Food inflation and supermarket silliness
You have to love the silliness that surrounds supermarkets in Australia. The current silliness relates to food price rises. According to Frank Zumbo the supermarket “duopoly” is responsible for Australia’s food price inflation rate being higher than the Britain over a ten year period (even though the Australian rate was less than the British rate over the last five years). Even the Minister, Dr Emerson (PhD in economics) seems to have jumped on the bandwagon although other reported

RA work?
I’m presently advertising for a full-time research assistant, on a 12 month (renewable) contract. The skill-set I’m seeking is a convex combination of energy, economics nous, Stata knowledge, and high-level English proficiency (can you find more than 3 errors in this post?). I’m also hoping to find someone who is good at balancing multiple projects (I have about 20 ongoing at present). If you know someone who might be interested, please ask them to apply: the job ad is here, and the ANU closing date is the rapidly impending 22 November.

Brown’s Tobin tax
Gordon Brown has suggested that a tax on financial transactions be introduced, a proposal that France and Germany are keen on.  For those interested in this idea there is a nice summary of the issues in a book titled “The Tobin Tax: Coping with Financial Volatility” edited by Ul Haq, Kaul and Grunberg in 1996.  Among those in favour of the tax was John Langmore, who has a chapter on what kind of revenues could be raised with different tax rates. The point is that a lot of revenue can be raised with very small tax rates, given the amount of daily financial transactions globally. The issues come down to how to collect, share, and distribute the tax, how to stop avoidance, an

Extra-Marital Payouts
Andrew Norton points to this Herald Sun article about a man who was sued by his mistress of 20 years and she won a payout of $100,000 when their relationship ended. Andrew doesn’t like it. This encourages adultery and gold-diggers, at significant emotional and financial risk to the first family. While prohibiting this kind of behaviour is pointless, it should not be encouraged by lessening the risks/increasing the rewards to those threatening existing relationships. How relationship

The Wholesale App Market opens
The most common form of commercialisation of iPhone apps is self-developers, writing apps and putting them on the iTunes App Store. Recently, we have seen some unbundling of the production chain with developers purchasing app ideas from anyone who comes up with ideas and also who offer to develop apps on behalf of others who then put them on the App Store. Well, today, the market for the rights to sell completed apps (already in the App Store) opened up. If you want to get into the App sellin