Club Troppo

In reading for Best Blog Posts 07 there are several first rate posts on the aboriginal intervention. And one of them linked to this fascinating piece by one of our great journalists - Jack Waterford - of a more clearly well motivated exercise in the mid to late 70s. Then the i...

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Christopher Hitchens has some strange views. But it's not hard to see why he gets published. Triffic writing - as for example in this post on Robert Hughes.

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To your right is a graph of carbon emissions - megatons of C02 equivalent per annum. We'll get to them in a sec. As Dani Rodrik observes , when a WTO dispute resolution procedure requires the US to do something it doesn't want to do, guess what it does? It actually does it! So...

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Via Andrew Leigh's blog I came upon Give Well which attempts to rank charities in terms of their effectivenss. Damn good thing too. I have a question to any Troppodillians who might know which is this "what has been done, if anything, to 'internationalise' our capacity to dona...

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By Aaron Edlin Here . In the best of all worlds, we would all benefit from the so-called network effects that result from most people using the same software: everyone could easily communicate with each other and teach each other how to use the software efficiently. Unfortunat...

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HT - Peter Martin.

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Below the fold is the final part of the series on the CIS's recent paper on the Australian and New Zealand economies. I decided to write the whole thing out as an integrated whole and it has now been posted on Australian Policy Online . There's been a fair bit of rewriting and...

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Being a bit of a columnist, I like a good column. I think the best column I've done was on greenhouse. I've just read the best column I've read this year, and it's on greenhouse. By a master of the column - Martin Wolf. Go read it - I've reproduced it below the fold for you. I...

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There are 100,000 times as many stars in the universe as sounds and words ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived. This is the tenth of ten big facts about the universe. See how many you know here .

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Yesterday evening was one of those nights that remind Jen and I why we still live in Darwin despite its many drawbacks. The warm wet breeze blowing as the sun set over the harbour, silhouetting a huge gas tanker leaving for Japan, sitting under the palm trees at the Ski Club l...

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Can't say I've ever been remotely tempted to get involved with "social networking" sites like MySpace or Facebook. It's probably something to do with being fundamentally anti-social, sometimes even bordering on misanthropic. But it's also an instinctive aesthetic aversion; it...

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Below the fold is my column on Bali and greenhouse from today's Australian . AS representatives of the world's peoples wrestled in Bali with the greatest challenge to human co-operation we have ever known, different ideas of what was fair and what wasn't threatened to tear the...

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While absent-mindedly sauntering home the other night from a little Melbourne city gathering , I was shaken from my reverie by a fellow who adopted a strange stance as I approached. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that he had lifted one leg from the sidewalk, and swung i...

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Dani Rodrik has a post on the differences between himself and Joe Stiglitz on development. With appropriate genuflection to the vastly greater knowledge and intelligence of both men, I agree with him and disagree with JS on all four points - which are over the fold. To caricat...

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Well blow me down this is true. From this website director general of the World Trade Organization, Pascal Lamy is happy to have himself described as a Marxist. Might not be the most low key way to get his message across. Anyway, if he hadn't described himself as a Marxist, it...

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The story so far : The CIS publishes a paper discussing the deviation between New Zealand's and Australia's economic performance, and ends up blaming the usual suspects. Your correspondent wonders whether the paper could be improved. Things get interesting when the paper cites...

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Fiona Campbell For the sake of completeness, here's a brief and belated reaction to Juditha Triumphans , which I previewed last week. The production surpassed even my very high expectations. As commenter John Greenfield noted, the sets were not lavish, but I thought the use of...

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The National Museum of Australia has launched its annual Behind The Lines exhibition, featuring the work of the country's top editorial cartoonists. (I didn't submit anything this year so I'm not in it.) This year's review covers everything from the NT Intervention to Kevin 07...

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Here's poor Odysseus being tempted by the sirens. I wouldn't mind being so tempted - but there you go - you can't give in. He made sure he couldn't give in by getting his crew to tie him into the mast - they then blocked their ears with wax. No reference to Kevin Rudd was inte...

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Like the Wallabies and the All Blacks, Australians and New Zealanders argue about who's economy is doing better and why. Well we're not arguing about the first of those questions any more. Coming from a very similar standard of living in the 1970s, both countries embarked on w...

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