Photos & Videos

 Assorted stuff relevant to info on my About page



My house
My garden jungle (view to porch)
My garden flora
My lupins
My resident blue tongues
‎⁨Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges
Flinders Ranges
‎⁨Beowa National Park⁩ (hunting giant lizards)
Deua National Park⁩
Victoria-NSW border beach
Flinders Ranges
Brumbies (wild horses) Barrington National Park

View from tent door Northern Territory 2018
Still on the dirt roads 2018
Still on the dirt roads 2019
The year of lock down, Botany Bay
...click on image for good weather..
Started work on my next book 2020 with a view of the docks

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Hellerian Capitalism II: Douglass North and Institutional Impersonality

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Nicholas Roerich 'Nanda Devi' 1944 By way of introduction let me say I first read Nobel prize winner  Douglass North in the early 1990s when I borrowed Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (1990) from my father who was also a social scientist. Like so many others I was immediately influenced by this extremely persuasive new economic approach to the study of institutions.  Over the years I realised that some of North’s central ideas had roots in classical economic sociology. North packaged them differently by combining them with advances in economics such as rent-seeking, game theory, path-dependence, Coaseian transaction costs. But the substance relating, for example, to appropriation of property rights and transitions from customs or convention to law could rightly be called Weberian. Sometimes North’s conceptual language and meaning is identical to Weber’s, though Weber is not mentioned. While I wrote my book on capitalism I spotted
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Hellerian Capitalism I: Characteristics and Conditions

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Nicholas Roerich 'Everest' 1938 Why theorise capitalism? As Mallory said of Mount Everest, “because it’s there”. Today begins a new series titled The Economic Sociology of  Capitalism (2003)  which will draw on my wealth of useful material from adventuresome years as an academic when I trespassed creatively across disciplinary boundaries and wrote continuously but refused either to publish or to perish.  Below is the first of several extracts I plan to post from an unpublished chapter called Capitalism that I sent to Peter Dougherty at Princeton in October 2003. I think it is good enough to offer here more or less verbatim. Peter wrote to say he liked it and encouraged me to send more chapters, which I could not do until October 2006. Life intervened, as it does even during Everest climbs.  ______________ Chapter 4: Capitalism by Michael Heller (2003) Introduction and section 1: Definitional Characterisations “Progress toward capitalism has been th
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Lazy Malay, Lazy Thinking

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Irma Stern's 'Portrait of a Young Malay Girl' 1939 Southeast Asians sometimes use cultural or hereditary arguments to explain their own allegedly easy-going, deferential and uncompetitive nature. In a 1970 book The Malay Dilemma Mahathir Mohamad -- the eccentric and bad mannered prime minister of Malaysia from 1981 to 2003 -- justified giving Malays special economic and political privileges designed to help them overcome a historic ethnic-cultural disadvantage vis-à-vis the country’s more go-getting Chinese and Indian population. Mahatir argued it was simply good breeding, manners, and nobility which habitually made a Malay “stand aside and let someone else pass”.  Until the influx of Chinese and Indian migrants during British colonial rule Malaysia’s resource base allowed the indigenous population comparative comfort without the need for undue exertion or ingenuity. Malays did not have to be ‘fit to survive’. They had free time and ample food. Seeing that Chinese o
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