Club Troppo

In this week's Missing Link Friday: inequality, McMansions, education, brown coal and flaming kittens. Inequality: Why don't Australians complain more about wealth inequality? According to David Neal at The Conversation it's because most of us underestimate how unequal the dis...

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In an earlier post , and one of a series by me and subsequently Ken as well, I suggested that an important part of any professional education should be a kind of counter-narrative in which those who learn a profession are also made familiar with that profession's cognitive bia...

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Cross posted from Australian Policy Online http://inside.org.au/how-fair-is-australia%e2%80%99s-welfare-state/ IN ITS 28 May edition the Economist carried a long feature about Australia, praising our resilient economy, criticising the quality of our political discourse, and hi...

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Peter Roebuck, the Fairfax cricket writer, has joined Mike Atherton in suggesting a boycott of Sri Lanka . For England that means next year; for Australia, next month. It's good to see that someone outside the cloisters of human rights activism is prepared to make a stand agai...

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For more - here .

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I reckon this is the most succinct, accurate and balanced summary I've read of the current state of the carbon pricing debate: Pricing carbon in Australia is about pricing carbon, not saving the planet. As an insurance policy, we need to have a soft mechanism in place that can...

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No Kidding. They're making a movie of Franz Stampfl's life - a doco. Who was Franz Stampfl I hear you cry? Wikipedia says this: Stampfl was born in the capital of then Austro-Hungarian Empire . He was the son of an Austrian general. He studied writing and painting in school. A...

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From Supersizing supercenters? The impact of Walmart Supercenters on body mass index and obesity, by Charles Courtemanche and Art Carden, Journal of Urban Economics 69 (2011) 165–181 Researchers have linked the rise in obesity to technological progress reducing the opportunity...

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You'll be pleased to hear that the Mortgage Industry Association of Australia is on a campaign to ramp up the qualifications of mortgage brokers. Just because all they do is sell loans and fill out forms - and otherwise manage the process by which you apply for a loan - is no...

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I never fully understood Google Health . It seems to be a consumer product, inviting you to input your data and track your health, set health goals and so on. Certainly there could be some benefits in this and in the aggregation of information, but the amount of effort maintai...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVGcfqj04Qk&feature=related Last night Jen prevailed on me to watch an episode of the doco series The First Australians . Such programs tend towards the irritatingly sanctimonious and question-begging in my experience, and that may well be true o...

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"There was a time when Labor’s aim for the poor and disadvantaged was to end poverty and disadvantage", writes John Quiggin . "Now the best they can hope for is ' extending opportunity '." Under John Curtin and Ben Chifley , Labor was the party of work and welfare. The party s...

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Joshua Gans can't imagine how staff and students at The Spot would be blocking the toilets with paper towels. It turns out that the problem may be caused by toilet ' nesters '. As commenter Alister explains "students and/or staff are using paper towels as seat-liners." And, as...

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"Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying" philosopher Richard Rorty once said . Earlier this week journalist Johann Hari discovered he'd made a mistake about what was true and what wasn't. Guy Beres at Larvatus Prodeo writes : "When I read an interview,...

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Tonight's 7:30 Report featured a story on gay marriage (yes, I know the "report" bit has been deleted, presumably to signal the new post-Red Kezza regime). Strangely though, it didn't even mention in passing the fact that there is significant doubt as to whether the Commonweal...

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I'm thrilled to say that we raised over $30,000 for Africa. Troppo itself initially raised a little over $2,000 to which would have been matched the contribution I'd promised, but in the last day I also said to the fund raisers that if they could get some more funds in by refe...

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I love finding links between equity and efficiency - there are lots around. Here's another . . . . (it seems). Early Non-marital Childbearing and the "Culture of Despair" by Melissa Schettini Kearney, Phillip B. Levine This paper borrows from the tradition of other social scie...

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My first smartphone was an Apple iPhone. I'm rather proud of being a technology laggard - it's nice to have others at the bleeding edge. Anyway, just before doing the Govt 2.0 Taskforce I thought I'd better get a bit hip and get a smart-phone and only one appealed - the iPhone...

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"I arrived with fellow baboon researcher Monica yesterday night, after a fairly smooth trip starting in St. Louis and passing through Atlanta and Johannesburg." That's primate biologist Kenneth Chiou writing about his trip to Pioneer Camp outside Lusaka. Chiou has been bloggin...

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Antinomies are discomforting things. If you haven't run into them before, they were a topic of debate and discussion introduced into modern philosophy by Kant (Unless he had some forebear of which I'm unaware), though you might say that they bear some resemblance to Zeno's par...

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