Club Troppo

The other day I was describing my honours research to someone (namely James Farrell), which started me churning some of the frustrations I have had with the empirical institutional literature of the past 10 years and I stumbled upon another issue I hadn't considered before - i...

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I've often mused at the paradoxical fact that we buy insurance to reduce risk and then gamble to increase it. Which led me to wonder how one could harness the gambling instinct to try to make the lives of those who like going to casinos better rather than worse. I don't have a...

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Thank you Nicholas for a generous introduction, not to mention the gift of an opportunity to pontificate. And hello Troppodillarians. Formally. Nicholas's "formidably well read" comment in his intro was a bit OTT, replies to blog posts being an opportunity to make a great deal...

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I'd like to introduce Julia Thornton to Troppodillians. IJulia is involved in the Accountability Roundtable has been dropping in to Troppo for a while now and judging by threads like these is formidably well read in a range of areas. Now speaking as one of the chief bloviators...

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Since I heard of it, I've been fascinated by an idea that William Hazlitt wrote up to prosecute his case for the "natural disinterestedness of the human mind". From an early age and then until his death Hazlitt fancied himself as a philosopher even though it wasn't where he ma...

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This story on slashdot is an excellent example of how debauched intellectual property is as a means of stimulating research, development and innovation: As we discussed on Tuesday , Andre Geim won this year's Nobel prize in physics for graphene , but he never patented it. In a...

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In a recent post I noted the massive investments that are going into moving the servers of traders for hedge funds and such like as physically close as possible to exchanges so as to get a few milliseconds ahead of their competitors. I proposed this solution Buyers and sellers...

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The Monkey Cage , via Mark Thoma Does Inequality Make People More Conservative? Yes, according to some new research (pdf) from Nathan Kelly and Peter Enns . They rely on a a yearly measure of “policy mood” from 1952-2006. This is an omnibus summary of the public’s ideological...

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A while back I was rung up and interviewed by a student doing a thesis on Government 2.0. She asked lots of good questions and they brought out in me a bunch of things I've been thinking about regarding Government 2.0. Since she sent me a transcript, I thought it may be useful...

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Some readers will be familiar with a famous refrain from the Tea Party "Keep your Government hands of my Medicare payments". Anyway, I liked this property newsletter which complained that negative gearing really wasn't what it used to be: It’s been all bad news for property in...

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Next week the Mont Pelerin Society has a General Meeting in Sydney (Australia). Speakers will address a range of topics under the general theme of The 21st Century Liberal Enlightenment. I appreciate that there is a high level of scepticism regarding the MPS on this site howev...

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Lang, Kevin. 2010. "Measurement Matters: Perspectives on Education Policy from an Economist and School Board Member." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 24(3): 167–82. DOI:10.1257/jep.24.3.167 Abstract One of the potential strengths of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act enacte...

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Web 2.0 is a great thing not least because we no longer have to rely on journalists for our reading about contemporary events. Particularly in the area of commentary, why read a journo when you can read a Nobel Prize winner in their field. This sentiment finds its apotheosis i...

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Here's a review essay I worked on in early 2009 which was published in the monthly . I've reproduced the review as filed rather than as printed as The Monthly needed to prune it back for reasons of space. The easiest way of doing so was to get rid of a great quote from Wolf, w...

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Envy and Altruism in Children Date: 2010-09-17 By: Kirsten Häger (School of Economics and Business Administration, Friedrich Schiller University Jena) URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2010-063&r=exp Envy and altruism have been studied extensively in adults. Here, w...

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I put off buying an iPad. It was cheap (good) but I was wary of the iPhone software. I expected some decent clones out in a few months of the Apple's launch but got sick of waiting. It's roughly what I expected. Nice, natty and with some stupid things, like the absence of a US...

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Black to play C Lolli vs D Ercole Del Rio 18. ...? See game for solution. about our puzzles OK, so it's not hard to work out the answer, but it's cute, and it happened in Modena in 1755. Before Adam Smith finished The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759 there was, obviously eno...

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Yes folks as part of our relentless drive to leverage our world class infrastructure and skills to bring our readers to their personal delight point - and beyond, Subho Banerjee of PM&C emailed me (amongst others to tell me of the opportunities below). He assured me that anyon...

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Vince Cable, Secretary for Business, UK. Liberal Democrat. “On banks, I make no apology for attacking spivs and gamblers who did more harm to the British economy than Bob Crow could achieve in his wildest Trotskyite fantasies, while paying themselves outrageous bonuses underwr...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SBL6dgBBak

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