I've been thinking for a while about retail and information flows. If sellers were performing their task in a socially efficient way, they would be conveying the best information they could to their customers. Of course retailers and marketers don't do that. They try to spin t...
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Someone asked me the other day for ten books on economics that they should read (not being an economist). I haven't given this a lot of thought, but here are some books - and some comments on them. I'm hoping the list can be filled out by other Troppodillians. John Kay, The Tr...
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Having just read this pussy footing review of this film, I am brought back to thinking about it, though not that much. I saw it last week in Sydney while killing some time before heading off to my hotel for the night. I was very keen to see it having seen it get five stars (th...
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By which I mean, one in which amazing, deep moves are made, and after a flurry of sacrifices, the king is slain, with each of its opponents' remaining pieces playing a role in dropping the final curtain. For those of you who care for such things, Enjoy!
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From Martin Wolf We have three alternatives: liquidation; inflation; or growth. A policy of liquidation would proceed via mass bankruptcy and the collapse of a large part of the existing credit. That is an insane choice. A deliberate policy of inflation would re-awaken inflati...
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Sydney Morning Herald 29 May 2009 An abattoir worker has been jailed for eight years for raping his 14-year-old stepdaughter and then blaming his crime on her wearing short skirts around the house. The man, who cannot be named as it would identify his young victim, tried to se...
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But then I would say that wouldn't I? Lawrence Lessig quotes an Australian economist explaining why free access to public goods isn't 'socialism', it's 'civil society'. Lessig's piece is below the fold. Et tu, KK? (aka, No, Kevin, this is not "socialism") May 28, 2009 5:57 PM...
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A triffic little service , allowing you to have a peek in 'real time' as we say, at the state of Sydney traffic. Click on one of the bright green diamonds. (Apologies if this is old news and you know all about it).
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I put quite a bit of effort into my two pieces o n Adam Smith in Ross Gittins' column while he was on leave and got quite a lot of positive feedback about them. So when I was asked to talk to an excellent conference organised by the indefatigable Fitzgerald siblings of QUT - P...
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The speakers were taking questions, and a member of the audience asked whether mandatory superannuation contributions had helped to insulate Australia from the GFC, by promoting saving and reducing borrowing. The keynote speaker, one David Gruen from the Treasury, replied that...
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Steve Keen recently produced an interesting (and sobering) look at the Australian real estate market entitled " Lies, Damned Lies and Housing Statistics ". In it, he takes issue with a number of fairly widely held perceptions, among them that housing affordability is now back...
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With John Quiggin proposing bets on the respective labour market performance of the US and Europe counting prison populations, t he Dutch are closing jails for lack of prisoners . Poor cuties. (HT: Michael Neilson )
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Penélope Cruz? You decide. I saw Elegy last night. It's been around for a while but hadn't caught my attention, mainly because I haven't been paying much. These comments will be of interest only to readers who have seen the film, and might spoil it for someone who still intend...
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[caption id="attachment_30918" align="alignright" width="580" caption="Artist concept of Kepler in space. Credit: NASA/JPL"] [/caption] From Universe Today The checkout and calibration phase for the Kepler spacecraft has been completed, and now the telescope will begin one of...
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The definitive experiment, February 2008 Here's the picture to accompany my comment on Nicholas's post about big things. My point is just that, as a design dictum, 'bigger is better' does not supplant 'all things in proportion'. Malcolm Oliver, no doubt the undisputed authorit...
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HT Gizmodo and Joshua Gans
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From Crooked Timber Jon Mandle On her show last night, Rachel Maddow provided a genuine service. [tip: TPM ] She reviewed Bush Administration claims about the link between al-Qaeda and Iraq (with clips) and ran that alongside a time line concerning the use of torture. This too...
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I was struck by Krugman's column on greenhouse . I've been working myself up into a lather of pessimism on greenhouse. Not only is this a really really hard problem to solve, but the way we're going about solving it is just so awful from so many perspectives, it's hard to innu...
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David, Cate and Andrew in happier (very recent) times - from SMH It's always sad when heroic high achievers begin to lose their powers, still more when they fail to age gracefully and succumb instead to bitterness and envy. But so it seems to be with David Williamson, once sai...
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Andrew Leigh asks : "are smokers more likely to vote for parties of the right (because they believe in individual liberty) or parties of the left (because they tend to be poorer than non-smokers)?" The answer in the United States is that smokers are more likely to vote Democra...
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Many years ago, as we were looking at a scrum in a rugby game being played in Towoomba of all places, a friend of mine commented that it looked like the quintessentially British institution! The other wise observation I have for you is that political think tanks on both sides...
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Grollo's Amazing Melbourne Tower was lambasted by the soft left as phallic. Perhaps it was. Perhaps it's because I'm a boy, but I just lerve things that are so big it makes me go 'Wow!'. (Unless they're unusually ugly, which they usually aren't). And we seem to get towards fin...
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This New Yorker cartoon by Australian cartoonist once plying her trade in the Good Weekend and now made good in the Big Apple is good fun on it's own. Turns out it's also a comp . I presume a caption comp. No reason we can't participate.
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Today's Canberra Times has a very pertinent article by John Pitchford on the benefits of the fiscal stimulus (no links). He makes three points: (1) Rudd's anti-recession economic stimulus package has effectively prevented much lower output, profits and employment (200,000 Aust...
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From Mark Thoma . Click through to his site or read over the fold. Bill Easterly sent me a link to the post The Vortex of Vacuousness that I posted the other day, but I like this one better: Maybe we should put rats in charge of foreign aid research, by William Easterly : Labo...
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With black to move, the threat of white capturing the f7 pawn in this position makes for an inevtiably wild ride. Even Fischer has lost as white in a good looking position. But I've never seen anything like this madness. The guys who fight this game out seem to have form. Here...
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I recently linked to designer Milton Glaser's ten point credo about life one of the points of which was this. PROFESSIONALISM IS NOT ENOUGH or THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT. Early in my career I wanted to be professional, that was my complete aspiration in my early life b...
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Ken: G'day Tab. Tab: G'day Ken. What are ya doin'? Ken: Just sitting here reading the Sunday paper and eating these squid satays ... Tab: Mind if I join you? Ken: Not at all. Pull up a chair ... Tab: What are you doing these days? (I represented him at one stage in one of his...
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I had a knee operated on last Thursday. Having had almost exactly the same thing done on the other knee a couple of years ago, I told my doctor I wasn't that happy with the way I was treated, and asked if he could suggest anyone else. Though it's a very minor procedure, it's s...
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Peter Thiel is a super-smart, super-successful businessman and libertarian activist. He co-founded PayPal , invested in Facebook and has pledged three and half million dollars to a project searching for the key to human immortality . He also thinks it was a bad idea to give wo...
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Remember how Luke Skywalker destroyed the Death Star ? At the crucial moment, the young Jedi switched off his targeting computer and used the Force to aim his laser torpedoes. It was one of the most important decisions of his life, and he made it, not on the numbers, but on in...
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Strength through joy wasn't such a big hit in the end, but fun through stupidity - now that's an inexhaustible well. Michael Neilson links to ten videos of chairs being used in various silly 'extreme' sports. Except for the very first office do, virtually everyone is a young m...
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The finish of this game is pretty cool. I would in fact go so far as to call it tres cool . Indeed, Adoph Andersson won plaudits in the nineteenth century infancy of the modern game of chess for his 'immortal game' against Lionel Adalbert Bagration Felix Kieseritsky(!) in whic...
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Paul Collier has finally 'nailed it' as they say on Australian Idol. Climate change is, in fact, infested with ethical baggage, much of it unhelpful. Lets get rid of some of it now. First, climate change has been hijacked by the environmentalist hatred of industrialized modern...
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Black to play A Yurgis vs Botvinnik 34. ...? See game for solution. about our puzzles
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"I must admit to having no compence in economics whatsoever" wrote Robert Manne in the Introduction to The New Conservatism in Australia (1982). He proceeded to demonstrate the truth of that admission by turning his face against economic reform and advocating the kind of polic...
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Mark Blaug (1937- ) was born in the Netherlands, raised in the US and became a naturalised Briton in 1982. He made far reaching contributions to a range of topics in economic thought. In addition to work on the economics of art and the economics of education, he is best known...
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Every cycle of monetary policy seems to bring forward some piece of confused thinking that somehow turns up centre stage. It's not as if monetary policy is easy - given the inevitable level of ignorance and the long and variable lags in the effect of monetary policy. But centr...
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I attended a graduation last week, and submitted to my usual ritual of explaining, to everyone who asked, why I sat in the stalls in mufti rather than on the dais in academic regalia. Some of my colleagues inform me that they hate graduations, either because they are bored by...
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There's lots of crowing by opponents of the right in both Australia and the US that the right are in grave trouble. It always looks that way. And in Australia it does look like oppositions spend a lot of time out of power. But there's always a lot of luck involved. Howard was...
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I enjoyed the launch of the John Button Prize in Melbourne last 'Thursday night. After the event I retired to a restaurant Button liked in Little Bourke St - The Shark Fin with two of his three sons, two of his three wives and two of what may be three grandchildren and some ot...
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Thatcherism is just another word for neoliberalism, says Kevin Rudd . It's been almost two decades since Margaret Thatcher left office and her record has been obscured by mythology. Sure she took on the unions and sold off some public enterprises , but did she really " roll ba...
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I'm pretty downcast having read Glenn Stevens latest speech. It's on the usual topic - the economy, its past fortunes and future prospects. I don't read these kinds of speeches much because I'm not an 'economy watcher' trying to predict the next GDP numbers and I have a strong...
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When Ross Gittins asked me to write a couple of columns in his place as he went on leave I agreed and realised shortly afterwards that they would coincide more or less with the 250th anniversary of the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments . So I decided I'd try to wri...
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