Club Troppo

Paul Krugman recently gave a speech, Mr Keynes and the Moderns on several aspects of the legacy of the General Theory , including both the ways it has been read, and how it has been ignored. The latter is a recurring theme after the financial crisis as it became apparent that...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIDo1Oug6JY&feature=player_embedded Last Christmas, instead of sending gifts to its clients, the multi-billion dollar conglomerate that is Peach Home Loans sent them donations to Women for Women in Africa in lieu thereof. I found out about it bec...

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How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was un...

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http://youtu.be/6uOZQkKHOFE

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As an admirer of most of the positions Paul Krugman takes, I was caught on the fence when he supported public sector union outrage over what the (I think newly elected) Republican Governor in Wisconsin proposed to do to public sector conditions. From memory the basic political...

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I've always liked these cute pictures of the light of our cities from space. It hadn't occurred to me but of course you can use them to measure economic growth. Quite accurately where you have reason to believe that the countries books are otherwise cooked. As explained in thi...

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In the first of series of posts on Marxism , John Quiggin goes in search of the revolutionary working class. It takes Professor Q an entire paragraph to establish that no such class exists and that the revolution is off. Most Marxists (and recovering Marxists) seem to have com...

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Richard Posner is puzzled by by increases in female earnings. After all: "Women are not as well suited to perform jobs requiring upper-body strength as men are, but men can perform virtually all service jobs as well as women can." Really? As developed economies move away from...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEUiJTRLG0w ATMs have been around since the early 1970s but US banks still employ hundreds of thousands of human tellers. So why is Obama blaming ATMs for persistently high levels of unemployment? From 1972 to 1980 American banks put on an additi...

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There's a disconnect between Friedrich Hayek's principles and his practical policy positions, according to Canadian scholar Andrew Lister . In a working paper for the Centre for the Study of Social Justice at Oxford Lister argues that Hayek is a closet Rawlsian -- an egalitari...

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Interesting graph from the OECD which came with this email to subscribers - I think it's to journalists, and I'm on it because I've sought various reports to write columns on. I haven't read the referenced material, but it's light and predigested so no doubt some enterprising...

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"Marian Evans was enraged by the suggestion that the scenes and characters in her early books were simply transcribed from life", writes Adair Jones . "... the assumption that the work was drawn from life was not an affirmation of her talent for realism, but a denial of her cr...

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I'm trying to find the above mentioned person for a one off consulting job - for a friend's work, not Lateral Economics. Any suggestions?

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From the General Achievement Test for the Victorian Certificate of Education sat today. The image of the Australian outback on the next page was painted by Russell Drysdale. Pamela Bell described the painting in the following terms. Man reading a Paper is one of the most surre...

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A while ago I listened to some lectures to learn a bit about neurology. One topic that came up was Source Amnesia. This describes a human tendency to remember things like statements and facts, but not the context in which one heard them and the caveats, explicit or not, that c...

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Below is my column today from Crikey. This gives me as much of a sense of satisfaction as my involvement in the Button Plan with the recipe for success following much the same formula. Get a small possie as an 'insider', get some bearings on where policy should be heading and...

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No - at least in this case. Do Illegal Copies of Movies Reduce the Revenue of Legal Products? The case of TV animation in Japan , byy Tatsuo Tanaka Whether or not illegal copies circulating on the internet reduce the sales of legal products has been a hot issue in the entertai...

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Does anyone know a place I can load a chess game (in pgn) and then embed it on a blog - for people to play?

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I couldn't help thinking that the media's obsession with presenting a superficial appearance of ideological balance might have gone a little too far when I discovered that The Age has not only a religion correspondent but an atheism columnist . The latter rather crassly bills...

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