Club Troppo

Joe Hockey has received a lot of flack after his ‘thought bubble’ that first home buyers could be permitted to withdraw from their superannuation accounts to fund their home purchase. From the housing perspective, many have warned that faced with a fixed supply of housing, an...

Continue reading →

That Tony Abbott should have been forced this week to concede defeat on fiscal reform by declaring partial victory over “debt and deficit” (“the glass is half full”) is both ironic and fitting. As I discussed in a fairly recent post , Abbott was responsible for bringing to des...

Continue reading →

I drove for the best part of 11 hours over the last few days giving a Do Lecture (would you believe?) which was fun. In any event I listened to some seriously great radio. Inside the drug court I was riveted by three 50 minute docos on the NSW Drug Court. It really is a traged...

Continue reading →

Fellow Troppodilians, especially those resident in Canberra, may I commend this production of Black Diggers to you. I saw it last year in Sydney at a packed out matinee (only tickets available) at the Opera House on Australia Day! It was electrifying: great script drawing on e...

Continue reading →

[caption id="attachment_27054" align="aligncenter" width="865"] Source: OECD: Skills for social progress, Click on image to be taken to the publication[/caption]

Continue reading →

Oh well I guess snark can be justified as necessary to keeping standards above some rock bottom. Anyway, I did wonder whether this article on the Renaissance and innovation was the silliest thing written on either. Even ignoring the fact that he is about half a millennium out...

Continue reading →

We've gone from the assumption that there's a necessary tradeoff between efficiency and equity to a state in which it's almost de rigueur to point out the ways in which inequity can harm efficiency with quite some speed. Why even the OECD, while it hands homilies about how 're...

Continue reading →

Just as happens with dividend imputation in Australia , corporate structures are remarkably robust to seeing things from the shareholder perspective, leading Troppo's self-appointed Chief Economist and Joint Pontificator In-Chief to conclude that tax cuts to dividends offer th...

Continue reading →

From the latest Journal of Economic Perspectives Fair trade coffee is a cup half full, according to Raluca Dragusanu, Daniele Giovannucci, and Nathan Nunn in “The Economics of Fair Trade” (Summer 2014, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 217–36). We are not persuaded. The authors barely menti...

Continue reading →

Monday's column in the Fin published as "Debate should be on best-use, not ownership of public data" Data is in the news but we’re still working out how to think about it. Ladies and Gentlemen, we’ve got the Wrong Metaphor. Let me explain. There’s endless argy-bargy about who...

Continue reading →

Here's another post highlighting a film festival. It derives from my frustration at being able to actually work out what's worth seeing and when from festival propaganda which is mainly directed at trying to get you to go, not helping you work out what you'd like to see. Regul...

Continue reading →

[caption id="attachment_22531" align="alignleft" width="404"] My one remaining lobster cartoon saved from the flames[/caption] I once drew a whole book of cartoons featuring lobsters in various socially awkward situations. One of my favourites was of a lobster trying to get in...

Continue reading →

Some readers of this blog with know my preoccupation with the shortcomings of Vox Pop Democracy . Here are some aphorisms from David Van Reybrouck who's book Against elections does not appear to have been translated out of Dutch at this stage. They offer some interesting ways...

Continue reading →

HT Paul Monk who cites this as one of his favourite passages. It's now one of mine. And a nice explanation of how easy it is - whether within an organisation or the caverns of one's own riotous psyche - to slip into the pathologies of groupthink and self-deception. Somehow thi...

Continue reading →

The Dunera Boys' views of their own treatment separated very broadly into two camps which also had something of a geographic dimension. Some regarded their treatment - by a sadistic captain on board the Dunera and his not much better deputy - as a scandal and their incarcerati...

Continue reading →

Continue reading →

Well folks, my bright idea of a link isn't working. We need 50 subscribers to qualify for the lowest price subscription to Crikey and so far only 30 people have made their way to the link and subscribed. And here's the crisis. For everyone to get the lowest price, we need 50 s...

Continue reading →

Here's yesterday's op ed for the Fin published as Technology education is about more than funding : STEM is all the rage in education – that’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. Part culture war against Australian mediocrity, part cargo cult, a principal goal is more...

Continue reading →

The people at Abbotsford Convent asked me to pen a 'shout' for their fundraising campaign. I'd recently been on a tour of the place, and though I'd been there before and wandered around curiously, on the tour I was transported by a Big Idea, though those who've read my stuff h...

Continue reading →

After two weeks of a new government in Greece, a Greek exit from the Euro (termed a ‘Grexit’) looks more and more likely. The betting markets give it about 30% to happen this year, and Greece is the out and out market favourite to exit the Euro before any other country. Though...

Continue reading →