http://youtu.be/xlIrI80og8c I didn't know I was a fan of Karl's till this. (Apologies if you've seen it before - like our tagline says - Troppo, proudly a few months behind the cutting edge of popular culture)
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Erstwhile econoblogger and now federal Labor MP Andrew Leigh has been unjustly traduced by the dastardly Liberals and has complained about it on Twitter. Somewhat uncharitably some might think, I couldn't resist a gentle return poke: As media analyst Andrew Catsaras pointed ou...
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It seems intuitive that other things (which means total wealth) being equal, the more equally income is distributed, the more utility gets squeezed out of it. Of course at the limit there's a tension between equality and efficiency - but then at the limit there's also a tensio...
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Keynes. mercantilism and the Euro crisis
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[caption id="attachment_20702" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Sri Lankan asylum seekers in Nauru detention in 2007"] [/caption] Why doesn't the Gillard Labor government swallow its pride and simply accept the Coalition's latest compromise proposal on asylum seeker pol...
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The Modular Nature of Trustworthiness Detection By: Bonnefon, Jean-François (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) De Neys, Wim (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) Hopfensitz, Astrid (TSE) The capacity to trust wisely is a critical facilitator of success and...
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Regular Troppodillians will have observed occasional attempts by me to get something regular going on Troppo regarding films. None have come to anything. Anyway, I've just completed a couple of deadlines and have a couple of free film passes obtained last year which only last...
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Stand Your Ground Laws and Homicides , Chandler B. McClellan, Erdal Tekin Since 2005, eighteen states have passed legislation that has extended the right to self-defense, with no duty to retreat, to places a person has a legal right to be, and several other states are debating...
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Finding Eldorado: Slavery and Long-run Development in Colombia , Daron Acemoglu, Camilo García-Jimeno, James A. Robinson Slavery has been a major institution of labor coercion throughout history. Colonial societies used slavery intensively across the Americas, and slavery rema...
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[caption id="attachment_20699" align="alignright" width="300"] Ceci n'est pas un Duchamp[/caption] I once overheard a serious conversation between two curators as to whether the urinal they were looking at was a genuine Duchamp or an unauthorised urinal. Strange loops involve...
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In the torrent of words over the job cuts at Fairfax and News Ltd, not many people seem to have noticed that these events also further undermine the already teetering argument of the Finkelstein Review for a new system of media regulation. How's that? Recall that the Finkelste...
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"All I want to do is go to the movies, have a soda and popcorn" says Michael Graham . But with New York mayor Michael Bloomberg banning supersized sodas and officials talking about extending the regulations to popcorn , conservatives like Graham are feeling nanny's hot breath...
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[caption id="attachment_20629" align="aligncenter" width="525" caption="I (KP) couldn't find a cartoon satirising the absurdity of the apparently dominant American attitude to Obamacare, except this one that does so unintentionally ..."] [/caption] No time to write a considere...
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This week's dramatic events in the Australian media have underscored the Schumpeterian "creative destruction" being wrought before our eyes by the Internet and associated technologies and cultures: Fairfax's announcement of the sacking of 1900 staff, closure of print facilitie...
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by Maria Popova - capacity to “learn, unlearn, and relearn” emotional behaviors and psychological patterns is a form of existential literacy.
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Why hasn't (Darwinian) evolution evolved the building blocks of Lamarkian evolution? Well it has once - with us - but why hasn't it done so at the biological rather than the cultural level? Perhaps smuggled into Lamarkianism is the idea of telos, which can exist within conscio...
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[caption id="attachment_20414" align="alignright" width="316" caption="NT government croc catcher Tommy Nichols"] [/caption] News Ltd polling guru Peter "Mumble" Brent disagrees with my assessment of the likely state of play in the run-up to the NT election on 25 August: I don...
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by Anne Twomey - Parliament's abject surrender of its powers of financial scrutiny to the Executive, just to save a few school chaplains.
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http://youtu.be/uiyMuHuCFo4 HT Brad Delong
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This was the best bit in the essay that Ken quoted recently . Care is impliedly conceptualised as resulting from poor fortune, to be provided for as a ‘service’ rather than something essential to realising our humanity. Incapacity is spoken of as a ‘risk’, as if it were someho...
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Bill Easterly thinks colonialism is not all bad. The European Origins of Economic Development by William Easterly, Ross Levine. A large literature suggests that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and economic outco...
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As Ken Parish's post below shows, there is now a widespread view that Gina Rinehart will win control of Fairfax , publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and then seek to move their editorial stances well to the right. From people who believe that, you hear both wa...
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From @danilic (zoom in to read some of the smaller text)
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[caption id="attachment_20275" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Hendo"] [/caption] The Northern Territory is facing an imminent general election, on 25 August to be precise. We know this because the Henderson Labor government introduced fixed four year terms after rushi...
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[caption id="attachment_20266" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Federal Attorney-General Nicola Roxon"] [/caption] Federal Attorney-General Nicola Roxon's media intervention into the Ashby v Slipper case provoked a Twitter discussion that's worth recording and then musi...
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by Sarah Joseph - considers the moral and practical dilemmas of Australia's asylum seeker policy
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by Jeremy Waldron - some reasons for regulating hate speech are bad ones but some (like protecting dignity) are not.
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Here's a great picture of the sub-assemblies of the Boeing 787 (Dreamliner - ok it's a silly name, but it's somehow fun to say). Its touted by Deloitte as an example of how disaggregated industries are. But looking at it I wondered, might it tell us something else. What (the h...
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by Anne Twomey - Politicians may be more likely to funnel pre-election and other funding through properly legislated and overseen programs.
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by David Ritter - The reality for today's Australians is material abundance, accompanied by tiredness, time-poverty, jadedness and anxiety.
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by Gabrielle Appleby - States may have more to lose than money on legal bills if they join "Twiggy" Forrest in opposing Labor's mining tax.
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My previous post - ' With friends like this’: Labor policies and the commercial, independent visual arts sector - was kindly posted by Ken Parish, 6 June. In many ways, artist resale royalties are intrinsically a throwback to the pre-reform days of the 1970s and '80s. The roya...
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For quite a few years Club Troppo has had a self-appointed mission to bring the best of blogosphere writing to a wider audience. There’s a lot of rich, diverse, high quality material out there, much more so than in the mainstream “print” media, degraded as it is by competitive...
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I have a running conversation with Henry Ergas in which I argue that one could get a long way in economics just by not doing silly things - ie there are plenty of $100 bills on the pavement. He doesn't seem to agree. But here's a $100 bill on the pavement. From today's column...
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I've been asked to pontificate on this subject on national radio on Sunday night. My main message will be that yes, manufacturing will be smaller than now and will generally follow the trend it's been following and that that's fine. There's not much that's special about manufa...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnsGc2r0m4k Coroner Elizabeth Morris's findings 1987 Royal Commission (Justice Trevor Morling) Coroner Barrtt's original findings (1981) [caption id="attachment_20121" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Doesn't Colin Wicking have a patent o...
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White to play D Tomic vs F Winzbeck 44. ? See game for solution. about our puzzles Still, perhaps not so tricky if you're used to solving these puzzles.
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Right now, for those that are interested, there's a Big Chess Tournament on. The Tal Memorial (which you can follow as the games are played here ) in which ten of the top fifteen players in the world are competing, including three rated over 2,800. Luke McShane is the only one...
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So, Spain got another 100 billion to sort out its banks . There seem to be very few strings attached to this bailout: the money comes from the recently set-up European stability funds (EFSF and ESM). The central Spanish government gets it and its up to the Spanish to figure ou...
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I see John Quiggin is touting Thursday (give or take a few days) as the tenth anniversary of the birth of his blog. I can't be even that precise, because this blog has been through several iterations, and the early days coincided with my marriage breakup so events tend to be a...
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The grand nephew of the Belanglo murderer has conducted a kind of ecstasy killing - which is to say he and another person dragged someone into the Belanglo forest and humiliated and terrified the victim before executing him with an axe, recording the incident and boasting abou...
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Like lots of people, I've always been fond of Marilyn. She was an interesting and courageous person. I liked her apparent seriousness. And the cut of her ideological jib. She was one of the few people who stood against McCarthyism. Yet I always harboured the view that this was...
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I could have made this a comment to yesterday's dodgy asylum seeker dilemma post, but I thnk it deserves a thread all on its own. One of the more interesting but largely unexamined aspects of statistics about asylum seekers in Australia is the stark disparity between success/a...
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Savvy speculators have been making billions from the European crisis by second-guessing the politics. For instance, whilst big banks were forced to take a 70% haircut on their Greek bonds in March, some savvy investors that bought them up simply refused the haircut and got pai...
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by Jonah Lehrer - Smarter people are even more vulnerable to basic thinking errors than less intelligent ones.
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These articles might be a week or two old, but they're well worth reading if you haven't done so already ...
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[caption id="attachment_20019" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Australian Aboriginal Art is much sought after internationally, but Australians overall and Aborigines themselves benefit little from it (and even less since Labor's Resale Royalty Scheme which is the subje...
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Monday evening's Four Corners program about people smugglers gaining fraudulent entry to Australia didn't derail the Refugee Action Coalition Sydney's propaganda campaign even for a moment: The Four Corners’ people smuggling program has only added to the demonisation that surr...
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[ first published at Prawfsblawg by Paul Horwitz. ] Jeffrey Rosen has a new piece at TNR about what he calls "The New Textualism" -- originalism for political liberals, in other words. It argues that liberals have failed by making non-originalist arguments for their desired re...
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[ first published at The Failed Estate by Mr Denmore. ] The debate over media regulation has reached an impasse: In the one corner, the unrepresentative left-liberal academic elitist swill seeking to silence free media with their jackbooted authoritarianism; in the other, the...
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[ first published at OpenDemocracy by Leanne Weber. ] Since 1993 a staggering 16,136 deaths ? at the borders of Europe have been recorded by the activist network UNITED ? . This will be a considerable under-estimate of the true death toll, since many deaths at sea - which acco...
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[ first published at Curl by Kate Galloway. ] First year law students are invariably regaled with the mantra of learning to think like a lawyer: that law school is all about developing this skill. As some have identified , 'thinking like a lawyer' is a nebulous concept at best...
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[ first published at Normblog by philosopher Norman Geras. ] There's a column by Simon Armitage here headed 'Poetry should be subversive'. I started reading the piece thinking 'No, it shouldn't', because I don't believe there's anything (in the way of political direction or ch...
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There are rumours in the Welt am Sonntag and the Wall Street Journal of another grand plan to save the Euro. The main outlines have already been foreshadowed in recent weeks by the main players (Draghi, van Rompuy, Barosso, Juncker): a re-focus on bailouts for banks, not gover...
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It's a pity Twitter doesn't allow slightly longer threads. Otherwise I'd post this there. I just ran across it in a John Kay book and I think it's delightful. It's the introduction to a section on Advertising. My uncle was a Scottish pharmacist of scrupulous integrity. When as...
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More evidence that groupthink is one of the biggest enemies of organisations. Ingratiation and Favoritism: Experimental Evidence Date: 2012-05-03 By: Stéphane Robin and Agnieszka Rusinowska, Marie-Claire Villeval at http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-00694160&r=exp...
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I've offered Troppodillians several of Constantine Cavafy's poems. They're magnificent. I haven't actually managed to elicit a comment on any of them, but perhaps they're being enjoyed anyway. I'm told they're of a different order in the original. But I wouldn't know. Here's o...
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The more they change Here are two facts about the world which won't return any time soon. Good facts. The first is that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a paraplegic. Now of course you knew that, but the fact associated with it is that noone knew. The mores of the time were the o...
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