[...]... their rigorous and in-depth study of the facial and body characteristics of all Playboy magazine’s Playmates of the Year from 1960 to 2000 In their paper ‘Playboy Playmate curves: Changes in facial and body feature preferences across social and economic conditions’, they found Playmates were older, heavier and taller during economic downturns, ‘with larger waists, smaller eyes, larger waist-to-hip ratios,... consumers of increasing trade and specialisation are often overlooked While millions of consumers stand to benefit, they tend to rally much less than the smaller group of people directly employed in trade-exposed industries who stand to lose much Of course, it is understandable and entirely predictable that manufacturers and the people they employ should lobby hard to save their jobs And they have powerful... buy more for a given level of income, meaning higher living standards In this way, moves to dismantle import duties in the 1980s and 1990s, while tough on domestic competitors, boosted Australian living standards and helped create the low-inflation world we now enjoy Feeling cheated by paying $15 a kilo for bananas? You should be New Zealand: shake, then watch it grow 11 September 2010 They’re made... broadly the order you’d find them in a standard economics text We start by exploring the supply and demand for a particular good, bananas, which is pretty standard microeconomic fare We then explore how the principles of economics can be applied to many areas of our lives: our homes, our health and even our love lives We move on to consider the failings of markets and to see how governments can make strategic... ‘icon’ It seems we can add Foster’s brands such as Victoria Bitter and Carlton to the growing heap of formerly Australian-owned brands such as Arnott’s Biscuits and Aeroplane Jelly The takeover of Foster’s, which controls about 48 per cent of the Australian beer market, means Australia’s two biggest brewers will be foreign-owned Lion Nathan, the brewer of Toohey’s, XXXX and Hahn, with 43 per cent of the... of newspapers Perhaps, too, a few people remember that many other loved Australian brands such as Holden and Vegemite were American-owned from the start—by General Motors and Kraft And so we’ll continue to sip VB, sitting in front of a television imported from South Korea, wearing a T-shirt manufactured in China, and mumble about the rising cost of living, without realising it could have been much... suggestion by the economist Saul Eslake that temporary imports of bananas be allowed to curb price rises But while Australians were told to savour their rolled-gold, sweet, disease-free bananas, foreigners were chowing down on super-cheap alternatives from countries such as the Philippines and Costa Rica My international spies on Facebook and Twitter brought reports of prices per kilogram as low as $2.20... called home The second thing that irks is that so-called ‘first home owners’ rarely actually own their homes outright Why not call a spade a spade and just call first-time buyers what they really are: ‘young people with a very big asset and similarly sized debts’ The same distinction between ‘home owners’ and ‘home borrowers’ applies to the broader property-owning community Australia’s home ownership rate... prices People may start eating fewer bananas, limiting that pressure But it remains unclear how ‘elastic’ Australians’ demand for bananas is— that is, whether consumers reduce their consumption in response to higher prices, reducing demand and limiting upward pressure on prices Sources: Australian Banana Growers’ Council; abs.gov.au; Canegrowers Australia; Queensland Tourism Industry Council; Reserve... relatively labourintensive goods such as textiles and simple manufactured goods For countries such as Australia, with higher labour costs, it means producing higher value-add services, like financial services, along with mining and farming goods to exploit our abundance of land and minerals When countries export goods on which they earn a high return and import goods more cheaply than it would cost . Unwin Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Email: info@allenandunwin.com Web: www.allenandunwin.com Cataloguing-in-Publication details. rolled-gold, sweet, disease-free bananas, foreigners were chowing down on super-cheap alternatives from countries such as the Philippines and Costa Rica. My international spies on Facebook and Twitter. we are and why we do the things we do. Stripped of all the boring equations, hideously complex graphs and other hieroglyphics economists use to communicate, obfuscate and generally big-note themselves,