Club Troppo

I'll be giving a seminar to the CIS tomorrow on Hayek and regulation. Somewhat to my surprise, The Australian asked me for an op ed, but then the editor got squeezed for space. As she wanted to run it on the day I gave the paper it got quite chopped about , though I hope the m...

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For better or worse, here are my answers to the two compulsory questions for those wishing to make it to the summit. No surprises for regular Troppo readers - I've learned the art of repetition. But they could have had any number of other ideas. A few ideas promised for Troppo...

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Swan Lake , so second hand, on TV, in Darwin, yet even still, there are tears rolling down my face as the final act resonates. From beginning to end this ballet is a grand romantic gesture reconfigured with Murphy's grand contemporary choreography. This interpretation dips its...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Hmm. Can we engineer a feminism snark thread two days in a row, thereby consolidating ML's tit...

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I did not apply to participate in the 20/20 summit but I did submit a 500 word piece on employment policy. Although Club Troppo readers would have heard my views before, the submission is set out below. I also had an interesting disagreement with The Australian editorial write...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian This is an entry in a contest to match new products with old advertising visuals. Check out al...

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Ignominious isn't it? You get invited to the 2020 Summit as one of the (cough) 'best and brightest' and they ask you just a few questions, and the leave the hardest till last. What have you been wrong about in the last 10 years? I could say that I was wrong in expecting that m...

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Here is a book review that has recently been published in Policy Magazine . Book Review: Full disclosure: the Promise and Perils of Transparency, Cambridge University Press, New York. By Fung, Archon, Graham, Mary and Weil, David, 2007. Over seventy years ago Friedrich Hayek p...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Saint just doesn't see the funny side of this unofficially sanctioned Toyota ad : In as much a...

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What shape is the income distribution of Andrew Leigh's dreams? Even he doesn't know. "I don’t have a strong sense of what the right level of inequality is", he writes . "Indeed, I'm not even sure I have the right intellectual framework for answering the question." The questio...

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BBC TV screened a debate yesterday on the future of old and new media. Panellists included Google founder Sergey Brin and Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein. I'll certainly be watching when the streaming video becomes available in the next day or two. It's a popular topic int...

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In writing this article , it occured to me that one way to describe my own approach to economics is the search for the $100 bill on the pavement. That is, if you can find ways of bringing new ideas into some well developed framework (well new-ish ideas or just ideas that are c...

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One of the best investments my wife and I ever made was $1,000 for a midwife for the delivery of our second child. For this we got a stream of advice and a few visits before the delivery and then she was with us throughout the delivery. The woman in question had been head nurs...

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Today's Herald reports that the NSW Treasury has done its own estimates of the costs of achieving various targets for carbon emissions. The NSW Treasurer, Michael Costa, said it would cost $430 billion to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 80 per cent as outlined by Ross...

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A truly lovely space non? As I've been thinking about all the exigencies of making 'continuous improvement' a feature of our regulatory culture and institutions, I read an intriguing and, in such circumstances inspiring essay by Glyn Davis (pdf), cleverly titled "A city of two...

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In all the relevant senses of the word. I've not said anything about the Summit here mainly because I don't think there's much to say about it until we see more of what it does and doesn't achieve. And even if it isn't a great success I can't see how it will be a big failure....

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Subject to my own reservations outlined in the introduction to Kevin's first guest post, here's his second. Improving the Health Industry Market Place by Kevin Cox The general theme in this set of blogs is how to overcome market failures or to create markets with tagged money...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Brendan Nelson asks: " What is the suffering of the people who are evicted by banks, compared...

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I was delighted to hear Radio Eye's bio on the late and thoroughly great Campbell McComas . I first heard him in his prototypical role as the Cambridge Criminal Lawyer Granville Williams. A bootleg tape of a marvellous lecture he gave impersonating this fictitious person - the...

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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian To keep his hand in while he waits for the next election to bring on another season of bungled...

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