Club Troppo

Government regulation of the media acts like a public subsidy, argues Mr Denmore . It makes it difficult for new players to get a foothold and "encourages monopolistic behaviour that circumvents reasoned debate." So what is to be done? One possibility is to hope a white knight...

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Don asks what the policy engaged outside the Political-Journalistic complex can do to improve public debate, implicitly envoking the role of blogs and other social media. So I've decided to post some of the ideas I've had on the odd chance that one of them might prove fruitful...

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Everyone's talking about evidence-based policy. And since gathering evidence is their job, you might think this would give academic researchers a more important role in the policy process. But as Peter Shergold writes in the Australian Literary Review , academics have little i...

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Freedom is a keyword in American politics, writes Corey Robin in the Nation . It lies at the centre of every successful political movement from the abolition of slavery, to civil rights and feminism. The secret of conservatism's success is that it identifies freedom with marke...

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Everyone agrees that the quality of public discourse in Australia is dismal. Most of us blame politicians and the media. But the constant carping is getting tedious and irritating. Isn't it time the rest of us thought about what we can do to lift the quality of public debate?...

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In this week's Missing Link Friday, bloggers remember Sydney book seller Bob Gould, US blogger Mark Perry explains what's up with manufacturing, Andrew Norton examines a new poll on attitudes to welfare, and various writers complain about the dismal state of politics today. Re...

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I've written a few times on measures of wellbeing on Troppo. For instance here and here . (In fact, reviewing it, I can't find both of my articles for New Matilda on the Australia Institute's GPI, so here they both are (pdf).) As ever Troppo was hip before the world caught up,...

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Forced board changes: Evidence from Norway (pdf). By: Nygaard, Knut (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration) The recently introduced gender quota on Norwegian corporate boards dramatically increased the share of female directors. This ref...

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Doesn't matter how much I look at this picture, I can't figure it out.

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I heartily agree with Ross Gittins' assessment of Tony Abbott, and I also tend to agree with Harry Clarke about the respective current merits of Labor and the Coalition, although I'm not quite as scathing about Labor and certainly not a long-time Liberal supporter: Because of...

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As Philip Tetlock so powerfully showed, most expertise isn't worth nix if the criterion of expertise is whether you can demonstrate superior predictions about what will happen in the future. As he showed, most experts can't predict any better than tolerably informed non-expert...

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n.b I did the hokey pokey on this post, putting it in and taking in out because I figured it was fairly pointless. Now I'm putting it in again (and shaking it all about). The other day I was idling away some spare time by looking at roads on Google Maps. I looked at roads and...

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At exactly the time late last year when the Wikileaks saga was occupying seemingly endless media column centimetres, important amendments were implemented to the Commonwealth's Freedom of Information regime. They flowed from a reform process implemented by Senator John Faulkne...

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Andrew Norton has some interesting posts distinguishing between classical liberalism (to which he regards himself as an adherent) and libertarianism (to which he doesn't). His explanation of the distinction - at least skimming his posts again quickly - is that libertarianism i...

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I notice that a UK MP has just "outed" soccer player Ryan Giggs as the prominent sportsman who had a well-publicised extra-marital affair. His identity was (and remains) the subject of a "super-injunction" issued by the UK High Court and based on rights to privacy in the Human...

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US congressman Paul Ryan wants to "strengthen welfare for those who need it" and "end it for those who don't". And to hard working Americans that sounded reasonable enough ... until some of them realised he might be talking about Medicare and Social Security . How could benefi...

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It's funny. I think academia is too theoretical, and politics isn't theoretical enough. In this post I'll defend the second proposition on politics, and if I manage it, a subsequent post will defend the first. I'm also thinking particularly about the ALP. In a sense my proposi...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE8qRDHfA5Y&feature=related When I was in the market for young kids music entertainment, my favourite entertainer was Peter Combe (pronounced Coom). The Wiggles were nice enough but very anodyne - so much so that, when Disney took them up they ne...

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OK - so I just read it from a link on a Krugman blog post , but it's worth repeating. An example of fad economics occurred in 1980, when a small group fo economists advised presidential candidate Ronald Reagan that an across-the-board cut in income tax rates would raise tax re...

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