Today's column in the Age and SMH Public private partnerships (PPPs) haven't been such a happy experiment. Using private money to build arterial roads just increases their cost because private capital requires much higher returns than government borrowing. But I've long wonder...
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As a lifelong and warm supporter of the ideal of a United States of Europe (USE) stretching from the coast of Ireland to the Urals, I was interested to see the recent wrangling’s inside the EU about its future. The UK Prime Minister David Cameron has now promised a referendum...
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The smell of death, the river's breath. The cones and arms of gods, the barks of thin grey dogs. Beggar guards that corner you underneath a spire, Niggards that tell you of child beggars for hire. Students dreaming of Oxbridge, night and day, Studying books and looks the Engli...
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Word has just come in from Europe that there will in fact be a deal between the EU and Cyprus about keeping the banks in Cyprus alive. The basics of the deal are now that one of the two major banks (Laiki) will go bankrupt with losses to junior and senior bond holders. It is t...
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It takes a lot for a seasoned partisan pro like Dennis to react like this. It means he's not 'in the tent' and that's not much fun, especially if you still work for these guys on a freelance basis - though Dennis has plenty of other clients for his writing business. In any eve...
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On a previous thread, my counter-intuitive claim that verbal definitions are superfluous to science survived objections. I have been wondering if some further unconventional notions would survive a Troppodile attack. Because natural science is effective, I suggested that we sh...
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Is there discrimination on colour in Queensland? In order to find out if black and Indian people are a discriminated ‘out group’ in Queensland, together with Redzo Mujcic I carried out a large-scale experiment involving bus drivers in Brisbane. We sent test subjects of various...
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The Australian Pharmaceutical benefit scheme is a monopsony buy-in arrangement for medicines run by ministries. It currently costs tax payers about ten billion dollars per year (see page 3 here ), up from a paltry 149,000 pounds in its first year of operation, 1948! The upward...
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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="284"] White to play and win: Click on the image to play the game.[/caption] Meanwhile, in case you're interested, the Candidates matches have begun. We are two rounds in with the four strongest players in the world in an eight man (yes,...
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The graph below tells you the average number of hours worked in Australia from 1978 to 2013 per person per month aged 15-64. The key thing to note is that there has been remarkably little change over time in terms of the peaks of the cycle: in 1980 the average Australian betwe...
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Here's a paper that may appeal to some people's priors, and might have appealed to my priors before I got some experience on this. Most of my attempts to generate telework for workers have failed, not for lack of decency on their behalf but for their lack of motivation and org...
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As opposition leader Mark Latham vowed to wage war on poverty . It's an idea he revives for his latest Quarterly Essay, Not Dead Yet: Labor's Post-Left Future . According to Latham, poverty isn't about a lack of money. The dole is generous enough to cover people's basic needs,...
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The usual political debate inside our country revolves around conspicuous things concerning the top leaders, like whether someone has been overtly corrupt, promised something too loudly that they could not really deliver, is handing out money to worthy or unworthy causes, or i...
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Is Economics a House Divided? Analysis of Citation Networks Date: 2013-02-13 By: Sina Önder, Ali (Uppsala Center for Fiscal Studies) Terviö, Marko (Aalto University and HECER) We investigate divisions within the citation network in economics using citation data between 1990 an...
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Click on the image for the website from which it comes. Detail on the makeup of the index in the legend at bottom of the graphic. While unusually low female labour force participation sounds like bad news, I'm not sure that the higher the female labour-force participation the...
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The platform this is from has an 'embed' function but Wordpress has it's own, which, unless you're as clever as Jacques means you can't embed anything other than those sites they have programmed for. In any event you can click here .
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I heard that the South Australian Government had released a new logo on the radio. It was a bit of a talking point. So I wondered about it. Wondered if I wouldn't like it much and get to like it - like the Commonwealth Bank's one, or would just think it was a silly waste of ti...
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As I've argued on this blog before, standards are an important public good - and in the age of information, an increasingly important public good. Here's some good evidence of the value of high quality standards. The nascent market for “green” real estate in Beijing , by Siqi...
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The Decline of the Self-Employment Rate in Australia,Atalay, Kadir, Kim, Woo-Yung, Whelan, Stephen URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:syd:wpaper:2123/8925&r=ent This paper using the Australian panel data(HILDA) investigates the declining trend of self-employment rate in Austral...
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These two images dominate a marketing email that's just arrived in my in tray from Olsen Irwin Galleries. Guy Maestri Ball's Pyramid No.10 oil on linen 183 x 152cm 2013 Click to view details Emma Van Leest Ingenue archival paper, foamcore and glue 51 x 31.5cm 2013 Click to vie...
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In the past month, I ran posts on the limits to certainty in economics. On the theory side, I talked about how mathematical tractability limited the economic phenomena you can describe well with models. On the empirical side, the inability in social science to measure any abst...
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People of Groupon, After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding - I was fired today. If you're wondering why ... you haven't been paying attention. From controversial metrics in...
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Well everyone in my family and extended family are proud of Angus Gruen, my nephew who left Paris (thus avoiding dinner with his uncle and a burn under the seine in the Troppo Mercedes Sports 350 SE), turned up jetlagged and sick at Monash Uni to participate in the Physics Oly...
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You're invited to view more works here . Alas, there are no more works - at least on the page where they say you can "view all works". But I like this one.
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In this OECD report of falling investment, the culprits are "international uncertainty", "the euro crisis" and catchall "a deepening mistrust in the global state of affairs". Inadequate demand? Well it doesn't rate a mention.
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Here's Dennis Glover's go at articulating his dismay at the kinds of things I expressed dismay about here . I've always been amazed at the extent of antagonism that Labor holds towards the Greens. It seems so obvious that the right relationship between them is as occasionally...
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