Club Troppo

The Lowy Interpreter is running a series where their experts explain, in (theoretically) 100 words or less, what they regard as the most important international policy issue of this campaign. I'm intrigued enough to think that the thoughts of a interested, but non-member, of t...

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Have a look at the graph below, taken from www.earth-policy.org , which conveys the stylised fact that greater economic development leads populations to eat more meat. The graph shows that total meat consumption in China increased from 10 million tonnes in 1980 to around 70 no...

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Here’s a simple problem. Due to tradition, law and custom about the way we deal with debt and contracts and the like, a great deal of human activity requires the transport of pieces of paper from person to person. The information on this paper does not carry the same force if...

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Nearly "every problem with the Republican Party today could be cured by a neocon revival", says David Brooks . Brooks isn't talking about the hawkish approach to foriegn policy that urged US military involvement in the middle east, he's talking about the domestic policy ideas...

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One type of news item I notice often – because it confirms a belief that I like to maintain – reports that a recent psychological study has found that the most effective way to give yourself a quick happiness fix is to do someone else a favour. The most recent I remember repor...

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Felix Barbalet is a data scientist and economist working in Canberra who has recently launched http://www.APSindex.com and https://www.APSjobs.info . He is a good fellow and on discussing his new websites with him, I suggested that he give us a post about the remarkable produc...

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There are always more books to read than time to read them. But Paul Frijters' and Gigi Foster's An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks is on my shortlist. Foster's preface is personal and captivating: A longer-term cost that has come from working on this book...

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The journal 'Agenda', the policy journal of the College of Business and Economics at The Australian National University just released a piece of mine called ' Universities as Royal Courts'. One can download it free of charge (just click on the link). It continues my long-runni...

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One of the popular economic memes of the 2000s has been that Australian needs more infrastructure. It has filled out many a think-tank report . In the form of the National Broadband Network , it helped Labor win government in 2007. It has led to a current crop of serious propo...

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Don’t worry, I’m not after a date or anything. I won’t be stalking you round the hills of New England. It’s more the sort of crush I had on James Stewart after I saw The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, or Yves Montand whenever he played a resistance fighter. It’s a political kin...

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Like many, I was puzzled by the transformation in Gillard's public persona post-2010. The warmth, humour and sparkle she'd often displayed in parliament and elsewhere vanished. What remained was wooden, distant, usually dull and often irritating. Judith Brett recently made som...

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For decades the gun lobby has told us that guns don't kill people. If only people would stop pointing them at themselves and each other, guns would be completely harmless. It's not the availability of guns that's the problem, they say it's the individual's decision to pull the...

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I recall going to a lecture by Naomi Wolf at the Australian National Gallery in Canberra when she burst onto the scene as the author of The Beauty Myth which seemed to promise some new beginning after the sixties' and seventies' 'second wave' feminism. The obsession with women...

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Last week a prostitute was murdered on the streets of St Kilda in Melbourne, where I am currently living part of the time. Journalist Wendy Squires yesterday drew parallels between that crime and the horrific rape and murder of ABC employee Jill Meagher by serial rapist Adryan...

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Luddites have been with us from the start and always been proven wrong. New types of jobs invariably emerged to make up for those lost through technology, and our standard of living climbed ever higher. No surprise, really. Markets, providing they're relatively unhindered, are...

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I was visiting Wikipedia a couple of days ago when I happened upon the image to the right. "Ah, a new feature, how nice." I thought. Then a click took me to a dead standard Bing search. The "What's this?" text didn't activate anything. I thought "well that is odd, Wikipedia is...

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“Welcome all ye listeners, today we are discussing the new ‘Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’, colloquially known as DSM-5, the sequel to the hugely influential and popular DSM-4 that really put the American Psychiatric Association on the map. We are joi...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kFTtNKUivKk Well there I was, minding my own business - which as you know all too well is my wont, nay my metier, when what should I happen upon on the wires but the Flinders St Railway Station Redevelopment Competition si...

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Can't remember who first pointed me to ' Becks in Paris '. Whoever it was, I'm grateful. [The] blog imagines Beckham’s internal monologue as he collides with the Parisian intellectual tradition – the glittering surface of a footballing icon cracked open by existentialism. Gold...

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