Club Troppo

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are the rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried than before - more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. I went to see Mr Pip last night. I chec...

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I am no bearded Dumbledore, but it was impossible not to see Magnus as a type of Harry Potter, a super-talent destined to become one the greatest and to leave a deep mark (a lightning bolt?) on our ancient game. Gary Kasparov Well folks, this just wouldn't be Troppo if I didn'...

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"MIT's Openness to Jewish Economists" , E. Roy Weintraub MIT emerged from “nowhere” in the 1930s to its place as one of the three or four most important sites for economic research by the mid-1950s. A conference held at Duke University in April 2013 examined how this occurred....

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As conversational topics go, productivity is hardly a barbecue stopper. Nevertheless, adopting policies that boost national productivity is really the only way for Australia to avoid a slide into national penury as our population ages and the Chinese mineral boom ends. That's...

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How do health and wellbeing correlate, and how do they correlate across countries? No problem, check out this interesting graph which I found in this OECD report on wellbeing through the crisis. I wonder how New Zealand does it - all that equity of health outcomes? Perhaps it'...

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by Prashant Bharadwaj, Leah K. Lakdawala, Nicholas Li - #19602 (CH DEV) Abstract: While bans against child labor are a common policy tool, there is very little empirical evidence validating their effectiveness. In this paper, we examine the consequences of India's landmark leg...

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Schumpeter's two chapters on democracy in his great book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy provide the best framework I know of articulating the things that trouble me about the current state of democracy. The chapters assert the following propositions: Rousseau's idea of th...

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Have a look at the beautiful graph below , which depicts the main trends in Australian emissions and its promised emission reduction targets. Australia's emissions trends, 1990 to 2020 Note : trajectories to the 2020 target range are illustrative The dotted orange line shows t...

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The Australian stock market opened lower this morning on the back of Rupert Murdoch’s speech to the Lowy Institute last night. A senior analyst, interviewed by this correspondent attributed the fall in the Australian share price to the “transparent and misguided attempt at nat...

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What should Australia do about a slowly warming world? Join a small group of European countries who have more permits to sell than their own industry can manage to use ? Join hands with a coalition of the desperate in enacting one of the front-runner geo-engineering solutions...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=S7QxOllK0VU

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I remember the great bushfire in Canberra of 2003. I had only arrived with the family a week before and had just rented a nice house near the top of Mt Cook, right in the path of an enormous bushfire that ended up destroying hundreds of homes. The heat of that day was immense:...

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Eugenics got a bad name after the second world war. It got associated with pseudo-scientific theories under which people at the bottom of the societal ladder were branded as hopelessly deficient for supposedly inalterable biological reasons. Societies’ less successful were, qu...

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Tabloid TV – it’s one of modern life’s little irritations but, thankfully, one that’s easily avoided – unlike Melbourne’s Myki system, the rococo convolutions of bus routes in Melbourn's outer suburbs and numb-nuts who conduct loud conversations on their mobile phones while yo...

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A tweet took me to this article from Time World . And it had a panel of articles 'from the web' at the bottom, each with nice little illustrations making it look like content of sister magazines or at the very least content the selection of which had been 'curated' by Time. Af...

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Brands, brands, brands! Teams, Teams, teams! They infest Australian political commentary these days the way gondolas infest Venice . Right now, for example, the challenge for ALP members is to get in behind Bill Shorten and rebuild the Labor brand while Tony Abbott’s ascension...

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For 14 months, Australia has had an electronic national health register . It has almost nothing in it, but the hope is that in years to come ( when lots of people have registered ) it will start to have all the information on someone’s health that floats around in the health i...

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Think tank scholars and policy wonks strive to be both practical and clever. Being practical means proposing policies that have a good chance of getting taken up by government in the short term. And being clever means policies that generate big benefits at little or no cost. B...

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It was quite a few years ago – last century in fact – that through Martin Gardner’s ‘Mathematical Recreations’ column in Scientific American that I first learnt of Raymond Smullyan. It was in a review of either The Lady or the Tiger or What is the Name of this Book , two of Sm...

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The following quote is from an article published in London's Financial Times on October 4. The article is further confirmation that the previous Labor government's gratuitous interference in the art market has had a devastating effect on sales and its legacy is continuing to p...

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