Club Troppo

Is Socially Responsible Production a Normal Good? , Jana Friedrichsen This paper uses a controlled laboratory experiment to investigate the effect of wealth on individual social responsibility (ISR), defined as choosing a more socially responsible product if a cheaper alternat...

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This is a pretty weak study, but even so, it's certainly pretty plausible that poverty depresses productivity. And the effect could be quite substantial. <irony>Which would explain why business is pretty strongly campaigning to minimise poverty in our society as part of its ov...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEjtKHxLl54&t=2s A favourite comedian of mine, Stewart Lee, seems to be getting with the program. Our extensive contacts with the Russian Embassy in Washington report that despite attempts to cover his tracks with the timestamping of the Youtube...

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An article in today’s Northern Territory News (online version marked “premium” – I read the paper version while sipping coffee at the Roma Bar) gives what the newspaper describes as a six month report card on the Gunner Labor government. It’s a peculiar article. Its principal...

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The latest National Accounts release confirms the lack of growth in Australian household incomes. Is this the start of a new era of stagnant incomes? In recent years GDP has continued to increase (save for a small drop at the end of 2016), but household incomes have hardly gro...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsbcScp9wpU When I saw Ray Martin fronting a doco on racism I expected the worst. He's so in love with schmoozing the audience with his dulcets, I expected a whitewash. There are a few bad eggs, but we're not racist. We're Aussies! The program c...

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There are also Idols formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other, which I call Idols of the Market Place, on account of the commerce and consort of men there. For it is by discourse that men associate, and words are imposed according to the apprehension of...

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ABC Radio National's The Spirit Of Things is a long-running show about spirituality presented by Dr Rachael Kohn. Its territory extends from straight interviews with interesting people to the more way-out fringes of spirituality. Kohn and co-producer Geoff Wood journeyed out o...

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Some time ago I was written to by an Australian University asking me to become an Adjunct Professor in Journalism. This is an honorary position so, (paradoxically) it's not much of an honour! In any event, this is how the letter I received begins. The University’s 2012-2016 St...

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ClubTroppo chief executive Nicholas Gruen - who was criticised by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull for his imaginary $5.6 million salary - has resigned from the job after seven years. Mr Gruen, who began the job in his own mind long, long ago, tendered his resignation to the Cl...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVRQK58jrbw You will no doubt be familiar with a fund-raising technique involving people coming to your door and asking for money for one cause or another. No matter how good the cause or how respected and established the cause, the technique se...

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Cross posted at the Mandarin There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order ofthings. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under...

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Can a democracy attract competent leaders, while attaining broad representation? Economic models suggest that free-riding incentives and lower opportunity costs give the less competent a comparative advantage at entering political life. Moreover, if elites have more human capi...

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https://vimeo.com/802540

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Crossposted from The Mandarin today where they almost never make comments :( [T]here is an Australia of the spirit, submerged and not very articulate … [b]orn of the lean loins of the country itself, of the dreams of men who came here to form a new society …. Sardonic, idealis...

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I happened upon this yesterday and thought it might be of interest to readers here. THE next few months may decide not only whether we are to survive as a nation, but whether we deserve to survive. As yet none of our achievements prove it, at anyrate in the sight of the outer...

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We use a novel method to measure racism at both the individual and the country level. We show that our measure of racism has a strong negative and significant impact on economic development, quality of institutions and education. We then test different hypotheses concerning th...

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I've written about the remarkable phenomenon of reality TV before , but just want to make a quick note of something here. The tweet above would have been unimaginable just a decade ago. I won't say reality TV caused the conditions that made it possible, but one of the things t...

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This post is based on a comment on an article promoting informed consent for experiments. I don't seem to have got a response from the author, so in case others wished to discuss, I thought I'd post it here. While most of the examples used were ones where I would have agreed w...

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By Tony Beatton ; Michael P. Kidd ; Stephen Machin ; Dipa Sarkar This paper reports new evidence on the causal link between education and male youth crime using individual level state-wide administrative data for Queensland, Australia. Enactment of the Earning or Learning educ...

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