Club Troppo

Speaking of $100 bills on the pavement , I haven't looked into this - but look forward to doing so at some stage. Given the preponderance of IT systems which generate real time data for their organisations - firms and agencies - why aren't we trying to do more of this with our...

Continue reading →

Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School. Niall F's website doesn't just tell uswhat a dashing fellow he is. It shows us. There he is - hair pinned back by the onru...

Continue reading →

Keynes famously said that the hardest part of coming up with the General Theory was not coming up with the new ideas so much as escaping from the old ones. I've just run into a great article on the implications of happiness research for making policy (and yes there are implica...

Continue reading →

I can attest to the truth of Krugman's claim that a zombie talking point is alive and well in the US, which hasn't really taken root here. It is that only the rich pay tax. That's roughly true here if you're looking at families (because of family payments), but it's based on a...

Continue reading →

Amongst developed countries, we're nothing special, ranking 51st. This is from the Yale Environmental Performance Index . Though plenty of caveats need to be kept in mind, and the report itself is full of the implicit assumption that everything is always and everywhere better...

Continue reading →

(memo to self) Probably the most significant geopolitical event of the last 12 months has been the regime change in the Arab world, where the 360 million Arabs [1] make up 5% of the world population . Though a small and relatively poor group in this world, they occupy the main...

Continue reading →

Last night's riot and torching of the Villawood Detention Centre inevitably brings the asylum seeker issue back into the political spotlight, especially on top of the similar incident at Christmas Island a few weeks ago. Some "johnny-come-lately" Troppo readers might have gain...

Continue reading →

This story triggered a bit of childhood reminiscence, not to mention reflection on how times have changed: A West Australian teacher who allegedly tied a five-year-old boy to a chair to punish him for misbehaving has been stood aside while the case is investigated. When I was...

Continue reading →

'You go with the information you had...' I'm probably almost the last person to have seen Charles Ferguson's documentary Inside Job . But the film is still showing in a few cinemas in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, so it's worth making a belated recommendation. If only for th...

Continue reading →

A pretty interesting article I think. Jeffrey V. Butler (Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF)), Luigi Guiso (European University Institute and EIEF), Tullio Jappelli (University of Naples Federico II, CSEF and CEPR) URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sef:csefwp:28...

Continue reading →

When John Quiggin accused Julia Gillard of embracing neoliberalism one of his readers suggested the PM was taking advantage of Ayn Rand's renewed popularity to chase the libertarian vote. Rand seems to be everywhere these days. With the release of movie based on her 1957 novel...

Continue reading →

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="640" caption="Cartoon purloined following Patrick's excellent advice @ comment 8. "] [/caption] As I've said at least once before, my own approach to economics could be described as looking for $100 bills on the pavement. I think they'r...

Continue reading →

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="498" caption="And what is this fetching picture doing here? Ask Google Images which popped this up when I entered the search string "the rise of science""] [/caption] In discussing 'open science' with someone today I thought I'd be able...

Continue reading →

In this week's Missing Link Friday: a British conservative blames women for inequality, Australia's PM celebrates the dignity of work, Americans argue about health care spending, and the Freakonomics blog reveals the damaging environmental impact of medical marijuana. Is femin...

Continue reading →

With miners and tobacco companies running well-funded campaigns against perectly reasonable government policies, it's hardly surprising that the licensed clubs industry is looking at similar measures to combat imposition of compulsory pre-commitment settings on poker machines...

Continue reading →

Fairfax columnist John Birmingham's column raises some interesting issues about the practice of tipping for provision of goods and services, especially the aggressive way tipping is pursued in the US where restaurant tips of up to 20% of the bill appear to be the norm. In Aust...

Continue reading →

A very reasonable request - so it seems to me - from Dave Bath who has asked me to post the guest post below. I guess there's a message there - not just for Auditors General but for all right thinking government agencies. It's bleg time... for people who'd like to get all Audi...

Continue reading →

Happiness and Tax Morale: an Empirical Analysis By: Diego Lubian (Department of Economics (University of Verona)), Luca Zarri (Department of Economics (University of Verona)) This paper presents empirical evidence that "tax morale" - taxpayers' intrinsic motivation to pay taxe...

Continue reading →

Nice to see a journalist with a memory. Not that there's much point in complaining about political actors acting like political actors - responding to the incentives they face. Business associations are into solidarity long before they're into principle. The one thing Keene le...

Continue reading →

It always struck me how inefficient universities were with most efforts going into lectures which were inherently a broadcast medium - so much so you could go and get the tapes of the lectures. Meanwhile, tutes were usually a bit of an afterthought and a place where grad stude...

Continue reading →