Club Troppo

Retired diplomat Bruce Haigh has a valid point when he refers to Gillard government threats to refuse to issue visas on "character grounds" to Christmas Island asylum seeker rioters as "revengeful". More accurately it's cynical playing to the populist gallery on a par with Ton...

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Peter Whiteford is one of my favourite commenters. He rarely joins a thread without adding useful data or some telling insight. On Monday he showed up on Matt Yglesias' blog to explain the difference between progressivity and redistribution in the tax system. The debate was ov...

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Well it's an overused word right now but have a look at this if you've not seen it before - it's lovely. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkGeOWYOFoA

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A while back I was asked if I would be the patron of the Australian Digital Alliance . Well . . . you could have knocked me down with a feather! Anyway, the ADA is a fine organisation which describes itself as follows on its website. The ADA is a non-profit coalition of public...

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A couple of months ago I read Interstate 69 , which is an unexpectedly interesting account of the advocates and opponents (neither of whom are really insiders) of an extension to the eponymous road from the American Midwest to the Mexican border and their attempts to gain the...

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Yes folks, the guy I probably very unfairly was rude about here , has done something with his life. He's lent some of his famous empirical skills to showing something we all know in our bones, namely that people are still producing records, even though the bottom has been slid...

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Just so you know, this time of year sees one of the most fun chess competitions on the calendar - that is if you don't think a fun chess competition is a contradiction in terms. The Amber Tournament pits the very top echelon of chessdom against each other with each round invol...

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One of the things I have against academics is that they are supposed to be smart. They are smart. Yet get enough of them together and you get this - from Robin Hanson . Words fail me. Once upon a time some researchers gave people diseases without their consent or knowledge. Ot...

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When the SL-1 nuclear reactor exploded in Idaho releasing a radioactive plume and killing three workers, a local paper reported the accident on page 12 . That was 1961. Today some residents of Idaho are so worried about the nuclear accident 8000 kilometers away that they're bu...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X454D3Fzwso I've spoken about it previously, but I've just found the treasure trove above of Farnarkeling reports from the Gillies Report. The form of comedy is so pure that the final song is a bit of a pity - as good as it is - compared with the...

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The crisis in Japan has dominated the media over the past week. With the earthquake and tsunami over, many bloggers turned their attention the unfolding disaster at the Japanese nuclear power plant Fukushima Daiichi and its implications for the future of nuclear energy. It's n...

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I've just finished a bit of a barnstorm tour of New Zealand giving two presentations with a similar title to that above and a talk on Govt 2.0 which funded the visit. I must say I've loved it. Having checked out Auckland and Wellington for the first time in forty years, I can...

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My first reaction to Coles' recent milk discounting was that this is good news. Milk is not a huge expense for our family; we buy all our milk at the deli. But for those doing it tough, paying $1 a litre for milk (and lower prices for several other staples) could conceivably m...

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The latest situation with damaged Japanese nuclear power plants seems if anything more potentially dire and apocalyptic than what prompted my comment on Don Arthur's post : Seems to me that whatever now happens the nuclear power option is almost certainly a dead duck in all we...

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Of course we are, but in order to convince the outside world that we are has needed someone to collect the data on the grades given to foreign students and analyse it. Gigi Foster of UNSW has done just that in a study looking at the marks of students of different backgrounds i...

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A lot of nonsense is being written by pundits about Julia Gillard's supposedly terminal leadership situation in the light of the carbon tax issue. The reality is that if she manages to broker a deal that gets through Parliament this year, then she'll be seen as a strong leader...

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Happiness is a recurrent topic in the blogosphere, not least at Troppo where several of us have posted abou t it more than once. There's even a strand of economics that focuses on studying happiness. In part that's why it struck me as a bit strange that Australian writer David...

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I liked this brief piece from Peter Drysdale introducing a recent East Asia Forum Weekly Digest and asked if I could reproduce it here and he agreed. 'Be not afraid of greatness,' wrote William Shakespeare in Twelfth Night. 'Some men are born great, some achieve greatness and...

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Saul Eslake asked a bunch of people for comments on the recent Grattan Institute study of productivity and I sent him back a long email which I reproduce with some editing here. Nothing very surprising for people who are regular visitors here, but perhaps worth posting in case...

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I was contemplating writing a post about an ignorant, self-interested op-ed by billionaire mining heiress Gina Reinhardt until I asked myself the question: what's the point? It's a question whose answer increasingly constrains my blogging output after almost 9 years at the gam...

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