[below the exact text (with different font/highlight) as Gigi Foster's submission to the Victorian parliamentary library in mid-August here . To see her health-related notes, including on topics like non-linearities and Sweden, see here , and to see all documents of that inqui...
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Posted in Politics - national, Education, Economics and public policy, Science, Health, Ethics, Medical, Social Policy, Democracy, Employment, Coronavirus crisis
In the Age of COVID chess has been reinvented. In March (I think it was) the Candidates Tournament was dramatically ended a few rounds in and everyone wondered "what next". Enter Magnus Carlsen entrepreneur. With his star power, he has been getting himself a piece of the actio...
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For months now, demographers and other social scientists have been predicting a covid baby bust because marriages were postponed , pubs were closed, anxiety levels were up, measured fertility intentions were down, sexual activity went down (in some reports), and economic uncer...
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Posted in Life, Philosophy, Society, Science, Geeky Musings, Health, Dance, Social, Parenting, Social Policy, Coronavirus crisis
Below is a piece I published on the NESTA website in early 2016 which they took down in a web revamp. It's still available on archive.org , but I thought I'd also publish it here for the record. [caption id="attachment_34195" align="alignright" width="404"] Quick Troppo Quiz:...
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[caption id="attachment_34192" align="alignright" width="202"] A stupid diagram which I have made small for obvious reasons.[/caption] The Mandarin asked me to provide a summary answer to this question: What is the appropriate level of the use of consultants in the public serv...
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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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[spoiler alert!] As a fan of the “Hunger Games”, a dystopian trilogy where teenagers are thrown into gladiatorial games to fight till the last survivor in a world that is a blend of ancient Rome and modern America, I eagerly awaited its prequel “The Ballad of Songbirds and Sna...
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Suppose you agree with me that containment and elimination strategies pursued regarding Covid-19 do far more harm than good. Suppose you also believe that having an open economy and a vibrant close-contact social life is vital for the long-run health of the country. You want t...
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Posted in Politics - national, Life, Education, Society, Economics and public policy, Science, Media, Health, Death and taxes, Social Policy, Employment, Coronavirus crisis
https://youtu.be/w5WsRmgqe_M Early this year I published an essay in the Griffith Review critiquing what I called the competition delusion. I was passing by more common critiques of competition, which for instance argue that competition isn't necessarily a great idea in numero...
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Scrap attempts to reforming politics as a whole. From a practical point of view attempts to do so by legal constitutional change have no possibility of succeeding from a theoretical point of view, it is folly to assume that if we agree broadly about principle and are motivated...
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Slightly updated from its being published at the Mandarin . The catastrophe of Victoria's resurgence of COVID is a lesson in non-linearity. This reminds me of Paul Romer's recent comments to the effect that, since economists have foisted cost/benefit analysis on others as a on...
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[caption id="attachment_34150" align="alignright" width="402"] There were some pretty stupid illustrations of the post COVID economic recovery. The people in this picture are also doing something pretty stupid. But they're working for their living. They are not consultants, an...
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A couple of weeks ago, Shane Wright e-mailed me telling me that he was doing a piece for next weekend (the 18th) about the recession we're in, and how to get out of it. He was "talking to people who were at the economic policy coal face in the last recession. That means your n...
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An earlier version of this piece was published last week on the Mandarin . Because the idea I have called “the Evaluator General ” is several ideas knitted together to try to resolve a number of dilemmas, it comes with numerous implications that are often missed or misundersto...
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The UK Office of National Statistics data on the wellbeing of the British population shows a unprecedented drop of about 10% in average wellbeing in the UK since March 2020. Anxiety levels almost doubled, slowly returning to normal, but wellbeing remains low as people are prev...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3ZIC393egM Here's the transcript of my talk to Nudgestock which was held a few weeks ago. I was hoping to do it in London where it's normally held, but in the world of COVID it migrated online and acquired for itself an enormous audience. I was...
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Some of you may have noticed a Twitter account called ' Sarhanis '. In any event, Antonios Sarhanis is its proprietor and we got to talking on Twitter and discovered that we shared various maladies. He's interested in philosophy but pretty unimpressed with the way it's handled...
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[caption id="attachment_34097" align="aligncenter" width="900"] King Lear and Cordelia's Rejection[/caption] Welcome to Antonios Sarhani' s first post. I've got a brief post welcoming him aboard immediately above this post. Nicholas Gruen The ceremony and the circumlocutions o...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=fEHYX3J8Jm4 Note, this essay was published in three parts in the Mandarin and is published in consolidated form (complete with its footnotes) here. It is impossible to remember, until one gets in the country … that they care about th...
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Here is the second fragment on early neoliberalism. The previous post being on Hayek, this one is on Michael Polanyi. Both built their approach to the world upon their abhorrence of the Soviet Union – a position that was unfashionable among intellectuals at the time. But where...
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