Something very odd happens when people get told a story of how other people with some shared characteristic have behaved in the past: they take it personal and see themselves in those ‘ancestors’, even if they share no actual family relationship to those people and even though...
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If, as I think, academia has gone from being inefficient but effective to being efficient but ineffective (a proposition I won't defend here), the mechanism for making the switch was going from embodied cognition to abstract Cartesian cognition, or to be more precise from a ri...
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Pedantry is alluring. Especially if one gets some aesthetic satisfaction from the way words are used. Take "begs the question" for instance. I love this term because it is such a simple, chummy way of naming something that's maddening in is subtlety. To beg the question in its...
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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks Military Wives (Opening Night) The life of a military wife can be thankless. Separated from loved ones, their suffering and sacrifice go unnoticed while they live with the dread of a fateful knock on the door. But Kate finds freedo...
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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks 1968 (Opening Night) April 4th, 1968: Greece is under right-wing military rule. In Athens, 80,000 people have gathered at the stadium, while millions are glued to their radios — like the tram driver who witnesses a miracle, the wid...
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Let's first agree that if Trump is a blessing in disguise for world peace, he makes an exceptionally good disguise. Trump's bark is probably the worst of any US president in living memory. He has threatened the total destruction of North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and probably a...
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Sometimes we should just be grateful in this country for the steady hand on the tiller at the very highest levels. People might mock but it's easy to mock. Philip Lowe wants us to take a bow! I don’t think we should forget that more Australians have jobs today than ever before...
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Things are shaping up for extraordinary developments in the UK, and I'm not talking about Brexit. Well, I am, but not directly. I'm talking about strategic or tactical voting. In Australia we are mightily protected from such dilemmas by preferential or instant runoff voting wh...
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Are you dismayed at getting 100 emails a day you need to wade through, disturbing your concentration? Does your administration bother you constantly with things you just ‘have to be aware of’? Are you tired of the ‘executive reports’, ‘award notices’, 'compulsory breathing tra...
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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks The Champion (Opening Night) Christian Ferro is a young superstar striker for Roma. Growing up in a rough area is a far cry from the millionaire lifestyle he is now living, which has attracted party-animal friends from home as well...
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The family cycled from Berlin to Tallinn this year, giving me an opportunity to see how Poland and the Baltics have fared after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990s. Some observations: - Poland is doing well. Agriculture there is as organised and productive as in Germany,...
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There is still, I think, not enough recognition by teachers of the fact that the desire to think – which is fundamentally a moral problem – must be induced before the power is developed. Most people, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a...
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If these kinds of things existed in my country, I wouldn’t need to be running for President to fix everything up. Elizabeth Warren The only thing that didn't leave a nasty taste in my mouth last year was the food. Barry the hypothetical troll from last year (He's been debunked...
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Delivered at Melbourne University, Friday 19th July, 2019 and cross posted at The Mandarin . Welcome to the launch of another book by Australia’s most overachieving economist. A global authority on decision theory, he also publishes in the daily press, in submissions to govern...
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Cross posted from the Mandarin There is a huge catch 22 driving impact measurement in human services. A lot of the evaluation is done because governments seek it, but then it goes nowhere – and for good reason. NGOs and others hoping to 'scale-up' innovation can’t escape this...
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[caption id="attachment_32902" align="alignright" width="381"] You might think that on a post about counterfactuals, we'd have a picture of sliding doors together with two contrasting pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow. But you'd be wrong. We're full of surprises here at Lateral Econ...
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Here's Phil Lowe reporting on the RBA's failure to meet its performance targets and refusal to do anything about it: This decision [to cut rates by 0.25%] was not in response to a deterioration in the economic outlook since the previous update was published in early May. Rathe...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7tvauOJMHo Lateral Economics has been commissioned by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to estimate the value of the Australian Census to the Australian community. As part of that exercise we've got the go-ahead from ABS to do something...
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Yesterday I was chatting online about Wednesday evening's dreadful shooting massacre in Darwin (like many shocked people here). I posted a comment listing the various murder scenes, saying: "A fourth was murdered at 18 Gardens Hill Crescent (or Gardens Rd, not sure which)." A...
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[caption id="attachment_32881" align="alignright" width="300"] An interesting graphic which the SMH thought was better presented in a form in which you can't read whatever was near the right hand margin. NG (ed)[/caption] Claims of a left-wing bias at the ABC are seldom absent...
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