If you'd like to be in this year's submission to Crikey for a group submission, please email me on ngruen AT the domain formerly known as gmail (and still known as gmail). And please spread the news far and wide using all the means – inane and otherwise – at your disposal.
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Cross-posted on The Mandarin : To quote Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King in 2010 “of all the many ways of organising banking, the worst is the one we have today.” As I documented in part one , the Bank of England continues as a thoughtful critic to this day. And as we’ve...
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https://youtu.be/LHrvQ7qaadE If you're a chess player who's touched with the human weakness of impatience or just liked to be engaged and see things develop – as we almost all do on our smartphones, checking our emails over 100 times a day – it's hard not to be drawn to speed...
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In the engine room of nation states, ie the tax departments, the coming battle with platform providers is taking shape. Uber, airbnb, facebook, linkedin, ebay, jobseek, and a myriad of specialised platform providers facilitate micro-trades that are largely untaxed by the autho...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, regulation, Political theory, Law, Information, Intellectual Monopoly Privileges, Innovation, Social, Intellectual Property, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Employment
Most contemporary discussions of how to improve politics focus on problems of representation and power. When I come along and want to thrust getting better decisions into the forefront and claiming that a certain sort of untried forum could get improved results even without ch...
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Anglo-Saxon countries are often heaped together as having a single culture. When it comes to migration, attitudes to sex, teenage-pregnancy, inequality, language, and bellicosity, that seems about right. At least, the UK, the US, and Australia are pretty close on those scores....
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, History, Humour, Libertarian Musings, Geeky Musings, bubble, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Bullshit, Indigenous
[caption id="attachment_31685" align="aligncenter" width="1000"] "Arrival" by Brett Whiteley, painted for the Bicentennial celebrations of the arrival of the First Fleet on 26 January 1788[/caption] We’re a weird mob, we Australians, even weirder than we were in 1957 when John...
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In many areas of policy, particularly where relatively homogeneous communities deliberate about matters within their everyday experience, the informal processes of discussion in the community can, and often do, lead to changes in public opinion that in turn lead to effective p...
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A post by John Burnheim. About ten months ago, John Burnheim wrote to me in terms I've reproduced on this blog previously. John was one of the early movers in academia exploring the limitations of electoral democracy with his book Is Democracy Possible published in 1985 and th...
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* cross-posted from Screen Hub . The #MeToo sexual harassment tsunami generated by the unmasking of American screen industry heavyweights Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey has hit Australian shores with a vengeance. As an old Monty Python sketch observed: ‘Nobody expects the S...
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From today's column in the Guardian UK. There’s a chasm between the will of the British people as expressed in their 52 percent vote for Brexit and their considered will. Turns out ordinary Britons deliberating amongst their peers think things through, ‘unspinning’ much of the...
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Australia has a backlog of issues that will need to be resolved by constitutional referendum sooner or later: Indigenous recognition (especially the Voice to Parliament); resolving the problems caused by archaic and unworkable parliamentary disqualification rules in section 44...
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I was rung yesterday by Ida Argy, wife of Fred Argy and she told me that Fred had recently had a stroke from which he did not recover. Fred was rather like my Dad Fred. A Jewish immigrant – Dad was from Austria (via England) and Fred was Egyptian, though I think both were non...
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Reposted from the Mandarin I In our contemporary lexicon 'independence' – for instance of a government body – is usually a Good Thing. [1. other Good Things include 'appropriate', 'modernised', 'reform', 'enhance', 'principled' It's sobering to realise how rhetorical we are. T...
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Do black politicians matter Abstract: This paper exploits the history of Reconstruction after the American Civil War to estimate the causal effect of politician race on public finance. I overcome the endogeneity between electoral preferences and black representation using the...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRrlkEqWpZA&t=12s Here's a presentation I gave at the anniversary of Australian Policy Online which has been cunningly rebranded under its old acronym as Analysis and Policy Observatory. I gave a similar one at Kings College London a few weeks p...
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https://youtu.be/tXlM99xPQC8 Well there's been a frisson of excitement in the chess and AI world lately with the extraordinary performance of AlphaZero – essentially the computer that mastered the game Go – a game which proved, despite the relative simplicity of its rules, a m...
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https://soundcloud.com/britishacademy/the-redescription-of-enlightenment Last night, having read a fantastic essay (pdf) by the great historian of revolutionary and pre-revolutionary America Bernard Bailyn, I made my way to the lecture series in honour of Isaiah Berlin where t...
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The extraordinary outpouring of national happiness following the passage of the same sex marriage legislation on Thursday unavoidably gives rise to the question of whether some similar community consultation/plebiscite/survey mechanism (perhaps a well-designed and secure onlin...
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The EU and the UK government have just agreed to muddle on in their negotiations. Nothing is truly decided until everything is decided, but they have adopted a position document (see here ) that details what they want the next steps to look like and what they will do in case o...
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