Club Troppo

So far in Inequalityfest 2011 we've focused largely on moral and ethical issues, as well as on the distinction (if one can be made) between inequality of opportunity and inequality of outcome. These are very important issues, but I'm interested in one that I think is overlooke...

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Yes folks, Julia Gillard is softening that story about how she's gonna achieve a budget surplus by 2012/13. Arguably it makes sense if there's a huge bill from the floods, but now the fun starts. A bit like the anxious months when we waited for Wayne, Lindsay, Julia or Kevin t...

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About to book United Airlines to the United States, I thought I'd let any Troppodillians who don't know of this video, that it exists, and that it's fun (and it lopped around $170 million off UA's market cap according to some factoid crazed journalists). And looking it up, I j...

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If only we could persuade poor people to adopt the values and behaviours of their rich neighbours we could end poverty in a generation. Or at least that's the impression you'd get from reading the never ending stream of books and articles about the culture of poverty, the unde...

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Christopher Joye is relaxed about income inequality. In a recent article for the Drum Unleashed he writes: I don’t think there is anything wrong at all with a rise in income inequality if one assumes that: (a) we have equality of opportunity; (b) we are committed to combating...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVDla_Ax40k&feature=player_embedded

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You've read about the floods , you've given to the flood relief appeal and now you need a break. So instead of talking about the distribution of water, let's talk about the distribution of income. Thanks to Christopher Joye it's been a hot topic over the past week. People are...

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Given it's still the offseason, I thought we might want to revisit an passtime of a previous time. When I was a child in the 90s, during the Keating era, there was a fairly pointless question (they never bothered to actually debate it); Is Australia part of Asia? Whilst the qu...

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On Sunday I ate at a Filipino restaurant. This was a first; prior experiences of Filipino food had been solely at friends' houses. Restaurants were simply just not around. In fact, some googling seems to indicate there may be less than 10 in the entire state of NSW. Which is s...

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I think Adam Smith thought of modern commercial society as gradually diffusing power throughout the society and both creating and enabling a world in which decision making became more decentralised and people's autonomy, productivity and virtue grew together. In average and in...

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I’ve had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach ever since the final stages of the 2008 campaign. I remembered the upsurge in political hatred after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 — an upsurge that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. And you could see, just by watching...

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Not two weeks gone - and this: Labor needs a comeback. Fast. Julia Gillard's dogged insistence she will return the budget to surplus in 2012-13 is growing old. So she should tighten fiscal policy. You wouldn't want a policy with a three year horizon to 'grow old' now would we?...

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As I sometimes do I was tapping away on a blog post and then thought I'd like to give it greater exposure. So I didn't press 'publish' and then pitched it to the Age who liked the idea. So I worked away to convert the post into a column - they're fairly different things (for m...

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That was quick. It only took a week for media consensus on the retail campaign by Gerry Harvey and others, in contrast to the consensus on the campaign by mining companies. Both represent campaigns by established and vested interests to serve their own interests whilst claimin...

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Missing Link Friday is back. And to start off the new year, here's a short quiz. Follow the links to check your answers. 1. When the Japanese look at the moon, they don't see a man, writes Catallaxy's Ken Nielsen . According to Nielsen what do they see? A. A lotus root B. A ra...

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So now we have to take it seriously! Well I doubt any study can prove something like that, but there you go. Causation could go in both directions, but either way, we told you so . Public policy, trust and growth: disclosure of government information in Japan. Date: 2010-12-20...

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I was in John Dawkins' office when, to my amazement he decided to move the (then) Industry Commission, now Productivity Commission, to Melbourne. Anyway, with Dawkins having rebuffed attempts to dissuade him, as the move proceeded against great angst and gnashing of teeth, the...

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I was talking to my wife today about an alternative form of reverse discrimination and came home to find something else I'd said about it linked to by Richard Green . To introduce the issue, here was my comment. I’ve always thought that the absence of women in politics is in f...

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A while ago Paul Montgomery, whom I didn't know, tweeted that he had wanted to set up a blog of the radical centre. His tweet was about his crestfallen discovery that we beat him to it. Anyway, my handle @nichlasgruen was in this tweet so I saw it and suggested that Paul submi...

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The rough beast is slouching towards Bethlehem again. In the latest issue of Quadrant Rob Nugent warns that young people are losing their connection with history and culture. Literary reading is in decline and postmodernism is to blame. According to Nugent, our intellectual el...

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