Club Troppo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzvOjcGifOM The post below is a guest post from a fine person who is a friend of mine. Sonia Ben Ali,, Co-founder and Executive Director of the international NGO, Urban Refugees. It's a pretty fledgeling organisation with a remarkably important...

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This post began as a comment on Paul's last comment on my "Mainstream Radical Centrists: Where are they? " column. Paul boiled down his response to this: If you want to have a serious debate about reforms, go to countries that are hurting and that see the need for it. Like the...

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Australia's 'economic miracle' off the back of what might be called the 'reform period' which can be dated fairly neatly from late 1983 and the floating of the dollar to mid 2001 (which, IIRC was the date the ANTS tax reform package was introduced). It came about because peopl...

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What is the meaning of the relief sculpture above? I recall when I was last on the Athenian Acropolis just over a year ago marvelling at the Parthenon, not just its emphatic and sublime beauty but also its strangeness . It's so big and so magnificent. What the hell did this ci...

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With Fairfax culling 120 journalists (in the wake of previous mass redundancies), Murdoch/News apparently contemplating more cuts, and newspapers in general losing money hand over fist, some pundits are suggesting that Fairfax at least is likely to stop publishing the Monday t...

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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 its progenitor had intended. Examples include the theory of the second best, the central point of w...

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I was at a PC function yesterday on 'disruptive technology' and said, in a rather crabby way, that I'd been talking about the significance of informing consumers about the quality of products for a long, long time and now, it's only when people can actually see Uber and Airbnb...

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It appears clear that the Governor-General (acting on the advice of the Prime Minister as per Westminster convention) can under Constitution section 5 prorogue the current Parliament and then appoint a new session to commence on 18 April. Presumably that is what occurred this...

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Some interesting constitutional questions seem to have arisen in the wake of Thursday/Friday's marathon Senate sitting which passed voting reforms for that House. Both Independent Senator Bob Day and veteran psephologist Malcolm Mackerras are threatening to launch High Court c...

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I went to see The Secret River last night - and returned from the experience underwhelmed. It tries to be a truthful depiction of one aspect of the 'frontier wars' and so it presents a bunch of Europeans setting up shop in an area that the local indigenes (surprise, surprise)...

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Bargaining over Babies: Theory, Evidence, and Policy Implications by Matthias Doepke, Fabian Kindermann - #22072 (CH EFG) It takes a woman and a man to make a baby. This fact suggests that for a birth to take place, the parents should first agree on wanting a child. Using newl...

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Racial Sorting and the Emergence of Segregation in American Cities by Allison Shertzer, Randall P. Walsh - #22077 (DAE LE) Abstract: Residential segregation by race grew sharply in the United States as black migrants from the South arrived in northern cities during the early t...

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Disruptive Change in the Taxi Business: The Case of Uber Abstract In most cities, the taxi industry is highly regulated and utilizes technology developed in the 1940s. Ride sharing services such as Uber and Lyft, which use modern internet-based mobile technology to connect pas...

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[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500"] This chart is for the UK though the graph for the whole of the developed countries looks similar. If updated for the most recent times it would be gradually trending up by now, but not in any danger of returning to anywhere near...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDZadLhTMoc I recall when working as a staffer for the Hawke/Keating government, how Labor staffers wore their disdain - bordering on contempt - for the Democrats with the same kind of pride that economic rationalists had for their own disdain f...

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Paul Frijters' fascinating post analysing Turkey's successful employment of ruthless realpolitik tactics is fairly depressing. But maybe there's some qualified good news hidden amongst all the cynical manoeuvres. Reported arrangements between the EU and Turkey for dealing with...

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I visited Turkey in April last year, traveling through the country, witnessing the troubles of the leadership of the ruling AKP party: it had just lost a general election that left it without a workable majority in parliament and only 40% of the popular vote; it was sucked int...

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I don't stay on top of many of the latest issues. After all, they're complicated, time is limited, so I'll just satisfy myself with starting, largely ideological reactions (and of course not opine too strongly given my state of ignorance) about any number of public issues. Is...

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Abstract : National policies take varied approaches to encouraging university-based innovation. This paper studies a natural experiment: the end of the "professor's privilege" in Norway, where university researchers previously enjoyed full rights to their innovations. Upon the...

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