Club Troppo

Will the Coalition get to 76 seats? The ABC's Barry Cassidy 'can't see that happening'. But is the prospect of minority government really as horrific as much of the media is portraying? The only real problem (for both Malcolm Turnbull and Australia) with a Coalition minority g...

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In the last post ,Paul Frijters dismissed my proposal that deliberative democracy mechanisms should have had some role in the Brexit decision. I don’t think sortition makes any sense in the case of something like Brexit. The notion that a jury of randomly chosen citizens would...

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Effects of the Minimum Wage on Infant Health The minimum wage has increased in multiple states over the past three decades. Research has focused on effects on labor supply, but very little is known about how the minimum wage affects health, including children's health. We addr...

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There's a reason that the UK's vote on EU departure seems so strange, and it applies regardless of whether you like Brexit or not. It's this: the UK has made what might be a very substantial change to its own nature based on a simple majority vote – and such changes should be...

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I fantasise about the day when the people who fancy themselves the champions of liberal capitalist democracy - you know the Business Class set - will realise that they are munching through the landscape and, as Schumpeter argued - following Marx - that they were undermining th...

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To a substantial extent the 'left/right' divide is characterised by a common way of seeing the world in which there's self-interest and its opposite - altruism. But I think that impoverishes the debate. I think there's a third category far more important than 'altruism'. To ge...

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Sanjiv Erat1, Uri Gneezy1 We investigate whether piece-rate and competitive incentives affect creativity, and if so, how the incentive effect depends on the form of the incentives. We find that while both piece-rate and competitive incentives lead to greater effort relative to...

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I am seeking a lawyer to run an Adverse Action case connected to the recent Fair Work Commission verdict that found systematic breaches of procedures and procedural fairness in the University of Queensland's actions against me following my research on racial attitudes in Brisb...

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I fantasise about the day when the people who fancy themselves the champions of liberal capitalist democracy - you know the Business Class set - will realise that they are munching through the landscape and, as Schumpeter argued - following Marx - that they were undermining th...

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I just came across this abstract. I have no idea what it means. It's not a 'post-modernist' journal from what I can see, but I still don’t know what it means. I'd like to write more about this, but don't have the time right now, and am still pondering it all, but the abstracti...

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I've talked on Troppo a few times on the joys of ' theming '. Instead of organising the stimulus around a pragmatic search for all the possible ways we could expand the budget implementing all the most prospective in terms of economic expansion per dollar spent down to some le...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iISvNABkToE&feature=youtu.be Here's Paul Krugman giving a commencement address. Eschewing inspiration porn, the talk is kind of what you'd expect. He talks about what it might be like to be a young person starting out at college now compared wit...

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It's well past time to reconsider our communal attitude towards professional sport. We're subjected almost daily to scandals about drug cheating, gross and usually drunken behaviour by sports people, rorted salary caps and match-fixing by players colluding with bookmakers and...

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Can War Foster Cooperation? by Michal Bauer, Christopher Blattman, Julie Chytilova, Joseph Henrich, Edward Miguel, Tamar Mitts - #22312 (DEV PE POL) Abstract: In the past decade, nearly 20 studies have found a strong, persistent pattern in surveys and behavioral experiments fr...

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At the end of 1850, the UK's patent system and law was a 'exclusive law ' and it had been so for centuries. Within 18 months things had changed. The July 1, 1852 "Patent Law Amendment Act" meant that getting a patent was no longer the exclusive preserve of those with quite a l...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF-ejjtxpeE The biggest sporting thrill of my life came when Muhammed Ali managed to bamboozle the monster George Foreman to regain the world title that had been wrongly taken from him for his stand against the Vietnam war in the 1960s. What an...

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La Trobe University has now retreated from acting against academic Roz Ward (as I suggest below that it should). However I concluded it was still worth publishing this post, because it analyses important constitutional and legal issues that arise repeatedly in cases where an e...

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From a quick squiz at their report, the PC seems to have done an excellent job on the question of IP. It didn't put too much effort distorting its recommendations to somehow second guess what was politically palatable and just set out the appropriate principles and their upsho...

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As some may have noticed, I've been musing of late about the likely future social and economic effects of the increasingly rapid and interconnected development of ICT, artificial intelligence and robotics. This article is a bit silly in some respects but makes some useful poin...

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