Ashley Craig
@ash_craig
Economist @ANU_CBE. Dad. Husband. Research in Public & Labor economics. Opinions mine.
🔔 Annual Reminder ⏰ Even if you don't care about the rich *at all*, taxing them efficiently lets you get more out of them to give to others ➡️ Efficiency should matter to you, regardless of your political alignment.
Jonathan Pincus argues a zero-tax baseline should be used to measure superannuation tax burdens. On this basis, upper-income earners will have paid over 50 cents for every dollar in their Superannuation Guarantee balances over 25 years. austaxpolicy.com/despite-conces…
I also think that introducing yet more “soft metrics” into admission feeds into right-wing grievances over hyper-competitive undergrad admissions to elite universities Begging my fellow academics to return to basics - test scores, grades & courses taken, recommendation letters
Not to make a mountain out of a molehill, but #Veo3 is very good.
Oh no, they gave me access to Veo 3. How about I going to be productive now?
If someone asks an Australian whether drop bears are real, the correct answer is YES. Saying no is a serious violation of social norms. I thought this was obvious. Some people these days…
This is not my experience with Americans. Though to be fair, all the Americans I know are economists.
Zero percent of the benefit of HECS debt forgiveness goes to people in the bottom 40% of the wage earner distribution. 1% goes to people below the median. 99% accrues to people earning over the median wage.
A large part of why LLMs are great is that you can get all the helpful stuff StackOverflow used to provide, but without the dreadfully annoying judgmentalism and snark. Or if you miss that, you can add it back in.
We talk about literacy and math, but I want a school that doesn’t tell my kids the primary colors are red, yellow and blue.
1/ Treasury says the CGT discount is a $22.7b “tax expenditure”. When is the last time you read an article considering it full taxation of nominal gains (ie no discount or indexation) is a reasonable alternative? Helpfully, the OECD provides an alternative comparison point.
The year my son got cancer. DISCLAIMER: THIS IS A PRO BONO PIECE WRITTEN IN COLLABORATION WITH THE CHILDREN'S CANCER FOUNDATION.
Nice article by @profholden on productivity, including AI. Knee-jerk over-regulation would be a mistake that Australia can’t afford. afr.com/policy/economy…
I have a great and really novel new idea for a Marvel movie. It’ll have hulk, but a *blue* one this time. The bad guys will have mind control like all the other movies. But it will be subtly *different* mind control. A hero who can fly and has really strong armour will fight…
Even better, use AI to make custom books, complete with illustrations. With adventures and characters your kids help come up with, and morals chosen by you to help with your parenting challenges. It’s a hit around here! Fun for everyone.📕
I can't stress enough how important it is for you to read to your kids. It's the single most effective thing you can do to ensure your child's success in school. They need to be exposed to books from a young age. And you can make it fun.
It would be great to have a default feature built into Chrome where AI replaces causal with correlational language everywhere, except in the rare cases where causal language is justified.
"However, all of these studies had limitations, including that they were observational and could not prove cause and effect." Limitation is a word. So is "useless". afr.com/life-and-luxur…
People complain that written / spoken summaries of papers by AI tools aren't perfect. There are occasional mistakes and misinterpretations, so it's not really a complete substitute for reading the paper. I agree with that. But in more cases than not, the counterfactual is not…