Is there anyone at home? Is the chess program on your phone conscious? Is ChatGPT5 a conscious agent? Will ChatGPT9 be conscious? Most people would answer "no" to the first question, "don’t think so" to the second and “don’t know” to the last. I think it is more likely that th...

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This is becoming a series. The point is that public figures now routinely refuse to engage with counter-arguments. I have another one not yet written about Nobel Laureate Brian Schmidt who did not respond to three polite emails from me. The latest intellectual coward is Liz Al...

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I posted something similar on Facebook a few days back, and thought I might get some useful feedback here. Iran is criticised for violating their obligations under the NNPT. But the NNPT was signed by The Shah, who was a US puppet deposed in 1979. I do not think this obliges t...

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I try to replicate my more substantial posts on Substack here, but forgot this from a few weeks ago. So I'm now making amends. When it comes to Magna Carta clause 39 is the one hanging in the foyer. No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or posses...

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I was reading some arguments by Bettina Arndt recently about women dominating the legal profession, especially in the Family Law sphere, so I thought I would the check the facts. This is my modus operandi . Read polar views on an issue (I also consult OurWatch and White Ribbon...

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The federal Coalition's adoption of a policy involving government-owned construction of 7 nuclear power plants around Australia has raised an argument that most people thought was over 30 years ago or more. Labor and the Greens are opposed to it, as are several state Liberal P...

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As longstanding readers will know, I was one of the founders of Troppo along with Nicholas Gruen and several others including Mark Bahnisch and Don Arthur. The latter two moved on to other things (Don was a research at the Federal Parliamentary Library last time I heard, a rol...

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I find it hard to understand how passionate some folks are about voting Yes or voting No. Not because I do not understand passion, but because the cases for either position are so unconvincing. I am not “barracking” for either side. If the result is Yes I will find it hard to...

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I discover that I don't seem to have cross-posted this old essay previously published in the Mandarin, and since this is my place of record (where I can make notes to myself in the comments of new sources, thoughts or developments) I am doing it now. This is part three of Nich...

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(Cross posted from On Line Opinion) Australians are very mindful of prejudice and discrimination in our community, and rightly so. Yet, many prejudices are so fashionable and pervasive that they go unnoticed. We are blind to some bigotries. I am a member of an ethnic and cultu...

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[caption id="attachment_36685" align="alignright" width="417"] This picture makes the obvious point that if we got an extremely large person to put on extremely large rubber gloves and gave them an extremely large scalpel, there is no end to the good they could do, starting wi...

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The only education I ever got was in history. And what history taught me is wrapped up in the story the premier English speaking philosopher of history of the 20th-century told about detecting the Albert Memorial. I wrote it up here , but the upshot is a point that’s both obvi...

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Australia punches above its weight in the medical research space. The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) is the main government granting agency in the field of medical research. On October 16 th , it was announced that future mid-level and senior grants will...

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I always say that political economy is the best (or least worst) lens through which to examine how health systems work. This goes for Medicare, which is far more than a service delivery model and has massive institutional and political import. The recently established 'Strengt...

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Scott Morrison's "secret powers" are being heralded in much of the media as proof that he was up to no good. The simpler explanation is that on governance issues, he was often just not much good. "No worries, mate; I'm just nominating us both for Australia's official list of b...

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Standards: continued from Part One . [caption id="attachment_35719" align="aligncenter" width="270"] Why is this man smiling?[/caption] I. Introduction Why is this man smiling? He's smiling because he is Charles Francis Richter and he came up with the Richter scale. And if you...

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We have a broken process for evaluating costly government investments. The evolving plan for an underground railway through Melbourne's middle suburbs reminds us that we need something better. The Victoria government is currently in the early stages of building what would like...

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[caption id="attachment_35549" align="alignleft" width="700"] Michael Polanyi (L) and Karl Popper (R)[/caption] I've been working on a joint paper with someone else about blockchain. One way the paper might develop would be to argue that the discussion of DAOs (decentralized a...

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Dear Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland (Scandinavia), First off, thank you for the last 18 months. Almost alone in ‘the West’ , you have either avoided covid madness completely (Sweden) or at least regained your sanity more quickly (the rest). You have not deprived...

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I have been fully vaccinated. I wear a mask. I believe that lockdowns drove the number of infections in Melbourne to zero. I scan the QR code whenever I have the chance. When I go to the supermarket, it is just me. Yet, I see many couples shopping and not being challenged by s...

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This is an edited version of a piece published in Crikey on 2 July 2021. It looks like Australian health funds will get more say in how care is delivered in the future if the ACCC’s draft decision giving health fund Nib more leverage to negotiate contracts with providers, and...

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I've quoted Zweig several times on this blog since reading his memoirs, but I was going to post this — and forgot. So, better late than never, here it is. A lovely story: One day I had an express letter from a friend in Paris, saying that an Italian lady wanted to visit me in...

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[caption id="attachment_34756" align="alignright" width="464"] Amazing what Google Images serves up[/caption] Last week Sam Roggeveen e-mailed me asking if I'd accept a post for Troppo from him on the above subject. I said I would – any time. When he sent it to me I thought it...

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The Fairness Doctrine was a 1949 policy that required holders of broadcast licenses (so TV and radio) to air contrasting views on controversial issues of public importance. It was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1969 but eventually was abolished in 1987 by the FCC commission un...

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The federal government has overpromised and underdelivered on the COVID-19 vaccine. It deserves to be criticised for that. But delaying immunisation means that Australia may -- albeit inadvertently -- be doing the right thing. Vaccine nationalism was always to be expected – an...

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https://youtu.be/wUpbbK104Zg About a year ago, I happened upon the video above and it reminded me of the revelation that the Toyota production system was to me when I first encountered it in 1983. I was working for Industry Minister John Button and reviewing Australia's car in...

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

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

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[caption id="attachment_34474" align="aligncenter" width="750"] Wellbeing: As you can see from the picture, everyone's a winner.[/caption] I was asked to respond to this question by the Mandarin as part of their ‘select committee’ of worthies (note: the link is behind the 'Pre...

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[caption id="attachment_34459" align="alignright" width="220"] Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, one of central Europe's brightest and best, fresh from a stint as Einstein's research assistant arrives in Manchester in 1933.[/caption] I have now finished the second draft of an essa...

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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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Last week I gave a masterclass lecture at University College London on the costs and benefits of lockdowns and other covid-policies in the UK. A recording is here (Passcode: f@$?y9J9 ), and the powerpoint slides are here . A key piece of evidence was the sudden 0.7 drop in lif...

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Till 20 year ago, IQ scores in the West increased about 3 points per decade ever since the 1920s, a phenomenon known as the “Flynn effect”. That rise in IQ test scores, which have an average of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, was attributed to improved schooling, improved...

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[micro-trigger alert: dark humour ahead] The top prize for economic winners in the covid hysteria goes to the pharmaceutical companies who were quickest to jump on the covid-vaccine business. They are already selling billions of unproven vaccines that will now clearly arrive t...

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I've been dipping into Herbert Simon's autobiography, Models of my life . He's from an interesting time in the intellectual history of economics and the social sciences. The major contributions of his professional life began in the 1950s and, though he was part of the mainstre...

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[caption id="attachment_34082" align="aligncenter" width="480"] The Mandarin headed this part of the essay up with a picture of a woodpecker, which seems fair enough. But such 'nuanced' imagery, as we say these days is always off-brand here at Club Pony. Where too much directn...

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The economic and social damage of lock downs in Australia is starting to get noticed so much that even academic economists are paying attention. After months of resisting actual data , some Australian economists who previously refused to even contemplate the idea that an econo...

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

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

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

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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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Spare a tear for millions of poor people around the world. They will no longer have good jobs, good health, or long life. Weep for the poor, the sick, and the old in our own societies. Their hopes, dignity, and pensions are gone. Light a candle for the workers in hotels, bars,...

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Here's a potentially unpopular proposition: The bulk of government economic action over the next few months should be directed to keeping businesses alive. Specifically, we need to keep afloat the many businesses with coronavirus-related short-term cash-flow problems. The corr...

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I believe that our political leaders are still underestimating the challenge posed by coronavirus. Radical action is needed to mitigate potential catastrophe. We must accept that the costs of coronavirus will be massive – a chunk of the economy will shut down. And that’s ok –...

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OK, well that heading and graphic were linkbait. I'm a firm believer in my own and everyone else's ignorance. But here's some correspondence from someone for whom I have great respect that I received this morning you may wish to ponder and/or respond to. Using various resource...

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I have little economic insight to add to the various projections made by other economists in Britain about the Brexit scenario that follow under various outcomes of the negotiations with the EU. Like all of them, I think severing trade ties will not work out well in the short...

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Hello, my name's David Sligar. Nicholas Gruen has kindly encouraged me to do some blogging here. I started reading this blog over a decade ago, so I'm excited to contribute. First up is a slightly modified cross post from my blog proposing a " job of last resort ". The policy...

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Things are shaping up for extraordinary developments in the UK, and I'm not talking about Brexit. Well, I am, but not directly. I'm talking about strategic or tactical voting. In Australia we are mightily protected from such dilemmas by preferential or instant runoff voting wh...

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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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The family cycled from Berlin to Tallinn this year, giving me an opportunity to see how Poland and the Baltics have fared after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990s. Some observations: - Poland is doing well. Agriculture there is as organised and productive as in Germany,...

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<SelfIndulgenceAlert>Stuart MacIntyre was kind enough to suggest me as a discussant on a paper on financial deregulation in the 1980s in a workshop focusing on Australia and the Bretton Woods conference put on by Melbourne Uni History and Economic History. (Yes I know it's a l...

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Cross posted with the Mandarin Nicholas Gruen has argued that it’s much harder to realise evidence-based policy – both institutionally and intellectually – than many calling for it realise. Here he explains how putatively ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ approaches can, paradoxica...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="342"] Put in "Crikey" to DuckDuckGo's image search (Google is for data donating chumps) and you mostly get Steve Irwin and crocodiles. And Pauline, who, as we speak, is, between takes of Dancing with the Stars , fighting for second amen...

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I've just been reading some of Tim Berners-Lee's Weaving the Web about building the World Wide Web and it put me in mind of Paul Frijters' recent post on teaching the social sciences. Paul argued that: The biggest change needed is to teach the material in terms of basic patter...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="740"] This essay is cross posted from Quillette [/caption] I It looks like liberal democracy is falling apart. But we can put it back together if we take democracy seriously enough—as seriously as the ancient Greeks. The chaos of Donald...

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https://youtu.be/XWwLCNgs37Q About a year ago my wife Eva and a friend of hers, Danny Finley started working on a program designed to tackle loneliness through intergenerational contact. Kids are paired with older people in their community through contact between schools and a...

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Cross-posted from The Mandarin . I Since I used the term ‘policy hack’ in my presentation “What economic reform thinking might look like if we’d bothered to do it” , I’ve had a number of exchanges with Martin Wolf, my discussant that evening, about what I mean. Here’s how I de...

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There are so many pitfalls here. Mathematics enables us to construct moving pictures of almost any possible state of affairs. But no picture can say that there is a real state of affairs corresponding to it in the real world. Much less can it say the picture explains or predic...

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At a time like this, with two sleeps to go before Santa's elves hack Alexa and get it to let Santa and his reindeer shapeshift their way through your aircon duct and into your living rooms, our minds turn to the simple things that matter. Like my proposal for an Evaluator Gene...

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Children are now on the move. Their phone is their companion for reaching out to friends, texting, referencing, looking up what they want and need to know, viewing YouTube, playing games, taking photos and videos. They can click through what’s on offer: a cornucopia from which...

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Cross posted from Pearls and Irritations The Information-technology Revolution is challenging the assumptions on which the education of children and the provision of their entertainment are based. The doomsayers argue the big companies – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, et al....

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https://youtu.be/HzeekxtyFOY Putting the grown-ups to shame without the moral vanity the grown-ups tried so hard to teach her.

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A couple of weeks ago I got this email. Dear Prof. Gruen, I’m fifteen years old, I live in Memphis, Tennessee, and I’m very interested in economics. Recently I came across your interview on the Economic Rockstar podcast. I have a blog called Ceteris Numquam Paribus , where I p...

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Cross-posted at the Mandarin . [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="530"] The first image to come up in a search for 'new professionalism'. A very nice image too, especially for Kandinsky lovers like myself.[/caption] Working in and around government for over three decade...

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The Big Con - Reassessing the "Great" Recession and its "Fix" by Laurence J. Kotlikoff Abstract: Most economists differ, not on the causes of the Great Recession, but on their relative importance. They concur, though, on the basic problem, namely human, not market failure. Thi...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r7TzkFR7ps Konstantin Kisin is a comedian who was born in Russia and emigrated to Britain with his family when he was twelve. And he's a friend of mine whom I met at the inimitable Kilkenomics . Like most comedians he's a thoughtful guy. He's m...

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Peer Advice on Financial Decisions: A case of the blind leading the blind? by Sandro Ambuehl, B. Douglas Bernheim, Fulya Ersoy, Donna Harris - #25034 (PE) Previous research shows that many people seek financial advice from non-experts, and that peer interactions influence fina...

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https://youtu.be/5cR96KesAMQ The AIFS puts on a mean Annual Conference. They fussed over us speakers trying to make sure we weren't just a bunch of talking heads. I would have liked to have attended more of it, but had another conference at which I had pontification duties at...

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I reproduce here a fine review of what seems like a fine book. I'm not buying the book because of the outrageous price the academic publishers are charging. It's an interesting story of practical contribution – economics as clarified policy commonsense as I like to think of it...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="423"] Cross posted from Inside Story [/caption] In 1943, back working where he’d been during the first world war, the now-famous economist John Maynard Keynes wrote to a friend: Here I am back… in the Treasury like a recurring decimal —...

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Some more fascinating results in the 'whodda thunk?' category. You can track down the paper in various published and pre-published forms here . Note, while I've not changed any meanings, I've occasionally shortened a sentence without horsing around too much with [square bracke...

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Cross posted from the Mandarin : https://youtu.be/Lvcnx6-0GhA I recently made a submission to the Productivity Commission's inquiry into competition in finance. I wanted to suggest a very simple idea, that I thought could make a big difference. Moreover it came straight from D...

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One of my twenty something friends once told me of a meeting to discuss corporate social responsibility in their Big Law Firm. Along came the heavies of the firm, together with their Champions of Change. These champions of change are men who look out for women – largely by mak...

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A friend referred me to a relatively new site " Briefings on Brexit " yesterday which I checked out with interest. It was started by academics who were fed up with Brexit being stereotyped as mad and bad. They started the site to proselytise a reasoned and well informed case f...

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

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A number of previous researches indicate that men prefer competition over cooperation, and it is sometimes suggested that women show the opposite behavioral preference. In the current study the effects of social context on gender differences in cooperation are investigated. Fo...

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[caption id="attachment_31009" align="alignleft" width="865"] I happened upon this post in 'drafts' without my having drafted anything. Events now make that unnecessary.[/caption]

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I'd like to write up some thoughts regarding Shared Value some time, but I've not had the time and there's a fair few things in front of it in the queue. So in case anyone's interested here's quite a good panel session on the subject with Pru Bennett / Managing Director and He...

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We're nothing here at Club Pony if we're not banging on about the Issue of the Day and the Issue of the Day is Anzac Day. Owing to continuing flatlining in Troppo's celebrity endorsement and themed fluffy toy revenue and the Troppo elves striking for the right to learn to read...

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The Director-General of the BBC has now conceded there is a crisis, with young people spending more time viewing Netflix and YouTube than they do BBC programs. In July 2017 he announced the broadcaster’s biggest investment in children’s services in a generation – an additional...

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As I tweeted: I was gripped by this 2 hour intellectual brawl Would Ezra articulate compelling reasons for Sam Harris to rise to self-reflection? Or would Sam keep him at bay with his magic “I’m just after timeless scientific truth that scales” wand? Anyway, you may not be as...

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Below is an extract from a recent academic article setting out – rather laboriously I have to say – three 'theories' – I'd rather call them 'ways of seeing' what banks do in our financial system. One approach sees them as financial intermediators meeting the needs of those who...

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From today's column in the Guardian UK. There’s a chasm between the will of the British people as expressed in their 52 percent vote for Brexit and their considered will. Turns out ordinary Britons deliberating amongst their peers think things through, ‘unspinning’ much of the...

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As readers of my Twitter feed will know, I'm heading to London to give some seminars. One on the use and abuse of wellbeing to target policy at LSE , one on evidence-based policy at King's College London Policy Institute and a public lecture titled "Detoxing democracy: Brexit...

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Taxation is the potential downfall of the EU as an institution. The reason is that within the EU, several member states are making money from the tax evasion in other member states, a situation akin to having a wife slowly murdering her husband with poison. Unless this stops,...

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We are accustomed to the concept of colonising the solar system and populating the universe. We think of it as a project for the distant future but perhaps we should be getting on with it. I offer three reasons, any of which might suffice, for us to begin space colonisation: m...

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The birth of a Children’s Television industry (Continued from Part One ) No Children’s production industry in Australia can exist without a viable, film and television industry which must be sustained to tell Australian stories. That is a given. But what sits under that for ch...

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‘Tell me a story!’ What child has not expressed those words? Children find the fantasy world a story transports them into, comforting, entertaining and enlightening. As a prelude to sleep stories allow them to dream the impossible. They explain the strong emotions children exp...

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This is from Ian Rogers' regular newsletter for the financial industry. There may be a dash for the exits from the rowdy sanctums of the Australian Bankers Association, with more than one bank jostling for first mover advantage and any accolades from a select set of stakeholde...

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

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[caption id="attachment_34256" align="alignright" width="505"] Source: Sortition in the History of Democracy , Slide 41.[/caption] Cross-posted from The Mandarin : Our world has been optimised to within an inch of its life. Usually from the top down. With the economic, social...

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[caption id="attachment_31194" align="alignleft" width="640"] Artist's incorrect impression, from the film "Minority Report". In the real future, these autonomous cars would be travelling much closer together, and there would be more of them.[/caption] This month's print and o...

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I am a big fan of the GOT books and series, loving Season 7 and salivating at Season 8 to come. Great escapism and fantastic acting and camerawork. Part of what I love about GOT is how it far more ruthlessly than, say, Lord of the Rings, describes blind ambition, lust, treache...

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Why do the Swedes put barcodes on their ships? So they can Scandinavian. (Sorry about that). More seriously, this looks like a good haul of films. Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks The Other Side of Hope (Opening Night) Wikström is a man wanting to change his life...

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My latest column at The CEO Magazine asks whether Australia's 3.3 per cent minimum wage increase will cause any job losses . It focuses on a few pieces of research, including a new study of Seattle's minimum wage hike, older work by ALP frontbencher Andrew Leigh, and one of ec...

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High School Genetic Diversity and Later-life Student Outcomes: Micro-level Evidence from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study by C. Justin Cook, Jason M. Fletcher - #23520 (EFG LS) Abstract: A novel hypothesis posits that levels of genetic diversity in a population may partially e...

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From Revisionist History In the middle of Los Angeles — a city with some of the most expensive real estate in the world — there are a half a dozen exclusive golf courses, massive expanses dedicated to the pleasure of a privileged few. How do private country clubs afford the pr...

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And the Children Shall Lead: Gender Diversity and Performance in Venture Capital by Paul A. Gompers, Sophie Q. Wang Abstract: With an overall lack of gender and ethnic diversity in the innovation sector documented in Gompers and Wang (2017), we ask the natural next question: D...

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I've always thought that, if there's an economic driver for Australian culture it's the high demand for labour - exceeding supply a lot of the time - that applied in Australia from the convict period on and the resulting uppityness of workers - including convict workers judgin...

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Handle with Care: The Local Air Pollution Costs of Coal Storage . by Akshaya Jha, Nicholas Z. Muller - #23417 (EEE PE) Abstract: Burning coal is known to have environmental costs; this paper quantities the local environmental costs of transporting and storing coal at U.S. powe...

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The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms by David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence F. Katz, Christina Patterson, John Van Reenen - #23396 (LS PR) Abstract: The fall of labor's share of GDP in the United States and many other countries in recent decades is well do...

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Up from Slavery? African American Intergenerational Economic Mobility Since 1880 by William J. Collins, Marianne H. Wanamaker - #23395 (DAE LS) Abstract: We document the intergenerational mobility of black and white American men from 1880 through 2000 by building new datasets...

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My latest column for The CEO Magazine sees Scott Morrison enjoying his move to the political centre via the new bank levy . I still haven't worked out whether this particular $1.5 billion a year bank liabilities tax is actually good policy. But it has at least some policy just...

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A long time ago I ran Windows 98 and at least every 24 hours, though often more often I had to cold reboot it to make it work properly. Now, nearly twenty years after this was largely fixed in the Windows world, I have the same problem with my MacBook Air. I bought a new one a...

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An Economic Approach to Alleviate the Crises of Confidence in Science: With an Application to the Public Goods Game by Luigi Butera, John A. List - #23335 (PE) Novel empirical insights by their very nature tend to be unanticipated, and in some cases at odds with the current st...

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On the assumption that everyone in the online universe has now viewed the video of a plain-clothes policeman dragging a United Airlines passenger off his flight (see below), a few brief observations about United's deeply evil nature failure of problem-solving skills. [youtube...

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A persistent modern fear is that artificial intelligence and robot technology will advance so much that smart robots will soon be able to perform many of the tasks that we humans currently earn our crust with. Since they will come off the production line in a matter of minutes...

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John Clark died yesterday, a very sad day, he will be greatly missed RIP. This is my all time favorite piece of satire. Am sure that troppo can come up with more. https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="395"] Themed pre-performance dinner The chefs at Arts Centre Melbourne have created a three-course meal and carefully chosen matching wines themed around Carmen ($75pp). It's easy to add a dinner when you book your opera tickets on our w...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEjtKHxLl54&t=2s A favourite comedian of mine, Stewart Lee, seems to be getting with the program. Our extensive contacts with the Russian Embassy in Washington report that despite attempts to cover his tracks with the timestamping of the Youtube...

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It’s been a great 15 years in Australia for me and the family, so we will be leaving lots of friends and colleagues behind as we seek new adventures in London, where from next week onwards I will be part of a Wellbeing centre, pretty much the same topic as the Australian Resea...

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by Samuel R. Bondurant, Jason M. Lindo, Isaac D. Swensen - #22610 (HC HE PE) Abstract: In this paper we estimate the effects of expanding access to substance-abuse treatment on local crime. We do so using an identification strategy that leverages variation driven by substance-...

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https://vimeo.com/178401582 Readers of this blog will be familiar with Family by Family , the service which matches families up with other families in coached, mentoring relationships to help families through tough times and lower the risk of them falling into crisis with all...

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

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At the end of 1850, the UK's patent system and law was a 'exclusive law ' and it had been so for centuries. Within 18 months things had changed. The July 1, 1852 "Patent Law Amendment Act" meant that getting a patent was no longer the exclusive preserve of those with quite a l...

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Former ABC Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes has predictably been pilloried on social media over the last few days for an article about asylum seeker policy that repeats some themes I have discussed here at Troppo over the years. Holmes picks up especially on suggestions that p...

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For mainstream and social media partisans the current prolonged election campaign is an essential life or death struggle for premiership victory by one's chosen team. But to my way of thinking it doesn't really matter very much which team wins. The two major parties are Tweedl...

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Super-high-speed version: Australia has better things to do with $100 billion than building a high-speed rail line. It's all summed up in this exchange from the ABC TV series Utopia : A new high speed rail proposal is being put to Malcolm Turnbull, and already Rhonda is excite...

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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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The leak of 11.5 million confidential papers from the Mossack Fonseca consulting firm in Panama promises to be a major source of information on the tax avoiding shenanigan s of the elites. Already, 800 Australians are reportedly under investigation, and dozens of heads of stat...

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Keen readers of this blog will know that occasionally, just occasionally I identify a saying or concept which has somehow come to signify something close to the opposite of what its progenitor had intended. Examples include the theory of the second best, the central point of w...

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Paul Frijters' fascinating post analysing Turkey's successful employment of ruthless realpolitik tactics is fairly depressing. But maybe there's some qualified good news hidden amongst all the cynical manoeuvres. Reported arrangements between the EU and Turkey for dealing with...

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Last Friday the world woke up to the announcement that scientists had made an extraordinary discovery concerning gravity waves. It received a great deal of press and interest on places as diverse as The Daily Mail and others. Ever since that bombshell I’ve had ordinary Austral...

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The SMH points to a recent OECD report, claiming that over one-third of Australian pensioners live in poverty - with this being the second-highest rate in the OECD. Are we really that exceptional? No, we are not. Unfortunately, this is an example of analysis that undermines th...

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Among Australian economists, the reform years of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating (1983-1996) have achieved near mythical status. Their governments have been credited with opening up the country to foreign competition via reductions of the tariffs, freeing industry from the shackles...

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If next Tuesday's Labor "no confidence" motion against the minority Giles Country Liberal government succeeds in the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly, it will mark the first real test of the 4 year fixed term election arrangements that have become increasingly common in...

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

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There has been yet another failed political coup in Darwin overnight, with the minority CLP government failing to carry a motion to sack Independent (and erstwhile CLP) Speaker Kezia Purick. Keen watchers of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera known as Territory politics will...

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I understand that the High Court is likely to hand down its decision in North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency v Northern Territory of Australia (‘NAAJA v NT’) within the next week or so tomorrow. So what, you might say? The context – NT “paperless arrest’ law Well, the im...

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Last weekend I flew down to Sydney partly to attend the 50th anniversary party for the Class of '65 from Harbord Primary School on the northern beaches. Many old school photos were exchanged, including the one above showing me (circled in red) at the age of seven. The function...

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The great thing in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy . . . A 'character,' as J.S. Mill says, "is a completely fashioned will". William James, The Laws of Habit "Taste" is a word and an idea that comes from another time. But I think it's...

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As ever, here are the highlights of the Italian Film Festibule showing in a city near you with Melbourne times in the timetable below. There are even some five star movies. That's right five out of five, which is ten out of ten when you think about it in a sufficiently abstrac...

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The Germans have surprised me by eagerly welcoming a million migrants originating from Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Africa and elsewhere. They seem to invite many more to join them in years to come. Why are they doing this? From the perspective of my Dutch upbringing, the Ger...

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The furore of the last few days over the Trade Union Royal Commission and revelations about serious and illegal underpayment of workers (especially foreign students) by 7-Eleven, Australia Post and others have brought into sharp focus a wider political question. This article d...

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

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Everyone is charging into print on the smoking ruin that the Europeans will be leaving Greece after the latest barely believable debacle in which the newly elected government Syriza, after receiving the overwhelming support of its electorate to reject the punitive terms of the...

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The Iranian Revolution of the late 1970s meant a huge shift in Middle-East politics and the relation between Islam and the rest. Within a period of just a few months, the ancient civilisation of Persia went from a strong ally of the West, to a committed enemy of Western intere...

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The deal yesterday morning between the Greek PM and the Eurozone Finance ministers is an agreement to reform before talks. By tomorrow evening, the Greek parliament has to accept 4 pieces of legislation on a large range of issues (pensions, labour markets, taxation), after whi...

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I've had a request that … people put a break in their posts further up - ie with less of the whole article on show. Seems like a fair suggestion, so I'm 'putting it out there' as my daughter sometimes says.

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Click here for updated version

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The Greek referendum and the hype leading up to it have gone exactly according to my script of 8 days ago , where I predicted a resounding ‘no’ vote and a Grexit to stop the bank-run, with the other European politicians too offended and belittled by Tsipras and Varoufakis to o...

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Greece owes the IMF 1.6 billion euro that it doesn’t have but is supposed to pay by tomorrow. Unless the ECB lends it to the Greeks, effectively converting the IMF debt into an ECB debt, Greece is bankrupt tomorrow. In months to come, much bigger debt repayments are scheduled...

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Queensland's judicial system looks to be in quite a bit of strife at present. The former Newman LNP government's ill-advised appointment of an utterly unsuitable Supreme Court Chief Justice in Tim Carmody is continuing to cause serious problems. Mercifully, at least Carmody CJ...

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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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Fellow Troppodilians, especially those resident in Canberra, may I commend this production of Black Diggers to you. I saw it last year in Sydney at a packed out matinee (only tickets available) at the Opera House on Australia Day! It was electrifying: great script drawing on e...

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After two weeks of a new government in Greece, a Greek exit from the Euro (termed a ‘Grexit’) looks more and more likely. The betting markets give it about 30% to happen this year, and Greece is the out and out market favourite to exit the Euro before any other country. Though...

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Domestic violence is constantly in the news these days which can lead to the impression that the problem is increasing. To the extent that scrutiny and public discussion shines light in dark places, we might have expected the real underlying rates to be tapering. So I was more...

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When The Australian published Gary Johns' opinion piece ' No contraception, no dole ' nobody should have been surprised by what happened next. On 7's Sunrise program commentators described Johns' proposal as "off the planet" and "outrageous and backwards" while One Nation foun...

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I meant to put this up earlier, but it's sat in 'drafts' for a month or more. Now it can be a new year's present to yourself. If you missed it last year, make this Four Corners doco on transgender kids the first doco you watch this year. The kids, and one adult interviewed are...

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It's the time of the mid-year Economic Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) and we're told that we're about 11 billion deeper in the red this financial year than we thought, with the treasurer blaming the dropping iron price and the reduced wage growth. I have gone over the MYEFO documents...

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Middle-East watchers have been surprised by the events in Syria and Egypt the last 2 years. The betting markets in 2011 and 2012 expected the collapse of the Syrian regime, but it didn’t happen. The West and most Al-Jazeera commentators thought the coup that deposed the Morsi-...

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Does increasing the legal drinking age reduce traffic accidents caused by young drivers? The idea is that if you increase the legal age at which people can drink, young people are going to quietly abide by the law, not do anything stupid, read the bible, contemplate their sinf...

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Some people engage in socially disruptive behaviour on their own, such as when they free-ride on paying taxes. Others cooperate with others though when they are socially disruptive: cronyism, corruption, nepotism, gangsterism, and favouritism are all examples of cooperative be...

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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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In a submission to the Forrest Review of Indigenous jobs and training , the Australian Bankers’ Association (ABA) rejects Andrew Forrest's Healthy Welfare Card proposal. The card was one of the review's key recommendations and is meant to be cheaper and easier to administer th...

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It may be devoted to 70's nostalgia, but Björn Ulvaeus sees Stockholm's ABBA The Museum as a harbinger of the future. The museum doesn't accept cash . Since his son's home was burgled a while ago, the former ABBA member has been campaigning for a cash-free future arguing that...

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Tony Abbott might well be the last bloke on earth who could plausibly demand a "mature debate" on tax reform. But that doesn't deny the crying need for such a debate in Australia. Nor does the fact that it's the antithesis of what Abbott did in Opposition mean that Bill Shorte...

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[caption id="attachment_26524" align="alignright" width="140"] IPKats love a tweet[/caption] The lecture will be delivered (in Melbourne Sydney and Brisbane) by Jeremy Phillips. Jeremy (or more exactly a fictional and " notorious " cat: the IPKat) has three times, been named a...

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This is the second of a two part article about Aboriginal affairs policy in the wake of Noel Pearson's speech last week at Gough Whitlam's funeral. See From assimilation to Black Power to Gordon Gekko to where? (I) . Then read on. NB A very long post. I hope at least some will...

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[caption id="attachment_26386" align="alignright" width="300"] Rosie Batty (insert son Luke)[/caption] I commend to you an article about homicide survivor, mother and crusader Rosie Batty by Martin McKenzie-Murray in the relatively new publication The Saturday Paper . I was pa...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GchWJasxVYY It looks as if prominent and obsessively determined euthanasia campaigner Dr Philip Nitschke may be in trouble again. He has already had his right to practise medicine suspended and is facing Medical Board disciplinary proceedings ari...

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So the Senate will conduct an enquiry into the Queensland government – on the pretext that, to quote Senator Glen Lazarus , it has made "many questionable decisions". Never mind that state governments are elected by the same people who elect senators, or that senators are elec...

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

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Oh aren’t they so tough our current leaders? Beating their hairy chests over the ISIS threat to Western civilization. Here’s Cigar chompin’ Joe Hockey Wenesday morning We will not be intimidated by the threats of murderers; we will never be intimidated as a nation or a people...

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The latest cost-benefit analysis of various Australian broadband proposals is out. It's part of a report from an inquiry chaired by former Victorian Treasury head Mike Vertigan. And it says in essence that Australia's expected growth in demand for bandwidth is big enough to ma...

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An excerpt from the Dunera News. (for those who don't know, the Dunera was the prison ship on which my father was deported to Australia in 1940 with the Battle of Britain raging around them). The exerpt is an autobiographical sketch by Richard Sonnenfeldt (1923–2009) I was bro...

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Employers are prevented by law from subjecting workers to income management. What if they weren't? Libertarians favour freedom of contract. They believe the government's role is to enforce contracts not tell people what should be in them. One way governments have interfered wi...

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https://vimeo.com/96548236

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Putin currently graces the cover of Time , Newsweek , Der Spiegel and The Economist, together with a host of lesser publications. Always unfavourably of course, with the possible exception of Time where the headline is "Cold War II" and the subhead "The West is losing Putin's...

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The latest federal budget in Australia by the Liberal Party was a real break with the recent past in which politicians were reluctant to offend any large group of voters and in which the status quo with respect to entitlements was avidly kept. There was a bit of playing around...

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Equality of opportunity was one of the big themes of Gough Whitlam's 1969 and 1972 campaigns. His 1972 policy speech promised "a new drive for equality of opportunities" through reforms to education, health and urban planning. He argued that opportunity depends on the kind of...

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I just came across an article in PNAS (the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) with the catchy title 'Female Hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes'. It is doing the rounds in the international media , with the explicit conclusion that our society suffers fr...

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The Australian government education minister Christopher Pyne has made his wishes clear for the tertiary education sector: he is following the wishes of the GO8 Vice-Chancellors and wants to remove the caps from the HECS fees asked of domestic students. This seems to fit in a...

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The French economists Thomas Piketty recently published a long-prepared book on the growth of inequality in the Western World over the last few centuries. His main contention, as I see it, is that wealth inequality is rising rapidly again and that we are returning to 19 th cen...

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A decent society is one whose institutions do not humiliate people - Avishai Margalit The Great Depression stripped many Australian workers of their dignity. For many, applying for government relief was like begging for charity. Instead of giving unemployed workers cash, state...

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With people living longer and with societies becoming more forward-looking as to how to handle the long post-retirement years, the issue of optimal pension systems is big in Australia and elsewhere. Have a look at this excellent interview between John Piggott and Jan Libich wh...

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According to the Australian , the Abbott government's first budget will include tough new "learn or earn" Measures designed to force young people off the dole and into education, training or work. "One thing the government doesn’t want to do is to continue to pay people to sta...

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My own university, the University of Queensland, has around 6 flagship courses that it puts online for free, in a deal that involves universities from around the world who put up the courses that they excel in. It typifies the current reality of online courses: it is free; it...

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The ARR scheme so far has cost taxpayers just over $2.2 million and as of December 2013 has delivered a total of 7,800 royalty payments, to 800 artists (or estates) with a median value of about $105 per payment. The scheme has, in three and a half years, only generated a total...

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Michael Luca Digital Discrimination: The Case of Airbnb.com (pdf) Online marketplaces often contain information not only about products, but also about the people selling the products. In an effort to facilitate trust, many platforms encourage sellers to provide personal profi...

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Australia's Artists Resale Royalty (ARR ) scheme has so far cost taxpayers $2.2 million in direct support. And over many years the publicly funded lobbyists for this scheme, headed up by the National Association for the Visual Arts Ltd, have additionally spent a lot of public...

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

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Jan Libich recently interviewed Bruce Chapman , who was one of the main architects of the HECS scheme via which university places are financed in Australia, a system that is being copied all around the world now, making Bruce Australia's most influential international economis...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=SK5UUDYaK7g

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An experiment in occasional linkage to insights that might outlast the daily news cycle. If you find any of it interesting, let us know in the comments. Prepare for the knowledge automation transition to take decades (ABC Radio National Future Tense) – How long might it take f...

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Troppo author and frequent commenter John Walker asks: Ken The Bolt case was just one case- is there much information about how 18C has been applied, on a wider scale. Its pretty hard to judge whether there is a problem needing changes to the law , or not, on the basis of just...

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Here are the top picks from the German Film Festival in Melbourne, with the full schedule below. The Phantom|Das Phantom 06.00pm Friday 28 March @ Palace Cinema Como | 06.15pm Tuesday 8 April @ Palace Cinema Como After the partner of a policeman is killed he is drawn into a my...

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Many people say the best way to influence government is to give policymakers practical solutions to problems they care about. According to this perspective, academics and think tanks scholars can get it wrong by spending too much time analysing problems and their causes. Polic...

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Michael Fullilove, of the Lowy Institute, last week gave a speech espousing the established (non-radical) centrist view that more immigration to Australia is highly desirable - that migration is an essential step to A Bigger Australia. I like immigration. In fact, my gut suppo...

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One year ago our daughter died and was born. We called her Sakura, for the cherry blossom. Sakura is a thing of beauty that does not, and cannot last, longer than a short time. But we meet its brief time in this world with joy and not sorrow. Not surprisingly, I guess, thinkin...

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Vanavil is a school for the poorest of the poor in the middle of Tamil Nadu, India. It started in 2005 as an orphanage/school for the children of two historically nomadic communities left stranded by the devastating tsunami of 2004. Many of the children of these two communitie...

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What's in a name? In the September 2013 round of re-shuffles , I count no less than 17 changes in names of government departments in Australia, either by some name disappearing or some name changing. This appears to be a regular game in Canberra. When I worked in Canberra in 2...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Olc5C4SXAYM

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Researchers warn that substance abuse among the elderly will double by 2020 , but few journalists or policymakers worry about age pensioners squandering welfare money on alcohol and drugs. Things were different in 1905–6 when a royal commission looked at establishing a Commonw...

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Work for the Dole doesn't work, says economist Jeff Borland . Citing a study he and Yi-Ping Tseng carried out using data from the late 1990s, he argues that it does nothing to create long-term employment opportunities and too little to build skills. But maybe Borland is missin...

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A new working paper (to be found here ) by two PhD students in our school muses about whether firms optimise profits or returns-to-costs. Normally in economic papers you see the presumption that firms optimise profits, but from the point of view of investors allocating in lots...

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http://youtu.be/zEnhYlzqKUk

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by Melissa S. Kearney, Phillip B. Levine Abstract: This paper explores how specific media images affect adolescent attitudes and outcomes. The specific context examined is the widely viewed MTV franchise, 16 and Pregnant, a series of reality TV shows including the Teen Mom seq...

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A recent Swiss proposal for a basic income guarantee has sparked interest from commentators on both the left and right. In a discussion of libertarian arguments for the proposal, Bleeding Heart Libertarians blogger Matt Zwolinski suggests that the classical liberal economist F...

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We are off to the Badja. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3tMPfeI1w Dear Troppos, merry Christmas, have a good and happy time! John Walker and Anne E Sanders

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https://vimeo.com/82254326 I recently gave a presentation in Adelaide at the Australian Centre for Social Innovation which I chair. As you'll see, and perhaps to your surprise, there's a continuity between the way I've been thinking about the online world and social innovation...

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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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Economists are wedded to utilitarianism as their collective moral compass. This is why we speak of social planners, welfare, utility maximization, and quality of life. The essence of utilitarianism is that moral judgments are reserved for final outcomes, not the means via whic...

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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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When political parties want to convey vision they typically reach for slogans packed with values words like 'fairness' and 'strength'. But according to Ben Shimshon of BritainThinks : "Those grand vision words are almost always taken as a signal that what’s being said is just...

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Here is a puzzle for you: what is the theoretical link between bitcoins, Australian coal exports to China, and the US becoming a New Switzerland? It’s a bit of a convoluted link, so see at what stage in the story below you spot the answer. Bitcoins are all the rage at the mome...

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It is natural to think of our political leaders as either superhumanly clever and benevolent when we agree with them, or else dumb as dishwater and evil when we don’t agree with them. Yet, if one takes our own group-loyalty out of the picture, we can ask the simple question wh...

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In his introduction to his translation of the Analects of Confucius, Pierre Ryckmans likened that 'literary classic' to a coat hook that has over the centuries acquired so many layers of coats that it can no longer be seen-has become so big that it completely obscures the corr...

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Dear President Yudhoyono Or can I call you Susilo? We like to use first names here in Australia. It’s a sign of informality. It indicates that you’re not wanting to be stand-offish. If you like we can go with middle names so that’d be Bang Bang right? You can call me Tone, or...

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Have a look at the beautiful graph below , which depicts the main trends in Australian emissions and its promised emission reduction targets. Australia's emissions trends, 1990 to 2020 Note : trajectories to the 2020 target range are illustrative The dotted orange line shows t...

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The Australian stock market opened lower this morning on the back of Rupert Murdoch’s speech to the Lowy Institute last night. A senior analyst, interviewed by this correspondent attributed the fall in the Australian share price to the “transparent and misguided attempt at nat...

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What should Australia do about a slowly warming world? Join a small group of European countries who have more permits to sell than their own industry can manage to use ? Join hands with a coalition of the desperate in enacting one of the front-runner geo-engineering solutions...

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I remember the great bushfire in Canberra of 2003. I had only arrived with the family a week before and had just rented a nice house near the top of Mt Cook, right in the path of an enormous bushfire that ended up destroying hundreds of homes. The heat of that day was immense:...

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Eugenics got a bad name after the second world war. It got associated with pseudo-scientific theories under which people at the bottom of the societal ladder were branded as hopelessly deficient for supposedly inalterable biological reasons. Societies’ less successful were, qu...

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For 14 months, Australia has had an electronic national health register . It has almost nothing in it, but the hope is that in years to come ( when lots of people have registered ) it will start to have all the information on someone’s health that floats around in the health i...

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The following quote is from an article published in London's Financial Times on October 4. The article is further confirmation that the previous Labor government's gratuitous interference in the art market has had a devastating effect on sales and its legacy is continuing to p...

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The sight of the raw institutional dysfunction in the US government at the moment provides a useful reminder to Australians that we should both treasure and encourage the respect that Australians have for our federal government institutions. By "government institutions", I'm p...

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I was looking for evidence recently that tradies in Australia have become amongst the highest paid groups, which would means a profound change in relative rewards in that it would mean that smart young men could then rationally choose not to bother with university but simply b...

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Is there a health-status race in Australia whereby people get joy from being healthier and fitter than others? And what are the general implications for public policy if there is? My PhD student Redzo Mujcic and myself brought out a new working paper recently on how a health s...

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Suppose you wanted to believe, as I do, that intelligence and vague ‘racial groups’ are, on the whole, unrelated from a long-run perspective. What would you then have to believe about genetics and IQ, as well as the long-run effects of socio-economic circumstances on IQ to rat...

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AKA "Intellectual vanity and policy poseurs" AKA "Contorting sophistry in favour of contractionary monetary policy" AKA "The global Serious id hrumphs again". Part 3 of a series ( 1 , 2 ). Via Matt Cowgill I see weak corporate governance beneficiary [1] Richard Goyder humphs a...

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The excitement is palpable, the atmosphere is electric, the game is in motion as media attention quickly turns away from the dull low-wattage reality of the Coalition win, to the contest that really matters – The leadership of Labor in opposition. Bill “Spud” Shorten has alrea...

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I am taking this opportunity to launch me own website : johnrwalker.com.au. Hope you enjoy. I would like to thank Andrew Hunter of KeyChange Solutions for his patience and terrific design input.

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In previous elections, I either gave a list of mistakes I wanted the next government to avoid , or policies they could follow . Some of the mistakes I flagged in 2007 were indeed made, and about half of a preferred policy was implemented, no doubt entirely unrelated to my advi...

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With the coalition now promising a paid maternity leave scheme that once was championed by the Greens and the Democrats, it seems opportune to recycle a post on this topic here at troppo of 2007 called ' Should we have paid maternity leave '? All the arguments made for or agai...

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“This is not an equity argument” said Tony Abbott on this morning’s Chat n’ Chew with Fran . “Its’ a watershed social reform, it’s an idea whose time has come?” This was in answer to the first ever half-serious line of questioning on his justification the Coalition’s controver...

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Just as the Coalition surges ahead to the lead in this election and Mr. Rudd's increasing signs of rude ill-health are threatening to burst out from his rapidly expanding jowls, fitness freakoid and PM apparent Tony Abbott, who has been restraining his normally excessive over-...

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Krugman periodically goes into bat for maths in economics and invariably trivialises the concerns of critics. He says that maths helps focus arguments and weed out error. Too right it does. And so do words. So shouldn't we be using each to their best effect and not give oursel...

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The tragic situation in Egypt is so complex and unpredictable that one can find many opinions on what various groups and people in Egypt should do, but precious few predictions by ‘experts’ on what is actually going to happen. You can rest assured that whatever does actually h...

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As you may know over the last few years I have been arguing for a reduction in the price of common generic medications in Australia. Due to policy shortcomings, Australia currently pays some of the highest prices in the world for many of its generic medications. For example, a...

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With the next Australian election only a few weeks away, now is a good time to say which economic micro and macro policies you think a next government can/should implement. Around and in between past elections I gave you my list of things to do and things not to do (see here a...

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One of the more odd rules of social interaction is that the person in pain gets to own the truth and those without pain adjust. Think for instance about the words used to describe undesired traits that some people have to bear their whole life, such as low intelligence or high...

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On Friday 9th August Nicolas Rothwell published this article in The Australian on the state of indigenous art in Australia. Nicolas's article details how, over the past 6 years, the old free market indigenous art sector has largely been replaced by a state backed official Indi...

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I have a dataset of about 20,000 Chinese adults, a random sample of the population in 2008-2010 from all over China. Guess how many per 1000 adult women in that dataset say they have had children without being married? If you posed the question in Australia or the US, you shou...

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On Thursday 8th august the Australian ran this article by Nicolas Rothwell about the toxic debacle that is the reality of the governments Artists Resale Royalty scheme. The article concluded with an examination of the circular nature of the government funded lobbyists for ARR:...

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The Lowy Interpreter is running a series where their experts explain, in (theoretically) 100 words or less, what they regard as the most important international policy issue of this campaign. I'm intrigued enough to think that the thoughts of a interested, but non-member, of t...

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Have a look at the graph below, taken from www.earth-policy.org , which conveys the stylised fact that greater economic development leads populations to eat more meat. The graph shows that total meat consumption in China increased from 10 million tonnes in 1980 to around 70 no...

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Here’s a simple problem. Due to tradition, law and custom about the way we deal with debt and contracts and the like, a great deal of human activity requires the transport of pieces of paper from person to person. The information on this paper does not carry the same force if...

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There are always more books to read than time to read them. But Paul Frijters' and Gigi Foster's An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks is on my shortlist. Foster's preface is personal and captivating: A longer-term cost that has come from working on this book...

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For decades the gun lobby has told us that guns don't kill people. If only people would stop pointing them at themselves and each other, guns would be completely harmless. It's not the availability of guns that's the problem, they say it's the individual's decision to pull the...

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“Welcome all ye listeners, today we are discussing the new ‘Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’, colloquially known as DSM-5, the sequel to the hugely influential and popular DSM-4 that really put the American Psychiatric Association on the map. We are joi...

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(warning: the below is a bit of a rant!) The obesity epidemic is not just one of the greatest (mental) health problems of our time, set to become a more prevalent problem than hunger and more expensive to health systems than smoking, but it is also spawning new magical beliefs...

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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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Vote buying is a recurring theme in elections in ‘emerging democracies’. There are strong allegations it happened in the 2006 and 2012 Mexican elections . US elections normally have some party accusing the other of vote-buying ( through offering free food at election stations...

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Jon Altman is a Professor at the ANU Center for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research. His submission to the review is long and deeply grounded in long-term, first-hand knowledge of the indigenous art sector and remote area indigenous affairs more generally. It is a must read ....

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That Government bureaucracies at times create 'phantom employees' to publicly argue the 'public' interest-need for.... more bureaucrats, is a well known historical truth. What follows is what Paul Frijters called: A classic case of what Niskanen spoke about. The review has fin...

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I was travelling through Los Angeles, New York, and Washington the last two weeks in a book-promotion tour . It was my first real visit to the US so I was collecting impressions on the people and the culture there. Some loose impressions from my egalitarian (Dutch/Australian)...

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Parts I & II our review of the Review. As of Monday 15 July the web page for Office Of The Arts review of its Artists Resale Royalty scheme lists 40 submissions. All but a few of these submissions are unfavorable to the scheme. In his submission , Ben Quilty, Australian War ar...

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"Welcome to the era of hedged bets and lowered expectations", says the cover story of Time Magazine . A poll of 18 to 29-year olds, found 65 per cent agreed that it will be harder for their group to live as comfortably as previous generations. But despite the lowered expectati...

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Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies th...

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The Muslim brotherhood in Egypt is currently feeling the full force of the repression apparatus of the military and economic elite. Sad to say, but the torture chambers will be busy at this very moment, demoralising the elected government and its core supporters. A sad week. I...

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Greetings from Washington where we did two launches on 'An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups and Networks' . The launches went very well, thanks for asking. Due to its success, the book has gone kindle. I was just alerted to the video that UNSW put out on a discussion we...

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I just read Andrew Leigh’s new book that he will launch July 1 st in Canberra , July 2 nd in Melbourne, and July 3 rd in Sydney. I encourage you to attend one of these because it’s a ‘good yarn’. In this new book, Andrew makes a plea for an egalitarian Australia that values ma...

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This year, and the last, the lovely Lowy Institute Poll has produced a headline grabbing finding that Australians, and particularly young Australians, are ambivalent about democracy . The search for meaning was on. This year it was attributed, in part, to a generation who have...

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Scandals about politicians lying are a staple of our media, with the politician Mal Brough saga being the latest installment in Australia. At a dinner with others of his party there was a ‘mock-menu’ that included sexists jokes, made up by the restaurant owner. His protestatio...

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In three previous parts , I posed the puzzle of the measured increase in mental health problems (depression, anxiety, and obesity) across the Western world since the 1950s and briefly discussed the pros and cons of the main cultural explanation doing the round. Here I want to...

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Two major changes happened in my life on Thursday, one pleasant the other not so. The pleasant change was the arrival of my Yamaha P35 Digital Piano in the house. The other change was the departure of RB, one of my fellow boarders here in my present sanctuary and sacred place...

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

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In the two previous parts , I posed the puzzle of the measured increase in mental health problems (depression, anxiety, and obesity in particular) across the Western world since the 1950s and in Anglo-Saxon countries in particular. Here, I take it as given that this is real (a...

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Mark Crosby hrumphs about “Abenomics”. I put “Abenomics” in quotation marks because it’s not really about the current policy direction in Japan —especially since it doesn’t the monetary policy aspects which are both the most interesting, novel and experimental part that warran...

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Last week, I posed the puzzle of the decline in mental health from around 1950 till now in most Western countries (with some countries showing a plateau since the 90s). I was talking in particular about the increase in depression, anxiety, and obesity. One of the reactions (by...

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I concluded my last post on this topic with asking rhetorically whether I was optimistic that we'll find our way through, and what measures might be taken to maximise our chances of a happy ending. Here's the second part of the argument which was published in an edited form on...

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Here’s a true modern puzzle for you: why is the rate of mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and obesity, increasing in the US, Australia, urban China, and most Western countries? Which mental health problems again? Depression, anxiety, and obesity are the bi...

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Simply Delightful : Conservative billionaire Gina Rinehart called for the sterilization of the poor today, arguing that the only way to alleviate poverty is to stop the "underclasses" from multiplying. In a video uploaded to her official YouTube account, the Australian mining...

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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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This is sort of in the vein of the intermittent series ( 1 , 2 ), its adopted sibling and an older post on "hollowing out" . But it's also much less thought out. Earlier today, following the announcement that Ford would shut its Geelong plan t, Scott Steel tweeted The lesson t...

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As I said a few months ago , tax evasion is the big cliff in terms of the future of the EU project. It was thus fascinating to see the tax evasion games played out at the latest ‘summit’ In Brussels yesterday. To understand what really goes on at these summits, imagine yoursel...

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With the Gonski reforms expected to be rolled out across Australia in the coming 5 years, it is handy to reflect on what actually are the basic challenges for school reform in Australia. A view of the underlying issues helps one to judge the likely outcomes of the current refo...

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

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In an excellent recent piece on his own website , Timothy Devinney looks at how the compensation of Australian Vice Chancellors compares to those of the UK and the US. He gave me permission to re-use his calculations. Below I give you the guts of his story which, if one uses u...

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The book launch tour of Australia ended last week with a visit to the Melbourne Institute, where Deborah Cobb-Clark kindly hosted the last in our marathon-series of 5 launches. They all were a great success, with the publisher actually running out of books for the last one and...

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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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Tomorrow, there is a book launch of ' An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks ' at UNSW, hosted by Professor Chris Styles, Director of the Australian Graduate School of Business. It starts at 6pm and is in the JBR Theatre (AGSM building) of the Kensington Campu...

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Two years ago, I wrote a Troppo post on Coles' decision to sell milk for a dollar a litre . I took particular aim at the claim by consumer group Choice that regulators should investigate whether Coles is engaged in predatory pricing . Said Choice: “It is difficult to see why a...

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In 1989, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) was created with the hope of creating a local competitor to the University of Queensland. The resources given to it by the community have been immense, with real estate and subsidies worth many billions. With its prime locatio...

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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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In the terms of reference to the recent study into the non-viability of high-speed rail from Brisbane to Melbourne it is promised that “It will draw on expertise from the public and private sectors”. So, who did this study that concluded that Australia would need 50 years and...

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The mythology is that Thatcher came, saw, and conquered. Her enemies credit her with destroying the public sector by privatizations. Her friends credit her with the same, but also say she championed frugal spending and was fierce when it came to British independence. She suppo...

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See below for how my co-author Gigi Foster has been explaining key facets of our joint book to Tim Harcourt in anticipation of launches in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. Enjoy! [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk7eac53oG4]

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From its beginnings 70 years ago, the Institute of Public Affairs has struggled against class war. According to a 1948 issue of the IPA Review , the post war period saw a "revolutionary change" in the distribution of income: "The lower incomes are now enjoying a much larger sh...

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The US Fed is printing money to get the US out of a recession. The ECB is also printing money, with the same target in mind. In limited amounts, this is a good idea, but the central banks are going about it the wrong way: they are essentially printing money for banks and polit...

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Let us pretend you are the benevolent elected dictator in Australia. It is 1980 and you have to decide on education and migration policy. Your wily political adviser comes to you with the following plan: he tells you it would be popular and cheap to stop inflicting difficult a...

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As a lifelong and warm supporter of the ideal of a United States of Europe (USE) stretching from the coast of Ireland to the Urals, I was interested to see the recent wrangling’s inside the EU about its future. The UK Prime Minister David Cameron has now promised a referendum...

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The smell of death, the river's breath. The cones and arms of gods, the barks of thin grey dogs. Beggar guards that corner you underneath a spire, Niggards that tell you of child beggars for hire. Students dreaming of Oxbridge, night and day, Studying books and looks the Engli...

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Word has just come in from Europe that there will in fact be a deal between the EU and Cyprus about keeping the banks in Cyprus alive. The basics of the deal are now that one of the two major banks (Laiki) will go bankrupt with losses to junior and senior bond holders. It is t...

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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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Is there discrimination on colour in Queensland? In order to find out if black and Indian people are a discriminated ‘out group’ in Queensland, together with Redzo Mujcic I carried out a large-scale experiment involving bus drivers in Brisbane. We sent test subjects of various...

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The Australian Pharmaceutical benefit scheme is a monopsony buy-in arrangement for medicines run by ministries. It currently costs tax payers about ten billion dollars per year (see page 3 here ), up from a paltry 149,000 pounds in its first year of operation, 1948! The upward...

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The graph below tells you the average number of hours worked in Australia from 1978 to 2013 per person per month aged 15-64. The key thing to note is that there has been remarkably little change over time in terms of the peaks of the cycle: in 1980 the average Australian betwe...

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The usual political debate inside our country revolves around conspicuous things concerning the top leaders, like whether someone has been overtly corrupt, promised something too loudly that they could not really deliver, is handing out money to worthy or unworthy causes, or i...

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In the past month, I ran posts on the limits to certainty in economics. On the theory side, I talked about how mathematical tractability limited the economic phenomena you can describe well with models. On the empirical side, the inability in social science to measure any abst...

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Do we know in social science what it is that we are measuring or does any bit of data we look at on closer inspection reveal more complexity, no matter how close we look, just like a fractal? Another way to put this is to ask whether anything we measure is solid, concrete and...

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I enjoyed Waleed Aly's latest National Times column . But the more I read it, the more I wonder what he means. "Labor has lost the plot, and the narrative" says the headline in the Age . According to Aly, Governments thrive on narrative and Labor doesn't have one. It's a famil...

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At the moment, I am writing an empirical study into racism in Queensland, which I will report on at a later date. It made me reflect on the basic question of what racism actually is. Let me give you seven possible scenarios to help us reflect on what we think racism is, whilst...

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Yesterday I came across a fairly innocuous story about the seafood industry on AM . It is headlined (on the website) and introduced thus. Australia's seafood capital under pressure from imports TONY EASTLEY: Port Lincoln calls itself Australia's seafood capital. On South Austr...

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Your average workshop dinner sees 20 adults or so taken out for free food and drinks, paid for by a hosting university. They get drunk, are rowdy, eat too much, say things they normally wouldn’t, and have to carry on the next day with hangovers and smelly clothes. From a stand...

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Minami Minegishi was in tears . After being caught spending the night at Generations boy-band member Alan Shirahama, the J-pop idol lost her place in AKB48 's Team B and was demoted to 'trainee'. Shortly afterwards she appeared on YouTube, her head shaved, begging the fans for...

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In the first two parts, the readers and I looked at the long list of sectors in Australia where there is a privileged minority who, with the help of the government, is in a position to extract more than their fair share of income out of the economy. Medical specialists, GPs, b...

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As initially thought, the basic economic unit in Kolkata and West Bengal generally seems to be the family, not the individual. As a result, families invest in the education of their children and expect to share in the returns. Also, most businesses here are family businesses a...

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I am visiting Kolkata this week, the Centre for the Study of Social Science Calcutta. It is a great chance to collect observations and cross-check economic theories on India. What I tend to do when visiting a new country is to assemble lots of preliminary hypotheses I have on...

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In part I the question was posed to the readers which privileges bothered them most about Australia and what they thought could be done to reduce them. In this part I want to start to consider the barriers by talking about the ‘face’ of any privilege and how this creates parti...

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A question for you: how to combat privilege? As economists well know, we are all rent seekers who try to secure more and more privileges for ourselves and our families, be it monopoly rights (such as currently legally given to medical specialists or local pharmacies), over-pri...

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Have a look at this just-published article in PNAS by Jerome Dangerman and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber on the topic of climate change: Abstract The contemporary industrial metabolism is not sustainable. Critical problems arise at both the input and the output side of the complex...

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Well I’m overseas at present but I’ve received my first request for a renewal of the annual Crikey subscription. And in these days of email it can all be done with very little work, so I’m opening subscriptions for a record breaking, seventh year. (I have no idea how long I’ve...

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I regularly get asked by young Australian academics nearing the end of their PhD about the tradeoffs inherent in different positions they can apply for: post-doc or tenure-track; academia or policy land; researcher or administrator; a school of economics or a research institut...

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Just before Xmas, I asked the readers at Core and at Troppo what they though the best bits of news of 2012 were. Many, including myself but also David Walker, Steve Dunera, Tel and Jim Rose thought that last year was another in a long period of strong economic development in t...

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Tim Soutphommasane has written a defence, or more accurately, a vigourous promotion of Australian Multiculturalism. I have opinions, which, with effort, are forced into the alliterative framework in the title. Of course, by way of disclaimer, I am absurdly fond of multicultura...

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Here is a question to put to you over Xmas time, the season of joy and hope: what has been the best news for you this year in the sense of the most uplifting development in Australia or the world? For me, it has been the continued economic growth in India, China, and much of L...

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In part I and part II the question was posed what the source of the demand for apocalyptic stories was in our societies. The discussion made it plausible that there is in fact a strong cultural diversity in terms of Doomsday stories: they are prevalent in the West, where their...

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Last Friday, I asked the readers w hat they thought the source of the demand for apocalyptic stories was in our societies, and particularly whether there was anything new about the prevalence of apocalyptic stories. As Michael Stanley and Ian pointed out, apocalyptic stories g...

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Ever since the middle ages, apocalyptic visions have been a staple of Western thought. With every minor or major upheaval that came along, whether it would be the plague, Communism, or climate change, there was a large constituency receptive to the idea that the end of times w...

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In a previous post , I raised the question how best to measure ‘Nature’, arguing the benefits of an overall Index including biodiversity, habitat diversity, human usage value and sheer volume of living organisms, biomass. Here a look is taken at whether biomass has been increa...

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My post on the Territory's recent mini-budget has resulted in an interesting comment box discussion about Darwin property prices. At first blush general Troppo readers might not find it all that absorbing, but in fact the dynamics of Darwin's property market provide an instruc...

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Last Friday, I posed the question under what definitions of Nature one can say that it is doing badly, and whether there were other ones under which it was doing fine. I was explicitly interested in how Nature is doing now relative to decades or longer periods past, though of...

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I held off reviewing Acemoglu and Robinson's (AR) Why Nations Fail for a long time. Despite the material's relevance to my old research interests, my love of universal history and the popularity of the book, I just couldn't face the task. Yet, because it is now appearing in so...

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Another puzzle for you to pontificate on: is it really true that ‘Nature’ is suffering? For decades now, you will be hard-pressed to read a whole newspaper or magazine without someone complaining about how badly ‘Nature’ is doing. The melting glaciers, the disappearing Siberia...

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Queensland is shedding public workers in the health and education sectors in a bid to balance the books. There is nothing unusual about this, and there are more than enough ‘head-office’ positions that can be axed without any impact on the productivity of schools and hospitals...

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The Economic Society in Queensland runs a series of televised presentations whereby they get economists to talk about topical issues they are working on. Following Quiggin, Bhagwati and McKibbin, it was my turn a few weeks ago to talk about the Christian-Islamic conflict, the...

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Have a look the following 2010 graph produced by the University of Delaware on their college students : The key aspects to realise from this graph are that the girls who don’t drink basically don’t have (unprotected) sex, and that, more surprisingly, the boys who don’t drink d...

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We were all resigned to hearing that eagerly awaiting whether or not the Greeks are going to get the 2-year extension on their debt obligations or not. The announcement has just come through : the Greeks are not just getting an extension but are to get another 50 billion Euro...

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In part II, the barriers to reform in the university sector were discussed . It became clear that neither the governance structure nor the basic funding model was up for grabs. Also, one should not count on market forces, the unions, or the academics to be all that much help....

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Australian universities are admin-heavy , have high student-academic ratios and in recent years have seen a race to the bottom in standards, related to a battle over student numbers. The selling out of previously amassed reputation by reducing entry barriers most recently beca...

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In previous posts I talked about the immense overhead in the university sector. Some 70 cents in the commonwealth dollar aimed at universities ends up in admin and US researchers have calculated that the optimal amount of administration is so much lower than the current Austra...

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The question posed last week was how much of the money sent into the university sector at the point of DEEWR\DEST actually reaches the coalface in terms of teaching and research. My best guess answer is about 28 cents in the dollar, with the rest essentially going into admin....

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Here is a question for you: of the funds going into the university sector via the commonwealth ministries (DEST), how much actually ends up paying for research and teaching versus other uses of the money? Included in research/teaching here would also be the buildings and rooms...

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To my astonishment, Catholic Archbishop of Sydney George Pell spent part of a press conference today claiming that the news media are exaggerating the scandal of Catholic Church child abuse in Australia . There was "a persistent press campaign against the Catholic Church's ade...

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In his series on Australian macro-economics, Jan Libich this time has talked to Bob Gregory and Michael Knox. Bob was on the RBA board and still interacts extensively with Australian policy land. Michael is in the private sector (RBS Morgans) and as such advises firms on the m...

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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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US election-watching is a great spectator sport for many Australian politics-watchers. As Bob Carr says, it's The Greatest Show On Earth. But in the actual real lives of Australians, the dull reality is that US elections generally have big direct effects on just one issue: the...

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I was forwarded a fascinating paper on the optimal number of university administrators written by Martin and Hill who looked at public research universities in the US (the Carnegie I and II universities). The key result that they disclose in their abstract is that "the optimal...

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In part, I talked about how politicians were forced to lie to us because we the population are their bosses and we enjoy flattery. A nice recent example of just that was the announcement that we were going to have 10 universities in the top 100 by 2025. Yeah, sure. We demand o...

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In empirical economic research we live in the age of the randomistas where whole departments do nothing else but look for random events to give them some variation to identify a causal relation. Cyclone Sandy looks like providing a lot of random variation so you can bet your b...

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The white paper Australia in the Asian Century was released this week. It is as exciting as you expect white papers to be. [caption id="" align="alignright" width="170"] I am unimpressed by the arguments for increasing Asian language literacy.[/caption] As expected it is full...

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An oft-heard complaint is that politicians lie to us. They promise us 100,000 jobs, lower taxes, more generous spending, an end to poverty and inequality, economic growth, better schools, world peace, nicer climate, and victory over all our enemies. And when they do not delive...

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The Australian visa point-system is the envy of the world as it has ensured that Australia gets a large influx of well-educated, healthy, English-speaking migrants. How large is the free gift that comes walking into our doors this way? Conservatively, I would say 50 billion do...

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Radovan Karadzic is now on trial for his role in the massacre of Srebenica and general Mladic was already convicted before him for aiding and abetting this genocide as the military commander of the Serbs. The question I mainly want to pose here is whether the 450 Dutch troops...

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Yet another challenge for you: how many times has the water you drink been pissed out of a vertebrate (something with a spine) in the past? If the number is very small, then those who baulk at drinking recycled water have more cause to complain than if the number is very high....

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Have a look at the following picture that comes from a 2012 paper by Gotz and Hecq on forecasting growth. It tells you what the US growth rate at 3 different dates was estimated to be over time. This means that the start of the thick black line tells you what they thought in t...

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Last Thursday, I posed the mystery of whether there are in fact 16 million direct male descendants of Genghis Khan . This factoid came from a 2003 study of some 2000 Central Asian men, of which 8% were found to share a common male ancestor around the year 1000 AD, give or take...

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Here is a puzzle for you to figure out: did Genghis Khan really have 16 million direct male descendants? Note the careful wording: direct male descendants. It is a factoid that has been around since 2003 when a now famous genetic study concluded that 16 milllion men in Central...

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The Australian government wants us to join the Europeans in a carbon Emissions Trading Scheme. To this end they have sent legislation to the Senate who are going through the usual rigmarole of invited submissions on this topic. Together with my PhD student Cameron Murray, I ha...

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Poverty programs have become cash cows for powerful corporate interests, says Peter Schweizer at the Daily Beast . In the US, state governments increasingly rely on electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards to distribute social assistance. And around the world, financial service...

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Last week I posed the mystery of why the Great Wall of China was so small at the top of the hills but so large at the bottom. Anyone can jump right onto it at the top. Where Europeans built castles designed to keep even a single attacker out, something else was going on with t...

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Here is a mystery for you. The Great Wall of China is one of the architectural wonders of the world. Apparently not quite visible from space but very impressive nonetheless. Built and rebuilt many times over many centuries and by hundreds of thousands of labourers. The picture...

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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 don't want to overstate the case here - there are many, many more spectacular sights in nature than the tide-turn at Styx Creek - but in my world this brings me a sense of joy every time I see it. Mark MacLean Last week I was reading Why Nations Fail . The topic is of close...

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Jan Libich from Latrobe University is running a televised series on economics . He gets people into his TV studio to talk about some aspect of the economy and then puts it out there. Andrew Leigh, Andrew Hughes Hallett, and Eric Leeper were previous victims. Adrian Pagan and W...

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This an opinion piece, my effort to entertain or provoke you while I make an important point. In this paragraph I should start making an argument for the Important Point but, I'm off to bad start. My title should have included some clever figure of speech like a pun or literar...

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They are both amazing feats of human engineering? They both cost billions with little tangible benefit? They were both launched in a desert? Both mainly built by Western engineers? No, they are both good examples of status races. The moon landing was all about competition with...

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A vexing question for a parent, particularly an economist, is whether or not to reward your kids monetarily for higher school grades. Let me admit right here that this is how I was raised: something like 10 dollars for every subject I got an A, 5 dollars for a B and nothing fo...

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The Band, Old Rocking Chair c.1970 [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9M4azk6-GM&w=420&h=315]

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I once heard a person , in reference to the note at right, that you could tell a great deal about a country by who they chose to put on their notes. He felt it spoke well of Japan that Fukuzawa Yukichi, a thinker and philosopher, was chosen for their currency. I don't really b...

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In part I and part II , I discussed the general geo-political implications of the rise of China, and the internal dynamics within the Chinese bureaucracy and the Party, concluding that one should not underestimate the disruption to the whole of China and its international rela...

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Well I'm not the first to the party - 26 million late in fact, but it's fun nevertheless. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX1YVzdnpEc]

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The picture below is of a mountainous area in Spain. It used to be full of small-scale farmers and is now almost deserted. Over the many centuries that farmers have tried to eek something useful out of this area, they created terraces all the way to the top of the mountains. I...

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Today's Age and SMH column - on the great business tax mix switch - imputation for a 19% company tax rate. REMEMBER Kevin Rudd's mining tax? It needed some tweaking in industry's favour, but even then it would have hauled in massive revenue without harming investment, which is...

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It is easy to circumvent news and information written on paper entirely. I for instance solely read online foreign newspapers. My wife does the same. Until very recently, I also cut back on any subscriptions to hard copies of anything, including academic journals. The family’s...

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In part I , I discussed the general geo-political situation that we are moving towards in the coming decades, which is a world in which China will be the single most powerful country for a long time, constrained by a more diffuse West that is nevertheless wealthier and more po...

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The Italian head of the ECB, Mario Draghi, last week announced he would like to help certain countries in the south of Europe to borrow more cheaply. Subject to ‘strict conditions’, which were instantaneously refused by the Spanish prime minister, countries in Europe would now...

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9/11 is over ten years ago now, and after two take-overs of Islamic countries ( Iraq and Afghanistan ) and internal turmoil in the Middle East and Pakistan , the contours of where the conflict between Islamic fundamentalism and ‘the rest of the world’ is going to is becoming c...

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In the comments of Paul's post on face I mentioned a hypothesis I had never published that I felt overlapped with, or at least was tangental to the ideas he was using. I'm still very unhappy with the piece and the reasoning, but I thought I may as well publish the last version...

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We live in an interregnum, wherein the position of most-powerful single country is going from the US to China , with all major international players knowing this and no-one is seriously hindering its occurrence. The world has learned from the disastrous attempts in the last 2...

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I have been part of a research group looking into Chinese migration for about 5 years now (see rumici . anu .edu.au/ ), and the main cultural difference one has to get used to as a Westerner in interactions with the East is the notion of 'face'. This Asian cultural trait has b...

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(re-worked from the conversation) Linking Australia to the European Union carbon emissions trading scheme by 2015 will undoubtedly affect the revenue gained from carbon trading. The question is, how much? My best guess is that it will cost around 50% less revenue than original...

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(cross-posted from Core) Though the Assad regime is still brutalising the Syrian population in a desperate attempt to hold onto power, the post-Spring contours of the Middle East are becoming visible. It is now clear that the Assad regime cannot hold on ( see the betting marke...

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http://youtu.be/hOI7G2j_pRM

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[ This was written on Sunday. An edited version was published at the G8 universities site The Conversation late this afternoon. ] The Northern Territory's Labor government led by Chief Minister Paul Henderson was swept from power at yesterday's election by Terry Mills' Country...

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By October 8 th of this year, the European Finance ministers must decide whether or not to send Greece 11.5 billion Euros in bailout funds, based on the report of the ‘Troika’ (the EU, ECB, and IMF) as to whether Greece is holding up its end of the bailout conditions. If the T...

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In a recently published study withTony Beatton (QUT), I looked at how happiness changes by age. For the freely downloadable working paper version, see here. The main findings of the study can be summarised by the graph below, where you can see the way happiness changes over th...

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We are nearing the end of Mario Monti’s first year in office as Italian Prime Minister. As the largest of the Southern European economies experiencing difficulties paying off large public debts, Italy’s fate is crucial for the future of the European Union as a single financial...

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I wrote recently about the prevalence of personal smear tactics by both major parties in the current NT election campaign. It is one of the more repugnant aspects of modern politics, exemplified at federal level by the current Ashby v Slipper shenanigans. Last week the tactics...

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A gusty performance by Ecuador, granting asylum to Julian Assange. Assange's claim that he faces further extradition to the US from a disingenuous Sweden, appears to be borne out by the Ecuadorian behind-the-scenes investigations. A simple assurance from the Swedes that furthe...

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I had the pleasure this year of spending part of my holidays in northern Italy. Despite the prolonged recession that you can see the place is currently experiencing, it is still a rich country with good food, great wine, and great scenery. Indeed, there is no real feeling of g...

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http://vimeo.com/28413747

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Speaking of his attendance at a sermon by the Reverend Whitefield. He had a loud and clear voice, and articulated his words and sentences so perfectly, that he might be heard and understood at a great distance, especially as his auditories, however numerous, observ'd the most...

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Via Matt Yglesias , Ryan Cooper wonders why " why smaller countries are so much better at macroeconomic management ". Cooper suggests that smaller countries have smaller banks that are less able to distort policy debate. Yglesias suggests that larger countries get distracted b...

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Via Matt Cowgill , I was pointed to this Nick Rowe post. An exerpt 1. Watch what happens on a really steep uphill bit of road. Watch what happens when the driver puts the pedal to the metal, and holds it there. Does the car slow down? If so, ironically, that confirms the theor...

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New scientists Feedback page, 18th July issue, reports some recent research that has produced results so obvious that they might be brilliant. Why is it that Nigerian emails are so unbelievable ? The answer is that the extreme unbelievability of these messages automatically fi...

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Flash mob Barcelona style Annie I'm not your Daddy ,will put a spring in your day

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"In 2008-09, DEWHA was assessed as non-compliant for the Resale Royalty Right for Visual Artists Act 2009 and a post-implementation review is required to commence within one to two years of implementation."¹ The reason why the Artist Resale Royalty Act was assessed as non-comp...

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The 21st was supposed to be the age of flying cars, teleporters and affordable space travel, says David Graeber . But now here we are in the future still arguing about overcrowded trains and the price of petrol. David Graeber feels cheated: Where ... are the flying cars? Where...

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The Coalition is engaged in further hypocrisy. 1. The Coalition (both under Howard and more recently through Morrison’s own words) has supported Nairu as an appropriate venue well before Nairu had signed the UN Convention on Refugees. 2. The current Abbott policy still does no...

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[caption id="attachment_20699" align="alignright" width="300"] Ceci n'est pas un Duchamp[/caption] I once overheard a serious conversation between two curators as to whether the urinal they were looking at was a genuine Duchamp or an unauthorised urinal. Strange loops involve...

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In the torrent of words over the job cuts at Fairfax and News Ltd, not many people seem to have noticed that these events also further undermine the already teetering argument of the Finkelstein Review for a new system of media regulation. How's that? Recall that the Finkelste...

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"All I want to do is go to the movies, have a soda and popcorn" says Michael Graham . But with New York mayor Michael Bloomberg banning supersized sodas and officials talking about extending the regulations to popcorn , conservatives like Graham are feeling nanny's hot breath...

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As Ken Parish's post below shows, there is now a widespread view that Gina Rinehart will win control of Fairfax , publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and then seek to move their editorial stances well to the right. From people who believe that, you hear both wa...

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My previous post - ' With friends like this’: Labor policies and the commercial, independent visual arts sector - was kindly posted by Ken Parish, 6 June. In many ways, artist resale royalties are intrinsically a throwback to the pre-reform days of the 1970s and '80s. The roya...

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I have a running conversation with Henry Ergas in which I argue that one could get a long way in economics just by not doing silly things - ie there are plenty of $100 bills on the pavement. He doesn't seem to agree. But here's a $100 bill on the pavement. From today's column...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnsGc2r0m4k Coroner Elizabeth Morris's findings 1987 Royal Commission (Justice Trevor Morling) Coroner Barrtt's original findings (1981) [caption id="attachment_20121" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Doesn't Colin Wicking have a patent o...

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So, Spain got another 100 billion to sort out its banks . There seem to be very few strings attached to this bailout: the money comes from the recently set-up European stability funds (EFSF and ESM). The central Spanish government gets it and its up to the Spanish to figure ou...

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I see John Quiggin is touting Thursday (give or take a few days) as the tenth anniversary of the birth of his blog. I can't be even that precise, because this blog has been through several iterations, and the early days coincided with my marriage breakup so events tend to be a...

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Savvy speculators have been making billions from the European crisis by second-guessing the politics. For instance, whilst big banks were forced to take a 70% haircut on their Greek bonds in March, some savvy investors that bought them up simply refused the haircut and got pai...

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These articles might be a week or two old, but they're well worth reading if you haven't done so already ...

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[caption id="attachment_20019" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Australian Aboriginal Art is much sought after internationally, but Australians overall and Aborigines themselves benefit little from it (and even less since Labor's Resale Royalty Scheme which is the subje...

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[ first published at Normblog by philosopher Norman Geras. ] There's a column by Simon Armitage here headed 'Poetry should be subversive'. I started reading the piece thinking 'No, it shouldn't', because I don't believe there's anything (in the way of political direction or ch...

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There are rumours in the Welt am Sonntag and the Wall Street Journal of another grand plan to save the Euro. The main outlines have already been foreshadowed in recent weeks by the main players (Draghi, van Rompuy, Barosso, Juncker): a re-focus on bailouts for banks, not gover...

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More evidence that groupthink is one of the biggest enemies of organisations. Ingratiation and Favoritism: Experimental Evidence Date: 2012-05-03 By: Stéphane Robin and Agnieszka Rusinowska, Marie-Claire Villeval at http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-00694160&r=exp...

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It has been an interesting few months in Europe. The Greeks have just had their first round of parliamentary elections and need at least another round before a government can be formed. The French have just elected a new president on an anti-austerity platform, making it a cle...

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On all recent polls, it appears that the Coalition is still unbeatable. But Newspoll suggests that Abbott’s leadership of the Liberal party is viewed with suspicion by the electorate – for good reasons. First, Abbott has still to reveal how he is going to close the budget blac...

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http://youtu.be/lU-Uwl7AZ7o

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E-gad it's hard to keep those heterodox ideas from popping out - especially if they're the plainest commonsense. Brad Delong quotes Matthew Yglesias: Mitt Romney on Fiscal Policy : The GOP candidate sounds like Paul Krugman except without the qualifications about the zero lowe...

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Just as almost anyone has a near veto power in a bureaucracy even if they don't have much power, so the street theatre of outrage can have a powerful effect on politics even if the majority of people think that the minority putting on some show are way out of line. When things...

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Seems like an important paper - which I've not read yet. Trustworthy by Convention, By: M. Bigoni, S. Bortolotti, M. Casari, D. Gambetta, URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp827&r=evo Social life offers innumerable instances in which trust relations involve multiple...

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If Don McLean could write a smash hit about the death of Buddy Holly , I can at least do a blog post about the death this morning of Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees. The Bee Gees were hardly the most fashionable of pop groups among the cool kids, either at the time or now. But I re...

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Access to justice should be a big issue in Australia, as my Introduction to Public Law class explored yesterday in the context of discussing administrative law merits review.As commenter wilful observed on my last post about lawyers : I can reflect on my sister’s recent experi...

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Your editorial ( Politics of envy threatens our economy and ethos , 2 May) claims that “Research by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling has shown that all income levels prospered in the Howard years and that under the Rudd-Gillard governments the gap between...

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Interest rates in Australia have just been reduced by 0.5% in the hope that this will stimulate the economy. Will it work? Uncertain. But will politicians say it will work in the coming federal budget? Almost undoubtedly. Perhaps displays of optimism are not such a bad thing,...

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Anzac Day. A day for reminiscing. A day for remembering great deeds, and the heroic words that were written about them .

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http://youtu.be/fWNaR-rxAic I heard this song for the first time this evening. No doubt I'm one of the last to hear it - I certainly come after nearly 30 million YouTube plays. Anyway, it's a great song. What's nice is that it seems like a throwback to the time when women pop...

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(note to self) For many years now, it has been clear to the insiders that there is no hope in achieving serious reductions to greenhouse gas emission by means of international co-operation: the incentives to free ride on the efforts of others is too great and none of the big p...

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God speechless at outrageous Atheistic slurs It was billed at the debate to end all debates. The one where the big questions would be finally resolved. Renowned God scoffer, Richard Dawkins verses Australian stuffed-shirt-in-chief Cardinal George Pell were to have it out on th...

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Gillard is still the best person to lead the ALP (there is no one else). How deal with the loss of trust following her broken promise on carbon tax? This is a difficult question but it must be resolved. Abbott keeps making stupid remarks and then saying “it was an inappropriat...

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A Club Troppo Research Project In the Melbourne telephone directory, there are: 89 Head(s) 5 Neck(s) 13 Body(s) 1 Shoulder 14 Arms 69 Hand(s) 35 Finger(s) 52 Legg(s) 27 Foot(s) 1 Feet 6 Toe(s) 2 Heart(s) - A Time Lord? 22 Lung(s) 13 Kidney(s) No Stomach 1 Bowels No Penis, but...

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Responding to Noah Smith , Krugman says the following about the long term effects of the "Macro Wars" . On the academic side: look, to a first approximation nobody ever admits being wrong about anything. But my sense is that a lot of younger economists are aware, even if they...

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Risk theories typically assume individuals make risky choices using probability weights that differ from objective probabilities. Recent theories suggest that probability weights vary depending on which portion of a risky environment is made salient. Using experimental data we...

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In the USA (a presidential election year), there is a considerable debate on how much emphasis government policy should assign to economic growth (properly interpreted to encompass all externalities and market failures) and how much to income and welfare distribution. The argu...

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We are in the middle of the electoral cycle, which seems a good time to give advice on which policies make good economics in the sense of being in the interest of the long-run welfare of Australia. My top 5 of do-able economic policies, some big and some small, that a governme...

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A voice of reason from way out West speaks clear unvarnished truth. That the minerals Mother Nature once laid down in her youth, are the hope of teeming millions seeking sanctuary and jobs. Free Enterprise the means by which we’ll fill their starving gobs. We hear the message...

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Via Mark Thoma Languages di?er widely in the ways they partition time. In this paper I test the hypothesis that languages which grammatically distinguish between present and future events (what linguists call strong- FTR languages) lead their speakers to take fewer future-orie...

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A small plea to Kevin Rudd and everyone else in the country: can we restrict the term "faceless men" to people who are actually unknown? Today I see a reference to "Crean and other faceless men". For pity's sake, Simon Crean has been in public life since 1979 and in Parliament...

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

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Public debts in Southern Europe only grew in 2011, and they were already unsustainable in 2010. Worse, the interest rates these countries have to pay on their debts has grown as all the long-term rolled-over debt held by these countries now carries a 7% upwards interest rate....

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Next month I'm doing a gig for Rotary where I'm going to be on a panel with a demographer and a climatologist and they're going to ask us to say what will happen in the next 20 years. In five minutes. That's five minutes each - so there's plenty of time. I get to talk about th...

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