Bedside book pile

17 July 2011

Just as topics for blog posts are piling up, so are the books on my bedside table. I have always read more than one book at a time, but things are getting out of hand at the moment, and that doesn’t even take into account the books I have on the Kindle. In an effort [...]

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Cognitive dissonance

26 June 2011

Let’s say you think of yourself as a good person (bear with me for a moment if you don’t). Now you do something nasty to somebody. This leaves you with two contradictory thoughts in your mind: “I am good” and “I am nasty”. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, “doublethink” is quite routine, but in practice [...]

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Looking beyond the financial crisis

13 June 2011

The IMF has been busy of late, what with their attempts to stave off European sovereign defaults and shenanigans of its erstwhile managing director, Dominic Strauss-Kahn. I have been busy too (for rather different reasons I hasten to add) and so it has taken me a while to get to looking at the IMF’s most [...]

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Gibbons and welfare

5 June 2011

Regular contributor James Glover, aka Zebra, returns in a post that manages to combine gibbons, tax and a beer coaster. A question I often ask myself is how could gibbons possibly develop a civilisation comparable to our own? Gibbons are solitary creatures so do not form troops, groups or tribes. Developing and passing on knowledge [...]

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Why deficits are bad

2 June 2011

There have been many posts here on the blog arguing that government debt and deficits should not be feared, at least not in countries with their own free-floating currency and without foreign currency public debt*. In doing so, I have never discussed the reasons people may have for holding a contrary view. But I have [...]

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Action and reaction on climate change

22 May 2011

Regular guest contributer James Glover (@zebra) takes a closer look at the Coalitions climate change policy. Malcolm Turnbull, an Australian MP, did a rare and risky thing last week. He actually broke away from the political spin-cycle and explained some figures underlying the cost of the Coalition’s “Real Action on Climate Change” policy. Naturally he [...]

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Online music going backwards in Australia

15 May 2011

We have never been spoiled for choice when it comes to internet music providers in Australia, and things seem to be getting worse not better. Five or six years ago, I first came across the intriguing internet radio service Pandora which drew upon the painstakingly assembled Music Genome Project to generate customised radio stations. Entering [...]

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Return of the Drachma?

8 May 2011

It has been reported that Greece is considering leaving the euro and re-establishing its own currency*. More than a year ago, I argued that being part of the euro seriously exacerbated Greece’s economic woes, and for the reasons given there, I do think that re-establishing sovereignty over its currency is in Greece’s interests in the [...]

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S&P being silly again

20 April 2011

The debt rating agency Standard and Poor’s (S&P) has placed their rating of the US on negative outlook. What this means is that they are giving advance warning that they may downgrade their rating of the US from its current AAA level (the highest possible rating). Their actions were motivated by concern about “very large [...]

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Travels

18 April 2011

This is a quick post to reassure regular readers that I have not given up the blog. The hiatus between posts has been due to travel. Seasons in Australia are not as distinct as they are in Europe and when I lived in England (many years ago) I always found the arrival of Spring the [...]

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