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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I visited Afghanistan only once, on a brief visit in 2014. I fell off a donkey to great hilarity of the local villagers, slept in a compound with the armed owner keeping watch the whole night, heard stories of how life was in Soviet times, and got a glimpse of why the Afghan p...

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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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I have been a utilitarian for about 30 years now and am seen in my academic work as an extreme version of the genre. I did my Phd on the topic . I do not merely say that governments should make policy for the benefit of the wellbeing of the population, but have spent years in...

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Wellbeing & Policy Making Book Launch Event on 1st July 5-6.30pm London Time. Attending the Launch is Free, the book is not! [blurb from Nancy Hey, director of the WW Centre for Wellbeing]: The What Works Centre for Wellbeing , and our commissioning partners at the ESRC: Econo...

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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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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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Now and then one should look up and see if there are any trends that are not usually talked about in the media but that say something big about how humanity is going. I here want to briefly discuss the latest data on four big trends: war, food, (hunger?) deaths, and inequality...

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We lost David Savage this week to a heart attack at the age of 48, leaving a wife Deborah and many colleagues around the world. He was a Queensland boy who got educated in Brisbane and then quickly made it to Associate Professor in behavioural economics, teaching students in N...

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Ed Diener , one of the best-known scholars of happiness died this week at the age of 76. He was known as Dr Happiness in the United States, well-known for his 7-item scale on wellbeing and his constant refrain that the secret to happiness is in warm social relations. I met Ed...

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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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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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Sometimes one has an idea that blazes into one's consciousness as a solution to one particular concern, which then starts to be something much bigger than just a solution to a problem. It becomes an interesting thing in itself and starts appearing as relevant to many different...

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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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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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“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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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It’s an intimidating picture. But the weaker the freeze, the more people die in overburdened hospitals — and the longer it ultimately takes for the economy to restart. Donald G. McNeil Jr in the NYT Yes folks, I normally don't go in for all that MALARKY WITH CAPITAL LETTERS IN...

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I ran into Ken Henry at a function – I think it was the terrific PM's Science Prizes in late 2008 but someone may be able to look things up and falsify this claim. In any event, I squatted at his table and had a quick chat to him about the recently announced or soon to be anno...

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Consider the shown picture where you are the decision maker who can pull the lever of the train tracks to avoid the coming train from going straight. If you do not divert the train, one person, John, will get run over. He is elderly and suffering from many diseases. You know h...

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This post is a direct response and rebuttal to the recent ‘Has the coronavirus panic cost us at least 10 million lives already? ’ by Paul Fritjers. Paul’s post takes the current covid-19 crisis, and uses some haphazard multiplication to create an alarming narrative, muddying t...

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The number of people worldwide who have died from the coronavirus stands at 8,000 at the moment, equivalent to the death toll of two days of the world's traffic accidents. The fear is of course that millions more will follow. The panic over what the virus might do has now lead...

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[off the cuff research idea memo] There is an uncanny analogy between China in the 19th century and the US this very moment: in both cases a large part of the general population could not be persuaded away from drugs by morality or prison. Opium in China then, opioids in the U...

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Let's first agree that if Trump is a blessing in disguise for world peace, he makes an exceptionally good disguise. Trump's bark is probably the worst of any US president in living memory. He has threatened the total destruction of North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and probably a...

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The probability of a massive nuclear war the next 10 years between any of the 8 current nuclear powers (US, UK, France, Russia, India, Pakistan, NK, Israel) seems low. The bluster of the leaders is supposed to make the threat look a bit bigger than it is in order to get negoti...

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In the engine room of nation states, ie the tax departments, the coming battle with platform providers is taking shape. Uber, airbnb, facebook, linkedin, ebay, jobseek, and a myriad of specialised platform providers facilitate micro-trades that are largely untaxed by the autho...

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National history is the story that binds ‘us who make up the nation’ into a single entity with a collective memory . It has a purpose and as such we can choose what historical events and realities to put into that story, whilst forgetting the rest. Of the four main current con...

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Sometimes, it feels like 1910 all over again. Then, a confident Germany was the up-and-coming industrial power house, fearing an even more up-and-coming Russia, with the UK and France desperately holding on to their colonial empires. Now, a confident China is the up-and-coming...

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Looking at the newspapers you’d think Catholicism is having a hard time with philandering priests and cover-ups of their doings being found out on a weekly basis. In Australia, the royal commission has uncovered a lot of systematically covered-up child abuse in the Catholic Ch...

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Let me indulge, purely for entertainment value, in some fan-speculation on what we will see on-screen after the Long Night is over and the final 6 episodes Of Game of Thrones are run in 2019. Let me first talk about the end-game aspects I think the books and the tv-series seem...

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Have you ever reflected on what a strange concept the notion of a 'cause of death' really is? We use the term so often that it wouldn't quickly register as a cultural oddity, but it really is a quirky beast and has an odd history. I have a bit of a professional interest in thi...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM With the ongoing partisan squabbling about tax accompanying the imminent federal election, I thought it might be worth setting out my own “wish list” for an ideal tax system. As readers know, I am not an economist or accountant, and...

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Just as happens with dividend imputation in Australia , corporate structures are remarkably robust to seeing things from the shareholder perspective, leading Troppo's self-appointed Chief Economist and Joint Pontificator In-Chief to conclude that tax cuts to dividends offer th...

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