Club Troppo

In empirical economic research we live in the age of the randomistas where whole departments do nothing else but look for random events to give them some variation to identify a causal relation. Cyclone Sandy looks like providing a lot of random variation so you can bet your b...

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The white paper Australia in the Asian Century was released this week. It is as exciting as you expect white papers to be. [caption id="" align="alignright" width="170"] I am unimpressed by the arguments for increasing Asian language literacy.[/caption] As expected it is full...

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An oft-heard complaint is that politicians lie to us. They promise us 100,000 jobs, lower taxes, more generous spending, an end to poverty and inequality, economic growth, better schools, world peace, nicer climate, and victory over all our enemies. And when they do not delive...

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Samuel Sewall (1652–1730) is the man with the bowed head in this picture. He has much to feel remorseful about. Amongst eight other judges, he's sentenced nineteen innocent people to death for being witches in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. When January 14, was established as a...

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The Australian visa point-system is the envy of the world as it has ensured that Australia gets a large influx of well-educated, healthy, English-speaking migrants. How large is the free gift that comes walking into our doors this way? Conservatively, I would say 50 billion do...

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Radovan Karadzic is now on trial for his role in the massacre of Srebenica and general Mladic was already convicted before him for aiding and abetting this genocide as the military commander of the Serbs. The question I mainly want to pose here is whether the 450 Dutch troops...

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I've just finished listening to the ABC's Waleed Aly interviewing Jock Laurie, president of the National Farmers' Federation, on the newly-announced register of foreign investment in agricultural land. (You can listen to it too, here .) Laurie's position was effectively: "We k...

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Last Thursday I posed the question of how often the water you drink has been pissed by a vertebrate already. If the number is very small, then those who baulk at drinking recycled water have more cause to complain than if the number is very high. As some commentators to that p...

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Yet another challenge for you: how many times has the water you drink been pissed out of a vertebrate (something with a spine) in the past? If the number is very small, then those who baulk at drinking recycled water have more cause to complain than if the number is very high....

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Have a look at the following picture that comes from a 2012 paper by Gotz and Hecq on forecasting growth. It tells you what the US growth rate at 3 different dates was estimated to be over time. This means that the start of the thick black line tells you what they thought in t...

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[caption id="attachment_21735" align="alignright" width="300"] You have to wonder why even a young-ish Julia Gillard didn't smell a rat given Bruce Wilson's eyes ...[/caption] The hive-mind that is the Canberra Press Gallery has apparently decided that PM Julia Gillard's activ...

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Last Thursday, I posed the mystery of whether there are in fact 16 million direct male descendants of Genghis Khan . This factoid came from a 2003 study of some 2000 Central Asian men, of which 8% were found to share a common male ancestor around the year 1000 AD, give or take...

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Winter in the Fire Forest 20 October - 17 November 2012 Troppos are very welcome to join us at the opening Saturday 20 October 3pm-5 pm Utopia Art Sydney 2 Danks St Waterloo 02 9699 2900 exhibition catalogue Winter in the Fire Forest , 2005, archival oil on board, 60 x 80cm. C...

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As in part one of this series, I'm thinking about an idea that seems very possible, extremely interesting and well accepted, but which has little going for it in terms of observed evidence. The idea today is societal collapse. The premise is simple. Human societies are very co...

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Too many political commentators think about social media users as voters who don't matter when they should be thinking about them as an audience that does When Julia Gillard ripped into opposition leader Tony Abbott accusing him of sexism and misogyny, the YouTube video of the...

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Here is a puzzle for you to figure out: did Genghis Khan really have 16 million direct male descendants? Note the careful wording: direct male descendants. It is a factoid that has been around since 2003 when a now famous genetic study concluded that 16 milllion men in Central...

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The Australian government wants us to join the Europeans in a carbon Emissions Trading Scheme. To this end they have sent legislation to the Senate who are going through the usual rigmarole of invited submissions on this topic. Together with my PhD student Cameron Murray, I ha...

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Poverty programs have become cash cows for powerful corporate interests, says Peter Schweizer at the Daily Beast . In the US, state governments increasingly rely on electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards to distribute social assistance. And around the world, financial service...

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Last week I posed the mystery of why the Great Wall of China was so small at the top of the hills but so large at the bottom. Anyone can jump right onto it at the top. Where Europeans built castles designed to keep even a single attacker out, something else was going on with t...

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Interesting piece by well-known IT figure Jeff Atwood: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/09/computer-crime-then-and-now.html On one level, this piece is a terrific summary of how hacking is done. It's mostly not about messing with computers; it's about messing with people....

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