The Gregorian revolution gave rise to a form of organisation that was gradually stamped out all over the Western world and then to its followers. Constitutional monarchy: A pyramid with a chief executive at the top with the rest of the pyramid made up of checks and balances on...

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One of the more curious phenomena of the last 18 months has been the fatalism on display on both sides of the lockdown divide. In the anti-lockdown brigade fatalism props up in the guise of "this was the inevitable outcome of decades of planning", a view of humanity wherein on...

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A major theme in our book " the Great Covid Panic " (now also on Kindle !) is how a whole layer of politicians, medical advisers, and opportunistic business people grabbed the opportunity for more power and money during the lockdowns of 2020-2021. We detail how they did it and...

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It's here, the booklet I am sure you have all been waiting for. The one which Gigi Foster and Michael Baker slaved over for 10 months . It is also on Kindle . It is dedicated to all the victims of the Panic, in poor countries and rich countries. They include our children, the...

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Since I learned in April 2020 that transmission of covid was mainly via extremely small aerosols, I have regarded face masks as a placebo: they are to aerosols what garden gates are to mosquitoes. Yet, placebos have a role so I wasn't too against them and willing to have my as...

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What do you do as an Australian parliament when a foreign company censors mainstream media content in Australia, undermining free speech ? Do you organise an inquiry to hold those foreign companies to account and to see how you might prevent foreign meddling? Or do you fall in...

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This short post grew out of a response to Paul Frijters on another thread. Naturally enough, those who don't want to lockdown are telling us about our precious liberties. You know those we fought for at Gallipoli, and Iraq and Afghanistan. In any event, I strongly agree with t...

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Let us divide the countries in Europe that have at least 1 million inhabitants into three groups: the ones that had high movement restrictions in 2020, the ones with almost no restrictions, and the ones in between. The graph below gives you the punchline that countries with mo...

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Consider three graphs that really on their own tell the story of the groups in the US/UK that did well and that did badly economically out of the lockdowns. On the super-rich : On the workers , particularly the bottom 25% (meaning those who in their characteristics like educat...

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Pre 2020, I considered Scott Morrison a political enemy of the policies I wanted for Australia, but since then have sympathised with every attempt he has made to get Australia out of its love-affair with covid-mania. Over the fold is my take on what I think Scott Morrison's vi...

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Wellbeing science has behaved very honourably during this pandemic in my opinion, particularly in the UK, where many of the best-known wellbeing researchers openly pointed to the disproportionate costs of lockdowns compared to their (dubious) benefits . Many stood up in newspa...

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One of the things I keep track off in covid-times is what is happening to births. Though it was initially suggested couples might use their extra lockdown-time to produce babies, it has become clear that in the Western world the opposite is true and that they reduce births by...

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Martin Lally is a kiwi economist who late in 2020 decided to calculate for himself what his own country was losing by locking itself away from the world, coming to the conclusion that New Zealand was sacrificing something like 26 life-years in the future to 'save' 1 life-year....

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I am co-writing a book on the Great Panic to explain what happened and what can be done to avoid a repeat. In the course of our research for that book, me and co-authors are scouring websites in the rest of the world to find out how others in the Covistance have experienced th...

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Compared to the trends on January 2020, has Australia or Sweden lost more wellbeing in 2020? And which has seen the greater damage to expected future wellbeing years for after 2020? The Table below summarizes the answers to this. For the first calculation, let us only count th...

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I here want to salute the brave artists who used their talents to capture the inhumanity and essential insanity of lockdowns. My favourite is the "guerilla mask force", an artistic idea that apparently started in Switzerland but spread all over Europe. what this guerilla mask...

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The essential governance problem in March 2020 in Western countries was the overwhelming demand of the vast majority of the population to do something dramatic in response to their fear. There was a clamour to be ‘led to safety’ by populations scared to death by images in the...

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With a recent publication in Nature that reported lockdowns have no effect on covid-cases or covid-deaths, there are now over 30 studies that fail to find any covid-reducing benefits of lockdowns. Worse, across countries and time, more severe lockdowns are just leading to more...

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Guess which crackpot started his article on covid in that notorious right-wing publication 'The Guardian' with the sentence "The virus has been used as a pretext in many countries to crush dissent, criminalise freedoms and silence reporting"? It's that obvious conspiracy-nutte...

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While the hysteria marches on here in Europe, an interesting economics article came out in a decent journal on the political economy of that mass hysteria. Their abstract: In this article, we aim to develop a political economy of mass hysteria. Using the background of COVID-19...

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Consider the picture below of two hypothetical Accident and Emergency departments (A&E), one that has no covid-regulations and simply has the available nurses trying to help all comers as fast as possible. In the other one the nurses try to prevent mingling by testing newcomer...

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An important rule in politics is that you adopt the best policies and slogans of your opponent only after you have destroyed that opponent. Till that moment you pretend he is the devil, but afterwards you re-label his best ideas and call them your own. A great Australian examp...

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I am all for effective vaccines and have been impressed with how fast vaccines have been developed against covid, but I never expected them to be the wonder weapons some promised them to be. After all, the yearly new vaccines against the flu never eradicated the flu but reduce...

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“men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses more slowly, and one by one.” MacKay, 1841. Right now, London and much of Europe are in peak covid-mania, entering another two months of lockdowns on to...

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2020 was certainly a roller coaster for a social scientist, full of surprises. Let me not once again bemoan the increasingly coordinated attack on all sources of vitality in Western civilisation, but look ahead and openly wonder about what 2021 will bring in terms of 7 specifi...

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Guess which countries in Europe have had the lowest average restrictions on individual behaviour from March to December according to researchers at the Blavatnik school of government in Oxford ? Guess which countries in the world have had the most or least stringent government...

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Stock markets give us a glimpse what people with money have deduced about world events before they happen. Investors can make mistakes, sometimes terrible mistakes, but they are honest mistakes: you don’t buy a stock at a 100 if you actually honestly believe that same stock wi...

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How will Western historians in 2050 remember 2020? In scenario 1, "The Great Panic, a lost generation", I sketch my best guess. Scenario 2, "A job well done" is the one I imagine many current Western governments hope is told. Scenario 3, "The dark path of the Great Panic", is...

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How are we going to escape the authoritarian nightmare and regain our liberties and zest for life? This long read is written for organisers of new Covistance initiatives, explaining the logic of what others have done and what could further be done. So I am speaking to those of...

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Ramesh Thakur is one of many commentators inside the Covistance who think government public health advisers have committed crimes against humanity . His anger was raised by reports of desperate parents in India selling their children into virtual slavery, including sexual expl...

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Dr. Joffe just posted a new article on the many negative effects of lockdowns in Canada and in the world as a whole. He really has put in a fantastic effort to source the evidence on the negative effects of the covid-related policies, digging up and critically evaluating nearl...

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Sweden is a rich, spacious country famous for IKEA, ABBA, dark cold winters, and its unique covid-policies. We escaped London for a few days to see for ourselves what the deal was with this Scandinavian country of 10 million. It is as rich and well-run as the statistics say it...

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Those who already in March foretold the folly of lockdowns and social distancing did not dream we'd still be in the same place after 7 months. Only slowly has it dawned that the panic would become an enduring business model . For a long time, we believed sanity would soon prev...

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A group of senior medical scientists have gotten together to pen an open petition to governments and society, calling for a herd immunity approach to the coronavirus. Signatories already include over 3000 "Medical & Public Health Scientists", 4000 "Medical Practitioners", and...

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Have a look at the graph below which summarises (excess) deaths per week in 24 European regions , roughly the EU, over the last few years. Note how the vertical axis only starts at 40,000 and that hence the fluctuations relative to baseline are smaller than they seem here. The...

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One can tell many stories of how current times resemble some earlier historical period. The conflict between nationalism and internationalism, as personified by the controversies surrounding Brexit and Trump, has been seen as somewhat of a re-run of the conflict between fascis...

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[Bottom line: the conflicting forces now being created in the UK and Australia are truly frightening.] The UK government has just announced a nationwide return of one of the most destructive elements of lock downs: mandatory social isolation. Gatherings of more than 6 people a...

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[below the exact text (with different font/highlight) as Gigi Foster's submission to the Victorian parliamentary library in mid-August here . To see her health-related notes, including on topics like non-linearities and Sweden, see here , and to see all documents of that inqui...

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For months now, demographers and other social scientists have been predicting a covid baby bust because marriages were postponed , pubs were closed, anxiety levels were up, measured fertility intentions were down, sexual activity went down (in some reports), and economic uncer...

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Suppose you agree with me that containment and elimination strategies pursued regarding Covid-19 do far more harm than good. Suppose you also believe that having an open economy and a vibrant close-contact social life is vital for the long-run health of the country. You want t...

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The UK Office of National Statistics data on the wellbeing of the British population shows a unprecedented drop of about 10% in average wellbeing in the UK since March 2020. Anxiety levels almost doubled, slowly returning to normal, but wellbeing remains low as people are prev...

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There have long been scientists who were celebrities in their own time. Galileo, Keppler, Goodall, Linneus, Cousteau, Darwin, Smith, Leeuwenhoek, Da Vinci, Ibn Khaldhun, Curie, and many others in the last 800 years were followed and admired. They in many ways performed their s...

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Here is a new paper from Imperial College , this time by a team with David Miles, Mike Stedman, and A drian Heald, looking into the implicit cost per QALY that the UK spent via lock downs and other repression policies. They use a somewhat different methodology from mine , esti...

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There are 5 aspects of the covid-19 pandemic I really did not see coming, all pointing to a phenomenon that European sociologists of a century ago spent their whole lives describing, coming up with theories about crowds and their behaviour - theories now largely forgotten. Sch...

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If you, like me, believe our collective hysteria is needlessly causing the world tens of millions of deaths and enormous unhappiness , you surely need a bit of humour to keep going. So let’s view the whole crisis via a different lens and share the brilliance of UK government c...

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Find below the video of a seminar for the Australian Institute for Progress done a few weeks ago detailing the basic cost-benefit view of the current pandemic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TS2DE-D1TA The slides of this presentation are here: Presentation CBA Covid May 2020...

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Let’s talk about some of the covid policy options facing Australia in the coming months and years. It seems to me we can either grasp the nettle and accept we will get a wave of highly visible covid-19 deaths before life returns to normal, or we can try and defend ourselves ag...

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[in progress: will add more references, links and latest numbers when I get the time] In this note, I want to deal with three related issues: the main lessons on the corona virus from the reported deaths across countries with different policies; the feasibility of different “e...

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There is one hell of a recession coming for Australia. Economic activity has already reduced by 20% and actual unemployment will probably peak near 20% too , and about a million businesses have already applied for some sort of assistance. The population increase of the last 20...

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Here at Clubtroppo, we have been saying for well over a month now that a quick look at the economic damage and the health damage of the responses to the corona virus tells you they dwarf the possible benefits of suppressing the virus, anywhere in the West. This has lead to the...

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Note: Article expanded on 24 April and again on 27 April. The middle now has more meat. So you can read it again! As Paul Frijters has recently said on this site, many countries will soon ease their restrictions on social isolation. As Paul has been pointing out , we pay a hig...

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Did you know that Australia has over 13,000 IVF babies born per year, the UK over 20,000 , the West as a whole (Europe+US+offshoots) over 200,000 and the world as a whole 500,000 ? And did you know that due to the corona panic these services have been halted pretty much everyw...

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My first prediction is an easy one: many countries are going to ease their restrictions on social isolation in the coming weeks, including many countries with an ongoing corona problem. They simply have to if they want to have any economy left. You can see this happening to di...

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We're constantly in team meetings here in the underground bunker at Club Troppo working out how to tweak the linkbait. An edict has already been passed down the line from the AI that runs the place that no posts will be published on anything but Coronavirus for the next six mo...

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How much unhappiness is created by the unemployment of millions of people in Western countries (mainly N-Am +Europe) caused by the corona panic? How much unhappiness has been created due to the vast expansion of loneliness and physical inactivity? And in terms of the tradeoff...

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[caption id="attachment_36339" align="alignright" width="337"] Is this a bunch of black patches on a white background? It is. Of course it is. (Remember you're at Troppo now. No mucking around.) It also depicts something which you can't unsee once you've seen it. Such is the p...

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