 Read more »
One of the respondents to my earlier post on NSW electricity privatization accuses me of a possible “oideological bias against privatisation” and proceeds to make sweeping generalisation about the benefits of privatisation.. I thought I might clear the air on this issue. Read more »
This popped into my inbox about an hour ago from the CIS. I suggest you register your interest early as I reckon tickets will sell bloody quick. I will be going to the Perth lunch as a birthday present to myself. Anyone else going?
PJ O’Rourke speaks at the 25th Annual John Bonython Lecture and CIS Annual Dinner
Tuesday, 2 December 2008, Sydney
Monday, 8 December 2008, Auckland Read more »
A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill
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One of my grand kids is studying economics at the University and, to help him with an essay on current macroeconomic policy in Australia, he asked me three rather pertinent questions..
1. If there is an inflation problem which is overwhelmingly supply-side driven, as we now seem to have in Australia, and if everyone expects a significant slow-down in domestic demand in the year or two ahead, why are the Reserve Bank and the Government responding (or planning to respond) with demand-deflation policies? That is not what my textbooks tell me is the right response. Read more »
The new season of Australia’s Next Top Model has started. And you know what that means — each episode is being forensically funnied by PetStarr of Bland Canyon:
OHM OY GOURD CAN YOY EVEN BELOYVE IT?
ANTM is like, totally on again! And after winning fans, admiration and even the blessing of the anointed one, ANTM3 winner Alice Burdeu (I’m not kidding - see that big old quote over on the right there? That ain’t made up you know), I’ve decided to get back on the model rollercoaster and blog ANTM4 for your reading pleasure. Read more »
 And, in case you’re intersted, the book program is broadcasting from the Clunes Booktown, some festival in which Clunes - which is near Ballarat - invites booksellers to have a big book sale in Clunes - this Read more »
 As I’ve said ad nauseam on this blog and elsewhere, and quoting John Kay, the way we work out what’s good and what’s not is not by assessing it individually but by reputation. We know that Apple makes insanely great products not because we get our screwdriver out and check its specs, but because it has a reputation for d Read more »
The Canberra Times published today an opinion piece of mine on a topic I have been writing about since late November and is familiar to Club Troppo readers. My original version is set out below. For various reasons, I may not be able to respond to comments quickly. Sorry.
The economic outlook is uncertain. The Rudd Government needs to prepared for a worst case scenario involving a serious economic slow-down and unwelcome increases in unemployment – at least in some states - over the next two years. Read more »
A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill
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The updated copy of TinyMCE embedded in Wordpress 2.5 has bog ordinary indent and outdent buttons, of this approximate appearance:  .
This button essentially just adds a few extra tags in the HTML that say “push this over to the right by 20 pixels”. That would be fine, except that it buggers up a bunch of other formatting rules set by the stylesheet. Read more »
 I have about three draft posts, all unfinished on a particular theme which I have touched on once before here. The general theme is the growing viability of doing well by doing good. Read more »
 Love him or hate him . . . (when I grow up I want to be director of cliche management for Hill and Knowlton). Read more »
Writing a post about a Janet Albrechtsen column is almost certainly an advanced symptom of insanity, ranking just behind hairy palms and checking to see if you have them. Nevertheless, her effort in yesterday’s Oz about the alleged perils of an Australian charter of rights merits a response, if only because it appears to embody the current centrally mandated universal neocon talking point Read more »
I’ve proposed a theory of political momentum on Troppo before - somewhere . . . Read more »
A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill
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A whilc back ‘principle based’ regulation was all the rage. Outcomes based regulation is another catch cry. In an interesting paper Chris Berg of the IPA argues that the ‘mega regulators’ of Australia - the ACCC, APRA and ASIC - have now carved out for themselves such discretionary power that it’s a worry. We know so little about this that he may be right. Certainly the issues he elaborates on are worth considering. Read more »
Following my outlining of Web 2.0 ideas for the ABC on Counterpoint, innovator and entrepreneur Ralph McKay got in touch with me to tell me of his own efforts to develop online opinion markets. These are interesting because they’re not principally prediction markets. They’re devices to elicit the opinions of large numbers of people using the net. Elections do this of course, but in a less flexible way than the online opinion markets that one can develop on the net - where people can change the questions being asked and so on. Read more »
I’m reading one of the better Web 2.0 books around instructively and amusingly called Here comes everybody which Peter Gallagher told me today came from Finnigan’s Wake. I thought I was terribly clever when I discovered this book on the net within a day or so of it having been published and had it shipped here by Amazon. And then I saw the paperback sitting smiling back at me at the ‘new bestsellers’ part of Readings Bookshop. So no brownie points for me. Read more »
I didn’t want to let the Summit pass completely without sharing a few thoughts about it from an overseas Australian. Read more »
Karen Klapp 32, mother of five, has labelled the 2020 Summit a “boring dorkfest” and wants her money back.
Ms. Klapp was hand picked by the Herald Sun to represent the Bogan Community at this weekend’s national gathering, but her experience has left her cynical.
“Lots of big words and bulldust, is how I see it”, said Ms. Klapp. “They asked me to bring along a big idea, but I don’t reckon they’ll do it. Read more »
Quoth Christopher Pyne in an interview on ABC Radio this morning:
There are a thousand ideas, there are 660 minutes of discussion on the summit program, which means for every idea there are 39.6 seconds put aside for discussing that particular idea.
So far this claim has been repeated by the ABC and others, without contention, for about 4 hours. It’s a great soundbite.
But 39.6 seconds of contemplation will show that Pyne’s maths is faulty. It runs thus: Read more »
 The Fin asked me to write my summit idea up for them - so I did.
150 years after Adam Smith first expounded the miraculous way the market’s ‘invisible hand’ transforms private self interest into social prosperity, some economists argued that we could achieve the same result with sufficiently sophisticated government planning. Read more »
A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint.
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So yesterday I lost my temper at a monumentally silly bit of policy making on-the-run by the new ALP government. After that tantrum I learnt that there was both more — and less — than met the eye.
To start with, let’s review what Julia Gillard said yesterday to start the whole shitstorm: Read more »
We’re running slowly because the database server our installation of Wordpress relies on has suddenly decided to go bananas. I’m trying to find out why but nothing really obvious is coming up. It’s got a solid 100% utilisation on one of our 4 CPUs but nothing appears on the process list. Any MySQL wonks out there who might have an idea of what in tapdancing buggery it’s up to? Read more »
I honestly thought that the Coalition had set the low point for IT policy in Australia. Between Richard Alston and Helen Coombs the whole scene was comprehensively botched; Mark Vaille’s being utterly sucked in by slick US negotiators in the FTA negotiations — and the Chapter 17 trainwreck we got from his ignorance — just set the seal on it. Read more »
 I don’t know the ins and outs of gambling in Victoria. But I was amazed at the article by Stephen Mayne in Crikey! Victorian Premier John Brumby has acted to break the duopoly that holds licences to host poker machines in Victoria. Clubs will be able to bid for licences as well. I believe the decision does not increase the number of machines, but just allows greater competition for the right to host them. Read more »
  Hat tip Joshua Gans.
Yesterday, BG picked up one thread of the “mega blog discussion” kicked off by Don Arthur. I want to pick up another. In the discussion on Arthur’s post, BG and I seemed to agree that, apart from a firm safety net which encouraged able-bodied people to work, the social policy goal should be to strive for more equal opportunity rather than more equality of outcomes per se (although the first generally leads to the second). Read more »
Subject to my usual caveats, Kevin’s next post on tagged money is below the fold.
A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint.
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For better or worse, here are my answers to the two compulsory questions for those wishing to make it to the summit. No surprises for regular Troppo readers - I’ve learned the art of repetition. But they could have had any number of other ideas. A few ideas promised for Troppo readers in the next few weeks if I can get a moment.
If you want to get stuck into these ideas in comments, feel free, but remember I had to squeeze them into 100 words. Read more »
A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint.
Politics
Australian
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint.
Politics
Australian
 Read more »
 Here is a book review that has recently been published in Policy Magazine.
Book Review: Full disclosure: the Promise and Perils of Transparency, Cambridge University Press, New York.
By Fung, Archon, Graham, Mary and Weil, David, 2007. Read more »
What shape is the income distribution of Andrew Leigh’s dreams? Even he doesn’t know. "I don’t have a strong sense of what the right level of inequality is", he writes. "Indeed, I’m not even sure I have the right intellectual framework for answering the question." Read more »
Per pestering by Dave Bath:
TOPIC 9: The future of Australian governance
“Google Government” should be a motto going forward. FOI should be altered to place the emphasis on departments to decide at the point of creation whether a document is sensitive; the default should be full disclosure. All possible government documents and data should be accessible and queryable by any member of the public. Read more »
In writing this article, it occured to me that one way to describe my own approach to economics is the search for the $100 bill on the pavement. Read more »
A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint.
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint.
Politics
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I can’t really blame Australian Young Labor for attempting to clamp its collective lips on the public tit in the wake of the Rudd government’s accession to power. Read more »
 Having confused some people with my implicit definition of a ‘paradox’, I’m now going to let people down with some more observations. Why? Because it was in the process of writing what will become this post that I wrote the first part as an introduction. And now I realise that some people will think that part one over-promises. Read more »
Quite a while ago, Kevin Cox approached me with an idea he had called ‘energy rewards’. Kevin may wish to chime in on comments with an appropriate link to the best explanation of the idea. In any event it’s a method of generating purpose specific permits or certificates which are given out as a reward, and is then constrains the beneficiary to spend it in a certain way. One might earn energy rewards by reducing one’s consumption of energy and the rewards would be in the form of a subsidy for the purchase of items that might help you reduce energy consumption - Read more »
 On and off over the past few months I have received emails to say that our feeds don’t appear in aggregators like Google Reader or Bloglines. Or that they turn up late in big bunches. Or days in arrears.
Each time I would fire up my browser, navigate to the feed URL, confirm that the feed was feeding, and promptly blame Google or Bloglines; sometimes for variety I blamed Wordpress.
Then yesterday I got an email from James Andrewartha. He wrote: Read more »
A Troppo reader thoughtfully emailed me to point out that our clock was way out of whack. For some reason Wordpress had decided to set its time to GMT+22, which means that comments in the last day or so have all come to us (cue spooky theremin music) FROM THE FUTURE, duh duh daaa!Don’t be surprised if things show up in weird orders.
 Here’s an example, but there’s a whole gallery of pretty amazing landscape’s here. Not bad for an (excellent) economic journalist.
A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint.
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Steve Randy Waldman’s blog interfluidity is a good read. He’s a knowledgeable fellow with a penchant for trying to work things out from first principles. He’s good to read on what’s wrong with hedge funds and much else besides in modern financial markets. Read more »
The Australian reports breathlessly that Lindsay Tanner can’t guarantee that no working families will be worse off, nor that interest rates won’t rise in the future. Nor can Malcolm Turnbull, or Kevin Rudd or anyone else. Or to put it more fully, they can’t but if they did they’d be lying or stupid. So where’s the story?
I guess in raising the luxury car tax no one can guarantee that there will be fewer accidents on the road, or more accidents on the road. Read more »
I haven’t paid much attention to Telstra’s participation in the public policy debate. It usually manages to get itself seen in a fairly poor light at least if one is not paying much attention as I haven’t been. Even so, I’ve just read this speech by Phil Burgess (pdf), and I’m impressed. I’m impressed with it because its argument is interesting, and quite persuasive - except for one thing. Read more »
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We’ve had web-translation for yonks. 
In all the relevant senses of the word. 
Courtesy of 
I missed 
If you’ll allow me my fancy, it occured to me that, mutatis mutandis,