Here are a few of the links I've been clicking over the past few days: When is economic growth good for the poor? At Consider the Evidence Lane Kenworthy reveals the awful truth -- governments can make poor people better off by giving them money. Money and happiness . When peo...
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Orpheus and Eurydice by Carlo Cignani (1628-1719) O everlasting gods! I see your lovely eyes and your beautiful face, and yet I cannot believe my own eyes! These are the sentiments of Orpheus on being reunited with Eurydice in Hades, but they are also the standard reaction to...
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The publication of an edited version of my Troppo post about abolition of mandatory universal detention of asylum seekers at the ABC Unleashed site has certainly been an interesting experience. Fairly predictably it attracted the sort of polarised "howling into the darkness" c...
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I'm looking for a good web designer who can integrate a web presence with Facebook and Twitter and who also has a working familiarity with higher education learning management systems and in particular Blackboard. Can someone point me towards a suitable candidate?
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RBA governor Glenn Stevens always goes to the big issues. His latest speech notes that we are becoming more dependent on China and India buying our resources, and adds that these countries will probably have their ups and downs over the next quarter-century. So then he asks: h...
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Occasionally a report comes along which should give people a whole new way of looking at a public policy debate. A new report on universal high-speed broadband (UHSB) via fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP), titled "Superfast: Is It Really Worth a Subsidy?" , does just that. Written...
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From: Nicholas Gruen (Lateral Economics) Sent: Saturday, 20 November 2010 3:12 PM To: Assistant Subject: Qantas Booking Hi there, I purchased the ticket with details below at Mascot Airport and they said they'd send me my invoice by e-mail, but they've not done so. Can you che...
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In a recent post, Troppo's Ken Parish suggested that quality newspapers serve a gatekeeping role, ensuring "at least some measure of quality assurance". So what's happening at the Australian? In a recent piece on wind farms, environment editor Graham Lloyd attempted to explain...
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If you regularly copy and paste headlines or paragraphs from newspapers, you'll have run into Tynt Insight . It's the software that inserts the irritating "Read More" URL into your blog posts, emails and documents. As John Gruber at Daring Fireball writes , Insight "is a servi...
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There's more to reporting than quoting from media releases or explaining statistics you've downloaded from the ABS -- or at least there ought to be. And that's why it's so worrying to read this from Alan Kohler : It is now possible for anyone to find out almost anything. Someo...
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Journalists love nothing better than to navel gaze about the future of newspapers and the mainstream media in the Age of Social Media. Some journalists even see social media as threatening their long-term career prospects. It's probably inevitable given the struggle newspapers...
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This NT story might bear watching for its possible national implications: The Northern Territory's attorney-general is seeking an investigation into claims Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and his NT counterpart tried to bribe a candidate not to run in the 2010 federal el...
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This week's Missing Link Friday looks at who's to blame for the toxic waste in your garage, asks whether car drivers and Tasmanians are paying their way and investigates the latest public policy fad -- social investment bonds. Help! Rich guys in top hats are filling my garage...
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This afternoon I returned home from a day out doing various things Kaggle , and on the stairwell was a fancy black, clear wrapped package. I thought it was some fancy bit of nonsense for their frequent fliers points. Well it kind of was. It was their latest special card. I'd b...
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Well it's not a new topic for me, but if anyone's interested Lateral Economics got quite a bit of coverage for a study for Western Sydney showing that had the toll roads of Sydney been funded by governments rather than the private sector the NSW public sector would be worth ov...
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The release in federal Parliament yesterday of the report into last year's Montara oil spill off Australia's north-west coast is just the latest chapter in a saga of NT government incompetence: "Industry, government and regulators must be absolutely committed to a culture of h...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-3hL9FfQFc&feature=player_embedded Well, North Korea, this is stemming from I think, a greater problem when we’re all, you know, sittin’ around askin’, ‘Oh, no, what are we gonna do,’ and we’re not having a lotta faith that the White House is go...
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http://vimeo.com/16917950
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(Hat-tip Dale from Faith in Honest Doubt ) Although I intensely dislike the rabid intolerant atheism of people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, it's certainly no worse than the propaganda of some of the more cretinous American God-botherers: http://www.youtube.co...
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At last count eight people had been seriously injured and seven arrested after an extended family group returned to the Central Australian remote Indigenous community of Yuendumu, having earlier fled to Adelaide to escape "payback violence" after a stabbing murder in Alice Spr...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cAFf_UDj9Y&feature=player_embedded
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And yes, if you want you can do some sleuthing from the url of the picture.
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Early next month we'll learn whether Australia has won the hosting rights rights to the FIFA World Cup in 2022. Surprisingly, given this would entail such a large amount of government expenditure, discussion in the media relates only to the tactics of the bidding team and the...
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It always seems to be two steps forward and then two back with Australia's asylum seeker policy. In the wake of the High Court's M61/M69 decision, DIAC has apparently begun offering all offshore asylum seeker s who have been refused refugee status a renewed assessment and pres...
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How do people respond to evidence of their own privilege? Some will deny it. They'll try to tell you that earning $90,000+ per year makes them a middle income earner. Others will ignore it. And others still will try to justify it -- they'll say they deserve to be better off th...
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A fertile collaboration A brief reflection, albeit belated, on the passing of Henryk Górecki won't be out of place in such a hive as ours of classical music enthusiasts. The Polish composer secured immortality with his Third Symphony. It's a shame the expression 'achingly beau...
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Cheating students, immortal hamburgers, housing nutters and a cunning plan to improve the affordability of Grange Hermitage, all feature in this week's Missing Link Friday. Lies, lies and more lies Joe Hockey is an expert at deception, writes Ad astra at The Political Sword ....
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I have a dim recollection that somewhere someone has done a set of graphs of the rapidly contracting time horizons of scientists’ and economists’ predictions of environmental and economic problems arising from climate change, biodiversity reduction, risk to food supply and ene...
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I can finally see the point of Twitter. It lets you inflict isolated thoughts on people that are too trivial or even self-indulgent to merit a full blog post but that you need to share. The Librarians is the best Australian TV sit-com. Ever. Discuss. My ideal final episode: Oi...
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Well folks, some of you may not be chess fiends. But tonight and for the next two nights even you may be intrigued to pop in and watch world championship blitz tourney. Players have 3 minutes plus 2 seconds per move each. So they've got to get a wriggle on. And they are stupen...
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There is growing recognition that the dispersion of credit risk by banks to a broader and more diverse group of investors, rather than warehousing such risk on their balance sheets, has helped to make the banking and overall financial system more resilient. The IMF, 2006 (pdf)...
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Don't diss economies of scale in finance. Well I do actually. There's lots of evidence that, beyond a certain modest size, dis-economies of scale come to dominate economies of scale. And now it looks like those areas of finance that are not simple commodities that anyone can d...
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Under the wonderful post title " Copyright Infringement And A Medieval Apple Pie ”, the blogger Jane Smith (not her real name, one would guess) has documented the history of an online copyright infringement. Hardly unusual, you would think, indeed the internet is supposed to b...
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It's wrong to tell children that Santa Claus is real, argues Edward Feser : Parents who do this certainly mean well, but they do not do well, because lying is always wrong. Not always gravely wrong, to be sure, but still wrong. That is bad enough. But there is also the bad les...
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As Jason Kuznicki writes at Cato@Liberty , there's "a game lately played in the bookish corners of the left side of American politics" that you might call the "We Know Hayek Better Than You" game. It sounded fun, so I thought I'd have a go. Many self-styled classical liberals...
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Troppo co-host Nicholas Gruen made an impressively well-groomed appearance on Alan Kohler's Inside Business program on ABC TV this morning. Nicholas canvassed a really interesting idea I don't immediately recall his having yet ventilated here at Troppo. It's the concept of por...
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The thought hadn't occurred to me until I read this . The Impact of Income Distribution on the Length of Retirement By: Dean Baker David Rosnick Social Security has made it possible for the vast majority of workers to enjoy a period of retirement in at least modest comfort wit...
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What Australia needs is a "genuine grassroots free market advocacy organisaiton [sic]", writes Tim Andrews . And he's convinced he's the man to make it happen. Andrews is currently in the US equipping himself with the training and experience he'll need to create an Australian...
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I was browsing in borders and came upon American Essays of the Century (ie the last one) edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Which was very tempting. I would have bought it if it wasn't $45 too. But I read the essay below - full as it is of what are now cliches of the civil rights mo...
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Around here at Troppo we've been musing for a while about how Labor in general and Julia Gillard in particular need to connect the government's derailed policy agenda to some overarching vision or set of values likely to inspire commitment and enthusiasm from the erstwhile sup...
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There's been a lot written about what's wrong with modern macro. But this quite quiet methodological discussion by Colander is well worth the read - including I think for non-economists. It's quite rich in descriptive detail about what policy economics was like - and still is...
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Apart from the issues canvassed in my previous post about yesterday's High Court judgment on the validity of aspects of the Commonwealth's offshore "boat people" asylum seeker processes, the sixty four million dollar question now is whether it will affect any attempt by the Gi...
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It's Friday. And that means it's time for another Missing Link Friday. This week Bill Muelenberg explains why letting teenage girls bring other girls to school formals may encourage bestiality, an Australian conservative argues that female empowerment is a plot to disempower m...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfFMIhMEyYY&feature=player_profilepage I was pleased to be asked to speak at the Queensland's Right Information Day. In my speech I wanted to speak a little against the grain. The language used by Web 2.0, Gov 2.0 aficionados has a particular qua...
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Like David Marr , I've been waiting for a while for the High Court's decision in the M61 and M69 case. The applicant's arguments challenge on various constitutional and statutory interpretation grounds the legal validity of the current asylum seeker processing regime, and in p...
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High profile constitutional law academic George Williams argues in today's SMH that the federal laws prohibiting self-governing Commonwealth territories (NT, ACT and Norfolk Island) from legalising voluntary euthanasia should be repealed. As a Territorian and public law academ...
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for some time now, I have wanted to read a short intelligible piece telling me what the US health reforms actually were about. The problem till now has been that the reforms entail 1200 pages of unreadable legal text referring to more unreadable text, and that the issue became...
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This piece suggests that the UK may i mplement quotas to increase the representation of women on FTSE companies. I appreciate the sentiment. Even though it's hard to find someone who will explicitly state that women are unsuited to positions of power, the corridors of power bo...
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Australia's pro- and anti-population growth advocates seem to be competing with each other to see who can produce the most glib, fact-free piece of propaganda. Dick Smith's entertaining anti-growth advocacy-doco Dick Smith's Population Puzzle , screened in the lead-up to the r...
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In a fairly desultory post , Helen 'Skepticlawyer' Dale presents the right wing de rigueur view that the United Nations is a waste of space dominated by corrupt third world regimes and should be abolished. Her pretext is the imminent establishment of a new UN agency for women'...
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From Troppo's guest blogger Neal Lawson (OK I nicked his post and reproduced it here). It is so depressingly inevitable. Obama, like Clinton, Blair and Brown before him, like in Rudd in Australia, like the Swedish social democrats, like every example of centre-left government...
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HT Three Quarks, I enjoyed this wander around the James Bond genre. How can we take such pleasure from such bad movies. It's a mystery. I liked the essay and don't dismiss the author's principal explanation which is Freudian fantasy for boys. But I'm in the demographic he's wr...
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Here's this week's Missing Link Friday. One for the country Don't stop at two, says Mark Richardson. "to have stable population growth you need a large percentage of couples to have 3 children to make up for those having none. Limiting families to 2 children won't work." At Oz...
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This is an EconTalk interview by Russ Roberts, with links to relevant readings. You can download to listen or you can read the dialogue, which is a bit hard because you have to work out who is talking (maybe not hard if you pay attention, but you can't tell at a glance). The b...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OLP4nbAVA4&feature=player_embedded
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AT the peak of the recent housing boom, subprime mortgage companies were loaning $600 billion per year to homebuyers with poor credit histories. In The Political Economy of the Subprime Mortgage Credit Expansion (NBER Working Paper No.16107), co-authors Atif Mian, Amir Sufi, a...
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Here is a story about the internet working the way tech utopians think it should. Technology is as good or as bad as the social conditions of which it is a part, but this is one of the good stories. It can be read either as a perfect example of self interest working well in th...
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In 2001, Portugal decriminalized the private use of all illicit drugs, including heroin, cannabis, and cocaine. As long as a person is not found in possession of more than 10 days' worth of any of these drugs, use and possession is no longer a criminal offense. The main point...
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The NSW opposition will quite certainly become the NSW Government, so any policy announcements they give should be taken as a guide to future government policy. Unfortunately, such policy is extrememely thin on the ground - sometimes to an absurd extent. In the edition changes...
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