Club Troppo

The graph below tells you the average number of hours worked in Australia from 1978 to 2013 per person per month aged 15-64. The key thing to note is that there has been remarkably little change over time in terms of the peaks of the cycle: in 1980 the average Australian betwe...

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Here's a paper that may appeal to some people's priors, and might have appealed to my priors before I got some experience on this. Most of my attempts to generate telework for workers have failed, not for lack of decency on their behalf but for their lack of motivation and org...

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As opposition leader Mark Latham vowed to wage war on poverty . It's an idea he revives for his latest Quarterly Essay, Not Dead Yet: Labor's Post-Left Future . According to Latham, poverty isn't about a lack of money. The dole is generous enough to cover people's basic needs,...

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The usual political debate inside our country revolves around conspicuous things concerning the top leaders, like whether someone has been overtly corrupt, promised something too loudly that they could not really deliver, is handing out money to worthy or unworthy causes, or i...

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Is Economics a House Divided? Analysis of Citation Networks Date: 2013-02-13 By: Sina Önder, Ali (Uppsala Center for Fiscal Studies) Terviö, Marko (Aalto University and HECER) We investigate divisions within the citation network in economics using citation data between 1990 an...

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Click on the image for the website from which it comes. Detail on the makeup of the index in the legend at bottom of the graphic. While unusually low female labour force participation sounds like bad news, I'm not sure that the higher the female labour-force participation the...

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The platform this is from has an 'embed' function but Wordpress has it's own, which, unless you're as clever as Jacques means you can't embed anything other than those sites they have programmed for. In any event you can click here .

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I heard that the South Australian Government had released a new logo on the radio. It was a bit of a talking point. So I wondered about it. Wondered if I wouldn't like it much and get to like it - like the Commonwealth Bank's one, or would just think it was a silly waste of ti...

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As I've argued on this blog before, standards are an important public good - and in the age of information, an increasingly important public good. Here's some good evidence of the value of high quality standards. The nascent market for “green” real estate in Beijing , by Siqi...

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The Decline of the Self-Employment Rate in Australia,Atalay, Kadir, Kim, Woo-Yung, Whelan, Stephen URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:syd:wpaper:2123/8925&r=ent This paper using the Australian panel data(HILDA) investigates the declining trend of self-employment rate in Austral...

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These two images dominate a marketing email that's just arrived in my in tray from Olsen Irwin Galleries. Guy Maestri Ball's Pyramid No.10 oil on linen 183 x 152cm 2013 Click to view details Emma Van Leest Ingenue archival paper, foamcore and glue 51 x 31.5cm 2013 Click to vie...

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In the past month, I ran posts on the limits to certainty in economics. On the theory side, I talked about how mathematical tractability limited the economic phenomena you can describe well with models. On the empirical side, the inability in social science to measure any abst...

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People of Groupon, After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding - I was fired today. If you're wondering why ... you haven't been paying attention. From controversial metrics in...

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Well everyone in my family and extended family are proud of Angus Gruen, my nephew who left Paris (thus avoiding dinner with his uncle and a burn under the seine in the Troppo Mercedes Sports 350 SE), turned up jetlagged and sick at Monash Uni to participate in the Physics Oly...

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You're invited to view more works here . Alas, there are no more works - at least on the page where they say you can "view all works". But I like this one.

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In this OECD report of falling investment, the culprits are "international uncertainty", "the euro crisis" and catchall "a deepening mistrust in the global state of affairs". Inadequate demand? Well it doesn't rate a mention.

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Here's Dennis Glover's go at articulating his dismay at the kinds of things I expressed dismay about here . I've always been amazed at the extent of antagonism that Labor holds towards the Greens. It seems so obvious that the right relationship between them is as occasionally...

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The prisoner's dilemma is a simple and famous illustration of a problem that's very common. One of the areas in which it is common is the arms race where two parties competing with each other each invest to outdo the other. This is visible in lots of situations. In some areas...

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Do we know in social science what it is that we are measuring or does any bit of data we look at on closer inspection reveal more complexity, no matter how close we look, just like a fractal? Another way to put this is to ask whether anything we measure is solid, concrete and...

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https://twitter.com/NGruen1/status/1529689205420720129 Herewith today's column in the Age and SMH . George Orwell was a stickler for plain and simple English in public discourse. He argued that one could escape some of “the worst follies of orthodoxy” by simplifying one’s lang...

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