[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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