Club Troppo

I wrote these words just before we nearly threw away the 2010 Premiership. [I]t’s hard to figure out what exactly the plan is up forward. In the case of virtually any other club, if a mid-fielder gets the ball and their side has control, there’ll be a dangerous lead up forward...

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Travesties of the proverbial is a very occasional series one post of which began with these words. Keen readers of this blog will know that occasionally, just occasionally I identify a saying or concept which has somehow come to signify something close to the opposite of what...

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Hans Christian Andersen’s famous story The Emperor’s New Clothes epitomises the phenomenon of the truth hiding in plain sight as a result of collective delusion or selective vision. There is just such a collective public delusion at the heart of our current understanding of Au...

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This evening I received a highly significant email. It's from National Archives with which I'm doing some minor business. I have no idea what it means, but I figure it could be of considerable use to someone. If that person is you, I commend it to you. It's certainly a relief...

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Here's a list of buzzwords. I want to make a quick point. Note that there are very few ugly neologisms there - or even expressions that don't have clear meanings. Most of the expressions have very clear meanings. Indeed, some of them are quite compelling That's their point. Th...

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Experienced Troppo readers will be aware that I fairly frequently post articles about topics relating to crime and punishment, especially crime statistics and patterns. Quite often those articles consist partly of impassioned diatribes against sensationalist tabloid crime “sho...

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I've known Victor Perton since he was a lively Liberal MP interested in approaches to regulation that were more promising than the standard reg review boilerplate of the time. Neither of us made any progress on that score and reg review remains its ineffectual self. Now comfor...

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We need leaders who get up and out, are close to global megatrends and consumer behaviour, and understand leading indicators for changes to how people will work and live. A self described "leadership consultant" Continued from Part One . Starting sometime - I'm thinking late i...

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Black to play Stefansson vs Carlsen 21. ...? See game for solution. about our puzzles

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Here is a link to a companion article to Treaty: Yeah, Nah, Maybe which I cross-posted here at Troppo from The Summit a week ago: What might a treaty look like? Another article published there a couple of days ago ( The hidden karma of Aboriginal affairs policy … ) is also rel...

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If you're at all like me, you see and hear a bunch of people complaining that with the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, the world has gone mad and anything could happen. The New York Times today published a column by a former assistant attorney general in the Geo...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="530"] Further critical discussion of a range of aspects of strategy can also be found here [/caption] Corporate strategy is a comparatively new field which, took off a decade or so after WWII. There were various technical disciplines ma...

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When Harry Fired Sally: The Double Standard in Punishing Misconduct , Mark L. Egan, Gregor Matvos, Amit Seru - #23242 (CF LS) Abstract: We examine gender discrimination in the financial advisory industry. We study a less salient mechanism for discrimination, firm discipline fo...

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Does the reliability of institutions affect public good contributions? Evidence from a laboratory experiment By: Jahnke, Björn ; Fochmann, Martin ; Wagener, Andreas Reliable institutions - i.e., institutions that live up to the norms that agents expect them to keep - foment co...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xurO_YulJ4c I was listening to a recent episode of Big Ideas featuring Steven Oliver who gave a good account of himself I think. He also recited a poem which has gone viral on YouTube. You may have read it, heard it or heard of it. I liked the p...

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Cross-posted from The Summit . It was surprising (at least to me) that there wasn't more discussion at the NT Governance Summit surrounding the question of a possible treaty between Aboriginal Territorians and the Northern Territory Government. It seemed as if most of the curr...

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As you know, despite spending millions on marketing to get the word out, our arts industry, for easily understood commercial reasons , doesn't effectively get the word out about whether their products are any good or not. So for the cost of an hour or so's outsourced, offshore...

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Do Women Ask? Benjamin Artz, Amanda H. Goodall, and Andrew J. Oswald, September 2016 Abstract: Women typically earn less than men. The reasons are not fully understood. Previous studies argue that this may be because (i) women ‘don’t ask’ and (ii) the reason they fail to ask i...

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School Lunch Quality and Academic Performance , by Michael L. Anderson, Justin Gallagher, Elizabeth Ramirez Ritchie Improving the nutritional content of public school meals is a topic of intense policy interest. A main motivation is the health of school children, and, in parti...

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[caption id="attachment_30174" align="alignleft" width="600"] Melbourne from the Yarra[/caption] My latest column for The CEO Magazine extends my updated Troppo post on decentralisation . As I dug further into the issue for this column, I was startled by the extent to which go...

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