Below is a recent article of mine for the FT on a subject dear to my heart. The Chinese are trialling it. The UK Treasury and the Bank of England have a task force on it. So, after years of talk, central bank digital currency has suddenly become serious business. Think of CBDC...
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We lost David Savage this week to a heart attack at the age of 48, leaving a wife Deborah and many colleagues around the world. He was a Queensland boy who got educated in Brisbane and then quickly made it to Associate Professor in behavioural economics, teaching students in N...
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Ed Diener , one of the best-known scholars of happiness died this week at the age of 76. He was known as Dr Happiness in the United States, well-known for his 7-item scale on wellbeing and his constant refrain that the secret to happiness is in warm social relations. I met Ed...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6qmdqvItkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTaw6oQmRdM No folks, that is not a joke. Listening to it on occasion over the years, I've grown fond of the New Zealand National Anthem. The tune is classic national anthem. That is to say it manages...
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Martin Lally is a kiwi economist who late in 2020 decided to calculate for himself what his own country was losing by locking itself away from the world, coming to the conclusion that New Zealand was sacrificing something like 26 life-years in the future to 'save' 1 life-year....
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I am co-writing a book on the Great Panic to explain what happened and what can be done to avoid a repeat. In the course of our research for that book, me and co-authors are scouring websites in the rest of the world to find out how others in the Covistance have experienced th...
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[caption id="attachment_34828" align="aligncenter" width="2560"] I put in "Getting to the point" on the marvellous free graphics site Unsplash , and up came this: by salvatore ventura [/caption] Just in case people aren't sick of my extracts from SZ. I liked this. It very much...
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I continue listening to Stefan Zweig's description of the disasters of the twentieth century a passage of which I'll reproduce below. My big essay on the Productivity Commission's Draft Indigenous Evaluation Strategy represented a bit of intellectual progress for me. As I wrot...
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Compared to the trends on January 2020, has Australia or Sweden lost more wellbeing in 2020? And which has seen the greater damage to expected future wellbeing years for after 2020? The Table below summarizes the answers to this. For the first calculation, let us only count th...
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I've been listening to The World of Yesterday , the memoirs Stefan Zweig. Zweig was probably the best-known author in 1930s Europe and produced a mountain of material. Essays, fiction, history, poetry, translations, you name it. Today few know of him, though that may be differ...
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[caption id="attachment_34804" align="alignleft" width="1920"] Thanks to @followbenwhite for making this photo available freely on @unsplash 🎁[/caption] Troppodillians will know that I organise a discount Crikey subscription every year. But this year I'm also supporting Inkl ,...
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Sometimes one has an idea that blazes into one's consciousness as a solution to one particular concern, which then starts to be something much bigger than just a solution to a problem. It becomes an interesting thing in itself and starts appearing as relevant to many different...
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I’d like to introduce Joy Braddish who’s studying for a Master of Journalism at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism . She’s undertaking an internship at Lateral Economics where one of the things she’s helping us with is making some explainer videos. T...
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Writing about sortition, equality and merit, I spent a good part of today reading the last chapter of a book I read a decade or so ago on the relationship John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had in their dotage – including jumping in and out of references and checking up for insta...
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This podcast is quite a lively exploration of a proposal of mine that is – frightenly – a quarter of a century old! Below is Gene Tunny's introduction to his podcast interview with me. NG Last month, in a Financial Times article , (unpaywalled pdf here ) Nicholas Gruen propose...
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I have just finished reading Tyler Stovall 's White Freedom and this post is to recommend it wholeheartedly. I first became aware of it on Marshall Poe’s excellent New Books Network via this podcast . A striking fact about the political thought in the 18 th -century is the way...
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I here want to salute the brave artists who used their talents to capture the inhumanity and essential insanity of lockdowns. My favourite is the "guerilla mask force", an artistic idea that apparently started in Switzerland but spread all over Europe. what this guerilla mask...
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[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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As one the best illustrations of the way our minds deal with uncertainty, consider the following video. Please listen and watch at least 30 seconds so you can experience the three sequences of spoken words. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWGeUztTkRA[/embed] Pretty much...
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The essential governance problem in March 2020 in Western countries was the overwhelming demand of the vast majority of the population to do something dramatic in response to their fear. There was a clamour to be ‘led to safety’ by populations scared to death by images in the...
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Posted in Politics - international, Society, IT and Internet, Terror, Science, Health, Metablogging, Information, Innovation, Democracy, Coronavirus crisis
