John Quiggin

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here. Share this:Like Loading...

Daniel Kahneman, who was, along with Elinor Ostrom, one of the very few non-economists to win the Economics Nobel award, has died aged 90. There are lots of obituaries out there, so I won’t try to summarise his work. Rather, I’ll talk about how it influenced my own academic career. When I was an undergraduate, in the late 1970s, economic analysis of decisions under uncertainty was dominated by the expected utility (EU) theory of von Neumann and Morgenstern. The mean-variance...

Elections over the last week have seen some pretty good outcomes for the Greens and some very bad outcomes for both Labor and the LNP. Here’s what ChatGPT came up when I asked for a representation of Green Labor In the Brisbane Council elections, the Greens got 23.1 per cent of the vote, barely behind Labor on 26.9. The combined total of exactly 50 per cent wasn’t reflected in terms of seats, mainly because of preference leakage and exhaustion, but I want to focus on the longer...

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here. Share this:Like Loading...

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here. Share this:Like Loading...

Andrew Leigh’s The Shortest History of Economics is the latest in a series of such histories, mostly focused on particular countries. It begins with a striking mini-history of household lighting, focusing on the amount of labour required to produce the light now given off by a standard lightbulb: 58 hours for a wood fire, five hours for a candle based on animal fat, a few minutes for an early electric lightbulb, and less than one second for a modern light-emitting diode. The...

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here. Share this:Like Loading...

In a few days time, I’ll be lining up in the 65-69 category for the Mooloolaba Olympic triathlon (1500m swim, 40km cycle, 10km run)[1]. People in this age category are commonly described as “aging”, “older”, “seniors”, “elders” and, worst of all, “elderly” (though this mostly kicks in at 70). The one thing we are never called is “old”. But this is the only term that makes any sense. Everyone is aging, one year at a time, and a toddler is older than a baby. Senior and elder are...

My latest in The Conversation via my Substack If you believe Newspoll and the Australian Financial Review, Australia wants to go nuclear – as long it’s small. Newspoll this week suggests a majority of us are in favour of building small modular nuclear reactors. A poll of Australian Financial Review readers last year told a similar story. These polls (and a more general question about nuclear power in a Resolve poll for Nine newspapers this week) come after a concerted effort...

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here. Share this:Like Loading...