Club Troppo

Around here at Troppo we've been musing for a while about how Labor in general and Julia Gillard in particular need to connect the government's derailed policy agenda to some overarching vision or set of values likely to inspire commitment and enthusiasm from the erstwhile sup...

Continue reading →

There's been a lot written about what's wrong with modern macro. But this quite quiet methodological discussion by Colander is well worth the read - including I think for non-economists. It's quite rich in descriptive detail about what policy economics was like - and still is...

Continue reading →

Apart from the issues canvassed in my previous post about yesterday's High Court judgment on the validity of aspects of the Commonwealth's offshore "boat people" asylum seeker processes, the sixty four million dollar question now is whether it will affect any attempt by the Gi...

Continue reading →

It's Friday. And that means it's time for another Missing Link Friday. This week Bill Muelenberg explains why letting teenage girls bring other girls to school formals may encourage bestiality, an Australian conservative argues that female empowerment is a plot to disempower m...

Continue reading →

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfFMIhMEyYY&feature=player_profilepage I was pleased to be asked to speak at the Queensland's Right Information Day. In my speech I wanted to speak a little against the grain. The language used by Web 2.0, Gov 2.0 aficionados has a particular qua...

Continue reading →

Like David Marr , I've been waiting for a while for the High Court's decision in the M61 and M69 case. The applicant's arguments challenge on various constitutional and statutory interpretation grounds the legal validity of the current asylum seeker processing regime, and in p...

Continue reading →

High profile constitutional law academic George Williams argues in today's SMH that the federal laws prohibiting self-governing Commonwealth territories (NT, ACT and Norfolk Island) from legalising voluntary euthanasia should be repealed. As a Territorian and public law academ...

Continue reading →

for some time now, I have wanted to read a short intelligible piece telling me what the US health reforms actually were about. The problem till now has been that the reforms entail 1200 pages of unreadable legal text referring to more unreadable text, and that the issue became...

Continue reading →

This piece suggests that the UK may i mplement quotas to increase the representation of women on FTSE companies. I appreciate the sentiment. Even though it's hard to find someone who will explicitly state that women are unsuited to positions of power, the corridors of power bo...

Continue reading →

Australia's pro- and anti-population growth advocates seem to be competing with each other to see who can produce the most glib, fact-free piece of propaganda. Dick Smith's entertaining anti-growth advocacy-doco Dick Smith's Population Puzzle , screened in the lead-up to the r...

Continue reading →

In a fairly desultory post , Helen 'Skepticlawyer' Dale presents the right wing de rigueur view that the United Nations is a waste of space dominated by corrupt third world regimes and should be abolished. Her pretext is the imminent establishment of a new UN agency for women'...

Continue reading →

From Troppo's guest blogger Neal Lawson (OK I nicked his post and reproduced it here). It is so depressingly inevitable. Obama, like Clinton, Blair and Brown before him, like in Rudd in Australia, like the Swedish social democrats, like every example of centre-left government...

Continue reading →

HT Three Quarks, I enjoyed this wander around the James Bond genre. How can we take such pleasure from such bad movies. It's a mystery. I liked the essay and don't dismiss the author's principal explanation which is Freudian fantasy for boys. But I'm in the demographic he's wr...

Continue reading →

Here's this week's Missing Link Friday. One for the country Don't stop at two, says Mark Richardson. "to have stable population growth you need a large percentage of couples to have 3 children to make up for those having none. Limiting families to 2 children won't work." At Oz...

Continue reading →

This is an EconTalk interview by Russ Roberts, with links to relevant readings. You can download to listen or you can read the dialogue, which is a bit hard because you have to work out who is talking (maybe not hard if you pay attention, but you can't tell at a glance). The b...

Continue reading →

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OLP4nbAVA4&feature=player_embedded

Continue reading →

AT the peak of the recent housing boom, subprime mortgage companies were loaning $600 billion per year to homebuyers with poor credit histories. In The Political Economy of the Subprime Mortgage Credit Expansion (NBER Working Paper No.16107), co-authors Atif Mian, Amir Sufi, a...

Continue reading →

Here is a story about the internet working the way tech utopians think it should. Technology is as good or as bad as the social conditions of which it is a part, but this is one of the good stories. It can be read either as a perfect example of self interest working well in th...

Continue reading →

In 2001, Portugal decriminalized the private use of all illicit drugs, including heroin, cannabis, and cocaine. As long as a person is not found in possession of more than 10 days' worth of any of these drugs, use and possession is no longer a criminal offense. The main point...

Continue reading →

Continue reading →