Club Troppo

Obviously the biggest news of the day is the recent Lancet article which concludes that the number of excess deaths in Iraq since the war began is around 655k with 95% confidence interval (393k,943k)*. Cause of death is also attributed with over half due to gun shot, 90% viole...

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A clever bit of econometrics seems to confirm something that Mark Latham argued in his tome Civilizing Global Capital. That the tele undermines social capital. It seemed a plausible argument, but what was the evidence other than the historical concurrence of the rise of tele a...

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Liberals aren't comfortable talking about right and wrong. After all, the whole point of liberalism is to avoid arguments about morality. Rather than arguing, liberals want to establish institutions which will allow everyone to pursue their own idea of the good life. Morality...

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Edmund Phelps is a good choice for this year's Sviriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences . He's best known as the joint inventor, with Milton Friedman, of the concept of the natural rate of unemployment, in the late 1960s. The NRU essentially means full employment - or labo...

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It all started with Barbie , "the vampy fashion doll" that "helped to bring about the sexualization of childhood." At least that's how the Manhattan Institute's Kay Hymowitz remembers it. According to Hymowitz , Barbie is "not-so-spiritual godmother of Britney Spears" and a si...

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A paper done for CEDA is coming out of embargo tomorrow - Wednesday. Here is the 'op ed' of the paper which is appearing in the AFR. I'm told the paper will be downloadable from the CEDA website, but it's not as I write this and I'll be out of range for most of tomorrow. If yo...

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Given the discussion on liberty and liberalism below , it might be a good time to revisit what Australian Republicanism is. Unfortunately most current perceptions of republicanism have been defined by the 'minimal' campaign run before the 1999 referendum which ended up promoti...

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Who are Australia’s top libertarian identities? At Thoughts on Freedom, John Humphreys nominates Andrew Norton . That's odd because I always thought that Andrew identified as a classical liberal rather than as a libertarian. About a year ago Andrew wrote a post for Catallaxy o...

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Get a load of this! Curtesy of Brad DeLong's site . Brad lets us know this. After some viewing I think that this isn't just a series of pretty pictures. This is a real story. What we're watching is the innards of helper T-cell activation. The lymphocyte crawling along the arte...

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Heartening news for Australian patriots in today's Age (A hotspot of soft-Leftism if you believe the paranoid fantasies of Gerard Henderson on Sunday's Insiders ). According the Nielsen Poll Labor's primary vote jumped three points to 42 percent ahead of the coalition on 39 pe...

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A few days after fighting between Hamas and Fatah took a dozen lives and led to the destruction of various Palestinian government buildings, the Fatah-affiliated head of Palestinian intelligence services believes Palestine is on the verge of civil war : We are already at the b...

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In his 1984 book Losing Ground , Charles Murray argued that welfare hurt poor families by creating incentives for self-defeating behaviour. Last month, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed that poor families ought to be rewarded for making the right decisions: "This polic...

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If you want to go fill in a form on the subject for a PhD student - click here and do so. I have. (Hat tip: Chris Lloyd)

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I'm reading up for a two day workshop at an fine institution I discovered a few years ago called Cranlana . Named after the Myer Family's mansion in Toorak where it is housed it's a (small 'l') liberal talk shop which holds 'colloquiums' at which various topics are discussed....

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The debate started by Don Arthur (Is bad Peter Saunders a neo-conservative?) has been very interesting and helpful (my particular thanks to Don for developing the distinction between the Hayek and Saunders positions). But as the subsequent discussion has branched out into equa...

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Topalov wins another marvellous game. He played with great precision and energy throughout though it was a more traditional storming of the kingside than the last miraculous game. Kramnik was passive and it's not looking so good for him. Though it's still drawn (if he gets bac...

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Those who are not opinionated out from commenting on public intellectuals, feel free to have a bash below.

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[photopress:Australian_Intellectual.jpg,full,pp_empty] Australians love a good competition. We can turn anything into sport. So if shows like Australian Idol can give young singers a chance to crack into the music business why not have an Australian Idol for public intellectua...

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Have a look at this write up of the budget by a financial planning consultant. Now that all manner of restrictions have been lifted from the super system, the standard method for avoiding tax for those in their late forties and early fifties, will involve something like this....

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