In a new high watermark in he said she said journalism the ABC news tonight had a story of a school that 'someone said' had been "paid off" to keep silent about education spending overruns. The story seemed to be this: Some school community had complained that they couldn't ge...
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I hate to say this but all my forecasts over recent months seem to be proving right. First, we have over-done monetary policy (see my contributions in Club Troppo, January 29 and February 4th 2010). Second, our expansionary fiscal policy was on the right scale (although misman...
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Grossly unfair but wickedly funny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PE_vr0t3FA
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Paul Krugman asked the New York Times if he could publish today's column on Troppo. We have of course licensed the content to the NYT. In fact, ironically, owing to an administrative oversight, the column appeared on the NYT website before it was hoisted here. Recessions are c...
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Professor Peter Drysdale of the ANU's East Asia Forum, veteran of Australia's foreign economic relations with the region, outlined the demise of Rudd to the readers of the Forum's weekly digest. It kind of helps to remind us how strange this would look to foreigners. Many of o...
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Are you tired of separating the recycling and having to put your underpants in the laundry basket? Are you sick of watching your wife's vampire shows on tv? Chrysler knows how you feel. Last year the struggling US auto company filed for bankruptcy protection and was forced int...
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I won't shed any tears for Kevin Rudd. He was an irritating smooth talker, incapable of commanding much personal affection. Julia Gillard seems a nicer person, conveys a deeper sense of commitment to social democratic values in contrast to Rudd's technocratic rhetoric, and is...
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Magnus Carlsen, 2813 Wang Yue, 2752 Boris Gelfand, 2741 Teimour Radjabov, 2740 Ruslan Ponomariov, 2733 Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu, 2672 Yes folks, he's on the rampage again. And this time there's a new toy - which has probably been available for quite some time, but it's the first...
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This week at work I was discussing the throw-in in soccer with a colleague (we work at night and we were watching the World Cup) when I had a memory. Growing up in Maitland through the 1990s, when I played soccer either as a junior or at school, the throw in was invariably des...
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The standard result in the econometric literature on social diversity is that it leads to lower levels of trust in the community and lower provision of public goods. The experiment below confirms the former result in the short run, but not in the long run. This conforms with m...
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I've just looked at the top four apps on Victoria's AppMyState comp - the winners were announced tonight - and they're marvellous. Really natty, fresh and (it seems well done, though I've not put them through any very rigorous testing.) What's happening here is something a lit...
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This is how you do it! From the Master. Courtesy of You Tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGTOGG4o_eU&NR=1
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In the 1960 s and 70s Palmolive ran a series of tv ads warning men that body odour could hurt their career prospects. "Don't wait to be told", said the jingle. And the reason was obvious -- it's awkward to talk to someone about how they smell . But body odour isn't the only as...
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Australia vs Ghana: “Tactics? Tactics?...I thought they were a type of mint!”... So Ally Maclleod, manager of Scotland’s shambolic team in the 1978 World Cup, was reputed to have said. But let’s remember that that Scotand did give us Archie Gemmil’s lovely solo goal, and celeb...
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Thoughts on reading this psychologist's write up of the Gulf of Mexico disaster: A long time ago I stopped calling my Mum a Labor supporter and called her a Labor barracker. She's disdainful of my interest in football - a thoroughly trivial activity which is arresting for thos...
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In a memorable moment in the 1983 election Malcolm Fraser, suggested that if people got a Labor Government they’d have to keep their savings under their bed. Bob Hawke responded that the commies were already under the bed. Back then Hawke could tap into a collective consciousn...
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Via LP we have a piece by Laura Tingle in the AFR on Tuesday which describes efforts to create a "consumption based" rather than "production based" ETS. I held off commenting until I read the piece itself, but my confusion is still here. Take this paragraph. Charging people fo...
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Over a third of British men with no qualifications are economically inactive -- neither working nor looking for work. Even those with basic qualifications of ( NVQ level 1 and below ) have less than half this rate of inactivity. According to official statistics the major reaso...
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Yep, its getting yucky down there in the Gulf. From Nasa's Earth Observatory . On June 12, 2010, oil from the still-leaking Deepwater Horizon well was particularly visible across the northern Gulf of Mexico when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA...
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Australia's unemployment rate may be back to where it was in the late 1970s but the structure of our labour market and our society is very different. For example, in the late 1970s almost 70 per cent of men aged 25 to 34 were married and working full-time. Today it's less than...
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James Farrell has very kindly asked me to post my thoughts on the Australia vs Germany World Cup Finals tie to be played tomorrow morning. So far, for me, the tournament has got off to a relatively entertaining start. The opening game between South Africa and Mexico was a prom...
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On today's RN News, the ABC reported that Lindsay Tanner had told the Insiders program that Kevin Rudd would lead the ALP to the next election. This was one of the six most important things to tell us at 10.00 am this morning. Why is that news? What was he supposed to say? "Ac...
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The case for more independent fiscal policy has always struck me as bleedingly obvious. I still think it is kind of inevitable but we're certainly taking our time. The adventures of the last decade both here and in most other developed countries are a nice illustration of why...
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Several nations -- including Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, and Colombia -- have used subsidized programs to get personal computers into poor households. Governments have promulgated such programs despite little credible evidence that the technology improves children's academic perfor...
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According to Will Wilkinson , "the U.S. welfare system is very generous". And compared to the welfare states of most African countries, that's obviously true. But Wilkinson is comparing the US to the Nordic nations. So what's going on? It all starts with a Freakonomics post by...
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Last week, the Minerals Council Australia (MCA) came up with a KPMG report (download here ) that suggested that the newly introduced Resource Super-Profit Tax (RSPT) would lead to many future mining projects being non-viable. This is of course a cornerstone in their scare-camp...
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This film won both the Palme D'Or and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film last year. Paul Martin endorsed it a couple of months ago, but since it's approaching the end of its run in Australian cinemas, I thought one last recommendation wouldn't hurt. I find myself in comple...
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Here are the first three dot points in the UK Coalition's new agreed policy document (pdf) on "Business". We will cut red tape by introducing a ‘one-in, one-out’ rule whereby no new regulation is brought in without other regulation being cut by a greater amount. We will end th...
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Paul Bloom raises a fascinating question in his recent essay The Pleasures of Imagination : Do we enjoy imaginative experiences because at some level we don't distinguish them from real ones? Bloom's question makes me wonder about the way politicians harness the imaginative te...
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Arthur C Brooks launches a creative defence of small government in the National Review . He argues that people value money because it is a symbol of earned success. And because it is earned success rather than money that makes people happy, redistributing income from the rich...
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Andrew Leigh has posted on what a good idea it would be to do some random tax audits. "Don't they already do this", I hear you cry. No they don't, not in Australia. As part of our 'we know what we're doing' approach, the ATO pursues people whom it's modelling, and perhaps its...
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Well, after a week and a half of our HIV progression comp we beat the best available model of HIV progression. Now the best entry in our Eurovision comp picked the winner. That's not so amazing because it was a pretty one sided affair. What was worthy of note is that Kaggle 's...
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Yes folks. I've mentioned this before on Troppo. Having read of this bout , I can see how it could be quite exciting. Strange business. Play through the game here and the commentary has a little spice to it - as the two players get up from the board and try to beat each other...
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On a recent visit to Washington, or 'D.C.' as our aficionados (and efficionados) call it, I had my iPhone stolen. So I need a new smart phone. Here are my impressions of the market and I'd be happy to be corrected and/or have my knowledge extended with a view to deciding what...
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Sinclair Davidson has extracted a concession from David Gruen at the Treasury regarding some purported evidence for the efficacy of recent fiscal policy, that appeared in the Budget Papers. But before we consider the specifics, it's worth thinking through how one would discove...
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The recent signings of Rugby League players to the expansion clubs of the AFL has me thinking about the history of football (used here generically for all codes) and just what makes Aussie Rules distinctive in the current world. Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson has a i...
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Well, the Israelis have been at it again. Boarding a humanitarian flotilla that was bringing humanitarian supplies to a besieged population on the Gaza strip, the Israeli military shot at least 9 people dead and once again displayed a worrying degree of disdain for UN resoluti...
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This is a note to myself, which I hope to come back to. The internet has the power to revolutionise a lot of industries. Print and software are two that have been revolutionised - and, in areas that could be 'commoditised' have led to plummeting costs. In health and finance, t...
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For years I've watched people poke and prod at the internet, trying to get it to cough up enough cash to support careers in professional journalism. But in a world where even Rupert Murdoch complains about not getting paid, it's no surprise that most fail. At Crikey Margaret S...
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