Club Troppo

This week's Missing Link features reactions to John Birmingham's column: Why is fat such a fractious issue? Then there's a miscellaneous collection of links on topics like the flood levy, the property market, inequality and race. The F word John Birmingham sees himself as a to...

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Tyler Cowen's e-bookette, The Great Stagnation is being debated around the various blogospheres, even by people who haven't read it . I do dig the way it exploits the format of ebooks, being allowed to be longer than an essay, but not padded out into a book. A huge number of b...

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I wonder why oz theatre icon David Williamson reacted with complacent high dudgeon to a bitchy review on Crikey of his latest turgid thespian offering Don Parties On ? After all, the Murdoch and Fairfax reviews were almost as negative, and redoubtable blogging theatre critic A...

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Links to follow developments : BOM map and updates ; Yasi Twitter feed compiled by ABC The frightening power of even a modest cyclone has to be experienced to really understand just how big a threat such a weather event poses. Having been through a couple of small-ish cyclones...

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Not so long ago I published a post titled: The future of journalism and blogging – chapter 957 . Essentially I argued that, despite all the despairing navel-gazing and prognostications of doom for MSM news and political journalism posed by free content on the Internet, especia...

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Of all the products advertisers and marketers have pitched over the years, the one most vital to their survival, and the one they have been most successful at convincing people the utility of, is marketing. Without selling advertising and marketing, there is no industry at all...

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Recent NT News discussion on the perennial topic of crime and punishment seems to have generated more heat than light. Chief Justice Trevor Riley wrote an excellent piece pointing out basic facts about the NT criminal justice system, not least the fact that NT judges and magis...

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Those are the words that the sub-editor of the Australian - I presume that is who wrote them - used to describe these comments from Warwick McKibbin. "It is more important to have independent voices (on the bank board) than ever, because the policies being proposed in recent y...

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This week we're stealing a few links from the Profligate Promiscuous Strumpet before moving on to a couple of stories from the US blogosphere. The theme is motherhood. So that's what they're for! "Why does a woman breastfeeding in public cause such alarm among some people", as...

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I might have preferred for the Government to take a risk with the surplus in 2012/13, and perhaps to have a go at middle-class welfare, but that would have been politically too hard. It has been seen as “an intellectual defeat” to the Coalition – but is it not a fact of life w...

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When conservative commentator Tucker Carlson launched the Daily Caller last year he promised readers original reporting on US politics. As he told the Columbia Journalism Review : "our view is that people want reliable information they’re not getting other places". When journa...

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The cold shower effect is a dangerous beast. It supports free market types in supporting trade liberalisation. When last seen , the cold shower effect was explaining why trade liberalisation is even better for you than you thought. If there's a cold shower effect it means that...

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It's becoming a point of distinction not to have prognosticated on the future of China, especially in Australia as China takes great significance in our region and in our economic future. A lot of this prognostication must be infuriating to veteran China Watchers, being conduc...

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At Larvatus Prodeo, Kim writes about The great American neoliberal liberal blog kerfuffle where blogger Freddie deBoer claims that "almost anything resembling an actual left wing has been systematically written out of the conversation within the political blogosphere". Accordi...

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Many of the agendas associated with economic reform have been big successes. Deregulation of things that shouldn't have been regulated, like trade, shopping hours, airlines, you name it has worked well. Financial regulation . . . ehem not so well. Indeed, in terms of the wellb...

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Why do all the spam comments say the same thing? Is it really that hard to think up template comments that I might let through when looking at the detritus our spam checker leaves for me to check. This one is specially silly, but otherwise conforms to the standard formula. I a...

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A few months ago the Sydney Morning Herald had an article in which Mike Baird, almost certainly the next treasurer of NSW, suggested the use of Tax Increment Finance. Briefly, TIF refers to the funding of infrastructure by allocating beforehand any increase in tax revenues tha...

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Are older women a threat to productivity? Does higher education educate? Can you trust Google's ngram viewer? And why are there so few Filipino restaurants? These are just a few of the questions raised in this week's links. Food Last week Richard Tsukamasa Green wondered Why a...

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Albert Hirschman called it the perversity thesis -- the claim that an " attempt to push society in a certain direction will result in its moving all right, but in the opposite direction ". The best example of thesis is in arguments against cash-transfer programs for the non-wo...

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Methodology and what in disciplines other than economics is called 'theory' has always interested me - so long as it remains at the level that can be understood by my tiny brain and does not waft off into structuralism, deconstruction, critical theory or other strange activiti...

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