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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(Not to mention Overton’s Elephant and Overton's Mouse) With inflation stuck at 4%, what a terrible problem that it will probably take a deliberately engineered recession to get it back into target. If only the optimal rate of inflation were 4%. Oh wait … No-one can be sure wh...
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I recently published this musing in my Substack newsletter. And coming across a further free kick from the policy world — something that would have negative costs and do a lot of good — I thought I'd publish both. Think of this as continuing the series begun over a decade ago...
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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="507"] A young Mondrian in 1908 channels an old Monet but is really thinking “I wonder if a bunch of rectangles on canvas would sell? If it did it could solve a lot of problems, perhaps not for everyone, but certainly for me.”[/caption] O...
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Adolf never had much time for planet sensible. Here he is after the Reichstag fire with fellow traveller Sefton Delmer who was Berlin correspondent for the "Daily Express" from 1928 to 1933, To the left of Hitler: August Wilhelm of Prussia. In the middle of the picture, half h...
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Right at the outset of this conflict, I worried that Israel was overestimating the strength of its hand. In the US, the Israel lobby’s lobbying has been as successful as the NRA’s lobbying. And it follows a similar strategy — zero tolerance. It holds a very tough line and then...
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Amid Australia's justified concern over male violence against women, it seems worth keeping in mind our achievements. Femicide, in particular, has more than halved in the past three decades. Prologue 1 : Violence against women is a bad thing, and it's still bad even when, as t...
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https://youtube.com/shorts/_XXLgZ8rYew?si=i8EWpLRcHJ3-rpjF I recently took my son to the stage play of Yes, Prime Minister. … The decades have made a huge difference in the sensibility of the new production … . The series ran through most of the 1980s, a period that contained...
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Just a decade ago, Australian labour was easy to find and infrastructure projects were often no-brainers. Now our economic times seem to have changed, resources are constantly sucked up – and policymakers may need to adjust to a new set of rules. The world is always changing,...
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William Hague has caught the bug for democratic lottery. And he writes about it well. This simple sentence is a nice little microcosm. “Social media companies are poisoning the democratic world with the addictive spread of narrow and intemperate opinions.” Hear hear. Writing a...
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Michael Polanyi was highly suspicious of the hyper-reductionism of neo-Darwinism. It’s reduction of the evolution of a thing so vast as life into a single causal mechanism. And it was a good call. Darwin himself had proposed that natural selection was a major mechanism of evol...
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https://youtu.be/6uPex480hRU Above is the video of a presentation I made at NESTA in London on 15th November with discussants Claire Mellior and Martin Wolf. I reproduce (AI generated) timestamps in the shownotes of the video below. 00:00 - Introduction and Overview The talk b...
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The biggest winner from the referendum on the weekend is John Stuart Mill. There’s a strand of left-wing orthodoxy these days that deprecates free speech and brands opposing viewpoints as dangerous wrongthink. This firebrand mode of thinking is excellent at producing an engage...
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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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Wikipedia defines 'grey literature' thus: Materials and research produced by organizations outside of the traditional commercial or academic publishing and distribution channels. Common grey literature publication types include reports ( annual , research, technical , project,...
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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="506"] A brilliant illustration of the broad terrain of both concepts. It’s telling (and sad for a left leaning centrist like me) that this comes from the very right wing Claremont Institute . (Though their artist may have got it from som...
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Many of us still venerate books. The evidence says they are not very good at what is supposed to be their primary job: putting new ideas in our heads. We are slowing developing new ways to achieve this old aim. Many of us own thousands of these. They cost too much, too many ha...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aupVJkTnIqY This is one of the best podcast interviews we’ve done. We discuss Peter Heather’s marvellous book “Christendom: the triumph of a Religion”. It covers the thousand years from the time Christianity becomes embedded in the Roman Empire,...
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https://youtu.be/aBTFQ6wwlq8 The more I've thought about sortition or as I call it "representation by sampling" the more profound I find the ways it differs from representation by election. The latter is inherently competitive and performative and both these things tend to und...
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