Club Troppo

Last year I wrote on this blog Meet Nikita McBride. Shes the daughter of friends of mine Ken McBryde and Stephanie Smith who are the co-founders of the wonderful architecture firm Innovarchi . Nikita has recently been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes type 1. In January 2009 sh...

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I'm usually a proud technology laggard, letting more intrepid people go ahead of me so they can help me out when I get round to the technology, letting systems get better sorted out and bug-fixed, and letting prices fall before I jump in. But, given how cheap they were - each...

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Tomorrow evening, as I've done on this date for the last two years, I'll put this sign on the front door: Trick-or-treaters: If you've come in a scary costume, please ring the bell. Otherwise, try again next year! It worked last year and the year before. In the preceding years...

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I've never been much of a fan of Lionel Robbins 1932 Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. It smacks of what I'd call 'authoritarian methodology' which had its sterile apotheosis in Popper's efforts to demark 'science' and 'non-science'. To cut a long story...

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One of the problems of mechanisms of 'regulation review' - for instance the requirement for new regulations to be accompanied by regulation impact analysis, is that this constraint is itself regulation - it's regulation of the regulators. An infinite regress beckons. I'm not a...

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In a post a few weeks back, I raised the question of what additional production factor one would have to include into the current production function framework in order to have a plausible story about the recent crisis. That post included a set of conditions any candidate woul...

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It's becoming increasingly clear that the only likely outcome of the current manoeuvrings over the Rudd government's Emissions Trading Scheme is that it will either be rejected by the Senate or so drastically watered down as to be almost entirely useless. If (like me) you acce...

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The decision to grant protection visas to all 42 Afghan asylum seekers from the SIEV36, the boat that exploded off Ashmore Reef on 16 April killing 5 people, may prove to be one of the biggest political and policy mistakes the Rudd government has made. Presumably they were all...

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A recent version of the Taylor rule specifies that the Federal interest rate target should have a threefold aim: (a) to curb inflation (b) to avoid excess unemployment and (c) stop prospective asset prices. With a rising Australian dollar (and with an under-utilised labour mar...

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My local council, Port Phillip is holding a competition for young people to name this dragon which has just been built in a playground. If you're any of the 0-17 kids reading this site you probably have some 'issues' but perhaps you can show it to your kids. If you get your en...

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Another one of those articles I'd like to read. I will in this case, but would be interested in others' thoughts on the contents either when I've read it or before. Looks interesting. Public Sector Employees: Risk Averse and Altruistic? Date: 2009-09 By: Buurman, Margaretha (E...

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I'd read this paper. Date: 2009-09-22 By: André De Palma (ENS Cachan - Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan - Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan, Department of Economics, Ecole Polytechnique - CNRS : UMR7176 - Polytechnique - X) Nathalie Picard (Department of Economics, Ecole Po...

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A few of my posts dotted about celebrate events like what seemed to be the truly contrite reaction of Allan McAlister on discovering how badly he'd handled the Nicky Winmar incident at Victoria Park all those years ago. This video is about a now famous event in which a truly e...

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Toby Huff in Max Weber and the Methodology of the Social Scienes (Transaction Books, 1984) suggested that the philosophy of science that Weber was reading read at the turn of the century was in better shape than the positivism that took off later under the inspiration of Mach,...

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The people on the Dunera were a clever lot. I keep finding new and clever things they got up to. Anyway in the latest Dunera newsletter (now powered at least as much by the second as the first generation) I saw this design. It was (I presume) a cover design for the Dunera Stat...

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(cross-posted with Core Economics) There has been much talk in the last 12 months about the relationship between macro-economic theory and explanations of the current recession. Krugman essentially dismissed most current macro theory as being delusional about the workings of m...

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His last five games - to win four and a half games out of five against super-grandmasters rated over 2,700, including beating the World No. 1 Topalov a queen down (OK that last bit wasn't true) is playing at a rating strength of 3143. A very amazing little 18 year old. Have a...

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Jeffrey Friedman has produced a special edition of Critical Review devoted to various perspectives on the crisis. Among the contributors are Friedman himself, Joe Stiglitz, Vernon Smith and Lawrence White All the abstracts are here . Friedman wrote a long lead article. ABSTRAC...

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Peter Martin tweets a reference to this blog post outlining Dan Pink's well documented argument that bonuses might be good for productivity for simple tasks, and that they're at best a double edged sword for complex tasks, where intrinsic motivation is more important, and bonu...

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