Club Troppo

In the words of Ronald Reagan, here we go again.* Sandy Pentland rehearses something that's made it's way from heresy to platitudinal commonplace with breakneck speed. Asked "what, specifically, is the New Deal on Data?" Sandy tells us this: It’s a rebalancing of the ownership...

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A Tale of Repetition: Lessons from Florida Restaurant Inspections by Ginger Zhe Jin, Jungmin Lee - #20596 (IO) Abstract: We examine the role of repetition in government regulation. Using Florida restaurant inspection data from 2003 to 2010, we find that inspectors new to the i...

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Here is quite a good article seeking to "reframe" the asylum seeker debate. It takes a reasonably moderate, non-hysterical approach. I haven't written on the subject recently myself, because I have been feeling a little conflicted. On the one hand, long-time Troppo readers wil...

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Just a note to record the fact that blogging is 20 years old this month, maybe. New media legend Dave Winer, a rare combination of great writer and programmer, started posting at DaveNet on 7 October 1994 , as Philip Greenspun points out. There was no announcement that Winer h...

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Top Picks Little England In the Greek island of Andros during World War II, the lives of its women are dominated by long periods of isolation brought on by the seafaring nature of the island’s economy. Two sisters-the quiet and reticent Orsa and the extroverted Moshca-become e...

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http://vimeo.com/108138933

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The Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) lives in the suburb next to mine and is a Good Thing. It's housed in one of the umpteen magnificent town halls of Melbourne, in this case South Melbourne Town Hall and a lot of its concerts are put on by students, often supplemen...

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If you want to understand what bank regulators were doing in 2008, and what people like APRA and the Reserve Bank worry about here, try reading Matt Levine's latest column . Leviine's piece is nominally about a weird court case involving AIG, the insurance behemoth which almos...

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Source OECD .

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An Englishman enters a naval action with the firm conviction that his duty is to hurt his enemies and help his friends and allies without looking out for directions in the midst of the fight; and while he thus clears his mind of all subsidiary distractions, he rests in confide...

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This post is mostly a note to self: Like I keep saying, there's an ecology between public and private goods. This article asks whether smartphones should be used in meetings. That's a question about a cultural rule. It's a public good question. The article however seeks the an...

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by Alice Chen, Emily Oster, Heidi Williams - #20525 (AG CH HC HE PE) Abstract: The US has a substantial - and poorly understood - infant mortality disadvantage relative to peer countries. We combine comprehensive micro-data on births and infant deaths in the US from 2000 to 20...

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So the Senate will conduct an enquiry into the Queensland government – on the pretext that, to quote Senator Glen Lazarus , it has made "many questionable decisions". Never mind that state governments are elected by the same people who elect senators, or that senators are elec...

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You may notice that I have changed the masthead motto, which until now read "the suppository of centrist wisdom since 2012". It was a somewhat snide and gratuitous reference to a Tony Abbott malapropism uttered in the leadup to the 2013 federal election (and pretty much on a p...

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I'm a big, though not uncritical admirer of Paul Krugman - of his straightforwardness and his aggression in what is almost always a worthy cause. And yet, reading Martin Wolf's magnificent book rather inauspiciously titled The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned-and Have...

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The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of f...

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This paper is pretty interesting. The last generation has seen the triumph of the baby boomers in attracting resources to themselves, at the cost of other generations, most obviously illustrated in throwing off the shackles of university fees (so other generations and the uned...

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Contractual Freedom and the Evolution of Corporate Control in Britain, 1862 to 1929 by Timothy W. Guinnane, Ron Harris, Naomi R. Lamoreaux - #20481 (DAE) Abstract: British general incorporation law granted companies an extraordinary degree of contractual freedom to craft their...

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Below the fold is the Ockham's Razor lecture that went to air yesterday. Since the trolls have already come out in force on the ABC thread (The ABC's illustration doesn't help!), I've reproduced it for your delectation below. Nicholas Gruen: Both popular commonsense and econom...

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As a council member of the National Library I had the privilege of not only going to this lecture last Friday night but of having dinner with Ray, the benefactors of the lecture (John Seymour - whom I taught Legal Writing and Research alongside in 1990 or thereabouts - and his...

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