Posted in Australian Politics, Economics, Feminism, Parenting, Work and life on 25 May, 2008 | 6 Comments »
The campaign for paid maternity leave in Australia has gotten renewed vigour following the recent change of government. The government has asked the Productivity Commission to enquire into what should be done.
And there are a lot of blog posts about it. Joshua Gans has written a series from an economic point of view, which culminates [...]
Posted in Economics, Education on 22 May, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Today the teachers went out on strike in NSW - over recruitment policies for schools. The SMH had two conflicting letters next to each other from teachers:
The Government’s tinkering with a fair, time-tested and successful transfer points system is just the latest unintelligent act that will make recruiting quality teachers more difficult.
and this one
As a [...]
Posted in Economics, Education, global warming on 15 May, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Mr Penguin alerted me to this interested article in Wired. As you would expect, in the US, Republicans are more likely to be sceptical about global warming than Democrats. Environmentalism has always been found more on the left than the right, and Republicans have more to lose from action that makes energy more expensive.
But college-educated [...]
Posted in Economics, tagged Health care on 12 May, 2008 | No Comments »
As part of the carefully scheduled program of budget leaks, the government has leaked a likely change in the medicare levy in this weeks’ budget.
A few blogs have comments - Larvatus Prodeo, wonders whether this will increase the pressure on the public system with a long comment thread, covering all sorts of health economics ground, [...]
Posted in Australian Politics, Economics, global warming on 3 May, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Sydney’s water crisis is over, for the moment. Our dams are now 65.5% full - up from 33.9% on the 8th February 2007. That will last us around two to three years without any more rain, at the current rate, which feels like a reasonable cushion. Not coincidentally, Sydney’s water consumption went from an average of 1,800 or so [...]
Posted in Australian Politics, Economics on 6 April, 2008 | 3 Comments »
The Sydney Tele yesterday had a front page screamer about Glenn Stevens, Governor of the Reserve Bank - Is this man Australia’s most useless? There were two main parts to the critique. First, that the Reserve Bank should be stopping the banks from raising interest rates beyond the official cash rate;
“it is a key part of [...]
Posted in Economics on 18 March, 2008 | No Comments »
Many column inches have been spent in the past couple of days analysing the Fed’s decision to prop up Bear Stearns while it found a buyer - in the end JP Morgan agreed to buy it for around 10% of the trading price a week before.
What the Fed did was to provide liquidity - effectively [...]
Posted in Australian Politics, Economics, Parenting on 1 March, 2008 | 4 Comments »
When you have a new baby, suddenly you notice them everywhere. Certainly, that’s how I felt with Chatterboy. I assumed that in my formerly childless state, they’d always been there, but I hadn’t noticed them before. But I’ve just been looking at the census statistics for my local area, and it turns out that, like [...]
Posted in Economics, Life, Parenting on 25 February, 2008 | 3 Comments »
The Penguin family (99% Mr Penguin) does a fair bit of volunteering around the place. But we also live in a quite affluent area, where there is a strong sense of entitlement, and willingess to pay for things. It’s interesting to watch the intersection of those two things.
Freakonomics has an interesting chapter about what happens [...]
Posted in Australian Politics, Book Reviews, Civil Liberties, Economics on 8 January, 2008 | No Comments »
Today’s book review is Immigrants - Your Country needs them, by Philippe Legrain. Legrain is a British journalist (but with a complex heritage involving Estonia, the US and France) who started writing this book just after the July 2005 terrorist attacks on London.
The book’s introduction is titled “It’s time for fresh thinking about immigration”, and it [...]
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