I don't want to overstate the case here - there are many, many more spectacular sights in nature than the tide-turn at Styx Creek - but in my world this brings me a sense of joy every time I see it. Mark MacLean Last week I was reading Why Nations Fail . The topic is of close...
Continue reading →
It was around four in morning when I pulled the car over to the side of the road and switched off the engine. I was a hundred or so kilometres out of Perth and when I killed the lights everything went black. When I stepped out of the car I was afraid I might not find my way ba...
Continue reading →
Jan Libich from Latrobe University is running a televised series on economics . He gets people into his TV studio to talk about some aspect of the economy and then puts it out there. Andrew Leigh, Andrew Hughes Hallett, and Eric Leeper were previous victims. Adrian Pagan and W...
Continue reading →
This an opinion piece, my effort to entertain or provoke you while I make an important point. In this paragraph I should start making an argument for the Important Point but, I'm off to bad start. My title should have included some clever figure of speech like a pun or literar...
Continue reading →
You're looking at two Segues ® converted by Marathon Targets in Sydney into a moving target for the training of our military. The input segues cost a few thousand and after Marathon Targets have armour plated the moving parts, and built software and various controls to turn th...
Continue reading →
They are both amazing feats of human engineering? They both cost billions with little tangible benefit? They were both launched in a desert? Both mainly built by Western engineers? No, they are both good examples of status races. The moon landing was all about competition with...
Continue reading →
Gentlemen, Whilst marching from Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your requests which have been sent by His Majesty’s ship from London to Lisbon and thence by dispatch to our head...
Continue reading →
A vexing question for a parent, particularly an economist, is whether or not to reward your kids monetarily for higher school grades. Let me admit right here that this is how I was raised: something like 10 dollars for every subject I got an A, 5 dollars for a B and nothing fo...
Continue reading →
The Band, Old Rocking Chair c.1970 [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9M4azk6-GM&w=420&h=315]
Continue reading →
I once heard a person , in reference to the note at right, that you could tell a great deal about a country by who they chose to put on their notes. He felt it spoke well of Japan that Fukuzawa Yukichi, a thinker and philosopher, was chosen for their currency. I don't really b...
Continue reading →
In part I and part II , I discussed the general geo-political implications of the rise of China, and the internal dynamics within the Chinese bureaucracy and the Party, concluding that one should not underestimate the disruption to the whole of China and its international rela...
Continue reading →
Well I'm not the first to the party - 26 million late in fact, but it's fun nevertheless. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX1YVzdnpEc]
Continue reading →
As some readers may have noticed (assuming you can access us at all), the performance of Troppo is still distinctly dodgy despite Jacques shifting from his original choice of Wordpress web host. Its name was WpEngine and it provided next to no service during the day in Austral...
Continue reading →
The picture below is of a mountainous area in Spain. It used to be full of small-scale farmers and is now almost deserted. Over the many centuries that farmers have tried to eek something useful out of this area, they created terraces all the way to the top of the mountains. I...
Continue reading →
The graphic below comes from the University of Michigan's Professor Mark Perry, who runs a libertarian and market-oriented blog called Carpe Diem . It shows, essentially, the collapse of the advertising revenue stream in US newspapers. Adjusted for inflation, US newspapers wil...
Continue reading →
Today's Age and SMH column - on the great business tax mix switch - imputation for a 19% company tax rate. REMEMBER Kevin Rudd's mining tax? It needed some tweaking in industry's favour, but even then it would have hauled in massive revenue without harming investment, which is...
Continue reading →
It is easy to circumvent news and information written on paper entirely. I for instance solely read online foreign newspapers. My wife does the same. Until very recently, I also cut back on any subscriptions to hard copies of anything, including academic journals. The family’s...
Continue reading →
[caption id="attachment_21438" align="alignnone" width="500"] What do you reckon this is? The first correct entry will be flown first class to the uprising of their choice with the Troppo Mercedes waiting on the tarmac on their arrival.[/caption]
Continue reading →
In part I , I discussed the general geo-political situation that we are moving towards in the coming decades, which is a world in which China will be the single most powerful country for a long time, constrained by a more diffuse West that is nevertheless wealthier and more po...
Continue reading →
Herewith the column of two reports for the Australian Digital Alliance on copyright exceptions. Sounds abstruse but it's quite engaging methinks. On December 17, 1903, after years of tinkering with his brother Wilbur, Orville Wright took to the skies at Kitty Hawk, North Carol...
Continue reading →
One of the most puzzling features of the world in the aftermath of the financial crisis is that so far, populism has taken primarily a right-wing form, not a left- wing one. In the United States, for example, although the Tea Party is anti-elitist in its rhetoric, its members...
Continue reading →
Quite an interesting finding - which also roughly confirms what I would have guessed before I saw the data. The returns to education for opportunity entrepreneurs, necessity entrepreneurs, and paid employees Date: 2012 By: Fossen, Frank M. Büttner, Tobias J. M. URL: http://d.r...
Continue reading →
The Italian head of the ECB, Mario Draghi, last week announced he would like to help certain countries in the south of Europe to borrow more cheaply. Subject to ‘strict conditions’, which were instantaneously refused by the Spanish prime minister, countries in Europe would now...
Continue reading →
Fairfax asked for an op ed on the Herald/Age Lateral Economics Index of Wellbeing (the HALE) one year on from its launch and that's what appears below and, in a slightly edited form in the SMH . There’s plenty wrong with GDP as a measure of national wellbeing. As Bobby Kennedy...
Continue reading →
9/11 is over ten years ago now, and after two take-overs of Islamic countries ( Iraq and Afghanistan ) and internal turmoil in the Middle East and Pakistan , the contours of where the conflict between Islamic fundamentalism and ‘the rest of the world’ is going to is becoming c...
Continue reading →
A good while back I wrote about carve-outs or exceptions - and how they're made. It's an important, if much ignored topic. One area I didn't mention was exceptions for the powerful. Like those queues at the airport where 'VIPs' and those flying business and first get to go ahe...
Continue reading →
In the comments of Paul's post on face I mentioned a hypothesis I had never published that I felt overlapped with, or at least was tangental to the ideas he was using. I'm still very unhappy with the piece and the reasoning, but I thought I may as well publish the last version...
Continue reading →
Well it's off to the footy tonight. Wish me (and outsider Collingwood) luck. Do we have a chance against the mighty Hawks? Not much. Why? Let me count the ways! We seem to have been down on form lately - but that might turn round in a final. We are surprisingly low on skill. W...
Continue reading →
We live in an interregnum, wherein the position of most-powerful single country is going from the US to China , with all major international players knowing this and no-one is seriously hindering its occurrence. The world has learned from the disastrous attempts in the last 2...
Continue reading →
Here's my column in response to the Manufacturing Industry Taskforce's proposal for 'smarter workplaces' - some transparency to enable us to determine what workplaces are - at least in the opinion of their workforce engaging places to work. AMID the endless alarums and excursi...
Continue reading →
I have been part of a research group looking into Chinese migration for about 5 years now (see rumici . anu .edu.au/ ), and the main cultural difference one has to get used to as a Westerner in interactions with the East is the notion of 'face'. This Asian cultural trait has b...
Continue reading →
I just came across an impressive philanthropic venture that nevertheless felt the need to articulate its 'values'. I won't go into it at any length here, but the more I think of formal articulations of values the less impressed I am. So many organisations do it that perhaps it...
Continue reading →
(re-worked from the conversation) Linking Australia to the European Union carbon emissions trading scheme by 2015 will undoubtedly affect the revenue gained from carbon trading. The question is, how much? My best guess is that it will cost around 50% less revenue than original...
Continue reading →
