Big business lobbyists and greedy foreigners are turning Sydney into an overcrowded hell hole, says Clive Hamilton . In Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald Hamilton draws on John Calhoun's famous rat experiments to argue that Sydney risks becoming a ' behavioural sink ' -- a city...

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[photopress:Rand_Window3_1_2.jpg,thumb,alignleft] Ayn Rand despised Friedrich Hayek. In a letter to Rose Wilder Lane she described him as "an example of our most pernicious enemy". At Thoughts on Freedom, Andrew Russell takes issue with some of my earlier comments on the Rand/...

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I took Alexander (my son) to the Australian Chess Championships being held in Canberra the other day. There on the top boards were four Grandmasters playing (I think Australia only has two - and both were there - Ian Rogers and Darryl Johansen.) Now I wouldn't be telling Tropp...

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Earlier this week I downloaded Mozilla Firefox and started using it as my default browser. However its inbuilt version of Google is much more primitive than the Google Toolbar I've been accustomed to using with Internet Explorer. Accordingly I tried to install the new Google T...

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Some weeks ago, Tim Blair, in his ongoing quest to ridicule Global Warming out of existence, decided to take a swipe at influential UK columnist George Monbiot. If you don't know of Mr. Monbiot he appears to be a very impressive fellow . He has led a very exciting life, having...

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Last night I happened upon a chapter by Murray Rothbard in a book called " Dissent on Keynes: A Critical Appraisal of Keynesian Economics . It was published in 1992 and the web version was published in 2003 and available here. The brief? Well roughly the brief Junie Morosi int...

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Not content with continually revealing his true identity to the world, one of his seemingly numerous enemies has now gone and stolen Anonymous Lefty's blogs !! I hope for his sake Lefty backed up the contents regularly. I also hope Blogspot proprietors Google take the matter s...

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For those members of the Barmy Army who are over here and overawed. Spiked columnist Ethan Greenhart had some advice for you , which apparently you ignored. Flying to Australia is never acceptable.

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I was watching Rage while polishing off a bedtime snack and saw a video that I though was going to annoy me - but turned out to amuse me - and indeed to make me smile and feel good. And of course it's on You Tube. The city it's filmed in turns out to be Sydney as I realised wh...

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For only a few more days the podcast of Richard Dawkins reading from his book is up at the ABC website . I listened to this when it was first broadcast, and while it didn't change my mind about Dawkins and his enterprise regarding religion and though he didn't really discus th...

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According to ex-Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, there is no reason to disbelieve in the existence of Santa. Please pass this message on to sceptical children. Dear Mr Rumsfeld, I am 8 years old. Some of my liberal friends say there is no Santa Claus. Daddy says "If Donal...

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From yesterday's AFR. It is the week before Christmas. Political programs such as the ABC's Insiders have ended and John Clarke and Brian Dawe have retired for the year to join an audience distracted by the summer. But this inattentive season is also the time for ministers to...

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What I should be avoiding at Christmas (but won't) It's getting increasingly difficult to compile Missing Link , what with so many bloggers announcing a Christmas hiatus. And it's been even harder this morning, because Google's Blogger service seems to have been playing up, ma...

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A friend Alex sent me this op ed by Polly Toynbee of the Guardian . I confess to being a bit irritated with the way it started off. "Fat is a class issue, but few like to admit that most of the seriously obese are poor." This actually gets to the nub of a crucial issue, but I...

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Op edders that is. Anyway, below the fold is an op ed of mine the Age published today ostensibly on Kevin, which was foreshadowed to Troppodillians here . In it I try to argue that all this stuff about the importance of projecting values in politics can be turned to good effec...

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After watching a replay of a Geraldine Doogue interview with Heavy Kevy on Compass last night, I find it increasingly difficult to credit Amanda's and Chris Sheil's hypothesis (developed on this thread here at Club Troppo) that he has already endeared himself to the general po...

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(via Sarsaparilla ) If you haven't checked out "Sublimely Gothic Cowgirl" and her blog Poligoths , now's the time. This cowgirl is a black belt Photoshopper. Probably my favourite is Amanda Vanstone (right) as Mistress of the Dark, followed closely by Phil Ruddock as Lord of t...

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Following its mooting on Troppo a few days ago, we're planning to (hastily) compile a Best Blog Posts for 2006. Online Opinion has indicated an interest in hosting the collection (and we can cross post it with links on other blogs). We're e-mailing a bunch of bloggers inviting...

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I was recently talking to Dennis Glover who told me of his October op ed equating the right commentariat with old style Marxists, making the pretty obvious point that most of them began as Marxists. I'd missed it when it appeared. It's makes a large number of good points so it...

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Andrew Leigh has a post on an ANU award for great teachers . This is a Good Thing. While I'm in full cry about the forth arm of government - the 'suasional' arm of government - I wondered why the ALP didn't give out awards like that. Couldn't do them much harm. Could do them s...

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Howard's End? Matthew Talbot Hostel for Homeless Politicians, as imagined by Aussie Bob at Road to Surfdom There hasn't really been any clearly dominant issue in the political blogosphere over the last couple of days. I suppose it reflects the onset of the Christmas silly seas...

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The collected papers from the 2002 Popper conference in Vienna are now available at the cost of an arm and part of a leg. See if anyone here can manage some more intelligent comment than the parade of puns at Catallaxy .

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[photopress:OneWay.jpg,full,centered] At Larvatus Prodeo Mark Bahnisch argues that Team Rudd is blurring the differences between Labor and the Coalition and driving left-leaning voters back towards the Greens, Democrats and independents: So much for product differentiation, Ru...

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Palm Island residents riot over 'Mulrunji's' death in November 2004. Photo: ABC Chloe Hooper's The Tall Man really is one of the most powerful essays in The Best Australian Essays 2006 , which I reviewed earlier this week . It tells the story of the inquest into the death of '...

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I'm writing an op ed which argues that there's more to politics than policy. Well that's not news particularly in this age of 'values based' politics. But I want to develop an argument I began in this this essay in these terms. We are taught that there are three arms of govern...

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As Andrew Landeryou reported at 4:11am (and The Age at 8:13am), last night's Victorian Legislative Council recount in several seats resulted in the DLP indeed losing the last seat in Northern Metropolitan to the ALP, apparently as a result of 6000 Green preferences which had p...

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Looking at some consulting work on regulation I hunted down something I'd seen before - the Business Costs Calculator . This seems like a sensible initiative which is designed to provide a template through which those engaged in 'regulation review' activities can be taken thro...

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Warm relationship between Beattie and Gillard - a particularly disturbing photo from Landeryou's blog I'm generally very wary of linking to Andrew Landeryou's blog because it's so full of material that appears to be seriously defematory. However, he's currently running a story...

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Balancing Work and Family , the recent report from the House of Reps Standing Committee on Family and Human Services contains a version of one of my favourite pictures. (I've posted my own version below the fold.) The figure shows how labour force participation has changed for...

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The [US] National Venture Capital Association released a study titled: American Made. The impact of immigrant entrepreneurs and professional on US Competitiveness [PDF] . The report studied venture capital backed public and private businesses consequently it does not cover imm...

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Victorian fires - Photo: Cameron Quinten, an Age reader The death of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Howard's citizenship test, the DLP winning two seats in Victorian's Upper House courtesy of ALP preferences(!!!), the latest Newspoll and the Victorian bushfires are...

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I've known that George Bernard Shaw had a thing or two to say about conflicts of interest in the medical profession, about how doctors have a direct pecuniary interest in providing you with services (for which they charge a fee) rather than in keeping you well (in which case t...

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A Beautiful Mind? If you've never taken much of a look at Andrew Bolt's columns in the Herald Sun, you may wonder which category of columnist he falls into. Is his the anger of a sharp mind frequently impatient with the foolishness of those around him - Melbourne's own Tom Wol...

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There's been a bit of discussion both here and at Lava Rodeo about the possibility of compiling a Best Australian Blog Essays 2006 anthology. Efforts in that regard are afoot. But what about best comments? This one from Nabakov over at LP (about Howard's Oz culture citizenship...

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These are detainees held in Santiago's National Studium after the coup, awaiting an uncertain, and in some cases hideous, fate. Thinking about them, should we be sorry that Pinochet managed in the end to evade a trial and sentence? Or should we rejoice that at least he lived l...

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When Nicholas Gruen asked me to review The Best Australian Essays 2006 published by Black Inc (in which his essay on Adam Smith - workshopped right here at Club Troppo earlier this year - features), the first question I asked myself was a really basic one. What is an essay? No...

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Smoke over Victoria as at Friday - I guess it was much worse by yesterday - image via David Tiley Touring around the blogs this morning reveals that there are quite a few who have stowed away the keyboard early for the Christmas break. Fortunately there are still lots who cont...

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I think Ken will shortly be posting a review of Best Australian Essays published by Black Inc , but as I'll be leaving Melbourne towards the end of next week I thought I'd post this here now. As a contributor I've got rights to copies at $12 a pop, so if any Troppodillians wan...

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� Mr Rudd by Colin Wicking The media is inevitably full of predictions about the Rudd/Gillard Labour leadership. What follows is the case for flipping straight to the sports pages. Because none of the punditocracy have much of a record of accurate judgment in the week after...

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Would you vote for this woman? Or read her column? Don Arthur did (the latter anyway) ... I wonder why Miranda hasn't lectured Julia Gillard on her hairstyle yet? Why bother with scholarly research when you have television? In a recent study , Amy King and Andrew Leigh found t...

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Back in 2003, Federal Liberal MP Sophie Panopoulos (now Mirabella) was keen to see that Australian "terrorist" David Hicks "paid for his crimes". Her eagle eye had spotted that Hicks' father Terry was trying to beat up sympathy for his son. In an attempt to attract sympathy,...

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Google is closing down a great experiment called Google Answers in which Google acted as a broker for research assistance. If you've not seen it, you posted a question and offered a fee, and if someone wanted to they responded - for 75% of the fee with Google taking the rest....

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I've started using Google reader which, in case you don't know about it, is a great way to read blogs. Joshua Gans told me about it pointing me to the link on his own blog which shares interesting links through Google Reader. This took me to this link and thence to this speech...

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Just remember. This link brought to you and endorsed by Club Troppo. Home of middle aged grumpy respectability .

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Yes folks - it's the new swiss army knife - link overleaf

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No caption needed really ... There hasn't really been a particular obsession in the blogosphere over the last couple of days. A few more Rudd posts, of course, but it looks like bloggers might have joined the pollies in heading off for summer holidays. I certainly hope not, ha...

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What do Schapelle Corby and John Howard have in common? (hint see Hansard page 54) What is it about Northern Territory politicians and fridges ? Why didn't I realise that Miranda Devine was right ? [ NB not work-safe ]

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I was alerted to this funny story on Late Night Live. When the London Review of Books began taking personal ads, the content was quirkily British - as for instance in the ad from which I took the heading. ""Bastard. Complete and utter. Whatever you do, don't reply - you'll onl...

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When I went from year 10 to year 11 at high school, I also moved cities and schools. I moved from a private boys school - Haileybury College in Keysborough (Vic) - to a co-ed High School in Canberra - Campbell High. I remember arriving at Campbell and spending lunchtime during...

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Adrian the Cabbie photoblogs a truly dreadful Christmas decoration at Sydney's (usually uber-trendy) Double Bay Most readers won't be surprised to learn that Rudd, Fiji and the cricket are the most common blogosphere themes of the last day or two. I'm only extracting a tiny se...

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In the late 1500s England was rising as a maritime nation. It was beginning to dominate the important technologies of cartography and longitudinal calculation. In 1598 Edward Wright produced the most accurate map the world had seen. Apart from using the new technology of Merca...

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Some people are little grumpy before they've had their first cup of coffee. And maybe that's why Sunrise co-host David Koch got so many complaints when he repeated this joke at 6:50am. But how risqué can a joke be if versions of it have appeared in respectable magazines like t...

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The increasingly farcical Milne versus Mayne prizefight at last Thursday's Walkley Award presentations has taken an even more bizarre but very entertaining twist. Yesterday the Poison Dwarf came out with a very funny piece titled Why I snapped on live TV . It blamed Mayne for...

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Looks like Rowen favours the Dream Team The Labor leadership spill result will be known by the time I post this (update - fairly predictably it's Rudd ), so there's no point in posting links to the predictably huge volume of blogosphere comment on Bomber versus Rudd. A couple...

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Michael Duffy thinks we live in a meritocracy -- a society where everyone gets the income they deserve. But in the Duffyverse, evil genius Lex Luthor would be more deserving than Superman . Why? Because Luthor has a higher IQ . Duffy argues that Australia has a new upper class...

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The December 1st Senate Hansard had an interesting exchange during the debate over the Independent Contractors amendment to the behemoth Workchoices legislation. First Andrew Murray ; As the chamber knows, various state legislatures have attempted to grapple with this but at t...

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Not the football team you galahs, this man .

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Pursuant to Ken's ambition to make CT Australia's premium soccer and opera blog, it's my duty to announce that Opera Australia's production of Giulio Cesare launched its Melbourne season tonight. This is probably the best known of Handel's fifty or so operas, and, if that were...

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Well he was on Seinfeld anyway. Some people may have seen this before but, having heard about it on the radio recently I looked it up on YouTube. Truly shocking. Nice to see the audience filing out as he sank deeper into the mire.

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It was utter madness on the streets of Melbourne this evening, as literally tens of people listening to Huggy on the Gold FM, drive time, Bread back-to-back retrospective were thrust rudely into the new millennium by the shocking but welcome news that Shadow Foreign Minister K...

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I posted on this last year and it's worth mentioning it yearly. A lot of stuff gets exchanged each year that's pretty useless when we could give gifts to each other of donations to causes that could really do with the money. This would have had the assent of most economists be...

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The Bomber among friends yesterday, but how many will he have in Caucus next week ? We'll add links here to developing blogosphere coverage ... Just in case you thought Wednesday's first Missing Link feature was a fluke and doubted that the blogosphere really does consistently...

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Last time I raised this subject Richard Phillipps hopped into me suggesting that I wasn't being helpful. In any event I'm at it again. I've not researched this case in any detail, but it sure looks strange on its face and the report from The Age does not appear to be sensation...

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You can tell this is the good Peter Saunders because he looks like Santa Claus ... Somewhat by accident, (happy accident though it is) Troppo seems to have become a place for really excellent policy discussions about welfare, the labour market, inequality and poverty with cont...

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Sometimes being played for a sucker has positive but unintended consequences. My recent 'free' subscription to Crikey confirmed what I had always suspected. The average quality of their articles isn't crash hot, not when you consider how much they charge for a subscription. Th...

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I was browsing over at Lava Rodeo a few minutes ago, and noticed that Mark Bahnisch was asked about whether he was paid for the articles he writes for Crikey . His answer rather surprised me: The answer would be no and yes. I'm not on a retainer or a contract and can submit ar...

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Iranian President Ahmadinejad If you had imagined that expansionist militaristic "neocon" influence over the Bush administration had been vanquished following the Democrat victory in the US mid-term elections, the sacking of Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary, and the appoin...

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The British Empire League was a bunch of Australians in the early 20thC who wanted imperialism to prevail rather than nationalism in Australia. The prominent politician of the time, Alfred Deakin, was the great compromiser and saw no difference between being Australian and a B...

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Here is the last post on primate sentiments - and as I said at the end of the last post, it's really a postscript. It doesn't further develop the points made in the last two posts, but tidies up some loose ends. Smith himself cooked up a theory of the evolution of language at...

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Andrew Leigh wonders why Labor performs so well in state and territory elections but so poorly in national elections. His favourite theory is one Andrew Norton floated a while ago -- voters think of the nation as a family where Labor is mum and the Coalition is dad . State and...

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Kramnik will take on Deep Fritz starting tonight in a six match game. I expect he's got very little chance - especially the way he played against Topalov. He played better than Topalov and Topalov is a great player, but . . . Topalov didn't play that well against him (except i...

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One of the issues that emerged almost inevitably in the commentary on Friedman's death was the contrast with Keynes. James Farrell commented on the way Friedman deprecated the originality of aspects of Keynes' contribution. But I drew attention to Friedman's expressed admirati...

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Do we really want political leaders with vision? Now that it's leadership speculation season again, every speech or media appearance by a Labor politician is seen as an audition for the leadership. Supporters are looking for someone with big ideas, passion, and a vision for ou...

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While Blair's New Labour remains mired in the war in Iraq, Cameron's new-look Conservative Party declares war on poverty and makes peace with Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee . In a recent article, Tory front bencher Greg Clark , says that : Ignoring the reality of relative po...

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A journalist from the AFR rang me today to ask me to comment on a recent report by the World Bank and PWC which is a comparative study on the payment of tax by companies. It's an interesting report but it's conducted with such heroic simplifications that one sometimes wonders...

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To start of what may (or may not) be a semi-regular post (whatever happened to Dr Troppo?) here is my quote of the week - from rookie Troppodillian DW Griffiths. Jagger seems a disciplined bloke, but he plays dissolute superbly - and it seems to be what the world reacts to mos...

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Ahead of this weekend's announcement of the 2006 Australian Idol , today's Age Green Guide acknowledges the popular culture phenomenon. The paper then labels the show, for about the tenth time, as "karaoke". The Age is not alone; a large part of the Australian pop/rock music i...

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Just to let Troppodillians know, watch out for the maiden post of of D. W. Griffiths, a raging moderate currently working in the public policy business.

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Comparing Australia with the rest of the developed world, we have a distribution of FINAL disposable incomes that is about average. Yet, measured the same way (i.e. using the GINI coefficient), inequality of MARKET incomes in Australia (the distribution of gross incomes before...

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Erwin Fabian was a friend of my father's from the time he came to Australia on the same refugee boat as Dad. He was a few years older than most of the younger ones. They were in their late teens. He was 25. He painted a fantastic portrait of Dad when he was in the camp which h...

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Lindsay Tanner says that Australians are anti-intellectual , but has anyone told the Daily Telegraph's Simon Benson ? Today he's casually quoting 19th century German philosophy : OBVIOUSLY, Peter Debnam hasn't read Nietzsche. If he had, he would know that while madness might b...

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( crossposted at sidelined ) I am almost too disappointed to write this. Frankly, what a waste of a game. I suggested before that the backline selection was illogical, and indeed two people who had never played together in the centres before turned out, against arguably the be...

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Another blogger was arrested in Egypt for being critical of the government ; Rami Siyam, who blogs under the name of Ayyoub, was detained along with three friends after leaving the house of a fellow blogger late at night. ... No reasons have been given for Mr Siyam's detention...

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Winners and winner-groupies were hugging themselves with delight and gay abandonment today, at the unbelievable news, that Australia's most famous news packaging and dissemination service, News Corporation , was first with the news, that News had been extremely successful at t...

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All those jokes about the Thorpedo's sexuality are just so tacky and predictable, n'est-ce pas? For my money the best take on the Thorpie retirement soap opera was from Skeletor over at Spin Starts Here : Apparently Kim Beazley has passed on his commiserations to the Tasmanian...

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Hayek enthusiasts were up in arms when Jeffrey Sachs wrote, "Austrian-born free-market economist Friedrich August von Hayek suggested in the 1940s that high taxation would be a 'road to serfdom,' a threat to freedom itself" ( pdf ). Hayek's supporters were quick to point out t...

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In Alexander's time the amphitheatre was a sign of Macedonian power. Especially for the new and conquered cities in modern-day Turkey. The amphitheatre combined the Macedonian dominance of technologies such as architecture, construction, science, art, culture and wealth. The R...

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According to a story in today's Herald, plagiarism is rife at universities . Harriet Alexander reports that It is difficult to establish a total number of plagiarism cases across all universities because collection methods vary. But a conservative estimate is 3336 cases betwee...

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Here's a review of mine of Fred Argy's excellent and neglected paper for the Australia Institute (pdf). Introduction What could offer more powerful advocacy against some iniquity than to show how it hurts us all not just its victims? This style of argument has been the stock i...

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Crikey alerts us to this story in the Daily Telegraph. BOB Carr has embarrassed his former State Government colleagues by racking up a new record of $438,683 for expenses billed by a retired premier. The huge cost to NSW taxpayers of keeping Mr Carr in his first year of retire...

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The story so far. Robin Dunbar is arguing that language developed amongst apes as something that could replace grooming in facilitating larger social groups than could be supported by grooming. Adam Smith is lurking in the background with the promise made that there are errie...

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Adding to Don's observations below , here's a partial list of Friedman's achievements, with a score out of ten for each. The permanent income hypothesis. This was advanced in A Theory of The Consumption Function (1957). Keynes had argued that household consumption varies with...

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[photopress:Horned_Hayek.jpg,full,alignleft] Kevin Rudd is starting to remind me of Buffy the Vampire Slayer . In season three Buffy battled the Mayor of Sunnydale , a polite, quietly spoken politician who formed a pact with demons to ensure his own survival. Rudd also has dem...

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Michael Moore empathises with US conservatives and offers the poor dears a compassionate head tilt .

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Greg Ransom at PrestoPundit has set up a running file of notices , obituaries and tributes to Milton Friedman, including some of his last interviews.

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Disclosure: This is not a paid review Helen Dale (aka skepticlawyer ) has signed Catallaxy up with ReviewMe, a service that makes it easier for businesses to pay bloggers to review their products. Critics call it pimping , Sam Ward at A Yobbo's View calls it an antidote for wr...

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[photopress:kimbo.jpg,full,pp_empty] FEDERAL Opposition Leader Kim Beazley has committed a major blunder , confusing grieving TV host Rove McManus with White House strategist Karl Rove.

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When Milton Friedman visited Australia in 1975 the Institute of Public Affairs declared it "a breath of fresh air." But their enthusiasm had limits. "Friedman is a proponent of the free market doctrine in its purest form" said the IPA Review (vol 29 No 2). And for an organisat...

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Another paper confirms the importance of default options in influencing a range of decisions about retirement planning. I've written on this a few times . When will we get going on this agenda? The abstract of the paper is over the fold. Many workers in the U.S. and around the...

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Economist Milton Friedman died today in San Francisco . Friedman was not just a Nobel Prize winning economist, he was a celebrity. He wrote for Newsweek and the New York Times Magazine and was interviewed by Playboy . In 1980 he and his wife Rose produced a television series f...

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I've just finished reading a book entitled " Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language " (Amazon link - but no pages to view) by Robin Dunbar a 1996 book written in a highly entertaining style for a lay audience. In my ignorance of the field, I found the book highly ente...

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Economists have a proud history of leading social causes of great value. The fight against slavery is my favourite cause of economists with Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill in the forefront. That's where economics got it's nickname of the 'dismal science' (from Thomas Carlyle w...

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Jason Soon has more on the debate over Nordic social democracy and Friedrich Hayek's road to serfdom thesis. It began with an article in the Scientific American where Jeffrey Sachs annoyed Hayek fans by saying: Von Hayek was wrong. In strong and vibrant democracies, a generous...

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Fred Argy has written a letter to the AFR protesting changes to cross-media laws. In it appears, to me at least, the incredible implicit assertion that Fox News is bad for American democracy. Because I think he is an intelligent man and I quite respect his opinion on most subj...

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A while ago I categorised the referendums at the federal level to see what voters were rejecting. It turns out it was centralisation; or the constitutional increase of power to the Commonwealth Government. Of the twenty-seven referendums for increased centralisation only three...

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Public transport is all the rage amongst the left of centre. It has a community feel to it which gives us a warm inner glow in these days which are heirs to the plummeting of social capital. It yields benefits in many forms. It typically generates less pollution than cars and...

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[photopress:nz_news.jpg,full,pp_empty] New Zealand is to get its first 24-hour news channel. News 24 will be launched late next year. Of course, it will be 24-hour news from 1950.

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also featuring: Ireland A v Australia A, Limerick, 15 November 2006 cross-posted for the first time to sidelined . Australia A v Ireland, 15 November 2006 Australia A play the Ireland A tonight, which might not seem like big news but in the greater scheme of things will be a p...

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Needing little encouragement from Justices Kirby and Callinan, the Henny Penny brigade are off and running over today's Work Choices decision by the High Court. Tim Dunlop titles his post "The States are Dead" over at Rupie's place. Meanwhile, the hard core lefties over at Lav...

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Colin Wicking beat me to the punch with a comment on this morning's High Court decision in the WorkChoices Case . My only excuse is that my sort of commentary forces me to read the actual judgments rather than just the headline outcome. Nevertheless, although the judgments are...

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It is a rare for me to agree with Janet Albrechtsen. Still rarer for me to hear her say, almost verbatim, an idea that I have bored my friends with for years. In yesteday's Australian she draws attention to the corrupting influence of political donations and finishes with a rh...

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This storm - on Saturn - really looks like it has an eye.

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Sometime commenter Spog sent me the diagram and the commentary below on the question of churning. He's produced an excellent diagram illustrating the incidence of churning. It seems to work approximately as one would hope, to target assistance where it's most needed - subject...

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One of the fun things about Don Arthur's posts is following the links. I followed a link to Peter Boettke and a few links later came upon this (pdf) fine statement of the early and (for so long) enduring American commitment to modesty in international affairs. I guess isolatio...

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"Hayek was wrong" says Jeffrey Sachs . For decades classical liberals have relied on Friedrich Hayek's 1944 book The Road to Serfdom to warn that tax increases lead to tyranny. But in a recent article for the Scientific American , Sachs argues that high taxing Nordic countries...

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[photopress:Weiners_and_gorge.jpg,full,centered] The prospect of Nancy Pelosi capturing the top spot in Congress and the continued rise of Hilary Clinton has unleashed a masculinity crisis according to Texas blogger Amanda Marcotte : The asswipes are relentless. Fear-mongering...

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Perhaps the most embarrassing part is that they will probably out-scrum us, but that should be it. Our scrum should really use this as valuable training since they can be confident that even if they fall apart the backs will carry this one. For the record I expect we won't con...

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Who is Nancy Pelosi ? I wondered. It was 1987 and a long haired guy was photographing a doctored Pelosi campaign poster in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district . The poster originally said, "Nancy Pelosi, a voice that will be heard." Now it read "Nancy Pelosi, a voice that...

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Why is Christopher Pearson promoting a book by a Derrida scholar and an academic who writes about Indigenous issues ? Well... because it includes an entire chapter on him. Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler's new book, The War on Democracy Conservative Opinion in the Australian Pres...

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Ever dreamed about blogging for living? Earlier this week The Road to Surfdom 's Tim Dunlop made the move to news.com.au. Tim is now firmly established at Blogocracy one of News' growing stable of blogs . The opportunity didn't just fall into his lap. Tim's PhD thesis was on d...

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If there really is a vast right wing conspiracy, perhaps it's a conspiracy against the Republican Party Choice quotes from right leaning American magazines: "Republicans must be punished" Ronald Bailey, Reason Magazine "GOP Must Go" The American Conservative "Republicans have...

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Should I call this thing Weekend reflections? Any suggested alternatives?

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Senator Alan Eggleston has some interesting comments on the Western Australian boom with its economic and foreign policy implications . The Westralians have enjoyed the pressure that a booming China and India have put on commodity prices. Eggleston opens with an anecdote on th...

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"Let's not be misty-eyed about Friedrich Hayek" says Kevin Rudd , "he taught (and modern Liberals believe) that there is no such thing as social justice and that the only dignity to be delivered to human beings is through their emancipation by free markets untrammelled by the...

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America was in the grips of civic excitement last night; televisions, websites, phones - all running hot. A friend of mine who runs a prominent political website spent his day watching the loads on the webservers increase as the east coast Americans left work, and the west coa...

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This chart is quite revealing. Troppo readers either gloating over their high house prices, or groaning in anticipation of trying to ever buy one, are wondering what's driven house prices up. In the last few years an international deregulationist movement based around the webs...

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also featuring: France v New Zealand, 11 November 2006, Lyon Ireland v South Africa, 11 November 2006, Dublin I should be embarrassed to admit this but I am getting up for the second of these matches! Italy v Australia Who really cares how many points we score against Italy, e...

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Theos -- Britain's new public theology think tank " We don't do God " said the PM's spin doctor. When Vanity Fair's David Margolick tried to steer Tony Blair into a conversation about his religious beliefs, his director of strategy and communications, Alastair Campbell, butted...

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Over at Larva Rodeo a few days ago, "Atticus" forensically dissected a typically silly and dishonest Miranda Devine column . Devine bemoaned a recent NSW Court of Appeal decision in which a DPP prosecutor was heavily criticised. Prosecutors shouldn't have to be so dispassionat...

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From today's Crikey. As an admirer of Christian Kerr, I'm disappointed in his lack of responsiveness to a fabulous debate in September that he helped to kick off in Crikey it was then adjourned to Club Troppo. It was blogging at its best with experts dropping in from the burea...

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In a comment earlier this morning, James Farrell made this peripheral point: It's less than twenty years since a South Australian judge had to resign for saying that some wives needed a bit of rough handling, or whatever it was exactly. The judge James had in mind was Justice...

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What a start! For a while one might have been nearly 10 years ago when Australia v Wales was just a question of how many points Australia would score. And then Wales, fortunately for their world cup hopes, came flying back, and what an anticlimatic finish. First though, I woul...

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There are two possible dominant political entities in liberal democracy, the individual and the state. Progressivism, republicanism, liberalism and libertarianism see the individual as the dominant entity whereas conservatism and nationalism sees the state as the dominant enti...

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This is Imre Nagy speaking, the President of the Council of Ministers of the Hungarian People's Republic. Today at daybreak Soviet troops attacked our capital with the obvious intention of overthrowing the legal Hungarian democratic Government. Our troops are in combat. The Go...

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Suggested reason for a trip to the Old Country. The Bank of England announced the making of a new £20 banknote which will feature Adam Smith (see here , and here is what The Times says). It will come out in the Spring 2007. It is ironic in some way that the Bank of England fea...

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Just one day after the launch of the Victorian State Election, the Bracks Labor Government is facing a crisis with members across the State threatening to ignore the voting directions of the Party bosses by voting below the line on the ballot, and in an even more significant m...

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[photopress:Clive_Hamilton.jpg,full,pp_empty] The left got into trouble when it lost its ethical moorings, said Tony Blair. Influenced by the Christian socialism of John Macmurray , Blair saw New Labour as heir to the communitarian traditions of ethical socialism and New Liber...

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Left and right are both calling for the manic Sheik Al Hilali to be deported from these fair lands. The left take offence at his comparing uncovered women to "raw meat". The right take offense at his support for terrorists. Listening to ABC radio this morning, I seemed to be...

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Great piece by Margaret in today's Crikey. Last Tuesday Crikey published an editorial criticising Chris Masters's Jonestown for the way in which it "outed" Alan Jones and treated its subject matter with "breathless, censorious innuendo." It took my breath away. It wasn't only...

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In early 1996 my father Fred fell from his motorbike on the farm and cracked a rib. He had blood in his urine, which the doctors called haematuria which means bloody urine in Greek. The doctor told him that the indicated procedure for haematuria was a cystoscopy to check the b...

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What would you call a situation in which a man . . . [P]unched his wife in the face and she fell to the ground. He kicked her before smashing her face with a rock. She suffered multiple fractures to her skull, ribs, vertebrae, and shoulder blades, as well as a ruptured liver....

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Why Rudd is wrong about Hayek Friedrich Hayek argued that human beings are "almost exclusively self-regarding", says Kevin Rudd . In contrast, modern Labor "argues that human beings are both 'self-regarding' and 'other-regarding'." But what Hayek actually argued was that human...

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Methinks this is a tad biased, but nevertheless an interesting run through the two contenders in the 'browser wars'. The authors conclude that in five out of five areas Firefox is better than IE7. I'd like to believe it but, as I've said, I think there's a bit of bias in there...

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There are few things we enjoy more here at Club Troppo than a good rant about morality and values. Some even think we're a bit precious about it. Anyway, I was mightily pleased to see bipartisan agreement between The Bomber and The Rodent about the desirability of making immig...

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On Insiders last Sunday, the topic of the day was the growing debacle in Iraq. It included sound bites from the PM, a longer interview with Paul Kelly and some predictable political tap dancing from Kevin stay-on-message Rudd . The armchair discussants included David Marr and...

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Today's newsletter to the finance industry 'The Sheet' outlines a series of unfortunate events by which a consumer was lent money that he could not repay. Again and again. Fortunately the nasty lenders lost their money and the poor consumer didn't have to pay - anything. Kremn...

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I am reading David Kuo's book, Tempting Faith . It is an entertaining read. Kuo is up and down like a dunny seat - running from radicalisation to depression to radicalisation again and then back to depression - but he is a good writer. It is also rare in that it is one of the...

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It is clear that the Work Choices legislation, coupled with the welfare-to-work measures, has strengthened considerably the power and autonomy of employers relative to non-managerial, non-professional employees. Even before Work Choices, there was a trend for earnings inequali...

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Its been harrumphing and gasping aplenty in Australia's two ring media circus this week, as the Alan Jones Biography hits the stands, and the pundit-o-rama gets all precious about Mr. Jones' secret life being public fodder. A loathsome attack bleats Tim Blair. Rank homophobia...

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https://youtu.be/NAn6iDCpK5k A while back I turned on the tele late one Weekend night and saw that they were replaying old Videoclips of the Beatles. I watched mesmerised for around 45 minutes after which they went onto something else. I think I would have stayed a fair while...

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Microsoft are a much maligned company. Their software's got better over the years. And I'm sure this won't happen to everyone, but I just downloaded Microsoft Internet Explorer 7. It took a long time to install as it installed about four other pieces of software. Then it asked...

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There was an interesting debate in the Senate on October 16th between Andrew Murray, Chris Evans and Eric Abetz. It pretty much represents all that was good and bad with the Senate. Andrew Murray argued for discrete budgeting, line by line, in parliamentary entitlements which...

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I have a particular dislike of Richard Dawkins and enjoyed this demolition of Dawkins' latest attack on God. If you read carefully you'll notice that it's not done on behalf of religion. It does not presupose religious belief. The author - Terry Eagleton concedes, having concl...

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The Victorian Government is interested in taking Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) into education as the Blair Government has done. PPPs have so far represented a scandal of economic reform. A method used to shift debt off governments' balance sheets so they can commit to deb...

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I was going to do a brief post congratulating Muhammad Yunus for his winning of the Nobel Prize and mentioning a similar great Austrailan initiative of a similar vintage which you can donate to - Opportunity International . If I could do one tiny fraction of the good these peo...

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If you've been having trouble connecting to Jason Soon's group weblog Catallaxy then maybe you've been looking in the wrong place. If you bookmarked the old site at badanalysis.com then it's time to update -- you won't be automatically redirected anymore. Catallaxy is fast eme...

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The readers of Melbourne's Herald Sun went into deep shock yesterday, when former Dutchman, and contrived controversy confectioner, Andrew Bolt launched his missiles of mockery in support of international pop sensation Madonna's right to spend her wealth on acquiring African o...

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Here is a brief extract from the beginning of a staff discussion paper (pdf) on the regulation of the professions published by the National Competition Council in 2001. I think there's something missing from it - do you agree and if so what do you think it is? The challenge of...

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Fred's last post prompted several commenters to mention subsidies for private schools. It's worth taking a closer look at this issue in isolation. As Harry Clarke reminded us some time ago in a related discussion, subsidising private education is efficient if it reduces the bu...

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Well boy anyway. It's the 13 year old . . . Well here's another clue - the whole picture. It's the most prodigious chess player that ever lived - the amazing and now pretty much certifiable R. J. Fischer. This picture was taken in 1957, the year Bobby burst onto the internatio...

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Today's AFR has a letter of mine on education inequality. What follows is an extended version of the letter, drawing on material from my other writings. The current passionate crusade by Howard Ministers to weed out the so-called "left-wing" bias of the education establishmen...

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If I'm not mistaken the Beazer is actually getting some traction right now. Witness yesterday's delightful poke in the Prime Minister's eye in Parliament, where the Beazer with an admirable paucity of prolix jabbed out these belly punches on the failed strategy in Iraq. One: S...

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[photopress:cat_lady.jpg,full,pp_empty] Time for a cartoon, methinks.

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One of the curious aspects of an open economy is that economic liberty is synonymous with economic integration. In this respect immigrants have taken to Australia with a will and make up a significant proportion of our productive output. According to the 2003/2004 Tax statisti...

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I promised myself I'd post a couple of very cute chess puzzles on Troppo when I saw them. Now after the chess fest of Kramnik's great victory (he can't have made too many trips to the dunny when he was playing rapid chess with Topalov which he won), and after a long day at a b...

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The Pew Charitable Trusts are spending $2.2 million to start a national discussion on income mobility in America. The initiative attempts to raise the profile of income mobility by forging consensus on the issue with leading thinkers representing a broad spectrum of think tank...

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"Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you're half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose and teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you're going a hundred miles an hour down a suburban side street....

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There aren't many topics that can tempt me out of self-imposed blogging retirement, but Coolhand James McConvill is one of them. I have to confess I've been wondering idly what happened to McConvill ever since his blog suddenly disappeared a few months ago at about the same ti...

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Apologies for not keeping you all up to date on the Great Match. My excuse - well I got less excited because Kramnik dug himself out of the hole he was in. He's won 3 games to Topalov's 2 over the board. But right now as I type there is a play-off because (if you recall from t...

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Obviously the biggest news of the day is the recent Lancet article which concludes that the number of excess deaths in Iraq since the war began is around 655k with 95% confidence interval (393k,943k)*. Cause of death is also attributed with over half due to gun shot, 90% viole...

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A clever bit of econometrics seems to confirm something that Mark Latham argued in his tome Civilizing Global Capital. That the tele undermines social capital. It seemed a plausible argument, but what was the evidence other than the historical concurrence of the rise of tele a...

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Liberals aren't comfortable talking about right and wrong. After all, the whole point of liberalism is to avoid arguments about morality. Rather than arguing, liberals want to establish institutions which will allow everyone to pursue their own idea of the good life. Morality...

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Edmund Phelps is a good choice for this year's Sviriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences . He's best known as the joint inventor, with Milton Friedman, of the concept of the natural rate of unemployment, in the late 1960s. The NRU essentially means full employment - or labo...

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It all started with Barbie , "the vampy fashion doll" that "helped to bring about the sexualization of childhood." At least that's how the Manhattan Institute's Kay Hymowitz remembers it. According to Hymowitz , Barbie is "not-so-spiritual godmother of Britney Spears" and a si...

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A paper done for CEDA is coming out of embargo tomorrow - Wednesday. Here is the 'op ed' of the paper which is appearing in the AFR. I'm told the paper will be downloadable from the CEDA website, but it's not as I write this and I'll be out of range for most of tomorrow. If yo...

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Given the discussion on liberty and liberalism below , it might be a good time to revisit what Australian Republicanism is. Unfortunately most current perceptions of republicanism have been defined by the 'minimal' campaign run before the 1999 referendum which ended up promoti...

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Who are Australia’s top libertarian identities? At Thoughts on Freedom, John Humphreys nominates Andrew Norton . That's odd because I always thought that Andrew identified as a classical liberal rather than as a libertarian. About a year ago Andrew wrote a post for Catallaxy o...

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Get a load of this! Curtesy of Brad DeLong's site . Brad lets us know this. After some viewing I think that this isn't just a series of pretty pictures. This is a real story. What we're watching is the innards of helper T-cell activation. The lymphocyte crawling along the arte...

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Heartening news for Australian patriots in today's Age (A hotspot of soft-Leftism if you believe the paranoid fantasies of Gerard Henderson on Sunday's Insiders ). According the Nielsen Poll Labor's primary vote jumped three points to 42 percent ahead of the coalition on 39 pe...

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A few days after fighting between Hamas and Fatah took a dozen lives and led to the destruction of various Palestinian government buildings, the Fatah-affiliated head of Palestinian intelligence services believes Palestine is on the verge of civil war : We are already at the b...

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In his 1984 book Losing Ground , Charles Murray argued that welfare hurt poor families by creating incentives for self-defeating behaviour. Last month, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed that poor families ought to be rewarded for making the right decisions: "This polic...

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If you want to go fill in a form on the subject for a PhD student - click here and do so. I have. (Hat tip: Chris Lloyd)

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I'm reading up for a two day workshop at an fine institution I discovered a few years ago called Cranlana . Named after the Myer Family's mansion in Toorak where it is housed it's a (small 'l') liberal talk shop which holds 'colloquiums' at which various topics are discussed....

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The debate started by Don Arthur (Is bad Peter Saunders a neo-conservative?) has been very interesting and helpful (my particular thanks to Don for developing the distinction between the Hayek and Saunders positions). But as the subsequent discussion has branched out into equa...

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Topalov wins another marvellous game. He played with great precision and energy throughout though it was a more traditional storming of the kingside than the last miraculous game. Kramnik was passive and it's not looking so good for him. Though it's still drawn (if he gets bac...

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Those who are not opinionated out from commenting on public intellectuals, feel free to have a bash below.

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[photopress:Australian_Intellectual.jpg,full,pp_empty] Australians love a good competition. We can turn anything into sport. So if shows like Australian Idol can give young singers a chance to crack into the music business why not have an Australian Idol for public intellectua...

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Have a look at this write up of the budget by a financial planning consultant. Now that all manner of restrictions have been lifted from the super system, the standard method for avoiding tax for those in their late forties and early fifties, will involve something like this....

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Nothing's easier to understand than a story. It's as if human beings were hardwired for narrative -- stories with beginnings, middles and ends populated by people doing things. According to cognitive scientists Roger Schank and Robert Abelson that's not far from the truth. Bac...

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Peter Saunders likes to call himself a classical liberal . Leftist commentators prefer to call him a neoconservative . But what is neoconservatism and how does it differ from ordinary versions of conservatism? And what has he done to earn the label? Andrew Norton says that "no...

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It completely beats me what Topalov is playing at. He is known for his swashbuckling attacking style, and is being slowly ground down by the very hard to beat Kramnik. His response? Get your manager to make all sorts of allegations that you're cheating and play quite aggressiv...

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Extreme anger is as good a reason as any to come out of blogging retirement temporarily. The ABC's Andrew Denton has demanded that Channel Nein apologise to Joanne Lees for publishing a poll on yesterday's Today program asking viewers if they felt Ms Lees was innocent of Peter...

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Alan Kohler has a piece on T3 in Wednesday's Herald that, as you would expect, does a pretty decent job of unpacking what's going on. He notes the huge commissions being offered to the stock salesmen, and concludes that: ...you can't believe anything most brokers say about Tel...

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RMIT's Rob Watts attempts to save the welfare state by attacking liberalism Neoconservatives are winning the welfare debate because they take values seriously, says RMIT's Rob Watts . In a recent paper on the welfare-to-work debate ( pdf ) he rejects the idea that the left is...

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Guest Post by James Wheeldon of http://www.jameswheeldon.net/ The Commonwealth Government is about to embark on a $20 million advertising campaign to encourage retail investors to pick up Telstra shares in the "T3" third tranche of its privatization. It is generally accepted...

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From the pre-game commentary Slater was well held by the Dragons. He is probably due for a blinder. King could be ready to explode as well, his best work was done in defence the other night when he practically closed down Gasnier. The biggest danger for the Storm will be the p...

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A mate of mine made this tongue in cheek comment the other day to a Canadian fellow; Why do you hate America so much that you decided to be born somewhere else? Which is an appeal to the absurd in nationalism and the arbitrary nature with which it deals with individuals, citiz...

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I vaguely remember - at about the time of the September 11 attack as part of the 'everything has changed' meme, a lot of invitations to the left to apologise for all the things they'd done wrong. All their naivite, all the things they stuffed up, all the things they didn't und...

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Chess players are nothing if not temperamental. The story so far - at least as I could be bothered learning about it is that: Topalov's camp protested about the frequency with which Kramnik was going to the toilet(!) The officials seem to have required Kramnik and Topalov to u...

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It all started on the 10th of March with the Dragons and Tigers and will end about 8:45 Sunday night with either the Broncos or the Storm being the 2006 NRL Premiers. It has been an interesting season but the post mortem will come later. The immediate concern is who will win S...

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Two weeks ago Ken wondered aloud on 'weekend reflections' that it might not work all that well on Troppo. It had only attracted between four and ten comments in the past. Anyway, the very thread he wrote this on attracted some interesting comments. Last week's weekend reflecti...

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In 1963 the Australian Government ordered the F111 at the then astronomical cost of $112 million with the final cost a decade later being 324 million. It has been the best bang for the buck purchase Australian has made in defence. Like all good deterrents it will be retired wi...

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There is nothing, I'm sure you'd agree, more fascinating, more delightful to observe, or more satisfying to the soul, than to see two grown men poke their tongues out at each other, fully extend to the other, the middle digit of both hands and for good measure unbuckle the bel...

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It is generally accepted that Popper did not give a thorough account of the way that science actually works, and that is supposed to indicate that by the 1960s he was a bit out of things. Perhaps he did some interesting work back in the 1930s that challenged the logical positi...

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I've been doing some (fairly idle) thinking but not much reading about globalisation and the extent to which large amounts of 'offshoring' of labour will be good and who it will be good for. I can't say I've got far but was interested to read this post which was pointed to by...

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I'll be giving a presentation with the above title at the University of Canberra tomorrow - Wednesday 27th of Sept in Room B34, Building 6 University of Canberra at 12:30 pm. This is a repeat of a seminar I did at the ANU last year, but if you missed it and the title or abstra...

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The shelves in American bookstores relating to politics over the last few years have become dominated by titles such "How to kill a liberal and get away with it", or "How to dice a conservative and serve them for dinner without wasting pepper". I often think when faced with al...

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Susan Polgar - one of the best women players in the world on the second game between Topalov and Kramnik. Looks like the same story, as last game but different format. Topalov bounced out of the blocks with white and mounted a ferocious attack on Kramnik's king. Kramnik held o...

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So it happened again. No Melbourne team in the grand final. In fact, none of the top four teams in the AFL competition were from Melbourne. We will go through the motions of pretending that grand final week still means something. And at 5.30 on Saturday there will be a quiet e...

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Those many of you who don't follow chess will not know that the first game in a unification bout for the World Anyweight Champion of Chess took place last night - our time. The players? Topalov whose extraordinary swashbuckling style - never mind that rooks are supposed to be...

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This open thread last weekend started off with a whimper, but turned into an interesting discussion about why nothing was happening on the thread! How's that for naval gazing! Anyway, a long time ago when I put on a sketch as an undergraduate at Burgmann College Robin Bell the...

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Today's Crikey has a brief piece by me in reaction to a piece by Christian Kerr on Wednesday. I've written about this a couple of times on Troppo before. Here's my reprise for Crikey. What makes Australia's social security system great The memes are out in force again, I see....

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I've admired Paul Monk's writing for a while now and have linked to a particularly good essay of his in the past. In any event, he's agreed for me to post essays of his on Troppo. Over the fold is an review essay of John Armstrong's recent book on Goethe and happiness. From th...

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I'm not much chop at reading poetry, but I was listening to a podcast of the Book Program and heard this discussion about Elizabeth Bishop. There was a marvellous reading of a poem about a Moose (would you believe). I reproduce it over the fold, though I expect I wouldn't have...

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Even Pope Benedict now agrees that some of the words in his recent speech at the University of Regensburg were just a tad ill-chosen. His regrets, however, may not be as acute as those of the friends and family of the nun apparently murdered by Muslim thugs as a result, or eve...

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Researchers say we've never been happier -- so where's the problem? According to economist Andrew Leigh only a handful of nations outrank Australian on measures of happiness and life satisfaction. Looking back over survey data collected since the 1940s, Leigh finds that our "o...

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That's the headline of the Washington Post's editorial on the subject. (Courtesy of Brad DeLong's Blog .) Of course, Mr. Bush didn't come out and say he's lobbying for torture. Instead he refers to "an alternative set of procedures" for interrogation. But the administration no...

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The IPA's article on Australia's 13 biggest mistakes (pdf) is a good conversation starter. I'm not very good at exercises like that, so I don't have a list of my own. Certainly the 'mistake' of publishing J S Mill's On Liberty is an odd one - I guess kind of tongue in cheek it...

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There's a delicious game going on in the regulation of financial advisors. 'Financial advising' grew out of insurance salesmanship. That was simple. Insurers paid good money to salespeople who could sell insurance. They got large quantities of the policies they wrote with the...

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Last week I spent some time collecting some data from various sources that summarise the differences and relationships between various crude measures of national performance, mostly for an introductory class on regression (which according to Rafe is the most fun that you can h...

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Is the childhood obesity epidemic caused by irresponsible fast food chains or by lax parenting and lazy kids ? Is poverty caused by a lack of opportunity or by the behaviour of poor people ? Is global warming caused by suburban energy gluttons or is the sun to blame ? The war...

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Imagine super-nanny on crystal meth. That's how Lawrence Mead 's ideal case manager deals with recalcitrant welfare recipients: One man I know in Milwaukee, who works for a private employment program ... summarized his message to his male clients this way: “I’ll do anything to...

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[photopress:robson.jpg,full,pp_empty] TodayTonight host Naomi Robson was trying to get to Papua to save the life of a young boy earmarked to be eaten by a tribe of cannibals, an industry source claims. They're kidding, right?

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Phillip Coorey in today's Herald praises the Opposition Leader for showing leadership in the debate over values. (In response to Howard's critique of Muslims who won't assimilate, Beazley proposed that vistors, including tourists, should sign a declaration on their visa form t...

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Via ex-coblogger Jason Soon , in case any Troppo readers haven't found it yet: Andrew's new blog . Andrew is an articulate and elegant writer, backs up his claims with facts and figures, avoids hyperbole, responds thoughtfully to reasoned criticism, and graciously concedes a p...

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"One of the best public intellectuals on the conservative side of politics" says ANU's Andrew Leigh . "A very thoughtful writer on the liberal side" says Mark Bahnisch at LP . A "radical neoliberal" says the University of Wollongong's Damien Cahill . Earlier this week Andrew N...

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I was setting up to deliver my talk on open source software at the Fabian Society. I decided to throw caution to the winds and the switch to Vaudeville by staring off with the same scene from Witness - 'raising a barn' - that i began my original essay for policy with. I'll ind...

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It's a question I hope to learn more about. These kinds of debates always take on heavy ideological overtones. There was the 'what made the Asian Tigers roar' debate of the 1980s in which free traders spoke past protectionists and didn't get very far. There was the 'Why can't...

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Economists have long been challenged by the question: how does one decide if a particular social program is in the national interest (to use the Prime Minister's favourite expression)? We economists talk a great deal about cost-benefit evaluations but it is never clear what go...

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More on Collingwood . Review of a collection of Collingwood's essays on political philosophy. Chapter 1 BENT OF A TWIG UNTIL I was thirteen years old I lived at home and was taught by my father. Lessons occupied only two or three hours each morning; otherwise he left me to my...

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Cedric Emanuel (1906-1995) was one of the most productive and versatile of Australian artists. He has major importance as a visual historian. For almost seventy years he sketched and painted the rapidly changing scenes of Australia from the outback to the inner suburbs of Sydn...

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Fear gripped the pulsing metropolis of Melbourne on this meaningful Monday the 11th. Fear and dread. Fear, and dread, and doubt (no doubt). We'd been warned just this weekend passed that we were on the top of the list of targets, and so on this day of symbolism and portent, we...

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Surely we cannot let 11/9 pass without a single relevant post? After all, the world changed forever five years ago today. For a start, folks the globe over ( sans moi ) have now begun quoting dates backwards, like the Americans. SBS recently aired a bizarre documentary allegin...

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Late night live sounds like it might be interesting tonight. I don't have time to read even this link , right now, but it all sounds interesting. World Bank economist Branko Milanovic says globalisation is in trouble. He shifts the focus from the economic effects of globalisat...

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Invited by the indefatigable impresario of ideas Race Mathews to talk to the Fabian Society I'll be doing so this Wednesday evening. The topic is the economic and social significance of open source software as a new mode of production, and I'm still working on the slides. Plea...

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In Jason Soon's capitalist utopia you can hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon , rear cattle in the evening and criticise after dinner . It's a world where the welfare state has withered away and in its place is an unconditional basic income paid to each adult citizen to...

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A woman was riding a bike and was shot in the chest with a .22 bullet. It almost hit her heart, but it didn't and she was OK. It transpired that the accused person was cleaning their .22 rifle on their front porch and the gun accidentally discharged. The accused was charted wi...

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Charles Murray and Peter Saunders both want to dismantle the welfare state -- they just have different strategies for doing it. Murray's plan is to convert current welfare state spending into cash grants for every adult American (except those in prison) while Saunders' plan is...

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Nicholas has very kindly invited me to contribute to Club Troppo. This is my first post. So it's virgin territory for me. Please be gentle. And, of course, I hope you will enjoy it"¦ I was driving to the shops last night listening to this PM story about workers in Melbourne no...

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Jason Soon thinks welfare payments should be replaced by a guaranteed minimum income scheme . Rather than subjecting welfare recipients to a regime of case management and workfare, Soon thinks they should be free to make their own decisions about work and lifestyle. ' Bad ' Pe...

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Here's the text of a letter of mine published in the Australian today. In the last five years, Australia has enjoyed a windfall gain of nearly 50 per cent in its terms of trade. This has added tens of billions to the coffers of the Federal Budget. Here was a great opportunity...

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It wouldn't be at all surprising if politicians and other commentators who have never seen an increase in interest rates that they thought was warranted seized on yesterday's June quarter national accounts as grounds for criticizing the Reserve Bank's decisions to lift interes...

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"I have done that," says memory. "I cannot have done that," says pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually-memory yields. Friedrich Nietzsche Perhaps if you were to update this saying for today's pacier times, you'd remove the word 'eventually'. John Quiggin reminds us of who...

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Something light to start off with. I woke up this morning to the clock radio's bad news about the Bali Nine and sitting in a traffic jam on the Easter freeway I wondered about what was really going on and reminded myself that 2+2 usually eqauls 4. Listening to RN in my office,...

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[photopress:full_1.jpg,full,pp_empty] Just to lighten things up.

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Cass Sunstein pumps out an amazing amout of stuff and yesterday I came across this brief blog post. The idea of ideological amplification rings true - though it needn't be ideological. Language itself and all use of it is an inherently co-operative exercise. Individuals use co...

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One of the ways in which economic reform might have developed and deepened from the fairly formulaic deregulationist mind set it got itself into from around the late 80s on would have been in the area of reforming legal procedure. It's still being left to lawyers. Here is a go...

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I'm very sad to say that Ken Parish has called it a day on Troppo. As he said there were some important private reasons motivating him, but there was also the agro and misunderstanding that flies around routinely. That increased the stress and tedium and that's a standing invi...

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Even though the game had no bearing on the final eight I spent a lovely day in the sun at Leichhardt Oval yesterday drinking beer and watching the Tigers flog the Bunnies. Even with the both teams out of the finals there was that air of expectation as the crowd enjoyed the bea...

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I don't have time for a substantial post on this, but have just seen a 2005 report by Seek - it was no doubt in the news at the time - but I didn't see it. Anyway this is one thing it says. Despite an environment of high employment and a buoyant economic outlook, job insecurit...

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The first time I heard about Steve Irwin, I was in the back of a taxi in San Francisco in 2000 with a couple of other Aussies. We were engaging in humorous banter with the heavyset black taxi driver. As you do when you're OS and you're looking to sample the local mood, and get...

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Interesting article in SMH wth which I agree. Especially this part. Yet this bedrock of the game - the Sydney and Brisbane club competitions - the source of most of the players for the four state teams, and most of the Wallabies, is never allowed its day in the sun, never allo...

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I once heard the late Lin Onus a teriffic aboriginal artist give a lecture to somewhere like the press club. He told a story of hearing his son singing the national anthem, which his son had picked up orally, to write out the words. They were truly hilarious when compared with...

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Michael Duffy never wanted the soccer World Cup here. Now he has solid grounds for his dread. He was evidently grazing in the archives of the Library of Economics and Liberty, an indispensable resource for rightwing culture warriors, when he came upon t his anti-soccer polemic...

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This is a blogging experiment. I'm teaching Jurisprudence to undergraduate law students this semester for the first time (although I've long been interested in legal theory). One of the early tutorial exercises I've set for my students arises from a very famous 1949 article/hy...

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Peter Faris today expands his defence of the anti-terrorism laws under which Jack Thomas has been subjected to a control order. He frames this analysis as a reasoned legal one: Two issues arise. First, is the control-order legislation good and appropriate legislation against t...

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Self-described "libertarians" all seem to have a blind spot about gun laws. Some of them are radically dishonest about their quasi-religious pro-gun obsessions. American "academic" John Lott, whose multiple misdeeds are chronicled obsessively by ozplogger Tim Lambert (to such...

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Parts 1 and 2 outlined six alternative ways of dealing with a socially disruptive economic reform. They all assumed that the postulated reform would proceed but dealt in different ways with the social consequences. In this final segment of the paper, I consider a seventh oft-o...

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In Part I outlined four policy strategies to deal with a reform which offered good GDP outcomes but had socially disruptive and regressive effects. All four did not require redistribution. I now look at the compensation option. Option 5: Compensate the losers The four options...

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Joshua Gans quotes my recent post on broadband and VoIP approvingly which I'm pleased about because he knows a lot more about both the economics and the technology of it than me. He puts the issue pithily. "Households are not the relevant unit for purchasing broadband; neighbo...

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Draft Economists are very good at advising on the best means of achieving given policy objectives - so long as the social objectives are clearly and fully laid out for them by the politicians. But most of the time the social goals are not specifically defined and so economists...

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I'm just back from the launch at the IPA - or rather re-launch for it was first published in 1980 - of The Heart of James McAuley by Peter Coleman. It was a star studded cast of launchers. Tony's Staley and Abbott did the launching but Peter Coleman was also there to respond....

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Harry Clarke draws our attention to the demise of Earth Sanctuaries Limited (ESL). It has been in bad trouble for a long time. It's a very sad day. ESL was a marvellous experiment in private conservation hounded out of existence by jealous bureaucrats and the ideologues of the...

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I just ran across this abstract in the Journal of Public Economics . I reproduce it here for what it is worth. I mean that literally, as it is not me pushing a barrow. I don't have a considered view and have done very little reading on this. Anyway, here's the abstract. In 198...

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I spotted a comment in the last week that I thought would be a good starter for our weekend open thread. If I do so again in the future, there'll be another commenter of the week. The comment was from Cam in the thread on history education - which was itself a pretty high qual...

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Last night's Late Night Live had a teriffic interview with David Runciman, Lecturer in politics, Cambridge University, UK. Theorising one of the most talented and in my view ultimately tragic polititians of our age Tony Blair, Runciman wrote The Politics of Good Intentions: Hi...

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Should you be restructuring your communications? A month or so I decided to bite the bullet and fix my family and (small) business telecommunications. I thought I'd outline what I did here and follow it with some reflections which I'm hoping to research further. Currently they...

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Here's a diagram from a recent paper (pdf) on the Swedish distribution of income. It shows that the kinds of income distribution through time that Andrew Leigh and Anthony Atkinson came up with for Australia and NZ are typical of most western countries. It also shows that you...

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Saul, who needs little introduction, has kindly accepted my invitation to occasionally post on Troppo. Saul is a wise and moderate fellow and you could do worse than accord his thoughts on the economy as much weight as you give anyone else. Over the fold is an article Saul has...

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Commenter Chris Lloyd asked the other day whether I had any observations about the risks of defamation action against bloggers. As it happens I do. Moreover, it's an opportune time to muse on the subject because there's a fairly new uniform national Defamation Act that is rele...

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Hot off the press from Sarsparilla . Regular Sarsaparilla contributor Wendy James' novel Out of the Silence has been shortlisted in the 'First Crime Novel' category of the 2006 Ned Kelly Awards for crime fiction. How good is that ?

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I was recently banging on about the ABC and podcasting re-iterating Steven Bounds' suggestion that the ABC could lower the cost of distributing podcasts by distributing them over BitTorrent when the very next day I hear that the ABC are considering doing just that . The ABC is...

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Troppo readers will know that one of my interests in economic policy is regulation. So with the Banks Report receiving its final response from Government, I wrote a column on it which was published today in The Age. Quite a bit was cut in The Age - something that usually happe...

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Here's Stephen Mayne from today's Crikey on the ABC and podcasting. The ABC's extraordinary podcasting performance All those ABC critics who attack the national broadcaster for not attracting large audiences are eating plenty of humble pie over its extraordinary performance wh...

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Political debate Australia is starting to remind me of the balls that used to be held at uni halls of residence when I was a student. Rather than some kind of broad discourse we move from one topic to another with the media paying obeisance to an agenda set by the Government w...

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An enterprising Paul Williams from the New South Wales Department of Education and Training sent me a study the Department had commissioned on the economic value of TAFE in NSW. Easily flattered on Club Troppo's behalf - I've not been courted as a media outlet before - I thoug...

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[photopress:Bookshelf.jpg,full,pp_empty] Carmen Lawrence's Fear and Politics Lawrence's central argument is that we need to get rid of the Howard government. We need to get rid of the Howard government because terrible things will happen to our nation if we don't. These terrib...

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I. I enjoyed myself at The Boy from Oz last Friday night. I'd have loved to see one of Peter Allen's big Broadway shows and was curious as to what all the fuss was about The Boy's great success in New York. Mind you, the reason for its success seems pretty obvious. Peter Allen...

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Thoughts anyone?

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Dear Crikey Subscriber, Father's Day is fast approaching, (September 3rd for all you forgetful children) and Dads across Australia are gearing up for another round of dodgy ties, el cheapo car cleaning kits, and of course, the three-pack of Bonds undies. Instead of going throu...

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This piece started out as a rejoinder to James Farrell's terse comments on a Catallaxy post about Peter Bauer's work on "development economics" and the role of aid in helping (more usually not helping) poor nations. Rafe Champion asks, apropos of nothing in particular, whethe...

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Lebanon has dragged public attention away from the progress of the Coalition of the Willing's Iraq adventure. But the blood continues to flow. Today's lead article in the New York Times reports that official US military statistics on the number of roadside bombs planted in Ira...

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I have no idea how reliable this article is. If people want to be influential (at least with me and I hope I'm not too alone) they should learn to conceal their political biases. Nevertheless I wish I could say that I'm confident that it's all rubbish. Like I said - I have no...

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The biggest story on the Eastern seaboard over the past few days has been about one man. Newcastle Knights half-back Andrew Johns . Even the the PM got involved . Bugger the Middle East or British terrorist plots. It is all about the footy in the end. As it should be. For thos...

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Andrew Landeryou , who I've faithfully promised not to call a "bovver boy", makes the following colourful observation on another Troppo comment thread: It honestly matters very little who they put on the ABC Board, it's the culture of the place that's the problem. It is stacke...

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I've just finished reading David Days very engaging and interesting biography of Curtin. It's an enjoyable, easy, long read. Early on I ran into the ten commandments of socialism. These were taught at socialist Sunday schools just after the turn of the twentieth century. Na¯ve...

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One audience member asked Albrechtsen what she thought of the media. She acknowledged the difficulty in speaking frankly due to her position on the ABC board, but thought the last five to ten years had seen steadily improving media, "such as Fox News."

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The current outbreak of floor-crossing conscience among federal Coalition backbenchers is an interesting phenomenon, not only leading to the demise of Howard's odious Indon-appeasing beefed-up Pacific Solution legislation but also to a graceful backflip on allowing a conscienc...

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A great video , that others have already linked to by Yobbo. If you've not clicked through - do yourself a favour.

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But occasionally we should look at their legislative work, if only to worry about it. Last week's debate on the proposed law to build a refugee-proof, legal wall around Australia highlighted their concerning contributions. One example is the Liberal Senator for the Australian...

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About three decades ago statistics a la USA arrived in rugby league. This had some interesting effects. One year (1976?) there was an epic battle between Ray Higgs (Parra) and Terry Randall (Manly) for a big prize for the leading tackler in the comp. Then someone realised that...

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We girly-men here at Club Faggot are nothing if not broad-shouldered. It's probably all that working out down at the gayboyz gym. So I thought it was only fair to re-publish Jason Soon's evaluation of Troppo: Club Troppo nowadays has such a prissy and precious atmosphere that...

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Well, after Round 23 the final 8 for the 2005 finals is all but decided. With a four point gap between 8 and 9 it will be to much for the Sharks, Panthers and Cowboys too make up. The Tigers, Panthers and Warriors have no hope. My atempt at predicting the 8 a few weeks ago has...

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Well this item seemed to draw some responses last week, so here it is again.

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The Fabians are emulating the CIS (I think) in establishing a essay competition for young people. The details are overleaf and if you win from the competition after finding out about it here we'll throw in an additional prize. A year's subscription to Troppo (if you win the pr...

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Here's Charles Richardson writing for Crikey today. I've been involved in politics one way or another for about 30 years; I don't think I had many illusions about it even when I started, and I certainly shouldn't have any left by now. But I was surprised how touched I was by t...

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Here's the second installment of my article on the GPI. Part One is here . I Last week I argued that, as well intentioned as it might be, the Australia Institute's Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) for Australia was systematically biased towards pessimism about our economic wel...

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This article (subscription required) reports on the US 401K super system getting a makeover. I have little doubt that the Congress has been pouring carefully over the ' Progressive Essay (pdf) I wrote for Craig Emerson advocating the 'backstop society' where we try to set 'def...

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"Mammon calls!" Thus spake me one day in Florence about fourteen years ago to Eva as we spent more and more time snapping up the cool, cheap clothes and other goods, and less and less time in the galleries. We finally got home with 80 Kgs of the stuff to somewhat alarmed airp...

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Helen Caldicott is one of the more notable distorters of truth among Australian "public intellectuals". Like the Australia Institute's Clive Hamilton, though on a global stage, she appears to rank making an ideological point well ahead of accuracy or acknowledgment of inconven...

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Clive Hamilton has an attack on Tim Flannery in The Age here . The criticisms of Flannery are of interest and generally well made. It's also interesting to see Hamilton's attack on green groups that he thinks are going over to the enemy - a theme which was taken up at greater...

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Here's a link to a good article about Wikipedia - it's in Atlantic Monthly which I've never been able to get access to without subscription on line before. Perhaps they're 'getting it' as we like to say smugly in the 'online community' and they're publishing more open articles...

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I was mightily relieved to read this in today's Herald Sun. MADONNA has weighed in on the Middle East crisis ... The accompanying picture seems to show a preference for some sort of peacekeeping force separating the two parties although I'm yet to decide if it is a peacekeepin...

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You'll hardly ever hear the words "Mark" and "Latham" uttered in the same sentence in ALP circles without the utterer mouthing a sneer and shooting a small gob of distaste at the nearest spittoon. It's become de rigour to demonize de-Latham in the ALP. It's just another litt...

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Wayne Bennett hasn't the best of relationships with the press. He has applied the siege mentality approach so successful in State of Origin campaigns to create unity within the Broncos. And while that approach has had some success, with the latest Broncos premiership campaign...

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Troppo has had a pretty sporadic commitment to regular open threads like this. Not sure why - but I thought I'd give this a try. Any thoughts provocative or otherwise would be welcome. I'm going to set a reminder to set up a thread like this each weekend for a month or so and...

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The Age published a piece of mine on the car industry today. It appears in the link just provided, and also - in case the link is broken in future and because it's slightly edited in The Age - in its original form beneath the fold. Some ideas for the car industry In economics...

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I made some snide comments on the GPI on the New Matilda website - which I reproduced here . Anyway, the piece I wrote expanded itself before my eyes into nearly 3,000 words, so I split it - a little uneasily - into two. So here is the first installment published at NM today....

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Courtesy of Troppo commenter Gaby.

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Here's a request for Troppo readers to help me out. First the story - from Crikey today. Highly-respected ABC broadcaster and newspaper columnist Terry Lane calls it an "ignominious end" to a long career in journalism. Writing in last weekend's Sunday Age , he unwittingly reli...

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From the 'living in exciting times' desk courtesy of Slashdot comes the following bit of exciting news. An anonymous reader writes "DesktopLinux.com is reporting that four countries have together ordered 4 million low-cost, Linux-based laptops from the One Laptop Per Child (OL...

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I've been fairly scathing in the past about some of the more egregious published opinions of Deakin University's blogging legal academic Mirko Bagaric . Here in relation to his advocacy of the legalisation of torture; and here on his proposal to re-introduce the notion of faul...

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Hot on the heels of the OECD saying what a good idea tax reduction for lower income earners is, the NBER has just released a major study of Earned Income Tax Credits, and to use an expression du jure jour it's "all good" or almost all good. So much for all those trade-offs we...

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Nice to see the OECD citing and supporting Lateral Economics' paper on income tax priorities - published as Tax Cuts for Growth by CEDA. The OECD has in the past lined up with the chorus of people calling for cuts to higher marginal taxes on the (unsubstantiated) grounds that...

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A great column by Krugman. Shock and Awe For Americans who care deeply about Israel, one of the truly nightmarish things about the war in Lebanon has been watching Israel repeat the same mistakes the United States made in Iraq. It's as if Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been po...

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Big Pharma is in a bind. A big bind. As James Surowiecki explains in this excellent piece there are some really big problems looming for pharmaceutical companies. And like the saying about banks, when the problems are big enough, they're our problems, not just the companies'....

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I went hunting for pieces by one of the worlds really good economic journalists, James Surowiecki of the New Yorker (author of the truly teriffic best seller The Wisdom of Crowds). This nice piece on net neutrality reminded me that I have seen the issue discussed around the pl...

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This is what it looks like. Only it's bigger - even bigger.

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I vaguely remember wondering if Skandar Keynes - who played Edmund Pevensee (the bad child who gets saved by the others) - was related when I saw the credits. Running into his name again in an unlikely context here , I asked Google if he was related to JM Keynes, which he is -...

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The following opinion piece first appeared in New Matilda. Comments welcome. Many economists are fond of saying that a country can have relatively high employment or relatively low inequality - but not both. The argument runs like this. Good employment outcomes can only be ach...

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An interesting piece by Stephen Koukoulas on the extent to which our inflation numbers are being driven lower than they otherwise would be by the falling price of Chinese imports. It's over the fold and was reported in Crikey and on Henry Thornton The focus of most analysis of...

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One for Nicholas! As soon as I could safely toddle My parents handed me a Model; My brisk and energetic pater Provided the accelerator. My mother, with her kindly gumption, The function guiding my consumption; And every week I had from her A lovely new parameter, With lots of...

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One of the less attractive qualities of Melbourne is its inferiority complex vis a vis Sydney. I know that to my parents' generation they're very different cities, but I've always been skeptical that they're that different. But there are clearly differences. It may be a clich©...

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This match really looks like being the crux match of the Wallabies' 2006 campaign. Perhaps if we do win here then the final Bledisloe will get all the headlines, and if the Boks get their act together then winning in the Republic has traditionally been a hurdle for Australian...

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Yesterday's Crikey mail included a comment by Michael Pascoe about the seemingly endless stories about corporate shonks being able to retain profits from their dodgy dealings. He writes: One should always be wary of suggesting another legal penalty to Laura Norder-crazed polit...

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Long time reader, first time poster. Ken has kindly invited me to join the exalted ranks of posters at Club Troppo, so I thought I might briefly say hi and introduce myself. Floating in a google cache somewhere under a pseudonym is the remains of my former blog, which featured...

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D.H.LAWRENCE :GENIUS OR JOKE? A paper delivered at the annual general meeting of the D H Lawrence Society at the Julian Ashton Art School annexe at Georges Heights, Mosman on Sunday 20 July 2006. My theme is from Joseph Conrad and his tale, The Shadow Line: Only the young, he...

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I once put on a comedy sketch at my hall of residence - Burgmann College - whereupon the staff tutor, Robin Bell said to me. "That was good Nick. Surprisingly good". Ditto this piece by P.J. O'Rourke on Adam Smith. It draws contemporary lessons from Smith without doing anachro...

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People speak about their 'bullshit detector'. I reckon I've got one of those as well as a 'preciousness detector'. Where bullshitting is a particularly (though obviously not exclusively) male vice, preciousness is a particularly (though obviously not exclusively) female one. W...

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Curtesy of a piece in Crikey today I discovered a terrific writer. I guess it won't be news to many Troppodillians but in the course of making some 'what is the world coming to' comments about the media (to which I can only respond 'what indeed, and what did you expect?') she...

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It seems hard to believe but the 2006 NRL season is already at round 20. Only 7 games to go before the finals. And what an interesting final 7 rounds it is going to be. The only side that does not have a chance (mathematically) of making the final eight is South Sydney. There...

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This is Tony Harris's latest column. But I wanted to add by way of introduction that Tony removed a great joke from it - which I've resurrected for Troppodillians. Namely "The one good thing about Phillip Ruddock's recent setbacks is that the egg on his face improves his pallo...

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Courtesy of Slashdot, World Firefox Day calls for little old people like me - and you - to spread the word about Firefox - the open source webbrowser. It works well and has a range of features like tabbed browsing that are terrific. Microsoft is trying to catch up and seems to...

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Rex Ringshot, nice guy, one time solo blogger , now blogmeister for Labor First, a self styled 'grass roots' attempt to renew an ALP that could do with some renewing, has asked me to draw your attention to a Labor First function to launch their 'good branch handbook' on the 4t...

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I've always been interested in the motives which drive people to achievements of various kinds and of the sociological and rhetorical descriptions thereof. Keynes would have described his own motives as public spirited, though I don't think he would have denied the gratificati...

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When I last pointed to something I'd read which was of interest Rafe wrote "Thanks for Club Troppo Ken, where would we be without access to these great pieces that other people find. Thanks Nicholas!" Well, thanks Rafe. Here's another great piece in today's Age - on the relati...

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The following letter was published in the Canberra Times today. I sent it because I am very concerned about what is happening to political freedom in Australia. Am I being paranoic or do others share my concerns? Text of letter follows. Both Brian Toohey ("Eroding State power"...

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Despite the thousands of words written about the latest Costello versus Howard circus, I'm still at a loss to understand why it actually happened. One minute Costello was giving every appearance of waiting contentedly for the PM's retirement announcement, to the extent that ma...

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Well, were to start? With an expletive you say? Been there done that! More productively, let's start with the quick wrap: First, the media seem to have taken leave of their senses, and frankly I think that a lot of the criticism directed at the Wallabies by the Sydney papers w...

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A month or so ago I watched a video of an excellent and terrifying report on 4 Corners on youth suicide focusing on the story of one young boy who was good at everything, loved by all, with lots of friends. He got prodigious scores. Then at the age of about 16 he discovered th...

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Some of you will remember that John Singleton made a fortune by setting out to irritate his TV audience with his ads, the 'where d'ya git it' ad being the paradigm case. I listen to the ABC's Philosopher's Zone program not because it's particularly good (it's not) but because...

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Spam email is the bane of my life. At one time a few years ago I was naive enough to leave my real CDU email address when commenting on blogs. Of course, it was harvested by the spammers and the number of spam emails I get in my work inbox has been spiralling upwards ever sinc...

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Looking at the debate on my earlier thread on 'moral rights' I reached for a column I wrote early last year on counterfeit goods. I thought it was posted here previously, but couldn't find it. So here it is. I think it's relevance to Ken's comment on my post is clear. I can't...

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Magnificent n'est pas? From Cassini. Explanation: Soft hues, partially lit orbs, a thin trace of the ring, and slight shadows highlight this understated view of the majestic surroundings of the giant planet Saturn. Looking nearly back toward the Sun, the robot Cassini spacecra...

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Who is this man and what is he up to? The French have a doctrine of the 'moral rights' of an artist. I don't know many of the details but it protects them against certain kinds of bowdlerisation of their works and (I think) is also the platform on which artists generates some...

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I remember an email which Rory Robertson sent out to his mailing list a short while after the Great Event when everything changed and it became appropriate to torture and detain people for years without trial in that war we're fighting against the Geneva Conventions - sorry -...

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Those sixties were fun! A while back I posted on Rolf Harris's amazing song Sun Arise. Well in the process of doing so I downloaded a couple of additional files which intrigued me. One was called "Rolf Harris with The Beatles - Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport.mp3" and I've appende...

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Big Brother is unquestionably garbage. It adds nothing to our understanding of a complex world. Nor does it enrich our lives with stories of timeless quality. By all accounts, it is an excruciating blancmange of meaningless banter, Benny Hill-style ribaldry and, now, low-level...

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From the 'obvious when pointed out' department comes this idea for powering ships. I've thought about this myself for ages, and wondered why sails were not put on ships as a matter of course. I presume they wouldn't add a lot of power, but surely modest sails would pay for the...

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I remember being at the national press club at about the time that Paul Keating had announced a further sell-down of the Commonwealth Bank. The trajectory was virtually the same as Telstra. From memory C1 was an initial float of 30% of the equity (ostensibly to 'pay for' the t...

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Given the failure of Dr Troppo to become a regular on this site, (he always seemed a bit dodgy) I thought I'd ask a question for light relief. Why are those shoes with canvas tops and rubber sole called Plimsolls (in Britain anyway)? The answer, and an interesting story from t...

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With federalism hotting up as an issue below the fold and here is Rory Robertson's piece from the Oz on how the states have not had the revenue windfall that they're supposed to have had from the GST. While I agree with Rory's argument, one thing that should be mentioned is th...

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Well, although for family reasons I am obliged to say that the soccer world cup is far from over, nothing stops me from pointing out that a) it is stating the obvious to say that the refereeing in that game is an absurd relic of the pre-television age, b) I would rather watch...

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Yes folks! Guusball is over and back to the real thing. Melbourne hosts the third State of Origin with the series at one game a piece. Will we be marvelling the mighty magic of the Maroons? Or will be saying bravo as the Blues return to their belligerent best? The beer is cold...

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(Well not really). I heard an excellent talk by him on ABC radio perspective last Friday and emailed him requesting the text - since the ABC only had the audio when I looked. (It's there now) He indicated that it was from his book and sent me the link . It's a good short peice...

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Peter Botsman who runs Australian Prospect sent subscribers an email a day or so ago inviting people to check out and buy aboriginal paintings. Some of them looked good to me so I offered to post them up on Troppo for him - if you're interested please click on the relevant lin...

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Paul Monk's essays have been gracing the pages of the AFR friday review for a while now. I read them when I see them and am rarely disappointed. But I particularly liked this review essay on the biography of Bertrand Russell by Ray Monk (I don't konw if he's any relation). It'...

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Here's a fascinating abstract from the National Bureau of Economic Research (US) Working Paper. Investor expropriation¢â¬âalso known as self-dealing or tunneling¢â¬âtakes such forms as excessive executive compensation and perquisites, transfer pricing, insider trading, self-...

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In what can become a regular feature with your help, welcome to the first 'pun watch'. Please feel free to put some of your favourite puns in the comments section below. Meanwhile, Chris Caton takes out the inaugural award. Not necessarily a truly great pun, but it tickled my...

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Courtesy of Slashdot (I think) I came across this interesting article reporting arguments that string theory has been the death of physics, or rather that it has basically taken it down a blind alley. Though many disciplines have suffered from 'physics envy', none less than ec...

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Last night was Cracker Night in Darwin, when every bogan fucktard blasts the hell out of their neighbourhood until 3 or 4 in the morning. It's also V8 Supercars weekend, when the self-same fucktards spend all day watching gas-guzzling hotted-up family cars circling round and r...

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I must confess I've been somewhat baffled by Fretilin claims over the last few days that former Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri enjoys an immunity from prosecution as a parliamentarian. There certainly isn't any such immunity in the Timor Leste Constitution . The only relevant pr...

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Here's an interesting abstract from the excellent Brookings-AEI joint centre on regulation suggesting that if real estate markets were regulated nationally to provide transparent listings, the real estate market - and in particular the market in real estate agents would be muc...

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I had a free Village pass to the movies which expired tonight so went to see Wah Wah . I don't recommend it - but then again it's not bad. Like a lot of movies these days it has excellent acting. It's consciously serious and 'art house' rather than going for the ratings. It's...

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New Matilda is running a fairly standard piece [subscription required] about the inadequacies of GDP as a measure of wellbeing. It all goes off in the predictable directions - we're getting richer but no happier, we're getting more selfish, less community minded, we're running...

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Published last week in Crikey Speakers of parliament are well remunerated. In the commonwealth they receive nearly $200,000, more than most ministers and 75 per cent above the salary paid to parliamentarians. And they are well cosseted. They enjoy extensive office suites with...

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Yesterday's Independent newspaper carries a powerful article by Henry Porter . It charts the loss of civil liberties in the UK created by nine years of the Blair Government. He describes clearly and powerfully how, given a choice between personal liberty and collective securit...

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From a few weeks back. The High Court decided in 1997 - the case was Lange v the ABC - that Australia's constitution necessarily implies "a limitation on legislative and executive power to deny the electors and their representatives information concerning the conduct of the ex...

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Belated Match Report, I know. But, having finally caught up with the tape, I do have a few thoughts to share, not all about that match (video highlights here now). Match Highlights: Matt Rogers : Sure, he went off and would have been sick to do it, but he's a sure thing to sta...

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I was wired at birth to allocate capital and was lucky enough to have people around me early on - my parents and teachers and Susie - who helped me to make the most of that. Warren Buffett It's presumably in the papers and I've missed it, or it's a hoax but courtesy of slashdo...

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Other things being equal, taxing goods is bad. Of course other things are not equal and we need the money. But we should only be taxing goods after we've exhausted the scope to tax bads. Taxing bads is good because the effect of the tax is to reduce the output of the bad. Thus...

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Ross Gittins has a nice piece in Saturday's SMH on the economic nonsense talked about 'competitiveness'. He begins with this quote from Hugh Morgan. As the pace of globalisation increases, the reality is that governments are in competition with each other. This means that the...

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David "Barista" Tiley is out of hospital after a harrowing surgical and subsequent ordeal. Fortunately, as ubiquitous commenter Nabakov observes, the loss of part of the bowel and the whole of his spleen (not to mention a heart attack along the way) hasn't done David's writing...

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[photopress:snap.jpg,full,pp_empty] Take it from me, snapping your fingers at a waiter does not work.

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What is Timor Leste President Xanana Gusmao up to in threatening to resign ? Is it just a spur of the moment emotional outburst, behaviour for which the President has been known in the past? Or is there a greater element of strategic calculation involved? If Gusmao does in fac...

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Peter Costello has announced that 4,100 pages of inoperative law will be removed from the taxation legislation. This is a Good Thing I guess, but I'm not sure I'd give it a reception quite as enthusiastic as Henry Thornton . You little ripper! Treasurer Peter Costello is going...

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I don't mind the odd cleansing ale but it seems that the result of the annual Rugby League Week players poll revealed a culture of binge drinking . And with perfect timing Parra's Tim Smith is ejected from a hotel after an altercation with cricket star Micheal Clarke and the D...

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Readers with an interest in NT politics might care to tune into the streaming audio version of this morning's ABC Local Radio morning program, where (among others) yours truly discussed a sudden outbreak of ill-discipline in the Martin government backbench. A memo from indigen...

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I only have a few observations to make, and won't have an after match report this time - I won't even be able to see this match live. Which is a shame because it will surely be worth watching! I think it will be a great contest, and I wouldn't be surprised if Australia win by...

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A photo titled Observer, of an East Timorese man at a market, taken by Joel Santos ... For a long-time observer of East Timor, last night's Four Corners program made compelling viewing. Liz Jackson presented pretty conclusive evidence that dismissed Interior Minister Rogerio L...

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One of the things that I've always liked about economic journalism is that it was putatively about some reality 'out there'. Political journalists and commentators often disappear into the endlessly self referential whirlpool of spin in which 'the perception is reality'. So it...

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On several occasions during my years in private legal practice, I observed the phenomenon of a company liquidator and his solicitors whose main goal appeared to be transferring the company's assets into their respective office accounts as quickly as possible. Of course, it's o...

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On Saturday I mentioned that our U21s beat NZ (21-17), for the second year running in the last round of pool matches, although unlike last year, NZ progress to the semis anyway, to play South Africa, who beat France (14-10) on Saturday as well. In their turn, the French are no...

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What a weird match! Yet wonderful because Australia were stronger, more creative and more organised and accordingly won , weird because the scrums were an odd battle until, without anyone at the ground understanding, they were no battle at all as England's props succumbed to i...

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I was walking in the Dandenongs with my kids the other day and told them of the extraordinary capacity of the lyrebird for imitating the sounds it hears in the bush (not much in the way of human speech unlike parrots). I don't know if they believed me about its virtuosity, but...

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The lefties over at Larva Rodeo have gone into a Henny Penny "sky is falling" frenzy ( here and here ) over the appointment of Keith Windschuttle to the ABC Board , joining Janet Albrechtsen and Ron Brunton as appointees seen by many on the Labor side as unacceptably partisan...

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It seems that happiness research, which I wrote about recently , has been going on for a very long time. I discovered this while blog browsing late yesterday. At the excellent new arts group blog Sarsaparilla I came across a reference to an anecdote at theatre critic Alison Cr...

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Speaking of equality of opportunity (which I was earlier today), occasional Troppo contributor and legendary economist Fred Argy gave an excellent speech on the subject (or more specifically, on social investment directed at enhancing social mobility, which amounts to the same...

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A bit of an experiment as I'm going to live blog the second State of Origin game. Can Queensland square the series and resurrect origin? Or while the mighty Blues achieve another series win? Settle in with a adult beverage of your choice and enjoy the ride over the fold. Pre g...

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A blog roundup is a type of post traditionally undertaken when you're bored and need a short break from the tedium of the working day, but are too lazy or lacking in inspiration to post anything original. Attention-seeking legal academic James McConvill appears to have done th...

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Australian Squad: I must say I think Connolly's forward picks are a little odd. Start with the front row: clearly (I think) Paul is on the bench because he has booked his flight to the RWC, but then does that mean that Baxter is also booked? I suspect it does. Now what about t...

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Hors d'Oeuvres of Australia have always been a particularly odd accoutrement to our national life. They were introduced as a bit of constitutional minimalism to convert the royal honours system into a more nationalistic system during Whitlam's time. But they still had the crow...

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I would wake up and thank God that I am not only a professional rugby coach but the coach of the potential triple-RWC champions. On that note, I would quickly down my morning nip before my thoughts went any further! As it is I am not he, and so I shall merely speculate as to w...

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'Unbelievable Win for the Socceroos' was how Michael Lynch of the SMH expressed it, and unbelievable was the exact word on my lips too when Tim Cahill's shot crashed off the post and back into the net, making the score 2-1. We couldn't find the game on any of our 35 TV chanels...

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Firstly, my thanks to Ken Parish for the offer to post rugby reviews here. As someone with a more than middling interest in the game, I am delighted to try my hand. In case I might lack any incentive, I have the luck to be starting at a really crucial and fascinating period fo...

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World Cup is of and running, and with the opening games we have already had a taste of some of the teams from around globe, which has sent body-clocks adjusting to a new form of nocturnal existence as thousands of viewers patiently wade through the early hours of mornings hopi...

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Round 14 sees the top eight starting to firm up and makes a good time to give a mid season report card on all clubs and even go out on a limb with the likely grand finalists. If the first 14 rounds are a guide, to make such a prediction this far out is fraught with danger but...

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Some good lines, courtesy of Tim Harkowitz . If there is no self, whose arthritis is this? Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated? There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was th...

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Courtesy of Slashdot, here is a picture of Jupiter with the two most perfect storms in the solar system heading towards one another. This is what is reported on the NASA website. Storm #1 is the Great Red Spot, twice as wide as Earth itself, with winds blowing 350 mph. The beh...

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I closed yesterday's post on national imprisonment rates by rhetorically asking why the mainstream media hasn't perceived as newsworthy the quite marked increase in imprisonment over the last decade and more. One reason may be that, despite significantly greater resort to impr...

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A US prison, but you get the picture ... The ABS's fascinating report Measures of Australia's Progress 2006 received a certain amount of coverage in the MSM when it was released last week. Most of its findings are very positive. But one disturbing aspect that hasn't received a...

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Prompted by comments from Uncle Milton and Chris Lloyd under my previous post about an apparent blowout in state public sector numbers and wages over the last few years, I decided to look a bit more closely at the claims of the IPA's Mike Nahan that state governments have "squ...

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I thought it was funny anyway

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Nicholas Gruen was certainly in tune with the zeitgeist when he posted about the lack of vision in Australian government, especially in relation to the way governments have spent the massive revenue "growth dividend" of the last few years. But of all people, it has been the Da...

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Yes, the federal government listened to the people and scuttled the sale of its 13 per cent share in the Snowy Hydro Corporation, and NSW reluctantly followed. But if you consider the statements by relevant ministers, you will find a farrago of deception. Most people will not...

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Customary Law is in the news again, but the Greek Gods aren't. Maybe they should be, perhaps their old dramas and poems would allow us all to see in dreaming a non-kissing cousin in the dance we have no choice but to partner. Remember a good dancer has good balance and that no...

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I don't often get time these days for a leisurely browse around the blogosphere. But I found a few spare minutes today, and happened to stumble across an unbelievably trivial but nasty spat between the lefties at Larva Rodeo and compulsive attention-seeking legal academic Jame...

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I heard this track (2 Meg mp3) on Andrew Ford's marvellous Music Show this morning. It's quite striking I thought and perhaps many troppodillians have heard it. But I hadn't. It won't take you long to figure out who is singing it, but some other things about the song might sur...

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In his book "A time of hope", Donald Horne details a remarkable passage in a speech about how we have all lost our bearings and how we needed to appreciate our environment more, worry about money less etc etc. The thing that was remarkable about it was not what it said it was...

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What a week. In terms of footy played round 12 had some great games and two golden point results. As for the players, one launched a spray at his team mates via the media, another was caught out after an on field incident was ignored by everyone else and one player ended up 'b...

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I posted about the Howard government's new(ish) sedition laws last year when they were going through Parliament, and expressed the view that they might well breach the implied cosntitutional freedom of political speech. Constitutional law academic George Williams expresses a s...

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