This Internet, which any demented person, any drunk can get drunk and write in, do you believe it? The Internet is like a vacuum cleaner, it can suck anything. Any useless person; any liar; any drunkard; anyone under the influence; anyone high on drugs; can talk on the Interne...
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Having just watched Q&A on the republic (looking for my daughter who'd got herself into the audience!), I was intrigued by the post I've replicated below. I am the most luke warm republican around and have almost certainly put Chris Dillow's first argument below somewhere on T...
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Here it is folks , courtesy of Cafe Hayek.
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Ken's last post seeks to crowdsource ideas for teaching law students some of their cognitive biases. I'd been contemplating on posting on something I'd read in Supercrunchers, and this gave me the perfect opportunity. Good questions Ken. I can’t answer them very satisfactorily...
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A bunch of new rules are being introduced to Parliament today governing what is usually called the "financial planning" industry. Big new regulatory schemes often have large unintended consequences, and this one could too. But if ever an industry needed to change its behaviour...
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Nicholas Gruen's post about Einstellung (a person's predisposition to solve a given problem in a specific manner even though there are "better" or more appropriate methods of solving it) has given me an idea. I would like to devise a couple of seminars for undergraduate Law st...
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Speaking of $100 bills on the pavement , I haven't looked into this - but look forward to doing so at some stage. Given the preponderance of IT systems which generate real time data for their organisations - firms and agencies - why aren't we trying to do more of this with our...
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Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School. Niall F's website doesn't just tell uswhat a dashing fellow he is. It shows us. There he is - hair pinned back by the onru...
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Keynes famously said that the hardest part of coming up with the General Theory was not coming up with the new ideas so much as escaping from the old ones. I've just run into a great article on the implications of happiness research for making policy (and yes there are implica...
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I can attest to the truth of Krugman's claim that a zombie talking point is alive and well in the US, which hasn't really taken root here. It is that only the rich pay tax. That's roughly true here if you're looking at families (because of family payments), but it's based on a...
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Amongst developed countries, we're nothing special, ranking 51st. This is from the Yale Environmental Performance Index . Though plenty of caveats need to be kept in mind, and the report itself is full of the implicit assumption that everything is always and everywhere better...
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(memo to self) Probably the most significant geopolitical event of the last 12 months has been the regime change in the Arab world, where the 360 million Arabs [1] make up 5% of the world population . Though a small and relatively poor group in this world, they occupy the main...
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Last night's riot and torching of the Villawood Detention Centre inevitably brings the asylum seeker issue back into the political spotlight, especially on top of the similar incident at Christmas Island a few weeks ago. Some "johnny-come-lately" Troppo readers might have gain...
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This story triggered a bit of childhood reminiscence, not to mention reflection on how times have changed: A West Australian teacher who allegedly tied a five-year-old boy to a chair to punish him for misbehaving has been stood aside while the case is investigated. When I was...
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'You go with the information you had...' I'm probably almost the last person to have seen Charles Ferguson's documentary Inside Job . But the film is still showing in a few cinemas in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, so it's worth making a belated recommendation. If only for th...
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A pretty interesting article I think. Jeffrey V. Butler (Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF)), Luigi Guiso (European University Institute and EIEF), Tullio Jappelli (University of Naples Federico II, CSEF and CEPR) URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sef:csefwp:28...
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When John Quiggin accused Julia Gillard of embracing neoliberalism one of his readers suggested the PM was taking advantage of Ayn Rand's renewed popularity to chase the libertarian vote. Rand seems to be everywhere these days. With the release of movie based on her 1957 novel...
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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="640" caption="Cartoon purloined following Patrick's excellent advice @ comment 8. "] [/caption] As I've said at least once before, my own approach to economics could be described as looking for $100 bills on the pavement. I think they'r...
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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="498" caption="And what is this fetching picture doing here? Ask Google Images which popped this up when I entered the search string "the rise of science""] [/caption] In discussing 'open science' with someone today I thought I'd be able...
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In this week's Missing Link Friday: a British conservative blames women for inequality, Australia's PM celebrates the dignity of work, Americans argue about health care spending, and the Freakonomics blog reveals the damaging environmental impact of medical marijuana. Is femin...
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With miners and tobacco companies running well-funded campaigns against perectly reasonable government policies, it's hardly surprising that the licensed clubs industry is looking at similar measures to combat imposition of compulsory pre-commitment settings on poker machines...
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Fairfax columnist John Birmingham's column raises some interesting issues about the practice of tipping for provision of goods and services, especially the aggressive way tipping is pursued in the US where restaurant tips of up to 20% of the bill appear to be the norm. In Aust...
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A very reasonable request - so it seems to me - from Dave Bath who has asked me to post the guest post below. I guess there's a message there - not just for Auditors General but for all right thinking government agencies. It's bleg time... for people who'd like to get all Audi...
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Happiness and Tax Morale: an Empirical Analysis By: Diego Lubian (Department of Economics (University of Verona)), Luca Zarri (Department of Economics (University of Verona)) This paper presents empirical evidence that "tax morale" - taxpayers' intrinsic motivation to pay taxe...
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Nice to see a journalist with a memory. Not that there's much point in complaining about political actors acting like political actors - responding to the incentives they face. Business associations are into solidarity long before they're into principle. The one thing Keene le...
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It always struck me how inefficient universities were with most efforts going into lectures which were inherently a broadcast medium - so much so you could go and get the tapes of the lectures. Meanwhile, tutes were usually a bit of an afterthought and a place where grad stude...
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Someone labours to fit a set of events into a 'theory' which is a restatement of the bleeding obvious: regulators and the regulated talk and this influences the evolution of regulation. Amazing really. Further there is "a circular and interactive relationship between the regul...
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Wonderful publish. Severely, you’ve got received some excellent subject material right here and I hope to acquire again quickly to study some additional.
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In the UK, the coalition government is taking an axe to spending but it hasn't abandoned a commitment to fairness. At least that's what Nick Clegg and Iain Duncan Smith argue in a recent opinion piece for The Telegraph : Our welfare reforms are intended to help people get on,...
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Author and Fairfax columnist John Birmingham posts a truly delightful splenetic prescription for appropriate responses to the odious Andrew Bolt, in the context of current racial vilification proceedings against him by a polyglot assortment of prominent Aboriginal activists: T...
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Murdered toddler Evelyn Greenup Last night's Four Corners on the Bowraville murders of three Aboriginal children some 20 years ago in northern New South Wales made rivetting TV. It painted a picture of a dysfunctional Aboriginal community riddled with alcohol and substance abu...
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Ian Verrender in the Sydney Morning Herald recently wrote of Victoria's two oldest power stations that they were bought by their owners "when the issue of climate change was well known". Though he made that remark in the middle of a longer article focused on different issues,...
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Christopher Hitchens loves writing paragraphs like this. And it's fun when you come across them . How dispiriting to see, once again, the footage of theocratic rage in Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif. The same old dreary formula: self-righteous frenzy married to a neurotic need to...
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The Hatfield clan circa 1897 I had a long chat recently with an old mate from my politics days who I hadn't seen for some time. The conversation turned to Aboriginal affairs issues, as it does when you've both worked with and for Indigenous groups for the best part of thirty y...
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I've posted before on New Zealand's Regulatory Responsibility Bill which has become the Regulatory Standards Bill on its passage from advisory taskforce into the Parliament (and it's often referred to in this post as the Regulatory Responsibility Bill or RRB). In the spirit of...
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There's a certain macabre fascination to watching the NSW ALP's post-election recriminations , a bit like watching the aftermath of an horrific train smash. However, it's an essentially pointless exercise given that the size of the Coalition's majority means that there isn't a...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blB_X38YSxQ Feel free to share stories of good April Fools jokes in comments.
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I recently posted about the Christchurch earthquake and the way in which Crisis Commons was able to help. Here's an email exchange from someone in the crisis centre working on the government side with Tim McNamara who was doing a lot of the organising on the Crisis Commons sid...
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Two pieces of news. Best Australian Essays has published a 'best of the decade' book, and it pissed me off how closely they stuck to recognised 'names' in essay writing. I have a conflict of interest having had an essay in one of the annual collections. So take it as sour grap...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DxeCK5Ne_Q I nearly posted on this when the event occurred, though before the denouement. Australian Health Economist and bureaucrat Stephen Duckett was CEO of Alberta Health Services and, in some situation of crisis or at least heightened media...
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