Thursday, March 14, 2013

FROM BIG DATA TO KNOWLEDGE

Talk to NatStats 2013 Conference, Brisbane, Thursday, March 14, 2013I want to make a contribution that’s a bit offbeat and a bit challenging, but hope is constructive. This conference is based on a proposition that’s simple, seemingly obvious and even admirable: the better information we give people, the better will be the decisions they make. Indeed, I imagine that’s a proposition that guides the whole of the bureau’s work....
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Wednesday, March 13, 2013

'Wealth creators' push materialism over social side

There is a contradiction at the heart of the way we organise our lives, the way governments regulate society and even the way the Bureau of Statistics decides what it needs to measure and what it doesn't. Ask people what's the most important thing in their lives and very few will answer making money and getting rich. Almost everyone will tell you it's their human relationships that matter most. And yet much of the time that's...
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Monday, March 11, 2013

Productivity improves, but no one notices

You could call it the mystery of the disappearing productivity crisis. Last week's national accounts for the December quarter confirmed that, if we ever really had an underlying problem with weak productivity improvement, we don't have one now. By now, that's not such a mystery. No, the puzzle is why the people who made so much noise about the supposed productivity crisis show little sign of having noticed its evaporation. For...
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Saturday, March 9, 2013

Underneath, the economy is slowing

THE world is a complicated place - and the Bureau of Statistics' national accounts are more so. Sometimes they're better than they look, but the figures we got this week aren't as good as they look. On their face, they say real gross domestic product grew by 3.1 per cent over the year to December. Since the economy's trend (medium-term average) rate of growth is about 3.25 per cent a year, that doesn't look too bad. The worry...
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Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Labor first out of blocks in race to mislead

I guess you've heard the news: the Gillard government has obtained new analysis of data from the Bureau of Statistics showing that Tony Abbott's election commitments inflict brutal damage on working families, particularly those in western Sydney, increasing taxes and cutting support to families. According to Treasurer Wayne Swan, Abbott's commitments include scrapping the tripling of the tax-free threshold, axing the new schoolkids'...
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Monday, March 4, 2013

Hockey would be no soft touch as treasurer

If the Liberals take over the management of the economy in September - as seems likely - one advantage should be that big business becomes more realistic about the extent to which it imagines the government can solve its problems. And just to make sure, Joe Hockey, the opposition's treasury spokesman, gave business his first pep talk along those lines last week. Hockey is much underestimated. If you've been watching you've seen...
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Saturday, March 2, 2013

How Reserve Bank retains control of interest rates

When the banks began moving their mortgage and other lending rates at variance with the Reserve Bank's changes in its official interest rate, many people took this as a sign the Reserve had lost its ability to control market interest rates, making its monetary policy ineffective. Fortunately for all of us, this impression was wrong. That so many people came to this conclusion showed their grasp on the mechanics of monetary policy...
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Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Cons and pros of the mobile revolution

I confess to a having an old fogey's ambivalence towards mobile phones. There are times when it suits me to keep in touch, but most of the time I don't want a phone taking over my life - or even interrupting it. And I figure I'm old and odd enough to get away with rarely using one. But of all the amazing things going on in the digital revolution - the spread of computers, the internet, the declining cost of telecommunications...
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Monday, February 25, 2013

Swan tries to legislate for budget honesty

It's too much to hope this year's election campaign will be a "contest of ideas" or even a debate over the pros and cons of the parties' rival policies. But one thing I confidently predict: there'll be endless arguing over the cost of promises and where the money will come from. For maybe 30 years the people who worry most about maintaining budget discipline - the econocrats in Treasury and Finance - have striven to discourage...
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Saturday, February 23, 2013

Economy's 'fast lane' bigger than you think

THE biggest thing that worries many people about the resources boom is that word ''boom''. Booms are cyclical, and thus temporary. So it's not surprising so many people worry about what we'll be left with when the boom's over. This week, two economists at the Reserve Bank, Vanessa Rayner and James Bishop, published a research paper neatly answering that concern. In short, what we'll be left with is a very much bigger mining...
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