Category Archives: Ideas

The tough go shopping

Can you really doubt that the Aus­tralian econ­omy will resume its recent strong growth in a year or so? Are you wor­ried that the rapid accu­mu­la­tion of wealth in the vast, still-poor economies of China, India and cen­tral Asia might be about to sud­denly stop? Do you fear that Aus­tralian firms will never again be …

August 9, 2011 – 8:48 am | By pwg | Posted in Ideas | Tagged | Comments (0)

Smoking and climate change

Mal­colm Turn­bull, in a recent speech invented a para­ble about a fool­hardy smoker to illus­trate his claim that con­test­ing the views of the “best sci­en­tists” on man-made climate-change is an “attack on sci­ence”. But does this para­ble make sense? Should we con­sider the the claimed “con­sen­sus” of science-policy bod­ies on dan­ger­ous global warm­ing to be …

July 26, 2011 – 4:54 pm | By pwg | Posted in Ideas, Public policy | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

The new future of old age

I have a fea­ture arti­cle on recent remark­able changes in the out­look for longevity in the cur­rent (Win­ter 2011) edi­tion of Pol­icy, the jour­nal of the Cen­tre for Inde­pen­dent Stud­ies. The arti­cle sketches some recent advances in under­stand­ing and manip­u­lat­ing the epi-genetic roots of age­ing, and draws atten­tion to the poten­tial eco­nomic value of com­ing …

July 11, 2011 – 12:01 pm | By pwg | Posted in Ideas | Tagged | Comments (0)

Elementary “Watson”

The IBM project that this week led to a spec­tac­u­lar demon­stra­tion of machine Ques­tion Answer­ing (yet another “QA” acronym) has a lot of seri­ous com­put­ing sci­ence behind it. Much of that technology—although none of the tech­niques, naturally—is lucidly explained in a recent arti­cle in AI Mag­a­zine. The over­ar­ch­ing prin­ci­ples in DeepQA are mas­sive par­al­lelism, many …

February 18, 2011 – 9:54 am | By pwg | Posted in Ideas | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Kay on the theory of value

Bril­liant sum­mary of the inter­ac­tion between dif­fer­ing pref­er­ences and judge­ments in error. “Wher­ever there is uncer­tainty, mar­ket prices reflect the beliefs of those who are more than aver­agely san­guine. The result is a reserve of illu­sory value, con­stantly depleted by events and replen­ished by fresh uncer­tain­ties. That is why mar­kets dis­play a sys­tem­atic propen­sity to boom …

July 21, 2010 – 9:28 am | By pwg | Posted in Ideas | Comments (0)

Watch this

Rev­enue strong; div­i­dends down. Google invests in ideas you wish you’d had. “Patrick Pichette, chief finan­cial offi­cer, said Google was invest­ing for what it expected to be a big expan­sion in online mar­kets in the next decade. ‘We think it’s the right thing to do at the moment in the com­pany.’ ” Extract from FT.com—Google prof­its …

July 16, 2010 – 10:35 am | By pwg | Posted in Ideas | Comments (0)

Economics’ standard model defective

Apt reminder from John Kay

“The stan­dard approach [’ratio­nal expec­ta­tions’ the­ory: PWG] has the appear­ance of sci­ence in its abil­ity to gen­er­ate clear pre­dic­tions from a small num­ber of axioms. But only the appear­ance, sincethese pre­dic­tions are mostly false. The envi­ron­ment actu­ally faced by investors and eco­nomic pol­i­cy­mak­ers is one in which actions do depend on beliefs and per­cep­tions, must deal with uncer­tainty and are the prod­uct of a social con­text. There is no uni­ver­sal eco­nomic the­ory, and new eco­nomic think­ing must nec­es­sar­ily be eclec­tic. That insight is Keynes’s great­est legacy.” Extract from FT.com / Colum­nists / John Kay — Eco­nom­ics may be dis­mal, but it is not a science

April 14, 2010 – 9:35 am | By pwg | Posted in Ideas | Tagged , | Comments (0)