Club Troppo

I just came across this MPI speech by Andrew Leigh. Damn fine job. Straightforward, informed, powerful. In a world in which people somehow get divided into subject wonks and sliver-tongues, it's amazing how much actually knowing stuff and having a perspective on things gives y...

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In the spirit of an earlier post addressing the French Film Festival, I'm now repeating my bleg, this time for the German Film Festival . Just to recap, this is an extract of what I said there . Film festivals are great things. Yet in my case I see them come, think “I’d like t...

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Gillard is still the best person to lead the ALP (there is no one else). How deal with the loss of trust following her broken promise on carbon tax? This is a difficult question but it must be resolved. Abbott keeps making stupid remarks and then saying “it was an inappropriat...

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The reason that you can't get many books back to the 1920s and then suddenly can? Copyright. Someone owns the copyright in the US if the book came out after 1923. Economics 101 teaches that the existence of the property right should enhance the availability of books. After all...

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Someone who emailed me saying he was coming to my presentation at Sydney Uni tomorrow night suggested we catch up for dinner. Which I'll be doing. Then I suggested to him that I'd invite anyone who was at the presentation who wanted to come along to come along. Not sure how th...

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No time to read the paper right now, but it looks great. Kantian Optimization, Social Ethos, and Pareto Efficiency Date: 2012-03 By: John E. Roemer (Dept. of Political Science, Yale University) Although evidence accrues in biology, anthropology and experimental economics that...

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Last year I did a presentation on Government 2.0 to Masters Government Students at Sydney Uni and it was lots of fun. So they invited me back. I suggested that this time we do it using the web properly, so I'll do a presentation but it will be filmed so that it can be hoisted...

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If you discovered that you had cancer would you (a) find a doctor who is an expert in treating your disease and follow their advice, or (b) attempt to devise your own treatment by reading about cancer on the internet? According to some sources, Apple founder Steve Jobs may hav...

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A Club Troppo Research Project In the Melbourne telephone directory, there are: 89 Head(s) 5 Neck(s) 13 Body(s) 1 Shoulder 14 Arms 69 Hand(s) 35 Finger(s) 52 Legg(s) 27 Foot(s) 1 Feet 6 Toe(s) 2 Heart(s) - A Time Lord? 22 Lung(s) 13 Kidney(s) No Stomach 1 Bowels No Penis, but...

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Responding to Noah Smith , Krugman says the following about the long term effects of the "Macro Wars" . On the academic side: look, to a first approximation nobody ever admits being wrong about anything. But my sense is that a lot of younger economists are aware, even if they...

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Risk theories typically assume individuals make risky choices using probability weights that differ from objective probabilities. Recent theories suggest that probability weights vary depending on which portion of a risky environment is made salient. Using experimental data we...

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Lawyers like their evidence to be nice and straightforward. Not to statistical. This is a real problem in some negligence cases. A surgeon might be a good surgeon, might have well below average adverse events, but if something screws up, doctrines like res ipsa loquitur - " th...

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Why don’t women patent? "In Why Don’t Women Patent? , a recent NBER paper, Jennifer Hunt et al. present a stark fact: Only 5.5% of the holders of commercialized patents are women." Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution . Innovation and inequality: What effect do now products and...

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In the USA (a presidential election year), there is a considerable debate on how much emphasis government policy should assign to economic growth (properly interpreted to encompass all externalities and market failures) and how much to income and welfare distribution. The argu...

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I tend to avoid business class even when entitled to it except for overnight flights, but being entitled to business class travel on a government board the computer always requires me to explain myself. And though it has an option where you can say that you're entitled to fly...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="220" caption="Tom Derrick - a good man to have on your side"] [/caption] I happened upon this on the front page of today's Wikipedia. Tom Derrick (1914–1945) was an Australian recipient of the Victoria Cross (VC) during the Second World...

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A a recent function I had the privilege to listen to David Halpern who heads up the 'Nudge unit' in the UK Cabinet Office. The "Applying Behavioural Insights" unit led by the aforementioned Halpern seeks to apply the insights of behavioural economics/psychology to public polic...

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Even Andrew Bolt is shocked . On Tuesday mining magnate Clive Palmer fronted the media and announced that the US Central Intelligence Agency is using the Rockefeller Foundation to fund a campaign to undermine Australia's coal industry. Palmer appeared in front of the cameras b...

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This lovely painting goes on sale this Thursday night at Menzies Auctioneers . An artist friend of mine isn't too impressed with Lin Onus, but then I think his work is lovely. So there. This painting will go for an estimated $150-200,000 plus buyers' fee plus GST, which is one...

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When the Koch vs Cato controversy erupted blogger Skip Oliva was all over it . Now he's just over it : When you cut through all the bullshit—90% of which is coming from the Cato side—what you’re left with is two old men who simply refuse to compromise. Charles Koch signed an a...

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