There are always more books to read than time to read them. But Paul Frijters' and Gigi Foster's An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks is on my shortlist. Foster's preface is personal and captivating: A longer-term cost that has come from working on this book...
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The journal 'Agenda', the policy journal of the College of Business and Economics at The Australian National University just released a piece of mine called ' Universities as Royal Courts'. One can download it free of charge (just click on the link). It continues my long-runni...
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One of the popular economic memes of the 2000s has been that Australian needs more infrastructure. It has filled out many a think-tank report . In the form of the National Broadband Network , it helped Labor win government in 2007. It has led to a current crop of serious propo...
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Don’t worry, I’m not after a date or anything. I won’t be stalking you round the hills of New England. It’s more the sort of crush I had on James Stewart after I saw The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, or Yves Montand whenever he played a resistance fighter. It’s a political kin...
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Like many, I was puzzled by the transformation in Gillard's public persona post-2010. The warmth, humour and sparkle she'd often displayed in parliament and elsewhere vanished. What remained was wooden, distant, usually dull and often irritating. Judith Brett recently made som...
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For decades the gun lobby has told us that guns don't kill people. If only people would stop pointing them at themselves and each other, guns would be completely harmless. It's not the availability of guns that's the problem, they say it's the individual's decision to pull the...
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I recall going to a lecture by Naomi Wolf at the Australian National Gallery in Canberra when she burst onto the scene as the author of The Beauty Myth which seemed to promise some new beginning after the sixties' and seventies' 'second wave' feminism. The obsession with women...
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Last week a prostitute was murdered on the streets of St Kilda in Melbourne, where I am currently living part of the time. Journalist Wendy Squires yesterday drew parallels between that crime and the horrific rape and murder of ABC employee Jill Meagher by serial rapist Adryan...
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Luddites have been with us from the start and always been proven wrong. New types of jobs invariably emerged to make up for those lost through technology, and our standard of living climbed ever higher. No surprise, really. Markets, providing they're relatively unhindered, are...
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I was visiting Wikipedia a couple of days ago when I happened upon the image to the right. "Ah, a new feature, how nice." I thought. Then a click took me to a dead standard Bing search. The "What's this?" text didn't activate anything. I thought "well that is odd, Wikipedia is...
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“Welcome all ye listeners, today we are discussing the new ‘Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’, colloquially known as DSM-5, the sequel to the hugely influential and popular DSM-4 that really put the American Psychiatric Association on the map. We are joi...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kFTtNKUivKk Well there I was, minding my own business - which as you know all too well is my wont, nay my metier, when what should I happen upon on the wires but the Flinders St Railway Station Redevelopment Competition si...
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Can't remember who first pointed me to ' Becks in Paris '. Whoever it was, I'm grateful. [The] blog imagines Beckham’s internal monologue as he collides with the Parisian intellectual tradition – the glittering surface of a footballing icon cracked open by existentialism. Gold...
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There are parallel conversations going on in social policy, says Matt Cowgill , "Values on one level, data another". How values and data interact is an interesting question. A decade ago, I was researching the debate over poverty. In 2003 the Senate Standing Committee on Commu...
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Today's Banking Day has the story of how Aussie John Symond avoided nearly $6 m in tax through an artificial arrangement which the Tax Office 'looked through' to send him a bill for the money. In 2004, the Australian Taxation Office started looking into Symond's tax affairs, a...
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(warning: the below is a bit of a rant!) The obesity epidemic is not just one of the greatest (mental) health problems of our time, set to become a more prevalent problem than hunger and more expensive to health systems than smoking, but it is also spawning new magical beliefs...
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“ they exert every variety of talent on a lower ground…and may be said to live and act in a submind”...... VS Naipaul “The Air Conditioned Bubble" Writing in 1984 about the republican convention of 1984 (the triumphant beginning of Ronald Regans second term), V S Naipaul wrote...
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Today was a pleasant day, right up until I came home and caught the news on ABC 24: Kevin Rudd has come up with the penultimate solution to the asylum seeker problem : Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says asylum seekers who arrive by boat will have no chance of being settled in Aust...
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Vote buying is a recurring theme in elections in ‘emerging democracies’. There are strong allegations it happened in the 2006 and 2012 Mexican elections . US elections normally have some party accusing the other of vote-buying ( through offering free food at election stations...
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Jon Altman is a Professor at the ANU Center for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research. His submission to the review is long and deeply grounded in long-term, first-hand knowledge of the indigenous art sector and remote area indigenous affairs more generally. It is a must read ....
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That Government bureaucracies at times create 'phantom employees' to publicly argue the 'public' interest-need for.... more bureaucrats, is a well known historical truth. What follows is what Paul Frijters called: A classic case of what Niskanen spoke about. The review has fin...
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I've written frequently on Troppo about the many ways in which equity and efficiency are friends , rather than enemies, although of course it depends on context. There are some ways and circumstances in which the two are in tension with one another. In any event, here's a fasc...
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Robert Waldman (who is unpleasantly aggressive and arrogant in his comments, but I digress) shows how Friedman's contribution to the idea that the Phillips curve would change as expectations changed wasn't much of a contribution at all. It was all in Samuelson and Solow - only...
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Pretty interesting stuff : In this article, we analyze the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, those who joined it, and its social and political impact by combining a wide range of archival data sources with data from the 1920 and 1930 U.S censuses. We find that individuals who joined the Kla...
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I was travelling through Los Angeles, New York, and Washington the last two weeks in a book-promotion tour . It was my first real visit to the US so I was collecting impressions on the people and the culture there. Some loose impressions from my egalitarian (Dutch/Australian)...
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Parts I & II our review of the Review. As of Monday 15 July the web page for Office Of The Arts review of its Artists Resale Royalty scheme lists 40 submissions. All but a few of these submissions are unfavorable to the scheme. In his submission , Ben Quilty, Australian War ar...
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http://youtu.be/ge7i60GuNRg
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Warning: Enthusiasm Alert. I've just got home from seeing the Crucible by Arthur Miller at the Melbourne Theatre Company. I thought it was a very good production. I thought I wasn't going to like David Wenham much at the outset as he seemed a bit strained. But that's perhaps b...
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"Welcome to the era of hedged bets and lowered expectations", says the cover story of Time Magazine . A poll of 18 to 29-year olds, found 65 per cent agreed that it will be harder for their group to live as comfortably as previous generations. But despite the lowered expectati...
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For 20 years some Australian school systems have been world leaders in giving schools more autonomy, and in trying to increase competition among them. Many countries are following suit, in the hope that policies to increase school competition will improve student performance....
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This is just some expanded and consolidated musing from Twitter. A few days ago I was thinking about The Fall of Icarus, the 16th century Dutch painting after Bruegel. It's probably most popular for near absence of the ostensible subject, Icarus, who is barely shown in the bac...
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Hugh White on Rudd and foreign policy : All this should make Rudd overwhelmingly the better choice as Prime Minister as far as foreign policy is concerned. But with Rudd nothing is ever that simple. Back in 2007 he came to office with lots of fresh ideas about how to position...
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The adoption of ARR as policy for governments (in about 2002) was driven by a small cluster of publicly funded, 'arts societies' management representatives, that were/are closely linked to a global network of copyright collection societies managements. The real aim of these lo...
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Bowling for Fascism: Social Capital and the Rise of the Nazi Party in Weimar Germany, 1919-33 by Shanker Satyanath, Nico Voigtlaender, Hans-Joachim Voth - #19201 (DAE POL) Abstract: Social capital - a dense network of associations facilitating cooperation within a community -...
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Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies th...
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The Muslim brotherhood in Egypt is currently feeling the full force of the repression apparatus of the military and economic elite. Sad to say, but the torture chambers will be busy at this very moment, demoralising the elected government and its core supporters. A sad week. I...
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I first got to know Tom Watson. OK I've never met him but we've corresponded when he'd just resigned as a Minister in Gordon Brown's Government doing many things to promote open government and I was doing the government 2.0 Taskforce. In any event, I've marvelled at Tom's morp...
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Greetings from Washington where we did two launches on 'An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups and Networks' . The launches went very well, thanks for asking. Due to its success, the book has gone kindle. I was just alerted to the video that UNSW put out on a discussion we...
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Cooperation under Democracy and Authoritarian Norms By: Björn Vollan, Yexin Zhou, Andreas Landmann, Biliang Hu, Carsten Herrmann-Pillath There is ample evidence for a “democracy premium”. Laws that have been implemented via election lead to a more cooperative behavior compared...
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Behind the contrived fluoro-jacketed appearances at workplaces, behind the simplistic sloganeering, is someone with a far more considered view of the world than his critics suppose. Abbott is comprehensible, but only on his own terms. You don’t have to like those terms, but it...
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