Club Troppo

I have a reminder from a dentist to go see him so he can check his handiwork putting a cap on one of my teeth. From memory this took four visits and cost several thousand dollars. He seems like a good dentist. Anyway, I'm sure he's following good practice in sending me the rem...

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As ever, here are the highlights of the Italian Film Festibule showing in a city near you with Melbourne times in the timetable below. There are even some five star movies. That's right five out of five, which is ten out of ten when you think about it in a sufficiently abstrac...

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Superstitions, Street Traffic, and Subjective Well-Being by Michael L. Anderson, Fangwen Lu, Yiran Zhang, Jun Yang, Ping Qin - #21551 (DEV EEE PE) Congestion plays a central role in urban and transportation economics. Existing estimates of congestion costs rely on stated or re...

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Henry Ergas offers let's say a bracing perspective on our increased refugee intake which is to say that we should profile refugees to try to screen out those with odious views - many of whom will be Muslims. It's quite compelling. Then again doing so opens a Pandora's box of c...

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https://youtu.be/QZAn7ZEvwek I know nothing of Jeremy Corbyn other than that he's reported to be about to win the leadership of the British Labour Party. The video above was literally the first I'd seen of him. But on looking at it I was struck by the similarity of his intervi...

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Nicholas Gruen recently posted about the high cost of civil court proceedings in Australia (and for that matter throughout the common law world): A more promising kind of imperialism would be the application of simple economic principles to the way various social systems are m...

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It's hardly a surprise, but somehow we put too much faith in competition, and not enough in all the other things like building capability not to mention a bunch of other things - not covered in the study below - like getting market architecture right, improving information flo...

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The Germans have surprised me by eagerly welcoming a million migrants originating from Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Africa and elsewhere. They seem to invite many more to join them in years to come. Why are they doing this? From the perspective of my Dutch upbringing, the Ger...

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One vice of academic discourse is the compulsion to cite authorities for the simplest, most commonsensical banalities ( Gruen, 2010 ). Anyway, for my own notes, I record a good example of this in the opening of a paper on vocational education and training. Teaching and innovat...

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Yes, folks flying high above the Pacific Ocean (which as Woody Allen's father concedes to his mother is a worse ocean than the Atlantic Ocean) I took in the final episode of the History Chanel's "Sons of Liberty" a mini-series about the American Revolution. I go for historical...

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Robert Waldman has a fantastic critique of Paul Romer's recent missives on economic science. He's commenting ultimately on why Lucas's work isn't such a breakthrough. In it he highlights something of immense importance. It's hard to think of many developments in economic theor...

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This is the second of two posts musing about Labor's failure to deal with the full implications of the neoliberal revolution that the Hawke-Keating government unleashed from 1985. That revolution was significantly easier for the Coalition to embrace, because extreme classical...

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The furore of the last few days over the Trade Union Royal Commission and revelations about serious and illegal underpayment of workers (especially foreign students) by 7-Eleven, Australia Post and others have brought into sharp focus a wider political question. This article d...

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The Impact of R&D Subsidy on Innovation: a Study of New Zealand Firms by Adam B. Jaffe, Trinh Le - #21479 (PR) Abstract: This paper examines the impact of government assistance through R&D grants on innovation output for firms in New Zealand. Using a large database that links...

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https://vimeo.com/136778702 Above is a panel discussion on the sharing economy with Jim Minifie, Ian Harper and me. There was a lot of good feedback on it after the event, so I was pleased to see it up on the Grattan website.

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I think I am in favour of gay marriage, on balance, with some reservations. I would not wave placards in the street, or even change my vote on this issue. Yet it seems that this moderate position is not considered ethical. There is almost zero tolerance among some people for a...

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One does not go about identifying the weaknesses of what another person says in order to prove that one is always right, but one seeks instead as far as possible to strengthen the other's viewpoint so that what the other person has to say becomes illuminating. Such an attitude...

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This article explains the idea being explored in Victoria for a 'victims redress' scheme for victims of institutional child abuse. It's clearly yet another scheme for cutting the dysfunctional legal system largely out of the action of providing redress for abuse and handing it...

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