Club Troppo

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The media are supposed to be finding out and telling us what is going on. They don't do that of course. They spend most of their time reporting on various lamely constructed dramas. The main meta-narrative is racecalling the parties or what I call pub-talk. Is Kevin or Malcolm...

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Yesterday Nicholas Gruen asked : What single book is the best introduction to your field your field for lay people? In the field of welfare reform I'd recommend Thomas Fowle's 1898 book The Poor Law . Progress comes slowly in social policy. Much of what passes for innovation i...

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From Sydney Morning Herald (I'm sure they won't mind) The strict political neutrality of Australia's Governor-General is a crucially important democratic principle, but one whose mention usually elicits a combination of boredom and baffled incomprehension from most people. It'...

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"The developing world, especially China, ran huge trade surpluses assisted by an overvalued currency." Ehem - try 'undervalued currency'. Malcolm Turnbull on the causes of the crisis. However perhaps it was a misprint. Anyway I just discovered this - no doubt others have been...

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Across Latin America, governments are turning to conditional cash transfers to overcome poverty and inequality. In a recent post, Andrew Leigh asks whether we should trial the approach in Australia. Conditional cash transfer programs attack poverty in two ways. Like income sup...

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Michael Neilsen links to a list of answers to this question: What single book is the best introduction to your field or specialization within your field for laypeople? He says it's a gold mine. Perhaps it is. On economics it has just one link - to Henry Hazlitt's Economics in...

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News that South Australian Premier Mike Rann is contemplating a High Court challenge to the federal Murray-Darling water deal is good news for constitutional lawyers, because it would result in the resolution of a question raised before Federation but never litigated. Such a c...

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Well the previous puzzle seems to have intrigued a few people. This one is dead difficult (for people of fair average stupidity such as myself anyway). Black plays two important moves. The first is the one I guessed. The second I wouldn't have guessed in a million years, but o...

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I was at a function yesterday with a bunch of economists - amongst some other people - and was annoyed to note that there wasn't much push-back against the casual assumption that the cash handouts had not worked - that people had just saved the money they were given. It all se...

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Keating: a chance to remake the global financial system Global financial confidence, once destroyed, requires myr­iad positive events and a heavy convergence of them to counter ambient pessimism and gloom. The recent series of government packages, notwithstanding their scale a...

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This one features gratuitous swearing so I'm linking to it rather than posting directly on Troppo. Don't want to lower the tone around here too much. Probably not safe for work.

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The monthly RePec rankings for Australia are in again. Always an exiting moment for the professional economists in Australia to see whether their latest publications have already been spotted by the automatic search routines, whether they have been cited as often as they deser...

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While it's very unedifying when people are stirred up, I enjoy the odd 'meta' discussion, or at least thinking about what the right principles are for discussion in the blogosphere. So I was intrigued to see them eloquently expounded in Crikey today - by virtue of the publicat...

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Treasury always supports foreign investments. It believes resources should flow to wherever they earn the best return. It says overseas investment is especially important for Australia because we depend on foreigners to fund our capital expansion. And in these financially stra...

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By yearend, investors of all stripes were bloodied and confused, much as if they were small birds that had strayed into a badminton game. -- Warren Buffett

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White to play and win. A very natty move.

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