No Clean Feed - Stop Internet Censorship in Australia

Category Archives: History

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold … A post somewhat about China

Historically, taxing land (rents) and trade have been the dominant income sources of rulerships not reliant on labour service (not to be confused with taxes on labour income, which have a different dynamic).* Trade was a particularly attractive source of income because it often involved taxing outsiders. But trade was also mobile–too much tax for [...]

Bubble trouble: all information is not equal

This post is partly prompted by this comment and this paper (pdf) (via) on the US housing price bubbles and busts and (greatly) extends this comment by myself. It is also a response to the work of mathematician-turned-historian Andrew Odlyzko. In a previous post, I argued that easy monetary policy was not to blame for the asset booms [...]

The $34m Question

US car giant Ford Motor will shut all its Australian manufacturing plants by October 2016, after more than 85 years of making vehicles in the country. About 1,200 workers are expected to lose their jobs from the Broadmeadows and Geelong plants, in Victoria state. Ford said its Australian operations had lost A$600m ($580m; £385m) over [...]

Bubble trouble: not an easy money problem

The notion that “easy money” created asset booms is levelled (famously by Austrian school economists such as von Mises and Hayek) against the 1920s boom and by a range of commentators about the Great Moderation boom. In both cases, the Fed (dominated by Benjamin Strong as New York Fed Governor up to 1928 and by Alan Greenspan as Fed Chair 1987-2006) is held to be to [...]

Against free markets

The term that is. There seem to be few usages that are a greater barrier to clear thought and debate than free markets. Whether used as a term of sneering abuse to create straw-person arguments or as a slogan of the right and proper, it is ready-made to close minds and abstract away from the issues [...]

Of fact and fiction

Novelist Kerry Greenwood (the author of the Phryne Fisher books, now a successful TV series), has recently published a book on the Somerton Man mystery, Tamam Shud: the Somerton Man Mystery. The book interweaves Kerry’s memories of her late father–a wharfie who loved telling stories–and her memories of Adelaide with the famous mystery of the unidentified man [...]

Bubble trouble: about asset booms and busts

Assets are items that produce income or retain value across time periods. Gold is a pure store-of-value asset, as it produces no income. Bonds are pure income assets, as they have no value apart from the income they produce–they are best thought of as a congealed money stream, their value being set by that money [...]

Human societies as studies in relative scarcity: the price of children, the cost of capital

That modernising societies experience a “demographic transition“–a change from high fertility and high death rates to low fertility and low death rates with an intermediate period of high fertility and low death rates–is well known. The likely reason is lags in adjusting to changes in death rates. The price of children Having children is a [...]

Check your expectations (2) Women preferring Sharia

I am deeply sceptical about any legal recognition of Sharia on two grounds. First, it is profoundly misogynist, starting with the discounting of evidence from women. Second, it evolved as an imperial legal system. It does not claim to be a legal system for only the faithful, as Jewish law does, but God’s law, applying [...]