Club Troppo

Are nurses more altruistic than real estate brokers? Find out here . But if you don't have time, here's the abstract. We report results from a dictator game experiment with nurse students and real estate broker students as dictators, and Amnesty International as the recipient....

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The great Scottish philosopher David Hume, friend of other great Scottish philosopher Adam Smith was 300 the other day. Crooked Timber is inviting favourite Hume quotes and Paul Krugman offers this . I have long entertained a suspicion, with regard to the decisions of philosop...

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White to play A H Wohl vs Gipslis 23. ? See game for solution. Just solve this puzzle. And here's another really amazing game .

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The rules and norms that allow markets to function effectively are public or collective goods. That's something to which internet entrepreneurs turn their attention when setting up 'two sided markets' like Kaggle . At Kaggle we are always asking 'what would make this an even b...

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If Julia Gillard is known for one policy direction, it is her advocacy of making educational opportunities available to all. Her passion for this idea is clearly genuine, and has survived her move from Minister of Education to Prime Minister. It is also personal. She enjoyed h...

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One of the most famous passages in economics writing — at least if you’re an economist, as opposed to a policy maker — is the conclusion of Keynes’s General Theory , on the importance of economic ideas: But apart from this contemporary mood, the ideas of economists and politic...

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I'm preparing to do a bit of whithering on tertiary education next week at a strategy retreat or some such for a university - and wanted to ask Troppodillians for any sources they think I should consult. I want to bang my drum about the ways in which education at all levels (w...

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In this week's Missing Link Friday: fat, feminism, fair pay, philosophy and more. The death of Obama? Catallaxy's Samuel J spots an unfortunate typo at the Australian . The dogs of war: "We sent 79 commandos to get Osama bin Laden — and one dog", writes Ezra Klein . Cutting th...

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Herewith my column for Today's Fin on the Government's proposed new R&D Tax Credit. The paper on which it is based is on the Lateral Economics Website . The politics of compromise can work to solve problems by taking everyone’s needs into account. But sometimes we just get cau...

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The Candidates is on! The Candidates is a tournament of the highest ranking chess players in the world (other than the world champion) and the prize is the right to challenge the champ in this case Vishy Anand. The guy on the left right is Aronian who's expected to win. And th...

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A long time ago in a galaxy far away (i.e. 2007), the University of Melbourne introduced 'The Melbourne Model' in which students were supposed to do many cross-disciplinary studies during their undergraduate degree (50 unit points, i.e. one year out of three) whilst being enco...

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I went to Harkaway State School in the foothills of the Dandenongs in Victoria. It was settled by Germans and apparently in WWI they rang the bell of the local church when they heard of a German victory in WWI. Probably not a good way to stay under the radar - though that was...

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Well blow me down! In early 2009 I was invited to Beijing to participate in a 'dialogue' on 'the knowledge society' which was being run between various academic institutions in Australia and Peking University. The 'dialogue' was quite formal and diplomatic - I recognised the g...

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No: the betting markets at Intrade showed a steady downward movement in the 'probability that Bin Laden would be captured or neutralised before midnight June 30 2011'. On May 1, the probability was deemed to be 2.7 % (down from about 10 percent a year earlier), with the close...

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This Internet, which any demented person, any drunk can get drunk and write in, do you believe it? The Internet is like a vacuum cleaner, it can suck anything. Any useless person; any liar; any drunkard; anyone under the influence; anyone high on drugs; can talk on the Interne...

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Having just watched Q&A on the republic (looking for my daughter who'd got herself into the audience!), I was intrigued by the post I've replicated below. I am the most luke warm republican around and have almost certainly put Chris Dillow's first argument below somewhere on T...

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Here it is folks , courtesy of Cafe Hayek.

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Ken's last post seeks to crowdsource ideas for teaching law students some of their cognitive biases. I'd been contemplating on posting on something I'd read in Supercrunchers, and this gave me the perfect opportunity. Good questions Ken. I can’t answer them very satisfactorily...

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A bunch of new rules are being introduced to Parliament today governing what is usually called the "financial planning" industry. Big new regulatory schemes often have large unintended consequences, and this one could too. But if ever an industry needed to change its behaviour...

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Nicholas Gruen's post about Einstellung (a person's predisposition to solve a given problem in a specific manner even though there are "better" or more appropriate methods of solving it) has given me an idea. I would like to devise a couple of seminars for undergraduate Law st...

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