Andrew Norton mourns the passing of the Bulletin : The Bulletin hasn't had a niche for a long time now. While it still occasionally broke stories, on a week-by-week basis it wasn't providing much you could not find more promptly and at lower cost in the newspapers. I haven’t b...
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You'd think that people would have had enough of silly false dichotomies. I look around me and I see it isn't so. I look at columns like this one by Geoffrey Barker. In which he juxtaposes 'government expenditure' (good) with equity and fiscal conservatism (bad) with efficienc...
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Ron Tandberg has done cleverer cartoons. He's done funnier ones. But somehow I've never seen a cartoon that's more Tandberg than this one. The master of the simple idea. And living national treasure.
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Where did all those "extraordinarily, unbelievably, stunningly gorgeous" Russian women come from, asks Anne Applebaum . If you walked into any "well-appointed drawing room, dining room, or restaurant in London" around 1995 there they were, she says. But in the 1970s and 80s, t...
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I've praised the Asus Eee PC before (though not its peculiar marketing name) as the direction I've been hoping portable computing would take for some time. It seems to have been a success and now they're unbundling their way to success it seems. Three new models are on the way...
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The report of the Campbell Committee* on Australias Financial System (1981) paved the way for financial deregulation of credit flows, interest rates and exchange rates. But it also recognized that a financial system could not operate effectively, let alone efficiently, unless...
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Seamus C's post proposing popular elections for Australian of the Year raises the intriguing possibility of a similar mechanism for appointment of a rather more important official Australian role, namely that of Governor-General. There was speculation only a week or so ago tha...
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[ Seamus C, a new Club Troppo contributor whose first piece is published below, is an Australian working overseas, and has interests and expertise in public policy areas - KP ] Would this man have won a popular election for Australian of the Year? Sadly, as Foundation Presiden...
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Australia, Australia, we think of you each day, Australia, Australia, at work and at play, we think of you in the evening and in the morning too, we even wake at midnight so we can think of you. Australia, Australia, we love you from the heart, the liver, the kidneys, the gibl...
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Pretty interesting paper . Abstract: Over time, increases in hours of work per capita have created the intuitively plausible notion that there is less time available to pursue social interactions. The specific question addressed in this paper is the effect of hours of work on...
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A while back, I came upon Beth Noveck who is doing some interesting things in trying to bring the techniques and possibilities of Web 2.0 to government. For instance in addition to theorising at American law journal article length about ways of moving governments into the Web...
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This week the Twentieth Century's seventh greatest mass murderer died a dignified death in his bed, amidst tributes from Western leaders. According to The Washington Post , President Bush sent his regrets over Suharto's death. "President Bush expresses his condolences to the p...
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Who's been watching Bob the Builder ? I've got to say I'm loving this. The speeches just get better. This guy can run up or get run up a hell of a speech and read an autocue like there's no tomorrow Aflac <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/abbie2637/web/free-polyphonic-ri...
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Juno is a great movie -- but there's something a little odd about the music. So you haven't seen the film? It's about a 16 year old girl called Juno who gets herself pregnant. And yes ... I can hear you. You're saying, "Gets HERSELF pregnant! Isn't there some male person who's...
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In the latest edition of Dissent , Jesse Larner has a leftist take on libertarian icon Friedrich Hayek . He " talks about what Hayek gets right, what he gets wrong, and where he is just a crackpot ". Larner joins a growing list of leftist writers and thinkers who share Hayek's...
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Sometimes I'm overcome with a feeling that Club Troppo's tone is rather too uniformly earnest and worthy. Dr Troppo's posts sometimes help to dispel the ennui, but I can't help thinking more is needed. There's so much more to life than politics, law and economics. Love and rel...
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The Democrats seem to be going to their usual lengths to lose the next election, bogging their own primary down in squabbles between Hillary and Obama which has both of them at their worst for reasons explained by Clive Crook . From my distance I wouldn't know, but I think Kar...
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A while back I posted a brief endorsement of a Guy Rundle piece, which brought forth a reference to another essay by Rundle . I disagree - sometimes to the point of strong irritation with some of the things he says, especially in the last half of the piece, but I recommend it...
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Unemployment fell as low as 4.3% of the work force in December 2007 the lowest rate for 30 years. While there is still much hidden unemployment (under-employed and discouraged workers), this too has been falling. Should we rejoice or have we been living in a fools paradise? Is...
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Paddy McGuinness died this morning . He was 69. As a columnist and editor McGuinness thrived on controversy. As Matthew Ricketson wrote , he was "loved and loathed in roughly equal measure, and that is the point -- and the trick -- with such columnists." At Catallaxy, Jason So...
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I was staying in an FAQ hotel in Adelaide last week and was asked to pay for WiFi access. Fortunately I'd brought my own wireless broadband connection (which is much more expensive using as it does the mobile telephony infrastructure rather than wires and WiFi) so I didn't hav...
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What a wonderful guy. Might we all have such quiet modesty, magnanimity and achievement written on our face when we're getting on a little. Heartfelt congratulations to David Bussau on his long overdue recognition - he has just been made Senior Australian of the Year. He is a...
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If you've ever been quoted out of context by journalist you'll know what it's like to be a fictional character. As a therapist to troubled inhabitants of fictional works, I see what happens when authors abuse characters who are often finer human beings than themselves . The in...
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I am always happy to assist readers in distress. Recently I received this letter. Dear Dr Troppo, Despite a protective screen of refractor rays, my gulch has been invaded by a small army of talking tin cans with sink plungers for hands. The leader of these metallic looters say...
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Keiren Healy at Crooked Timber talks about the ways in which disciplinary orientations can bugger up sensible problem solving opportunities in a policy area in which he has specialised - organ donation. The claim that presumed consent systems perform better than informed conse...
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PPE, the combined undergraduate course of philosophy, politics and economics became popular in Oxford in the early part of the twentieth century. It acquired the name "Modern Greats" by analogy with "Greats" or classics which was ancient history, philosophy and languages which...
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One of Australian blogging's pioneers Tim Blair has announced that he has bowel cancer and is to have major surgery tomorrow. Tim has always been a combative and even divisive blogosphere figure, but it isn't so widely known that he has often provided considerable behind the s...
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The most amazing chess player there ever was has just died. The idea of some link between madness and genius is probably a bit hackneyed, and in chess, I can't think of any other geniuses who were that crazy mad, but we sure got a doozy in Bobby. It's surprising more chess cha...
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There have been three important developments since my last posting a statement by Federal Reserve chairman Bernanke; a policy preview by President Bush; and a comment by RBA Governor, Glenn Stevens. In this posting I also explore policy options for Australia if the worst case...
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It is now widely expected that the world economy will slow down in 2008 and could start to affect Australias own economic vitality in 2008/9. A mild economic slow down in Australia would not be a bad thing. It would help relieve the skills shortages, dampen wage-price pressure...
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Things have been a little dull over the holiday period. So dull, in fact, that I've been picking through my receptionist's collection of novels. First there was that book everyone's been chattering about recently -- Ian McEwan's Atonement . The second book in her pile was Jona...
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Guy Rundle's op edlets in Crikey! often annoy me - they're too bombastic and self assured for my taste, though perhaps the extreme limitations of the genre - the shortness of the articles - is part of the explanation. In any event, I thought this essay from Arena was terrific...
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The receptionist's fingers paused over the keyboard. The heat was making it difficult to think and the din of hundreds of amorous black cicadas wasn't helping. She wanted to show Mr Farrell how completely he'd misunderstood Ian McEwan's novel , but at the same time she didn't...
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One of the clichés of industry policy from the late 1970s on is that inward orientation is to be avoided - outward or export oriented policy is the go. There are lots of good reasons for this. We didn't see those reasons and then failed to notice the empirical evidence that wa...
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As I took my seat to watch Atonement last night, I was thinking that I should have read the book first, and the feeling was even stronger by the time I walked out. It was beautifully filmed, and mostly very well acted. The chemistry between Keira Knightly and James McAvoy was...
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I heard Debra Dickerson for the first time on a summer replay of a Counterpoint program I'd not heard during the year. She wrote a book published in 2004 or thereabouts entitled The end of blackness. I wondered if Noel Pearson might have forgotten to acknowledge her in an essa...
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My friend George has been traveling in East Africa since October, starting in Ethiopia. He happened to be in Kenya for the elections, and his first-hand account of that fiasco, which he emailed to a few friends, deserves a wider audience. He wrote some illuminating notes on Et...
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Find out if you want to by clicking through when the word appears in this rather fun review of Christopher Hitchens. Not that Christopher is either my cup of tea or especially interesting. But he is quite fun to watch - so long as you don't devote much time to it!
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Let's start by admiting that a black man being banned for three matches for calling a dark brown Australian man a monkey is pretty peculiar. Next will be Ricky Ponting being banned for calling an English player a pommy bastard. Couldn't John Howard, cricket tragic and implacab...
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From Dani Rodrik's weblog . . . . As I was reading a paper by Raghu Rajan, for which I am the discussant in the annual meetings of the American Economics Association, I realized how much I had moved away from this kind of literature. Raghu's paper is squarely in that "old" pol...
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Via Patrick's comment on an earlier thread, and thence from Tyler Cowen's recommendation of "one of the best hour-wasters you will get this year", I happened upon a credo which I reproduce below. It's available on this page though it's amongst other posts many of which are fan...
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I hereby announce 'Best Blog Posts of 2007', an anthology of writing from Australian independent blogs over the past year, which began appearing at On Line Opinion on 2 January. The selection and republication of the blog posts in this series is a collaboration between On Line...
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