Fresh Economic Thinking

Most Aussie’s know Jim Penman’s face from the side of green trailers dragged through the suburbs as his franchisees mow lawns.

But Jim is more than a businessman.

He has written multiple books, has a PhD, and will run for election in Northcote, Victoria with the Libertarian party in November 2026.

I wanted to find out what motivated Jim to run for politics, ask him about where he sees government waste and interference reducing our quality of life, and of course broach the topic of fertility, which he has a unique view on.

It turns out that zoning and planning regulations are a big deal for Jim. Although we weren’t able to agree on much about this topic, we were able to break apart why our views differed.

Find out more about Jim, his books, and try chatting with “AI Jim” at his website, jimpenman.com.au. Find him on X/Twitter here, and pre-order his new book Birth Rate Crisis here.

Don’t forget about my upcoming Land and Housing Economics workshop on 9th and 10th June in Brisbane. Tickets here. PDF flyer attached below

As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

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Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights.

Jay Lasker, aka Crémieux on Twitter/X, has spent the past few years digging into bad science and its bad data, especially in health science.

For example, the rise in autism is almost solely due to expanded diagnosis and the incentives to get a diagnosis. This is especially relevant for policies like the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) in Australia, which pays out on the basis of a diagnosis.

Worse, because this idea of a rise in autism has become a global meme, people and politicians are already searching for answers and interventions to prevent it from getting worse! Before asking the question “Is the data correct and showing what we think?”, we jump to the question “What should we do about it?”

Indeed, many of the troubling social trends that seem to capture our collective minds are pure data measurement artefacts. They aren’t real. We can stop worrying.

Find Jay’s terrific Substack here.

And for his excellent regular posting on Twitter/X find him here.

As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights.

You may have heard that our town planning system of rules and institutions that govern land uses in cities and often across the country is stifling new housing production, causing high prices.

But much of the commentary misunderstands how town planning rules operate.

I chat with Sydney town planner Tim Sneesby about how the system works, from a strategic level of creating zones and desired outcomes at a broad level, including earmarking infrastructure locations, to the day-to-day operations of assessing applications against those broader plans.

I also push a little on some of the potential perverse incentives—wouldn’t town planners prefer to create cumbersome rules to keep themselves in a job and make their roles valuable even if there is no (or negative!) social benefit from those rules?

For example, this article notes a rise in town planners per new home developed and the economic cost of regulating so many aspects of building designs.

Let me know what you think?

All comments are personal views and not those of Tim’s employer or associated entities.

As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights.

Has the cultural and political pendulum swung too far in favour of women?

That’s the argument made by David Maywald in his new book, The Relentless War on Masculinity.

He doesn’t argue that women have done this. But even men in power are still fighting the battles of many decades ago. David looks at education and health outcomes, noting that women became the majority of university students four decades ago.

There are four ways in which the cultural and political bias is expressed, called the Four Horsewomen. Once you understand them, they are hard to miss.

* Misandry — the hatred of men, as well as the systemic contempt for men.

* Gamma bias — the psychological tendency to interpret male and female behaviour through different lenses. A man who asserts himself is labelled aggressive, while a woman doing the same is praised as confident. A mother who works long hours is celebrated for her ambition, while a father who does so is criticised for neglecting his family.

* Gynocentrism — societies that focus on women, are primarily concerned with female perspectives and interests, and take a feminine point of view.

* Gaslighting — convincing men that their concerns are imaginary. Speak up about family law bias, and you’re told you must hate women. Question the “gender pay gap” narrative, and you’re accused of being sexist.

David explains how to perceive these biases by whether the same judgment would be made regardless of the gender of the person being observed.

As a father with two sons reaching adulthood, the most interesting data point was that young men (aged 15-24) only sit behind men over 65 in the strength of their views about traditional gender roles. Perhaps the pendulum is swinging back.

Here’s a chart showing these trends, courtesy of analysis by e61 Institute.

Finally, an excerpt from the book is in the article below at David’s Substack.

As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights.

During the COVID panic one of the sane voices was congitive scientist Mark Changizi. He saw the resulting panic as an emergent social and cultural phenomenon, and went as far as to sue the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) for directing social media companies to censor what they deemed as misinformation.

In this conversation, Mark talks of his intellectual journey, from mathematician and physicist to congitive scientist. He describes the overarching view of human perception and coordination as evolved tools and how leads to social patterns that would be replicated in any civilised large scale cooperative creatures. Would aliens also be debating free markets and communism?

Here’s one example of evolved traits.

Why do humans perceive visual illusions rather than have an accurate visual receptor? Because our visual perception evolved to anticipate outcomes, not accurately represent the light hitting the eyeballs.

This was a fascinating discussion, and stay tuned for Mark’s comments on academia and his life since leaving academia 16 years ago.

His latest book is called Motorcycle Mind, and I would recommend his previous book Expressly Human.

Please find Mark at the following.

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@markchangizi X: https://x.com/MarkChangiziWebsite: https://www.changizi.com

As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had a coherent way of understanding the economics of housing supply?

You might be surprised, given the confidence of the prognostications of public commentators, that most don’t have a broadly accepted economic theory of why homes are built.

It’s all ad hoc and often contradictory.

Here, Tim Helm walks through the main empirical patterns that need to be explained by our economic theory of housing supply, and steps through why most current approaches are a poor fit.

A good written explanation is here.

Thanks for listening.

As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights.

Fresh Economic Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Previously, I have described an educational experiment happening in a castle in Belgium, called Academia Libera Mentis (ALM). It is run by my friend and co-author, Paul Frijters, with his wife Erika Turkstra, and alongside Gigi Foster and many others.

In this episode, we discuss the story of this endeavour, as told in the upcoming book Minds that Dare. You can read about the trials and tribulations of this educational endeavour at the ALM substack.

Check out the ALM website and the courses available in 2026.

With a bit of luck, you might see me at ALM at some point in 2026.

As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights.

A long chat with power engineer Ben Beattie about Australia’s energy conversation, some of the muddled economics and arguments in favour of privatisation, public provision, and more.

Check out Ben’s Baseload Podcast here.

As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights.

Is Australia’s housing market REALLY functioning normally? Regular co-host Jonathan Gadir pushes back on my recent statements about the housing market doing exactly what we should expect it to do in a conversation with Josh Szeps at his Uncomfortable Conversations podcast.

I also respond to Steve Keen’s idea that the secret to lower home prices is regulating access to credit, such as with tighter rules limiting loan sizes to a function of current rent or value, which he expresses in this video.

My basic view is that this can certainly change the speed of price adjustment in the housing market by preventing some trades, possibly dampening a bubble, but it won’t change the overall long-term average price level. It might also inadvertently make first home buying harder, not easier, which was a frustration of the strict credit controls pre-1980s.

I explain more about the economic forces that constrain what housing markets can do in my book The Great Housing Hijack. This is why I argue that rather than trying to fight these forces, simply side-step them with subsidised non-market housing for the groups we think should be able to access it.

As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights.

James Nuzzo’s sports science and health research shows the gap between perception and reality when it comes to gender issues. This research, and especially his public comments about his various studies, got him cancelled and squeezed out by Edith Cowan University. You can read about it here in detail.

As someone with an interest in the pursuit of truth and who is frustrated when the public conversation is at odds with the data, this topic is of interest.

For example, few would realise that women became the majority of university students four decades ago, and are now the majority of staff too. So why is there still such a big push to give women more opportunities in higher education when it is men who have been behind for decades?

Find James at X/Twitter here, and sign up to his newsletter below (and enjoy his Graph of the Week too).

As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights.

Fresh Economic Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.