Latest Posts
Actuaries as ostriches
The Institute of Actuaries of Australia does a quick (36 seconds is the promise) survey of its members once a month, reported in its imaginatively titled magazine Actuary Australia. Of the 345 respondents (self selected, but a good proportion of all the actuaries in Australia) 35% don’t believe that globalContinue Reading
Election geeks
We had a small party at our place for the election last night. I realised how well I’d chosen the guest list when the people that didn’t know each other started comparing notes on how much they loved Antony Green. This was the preparation I did for the evening: TheContinue Reading
Book Review: the Death and Life of Great American Cities
Today’s review is The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. This is a book I never would have read without my blogging habit. When she died last year, several of my favourite bloggers wrote about her. The book is an indictment of pretty much everything aboutContinue Reading
Interest rates
A friend of mine pointed out to me (you really should get your own blog, Brian!) that the discussion of who is a better economic manager by reference to absolute levels of interest rates misses some fairly fundamental points about how much is inside the control of the people managingContinue Reading
Jury again
One of the reasons (apart from general laziness) that I didn’t do Globlopomo is that I was called for Jury service for a month starting today. But I’m posting now because I got off. I got as far as sitting in the jury box of a trial of someone for sexualContinue Reading
Voting for children
Michael Duffy, in the SMH last week (although it seems to have disappeared from their website), mentioned in passing how many issues seemed to be setting the older generation against the younger – global warming, the aged pension, housing policy, even economic policy – the interests of the older generationContinue Reading
Productivity gains from niceness
I’ve long had a theory that psychological bullies in the workplace have a real productivity cost. And wandering the McKinsey site looking for something else, I found an article that suggests they do. The article seriously suggests that you calculate the “total cost of jerks” in your workplace – ifContinue Reading
Senate voting
I’ve always been one of the 4% of voters (Antony Green) who voted “below the line” in the Senate*. Every person who admits to sharing this obscure habit always comes back to one reason, “I wanted to vote [XXX] last”. So this year, with the release of the Senate ballotContinue Reading
Maternity Leave – the economics
Paul Frijters at Club Troppo has a post up about maternity leave – a disucssion of the recent policy announcement from the Greens and the Democrats to guarantee 14 weeks of maternity leave (at minimum wage) and the pros and cons from an economic perspective. I commented there that IContinue Reading
Effects of Diversity on performance
I recently read two, at least superficially contradictory, pieces of research on whether gender diversity improves performance. The first (abstract here), reported in the International Herald Tribune, studied performances of mutual funds managed by different combinations of men and women. The all male and all female teams did about theContinue Reading