Essays

Ah, the age-old question: does money buy you happiness? The general consensus is yes – to an extent. For example, surely the happiness a person gets from their billionth dollar is less than what they derived from their first dollar?

When you create a system that makes it costly to do things ‘by the book’ – common examples are drugs, guns and more recently, building houses – you alter the incentives that individuals face in their day-to-day lives. In the case of housing, strict planning and zoning laws create positive transaction costs, raise the price of houses, and increase the payoffs for criminality.

Denmark has a housing problem. Not Denmark the country, but Denmark Western Australia – population 2,375 – which happens to be the least affordable town in the state and “ one of the most inefficient communities in WA when it comes to the balance between large family homes and smaller dwellings, with a ratio of 1.22 bedrooms per resident”.

US President Joe Biden recently passed an executive order regulating artificial intelligence (AI), which was met with mixed reactions. A common criticism is that the order was highly prescriptive – it assumed a lot a about the future direction of AI, even though it’s a huge unknown.

Andrew Leigh delivered a great speech to the Economic Society of Australia in Canberra last week (alas I was not in attendance), in which he outlined his ‘Ten Lessons for Economic Policymakers’ in detail.

Rugby in Australia is at an all-time low:

Australia’s Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, gave his thirteenth speech on the “defining decade” this week, which he also calls the “turbulent twenties”. But other than those zingers, the speech was incredibly light on substance. So light that even a large language model was critical:

Picture this. It’s 2020, the pandemic has arrived with a bang and Big Tech companies’ share prices are soaring while the opposite is true for newspapers and TV. Australia’s then-Treasurer Josh Frydenberg settles in for his regular tennis and beer session with good mate Ryan Stokes – Josh was best man at his wedding – when he is told how big foreign social media companies were crowding out local companies such as his billionaire dad Kerry Stokes’ Seven West Media.

Who has fared the worst from the recent bout of inflation and ongoing cost of living crisis? It’s not who you might think from reading headline after headline about Australia’s rental crisis:

Australia’s rate of inflation – as measured by the Consumer Price Index, or CPI – “ rose 1.2 per cent in the September 2023 quarter and 5.4 per cent annually, according to the latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)”: