Club Troppo

I held off reviewing Acemoglu and Robinson's (AR) Why Nations Fail for a long time. Despite the material's relevance to my old research interests, my love of universal history and the popularity of the book, I just couldn't face the task. Yet, because it is now appearing in so...

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Here's a short note to everyone I know in the print media industry; Please, when you bemoan the state of media today, do not tell me that it's "management" that has got the industry where it is. I hear this all the time, particularly from Fairfax staffers and ex-staffers. If o...

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Another puzzle for you to pontificate on: is it really true that ‘Nature’ is suffering? For decades now, you will be hard-pressed to read a whole newspaper or magazine without someone complaining about how badly ‘Nature’ is doing. The melting glaciers, the disappearing Siberia...

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I haven't been posting on Troppo much lately, mostly because I'm pretty fully occupied establishing with partners a new private legal practice in Darwin, Melbourne and Adelaide by early January. However I haven't been able to restrain myself from indulging in the first sign of...

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Normally I tuck mp3 files of radio interviews which are loosely on columns of mine at the end of the column where it's reproduced on Troppo. However here's my last interview for the year on the ecology of public and private goods and public and private motives - which relates...

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Queensland is shedding public workers in the health and education sectors in a bid to balance the books. There is nothing unusual about this, and there are more than enough ‘head-office’ positions that can be axed without any impact on the productivity of schools and hospitals...

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This is an email I received earlier today from Karen Mahlab - and I offered to reproduce it here for the delectation and contribution of Troppodillians everywhere. The winner of the competition will be flown steerage to London for a weekend at Buckingham Palace with the royal...

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The Economic Society in Queensland runs a series of televised presentations whereby they get economists to talk about topical issues they are working on. Following Quiggin, Bhagwati and McKibbin, it was my turn a few weeks ago to talk about the Christian-Islamic conflict, the...

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Get a load of the UK Cabinet Office Minister's delivery. http://youtu.be/o-m6l4keQc8 It's fabulously low key, informal, indeed intimate compared with the formal bullshitting mode of almost all political utterance, and straightforward. It is of course 'spin', as it couldn't be...

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ASIDE from war, corruption is probably the biggest obstacle to economic and social development in poor countries. But it's best we see ourselves as being on a continuum with them, rather than as having solved the problem. Even if no law was broken, Wall Street financiers impos...

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Have a look the following 2010 graph produced by the University of Delaware on their college students : The key aspects to realise from this graph are that the girls who don’t drink basically don’t have (unprotected) sex, and that, more surprisingly, the boys who don’t drink d...

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We were all resigned to hearing that eagerly awaiting whether or not the Greeks are going to get the 2-year extension on their debt obligations or not. The announcement has just come through : the Greeks are not just getting an extension but are to get another 50 billion Euro...

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In part II, the barriers to reform in the university sector were discussed . It became clear that neither the governance structure nor the basic funding model was up for grabs. Also, one should not count on market forces, the unions, or the academics to be all that much help....

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Mosman is failing the nation, says Miranda Devine . The residents of Australia's richest suburb might be honest, hard working and committed to their families but they're failing to demand the same behaviour from the lower classes. As a result, social norms are collapsing in lo...

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Economists love tradeoffs. Indeed, their basic model of the world breaks down where such tradeoffs don't occur. Lucky for them since the world really is full of tradeoffs. If you want more carrots, you'll have to do with fewer of something else. Here they're substitutes. But,...

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PERSECUTION PERPETUATED: THE MEDIEVAL ORIGINS OF ANTI-SEMITIC VIOLENCE IN NAZI GERMANY* Nico Voigtlander Hans-Joachim Voth How persistent are cultural traits? Using data on anti-Semitism in Germany, we ?nd local continuity over 600 years. Jews were often blamed when the Black...

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Australian universities are admin-heavy , have high student-academic ratios and in recent years have seen a race to the bottom in standards, related to a battle over student numbers. The selling out of previously amassed reputation by reducing entry barriers most recently beca...

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In previous posts I talked about the immense overhead in the university sector. Some 70 cents in the commonwealth dollar aimed at universities ends up in admin and US researchers have calculated that the optimal amount of administration is so much lower than the current Austra...

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Nearly two years I speculated on reasons why there are so few Filipino restaurants in Australia relative to the large number Filipino migrants. A secondary purpose was to discuss the uselessness of preference based explanations - not because they could not be true, but because...

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The question posed last week was how much of the money sent into the university sector at the point of DEEWR\DEST actually reaches the coalface in terms of teaching and research. My best guess answer is about 28 cents in the dollar, with the rest essentially going into admin....

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