Club Troppo

Paul Krugman asked the New York Times if he could publish today's column on Troppo. We have of course licensed the content to the NYT. In fact, ironically, owing to an administrative oversight, the column appeared on the NYT website before it was hoisted here. Recessions are c...

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Professor Peter Drysdale of the ANU's East Asia Forum, veteran of Australia's foreign economic relations with the region, outlined the demise of Rudd to the readers of the Forum's weekly digest. It kind of helps to remind us how strange this would look to foreigners. Many of o...

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Are you tired of separating the recycling and having to put your underpants in the laundry basket? Are you sick of watching your wife's vampire shows on tv? Chrysler knows how you feel. Last year the struggling US auto company filed for bankruptcy protection and was forced int...

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I won't shed any tears for Kevin Rudd. He was an irritating smooth talker, incapable of commanding much personal affection. Julia Gillard seems a nicer person, conveys a deeper sense of commitment to social democratic values in contrast to Rudd's technocratic rhetoric, and is...

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Magnus Carlsen, 2813 Wang Yue, 2752 Boris Gelfand, 2741 Teimour Radjabov, 2740 Ruslan Ponomariov, 2733 Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu, 2672 Yes folks, he's on the rampage again. And this time there's a new toy - which has probably been available for quite some time, but it's the first...

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This week at work I was discussing the throw-in in soccer with a colleague (we work at night and we were watching the World Cup) when I had a memory. Growing up in Maitland through the 1990s, when I played soccer either as a junior or at school, the throw in was invariably des...

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The standard result in the econometric literature on social diversity is that it leads to lower levels of trust in the community and lower provision of public goods. The experiment below confirms the former result in the short run, but not in the long run. This conforms with m...

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I've just looked at the top four apps on Victoria's AppMyState comp - the winners were announced tonight - and they're marvellous. Really natty, fresh and (it seems well done, though I've not put them through any very rigorous testing.) What's happening here is something a lit...

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This is how you do it! From the Master. Courtesy of You Tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGTOGG4o_eU&NR=1

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In the 1960 s and 70s Palmolive ran a series of tv ads warning men that body odour could hurt their career prospects. "Don't wait to be told", said the jingle. And the reason was obvious -- it's awkward to talk to someone about how they smell . But body odour isn't the only as...

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HT Freakonomics blog .

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Australia vs Ghana: “Tactics? Tactics?...I thought they were a type of mint!”... So Ally Maclleod, manager of Scotland’s shambolic team in the 1978 World Cup, was reputed to have said. But let’s remember that that Scotand did give us Archie Gemmil’s lovely solo goal, and celeb...

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Thoughts on reading this psychologist's write up of the Gulf of Mexico disaster: A long time ago I stopped calling my Mum a Labor supporter and called her a Labor barracker. She's disdainful of my interest in football - a thoroughly trivial activity which is arresting for thos...

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In a memorable moment in the 1983 election Malcolm Fraser, suggested that if people got a Labor Government they’d have to keep their savings under their bed. Bob Hawke responded that the commies were already under the bed. Back then Hawke could tap into a collective consciousn...

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Via LP we have a piece by Laura Tingle in the AFR on Tuesday which describes efforts to create a "consumption based" rather than "production based" ETS. I held off commenting until I read the piece itself, but my confusion is still here. Take this paragraph. Charging people fo...

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Over a third of British men with no qualifications are economically inactive -- neither working nor looking for work. Even those with basic qualifications of ( NVQ level 1 and below ) have less than half this rate of inactivity. According to official statistics the major reaso...

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Yep, its getting yucky down there in the Gulf. From Nasa's Earth Observatory . On June 12, 2010, oil from the still-leaking Deepwater Horizon well was particularly visible across the northern Gulf of Mexico when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA...

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Australia's unemployment rate may be back to where it was in the late 1970s but the structure of our labour market and our society is very different. For example, in the late 1970s almost 70 per cent of men aged 25 to 34 were married and working full-time. Today it's less than...

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James Farrell has very kindly asked me to post my thoughts on the Australia vs Germany World Cup Finals tie to be played tomorrow morning. So far, for me, the tournament has got off to a relatively entertaining start. The opening game between South Africa and Mexico was a prom...

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