The Gregorian revolution gave rise to a form of organisation that was gradually stamped out all over the Western world and then to its followers. Constitutional monarchy: A pyramid with a chief executive at the top with the rest of the pyramid made up of checks and balances on...
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Posted in Philosophy, Innovation, Best From Elsewhere, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Death and taxes, Bullshit, Employment, Sortition and citizens’ juries, Isegoria, Coronavirus crisis, Criminal law
I've started posting things here that I'm drafting for my weekend newsletter — which you can subscribe to here — so here's another tidbit. This is an excellent podcast featuring an ‘industry expert’ and then someone who’s introduced as an ‘economic genius’ — Tyler Cowan. The i...
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I recommend the first 15 or 20 minutes of this podcast. Defs worth the listen as John Gray explains where he comes from — literally and intellectually and ideologically. His milieu is British working class and he got to Oxford and has been a maverick to all classes ever since....
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I have been reading The Great Persuasion Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression by Angus Burgin (ostensibly in order to write an article on Michael Polanyi) and was taken with this Chapter on Milton Friedman . I hadn’t really crystalised for myself until the chapter poi...
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From Twitter . Till now I’ve organisd a TROPPO GROUP CRIKEY SUBSCRIPTION for around 50 I advertised I was doing renewals on Twitter and Troppo a month ago and got about 1 or 2 takers Now someone else wants a renewal If I can get some serious buy-in I’ll rinse and repeat If not...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPHlT6LBXeo Since we're blogging the next crisis, I thought now was a good time to reheat the blogging of the last one. intriguing to think of all the changes, and in many ways how much steam has gone out of blogging, and yet how resilient it ha...
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This post is a direct response and rebuttal to the recent ‘Has the coronavirus panic cost us at least 10 million lives already? ’ by Paul Fritjers. Paul’s post takes the current covid-19 crisis, and uses some haphazard multiplication to create an alarming narrative, muddying t...
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https://youtu.be/S_SWo3Cj8Yc I have posted this talk previously , but can now post the transcript, worked up from a YouTube transcript with thanks to Shruti Sekar for editing it. You can download the slides to which I was speaking from this link . There's also a written paper...
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Regional and Racial Inequality in Infectious Disease Mortality in U.S. Cities, 1900-1948 James J. Feigenbaum, Christopher Muller, and Elizabeth Wrigley-Field #25345 Abstract: In the first half of the twentieth century, the rate of death from infectious disease in the United St...
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[caption id="attachment_31852" align="alignleft" width="800"] Actual picture of the Universal Basic Income idea[/caption] In my latest column for The CEO Magazine I take aim at the idea of universal basic income (UBI). The column uses the insights of the always terrific Peter...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpVcsRVwF8s&feature=youtu.be&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=events_2018&utm_content=randomists_event_recording Robert Solow once referred to the law and economics scholar Richard Posner as writing books the way the rest of us b...
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[caption id="attachment_31407" align="aligncenter" width="1035"] It's pretty obvious why this picture came up forth in a Google Image Search of the expression "competitive neutrality" but if you can't figure it out for yourself frankly the Troppo collective are disgusted. We'r...
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I've known Dennis Glover since we were both staffers in Parliament during the Hawke-Keating years (I was there in 1981, 83-4 and 1991-3 until just after the 'sweetest victory of all' in 1993 which with hindsight I wish John Hewson had won as it would have kept in-tact Australi...
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[getty src="171148424" width="498" height="344"] My column last week for The CEO Magazine reiterates a point made previously at Troppo : the weight of research shows decisively that high marginal tax rates have little effect on the efforts of most high-income earners. Sample q...
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Via Andrew Gelman's site , here's a TED talk by US philanthropist Laura Arnold entitled "The Four Most Dangerous Words? A New Study Shows". It details her journey through the world of social, medical, psychological and other research. It's a lively and concise summary of the d...
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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="778"] Exactly why George Pell's face should come up on Googling "Crikey" is anyone's guess, but I for one would like people to stop being mean to him. After all, he didn't ask to travel First Class representing the world's religion of po...
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Do anti-poverty programs sway voters? Experimental evidence from Uganda By: Blattman, Christopher ; Emeriau, Mathilde ; Fiala, Nathan A Ugandan government program allowed groups of young people to submit proposals to start skilled enterprises. Among 535 eligible proposals, the...
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A friend of mine Ian Marsh sent me this op ed which one of the papers said it would publish last week. Personally, I'm not surprised that they didn't. They're waiting for it to be validated by being put through its paces here at the Troppo Grinder first. No change there. Over...
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Persistent Social Networks: Civil War Veterans who Fought Together Co-Locate in Later Life by Dora L. Costa, Matthew E. Kahn, Christopher Roudiez, Sven Wilson - #22397 (AG DAE HE) Abstract: At the end of the U.S Civil War, veterans had to choose whether to return to their prew...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzvOjcGifOM The post below is a guest post from a fine person who is a friend of mine. Sonia Ben Ali,, Co-founder and Executive Director of the international NGO, Urban Refugees. It's a pretty fledgeling organisation with a remarkably important...
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With the Internet being a regular feature of our lives for about 20 years now, what have been the related developments that were hard to pick at the outset? What are the lessons? Five thoughts: Communication and personal expression is the main business of the Internet. That wa...
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Posted in Philosophy, History, Miscellaneous, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, Science, Libertarian Musings, Geeky Musings, Political theory, Business, Information, Innovation, Best From Elsewhere, Cultural Critique, Public and Private Goods
[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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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZwFaSpca_3Q
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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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I recall about twenty years ago now, I was taking a law tute in Legal Theory. The lecturer was pretty awful and spent huge amounts of time in his lectures explaining why his side of a particular debate - with H.L.A Hart the opponent as I recall - was the right side of the deba...
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Jeff Sparrow on 'the Imbecilic Andrew Bolt' and Unseen Academicals : ...“My problem is not,” [writes Alecia Simmonds], "that our public sphere harbours ill-educated members (like the imbecilic Andrew Bolt who never made it past first-year uni)." Sorry? Anyone who doesn’t posse...
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I've never heard of EDwin Tanner, but he does a cute line in pictures if this is anything to go by. It went under the hammer at 45K (I think plus 20 odd per cent buyer's premium) last Dec. Details here .
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Reuters' Counterparties blog assembles Marcos-like numbers for China : "The perception that China is ruled by wise leaders adhering to neo-Confucian ideals has been contradicted by revelations of the massive wealth accumulated by its elite: an estimated $2.7 billion by the fam...
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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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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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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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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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by Jonah Lehrer - Smarter people are even more vulnerable to basic thinking errors than less intelligent ones.
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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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I wrote this column for the Fin at the end of the year only to discover that I was on leave. Anyway, i t was put in this morning's Fin in a slightly edited back form . The original is below. Blogging the Crisis: Enter the bright world ushered in by 2008 George Soros called 200...
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