-poor with their own taxes. He calls this 'tax-welfare churning': Churnin...

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The plight of children is one of the most compelling arguments for government activism, say Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray . But in their 1994 book The Bell Curve , they argue that governments should resist the urge to intervene in dysfunctional families and communities...

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"It really is social science pornography," says Murray, as he pulls income and IQ statistics off his laptop computer. In a 1994 interview with New York Times reporter Jason DeParle , the think tank researcher talks about race, intelligence, poverty and Thai bar girls. Murray i...

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

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Having blogged for a couple of months now, I am conscious of the lure of writing 'why dont the people in charge do as I say' pieces. As an antidote I'd like to offer 5 observations which strike a European like myself on why Australia is a great country, some of which are likel...

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Quentin McDermott's Four Corners report on Telstra's management practices and their effect on employees was powerful and polished. I found it useful for several reasons. First, it revealed the secret of a large part of the productivity miracle of the 1990s. Of course this is n...

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To free the market classical liberals need to help break the nexus between income and status. The more strongly the two are connected, the more the left will try to regulate the economy to prevent the growth of income inequality. This is because the left's concern over income...

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Close on the heels of the latest ABS publication on Working Time Arrangements , the subject of a long blog discussion on Andrew Nortons site, the ABS has followed up with Preferred Working Hours of Wage and Salary Earners, Queensland. This Survey found that, of people surveyed...

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When a generation of activists, writers and artists rallies around slogans like " never trust anyone over 30 " and " hope I die before I get old " a book like Mark Davis ' gangland is almost inevitable. But Davis always knew that generationalism was a cheap shot -- a way of gr...

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"People get on welfare because they are lazy PERIOD" says an anonymous commenter to a Wisconsin newspaper article. Last week the La Crosse Tribune ran an article about welfare reform which provoked the usual hostile sentiments. The commenter went on to complain about left wing...

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If you like an occasional straight shot of social criticism, withering satire and fine, hard, funny writing, you could do worse than dip into James Kunstler's weekly diatribes . Best known for his conviction that America's love affair with the automobile, suburbia and cheap en...

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This brief article by Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Washington Post provides a useful contrast to Albrechtsen's opinion piece. Here are the opening few lines to give you the flavour: The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation...

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Chris Young didn't feel cared about . The food was good, the service was better than usual but it wasn't enough -- he wanted more from his waitress: I didn't feel like she really cared. Sure, she was attentive, but I didn't feel cared about. And I didn't feel like she was bein...

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

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To rule is to look ahead, it has been said. Let us therefore cast our eyes at the virtually universal wish of nations and their population to achieve economic growth. Jared Diamond argues in his latest book âCatastropheâ that this âgrowth fetishâ (as Clive Hamilton calls it) m...

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Iâve been musing lately about the connection between womenâs labour force participation and income inequality and Iâve been forced to the conclusion that, once again, itâs probably womenâs fault. Increasing inequality in market incomes, that is. My logic goes something like th...

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I received an e-mail a while back from a very enterprising TR Rose Associates a small New York public advocacy publishing house who have published a comic in aid of the cause for giving money to caregivers in the US. Parents and Grandparents. I don't know what the arrangements...

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Much as I hesitate to introduce yet another post with a plug for LNL, the interview with Chas Freeman last night obliges me to take the risk. Now retired, he was, as well as holding many other distinguished positions, US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War. Te...

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

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In the last few days two articles caught my attention: one about a raid on a presumed illegal brothel and one about a Sydney city council using private detectives to gather evidence against presumed illegal brothels (as an aside, private agents employed by government agencies/...

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Balancing Work and Family , the recent report from the House of Reps Standing Committee on Family and Human Services contains a version of one of my favourite pictures. (I've posted my own version below the fold.) The figure shows how labour force participation has changed for...

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A Beautiful Mind? If you've never taken much of a look at Andrew Bolt's columns in the Herald Sun, you may wonder which category of columnist he falls into. Is his the anger of a sharp mind frequently impatient with the foolishness of those around him - Melbourne's own Tom Wol...

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Ahead of this weekend's announcement of the 2006 Australian Idol , today's Age Green Guide acknowledges the popular culture phenomenon. The paper then labels the show, for about the tenth time, as "karaoke". The Age is not alone; a large part of the Australian pop/rock music i...

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Why Rudd is wrong about Hayek Friedrich Hayek argued that human beings are "almost exclusively self-regarding", says Kevin Rudd . In contrast, modern Labor "argues that human beings are both 'self-regarding' and 'other-regarding'." But what Hayek actually argued was that human...

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

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It all started with Barbie , "the vampy fashion doll" that "helped to bring about the sexualization of childhood." At least that's how the Manhattan Institute's Kay Hymowitz remembers it. According to Hymowitz , Barbie is "not-so-spiritual godmother of Britney Spears" and a si...

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In his 1984 book Losing Ground , Charles Murray argued that welfare hurt poor families by creating incentives for self-defeating behaviour. Last month, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed that poor families ought to be rewarded for making the right decisions: "This polic...

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

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

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

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So it happened again. No Melbourne team in the grand final. In fact, none of the top four teams in the AFL competition were from Melbourne. We will go through the motions of pretending that grand final week still means something. And at 5.30 on Saturday there will be a quiet e...

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

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Imagine super-nanny on crystal meth. That's how Lawrence Mead 's ideal case manager deals with recalcitrant welfare recipients: One man I know in Milwaukee, who works for a private employment program ... summarized his message to his male clients this way: “I’ll do anything to...

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In Jason Soon's capitalist utopia you can hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon , rear cattle in the evening and criticise after dinner . It's a world where the welfare state has withered away and in its place is an unconditional basic income paid to each adult citizen to...

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Charles Murray and Peter Saunders both want to dismantle the welfare state -- they just have different strategies for doing it. Murray's plan is to convert current welfare state spending into cash grants for every adult American (except those in prison) while Saunders' plan is...

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Nicholas has very kindly invited me to contribute to Club Troppo. This is my first post. So it's virgin territory for me. Please be gentle. And, of course, I hope you will enjoy it"¦ I was driving to the shops last night listening to this PM story about workers in Melbourne no...

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Jason Soon thinks welfare payments should be replaced by a guaranteed minimum income scheme . Rather than subjecting welfare recipients to a regime of case management and workfare, Soon thinks they should be free to make their own decisions about work and lifestyle. ' Bad ' Pe...

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[photopress:Bookshelf.jpg,full,pp_empty] Carmen Lawrence's Fear and Politics Lawrence's central argument is that we need to get rid of the Howard government. We need to get rid of the Howard government because terrible things will happen to our nation if we don't. These terrib...

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I. I enjoyed myself at The Boy from Oz last Friday night. I'd have loved to see one of Peter Allen's big Broadway shows and was curious as to what all the fuss was about The Boy's great success in New York. Mind you, the reason for its success seems pretty obvious. Peter Allen...

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I closed yesterday's post on national imprisonment rates by rhetorically asking why the mainstream media hasn't perceived as newsworthy the quite marked increase in imprisonment over the last decade and more. One reason may be that, despite significantly greater resort to impr...

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A US prison, but you get the picture ... The ABS's fascinating report Measures of Australia's Progress 2006 received a certain amount of coverage in the MSM when it was released last week. Most of its findings are very positive. But one disturbing aspect that hasn't received a...

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Customary Law is in the news again, but the Greek Gods aren't. Maybe they should be, perhaps their old dramas and poems would allow us all to see in dreaming a non-kissing cousin in the dance we have no choice but to partner. Remember a good dancer has good balance and that no...

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

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

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It's not just western cartoons causing protests abroad. In India Hindu activists are protesting against Valentine's Day. According to Asian News International Valentine's Day has become increasingly popular in India in recent years with retailers doing a brisk trade in heart-s...

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[photopress:Graffiti.jpg,full,pp_empty] A civilized society is one whose members do not humiliate each other... Avishai Margalit The Centre for Independent Studies is arguing for incivility. In a recent paper Nicole Billante and Peter Saunders say: Excessive civility threatens...

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

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America spends more on social benefits that Denmark, says Jacob Hacker . The difference is that the retirement pensions and healthcare benefits many Americans rely on are funded through tax breaks and employer contributions rather than the welfare state -- welfare comes as an...

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David Gruen (distantly related by fraternity) 1 sent me the following abstract from a recent NBER working paper. In it some econometrics is done on a phenomenon that (I believe) was first discussed seriously in American sociology in the mid to late 50s (you'd expect economics...

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I heard this program on PM the other day about the collapse into petrol sniffing of the aboriginal community at Uluru. In some ways a war zone would be better than this. Call it 'disadvantage' if you like, but I think that rather misses what is going on.

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This week's column is on the subject of the book "Children of the lucky country" the state of children. It speaks for itself I guess, though of course in a column format one doesn't have sufficient space to spell everything out. Suffice it to say that as I read the book it see...

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UK Troppo reader Alex Deane has just published a book, and writes to tell me he quoted extensively from some of my blog posts about values. The book is called The Great Abdication: Why Britain's Decline Is the Fault of the Middle Class , and the Amazon blurb describes it this...

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I can't decide whether American economist Richard Florida , who is currently doing the rounds promoting his latest book The Flight of the Creative Class , is one of those public intellectuals that Tim Dunlop loves, or just a populist poseur. Florida is responsible for the vogu...

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Sound familiar? A DECISION will be taken within weeks on whether to switch off the "futile" life support for the woman left for dead in the boot of her car in Melbourne earlier this year. Melbourne Magistrates Court heard today that Maria Korp would die in two weeks if medical...

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Meika the Dolebludger has been writing a novel , and it's nearly finished. An intensely thoughtful (if perversely prickly) individual, Meika poses the following question? Now, a[n] ethical problem. As a longterm dolebludger, should I:- A) sell it to a mainstream print publishe...

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In the comments thread Al Bundy has some kindly advice for parents who want to ban junk food from schools . Nic White says that kids should be able to eat what they like, while Andrew Norton and Michael Warby think that the real problem is that governments are running the scho...

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Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to ban the sale of junk food in California's schools. Naturally, the Center for Consumer Freedom is outraged. When former governor Gray Davis tried to do the same thing Consumer Freedom accused him of confusing the roles of government and f...

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In light of recent debates at Troppo , readers might be interested in an excellent op/ed piece by Gary Younge in The Guardian .

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I'm not inclined to participate further on the debate on non-heterosexualities and school education, partly because I think it's rapidly running its course , and partly because at the moment I can better focus my writing energies on my thesis. So after this post, I'll disappea...

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Rob Corr has put up a very measured post summarising the debate which started with the incident of the student teacher having her prac terminated because she answered children's questions about her same-sex partner over at Kick & Scream . Rob's post is tellingly titled 'Discre...

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Unfortunately, I'm feeling unwell today so unable to go into work. Happily, though, this gives me the chance to post on International Women's Day. There are a number of entries around the 'sphere - Rob Corr's birthday is also today, and he has some interesting reflections on c...

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You'd get the impression from parts of the recent comments threads around this joint lately that Western civilisation is about to collapse if the shaky heteronormativity in schools isn't immediately reinforced. As a number of us have pointed out, though, there are real people...

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I previously argued that talk of values - usually found associated with education debates - can be code for imposing conservative social values on everyone , and that one value that rarely gets mentioned is the fundamental liberal value of toleration. As the right wing culture...

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

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Or, the Civil in Civility It's odd that we hear so much about the Judaeo-Christian tradition (usually in the context of values) these days from the Culture Warriors who believe that our values are going to ruin all around us . It's as if, like the artist Frederick Goodall , th...

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In my previous post on right wing postmodernism , I referred to the work of American political theorist Sheldon S. Wolin. Wolin also has some relevant points to make about the "underclass" debate , which surfaced on Troppo in the wake of the Macquarie Fields riots. Wolin trace...

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I've been a regular net user since 1997, and first discovered the thing in 92, when we were delighted to find we could access the Village Voice sitting in the Semper Floreat offices at UQ. A feature in the Fin magazine on Friday made the point that many of the utopian claims m...

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Back in December, Scott wrote about internet dating . I'm single again, and as I'm hardly likely to meet anyone sitting in an office in Toowong by myself writing a thesis, I'm giving cyberdating a go . I don't want to write about my experiences, as I don't want to invade anyon...

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

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This will be my last entry in the Troppo literature wars, which I suspect are running out of steam with the same positions being reiterated. However, I wouldn't be doing my job as a sociologist if I didn't point out that the way that we read literary works and assess their val...

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Reuters reported about half an hour ago that Prince Charles will marry Camilla Parker-Bowles on the 8th of April . Kim Beazley's recent desire to revive the Republican debate in Australia will now probably get a kick along. However, that will be for the wrong reasons if it's s...

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

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Andrew Norton at Catallaxy recently published a scathing review of Marion Maddox' book God Under Howard . His scorn for this work by someone very loosely described by her publisher as "the leading authority on the intersection of religion and politics" in Australia is justifie...

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(Image reproduced by kind permission of Scribe Publishing) During Julia Gillard's candidacy for the Labor Leadership much ink was spilled about whether Australia was ready for a female Opposition Leader, and whether such a Leader would need to be married with kids. I don't wan...

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As Gilly hits the phones to guage support , the tortured politics of the ALP's attitude towards Gilly's marital status etc. is examined in a feature in The Australian . Among other outrages, apparently her kitchen is too clean. I wish I could say the same about mine. The Oz in...

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Everyone knows that some consumer products go together. Ties go with suits, check shirts and RM Williams boots go with country music, and beer goes with barbecued sausages . As Grant McCracken argues, goods have cultural meanings. The clothes we wear, the food we eat, the subu...

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There's an interesting sidebox in an article on the Labor leadership race in today's Sunday Mail where Julia Gillard discusses her intention not to have children and her single status: Julia Gillard believes she can lead Australia as a single, childless woman. The Opposition h...

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Christopher Pearson writing in The Australian has (or thinks he has) the good oil on the social agenda of a third term Howard government: Legislation preventing gay marriage was the Coalition's most significant third-term concession to the more conservative of its supporters....

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My grandmother died on 16 November 2004 and I, along with her other three grandsons, was a pallbearer at her funeral. One thing that was moving was a photo of her as a young woman on her coffin. The Catholic Church is now moving to restrict such personal touches : Placing meme...

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It used to be socialists who wanted to radically reorganize society In our society relationships between individuals are governed by a number of separate institutions with separate norms. The market is just one institution among many. For decades socialists like William Lane a...

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At Catallaxy Jason Soon argues that "Criminal conduct is just an externality like pollution. It should be properly ‘priced’" On this view the community should decide on the optimal level of criminal conduct and set the price accordingly. There is a huge gulf between right-wing...

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Back in December Scott wrote about Internet dating . Yellowvinyl has been a participant in the cyberdating game, and has some interesting (and sharp!) reflections on the vicissitudes of finding a partner online . Unfortunately Livejournal doesn't support trackback, but Troppo...

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All the discussion of communist t-shirts overlooked, as far as I can tell, the use of fashion to make a statement about a political or a social issue, as opposed to being an aspect of the commodification of dissent. The photo of Naomi Campbell above is from British designer Ka...

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It was Joh's 94th birthday today . Time to revisit the Dispatches from Johburg and share some random memories of my teenage years under the reign of Bjelke: - as a young public service clerk, going up to the third floor of the Treasury Building with some friends and sitting in...

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Alex White at Psephological Catechism has published an article on his blog about Labor's need to articulate a different vision of Australia . I couldn't agree with him more. John Howard's "ordinariness" and his identification as the quintessential avuncular Aussie have been a...

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The intellectual heirs of Adam Smith have two battles to fight. The first is to rescue the free market from mercantilism and central planning and the second is to rescue our moral sentiments from intellectuals who think they are inefficient and overly sentimental. Catallaxy's...

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Do governments put too much emphasis on economic growth? Winton Bates pumps his own moral intuitions and satisfies himself that the answer is no In the latest edition of Policy , economic consultant Winton Bates takes on Clive Hamilton's anti-growth arguments ( pdf ). After ag...

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Miss Piss at piss'n'vinegar is rightly horrified by a proposed law in Virginia requiring women who have a miscarriage to report it to the police within 12 hours - on pain of a fine or gaol term. In a discussion on Michael's post on Pentecostalism , Irant expressed some sceptic...

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A Guest Post by Michael Carden Pentecostalism was much discussed in the leadup to and aftermath of the Australian election, with much debate around the link between churches such as Hillsong and the Liberal Party and the politics of Family First. For a lot of commentators and...

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A recent trip to the Myer Centre convinced me that the latter day Leninist sects like the GreenLeft mob are on the wrong track with the protesting (and the infiltration of community groups, etc etc). The quickest and easiest way to destroy capitalism would be to convince teena...

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This is becoming a trend. Gerry's talking sense again . ELSEWHERE : Phil at Citystate has more on Hendo .

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

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Following on from my recent ruminations on politics, love and participation, I wanted to explore further some questions about how we could revitalise our public discourse and culture and political participation in Australia. Central to my previous argument was my agreement wit...

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As part of the discussion in the thread about inappropriate responses to the Tsunami tragedies , it was noted that Immanuel Rant had criticised the Anglican Dean of Sydney, Phillip Jensen's remarks about God's will ... Dean Jensen was quoted as saying "the will of God involved...

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Saintinastraightjacket at DogFightAtBankstown reminds us that 2005 is the UN Year of Microcredit . I agree with Saint that microcredit is an aid approach worth supporting. Go read his post for lots more info.

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It's heartening to read that governments like the US and the Japanese are now increasing the amount of aid they are giving to the countries and people affected by the Tsunamis . The stories appearing daily about the human and societal impact are heartbreaking. It was most appr...

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Alan Wolfe argues that while the left has adopted Carl Schmitt 's theoretical anti-liberalism , it is the American right that is putting theory into practice. According to Wolfe's article in the The Chronicle of Higher Education : Liberals think of politics as a means; conserv...

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"And if you can't be with the one you love" sang Stephen Stills , "Love the one you're with." As 2004 ended Andrew Norton and Mark Bahnisch wrote about desire. Andrew wrote about the link between happiness and the desire for consumer goods while Mark compared disappointed Labo...

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2004 has been a political year par excellence , with elections in the US and Australia. As the turning of the year is always a good time to reflect, it's interesting to note some thoughtful posts appearing in the blogosphere of late. Don has posted a stimulating piece on the p...

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John Quiggin's left wing conservatism Environmentalism has changed the way leftists think about government led social change. Like the natural environment, the social environment is complex and poorly understood. With their oversimplified models, reformers accept serious risk...

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Via Suzoz at Personal Political , I've just discovered and read this interesting column about raising kids without any religion by Adele Horin in the SMH . Some time ago, the British sociologist Anthony Giddens , until recently Director of the LSE, noted that one marker of a p...

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The trouble began when Denis Diderot received a new dressing gown as a gift from a friend. It was far more luxurious than his old gown and he took to it at once. But next to the new dressing gown the furnishings of his study looked shabby. One by one Diderot replaced them. Soo...

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Or, Keep the Wolfe from the Door lest Western Civilisation fall... Shocking news from a US survey that college students are having casual sex. Chris McGillion writes: Research into the sexual practices of American college students has identified a new phenomenon known as "hook...

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Julia Baird asks : If God was a DJ, as smooth-bellied songstress Pink has claimed, would the disco version of the national anthem be four-to-the-floor? Would crowds swell and sway on the dance floor to a revved-up Advance Australia Fair, as they did some time ago to the disco...

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I've been looking for work. It is one of the things that keep me busy, busier then I like to be. I find the job-hunting task to be an exceptionally frustrating and difficult experience. It brings out the total 'procrastinator' in me. Applying for jobs requires an individual to...

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Having given up on wrestling with Leo Strauss' esoteric and exoteric meditations on the question of What is Political Philosophy? for the night and having exhausted the pleasures available from Letterman , it's a relief for this tired sociologist to read something in the paper...

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Long before I started blogging, most of my online interaction with people was through chat-rooms. The first room that I made myself home in was a room dedicated to cricket fans, and through that room I met a lot of interesting people. It was great- we even did a get-together i...

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It's almost trite to point out that if you read the Latin poets of classical Rome, one thing you will come across again and again are laments about the moral standards of youth... and any readers of Robert Graves should be equally aware of Augustus' concern that sexual morals...

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Banning Santa is a great way to attract publicity With only 13 days left to Christmas it's time for newspapers and TV stations to track down politically correct kill-joys who want to ban Santa . If you're getting impatient for your 15 minutes of fame it's time to make your mov...

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Courtesy of the Sydney Morning Herald's new blog, Radar (note to SMH: if you're going to have a blog, please link to it on the front page!), some thoughts about why younger Australians are often working a 70 hour week. In Australia, contrary to a long secular trend (and in def...

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Posh and Becks feature in a nativity scene at Madame Tussaud's. Photo: Reuters. Continuing my musings on fame and its contemporary cultural significance, what's going on when our Nic is named UN Citizen of the World alongside Hans Blix and Lakhdar Brahimi, Angelina Jolie saves...

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Ross Gittins asks : Which do you think is more common: murder or suicide? If you think it's murder, congratulations - most people agree with you. But you - and they - are quite mistaken. Suicide outnumbers murder by far. That question is a cognitive psychologists' party trick....

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I recently posted on the imbroglio swirling around St. Mary's Catholic Community in South Brisbane. Today, Father Peter Kennedy of St. Mary's takes Archbishop Bathersby to task in the Courier-Mail . Fr Peter accuses the Church of being out of step with a democratic society. Th...

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In my post on Redfern , I referred in passing to the the actions of Sydney Archbishop Cardinal Pell in appointing conservative Priests from the Neo-Catechumenate movement to St. Vincent's, once the parish of Fr Ted Kennedy and a hub for the Indigenous community - a subject of...

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We seem to be returning to Ancient Greece for our film plots. The latest entry in this genre, Alexander , being an Oliver Stone film, has stirred up some controversy . And it's not just about Colin Farrell's silly wig, or Angelina Jolie's portraying his mum when she's only a y...

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In his SMH column today, Ross Gittins reports on some interesting new research which shows that while Independent Schools do better in getting students into Uni, these same students are out-performed in first year by students from Government and Catholic schools. Gittins also...

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As the Sydney Morning Herald reports that a new BBC Channel 4 reality tv series will show footage of couples having sex (in a tasteful way and for educational purposes, of course), news.com.au brings us the tantalising tidbit that Gretel Killeen has dumped Saxon . The wonderfu...

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Yes, you read correctly. The great German sociologist Max Weber once answered the perennial question of whether religion was primarily conservative or progressive in nature through a discussion of theodicy. His answer was that it can be either. Theodicy is the philosophical pr...

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I can remember sitting in an undergrad Political Sociology lecture in 1991 and hearing the acerbic Lecturer authoritatively state "Women in politics are only suited to nurturing roles, like Minister for Families or Social Welfare". I piped up, "What about Joan Kirner and Carme...

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Chris Sheil has brought us a marvellous story - you read it first in the Australian blogosphere (unless you're a Guardian subscriber, of course). The Tory Shadow Minister for the Arts, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, also editor of The Spectator , has had to resign after l...

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Tim Blair isn't a dumb guy but you'd hardly call him an education expert . Across the internet Ayn Rand loons , von Mises enthusiasts , and even the exceedingly grumpy Phyllis Schlafly have been denouncing a teaching method called 'whole language.' Obviously it's possible to d...

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Or is Wicca a legitimate religion? Sophie's stirred Troppo commenters up into a debate questioning whether membership of the Church of Satan ought to be considered a legitimate religion. Among other things, I do some work in the sociology of religion, and having published some...

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Don Arthur's post about Miranda Devine's latest ravings generated some comment box discussion about the extent to which the "yoof" vote might have been part of the reason for the Coalition's strong election showing. Don's post seems tacitly to assume that yoof still tend to vo...

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In the course of one of his repetitive self-pitying anti-babyboomer rants , Paul Watson raises a question that has interested me for some time. That is, the extent to which modern Australian society still involves some reasonably intact version of an extended family structure,...

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