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DIY recession insurance
Between 2000 and today Australia saw its ‘terms of trade’ nearly double. That is to say, the things Australians buy from overseas have halved in price relative to the things we sell. The key reasons...
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Why stories celebrate conflict rather than compromise
I wrote this for the Alternative Law Journal some time ago: As I was watching the film Avatar and the cinemagoers around me were cheering on the Na’vi heroes in their fight against human invaders, I...
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HECS a distraction from the real issues
I wrote this in April 2011 for the ANU student newspaper. Those without an interest in Australian education policy can safely ignore it. Opinions expressed are mine alone. Last week’s National Union of...
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Why doesn’t everyone use matching donations?
For the last two years whenever I have felt charitable, rather than directly give away the money – to VillageReach incidentlaly – I have offered to match donations made by my Facebook friends 1:1....
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Education is not a zero sum game
Recently the Australian Government produced a large report into its school funding arrangements. William Isdale over at Oxford’s Practical Ethics blog has examined the review and argued that it...
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The case for working on an AI singularity even if it is improbable
For those concerned about the future there are a lot of things to worry about. Nuclear war, bioterrorism, asteroids, artificial intelligence, runaway climate change – the list goes on. All of these...
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Why local food is not effective altruism
I’m going to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on ‘local food’ and then later ‘fair trade’ to explain why I don’t think they are worth putting much effort into. I hope it will inspire you to do...
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Education is not a zero-sum game part 2
Here I will unpack another common offered but dubious part of William Isdale’s argument that permitting families to spend extra on their children’s education is inefficient and immoral. Isdale asks us...
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The principle of ‘altruistic arbitrage’
There is a principle in finance that obvious and guaranteed ways to make a lot of money, so called ‘arbitrages’, should not exist. It has a simple rationale. If market prices made it possible to trade...
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Good relative to what?
People often say to me that certain actions, outcomes or policies are ‘good’. Something I usually try to establish right away is ‘compared to what?’ There are three common responses: relative to...
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Cowen and Singer on the marginal impact of eating a fish
jkaufman over at LessWrong has been good enough to post a transcript of an interview between Tyler Cowen and Peter Singer on ethics. It had a big influence on my thinking when I first heard it several...
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Are flow-on effects key to health interventions?
Last year I gave a few thousand dollars to the charity Village Reach, which performs vaccinations in rural Mozambique, on the recommendation of charity evaluator GiveWell. The bottom line of the...
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Should you floss? A cost-benefit analysis
If you are like most people I know, you don’t feel you floss enough. Each time you go to the dentist you get scolded for not flossing at least once a day. You promise to be a good patient but after a...
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Tilting at Zombies
Last year I published a mostly positive review of John Quiggin’s Zombie Economics in Policy magazine, which I never got around to cross posting here. Here it is: In a recent, noisy debate between...
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Is a life of poverty better than no life at all?
This is a question I repeatedly find myself asking especially in evaluating the desirability of Hanson’s Malthusian upload scenario, or increasing the number of wild animals. Here’s one piece of...
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The non-existent ‘lump of relationship’ fallacy
A very common mistake people commit when thinking about economics and the labour market is the ‘lump of labour’ or ‘lump of jobs‘ fallacy. It crops up in ideas like these: “We should cut immigration to...
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Reasons to worry about Australia’s terms of trade boom and ways to hedge
From a report by Societe General which justifies my concern about Australia’s lack of insurance against a Chinese bust. You may like to read the whole thing. “Mine production is being ramped up to...
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The flow on effects of eating meat
An academic has backed up my guess from a few months back that meat eating must result in more rodent deaths from plant agriculture than eating plants directly. His article makes such similar points I...
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Invest now, give later?
The power of exponential growth seems to make a compelling case for effective altruists to delay their donations. An average 5% return on investment (ROI) would turn one dollar into ten in 50 years...
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Don’t waste time to save money
For many years during my undergraduate degree I was living on a scholarship alone and so learned to be a very frugal person. As computers and mobile phones got cheaper, I would always take advantage of...
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