There is a widespread consensus in Australian policy circles that Australia should follow the US in almost any foreign adventure, though preferably on the cheap. The shining example of this was John Howard’s decision to publicly support the US in its war in Iraq in 2003, and y...
Continue reading →
Values are observed in actions and choices, and rather less so in words. Competition policy has been applied with great relish to the labour market – at least at the bottom end. (Subject to our relatively generous basic and award wage arrangements). So restrictive practices of...
Continue reading →
This is a guest post by Brian Schmidt. Actually it isn't, I've cut and pasted. I hope he doesn't mind. Important stuff. HT: John Walker Everyone in my office grew sick last week of my continual complaints about the state of the political polls. Not because of any insights into...
Continue reading →
I worked for the early Hawke government in 1983 and 1984 when I worked for Senator John Button. Hawke barely knew me then or later, but in 2003, I attended a dinner at Moonee Valley Racecourse in honour of the 20th anniversary of his election. Anyway, I happened to be at his t...
Continue reading →
Episode 5 of the final season of Game of Thrones showed us a vengeful fallen angle, Daenerys Targaryen, after whom thousands of children in the real world have been named. Even though her enemies had been defeated and surrendered, she nevertheless used her massive weapon, a fi...
Continue reading →
Posted in Life, Print media, History, Literature, Society, Religion, Films and TV, Theatre, Media, Geeky Musings, Law, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Social Policy, Democracy
Peter Dempster asked me to post this follow-up post to an earlier one of his . Nicholas A novel voting strategy for centrists Vote 1 for your preferred party but then do something very unusual – Vote 2 for the opposing party, symbolically joining the major parties on your ball...
Continue reading →
<SelfIndulgenceAlert>Stuart MacIntyre was kind enough to suggest me as a discussant on a paper on financial deregulation in the 1980s in a workshop focusing on Australia and the Bretton Woods conference put on by Melbourne Uni History and Economic History. (Yes I know it's a l...
Continue reading →
In 1900, the modern nation states of Europe faced many challenges in terms of how they were run, with poverty and disease still prevalent. The largest problems were more or less successfully addressed by 2000. The road involved world wars and civil wars, but the essential reci...
Continue reading →
Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Environment, History, Education, Society, Religion, Economics and public policy, Science, Libertarian Musings, Climate Change, Social, Ethics, Social Policy, Democracy
This recent essay in the Mandarin is a reworking of an essay I wrote in 2016 in a string of essays in which I developed the idea of the Evaluator General. I was following Gary Sturgess' suggestion that governments should not think of themselves as producing complex services in...
Continue reading →
Cross posted with the Mandarin Nicholas Gruen has argued that it’s much harder to realise evidence-based policy – both institutionally and intellectually – than many calling for it realise. Here he explains how putatively ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ approaches can, paradoxica...
Continue reading →
From around January this year I've tried to get the column below published – in the Guardian UK where my previous column was published. Unfortunately, and even after endless cajoling via the Guardian at this end, I couldn't get a reply which is piss poor but there you go. Mart...
Continue reading →
When policy problems are complex, we need to understand and learn from the front line. With desperately need to improve the early, middle and late stages of institutional learning and change-making, to enable successful policy development. From the recent Mandarin article . It...
Continue reading →
It’s impossible to avoid misjudgements in life or to get all one’s predictions right. But should economists get caught out quite so often. https://youtu.be/rWQ3jCURzy0 Paul Krugman is honest and self-critical. So he’s up for identifying what economists missed about globalisati...
Continue reading →
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="342"] Put in "Crikey" to DuckDuckGo's image search (Google is for data donating chumps) and you mostly get Steve Irwin and crocodiles. And Pauline, who, as we speak, is, between takes of Dancing with the Stars , fighting for second amen...
Continue reading →
[I just read a self-help book and, like Don Quixote, need to vent...] My 10 rules for becoming a successful guru: Appear popular at the start : humans are just like dogs that follow other dogs. So have a legion of disciples and followers. Make them up when you start out. Don’t...
Continue reading →
Posted in Life, Society, Theatre, Journalism, Libertarian Musings, Geeky Musings, Law, Space, bubble, Social, Ethics, Cultural Critique
I've just been reading some of Tim Berners-Lee's Weaving the Web about building the World Wide Web and it put me in mind of Paul Frijters' recent post on teaching the social sciences. Paul argued that: The biggest change needed is to teach the material in terms of basic patter...
Continue reading →
Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline could upend our thinking about our future of planet Earth with far reaching implications for policy on climate change, immigration and border control, defence, education, child care, and jobs, to name just a few. In the face...
Continue reading →
Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks The Trouble With You (Opening Night) Yvonne is the principled young widow of the local police chief who was killed in the line of duty. Each night she puts their young son to sleep with tales of his daring and bravery, and so natur...
Continue reading →
[caption id="attachment_32731" align="alignleft" width="640"] Friedrich Hayek was notoriously less savvy with photoshoots than some of his relatives.[1. Someone has since disabused me of the idea I picked up somewhere that Salma Hayek is distantly related to Friedrich.][/capti...
Continue reading →
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="740"] This essay is cross posted from Quillette [/caption] I It looks like liberal democracy is falling apart. But we can put it back together if we take democracy seriously enough—as seriously as the ancient Greeks. The chaos of Donald...
Continue reading →
