Club Troppo

"I have done that," says memory. "I cannot have done that," says pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually-memory yields. Friedrich Nietzsche Perhaps if you were to update this saying for today's pacier times, you'd remove the word 'eventually'. John Quiggin reminds us of who...

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Something light to start off with. I woke up this morning to the clock radio's bad news about the Bali Nine and sitting in a traffic jam on the Easter freeway I wondered about what was really going on and reminded myself that 2+2 usually eqauls 4. Listening to RN in my office,...

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[photopress:full_1.jpg,full,pp_empty] Just to lighten things up.

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Cass Sunstein pumps out an amazing amout of stuff and yesterday I came across this brief blog post. The idea of ideological amplification rings true - though it needn't be ideological. Language itself and all use of it is an inherently co-operative exercise. Individuals use co...

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One of the ways in which economic reform might have developed and deepened from the fairly formulaic deregulationist mind set it got itself into from around the late 80s on would have been in the area of reforming legal procedure. It's still being left to lawyers. Here is a go...

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I'm very sad to say that Ken Parish has called it a day on Troppo. As he said there were some important private reasons motivating him, but there was also the agro and misunderstanding that flies around routinely. That increased the stress and tedium and that's a standing invi...

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Even though the game had no bearing on the final eight I spent a lovely day in the sun at Leichhardt Oval yesterday drinking beer and watching the Tigers flog the Bunnies. Even with the both teams out of the finals there was that air of expectation as the crowd enjoyed the bea...

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I don't have time for a substantial post on this, but have just seen a 2005 report by Seek - it was no doubt in the news at the time - but I didn't see it. Anyway this is one thing it says. Despite an environment of high employment and a buoyant economic outlook, job insecurit...

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The first time I heard about Steve Irwin, I was in the back of a taxi in San Francisco in 2000 with a couple of other Aussies. We were engaging in humorous banter with the heavyset black taxi driver. As you do when you're OS and you're looking to sample the local mood, and get...

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Interesting article in SMH wth which I agree. Especially this part. Yet this bedrock of the game - the Sydney and Brisbane club competitions - the source of most of the players for the four state teams, and most of the Wallabies, is never allowed its day in the sun, never allo...

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I once heard the late Lin Onus a teriffic aboriginal artist give a lecture to somewhere like the press club. He told a story of hearing his son singing the national anthem, which his son had picked up orally, to write out the words. They were truly hilarious when compared with...

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Michael Duffy never wanted the soccer World Cup here. Now he has solid grounds for his dread. He was evidently grazing in the archives of the Library of Economics and Liberty, an indispensable resource for rightwing culture warriors, when he came upon t his anti-soccer polemic...

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This is a blogging experiment. I'm teaching Jurisprudence to undergraduate law students this semester for the first time (although I've long been interested in legal theory). One of the early tutorial exercises I've set for my students arises from a very famous 1949 article/hy...

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Peter Faris today expands his defence of the anti-terrorism laws under which Jack Thomas has been subjected to a control order. He frames this analysis as a reasoned legal one: Two issues arise. First, is the control-order legislation good and appropriate legislation against t...

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Self-described "libertarians" all seem to have a blind spot about gun laws. Some of them are radically dishonest about their quasi-religious pro-gun obsessions. American "academic" John Lott, whose multiple misdeeds are chronicled obsessively by ozplogger Tim Lambert (to such...

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Parts 1 and 2 outlined six alternative ways of dealing with a socially disruptive economic reform. They all assumed that the postulated reform would proceed but dealt in different ways with the social consequences. In this final segment of the paper, I consider a seventh oft-o...

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In Part I outlined four policy strategies to deal with a reform which offered good GDP outcomes but had socially disruptive and regressive effects. All four did not require redistribution. I now look at the compensation option. Option 5: Compensate the losers The four options...

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Joshua Gans quotes my recent post on broadband and VoIP approvingly which I'm pleased about because he knows a lot more about both the economics and the technology of it than me. He puts the issue pithily. "Households are not the relevant unit for purchasing broadband; neighbo...

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Draft Economists are very good at advising on the best means of achieving given policy objectives - so long as the social objectives are clearly and fully laid out for them by the politicians. But most of the time the social goals are not specifically defined and so economists...

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