ClubTroppo chief executive Nicholas Gruen - who was criticised by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull for his imaginary $5.6 million salary - has resigned from the job after seven years. Mr Gruen, who began the job in his own mind long, long ago, tendered his resignation to the Cl...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVRQK58jrbw You will no doubt be familiar with a fund-raising technique involving people coming to your door and asking for money for one cause or another. No matter how good the cause or how respected and established the cause, the technique se...

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Cross posted at the Mandarin There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order ofthings. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under...

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Can a democracy attract competent leaders, while attaining broad representation? Economic models suggest that free-riding incentives and lower opportunity costs give the less competent a comparative advantage at entering political life. Moreover, if elites have more human capi...

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https://vimeo.com/802540

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Crossposted from The Mandarin today where they almost never make comments :( [T]here is an Australia of the spirit, submerged and not very articulate … [b]orn of the lean loins of the country itself, of the dreams of men who came here to form a new society …. Sardonic, idealis...

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I happened upon this yesterday and thought it might be of interest to readers here. THE next few months may decide not only whether we are to survive as a nation, but whether we deserve to survive. As yet none of our achievements prove it, at anyrate in the sight of the outer...

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We use a novel method to measure racism at both the individual and the country level. We show that our measure of racism has a strong negative and significant impact on economic development, quality of institutions and education. We then test different hypotheses concerning th...

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I've written about the remarkable phenomenon of reality TV before , but just want to make a quick note of something here. The tweet above would have been unimaginable just a decade ago. I won't say reality TV caused the conditions that made it possible, but one of the things t...

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This post is based on a comment on an article promoting informed consent for experiments. I don't seem to have got a response from the author, so in case others wished to discuss, I thought I'd post it here. While most of the examples used were ones where I would have agreed w...

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By Tony Beatton ; Michael P. Kidd ; Stephen Machin ; Dipa Sarkar This paper reports new evidence on the causal link between education and male youth crime using individual level state-wide administrative data for Queensland, Australia. Enactment of the Earning or Learning educ...

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I've outlined some of the pathologies of what I call 'vox pop' democracy in various posts from time to time. As Western democracy degrades before our very eyes (President Donald Trump wasn't really imaginable a decade or so ago and is still hard to fully comprehend) we need to...

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In reciting his famous ditty, Henry Higgins offers a comical take on an ancient dilemma. This is a brief postscript to my essay on Care where I rather surprised myself by expounding my take on 'feminist economics' and the ethics of care. There's an inherent tension in feminism...

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