Club Troppo

Scandals about politicians lying are a staple of our media, with the politician Mal Brough saga being the latest installment in Australia. At a dinner with others of his party there was a ‘mock-menu’ that included sexists jokes, made up by the restaurant owner. His protestatio...

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As Troppodillians may know, I don't follow the daily political chit chat unless I somehow get inveigled into it which I usually do at election time and also when debates seem to carry electric cultural significance about something that I have some particular interest in. I was...

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Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) is one of our more rapacious copyright maximalist organisations. It is a nice illustration of why things that sound like nice ideas don't always work out. CAL was dreamt up when it was thought that photocopiers might damage incentives to publish,...

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Institutional Quality, Culture, and Norms of Cooperation : Evidence from a Behavioral Field Experiment, Alessandra Cassar (University of San Francisco), Giovanna d'Adda (University opf Birmingham), Pauline Grosjean (School of Economics, the University of New South Wales). We d...

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Recently I published a post suggesting that the performance of the Rudd/Gillard governments in policy terms was actually quite impressive . On the other hand, Julia Gillard's ability to sell that message has been spectacularly poor, for a variety of reasons some of which I don...

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I wrote a good while ago about the economics of doing well by doing good on the internet and when I received a curious email from someone with whom I was conducting a correspondence I decided to write the column below. I've just tried to find it on Google, and it seems I didn'...

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http://youtu.be/Lzi4o6cXilo Attentive Troppodillians will be aware of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation which I chair. After looking awfully like our 'runway' was coming to an end (as we stay in startup land) our first and still flagship program is growing strongly ....

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After decades of listening to jingles, slogans, and scare campaigns, it's odd to hear a political campaign strategist complain about short attention spans. But in Monday's Financial Review Mark Textor grumbled that the "the collective attention deficit disorder of those online...

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In three previous parts , I posed the puzzle of the measured increase in mental health problems (depression, anxiety, and obesity) across the Western world since the 1950s and briefly discussed the pros and cons of the main cultural explanation doing the round. Here I want to...

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Do Stimulant Medications Improve Educational and Behavioral Outcomes for Children with ADHD? by Janet Currie, Mark Stabile, Lauren E. Jones http://papers.nber.org/papers/W19105?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ntw Abstract: We examine the effects of a policy change...

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This is a guest post by Rob Bray, economist and research fellow in the School of Business and Economics, Australian National University. Thanks to Rob for his contribution to an important conversation. [caption id="attachment_23392" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Courtesy Ma...

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Two major changes happened in my life on Thursday, one pleasant the other not so. The pleasant change was the arrival of my Yamaha P35 Digital Piano in the house. The other change was the departure of RB, one of my fellow boarders here in my present sanctuary and sacred place...

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As people reading this blog would know, I'm no fan of Richard Dawkins writings on God. However, having seen this video, I have to admit to preferring Dawkins to this guy, whose attack on the four horsemen of militant atheism I broadly agree with. On top of his superior manner,...

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In the two previous parts , I posed the puzzle of the measured increase in mental health problems (depression, anxiety, and obesity in particular) across the Western world since the 1950s and in Anglo-Saxon countries in particular. Here, I take it as given that this is real (a...

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Mark Crosby hrumphs about “Abenomics”. I put “Abenomics” in quotation marks because it’s not really about the current policy direction in Japan —especially since it doesn’t the monetary policy aspects which are both the most interesting, novel and experimental part that warran...

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Long after Ken Parish published his post You Can Survive on Newstart But You Can't Live On It on January 6th it's still attracting a steady daily trickle of readers. It also attracts the occasional comment describing survival on Newstart, most recently this one from Brenton: B...

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The most striking thing I found about watching the ABC docudrama Whitlam: The Power and the Passion over the last two weeks was the extent of the parallels between Gough's crew and the current Gillard government. We (or at least I) often think that the Internet and the general...

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I've always thought that there were strong positive externalities in home ownership. As John Hewson got into trouble for saying all those years ago, which houses and neighbourhoods will be better looked after those where people have a strong pecuniary stake or those where they...

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With racism and racially-charged language much in the news right now, we're getting some interesting signals about people's beliefs. One of the most interesting popped up again in this Mama Mia article by The Project's Charlie Pickering, titled " I know nothing about racism in...

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Last week, I posed the puzzle of the decline in mental health from around 1950 till now in most Western countries (with some countries showing a plateau since the 90s). I was talking in particular about the increase in depression, anxiety, and obesity. One of the reactions (by...

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