Club Troppo

Tory leader David Cameron says he's " fighting this election for the great ignored ": Young, old, rich, poor, black, white, gay, straight. They start our businesses, operate our factories, teach our children, clean our streets, grow our food, keep us safe. They work hard, pay...

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News stories about the current population debate tend to be prefaced with the factoid that 'on current trends Australia's population will reach 35 million in 2050'. We are supposed to find this startling, either because we've only just adjusted to the idea of our millions bein...

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I'm not very old at all, but I'm old enough to have caught the tail end of a era in playground equipment design. This period was typified by danger. Metal slippery dips that one could cook an egg (or buttocks) on and which would hurl you far into the grass or merry go rounds t...

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From the NYT where you'll find other excellent reviews: If you’re old enough to remember the original 128K Macintosh, underpowered, not expandable, and soon-to-be obsolete, you know that the iPad doesn’t need to be perfect to be the harbinger of a revolution. If the iPhone did...

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From today's Crikey: Kevin, will that be two terms, or four? The government has got its eye in, and been blooded through the odd embarrassment. It needs to ask itself whether it wants to be a two term government? Of course it does. But what about becoming a four term governmen...

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An interesting post by Clay Shirky on the collapse of complex business models. This points to an issue which jumps out at me when I read the Moran Review on the Public Service. How much complexity, how much subtlety, how much productivity is it reasonable to expect a large cen...

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My last post on the UK and the third way began with this sentence. What do you do if you’re a ‘third wayer’ and things don’t seem to be turning out all that flatteringly for your vision? You just keep talking in pretty much the same way, slap a coat of Web 2.0 paint on the vis...

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Evelyn De Morgan, The Worship of Mammon (1909) An embarrassingly bad story on PM about economics versus Christianity spoiled my drive home on Good Friday. I suppose they need to present something about religion at Easter, but can't they do better than this? The hook for the st...

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What will Der Spiegel's German readers make of Kevin Rudd's dispute with comedian Robin Williams? In an interview with David Letterman Williams jokingly said that Australians were "basically English rednecks". And in a later radio interview the PM hit back ( video ). But the G...

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Lets imagine someone facing the end of a working career. They've built up a large jam jar of money. With these savings they can buy the goods and services they need/desire despite no longer producing anything to exchange in the market for them. Now imagine a society with a bul...

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What do you do if you’re a ‘third wayer’ and things don’t seem to be turning out all that flatteringly for your vision? You just keep talking in pretty much the same way, slap a coat of Web 2.0 paint on the vision and press on. Oh well, none of us that I know of are that cleve...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="464"] Not the ABC's logo, but a very nice looking image whatever it is![/caption] I think this is the first post on Troppo that's 'hoisted from archives' which is to say it's an earlier post that I'm reposting. It was done as preparation...

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Last year I asked what broader social purpose is served by schools competing for position on NAPLAN league tables . I emphasised both the meaninglessnesss of the information (reiterated recently by David Hardie in Crikey ) and the lack of any aggregate benefit from inducing fa...

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People who've read this blog for a few years may be familiar with my take on the regulation of mortgage brokers. I'm in favour of simple regulation which puts front and centre the fact that brokers should be thought of in the same way as fridge salespeople in a department stor...

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From Mark Thoma's blog: David Frum and the Closing of the Conservative Mind, by Bruce Bartlett : As some readers of this blog may know, I was fired by a right wing think tank Called the National Center for Policy Analysis in 2005 for writing a book critical of George W. Bush's...

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One of the things I like about Journey to the West (one of the four great Chinese classics, but better known here as the basis for Monkey Magic) is the way it delves into almost every conceivable corner of Chinese cosmology. Characters venture to the courts of dragon kings, to...

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This column makes me think of the craziness of the South - which while building a slave based economy also built a terrorist society in which people got bumped off for having the wrong political views, a society that was crazy in its refusal to compromise - all the North was s...

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(Originally published in the business pages of the Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald, 24th March 2010) When I first began writing about the global economy, more than twenty-five years ago, what would be considered a reasonably comprehensive coverage for an Australian aud...

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One of the great benefits of Web 2.0 is the way in which it facilitates collaboration and information exchange in all manner of ways. And one of the upshots of this is that it improves the market for reputation. It does so by speeding up the process itself - so people who have...

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HT: Peter Martin

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