Sandpit
A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on.
Articles from John Quiggin
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Monday Message Board
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.
Census crowdsource (repost)
In 2012, I crowdsourced an analysis of the census results, looking at the extent to which the increase in religion was driven by changes in stated affiliation from religious to non-religious, as opposed to the demographic replacement of older more religious cohorts by younger, less religous ones. A couple of wrinkles on this
Are the Nationals a political party?
I’ve made this point before, but I’m constantly reading articles about the rising share of “protest” votes going to “minor parties” in which the set of minor parties excludes the National Party. The reason is, of course, that the Nationals are a long-established party which, with a few state-level exceptions, operates in permanent coalition with the Liberals.
Technology to the Rescue ?
There’s been a fair bit of buzz about an article in New York Magazine with an apocalyptic picture of climate change over the next century. I’ll for a more complete response later. But as it happens, I was already thinking about a much more optimistic post.
Monday Message Board
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.
Not the way to bring down a government
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Labor is launching court action with the objective of having a government minister disqualified from holding his seat in Parliament.
My latest weekly email
The seventh in my (almost) weekly email series is over the fold.
Expertise and punditry
I concluded my post “Against Epistocracy” with the question “Who gets to decide who is well-informed? And who gets to decide who gets to decide?”. This is, I think, a fatal flaw in any system proposing to replacing democracy with rule by a well-informed elite, or any kind of putative aristocracy. But even in a democratic system, we have to make decisions about who should decide things.
Governments are buying up where the market has failed. Is this the end of privatisation?
That’s the title of my latest in The Guardian. The write-off sums it up nicely.
What we are seeing is the inevitable chaos that follows the collapse of a dominant orthodoxy. But we shouldn’t see it as a new dawn of socialism