https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqoXrjQQ9x8 There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives — wher...

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I have always assumed that the outrageous prices for global roaming on telcos is the problem of double marginalisation. Each of the monopolists takes their cut and here there's your domestic carrier and then the others in the other market. Perhaps there are some other carriers...

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It's the time of the mid-year Economic Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) and we're told that we're about 11 billion deeper in the red this financial year than we thought, with the treasurer blaming the dropping iron price and the reduced wage growth. I have gone over the MYEFO documents...

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[O]n the behavioral side, clearly people aren’t perfectly rational — but there are lots of ways to be slightly stupid, and it’s very hard to come up with a general theory about which of these ways they will choose in any given situation. Behavioral economics is a fine thing, b...

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Middle-East watchers have been surprised by the events in Syria and Egypt the last 2 years. The betting markets in 2011 and 2012 expected the collapse of the Syrian regime, but it didn’t happen. The West and most Al-Jazeera commentators thought the coup that deposed the Morsi-...

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In an outbreak of cross-pontification Tim Cook thinks that Facebook and Google customers should be pretty suspicious of them because they collect a lot of data. Not to be outdone, Mark Zuckerberg thinks that Apple should cut its prices so it doesn't make as much money. He does...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="570"] Source: Urbanization and the Good News About World Poverty [/caption]

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Many years ago now, Steve Sedgwick the Australian Public Service Commission explained to me that it wouldn't be right to publish the hoard of information the APSC has on APS employees' attitudes to their workplaces agency by agency because that would undermine the relationship...

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A brief note - with a long appendix - about my recent re-reading of Frankfurt's " On Bullshit " in the writing of a recent post . I remembered the article fondly, but on re-reading it I found it was mostly bullshit - Srsly! It wasn't the most odious of bullshit - which comes w...

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Does increasing the legal drinking age reduce traffic accidents caused by young drivers? The idea is that if you increase the legal age at which people can drink, young people are going to quietly abide by the law, not do anything stupid, read the bible, contemplate their sinf...

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Some people engage in socially disruptive behaviour on their own, such as when they free-ride on paying taxes. Others cooperate with others though when they are socially disruptive: cronyism, corruption, nepotism, gangsterism, and favouritism are all examples of cooperative be...

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Geo-engineering is increasingly looking like the only politically viable way of averting temperature rises above 2 degrees in the coming century. This is for three interlocking reasons: i) Any mayor country can try geo-engineering on its own without permission from anyone else...

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[caption id="attachment_26684" align="aligncenter" width="620"] Junction Oval[/caption] Victorian Premier Dennis Napthine announces a “plan” to spend $20 million upgrading Junction Oval at St Kilda to accommodate the AFL team named after the suburb, even though it hasn’t playe...

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In a submission to the Forrest Review of Indigenous jobs and training , the Australian Bankers’ Association (ABA) rejects Andrew Forrest's Healthy Welfare Card proposal. The card was one of the review's key recommendations and is meant to be cheaper and easier to administer th...

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It may be devoted to 70's nostalgia, but Björn Ulvaeus sees Stockholm's ABBA The Museum as a harbinger of the future. The museum doesn't accept cash . Since his son's home was burgled a while ago, the former ABBA member has been campaigning for a cash-free future arguing that...

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The announcement by Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull that the ABC’s budget will be cut by $50 million per year for the next five years has generated predictable kerfuffle in mainstream and social media circles. Whether it will have any real effect on the broader voting...

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http://youtu.be/jzG293KCitk I Some readers may recall an earlier post which I christened an 'untheory' of innovation . It argued that there's not much use in 'theories' of innovation if they're taken as recipe books for senior managers to 'drive down' innovation through organi...

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SENDING ALIENS TO AUSTRALIA. CANBERRA, Tuesday. In the House of Representatives this afternoon Mr. Martens (Lab., Qld.), said that the Government's acquiescence in Britain's proposal to send alien internees to Australia for safe custody was causing great alarm to many people....

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But maybe it doesn't matter ... Hardly anyone seemed to notice at last weekend’s G20 meeting in Brisbane that the Climate Emperor had no clothes. Nor did I hear anyone remark on the obvious contradiction involved in issuing a communiqué which simultaneously committed participa...

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Actually the magnitude of the effect is a bit of an eye-opener . Empirical Linkages between Good Government and National Well-being by John F. Helliwell, Haifang Huang, Shawn Grover, Shun Wang Abstract: This paper first reviews existing studies of the links between good govern...

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http://youtu.be/vmHPUtHlIXU Funny how, even though you've developed the mental skill and discipline to be the World Chess Champion, you can make a simple mistake. But what's much more intriguing is how, once you've actually made the mistake, you immediately know you've made it...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="668"] Exploiting the natural experiment of the unification of East and West Germany, researchers found that the past absenteeism of those applying for the public service was significantly higher than those applying for private sector job...

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The legal misadventures of some colourful Darwin characters in A Territory Testamentary Tale at Parish McCulloch website.

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The NIMBY Brigade is a blight on urban civil society. These people have never seen a new development that they don't oppose, unless it's a community vegetable garden or possibly a Montessori preschool built from mud bricks (although only if they're very quiet middle class kidd...

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Gray Matters: Fetal Pollution Exposure and Human Capital Formation by Prashant Bharadwaj, Joshua Graff Zivin, Matthew Gibson, Christopher A. Neilson Abstract: This paper examines the impact of fetal exposure to air pollution on 4th grade test scores in Santiago, Chile. We rely...

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For some time I have been posting specifically legal articles/posts over at the bloggy part of the Parish McCulloch, Barristers & Solicitors website. I cross-post some of them here at Club Troppo. I have just posted quite a long article there which discusses yesterday's High C...

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There are reports today (12 November 2014) from Fairfax and News Ltd that Prime Minister Abbott is urging Vladimir Putin to follow the example of the US government after the Iran Air Flight 655 shootdown — and that he has said the US both paid compensation and apologised. In p...

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Tony Abbott might well be the last bloke on earth who could plausibly demand a "mature debate" on tax reform. But that doesn't deny the crying need for such a debate in Australia. Nor does the fact that it's the antithesis of what Abbott did in Opposition mean that Bill Shorte...

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OK. The Grattan Institute with all its funding is producing, as it always does, a reading list for the PM. To show the power of blogging I thought we'd do the same here. I wrote "Opposition leader" above just to offer cheap differentiation from Grattan. But whether it's for Bi...

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My father died early this year at the age of 90, after a long but slow slide into dementia. The discussion on another thread about euthanasia and mental capacity has led me to decide to post the eulogy I delivered at his funeral. My dad was still relatively compos mentis at th...

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[caption id="attachment_26524" align="alignright" width="140"] IPKats love a tweet[/caption] The lecture will be delivered (in Melbourne Sydney and Brisbane) by Jeremy Phillips. Jeremy (or more exactly a fictional and " notorious " cat: the IPKat) has three times, been named a...

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The Northern Territory News reports that veteran euthanasia campaigner Dr Philip Nitschke faces a five-day hearing before the Medical Board starting today. Nitschke's arguments will include: Mr Nitschke says suicide is a lawful activity and the appeal was a question of whether...

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This is the second of a two part article about Aboriginal affairs policy in the wake of Noel Pearson's speech last week at Gough Whitlam's funeral. See From assimilation to Black Power to Gordon Gekko to where? (I) . Then read on. NB A very long post. I hope at least some will...

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[caption id="attachment_26455" align="alignright" width="300"] Noel Pearson delivers the Greatest Australian Political Speech in Recorded History[/caption] It didn't take long for the Aboriginal knockers to start tearing into Noel Pearson in the wake of his delivery of the Gre...

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[gallery ids="26440,26441,26442,26443,26444,26445,26446,26447,26448"]

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[caption id="attachment_26429" align="alignright" width="248"] John Brumby: deregulated the VET sector while Premier.[/caption] Ben Eltham has posted an article in New Matilda about the financial and regulatory travails of Victorian VET private mega-provider Vocation: Christop...

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http://youtu.be/0B5xPYUNGeA Scribe publishing occasionally sends me a catalogue of books it's publishing asking if I'd like to have one to review. Looking through their long list I picked my friend Tim Colebatch's biography of Rupert Hamer on which he's been working for a good...

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I just came across this hilarious story . Trying to rescue Naomi Campbell from the overzealous attentions of Mike Tyson, the Oxford philosopher A J “Freddie” Ayer – according to Ben Rogers, his biographer – inserted himself between the boxer and the supermodel. “Do you know wh...

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Top Picks (Looks like a good crop!) Testament of Youth The young Vera Brittain, an irrepressible, intelligent and free-minded woman who overcomes the prejudices of her family and hometown to win a scholarship to Oxford. With everything to live for, she falls in love with her b...

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[caption id="attachment_26386" align="alignright" width="300"] Rosie Batty (insert son Luke)[/caption] I commend to you an article about homicide survivor, mother and crusader Rosie Batty by Martin McKenzie-Murray in the relatively new publication The Saturday Paper . I was pa...

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[caption id="attachment_26366" align="alignright" width="584"] A Soyuz spacecraft docking with the International Space Station. As the picture makes plain, typical human-occupied spacecraft orbits are very close to Earth; SpaceShipTwo wouldn't get even this high. NASA photo.[/...

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[caption id="attachment_26358" align="alignright" width="275"] We can be confident that Tony isn't demonstrating the size of Scott's heart, or his brain for that matter ...[/caption] I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago which inter alia condemned the drastic breach of Australi...

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I don't have a particularly high opinion of Senator Nova Peris. I certainly don't think Prime Minister Julia Gillard should have effectively sacked long-standing and well regarded Senator Trish Crossin to get her into Parliament. Moreover, even if it was reasonable to aim at g...

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Monica Attard reports in The Hoopla on a very recent speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin in which he forcefully puts his country's side of the current conflict with Ukraine. I was especially struck by this observation: The US, [Putin] said, had instigated a “ coup d’eta...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GchWJasxVYY It looks as if prominent and obsessively determined euthanasia campaigner Dr Philip Nitschke may be in trouble again. He has already had his right to practise medicine suspended and is facing Medical Board disciplinary proceedings ari...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqMCZBjvmD4 In the midst of all the Whitlam nostalgia over the last week or so I couldn't help thinking of the contagious hope and excitement that was generated by the "It's Time" campaign theme in 1972. It still sends tingles down my spine liste...

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Black to play Shabalov vs Aronian 21. ...? See game for solution.

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In the words of Ronald Reagan, here we go again.* Sandy Pentland rehearses something that's made it's way from heresy to platitudinal commonplace with breakneck speed. Asked "what, specifically, is the New Deal on Data?" Sandy tells us this: It’s a rebalancing of the ownership...

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A Tale of Repetition: Lessons from Florida Restaurant Inspections by Ginger Zhe Jin, Jungmin Lee - #20596 (IO) Abstract: We examine the role of repetition in government regulation. Using Florida restaurant inspection data from 2003 to 2010, we find that inspectors new to the i...

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Here is quite a good article seeking to "reframe" the asylum seeker debate. It takes a reasonably moderate, non-hysterical approach. I haven't written on the subject recently myself, because I have been feeling a little conflicted. On the one hand, long-time Troppo readers wil...

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Just a note to record the fact that blogging is 20 years old this month, maybe. New media legend Dave Winer, a rare combination of great writer and programmer, started posting at DaveNet on 7 October 1994 , as Philip Greenspun points out. There was no announcement that Winer h...

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Top Picks Little England In the Greek island of Andros during World War II, the lives of its women are dominated by long periods of isolation brought on by the seafaring nature of the island’s economy. Two sisters-the quiet and reticent Orsa and the extroverted Moshca-become e...

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http://vimeo.com/108138933

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The Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) lives in the suburb next to mine and is a Good Thing. It's housed in one of the umpteen magnificent town halls of Melbourne, in this case South Melbourne Town Hall and a lot of its concerts are put on by students, often supplemen...

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If you want to understand what bank regulators were doing in 2008, and what people like APRA and the Reserve Bank worry about here, try reading Matt Levine's latest column . Leviine's piece is nominally about a weird court case involving AIG, the insurance behemoth which almos...

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Source OECD .

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An Englishman enters a naval action with the firm conviction that his duty is to hurt his enemies and help his friends and allies without looking out for directions in the midst of the fight; and while he thus clears his mind of all subsidiary distractions, he rests in confide...

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This post is mostly a note to self: Like I keep saying, there's an ecology between public and private goods. This article asks whether smartphones should be used in meetings. That's a question about a cultural rule. It's a public good question. The article however seeks the an...

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by Alice Chen, Emily Oster, Heidi Williams - #20525 (AG CH HC HE PE) Abstract: The US has a substantial - and poorly understood - infant mortality disadvantage relative to peer countries. We combine comprehensive micro-data on births and infant deaths in the US from 2000 to 20...

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So the Senate will conduct an enquiry into the Queensland government – on the pretext that, to quote Senator Glen Lazarus , it has made "many questionable decisions". Never mind that state governments are elected by the same people who elect senators, or that senators are elec...

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You may notice that I have changed the masthead motto, which until now read "the suppository of centrist wisdom since 2012". It was a somewhat snide and gratuitous reference to a Tony Abbott malapropism uttered in the leadup to the 2013 federal election (and pretty much on a p...

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I'm a big, though not uncritical admirer of Paul Krugman - of his straightforwardness and his aggression in what is almost always a worthy cause. And yet, reading Martin Wolf's magnificent book rather inauspiciously titled The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned-and Have...

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The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of f...

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This paper is pretty interesting. The last generation has seen the triumph of the baby boomers in attracting resources to themselves, at the cost of other generations, most obviously illustrated in throwing off the shackles of university fees (so other generations and the uned...

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Contractual Freedom and the Evolution of Corporate Control in Britain, 1862 to 1929 by Timothy W. Guinnane, Ron Harris, Naomi R. Lamoreaux - #20481 (DAE) Abstract: British general incorporation law granted companies an extraordinary degree of contractual freedom to craft their...

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Below the fold is the Ockham's Razor lecture that went to air yesterday. Since the trolls have already come out in force on the ABC thread (The ABC's illustration doesn't help!), I've reproduced it for your delectation below. Nicholas Gruen: Both popular commonsense and econom...

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As a council member of the National Library I had the privilege of not only going to this lecture last Friday night but of having dinner with Ray, the benefactors of the lecture (John Seymour - whom I taught Legal Writing and Research alongside in 1990 or thereabouts - and his...

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Films Marina True story of beloved singer, songwriter and accordionist, Rocco Granata, from his early life as an immigrant in Belgium to his emergence as a worldwide musical phenomenon with his 1959 song Marina, one of the biggest international hits of that era.1948 Calabria,...

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‘Nor is wisdom only concerned with universals: to be wise, one must also be familiar with the particular, since wisdom has to do with action, and the sphere of action is constituted by particulars’. Aristotle [caption id="attachment_31744" align="alignright" width="387"] Looki...

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By the time economic reform matured as a political project – let’s date it from Paul Keating’s announcement about its popularity with the resident galah in every pet shop – it was already on the slide into the kind of ideological formula of mercantilism that Ken Henry so power...

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Today the people residing in Scotland can decide whether they want to see an independent Scotland or to have Scotland remain in the UK. The betting markets concur with the opinion polls and favour the status quo: the markets give roughly 20% chance that the ‘yes’ vote will win...

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As we head back to Iraq, I'm struck by the way in which those making the case both for and against are avoiding certain ideas which seem to me to be true: This is not 2003 all over again . At least on a moral level, and at least as far as action in Iraq goes. We have been invi...

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Well gentle readers, it's come to this. Scottish independence is going down to the wire. It is hanging by a thread, though if you are concerned that I am mixing my metaphors, I think you're flogging a dead horse after it's bolted. In any event, in the question of Scottish inde...

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Miles Kimball, for the uninitiated a sensible centrist commentator on economic policy is also an admirer of John Stuart Mill and has supported the case for decriminalising drugs . At the same time, since he thinks drugs - certainly recreational drugs or the new ones - are bad...

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Creative Destruction: Barriers to Urban Growth and the Great Boston Fire of 1872 by Richard Hornbeck, Daniel Keniston - #20467 (DAE DEV EEE EFG LE PE) Abstract: Historical city growth, in the United States and worldwide, has required remarkable transformation of outdated durab...

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Ross Douthat in the New York Times presents a compelling theory about the waves of sexual abuse scandals , from Roman Catholicism to Rolf Harris to Rotherham. Remember that these scandals are scandalous precisely because their perpetrators all got away with rape and abuse for...

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I recently visited the National Gallery of Victoria's exhibition of 1950s furniture . I went to see Fred Lowen's furniture. Fred was a Dunera Boy - who I became aware of towards the end of his life when he had an exhibition of drawings at Australia Galleries in Collingwood. Th...

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On Tuesday I gave a talk to a Queensland Public Service Conference. The Conference is quite a production. It's a regular annual fixture and makes a good profit. Over 500 people attend and they take the opportunity to fund some excellent speakers. Dominic Campbell who founded F...

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Delivered for your amusement - if not necessarily mine: :) This conversation took around 15 minutes as I was working on other things. Thank you for choosing Optus. Please wait for a site operator to respond. Optus has a privacy policy, please let your consultant know if you wo...

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Oh aren’t they so tough our current leaders? Beating their hairy chests over the ISIS threat to Western civilization. Here’s Cigar chompin’ Joe Hockey Wenesday morning We will not be intimidated by the threats of murderers; we will never be intimidated as a nation or a people...

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Busy Troppovians have no-one other than Troppo to let them know when something serious has happened in the chess world. If Troppo had been going at the time, Troppovians would have been the first non-chess aficionados in the world to hear of Bobby Fischer's extraordinary explo...

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In this marvellous essay , Jesse McCarthy puzzles over why there is "a bloody knot in the social fabric that is as vivid in Ferguson, Missouri today as it was in Baldwin's Harlem half a century ago." He starts with "Fifth Avenue, Uptown: a Letter from Harlem", James Baldwin's...

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Following David's excellent post on the NBN, a somewhat related aside. Malcolm Turnbull was interviewed on AM yesterday about the NBN review, followed by a brief minuet around some current political dramas. What a contrast. By comparison, his colleagues still seem be strugglin...

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The latest cost-benefit analysis of various Australian broadband proposals is out. It's part of a report from an inquiry chaired by former Victorian Treasury head Mike Vertigan. And it says in essence that Australia's expected growth in demand for bandwidth is big enough to ma...

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It is remarkable - non? - that, with the vast amounts spent on arts marketing it's so hard to know what great arts events are on, where they're on and whether you should go to them ahead of other arts events. In other words that it's so hard not just to ensure that the informa...

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I managed to trigger the warning email below, presumably by installing Gmail Meter. But I've uninstalled it. It comes every day or so. The first link generates a "Forbidden: Error 403" while the latter link invites me to do some programing at Google Developer. I can't unsubscr...

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Chris Anderson managed to get an article, and then a book of the article (a pet peeve of mine, but we'll move on) out of the idea that 'free' is a big deal. Better than a low low price, free avoids 'mental transactions costs' and is all round a Big New Thing. One thing that I...

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In case anyone's interested I did an interview on ‘my trip’ overseas recently which if you fancy a bit of light and slightly educational entertainment is here . Anyway, the main burden of my remarks is that we’re losing ground within the leaders group on eGov and Government 2....

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Amazing that this is such a big deal, that we can administer morphine but not medical marijuana to alleviate pain. The paper is here . Abstract: While at least a dozen state legislatures in the United States have recently considered bills to allow the consumption of marijuana...

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In case anyone's interested, I did an interview on "My Trip" which can be downloaded from this link .

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An excerpt from the Dunera News. (for those who don't know, the Dunera was the prison ship on which my father was deported to Australia in 1940 with the Battle of Britain raging around them). The exerpt is an autobiographical sketch by Richard Sonnenfeldt (1923–2009) I was bro...

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Employers are prevented by law from subjecting workers to income management. What if they weren't? Libertarians favour freedom of contract. They believe the government's role is to enforce contracts not tell people what should be in them. One way governments have interfered wi...

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Cash for Corollas: When Stimulus Reduces Spending by Mark Hoekstra, Steven L. Puller, Jeremy West - #20349 (EEE IO PE) Abstract: Cash for Clunkers was a 2009 economic stimulus program aimed at increasing new vehicle spending by subsidizing the replacement of older vehicles. Us...

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Simon Heffer's High Minds presents us with a portrait of the mid-Victorians in which they consciously set about building the world which became ours. A liberal democratic world. To do so they recognised the need for all sorts of public goods. Those of education and health sure...

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https://vimeo.com/96548236

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Putin currently graces the cover of Time , Newsweek , Der Spiegel and The Economist, together with a host of lesser publications. Always unfavourably of course, with the possible exception of Time where the headline is "Cold War II" and the subhead "The West is losing Putin's...

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A question for Troppodillians: does anyone have a record of the Australian Government's response to 1988's accidental US shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655? I ask because the parallels with the MH17 shootdown are so clear. At a political level the government's response has so fa...

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Ben Hills has a new book out - Stop the Presses! How Greed, Incompetence (and the Internet) Wrecked Fairfax . It's published by (surprise!) News Corp's HarperCollins. Its essential thesis is that the Fairfax media group, owner of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, is in tr...

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As published on the Lowy Interpreter on 14 July 2014. Growth in HALE index, Intangible GDP, net national income and GDP, 2005-2014. John Edwards' Beyond the Boom tilts effectively against Australia's congenital Hanrahanism . It points out the extent to which we managed to fina...

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What is in the foreground of this picture. It is somewhere in Southern England around Salisbury. The winning entry will fly first class to London to pick up the Troppo Mercedes Sports from the panelbeater - who's had about enough of it sitting there since we dropped it off a f...

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The latest federal budget in Australia by the Liberal Party was a real break with the recent past in which politicians were reluctant to offend any large group of voters and in which the status quo with respect to entitlements was avidly kept. There was a bit of playing around...

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Employee Satisfaction, Labor Market Flexibility, and Stock Returns Around The World by Alex Edmans, Lucius Li, Chendi Zhang - #20300 (CF LE LS) We study the relationship between employee satisfaction and abnormal stock returns around the world, using lists of the "Best Compani...

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Patents and Cumulative Innovation: Causal Evidence from the Courts by Alberto Galasso, Mark Schankerman - #20269 (IO PR) Cumulative innovation is central to economic growth. Do patent rights facilitate or impede follow-on innovation? We study the causal effect of removing pate...

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It's Raining Men! Hallelujah? Pauline Grosjean and Rose Khattar We document the implications of missing women in the short and long run. We exploit a natural historical experiment, which sent large numbers of male convicts and far fewer female convicts to Australia in the 18th...

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From a recent column for the AFR . The report can be downloaded here . Earlier this year our Treasurer, Joe Hockey, led the G20 Finance Ministers to pledge lifting GDP by 2 percent over ‘business as usual’ over the next five years. It’s a big win for the Treasurer, but how can...

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Human Capital and Industrialization: Evidence from the Age of Enlightenment by Mara P. Squicciarini, Nico Voigtlaender - #20219 (DAE EFG) Abstract: While human capital is a strong predictor of economic development today, its importance for the Industrial Revolution is typicall...

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Equality of opportunity was one of the big themes of Gough Whitlam's 1969 and 1972 campaigns. His 1972 policy speech promised "a new drive for equality of opportunities" through reforms to education, health and urban planning. He argued that opportunity depends on the kind of...

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I just came across an article in PNAS (the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) with the catchy title 'Female Hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes'. It is doing the rounds in the international media , with the explicit conclusion that our society suffers fr...

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Human Capital Effects of Anti-Poverty Programs: Evidence from a Randomized Housing Voucher Lottery by Brian Jacob, Max Kapustin, Jens Ludwig - #20164 (CH ED HE PE) Abstract: Whether government transfer programs increase the human capital of low-income children is a question of...

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And the US has had better growth than Japan or Europe!

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The Australian government education minister Christopher Pyne has made his wishes clear for the tertiary education sector: he is following the wishes of the GO8 Vice-Chancellors and wants to remove the caps from the HECS fees asked of domestic students. This seems to fit in a...

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The French economists Thomas Piketty recently published a long-prepared book on the growth of inequality in the Western World over the last few centuries. His main contention, as I see it, is that wealth inequality is rising rapidly again and that we are returning to 19 th cen...

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A decent society is one whose institutions do not humiliate people - Avishai Margalit The Great Depression stripped many Australian workers of their dignity. For many, applying for government relief was like begging for charity. Instead of giving unemployed workers cash, state...

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With people living longer and with societies becoming more forward-looking as to how to handle the long post-retirement years, the issue of optimal pension systems is big in Australia and elsewhere. Have a look at this excellent interview between John Piggott and Jan Libich wh...

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According to the Australian , the Abbott government's first budget will include tough new "learn or earn" Measures designed to force young people off the dole and into education, training or work. "One thing the government doesn’t want to do is to continue to pay people to sta...

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In an everyday political sense I suppose we can't really blame Little Bill Shorten for cynically and dishonestly demonising the Abbott government's mooted tax increases and spending cuts. After all, Abbott cynically, dishonestly and very successfully demonised Labor's carbon a...

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Last night I attended the unveiling of a facsimile of a portrait of my father painted when he was fresh off the boat in 1941. Thanks go to Bruce Chapman above all, but to many others for organising. To Erwin Fabian, who pained the portrait all those years ago. It's been over 1...

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My own university, the University of Queensland, has around 6 flagship courses that it puts online for free, in a deal that involves universities from around the world who put up the courses that they excel in. It typifies the current reality of online courses: it is free; it...

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You know the drum. There's a film festival on and these are the films that rate four stars or more. Living is Easy with Eyes Closed In 1966, John Lennon was determined to leave the Beatles to become an actor, and arrives in Almería to shoot 'How I Won the War'. Antonio, a scho...

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Terms of Reference Phase 1 Report (the one that’s caused most of the uproar). Submissions from Organisations and Business Submissions from Individuals The humane alternative

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Just a note to let people know of the unveiling of a magnificent portrait of my father , discovered some years after he died. It's in Canberra on Tuesday afternoon. Here's the invitation. Perhaps I'll see you there. Professor Rabee Tourky Professor Bruce Chapman Emeritus Profe...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="397"] Life is miserable: run, run, run[/caption] I've always been struck by how we debate flexibility in the labour market without paying attention to the other problem in the labour market which is that it's extremely difficult to find...

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[video width="480" height="360" mp4="http://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/yt1s.com-Christopher-Hitchens-Why-Women-Still-Arent-Funny_360p.mp4"][/video] I have a strange habit of looking for bargain books. Why is this a strange habit? Because it looks awfully like...

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The ARR scheme so far has cost taxpayers just over $2.2 million and as of December 2013 has delivered a total of 7,800 royalty payments, to 800 artists (or estates) with a median value of about $105 per payment. The scheme has, in three and a half years, only generated a total...

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Michael Luca Digital Discrimination: The Case of Airbnb.com (pdf) Online marketplaces often contain information not only about products, but also about the people selling the products. In an effort to facilitate trust, many platforms encourage sellers to provide personal profi...

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French economist Thomas Piketty has been picking up a lot of attention in the rest of the English speaking world – well mainly the US – thanks to the publication of an English translation of his recent book Capital in the 21 st Century . Never heard of him? Don't fret about it...

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I remember a long long time ago - in fact it was nearly fifty years ago I went with my family on a three week trip to Alice Springs and the Northern Territory. Dad didn't spend much time with us as he was working while Mum, David and I tried to enjoy ourselves. Mum located a r...

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Wendy_Bacon Talk about clamping down on Pub Servants' social media reminds me of how as journos we used to interview them before access to info stopped 10/04/2014 10:09 am This tweet reminds me of something I've pondered for some time. The modern craze for making the implicit...

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Australia's Artists Resale Royalty (ARR ) scheme has so far cost taxpayers $2.2 million in direct support. And over many years the publicly funded lobbyists for this scheme, headed up by the National Association for the Visual Arts Ltd, have additionally spent a lot of public...

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https://vimeo.com/90297488 (For the full 27 minute video from which this 6 minute video has been extracted, click here .) Family by Family about which you've heard before is spreading its wings. We've started in Mt Druitt where we've scoped the program investigating how it sho...

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Book Translations as Idea Flows: The Effects of the Collapse of Communism on the Diffusion of Knowledge by Ran Abramitzky, Isabelle Sin Abstract: We use book translations as a new measure of international idea flows and study the effects of Communism's collapse in Eastern Euro...

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Jan Libich recently interviewed Bruce Chapman , who was one of the main architects of the HECS scheme via which university places are financed in Australia, a system that is being copied all around the world now, making Bruce Australia's most influential international economis...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=SK5UUDYaK7g

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An experiment in occasional linkage to insights that might outlast the daily news cycle. If you find any of it interesting, let us know in the comments. Prepare for the knowledge automation transition to take decades (ABC Radio National Future Tense) – How long might it take f...

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Troppo author and frequent commenter John Walker asks: Ken The Bolt case was just one case- is there much information about how 18C has been applied, on a wider scale. Its pretty hard to judge whether there is a problem needing changes to the law , or not, on the basis of just...

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Lamest April Fools' Day joke so far today . There must be better efforts out there. Just post 'em as you find 'em. Please. I could use a bit of ROFLMAO today. Update (9:41 EDST) : I wish I'd taken a screen shot. The current version of the linked post seems to me to have had so...

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From the soon to be published "PISA 2012 Results: Creative Problem Solving", OECD

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Yo5cKRmJaf0 I have almost certainly fulminated in various asides against TED talks on this blog, and even one full on cri de coeur against retail profundification . (I promised one on business class profundification but I...

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Much of the time, the public can make up its own mind on public events once it get a decent helping of facts; the theatre commentary from the parliamentary press gallery – a little of which I used to write – is more entertainment than vital input. But on the running of the par...

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Here are the top picks from the German Film Festival in Melbourne, with the full schedule below. The Phantom|Das Phantom 06.00pm Friday 28 March @ Palace Cinema Como | 06.15pm Tuesday 8 April @ Palace Cinema Como After the partner of a policeman is killed he is drawn into a my...

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The current inquiry into institutional child abuse holds some interesting lessons about the nature of religion, which I'll stay clear of here. But it also holds a larger lesson about the ability of organisations to act morally and to act properly in the absence of external reg...

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Many people say the best way to influence government is to give policymakers practical solutions to problems they care about. According to this perspective, academics and think tanks scholars can get it wrong by spending too much time analysing problems and their causes. Polic...

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This doco is worth watching for its own sake. (Why are media organisations so dumb and unprepared to allow embedding of their videos - given that the vids themselves come with ads that are hard to avoid - but I digress …) What struck me is how different it would be today. The...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZwFaSpca_3Q

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Suicide and Property Rights in India by Siwan Anderson, Garance Genicot - #19978 (DEV) This paper studies the impact of female property rights on male and female suicide rates in India. Using state level variation in legal changes to women's property rights, we show that bette...

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Pretty interesting paper (pdf). The abstract: We examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation. To assess this, we begin by implementing a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a Gaussian process classifier....

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Michael Fullilove, of the Lowy Institute, last week gave a speech espousing the established (non-radical) centrist view that more immigration to Australia is highly desirable - that migration is an essential step to A Bigger Australia. I like immigration. In fact, my gut suppo...

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The noise and drama surrounding Putin, Russia and the Ukraine obscure crucial foreign policy principles. In "Lord Salisbury's Lessons for Great Powers" , Robert Merry takes a closer look at what they might be. First, avoid promiscuous jingoism of the kind that Salisbury despis...

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https://youtu.be/-9q-sMsXLHs I was bemoaning ethics committees to someone the other day and they told me of this case in which Australian Hospitals refused a patient - a nurse who had done her homework - aggressive chemotherapy for her MS. The ethics committee knew better. So...

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One year ago our daughter died and was born. We called her Sakura, for the cherry blossom. Sakura is a thing of beauty that does not, and cannot last, longer than a short time. But we meet its brief time in this world with joy and not sorrow. Not surprisingly, I guess, thinkin...

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“This hand is not the color of yours. But if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be the same color as yours. I am a man.” Standing Bear to a Nebraska court, May 1879. More here . HT Three Quarks

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I recall seeing an exciting young player from Canberra at a Doberl Cup about seven or eight years ago. (The Doberl Cup is a regular fixture of the Canberra calendar. The comp was endowed by Mr Doberl with enough money so that the best from Australia and a few additional grandm...

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I don't pretend to understand the detail of the current situation between Russia and Ukraine, but it seems entirely reasonable to fear that this may well be the most significant threat to world peace since the Berlin Wall Crisis and Cuban Missile Crisis of the early 1960s. Eve...

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Vanavil is a school for the poorest of the poor in the middle of Tamil Nadu, India. It started in 2005 as an orphanage/school for the children of two historically nomadic communities left stranded by the devastating tsunami of 2004. Many of the children of these two communitie...

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From Chessbase where you can play the game https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EY27lgnPKWI In the above video we see a bullet game, played in Kragerø (Norway), between Magnus Carlsen and his second Laurent Fressinet. It was posted on August 6 2013 on Magnus...

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Attentive Troppodillians will recall Rooter , one of Troppo's stable of cars, frequently flown to locations around the world in order for the winners of our comps to to take do a few doughies with it. Now comes the learned journal article on Rooter (pdf). It's a hoax generated...

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Is there any area of public policy in Australia that gets weaker treatment than agriculture these days? Whether it's milk prices or agricultural investment , the normal Australian tough-mindedness about policy gets shunted aside in favour of emotive puffery. Not too many peopl...

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Relaxing Occupational Licensing Requirements: Analyzing Wages and Prices for a Medical Service by Morris M. Kleiner, Allison Marier, Kyoung Won Park, Coady Wing Abstract: Occupational licensing laws have been relaxed in a large number of U.S. states to give nurse practitioners...

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I know I took the notion of optimising to heart as I learned it - implicitly - from my economist Dad. And there are those who might argue that the idea in economics came from the society around economists as the discipline came into being. But now it seems optimising as the he...

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I just came across this largely trivial cultural skirmish . Obama said "I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree." In fact from the transcript you can see him, Eddie Maguire like...

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What's in a name? In the September 2013 round of re-shuffles , I count no less than 17 changes in names of government departments in Australia, either by some name disappearing or some name changing. This appears to be a regular game in Canberra. When I worked in Canberra in 2...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNTk29zXl4A OK so you all kind of know this, but I'm going to go out on a limb and just put it out there as one younger member of my family has been heard to say. It's depressing how much stuff is sent our way which repackages what's already in...

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This is an experiment in occasional linkage to insights that might outlast the daily news cycle. If you find any of it interesting, let us know in the comments. [caption id="attachment_25174" align="alignright" width="240"] Clock Tower, Freetown, Sierra Leone, October 2009, by...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Olc5C4SXAYM

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It may not prove much, or rather it proves the obvious - that stuff that makes its way between two pieces of land tends to take place over the sea - but it's kind of fun.

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Abstract: This paper argues that openness to new, unconventional and disruptive ideas has a first-order impact on creative innovations-innovations that break new ground in terms of knowledge creation. After presenting a motivating model focusing on the choice between increment...

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Researchers warn that substance abuse among the elderly will double by 2020 , but few journalists or policymakers worry about age pensioners squandering welfare money on alcohol and drugs. Things were different in 1905–6 when a royal commission looked at establishing a Commonw...

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As the festival is now upon us in Melbourne anyway, I'm sticking it up the front of Troppo for a while for your delectation. Below is a timetable of the French Film Festival in Melbourne together with a table of the films rating better than most. I hope it helps you get to see...

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Work for the Dole doesn't work, says economist Jeff Borland . Citing a study he and Yi-Ping Tseng carried out using data from the late 1990s, he argues that it does nothing to create long-term employment opportunities and too little to build skills. But maybe Borland is missin...

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A new working paper (to be found here ) by two PhD students in our school muses about whether firms optimise profits or returns-to-costs. Normally in economic papers you see the presumption that firms optimise profits, but from the point of view of investors allocating in lots...

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Remember the last time the Coalition government was insinuating treachery on the part of the ABC, and making like it was about to take a cricket bat to it? That was back in the days when Prime Minister Howard’s government was keenly promoting our mission to bring freedom and d...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz1XBcWI6LM Above is my presentation to the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society - the background blurb of which is here . You'll find the first half of the presentation on the fractal ecology of public and private goods is effectively the sa...

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It's on again folks - or at least I've started to receive emails about it from you people. The incredible Troppo Crikey Sub. I've not been able to find, on a quick search, the savings on a one year subscription, but if you can give us the link, please do so in comments. We typ...

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T he excesses of ethics committees are a pet hate of mine, but I'd always thought that for instance the Stanley Milgram experiment was an example of the kind of experiment where genuine ethical issues arose that might justify not going ahead. But now I read on Wikipedia that:...

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"as much as I don’t understand it, Jeffrey Sachs really, really, really doesn’t understand it." Nina Monk, author of The Idealist "I don’t want to argue with you Jeff, because I don’t want to be called ignorant or unprofessional. I have worked in Africa for 30 years. My collea...

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Well here we are at the beginning of another year trying to get things in order. And I've got two bits of spring cleaning (OK so seasonal metaphors are dominated by northern hemisphere geography - I guess I'm doing summer cleaning). Having been slack in not having my checkup f...

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http://youtu.be/84NwnSltHFo

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http://youtu.be/zEnhYlzqKUk

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by Melissa S. Kearney, Phillip B. Levine Abstract: This paper explores how specific media images affect adolescent attitudes and outcomes. The specific context examined is the widely viewed MTV franchise, 16 and Pregnant, a series of reality TV shows including the Teen Mom seq...

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Does Planning Regulation Protect Independent Retailers? by Raffaella Sadun Abstract: Regulations aimed at curbing the entry of large retail stores have been introduced in many countries to protect independent retailers. Analyzing a planning reform launched in the United Kingdo...

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How would you measure the safety of private motor vehicle travel? Let’s agree to focus on fatalities. Serious injuries are also important, but all the points I am going to make hold equally as well for injuries as for fatalities. Probably the silliest way to measure road fatal...

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A recent Swiss proposal for a basic income guarantee has sparked interest from commentators on both the left and right. In a discussion of libertarian arguments for the proposal, Bleeding Heart Libertarians blogger Matt Zwolinski suggests that the classical liberal economist F...

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