Club Troppo

I offered this comment in a LinkedIn discussion, and thought I might 'put it out there' as my daughter says. In the process I edited and played around with it a little. One of the things that the last few years have shown I think is that rank cynicism plays much worse for the...

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First it was David Brooks' Harold and Erica . Now it's the Obama campaign's Julia . Harold, Erica and Julia are all fictitious characters born into a perpetual present. They live and grow old in a world that doesn't change. As Michael Shear at the New York Times writes : At ag...

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Your editorial ( Politics of envy threatens our economy and ethos , 2 May) claims that “Research by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling has shown that all income levels prospered in the Howard years and that under the Rudd-Gillard governments the gap between...

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At the Lowy Interpreter Sam Roggeveen speculates about the possibility of a company (particularly Apple) buying a country. There has been at least on fictional treatment of a corporation taking over a country in John Brunner's wonderful 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar . It is bas...

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A while back I blogged about the spate of mandated product information when one buys medicine. I just got a scrip from the chemist with a new format consumer information in it and I'm afraid I'm pretty pissed off with what an organised piece of stupidity it really is. Previous...

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I'm not much of a fan of giving to wealthy causes. Like private schools for the well healed. I was asked to attend an interview to see if I'd go on the Council of my daughter's private school - which I said I would. I was then asked if I was Jewish (it's an Anglican School) an...

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Interest rates in Australia have just been reduced by 0.5% in the hope that this will stimulate the economy. Will it work? Uncertain. But will politicians say it will work in the coming federal budget? Almost undoubtedly. Perhaps displays of optimism are not such a bad thing,...

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Measuring the Effects of the 1991 Federal Alcohol Tax Increase , Philip J. Cook and Christine Piette Durrance "[A tax induced increase of 6 percent in alcohol prices] resulted in a reduction of 4.7 percent in injury deaths nationwide." ecause consumers reduce alcohol consumpti...

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Though our fiscal stimulus was exemplary (except by the standards of The Australian Newspaper which requires 20,000 investments to all go off without a hitch), there was one area where I argued at the time , that could have been improved. For reasons that are a tad mysterious...

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Debt Overhangs: Past and Present by Carmen M. Reinhart, Vincent R. Reinhart, Kenneth S. Rogoff Abstract: We identify the major public debt overhang episodes in the advanced economies since the early 1800s, characterized by public debt to GDP levels exceeding 90% for at least f...

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Herewith the text of my talk on Ockham's Razor this morning . It is from a longer essay which you can find here , boiled down so that it could be read in the 12 minutes or so one gets on Ockham's Razor. I. Shortly after Barack Obama became the first US president to build his c...

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Recovering journalist Mr Denmore succinctly summarises the response of the media (at least the Murdoch portion of it) to the Peter Slipper controversy: [T]he Tory regime changers of News Ltd could spin the Peter Slipper story into an imagined constitutional crisis and provide...

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[caption id="attachment_19526" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Magistrate Pat O'Shane"] [/caption] Cross-posted from CDU Law and Business Online With CDU Introduction to Public Law students due to study the topic judicial independence next week, it is an opportune time...

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How aged care reform slipped off the media agenda: "Confronted with a major policy initiative that, while affecting millions, offered little potential for partisanship or prurience, the media was a little flummoxed". Mr Denmore, The Failed Estate . The limits of citizen journa...

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They played the studio version of this song by Colin Hay on the day that we learned that Greg Ham had died. It was a good choice. I saw Colin Hay play this song back in 2002 at Woodford. Back then it was just him, a guitar and his gorgeous wife. Here he is playing it at the Co...

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Part one of a intermittent series on interesting ideas that might not be useful. Today I'm talking about path dependence that leaves us with second rate technology. The hypothesis is very simple, but very interesting. A society has a problem, and a number of technologies becom...

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Anzac Day. A day for reminiscing. A day for remembering great deeds, and the heroic words that were written about them .

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In 1992 Bill Clinton campaigned on ideal : "The ideal that if you work hard and play by the rules you'll be rewarded, you'll do a little better next year than you did last year, your kids will do better than you." This was the American dream. With the economy in recession, man...

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http://youtu.be/fWNaR-rxAic I heard this song for the first time this evening. No doubt I'm one of the last to hear it - I certainly come after nearly 30 million YouTube plays. Anyway, it's a great song. What's nice is that it seems like a throwback to the time when women pop...

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(note to self) For many years now, it has been clear to the insiders that there is no hope in achieving serious reductions to greenhouse gas emission by means of international co-operation: the incentives to free ride on the efforts of others is too great and none of the big p...

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