Latest Posts
Book Review: Bailout Nation, by Barry Ritholz
Today’s book review is Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy, by Barry Ritholtz, with Aaron Task. Barry Ritholtz is the author of The Big Picture, a blog I became addicted to when I was trying to make sense of what was going onContinue Reading
Book Review: The Pin Striped Prison, by Lisa Pryor
Today’s Book Review is The Pinstriped Prison: How overachievers get trapped in corporate jobs they hate, by Lisa Pryor. Lisa Pryor is a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald who got 100% in her HSC (school leaving exams). She started a law degree, but ended up a (less well paid) journalist,Continue Reading
Book Review: Nudge, by Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein
Today’s book review is Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard H Thaler, and Prof Cass R Sunstein. I’ve missed the zeitgeist with this one – this book was apparently very popular with Barack Obama’s policy team well before he won the election. And Sunstein is nowContinue Reading
How is Australia’s fertility? Hint, it’s the Gen Xers, not the baby bonus
The annual fertility statistics were released last month. There wasn’t as much of the traditional story about how Peter Costello had single handedly forced up the fertility rate by introducing the baby bonus (here’s a story here – reasonably staid), which was so prevalent a few years ago, but I thought wasContinue Reading
This (sartorial) life
On Friday, one of our major suppliers treated a few of us to a Boardroom lunch. It was very stylishly done, with good conversation about a mix of business and personal topics. Amusingly, as we were leaving, our host commented that it was a shame it was on a Friday.Continue Reading
Warning: Actuarial post ahead – mortality statistics
This week, the ABS released the annual mortality statistics – the analysis of all the people who died in Australia in 2008.. Overall, at a population level, the “standardised death rate” (deaths per 1,000 population, adjusting for a standard age structure) was 6.0 per 1,000 people – the same asContinue Reading
Why did Australia get out of the GFC so lightly?
By world standards, the Australian economy is doing very very well. Our unemployment rate was 5.8% in October, up from 4.3% a year ago. No banks have been bailed out. In May 2009, two Australian banks were in the world’s top 20 by market capitalisation (where Australia has around 1%Continue Reading
Flexible work – yes it is possible, and easier than you think to manage
I’m not necessarily the best person to write about this. I have a very full time job. Both maternity leaves, I came back part time, and ended up full time quicker than I intended, as it just seemed easier to go in for that meeting every single day… But IContinue Reading
Getting the right incentives for creative thinking
One of the things I’ve been doing lately at work has been setting KPIs (key performance indicators, for those readers lucky enough not to have to keep up with corporate jargon). Coincidentally, this TED talk appeared in my itunes podcast feed: Basically, Pink says that if you are asking someoneContinue Reading
Flexible work – does it make sense for an organisation?
I went to a conference at work recently – 60 or 70 senior people from my part of our organisation. One of the topics was how to improve the proportion of senior women (as an aside, I found it pretty amusing that all the men at my table were shockedContinue Reading