Herewith the text of my talk on Ockham's Razor this morning . It is from a longer essay which you can find here , boiled down so that it could be read in the 12 minutes or so one gets on Ockham's Razor. I. Shortly after Barack Obama became the first US president to build his c...
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Recovering journalist Mr Denmore succinctly summarises the response of the media (at least the Murdoch portion of it) to the Peter Slipper controversy: [T]he Tory regime changers of News Ltd could spin the Peter Slipper story into an imagined constitutional crisis and provide...
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[caption id="attachment_19526" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Magistrate Pat O'Shane"] [/caption] Cross-posted from CDU Law and Business Online With CDU Introduction to Public Law students due to study the topic judicial independence next week, it is an opportune time...
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How aged care reform slipped off the media agenda: "Confronted with a major policy initiative that, while affecting millions, offered little potential for partisanship or prurience, the media was a little flummoxed". Mr Denmore, The Failed Estate . The limits of citizen journa...
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They played the studio version of this song by Colin Hay on the day that we learned that Greg Ham had died. It was a good choice. I saw Colin Hay play this song back in 2002 at Woodford. Back then it was just him, a guitar and his gorgeous wife. Here he is playing it at the Co...
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Part one of a intermittent series on interesting ideas that might not be useful. Today I'm talking about path dependence that leaves us with second rate technology. The hypothesis is very simple, but very interesting. A society has a problem, and a number of technologies becom...
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Anzac Day. A day for reminiscing. A day for remembering great deeds, and the heroic words that were written about them .
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In 1992 Bill Clinton campaigned on ideal : "The ideal that if you work hard and play by the rules you'll be rewarded, you'll do a little better next year than you did last year, your kids will do better than you." This was the American dream. With the economy in recession, man...
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http://youtu.be/fWNaR-rxAic I heard this song for the first time this evening. No doubt I'm one of the last to hear it - I certainly come after nearly 30 million YouTube plays. Anyway, it's a great song. What's nice is that it seems like a throwback to the time when women pop...
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(note to self) For many years now, it has been clear to the insiders that there is no hope in achieving serious reductions to greenhouse gas emission by means of international co-operation: the incentives to free ride on the efforts of others is too great and none of the big p...
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In a speech at the Institute of Economic Affairs , Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey announced the the end of the age of entitlement. He followed up the speech with an interview for the ABC's Lateline . At Billablog, Hockey's speech inspires a song while Patricia at Cafe Whispers pe...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRhs26o03ok In the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty Friedrich Hayek explained that he saw little point in engaging with Rawls' Theory of Justice since "the differences between us seemed more verbal than substantial..." Many of his su...
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This wasn't supposed to be the theme of part two (Part One is here ) but Jessica Irvine's recent and timely column on superstardom and One Direction prompted me to add my two cents' worth - well someone else's two cents' worth but at least inserted by me. First; highlights fro...
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You heard it first on Troppo. And no Charlotte, it isn't bad that you didn't know that the Titanic was real. Philosophers have had the same trouble for years.
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I'll be making a few overseas trips in the next little while so will be catching up on some movie watching. I've just discovered 475 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc. so that's been a boon. However unfortunately a lot of them are on YouTube and/o...
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Whilst making pies yesterday I happened to recall a sentence I read 7 or so years ago, which suddenly struck me as very silly. So I just looked it up to make sure I hadn't imagined it. I didn't. Here's the whole paragraph. A final point worth noting on gang wars is that their...
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Journalism academic Terry Flew blogs about a recent paper by a UK colleague: Recently published on Open Democracy has been an influential paper by Angela Phillips on “ The Future of Journalism “. The paper was presented at the Media, Power and Revolution: Making the 21st Centu...
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[caption id="attachment_19320" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Peter Singer"] [/caption] Last week's ABC QandA debate between uber-atheist Richard Dawkins and Catholic archbishop George Pell generated quite a lot of blogosphere debate , not least here at Troppo . Howev...
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Twitter's a great medium for sharing links and short comments. And since that's pretty much what I've been doing with Missing Link Friday it raises an obvious question -- why not take Missing Link to Twitter? So I thought I'd give it a go: @donattroppo. Let me know what you th...
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Classical liberals and social justice: "many defenders of private economic liberty suffer from a malady that I shall call social justicitis . Social justicitis , as I use that term, refers to a strongly negative, even allergic , reaction to the idea of social or distributive j...
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God speechless at outrageous Atheistic slurs It was billed at the debate to end all debates. The one where the big questions would be finally resolved. Renowned God scoffer, Richard Dawkins verses Australian stuffed-shirt-in-chief Cardinal George Pell were to have it out on th...
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Some of you may know that Kaggle's motto is "We’re making data science a sport.™". Now we're publishing a leaderboard of our top ten performers . And it's quite an eye opener. There's not a professor there. Indeed there's not a person from a top university there. Just ten of t...
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Regular readers will be familiar with my dismay at the kind of bumph that passes for strategic planning . I recall as 'thinker in residence' at a one of the major departments in Canberra having a discussion with senior management about Web 2.0 and innovation in government. The...
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Here's an extract from a book on fair trade that I had occasion to look up. In what circumstances is fair trade a good thing? If we dig into our pockets to buy something at a higher price than necessary in order to engage in 'fair trade', then we know a few things. The sacrifi...
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It's a sad day in the Aus blogosphere. Leading left-leaning group blog Larvatus Prodeo has folded its capacious tent and joined the ranks of ex- parrots blogs. Supremo senior commissar Mark Bahnisch explains the public rationale: We collectively feel seven years is enough. I t...
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Medieval Universities, Legal Institutions, and the Commercial Revolution by Davide Cantoni, Noam Yuchtman - NBER #17979 We present new data documenting medieval Europe's "Commercial Revolution'' using information on the establishment of markets in Germany. We use these data to...
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Social Identity and Inequality: The Impact of China's Hukou System Date: 2012-03 By: Afridi, Farzana (Indian Statistical Institute) Li, Sherry Xin (University of Texas at Dallas) Ren, Yufei (Union College) URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp6417&r=exp We conduct an...
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Troppo's patron saint Adam Smith put it thus (note the generous assumption about human nature): The liberal reward of labor, as it encourages the propagation, so it increases the industry of the common people . . .. Where wages are high, accordingly, we shall always ?nd the wo...
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http://youtu.be/NOyx3r59L-I
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I just came across this MPI speech by Andrew Leigh. Damn fine job. Straightforward, informed, powerful. In a world in which people somehow get divided into subject wonks and sliver-tongues, it's amazing how much actually knowing stuff and having a perspective on things gives y...
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In the spirit of an earlier post addressing the French Film Festival, I'm now repeating my bleg, this time for the German Film Festival . Just to recap, this is an extract of what I said there . Film festivals are great things. Yet in my case I see them come, think “I’d like t...
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Gillard is still the best person to lead the ALP (there is no one else). How deal with the loss of trust following her broken promise on carbon tax? This is a difficult question but it must be resolved. Abbott keeps making stupid remarks and then saying “it was an inappropriat...
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The reason that you can't get many books back to the 1920s and then suddenly can? Copyright. Someone owns the copyright in the US if the book came out after 1923. Economics 101 teaches that the existence of the property right should enhance the availability of books. After all...
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