Club Troppo

In case anyone's interested I did an interview on ‘my trip’ overseas recently which if you fancy a bit of light and slightly educational entertainment is here . Anyway, the main burden of my remarks is that we’re losing ground within the leaders group on eGov and Government 2....

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Amazing that this is such a big deal, that we can administer morphine but not medical marijuana to alleviate pain. The paper is here . Abstract: While at least a dozen state legislatures in the United States have recently considered bills to allow the consumption of marijuana...

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In case anyone's interested, I did an interview on "My Trip" which can be downloaded from this link .

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An excerpt from the Dunera News. (for those who don't know, the Dunera was the prison ship on which my father was deported to Australia in 1940 with the Battle of Britain raging around them). The exerpt is an autobiographical sketch by Richard Sonnenfeldt (1923–2009) I was bro...

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Employers are prevented by law from subjecting workers to income management. What if they weren't? Libertarians favour freedom of contract. They believe the government's role is to enforce contracts not tell people what should be in them. One way governments have interfered wi...

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Cash for Corollas: When Stimulus Reduces Spending by Mark Hoekstra, Steven L. Puller, Jeremy West - #20349 (EEE IO PE) Abstract: Cash for Clunkers was a 2009 economic stimulus program aimed at increasing new vehicle spending by subsidizing the replacement of older vehicles. Us...

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Simon Heffer's High Minds presents us with a portrait of the mid-Victorians in which they consciously set about building the world which became ours. A liberal democratic world. To do so they recognised the need for all sorts of public goods. Those of education and health sure...

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https://vimeo.com/96548236

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Putin currently graces the cover of Time , Newsweek , Der Spiegel and The Economist, together with a host of lesser publications. Always unfavourably of course, with the possible exception of Time where the headline is "Cold War II" and the subhead "The West is losing Putin's...

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A question for Troppodillians: does anyone have a record of the Australian Government's response to 1988's accidental US shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655? I ask because the parallels with the MH17 shootdown are so clear. At a political level the government's response has so fa...

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Ben Hills has a new book out - Stop the Presses! How Greed, Incompetence (and the Internet) Wrecked Fairfax . It's published by (surprise!) News Corp's HarperCollins. Its essential thesis is that the Fairfax media group, owner of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, is in tr...

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As published on the Lowy Interpreter on 14 July 2014. Growth in HALE index, Intangible GDP, net national income and GDP, 2005-2014. John Edwards' Beyond the Boom tilts effectively against Australia's congenital Hanrahanism . It points out the extent to which we managed to fina...

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What is in the foreground of this picture. It is somewhere in Southern England around Salisbury. The winning entry will fly first class to London to pick up the Troppo Mercedes Sports from the panelbeater - who's had about enough of it sitting there since we dropped it off a f...

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The latest federal budget in Australia by the Liberal Party was a real break with the recent past in which politicians were reluctant to offend any large group of voters and in which the status quo with respect to entitlements was avidly kept. There was a bit of playing around...

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Employee Satisfaction, Labor Market Flexibility, and Stock Returns Around The World by Alex Edmans, Lucius Li, Chendi Zhang - #20300 (CF LE LS) We study the relationship between employee satisfaction and abnormal stock returns around the world, using lists of the "Best Compani...

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Patents and Cumulative Innovation: Causal Evidence from the Courts by Alberto Galasso, Mark Schankerman - #20269 (IO PR) Cumulative innovation is central to economic growth. Do patent rights facilitate or impede follow-on innovation? We study the causal effect of removing pate...

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It's Raining Men! Hallelujah? Pauline Grosjean and Rose Khattar We document the implications of missing women in the short and long run. We exploit a natural historical experiment, which sent large numbers of male convicts and far fewer female convicts to Australia in the 18th...

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From a recent column for the AFR . The report can be downloaded here . Earlier this year our Treasurer, Joe Hockey, led the G20 Finance Ministers to pledge lifting GDP by 2 percent over ‘business as usual’ over the next five years. It’s a big win for the Treasurer, but how can...

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Human Capital and Industrialization: Evidence from the Age of Enlightenment by Mara P. Squicciarini, Nico Voigtlaender - #20219 (DAE EFG) Abstract: While human capital is a strong predictor of economic development today, its importance for the Industrial Revolution is typicall...

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