Club Troppo

In a speech at the Institute of Economic Affairs , Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey announced the the end of the age of entitlement. He followed up the speech with an interview for the ABC's Lateline . At Billablog, Hockey's speech inspires a song while Patricia at Cafe Whispers pe...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRhs26o03ok In the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty Friedrich Hayek explained that he saw little point in engaging with Rawls' Theory of Justice since "the differences between us seemed more verbal than substantial..." Many of his su...

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This wasn't supposed to be the theme of part two (Part One is here ) but Jessica Irvine's recent and timely column on superstardom and One Direction prompted me to add my two cents' worth - well someone else's two cents' worth but at least inserted by me. First; highlights fro...

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You heard it first on Troppo. And no Charlotte, it isn't bad that you didn't know that the Titanic was real. Philosophers have had the same trouble for years.

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I'll be making a few overseas trips in the next little while so will be catching up on some movie watching. I've just discovered 475 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc. so that's been a boon. However unfortunately a lot of them are on YouTube and/o...

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Whilst making pies yesterday I happened to recall a sentence I read 7 or so years ago, which suddenly struck me as very silly. So I just looked it up to make sure I hadn't imagined it. I didn't. Here's the whole paragraph. A final point worth noting on gang wars is that their...

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Journalism academic Terry Flew blogs about a recent paper by a UK colleague: Recently published on Open Democracy has been an influential paper by Angela Phillips on “ The Future of Journalism “. The paper was presented at the Media, Power and Revolution: Making the 21st Centu...

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[caption id="attachment_19320" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Peter Singer"] [/caption] Last week's ABC QandA debate between uber-atheist Richard Dawkins and Catholic archbishop George Pell generated quite a lot of blogosphere debate , not least here at Troppo . Howev...

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Twitter's a great medium for sharing links and short comments. And since that's pretty much what I've been doing with Missing Link Friday it raises an obvious question -- why not take Missing Link to Twitter? So I thought I'd give it a go: @donattroppo. Let me know what you th...

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HT Possum .

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Classical liberals and social justice: "many defenders of private economic liberty suffer from a malady that I shall call social justicitis . Social justicitis , as I use that term, refers to a strongly negative, even allergic , reaction to the idea of social or distributive j...

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God speechless at outrageous Atheistic slurs It was billed at the debate to end all debates. The one where the big questions would be finally resolved. Renowned God scoffer, Richard Dawkins verses Australian stuffed-shirt-in-chief Cardinal George Pell were to have it out on th...

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Some of you may know that Kaggle's motto is "We’re making data science a sport.™". Now we're publishing a leaderboard of our top ten performers . And it's quite an eye opener. There's not a professor there. Indeed there's not a person from a top university there. Just ten of t...

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Regular readers will be familiar with my dismay at the kind of bumph that passes for strategic planning . I recall as 'thinker in residence' at a one of the major departments in Canberra having a discussion with senior management about Web 2.0 and innovation in government. The...

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Here's an extract from a book on fair trade that I had occasion to look up. In what circumstances is fair trade a good thing? If we dig into our pockets to buy something at a higher price than necessary in order to engage in 'fair trade', then we know a few things. The sacrifi...

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It's a sad day in the Aus blogosphere. Leading left-leaning group blog Larvatus Prodeo has folded its capacious tent and joined the ranks of ex- parrots blogs. Supremo senior commissar Mark Bahnisch explains the public rationale: We collectively feel seven years is enough. I t...

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Medieval Universities, Legal Institutions, and the Commercial Revolution by Davide Cantoni, Noam Yuchtman - NBER #17979 We present new data documenting medieval Europe's "Commercial Revolution'' using information on the establishment of markets in Germany. We use these data to...

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Social Identity and Inequality: The Impact of China's Hukou System Date: 2012-03 By: Afridi, Farzana (Indian Statistical Institute) Li, Sherry Xin (University of Texas at Dallas) Ren, Yufei (Union College) URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp6417&r=exp We conduct an...

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Troppo's patron saint Adam Smith put it thus (note the generous assumption about human nature): The liberal reward of labor, as it encourages the propagation, so it increases the industry of the common people . . .. Where wages are high, accordingly, we shall always ?nd the wo...

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http://youtu.be/NOyx3r59L-I

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