Club Troppo

Here's a link to a good article about Wikipedia - it's in Atlantic Monthly which I've never been able to get access to without subscription on line before. Perhaps they're 'getting it' as we like to say smugly in the 'online community' and they're publishing more open articles...

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I was mightily relieved to read this in today's Herald Sun. MADONNA has weighed in on the Middle East crisis ... The accompanying picture seems to show a preference for some sort of peacekeeping force separating the two parties although I'm yet to decide if it is a peacekeepin...

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You'll hardly ever hear the words "Mark" and "Latham" uttered in the same sentence in ALP circles without the utterer mouthing a sneer and shooting a small gob of distaste at the nearest spittoon. It's become de rigour to demonize de-Latham in the ALP. It's just another litt...

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Wayne Bennett hasn't the best of relationships with the press. He has applied the siege mentality approach so successful in State of Origin campaigns to create unity within the Broncos. And while that approach has had some success, with the latest Broncos premiership campaign...

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Troppo has had a pretty sporadic commitment to regular open threads like this. Not sure why - but I thought I'd give this a try. Any thoughts provocative or otherwise would be welcome. I'm going to set a reminder to set up a thread like this each weekend for a month or so and...

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The Age published a piece of mine on the car industry today. It appears in the link just provided, and also - in case the link is broken in future and because it's slightly edited in The Age - in its original form beneath the fold. Some ideas for the car industry In economics...

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I made some snide comments on the GPI on the New Matilda website - which I reproduced here . Anyway, the piece I wrote expanded itself before my eyes into nearly 3,000 words, so I split it - a little uneasily - into two. So here is the first installment published at NM today....

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Courtesy of Troppo commenter Gaby.

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Here's a request for Troppo readers to help me out. First the story - from Crikey today. Highly-respected ABC broadcaster and newspaper columnist Terry Lane calls it an "ignominious end" to a long career in journalism. Writing in last weekend's Sunday Age , he unwittingly reli...

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From the 'living in exciting times' desk courtesy of Slashdot comes the following bit of exciting news. An anonymous reader writes "DesktopLinux.com is reporting that four countries have together ordered 4 million low-cost, Linux-based laptops from the One Laptop Per Child (OL...

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I've been fairly scathing in the past about some of the more egregious published opinions of Deakin University's blogging legal academic Mirko Bagaric . Here in relation to his advocacy of the legalisation of torture; and here on his proposal to re-introduce the notion of faul...

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Hot on the heels of the OECD saying what a good idea tax reduction for lower income earners is, the NBER has just released a major study of Earned Income Tax Credits, and to use an expression du jure jour it's "all good" or almost all good. So much for all those trade-offs we...

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Nice to see the OECD citing and supporting Lateral Economics' paper on income tax priorities - published as Tax Cuts for Growth by CEDA. The OECD has in the past lined up with the chorus of people calling for cuts to higher marginal taxes on the (unsubstantiated) grounds that...

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A great column by Krugman. Shock and Awe For Americans who care deeply about Israel, one of the truly nightmarish things about the war in Lebanon has been watching Israel repeat the same mistakes the United States made in Iraq. It's as if Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been po...

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Big Pharma is in a bind. A big bind. As James Surowiecki explains in this excellent piece there are some really big problems looming for pharmaceutical companies. And like the saying about banks, when the problems are big enough, they're our problems, not just the companies'....

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I went hunting for pieces by one of the worlds really good economic journalists, James Surowiecki of the New Yorker (author of the truly teriffic best seller The Wisdom of Crowds). This nice piece on net neutrality reminded me that I have seen the issue discussed around the pl...

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This is what it looks like. Only it's bigger - even bigger.

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I vaguely remember wondering if Skandar Keynes - who played Edmund Pevensee (the bad child who gets saved by the others) - was related when I saw the credits. Running into his name again in an unlikely context here , I asked Google if he was related to JM Keynes, which he is -...

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The following opinion piece first appeared in New Matilda. Comments welcome. Many economists are fond of saying that a country can have relatively high employment or relatively low inequality - but not both. The argument runs like this. Good employment outcomes can only be ach...

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An interesting piece by Stephen Koukoulas on the extent to which our inflation numbers are being driven lower than they otherwise would be by the falling price of Chinese imports. It's over the fold and was reported in Crikey and on Henry Thornton The focus of most analysis of...

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