Club Troppo

There are parallel conversations going on in social policy, says Matt Cowgill , "Values on one level, data another". How values and data interact is an interesting question. A decade ago, I was researching the debate over poverty. In 2003 the Senate Standing Committee on Commu...

Continue reading →

Today's Banking Day has the story of how Aussie John Symond avoided nearly $6 m in tax through an artificial arrangement which the Tax Office 'looked through' to send him a bill for the money. In 2004, the Australian Taxation Office started looking into Symond's tax affairs, a...

Continue reading →

(warning: the below is a bit of a rant!) The obesity epidemic is not just one of the greatest (mental) health problems of our time, set to become a more prevalent problem than hunger and more expensive to health systems than smoking, but it is also spawning new magical beliefs...

Continue reading →

“ they exert every variety of talent on a lower ground…and may be said to live and act in a submind”...... VS Naipaul “The Air Conditioned Bubble" Writing in 1984 about the republican convention of 1984 (the triumphant beginning of Ronald Regans second term), V S Naipaul wrote...

Continue reading →

Today was a pleasant day, right up until I came home and caught the news on ABC 24: Kevin Rudd has come up with the penultimate solution to the asylum seeker problem : Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says asylum seekers who arrive by boat will have no chance of being settled in Aust...

Continue reading →

Vote buying is a recurring theme in elections in ‘emerging democracies’. There are strong allegations it happened in the 2006 and 2012 Mexican elections . US elections normally have some party accusing the other of vote-buying ( through offering free food at election stations...

Continue reading →

Jon Altman is a Professor at the ANU Center for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research. His submission to the review is long and deeply grounded in long-term, first-hand knowledge of the indigenous art sector and remote area indigenous affairs more generally. It is a must read ....

Continue reading →

That Government bureaucracies at times create 'phantom employees' to publicly argue the 'public' interest-need for.... more bureaucrats, is a well known historical truth. What follows is what Paul Frijters called: A classic case of what Niskanen spoke about. The review has fin...

Continue reading →

I've written frequently on Troppo about the many ways in which equity and efficiency are friends , rather than enemies, although of course it depends on context. There are some ways and circumstances in which the two are in tension with one another. In any event, here's a fasc...

Continue reading →

Robert Waldman (who is unpleasantly aggressive and arrogant in his comments, but I digress) shows how Friedman's contribution to the idea that the Phillips curve would change as expectations changed wasn't much of a contribution at all. It was all in Samuelson and Solow - only...

Continue reading →

Pretty interesting stuff : In this article, we analyze the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, those who joined it, and its social and political impact by combining a wide range of archival data sources with data from the 1920 and 1930 U.S censuses. We find that individuals who joined the Kla...

Continue reading →

I was travelling through Los Angeles, New York, and Washington the last two weeks in a book-promotion tour . It was my first real visit to the US so I was collecting impressions on the people and the culture there. Some loose impressions from my egalitarian (Dutch/Australian)...

Continue reading →

Parts I & II our review of the Review. As of Monday 15 July the web page for Office Of The Arts review of its Artists Resale Royalty scheme lists 40 submissions. All but a few of these submissions are unfavorable to the scheme. In his submission , Ben Quilty, Australian War ar...

Continue reading →

http://youtu.be/ge7i60GuNRg

Continue reading →

Warning: Enthusiasm Alert. I've just got home from seeing the Crucible by Arthur Miller at the Melbourne Theatre Company. I thought it was a very good production. I thought I wasn't going to like David Wenham much at the outset as he seemed a bit strained. But that's perhaps b...

Continue reading →

"Welcome to the era of hedged bets and lowered expectations", says the cover story of Time Magazine . A poll of 18 to 29-year olds, found 65 per cent agreed that it will be harder for their group to live as comfortably as previous generations. But despite the lowered expectati...

Continue reading →

For 20 years some Australian school systems have been world leaders in giving schools more autonomy, and in trying to increase competition among them. Many countries are following suit, in the hope that policies to increase school competition will improve student performance....

Continue reading →

This is just some expanded and consolidated musing from Twitter. A few days ago I was thinking about The Fall of Icarus, the 16th century Dutch painting after Bruegel. It's probably most popular for near absence of the ostensible subject, Icarus, who is barely shown in the bac...

Continue reading →

Hugh White on Rudd and foreign policy : All this should make Rudd overwhelmingly the better choice as Prime Minister as far as foreign policy is concerned. But with Rudd nothing is ever that simple. Back in 2007 he came to office with lots of fresh ideas about how to position...

Continue reading →

The adoption of ARR as policy for governments (in about 2002) was driven by a small cluster of publicly funded, 'arts societies' management representatives, that were/are closely linked to a global network of copyright collection societies managements. The real aim of these lo...

Continue reading →