Club Troppo

Gummo Trotsky, the Methuselah of erudite commentary, now has his very own blog . And he's "come out" under his real name, what's more. He calls the blog Sardonic Detachment Therapy. Gummo can be sardonic, but detached? I think I'll keep calling him Gummo anyway. I'm a creature...

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Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is something I'd like to do some more work in. I haven't because I've not been able to get a consulting gig for Lateral Economics on the subject (hint, hint, if you know anyone who wants some consultant to go boldly where no consultant has...

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I made a comment here a couple of days ago which I believe expresses the frustrations of many about the chronic failure of the Labor government, both under Rudd and Gillard, to effectively prosecute the case for reform in just about every area: The puzzle here, as in contempor...

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This post began as a response to Julia Thornton's brief comment on a previous post in which I outed myself as a fan of the philosopher Hegel, directing me to a site where Hegelians roamed free. It's an interesting thing what we make of what we learn at uni - and to some extent...

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NSW Premier Kristina Keneally has continued her stoush with Prime Minister Julia Gillard, described being forced to choose between signing up to uniform national workplace laws and $144 million in federal grants as a "Sophie's choice". I wonder whether the photogenic but seemi...

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Well well well. I'm a fan - perhaps a bit of an ex-fan of WordWeb . It's a great little dictionary, thesaurus which enables you to highlight any word in any app and by clicking a few keys get a definition of a word and synonyms, antonyms and so on. It's a 'freemium' model of m...

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From Deidre McCloskey's The Secret Sins of Economics A very pompous linguist was giving a talk at Columbia and noted that there were languages in which a double negative meant a positive (standard English, for example: “I am not going to not speak” = “I am going to speak”) and...

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As readers of this blog will know I regard the state of the economics profession as a scandal, and have for years. It's only occasionally when it really matters, as no matter how good the discipline was it is mostly condemned to ignorance - the world is too complex to understa...

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Japan. (HT The Melbourne Urbanist ) What is more interesting however is the fact it looks like...a Phillips curve. This is kind of astounding. You could pick up a vintage late 60s macro textbook and it'd be struggling to explain the situation that was unfolding then, but the p...

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Yes, folks it does at least according to the paper below. Which is pretty good news, because cultural diversity does or can do some other bad things - like undermine social solidarity and trust. Like the resource curse, I suspect cultural diversity can be pretty good all round...

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One word would be OK too - Tragedy. HT Lord Turner (again).

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Credit derivatives “enhance the transparency of the markets’ collective view of credit risks.. [and thus]… provide valuable information about broad credit conditions and increasingly set the marginal rice of credit. Therefore, such activity improves market discipline” “There i...

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Julia Gillard's tactic of targetting Tony Abbott's refusal of an offer to join her trip to Afghanistan was certainly a bit tacky , but it pales into insignificance beside the cynical efforts of Abbott and his team to extract maximum partisan advantage from the Afghan engagemen...

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When you're regulated, like mortgage brokers are, regulators sit around thinking what it would be good for you to do. What could be better than to get you to do 'professional development'? Wasn't that one of the reasons you got regulated in the first place? Because you weren't...

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I'm afraid I don't have time to explain this in any detail. But Hegel is perhaps my favourite philosopher. I worked out I'd like to know more about Hegel when so many of the people who interested me seemed to somehow go back to Hegel. R.G. Collingwood is a good example, but lo...

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I recently attended the David Solomon Lecture in Brisbane as part of Right to Information Day. David Solomon designed the freedom of information architecture of Qld and Anna Bligh asked him to do it and more or less implemented what he recommended. So good on her. He is a Good...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHlN21ebeak

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I'm seriously conflicted by the debate over Labor's National Broadband Network. On one hand, the future of CDU's online Bachelor of Laws programs, whose creation and development I oversee, is heavily dependent on the availability of almost universal truly fast broadband within...

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https://youtu.be/tUiUVfqFOhw A couple of months ago I caught up for lunch with Peter Dawkins whom I've known since my time at the BCA - which is to say since 1997 when he was running the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research. He's now head of the Dept of...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh0jOiz7pXk Joan Sutherland has passed on. Inevitably, obituarians are taking the opportunity to contend that she was the greatest soprano, or even the greatest singer, of the post war period, or even of the 20th Century. Others are content just...

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