Club Troppo

Something I picked up recently in San Francisco. OK I don't own it, but got to play with one waiting in a queue and talking to a developer waiting to get into a function at the conference I was attending. I was impressed. It looks a bit weird, but you ignore it until you want...

Continue reading →

Jeff Sparrow on 'the Imbecilic Andrew Bolt' and Unseen Academicals : ...“My problem is not,” [writes Alecia Simmonds], "that our public sphere harbours ill-educated members (like the imbecilic Andrew Bolt who never made it past first-year uni)." Sorry? Anyone who doesn’t posse...

Continue reading →

With the Gonski reforms expected to be rolled out across Australia in the coming 5 years, it is handy to reflect on what actually are the basic challenges for school reform in Australia. A view of the underlying issues helps one to judge the likely outcomes of the current refo...

Continue reading →

Thanks to commenter Sancho for alerting me to the following post, by Sarah Kliff, at the Washington Post's Wonkblog (via Reading is for Snobs ). It had me chuckling all the way to the bottle-o and back on this dreary, rainy Melbourne morning: Readers ask, we answer! What happe...

Continue reading →

http://youtu.be/C8IlMYeS23w

Continue reading →

In an excellent recent piece on his own website , Timothy Devinney looks at how the compensation of Australian Vice Chancellors compares to those of the UK and the US. He gave me permission to re-use his calculations. Below I give you the guts of his story which, if one uses u...

Continue reading →

From the Bank of Canada's Financial Stability Review - Dec 2012 .

Continue reading →

Meanwhile political correctness idiocy proceeds apace. Here's an email I received today. Your expertise and experience . . . makes you ideally placed to inform this research. We would appreciate the opportunity to capture your thoughts . . . . The interviews will be carried ou...

Continue reading →

The book launch tour of Australia ended last week with a visit to the Melbourne Institute, where Deborah Cobb-Clark kindly hosted the last in our marathon-series of 5 launches. They all were a great success, with the publisher actually running out of books for the last one and...

Continue reading →

(You can catch up with Part I here .) One thing that's become obvious as I've read through the CIS's corporatist manifesto is that their TARGET30 campaign is very much a moral crusade with two goals. First, to reduce the burden (of taxation) on future generations. Second, to e...

Continue reading →

One of the peculiar features of debates about big monolithic infrastructure projects, such as universal broadband networks and high-speed rail lines, is the way their supporters talk about them in public. To advocates, the wisdom of these projects is obvious. You can never hav...

Continue reading →

By: Philipp Ager (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hes:wpaper:0038&r=his Wealthy elites may end up retarding economic development for their own interests. This paper examines how the historical planter elite of the Southern US affected economic devel...

Continue reading →

A Spectre is Haunting Australia: the spectre of Corporatism. Since March this year the Centre for Independent Studies has been promoting its new manifesto ' TARGET30 - towards smaller government and future prosperity '. TARGET30's stated goal is to get Australia's total govern...

Continue reading →

Australia needs intellectuals, says Nick Cater. In his new book The Lucky Culture he writes: A nation is entitled to look to its intellectuals to articulate its common purpose, to pull together loose strands and write a narrative that says where it has come from and where it i...

Continue reading →

Economic Conditions and Child Abuse by Jason M. Lindo, Jessamyn Schaller, Benjamin Hansen - #18994 (CH HE LE LS) Abstract: Although a huge literature spanning several disciplines documents an association between poverty and child abuse, researchers have not found persuasive ev...

Continue reading →

*Guest post by Paul "Gummo Trotsky" Bamford (I've invited Paul to join the Troppo stable/pony club, and am pleased to advise that he's accepted. So expect more from Paul very soon). The mythical – or legendary if you so prefer – figure of the dole bludger has haunted our polit...

Continue reading →

Tomorrow, there is a book launch of ' An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks ' at UNSW, hosted by Professor Chris Styles, Director of the Australian Graduate School of Business. It starts at 6pm and is in the JBR Theatre (AGSM building) of the Kensington Campu...

Continue reading →

Two years ago, I wrote a Troppo post on Coles' decision to sell milk for a dollar a litre . I took particular aim at the claim by consumer group Choice that regulators should investigate whether Coles is engaged in predatory pricing . Said Choice: “It is difficult to see why a...

Continue reading →

It's always been hard to pin down who 'the elites' are why we are supposed reject them as un-Australian. A new book review by Tony Abbott offers some clues. It also hints at why attacks on 'the elites' are likely to backfire for conservatives. In the Spectator Australia , Abbo...

Continue reading →

I've been in San Francisco for over a week now and have been living near Haight Ashbury which I've only driven through previously. In any event I looked it up in Wikipedia and 1967's Summer of Love was quite a production with 100,000 odd people turning up and living from hand...

Continue reading →