Club Troppo

For the third year running, On Line Opinion and Club Troppo are collaborating to collect an anthology of Australian blog posts from the previous year. The first handful have now been published at OLO ; by the end of the month the collection will grow to about forty articles. F...

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HT 3 Quarks In The Know: Do You Remember Life Before The Segway?

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IPART is the independent economic regulator for NSW. It oversees regulation and conducts pricing reviews in industries such as electricity, gas, water,taxis and public transport. IPART recently completed a review of pricing for RailCorps rail pricing provided under the CityRai...

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In affluent societies, consumption is about creating identity rather than meeting human needs, argues Clive Hamilton. And to reinforce the point, he invites us to " consider the semiotics of the potato today ". According to Hamilton, today's shoppers can choose from 15 varieti...

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Paul Krugman points to a discussion on the prospects of the kind of financial meltdown (pdf) we've just had at Jackson Hole in which, most of the economists were in fawning agreement with Saint Alan Greenspan. As Krugman says "Larry Summers, Im sorry to say, comes off particul...

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HT Kathy G. Charles Bingley is renting a house in Hertfordshire! Mrs. Bennet became a fan of Charles Bingley . Kitty Bennet can't stop coughing!!! Charles Bingley is now friends with Mr. Bennet and Sir William Lucas . 11 of your friends are attending Assembly at Meryton . Fitz...

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Nice to see some ideas I proposed a good while ago getting a bit more of an airing , namely governments running open market operations in assets other than their own bonds (pdf) in the process of managing the economy. I suggested that governments should purchase equities on a...

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Tim Blair reports on Yvonne Ridley the British journalist who converted to Islam after being kidnapped by the Taliban who has won a case for unfair dismissal against the Islam News Channel. Earlier in the year she won nearly £14,000 in damages after winning a four-year unfair...

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The IMF states the obvious (pdf) - even if we've not yet fully taken it on board. First, and quite simply, governments should make sure that existing programs are not cut for lack of resources. In particular, central governments or sub-national governments that are facing bala...

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Although people endlessly ask for predictions, they rarely really want the answers. It was only late too late in life that I realised that when people said, We really want you to challenge our ideas, they mostly did not. They wanted instead to be congratulated on their wisdom....

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After uncomplainingly sitting through two episodes of Brideshead Revisited earlier this evening (even, I confess, with a degree of appreciation I didn't feel on first viewing 25 years ago), the prospect of backing up for Mansfield Park was a bridge too far, despite the lusciou...

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Time for a bit of economic navel gazing. What does the global financial crisis mean for the state of economics in the early part of the twenty first century? Pass? Conceded Pass? Fail? Well at the end of 2008, for all the talk of the search for stability from economists we sti...

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I feel quite angry with Pope Benedict message that "saving homosexual or transsexual behaviour was as important as protecting the enviornment" and that "God's creation was about protecting man from himself". Even some of my own grand children, who are devoted catholics, feel t...

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Nostalgia. It just gets better with age .

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Well, even reading against the grain of MSM reporting , the Archbishop of Canterbury seems to be throwing caution and Godwin's Law to the winds auditioning for the role of turkey this Christmas. Dr Rowan Williams risks causing a new controversy by inviting a comparison between...

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I've previously written - at least a couple of times - so I was interested to see this post from Greg Mankiw who sent a request from a reader seeking advice on good international development charities to development economist Michael Kremer. The strongest candidate in his lett...

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From 3Quarksdaily for which I think Ingolf for telling us about, a great article on Obama which in one way is far from starry eyed about him and his political methods, but ends in what can only be called a fantasy on the theme that the presidency is just a stepping stone to bi...

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In the days before the Americans turned him into a cuddly economic stimulus package, Santa led a much more exciting life. Today he lets even the naughtiest children sit on his lap and demand Nintendos, ipods and mobile phones. He listens politely and promises to do what he can...

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No real surprises here! (pdf) Abstract: Cross-culturally, male economic power is directly related to reproductive success. Displays of wealth and social status are an important part of human male mating effort. The degree of male financial consumption may be related to varianc...

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Guest postlet by Troppodillian Paul Hobson. This week news of the death of an Australian serving with the British forces in Afghanistan came as Kevin Rudd visited Australian troops. As Britain prepares to withdraw its troops from Iraq, Simon Jenkins asked in the Guardian why a...

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