Prelude: Lento It's after midnight and the other members of the household are either asleep or pursuing their own consolations in the silence of their own rooms. So, much as I might desire the consolation of recorded orchestral music played at concert hall volume, it just woul...
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http://youtu.be/nuIiqKytvnU I saw a preview tonight. Incredible, fabulous stuff. Go if you can.
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Interlude: Ruminations on 'the costs of speech', monkeys and Dexter In The 2013 PEN Free Voices lecture, reproduced on the ABC's Religion and Ethics web site , Waleed Aly makes the following observations on Freedom of Speech: … let us grind this out, beginning with a trite obs...
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Here’s a true modern puzzle for you: why is the rate of mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and obesity, increasing in the US, Australia, urban China, and most Western countries? Which mental health problems again? Depression, anxiety, and obesity are the bi...
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Simply Delightful : Conservative billionaire Gina Rinehart called for the sterilization of the poor today, arguing that the only way to alleviate poverty is to stop the "underclasses" from multiplying. In a video uploaded to her official YouTube account, the Australian mining...
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Stepping out in her new role for the Guardian, Katharine Murphy contacted me and asked me for an economic question to put to the PM. It was nice of her to ask, and I thought it a worthy challenge, but couldn't really come up with much for a day or so. I didn't want it to be a...
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Cross posted from the Lowy Interpreter Blog .* I was contemplating writing a post on Martin Wolf's latest Jeremiad on climate change when Sam Roggeveen sent me a link to his own post asking for my response to his musings on the same subject. So here's my response – or the firs...
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A Peculiarly Australian Cause Celebre In one of the less nebulous sections of the Liberals' curiously fisk-resistant manifesto i , you'll find this special promise for Andrew Bolt and his fans and supporters: Protecting freedom of speech – supporting an open media We will prot...
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In Saturday's Australian , Rebecca Weisser argues that the ABC is biased. To fix the problem she suggests creating "a commission of inquiry to rework the charter so that it stipulates that balance in programming is fundamental to the operation of the ABC". For political elites...
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On reading Sylvia Nasar's Grand Pursuit which I'm enjoying, I have been re-reading Keynes' fine essay on Marshall. One real mystery - at least for someone who doesn't know more like me - is Marshall's famous opposition to women's equality at Cambridge. Anyway Keynes has a sect...
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VIDEO: Goodes gutted by girl’s name-calling In the absence of Jacques intervention, Wordpress's coding interferes with my ability to 'embed' this video on Troppo but I recommend it. Funny how my team and those around it can be depended on to play the role of baddie - though of...
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Once again we're arranging ourselves into our usual trenches. Are you a free trader or a protectionist? And so we get the usual rehearsal of lessons from our recent experience as Ford closes. Fair enough. If you have to consume the lesson in a single slogan I guess "don't assi...
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This is sort of in the vein of the intermittent series ( 1 , 2 ), its adopted sibling and an older post on "hollowing out" . But it's also much less thought out. Earlier today, following the announcement that Ford would shut its Geelong plan t, Scott Steel tweeted The lesson t...
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As I said a few months ago , tax evasion is the big cliff in terms of the future of the EU project. It was thus fascinating to see the tax evasion games played out at the latest ‘summit’ In Brussels yesterday. To understand what really goes on at these summits, imagine yoursel...
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Well, as Ned Kelly may have said on the scaffold, "I suppose it had to come to this". Ford has been prosecuting a strategy of risk minimisation which has principally been about investment minimisation in Australia for at least a decade and naturally enough, if you don't invest...
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O ne of the most successful memes of the right in the last decade or so is that redistribution is the politics of envy. Of course politicians have to appeal to the emotions, and they have to appeal to all denominators including the lowest common ones. Well they don't have to a...
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Something I picked up recently in San Francisco. OK I don't own it, but got to play with one waiting in a queue and talking to a developer waiting to get into a function at the conference I was attending. I was impressed. It looks a bit weird, but you ignore it until you want...
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Jeff Sparrow on 'the Imbecilic Andrew Bolt' and Unseen Academicals : ...“My problem is not,” [writes Alecia Simmonds], "that our public sphere harbours ill-educated members (like the imbecilic Andrew Bolt who never made it past first-year uni)." Sorry? Anyone who doesn’t posse...
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With the Gonski reforms expected to be rolled out across Australia in the coming 5 years, it is handy to reflect on what actually are the basic challenges for school reform in Australia. A view of the underlying issues helps one to judge the likely outcomes of the current refo...
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Thanks to commenter Sancho for alerting me to the following post, by Sarah Kliff, at the Washington Post's Wonkblog (via Reading is for Snobs ). It had me chuckling all the way to the bottle-o and back on this dreary, rainy Melbourne morning: Readers ask, we answer! What happe...
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http://youtu.be/C8IlMYeS23w
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In an excellent recent piece on his own website , Timothy Devinney looks at how the compensation of Australian Vice Chancellors compares to those of the UK and the US. He gave me permission to re-use his calculations. Below I give you the guts of his story which, if one uses u...
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From the Bank of Canada's Financial Stability Review - Dec 2012 .
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Meanwhile political correctness idiocy proceeds apace. Here's an email I received today. Your expertise and experience . . . makes you ideally placed to inform this research. We would appreciate the opportunity to capture your thoughts . . . . The interviews will be carried ou...
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The book launch tour of Australia ended last week with a visit to the Melbourne Institute, where Deborah Cobb-Clark kindly hosted the last in our marathon-series of 5 launches. They all were a great success, with the publisher actually running out of books for the last one and...
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(You can catch up with Part I here .) One thing that's become obvious as I've read through the CIS's corporatist manifesto is that their TARGET30 campaign is very much a moral crusade with two goals. First, to reduce the burden (of taxation) on future generations. Second, to e...
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One of the peculiar features of debates about big monolithic infrastructure projects, such as universal broadband networks and high-speed rail lines, is the way their supporters talk about them in public. To advocates, the wisdom of these projects is obvious. You can never hav...
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By: Philipp Ager (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hes:wpaper:0038&r=his Wealthy elites may end up retarding economic development for their own interests. This paper examines how the historical planter elite of the Southern US affected economic devel...
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A Spectre is Haunting Australia: the spectre of Corporatism. Since March this year the Centre for Independent Studies has been promoting its new manifesto ' TARGET30 - towards smaller government and future prosperity '. TARGET30's stated goal is to get Australia's total govern...
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Australia needs intellectuals, says Nick Cater. In his new book The Lucky Culture he writes: A nation is entitled to look to its intellectuals to articulate its common purpose, to pull together loose strands and write a narrative that says where it has come from and where it i...
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Economic Conditions and Child Abuse by Jason M. Lindo, Jessamyn Schaller, Benjamin Hansen - #18994 (CH HE LE LS) Abstract: Although a huge literature spanning several disciplines documents an association between poverty and child abuse, researchers have not found persuasive ev...
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*Guest post by Paul "Gummo Trotsky" Bamford (I've invited Paul to join the Troppo stable/pony club, and am pleased to advise that he's accepted. So expect more from Paul very soon). The mythical – or legendary if you so prefer – figure of the dole bludger has haunted our polit...
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