Club Troppo

Just to let Troppodillians know, watch out for the maiden post of of D. W. Griffiths, a raging moderate currently working in the public policy business.

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Comparing Australia with the rest of the developed world, we have a distribution of FINAL disposable incomes that is about average. Yet, measured the same way (i.e. using the GINI coefficient), inequality of MARKET incomes in Australia (the distribution of gross incomes before...

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Erwin Fabian was a friend of my father's from the time he came to Australia on the same refugee boat as Dad. He was a few years older than most of the younger ones. They were in their late teens. He was 25. He painted a fantastic portrait of Dad when he was in the camp which h...

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Lindsay Tanner says that Australians are anti-intellectual , but has anyone told the Daily Telegraph's Simon Benson ? Today he's casually quoting 19th century German philosophy : OBVIOUSLY, Peter Debnam hasn't read Nietzsche. If he had, he would know that while madness might b...

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( crossposted at sidelined ) I am almost too disappointed to write this. Frankly, what a waste of a game. I suggested before that the backline selection was illogical, and indeed two people who had never played together in the centres before turned out, against arguably the be...

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Another blogger was arrested in Egypt for being critical of the government ; Rami Siyam, who blogs under the name of Ayyoub, was detained along with three friends after leaving the house of a fellow blogger late at night. ... No reasons have been given for Mr Siyam's detention...

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Winners and winner-groupies were hugging themselves with delight and gay abandonment today, at the unbelievable news, that Australia's most famous news packaging and dissemination service, News Corporation , was first with the news, that News had been extremely successful at t...

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All those jokes about the Thorpedo's sexuality are just so tacky and predictable, n'est-ce pas? For my money the best take on the Thorpie retirement soap opera was from Skeletor over at Spin Starts Here : Apparently Kim Beazley has passed on his commiserations to the Tasmanian...

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Hayek enthusiasts were up in arms when Jeffrey Sachs wrote, "Austrian-born free-market economist Friedrich August von Hayek suggested in the 1940s that high taxation would be a 'road to serfdom,' a threat to freedom itself" ( pdf ). Hayek's supporters were quick to point out t...

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In Alexander's time the amphitheatre was a sign of Macedonian power. Especially for the new and conquered cities in modern-day Turkey. The amphitheatre combined the Macedonian dominance of technologies such as architecture, construction, science, art, culture and wealth. The R...

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According to a story in today's Herald, plagiarism is rife at universities . Harriet Alexander reports that It is difficult to establish a total number of plagiarism cases across all universities because collection methods vary. But a conservative estimate is 3336 cases betwee...

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Here's a review of mine of Fred Argy's excellent and neglected paper for the Australia Institute (pdf). Introduction What could offer more powerful advocacy against some iniquity than to show how it hurts us all not just its victims? This style of argument has been the stock i...

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Crikey alerts us to this story in the Daily Telegraph. BOB Carr has embarrassed his former State Government colleagues by racking up a new record of $438,683 for expenses billed by a retired premier. The huge cost to NSW taxpayers of keeping Mr Carr in his first year of retire...

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The story so far. Robin Dunbar is arguing that language developed amongst apes as something that could replace grooming in facilitating larger social groups than could be supported by grooming. Adam Smith is lurking in the background with the promise made that there are errie...

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Adding to Don's observations below , here's a partial list of Friedman's achievements, with a score out of ten for each. The permanent income hypothesis. This was advanced in A Theory of The Consumption Function (1957). Keynes had argued that household consumption varies with...

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[photopress:Horned_Hayek.jpg,full,alignleft] Kevin Rudd is starting to remind me of Buffy the Vampire Slayer . In season three Buffy battled the Mayor of Sunnydale , a polite, quietly spoken politician who formed a pact with demons to ensure his own survival. Rudd also has dem...

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Michael Moore empathises with US conservatives and offers the poor dears a compassionate head tilt .

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Greg Ransom at PrestoPundit has set up a running file of notices , obituaries and tributes to Milton Friedman, including some of his last interviews.

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Disclosure: This is not a paid review Helen Dale (aka skepticlawyer ) has signed Catallaxy up with ReviewMe, a service that makes it easier for businesses to pay bloggers to review their products. Critics call it pimping , Sam Ward at A Yobbo's View calls it an antidote for wr...

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