Club Troppo

Via the Tele : A FRIDGE, underwear and a Darth Vader voice distorter were some of the items bought by Darwin's lord mayor using stolen council funds, a court was told today. Darwin's Lord Mayor Peter Adamson, 46, is facing four charges, including stealing, obtaining property b...

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Robert Solow is perhaps the funniest economist I know producing the marvellous passage quoted here on ideological orientations within economics. As well as being funny, he's super smart and low key sensible - a doubly rare combination. Here's his review of the McCraw biography...

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1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S. 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad Well, the news in this issue of Missing Link is that News Ltd appears to have played lots of people for suckers. First, there was the story that some of the proposed cit...

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When a generation of activists, writers and artists rallies around slogans like " never trust anyone over 30 " and " hope I die before I get old " a book like Mark Davis ' gangland is almost inevitable. But Davis always knew that generationalism was a cheap shot -- a way of gr...

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In the age of the network computer, it seems crazy for school kids to be lugging round heavy backpacks. Backpacks are much better for the health of their backs than the big canvas/vinyl sports bags that we used in our days - which may have played some role in the scoliosis in...

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Mark Davis is not a happy man. I bought his book Gangland a while back - turns out to be ten years ago - and it seemed quite interesting, and perhaps on a worthy theme. But it was strangely dissatisfying nevertheless. Now a piece in the Saturday mags edited from Davis's Overla...

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Via MeFi . This gave me a good laugh, someone is trying to describe Australian politics to an American audience: It's all perfectly simple. Australia's ruling conservative party is called the Liberal Party. The opposing, allegedly more liberal party is called the Labor Party (...

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There've been a few departures today but amongst them is Paul Wolfowitz . I often wonder why righties think that post modernity is some conspiracy of the left. Well I don't really - I guess it's because so many of the philosophers and cultural commentators who are regarded as...

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Jon Kudelka envisages Howard as Fred Flintstone and Bill Heffernan as Dino. Only trouble is that both look much too cute and loveable. Is Jon running out of inspiration? 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad...

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Australia has had a very successful economic decade with declining unemployment, low inflation and fairly strong economic growth. Are Howard and Costello right to argue that it was mostly the Governments doing and in particular that it reflected some hard political decisions s...

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Well bugger me. If Andrew Bolt in todays Herald Sun isnt having a good old whinge about the blatant bias of the recent ABC series Bastard Boys . Whod a thought it hey? The bias unveiled by Mr. Bolt includes inadequate mentions of the nick, inadequate representation of bludging...

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For anyone who's interested, McCraw's bio of Schumpeter will be the main item for your delectation on LNL tonight. Here's a review I've not read yet. 'Prophet of Innovation: Joseph A Schumpeter and Creative Destruction': Phillip talks to Harvard Business historian Thomas McCra...

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Well I keep promising to explain the neurological foundations of homo dialecticus in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments but then there keep being things that the previous post requires as a follow up. A couple of posts ago in this series I discussed feedback within the fi...

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A "dozen or so pages of ignorance and silliness". That's how Andrew Norton describes Christine Wallace's recent article for the Griffith Review -- 'Libertarian nation by stealth'. Wallace's major offence is to confuse Robert Bork's moralistic conservatism with libertarianism....

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If you want to impress an economist, tell him you've got this list of people to support what you want. Kenneth J. Arrow, Robert Forsythe, Michael Gorham, Robert Hahn, Robin Hanson, Daniel Kahneman, John O. Ledyard, Saul Levmore, Robert Litan, Paul Milgrom, Forrest D. Nelson, G...

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Mark at Stoushnet reflects on Heavy Kevy's alleged secret musings about re-introduing some form of AWA 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. The Yartz 3. Life and Other Serious Stuff 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad It's a rude shock returning to editing Missing Link, despite Helen...

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I'm reading an interesting book at the moment called He'll be right OK . It's by a NZ woman who has been working with men in prison for twenty odd years. She got caught up in something called "The Good Man Project" run by some NZ boys only schools and it's a memoire of her tim...

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Here's a nice illustration of the (hidden) costs of red tape. I've just signed up to let everyone know that I'm happy if they use bits of me for better purposes than feeding maggots if I'm dead. The letter I received with my card says that the details of my decision "are prote...

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IANAE but in June last year there was a spate of discussion over productivity and real wages having a one to one correlation. Nicholas Gruen wrote in a comment to his article Economic Nonsense : But in the long run, you expect to see income trending towards productivity. Peopl...

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As a fan of Robert Manne, I've been a bit disappointed in his output of late. But he's usually invigorated by a newly worthy cause and in this case it's academic freedom from the excesses of the culture wars .

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