Club Troppo

"The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date" was released a last week. It's dedicated to the idea that knowledge not only changes, but changes in a systematic way. From the blurb: Just as we know that a chunk of uranium can break down in a measurable...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wz9CbuC--w Enthusiasm alert: Well folks, some of you are aware that I suffer from bouts of enthusiasm. In the cold light of day, perhaps things don’t look so good. So here I am blown away by something I’ve just seen. But then I’m on a plane tra...

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Here is a mystery for you. The Great Wall of China is one of the architectural wonders of the world. Apparently not quite visible from space but very impressive nonetheless. Built and rebuilt many times over many centuries and by hundreds of thousands of labourers. The picture...

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https://youtu.be/x6f4ZB2xnF8 (Four minutes of extracts from a 27 minute video which can be watched here .) Here's today's column from the Age and SMH . MASS production and professionalised services built modern prosperity. But in welfare their legacy provides one of the great...

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Is the real genius of economics our ability to see things that are impossible to objectively measure? The examples I have in mind are incentives, market failures, groups, power, and corruption. Below, I will point out just how impossible these things are to objectively measure...

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I don't want to overstate the case here - there are many, many more spectacular sights in nature than the tide-turn at Styx Creek - but in my world this brings me a sense of joy every time I see it. Mark MacLean Last week I was reading Why Nations Fail . The topic is of close...

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It was around four in morning when I pulled the car over to the side of the road and switched off the engine. I was a hundred or so kilometres out of Perth and when I killed the lights everything went black. When I stepped out of the car I was afraid I might not find my way ba...

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Jan Libich from Latrobe University is running a televised series on economics . He gets people into his TV studio to talk about some aspect of the economy and then puts it out there. Andrew Leigh, Andrew Hughes Hallett, and Eric Leeper were previous victims. Adrian Pagan and W...

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This an opinion piece, my effort to entertain or provoke you while I make an important point. In this paragraph I should start making an argument for the Important Point but, I'm off to bad start. My title should have included some clever figure of speech like a pun or literar...

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You're looking at two Segues ® converted by Marathon Targets in Sydney into a moving target for the training of our military. The input segues cost a few thousand and after Marathon Targets have armour plated the moving parts, and built software and various controls to turn th...

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They are both amazing feats of human engineering? They both cost billions with little tangible benefit? They were both launched in a desert? Both mainly built by Western engineers? No, they are both good examples of status races. The moon landing was all about competition with...

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Gentlemen, Whilst marching from Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your requests which have been sent by His Majesty’s ship from London to Lisbon and thence by dispatch to our head...

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A vexing question for a parent, particularly an economist, is whether or not to reward your kids monetarily for higher school grades. Let me admit right here that this is how I was raised: something like 10 dollars for every subject I got an A, 5 dollars for a B and nothing fo...

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The Band, Old Rocking Chair c.1970 [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9M4azk6-GM&w=420&h=315]

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I once heard a person , in reference to the note at right, that you could tell a great deal about a country by who they chose to put on their notes. He felt it spoke well of Japan that Fukuzawa Yukichi, a thinker and philosopher, was chosen for their currency. I don't really b...

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In part I and part II , I discussed the general geo-political implications of the rise of China, and the internal dynamics within the Chinese bureaucracy and the Party, concluding that one should not underestimate the disruption to the whole of China and its international rela...

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Well I'm not the first to the party - 26 million late in fact, but it's fun nevertheless. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX1YVzdnpEc]

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As some readers may have noticed (assuming you can access us at all), the performance of Troppo is still distinctly dodgy despite Jacques shifting from his original choice of Wordpress web host. Its name was WpEngine and it provided next to no service during the day in Austral...

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The picture below is of a mountainous area in Spain. It used to be full of small-scale farmers and is now almost deserted. Over the many centuries that farmers have tried to eek something useful out of this area, they created terraces all the way to the top of the mountains. I...

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The graphic below comes from the University of Michigan's Professor Mark Perry, who runs a libertarian and market-oriented blog called Carpe Diem . It shows, essentially, the collapse of the advertising revenue stream in US newspapers. Adjusted for inflation, US newspapers wil...

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