Club Troppo

In the first post of this series I described recent work in empirical institutional economics and why I thought the work pursued a virtuous end but was compromised by the use of poor institutional measures. Today I will introduce a specific paper of this type that had drawn my...

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The Atlantic Monthly writes up Facebook's happiness index - they call it Gross National Happiness, but it's not - it's net of unhappiness - at least as measured. I'm a sceptic as to what conclusions one can draw from this, but one can see that killing some pirates rates as the...

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"I expected it to taste greasy and salty;" writes Clay Risen , "instead it was dry and smoky, with a hint of meat." Across America cocktail bars are serving up bourbon cocktails flavoured with bacon . In the Atlantic Risen explains the process: First, you fry up several thick...

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"Eat our weiners and gorge", says the sign on this Los Angeles fast food joint. Every time I look at this photo I wonder what that means. Is it an invitation to overeat? Is gorge the name of some American fast food delicacy? I took this photo in early 1987. From memory, it was...

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Reading this paper (abstract below the fold) led me to think of something which no-doubt others have suggested before. We would probably be able to get more money donated to charity by getting the tax office to establish authorised RSS feeds to verify the amount of money that...

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In 1997 I went out and bought a Sharp ultra light laptop. A lovely thing it was too. I still have it. It has a 6 gig hard disc and though that would seriously cramp my style if I were to use it as a main computer now, it would still be a great second machine, but I can't jigge...

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After you've checked them out and tried to work out whose side you'd rather be on, click the diagrams to see how these guys got into these positions and what they did with them. Amazing games.

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Remember when one of Peter Costello's killer arguments for replacing the GST with a WST was that Swaziland had a wholesale sales tax (WST)? As one of the minority of economists who opposed the GST but thought a broad based consumption tax was a good idea, I argued that a multi...

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How can we quantify culture? This sounds ridiculous. It sounds like a quixotic intellectual conceit. But I think the idea is important to economics because of the way we are now using the concept of institutions to explain social and economic phenomena. The fact that instituti...

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Richard Green is an honours graduate from Newcastle who is also an interesting and thoughtful fellow. He is eager for an audience for his work. So I've upped his permissions from 'subscriber' to 'author' so expect some posts from him in the early new year.

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I'm going to try to write some posts about public goods as part of writing something about the new age of public goods. As readers to this blog will know, I've got a bit of a thing about public goods, and most recently argued that Web 2.0 is the product of ' emergent public go...

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A bit of holiday trivia for you. I came upon a form of tourism I didn't quite believe. "Travelling Gentlemen" accompanied their countrymen to the Crimean War, and set up out of cannon range from the battlefields with their wives and hounds and had a jolly good time of it. Thei...

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Interesting stuff methinks: In Growing up in a Recession: Beliefs and the Macroeconomy (NBER Working Paper No. 15321), co-authors Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo substantiate the importance of the historical economic environment in shaping economic attitudes, affecting...

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The lads from the BBC radio comedy The Now Show, distill the essence of Copenhagen. The English Blog has the transcript

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I've been watching the Regulatory Responsibility Bill for some time. "What is the Regulatory Responsibility Bill?" I hear you cry. Well it's one of the last gasps of the ideological fervour that grips our antipodean cousins across the trench in New Zealand. As I observed in a...

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I'm dreadful at Christmas Cards. I don't think much of signing hundreds and having them sent off by a secretary, so if I do write them I try to write a bit on them, otherwise I can't see the point. I'm dead late this year again - though with a bit of an excuse - and the cards...

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[caption id="attachment_34760" align="alignright" width="415"] Julie Hempenstall from Bendigo[/caption] Here's today's column in the SMH which was slightly edited back from the original. Who is Julie Hempenstall? She lives in Bendigo and she likes reading Australia's historic...

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This is a survey of the treatment of selected themes in the famous textbook from the first edition in 1948 to the last in 1995. The sales figures: Edition, Year, Author(s,) Sales 1, 1948, Samuelson, 121,453 2, 1951, Samuelson, 137,256 3, 1955, Samuelson, 191,706 4, 1958, Samue...

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Jumping the shark Untill Tuesday night Ian Plimer was the respectable face of climate scepticism in Australia. Plimer looks the part of the distinguished professor, and as a geologist gives the impression of understanding the long run forces affecting the earth's climate, as o...

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