Club Troppo

I can't quite put my finger on it, but I find the Australia Institute's latest effort (pdf) particularly irksome. It uses data from Roy Morgan to describe the drivers of four wheel drives as unusually aggressive, lacking in community mindedness and various other things. Someti...

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The story in the two posts so far in which some foreshadowing of what's to come is snuck in. Smith's great work in sociology and psychology The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) shares a deep logical symmetry with his (now) more famous work The Wealth of Nations (WN). That symm...

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Here's a favourite economic journalist - Samuel Brittain - dispatching the idea that economics shouldn't make interpersonal comparisons of welfare. He's spent most of the column - engagingly titled "Truth, bullshit and economics" hopping into the more extreme relativist claims...

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As readers of an earlier post will know, I've become interested in the arguments that suggest that greater deregulation of land usage could improve land usage and in the process lower house prices to the great benefit of those trying to buy their way into the market. Here's th...

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Crikey outlines how much more engagement there is in political campaigning over there. And Tim Colebatch says some things that are similar to my own thoughts about the upshot of the NZ elections - namely that the power of incumbency combined with the power of being seen to wor...

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In 2000, out of the blue, the OECD rang me and asked me to present a paper I'd written to their senior treasury officials meeting (That's Treasury and/or Finance Secretaries). The paper advocated refashioning fiscal policy in the image of monetary policy. I decided to do what...

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If you are disgusted and dismayed by bile and propaganda thinly disguised as news, if like, Adam Smith you abhor views presented "with all the passionate confidence of interested falsehood", if you wonder how you could possibly get your case heard through the distortion and bi...

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Courtesy of Ian Rogers of 'The Sheet ' newsletter on the financial industry: Few CFOs pay down their credit cards In keeping with the findings of this East and JP Morgan survey in the past, the research found that less than 20 per cent of respondents at the top 500 companies m...

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David McKnight has set up a blog to promote discussion of his book. It is a very interesting exercise and I am making an effort to help him in his endeavours, especially to improve the revised edition of his opus. Commentary on some of the chapters can be found on Catallaxy. C...

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I have little doubt that when people look back on the Howard era they will see - apart from other things a similar set of wasted economic opportunities to those we saw under Fraser. The main difference is that Fraser inherited a difficult hand - and played it in a mediocre but...

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Check out this post on Catallaxy for a good interview with a friend and colleague of the late Paul F, philosopher of science, dadaist, man about town, opera buff and prodigious correspondent.

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On July 4, 1054 A.D., Chinese astronomers noted a "guest star" in the constellation Taurus; This star became about 4 times brighter than Venus in its brightest light, or about mag -6 (whatever that means), and was visible in daylight for 23 days. Over the fold you can see what...

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It will be interesting to watch the evolution of open source software (OSS) in the next few years. On the one hand it's a fabulous, powerful new way of working. But will it displace slightly less fabulous ways of working - like Microsoft's. I've always been sceptical that MS w...

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Here's Michael Bassett - former Lange Govt minister on the NZ election in today's Australian . National's caucus gets 24 fresh faces, several of them with substantial track records - diplomats, a top lawyer, a prominent secondary school principal and a medico. Hard to imagine...

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Belay there, me hearties, today Monday Sept 19 be International Talk Like a Pirate Day . Among a wide range of attractions and distractions on the site is the pirate personality test .

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From the SMH on the NZ campaign . Then there was an . . . unforgettable moment when a semi-naked, anti-Labour protester (later dubbed Undies Man) jumped in front of the PM, who promptly asked for a magnifying glass and branded him a "disappointment". Us boys couldn't get away...

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Andrew Norton had an interesting post on the different perspectives of 'classical liberalism' and 'social democracy' a week or so back on Catallaxy. He quoted this passage from Tim Colebatch's article on cutting the top marginal rate. There are good reasons to cut taxes, and b...

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The story so far. . . Smith's 1759 The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) builds a picture of people as inherently dialectical beings. As Montes (2004: 55) puts it "The TMS presupposes sympathy as a principle in human nature that fosters a continuous relationship between spectat...

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Below the fold a column for the Fin which appears tomorrow. It outlines the argument for an increase in the 'default' rate of super. I posted early drafts of the essay on which it is based on Troppo - here, and here . The essay is being launched as one of four Progressive Essa...

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This week's column tackles the thorny question of economic reform in NZ and Australia. Actually it doesn't really tackle it - it ducks the main bit of trench warfare according to which one side says that NZ performed badly because of reform and the other says it performed badl...

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