Club Troppo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVp8UGjECt4&feature=player_detailpage#t=320s Well folks, Yoram Bauman the stand-up economist whom you can see above and at his website is heading for Singapore in September and Tim Harcourt and I have been trying to get him to Australia. But to d...

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Well this confirms my own prejudices, and it may even be right! The Cost of Friendship Date: 2012-06 By: Paul Gompers Vladimir Mukharlyamov Yuhai Xuan This paper explores two broad questions on collaboration between individuals. First, we investigate what personal characterist...

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I stumbled upon this piece and voted in this online poll. I said I wasn't making any changes to my behaviour as a result of the carbon tax. But most people are! So far so good!

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The ABC has broadcast a two part doco on Woody Allen's life which I really loved. He's a remarkable person, and just keeps churning out films, great, good, bad and indifferent. In any event by the end of watching this documentary I was an admirer of his, not just of his films,...

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The 21st was supposed to be the age of flying cars, teleporters and affordable space travel, says David Graeber . But now here we are in the future still arguing about overcrowded trains and the price of petrol. David Graeber feels cheated: Where ... are the flying cars? Where...

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Amidst all the kerfuffle about asylum seeker policy over the last week, it probably escaped most people's attention that the Gillard government's Orwellian Newspeak-rebadged version of the Northern Territory Emergency Intervention, called " Stronger Futures ", passed through P...

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The Coalition is engaged in further hypocrisy. 1. The Coalition (both under Howard and more recently through Morrison’s own words) has supported Nairu as an appropriate venue well before Nairu had signed the UN Convention on Refugees. 2. The current Abbott policy still does no...

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http://youtu.be/xlIrI80og8c I didn't know I was a fan of Karl's till this. (Apologies if you've seen it before - like our tagline says - Troppo, proudly a few months behind the cutting edge of popular culture)

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Erstwhile econoblogger and now federal Labor MP Andrew Leigh has been unjustly traduced by the dastardly Liberals and has complained about it on Twitter. Somewhat uncharitably some might think, I couldn't resist a gentle return poke: As media analyst Andrew Catsaras pointed ou...

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It seems intuitive that other things (which means total wealth) being equal, the more equally income is distributed, the more utility gets squeezed out of it. Of course at the limit there's a tension between equality and efficiency - but then at the limit there's also a tensio...

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Keynes. mercantilism and the Euro crisis

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[caption id="attachment_20702" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Sri Lankan asylum seekers in Nauru detention in 2007"] [/caption] Why doesn't the Gillard Labor government swallow its pride and simply accept the Coalition's latest compromise proposal on asylum seeker pol...

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The Modular Nature of Trustworthiness Detection By: Bonnefon, Jean-François (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) De Neys, Wim (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) Hopfensitz, Astrid (TSE) The capacity to trust wisely is a critical facilitator of success and...

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Regular Troppodillians will have observed occasional attempts by me to get something regular going on Troppo regarding films. None have come to anything. Anyway, I've just completed a couple of deadlines and have a couple of free film passes obtained last year which only last...

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Stand Your Ground Laws and Homicides , Chandler B. McClellan, Erdal Tekin Since 2005, eighteen states have passed legislation that has extended the right to self-defense, with no duty to retreat, to places a person has a legal right to be, and several other states are debating...

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Finding Eldorado: Slavery and Long-run Development in Colombia , Daron Acemoglu, Camilo García-Jimeno, James A. Robinson Slavery has been a major institution of labor coercion throughout history. Colonial societies used slavery intensively across the Americas, and slavery rema...

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[caption id="attachment_20699" align="alignright" width="300"] Ceci n'est pas un Duchamp[/caption] I once overheard a serious conversation between two curators as to whether the urinal they were looking at was a genuine Duchamp or an unauthorised urinal. Strange loops involve...

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In the torrent of words over the job cuts at Fairfax and News Ltd, not many people seem to have noticed that these events also further undermine the already teetering argument of the Finkelstein Review for a new system of media regulation. How's that? Recall that the Finkelste...

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"All I want to do is go to the movies, have a soda and popcorn" says Michael Graham . But with New York mayor Michael Bloomberg banning supersized sodas and officials talking about extending the regulations to popcorn , conservatives like Graham are feeling nanny's hot breath...

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