Club Troppo

Things have been a little dull over the holiday period. So dull, in fact, that I've been picking through my receptionist's collection of novels. First there was that book everyone's been chattering about recently -- Ian McEwan's Atonement . The second book in her pile was Jona...

Continue reading →

Guy Rundle's op edlets in Crikey! often annoy me - they're too bombastic and self assured for my taste, though perhaps the extreme limitations of the genre - the shortness of the articles - is part of the explanation. In any event, I thought this essay from Arena was terrific...

Continue reading →

The receptionist's fingers paused over the keyboard. The heat was making it difficult to think and the din of hundreds of amorous black cicadas wasn't helping. She wanted to show Mr Farrell how completely he'd misunderstood Ian McEwan's novel , but at the same time she didn't...

Continue reading →

One of the clichés of industry policy from the late 1970s on is that inward orientation is to be avoided - outward or export oriented policy is the go. There are lots of good reasons for this. We didn't see those reasons and then failed to notice the empirical evidence that wa...

Continue reading →

As I took my seat to watch Atonement last night, I was thinking that I should have read the book first, and the feeling was even stronger by the time I walked out. It was beautifully filmed, and mostly very well acted. The chemistry between Keira Knightly and James McAvoy was...

Continue reading →

I heard Debra Dickerson for the first time on a summer replay of a Counterpoint program I'd not heard during the year. She wrote a book published in 2004 or thereabouts entitled The end of blackness. I wondered if Noel Pearson might have forgotten to acknowledge her in an essa...

Continue reading →

My friend George has been traveling in East Africa since October, starting in Ethiopia. He happened to be in Kenya for the elections, and his first-hand account of that fiasco, which he emailed to a few friends, deserves a wider audience. He wrote some illuminating notes on Et...

Continue reading →

Find out if you want to by clicking through when the word appears in this rather fun review of Christopher Hitchens. Not that Christopher is either my cup of tea or especially interesting. But he is quite fun to watch - so long as you don't devote much time to it!

Continue reading →

Let's start by admiting that a black man being banned for three matches for calling a dark brown Australian man a monkey is pretty peculiar. Next will be Ricky Ponting being banned for calling an English player a pommy bastard. Couldn't John Howard, cricket tragic and implacab...

Continue reading →

From Dani Rodrik's weblog . . . . As I was reading a paper by Raghu Rajan, for which I am the discussant in the annual meetings of the American Economics Association, I realized how much I had moved away from this kind of literature. Raghu's paper is squarely in that "old" pol...

Continue reading →

Via Patrick's comment on an earlier thread, and thence from Tyler Cowen's recommendation of "one of the best hour-wasters you will get this year", I happened upon a credo which I reproduce below. It's available on this page though it's amongst other posts many of which are fan...

Continue reading →

I hereby announce 'Best Blog Posts of 2007', an anthology of writing from Australian independent blogs over the past year, which began appearing at On Line Opinion on 2 January. The selection and republication of the blog posts in this series is a collaboration between On Line...

Continue reading →

You wont get any deep insights from Ronnie . The autobiography of Ron Wood, the other Rolling Stones guitarist. What you will get is a stargazing jaunt through the best part of British Rock history. Youll also get plenty on the booze hes drunk, the coke hes used, and the women...

Continue reading →

From this site - courtesy of Krugman.

Continue reading →

I found this document in a filing cabinet at home on Christmas Day but Troppo was down. But I thought it was an interesting document to 'share' as Dr Phil would say.

Continue reading →

About fourteen months ago I wrote a post called 'An apology anyone' . As I recall there were lots of calls for public apologies from the latte sippers by the right in triumphal mode. I asked if anyone could point me to any - but no-one could, so perhaps I am imagining it. I ma...

Continue reading →

I've been having a look at the PC's recent draft Review of Australias Consumer Policy Framework which at least on the reading I've done has some good stuff in it. One thing, which must have been planned well before the change of government is that the report makes it clear how...

Continue reading →

Paul Krugman offers a spirited defence of his book against a review by the Economist . Then again when have you noticed anything from Paul Krugman that isn't spirited? The exchange is well worth checking out, indeed a bit of a 'must' for anyone thinking about inequality. For o...

Continue reading →

Next year, you really should consider volunteering to help out with BB08 - that is the Best Blogs for the year series that James Farrell is currently editing with the help of a few of us. There's some dross of course - which gets most of us grumpy! And then there are some marv...

Continue reading →

What are your views on compulsory voting? I think I'm in favour of it. I've always been surprised that right leaning parties don't try to get rid of it in Australia. I've always assumed that it's in their interests to have voluntary voting as I assume the left leaning parties...

Continue reading →