[caption id="attachment_36320" align="alignleft" width="1031"] Why does this graph capture the idea of the Evaluator General? All is revealed in this post .[/caption] Luke Slawomirski, a health economist I met at the OECD over a decade ago when I proposed Gruen Tenders among o...

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No-one really knows the most cost-effective treatments for mental ill-health. But among the most promising options right now: take the dog for a walk. Illustration: A cost-effective mental resource takes a break from promoting healthy exercise and lifting spirits ... Meet Otis...

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Troppo readers may be wondering why I haven’t been blogging lately, after making a comeback several months ago after a long absence. The reason is that my wife Jen is in hospital dying from ovarian cancer. It’s very distressing, both for me and our daughter Jessica (not to men...

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David Tiley was one of the early generation of bloggers in Australia, starting in 2003, approximately the same time as I started. I first met him at a blogging meet-up in St Kilda (where David lived) in about 2005. Blogging was much more social in those days, and there were fr...

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As longstanding readers will know, I was one of the founders of Troppo along with Nicholas Gruen and several others including Mark Bahnisch and Don Arthur. The latter two moved on to other things (Don was a research at the Federal Parliamentary Library last time I heard, a rol...

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Valiant attempts have been made to measure happiness and wellbeing. People much smarter than me have developed fancy indices, and people even smarter than that, such as our own Nicholas Gruen, has called bullshit on many of them . What I propose is something far simpler: make...

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I always say that political economy is the best (or least worst) lens through which to examine how health systems work. This goes for Medicare, which is far more than a service delivery model and has massive institutional and political import. The recently established 'Strengt...

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This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in Crikey on 3 June 2022. As I see it, the four most pressing challenges for the new Minister for health and ageing concern: 1. promoting health (not just treating disease); 2. addressing the disconnect between care s...

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[caption id="attachment_35644" align="alignleft" width="1163"] For anyone who’s interested I recommend David Cayley’s series of CBC radio documentaries on Illich. (He’s the best broadcaster I’ve come across). The first series of five programs focuses on Illich’s social thought...

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Cross-posted from The Mandarin (and written about ten days ago, so it fails to mention Adelaide's latest snafu). Lockdowns, border closures, masks, apps and eradication. Where do you stand? One can’t sensibly address any of these issues without knowing more about context. But...

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[caption id="attachment_34406" align="alignright" width="320"] Kind of a fun graphic[/caption] Well, we look like getting a vaccine! Of course managing the policy response to the virus could know of this only as a possibility. But, looking like it is coming to pass, that possi...

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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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[caption id="attachment_34335" align="alignright" width="378"] Dan Andrews said that his 'Road Map' for easing the lockdown is not a doctoral thesis – a proposition that's hard to argue with. Further propositions will be offered at subsequent press conferences.[/caption] Life...

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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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[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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Dear Troppodillians, please welcome Luke Slawomirski to Troppo. I first met Luke at the OECD where I gave a paper on public-private digital partnerships with a particular focus on health policy. Luke was an Australian health economist working there and he's recently returned t...

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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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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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Well, certainly wearing a mask walking down the streets of Melbourne makes no sense at all Brendan Murphy, Australia’s Chief Medical Officer, March 9 . The philosopher Mary Midgley styles her own writing as that of a critic. She means something urgent by this – not something A...

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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_33714" align="alignnone" width="1800"] Whoever is doing PR for this virus has certainly come up with a natty logo.[/caption] An argument someone put to me today which makes a lot of sense. In the GFC markets collapsed not just because there was too much...

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The mass hysteria of the corona crisis is raging, with the resulting self-isolation of whole economies and populations. The loss seems greater with every new forecast on the economic collapse than I initially though t, and the benefit of imprisoning and terrorizing the populat...

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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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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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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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This recent essay in the Mandarin is a reworking of an essay I wrote in 2016 in a string of essays in which I developed the idea of the Evaluator General. I was following Gary Sturgess' suggestion that governments should not think of themselves as producing complex services in...

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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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[just a thought] US total fertility rates were bobbing along very placidly around 2.05 live births per woman from 1990 to 2010, when suddenly there was a clear drop to 1.8 in 2010-2017. That drop has even continued to 1.76 births per woman in 2017 . When I asked myself what co...

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In all ways that we measure these things, physical violence has reduced in Western countries in the last 70 years, particularly mainland Western Europe. What about psychological violence though? Psychological violence, ie the inflicting of mental pain, takes many forms. It inc...

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Saving Lives by Tying Hands: The Unexpected Effects of Constraining Health Care Providers Abstract: The emergency department (ED) is a complex node of healthcare delivery that is facing market and regulatory pressure across developed economies to reduce wait times. In this pap...

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From the moral panic division of ClubTroppo. Early Evidence on Recreational Marijuana Legalization and Traffic Fatalities Over the last few years, marijuana has become legally available for recreational use to roughly a quarter of Americans. Policy makers have long expressed c...

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https://youtu.be/PX4B6e0wnV8 Above is my presentation to CEDA's Outlook conference in Brisbane a couple of weeks ago. I came after a McKinsey's consultant talking about digital disruption which is always a fun thing to present or listen to because there are lots of 'wow' momen...

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The following is a guest post by RHONDA PRYOR , a recently retired senior manager in the Australian aged care sector. We are hoping Rhonda may become a regular contributor to Troppo. If you woke up to read the Government had announced that they have a totally new approach to S...

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The #MeToo flood of stories of women who feel abused by men – ranging from lurid stares to straightforward rape – seems like a disaster to me for the Democrats. Not because of the stories themselves, but because of how the progressive media and commentators have reacted to it....

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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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You've heard it a million times: in developed nations, populations are ageing. But what does that mean? At the extremes, it could mean either of two quite different things. It could mean a host of frail elderly people stuck in nursing homes for 20 years, or it could mean a bun...

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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=HMLt7bSX3iE I In writing a series of essays last year I came to an obvious conclusion. It's perhaps one that others had come to years ago, but then there's something in coming to a conclusion from a position sympathetic to its opposite.[1. As J....

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The well-being or 'happiness' push has been rolling for more than a decade now. Though there were plenty of other voices like Bruno Frey , I date its take-off from around the turn of the 21st century when Richard Layard started cranking up the issue and invoking the ghost of B...

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This is a note to myself. It's from the report of the NDIS Citizen's Jury Scorecard . However, in a way that speaks for itself, it may be of interest to Troppodillians. It's an illustration of professional obfuscation and indifference to those in their care. (Of course lots of...

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If Rex can give us his guide to Gravitational Waves - a very impressive performance I have to say, then I can dust off an old document from my days at the ANU law school - in the late 1980s. Concept Split: Shockwaves Shock waves spread from the policy making community through...

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I drove for the best part of 11 hours over the last few days giving a Do Lecture (would you believe?) which was fun. In any event I listened to some seriously great radio. Inside the drug court I was riveted by three 50 minute docos on the NSW Drug Court. It really is a traged...

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by Alice Chen, Emily Oster, Heidi Williams - #20525 (AG CH HC HE PE) Abstract: The US has a substantial - and poorly understood - infant mortality disadvantage relative to peer countries. We combine comprehensive micro-data on births and infant deaths in the US from 2000 to 20...

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Amazing that this is such a big deal, that we can administer morphine but not medical marijuana to alleviate pain. The paper is here . Abstract: While at least a dozen state legislatures in the United States have recently considered bills to allow the consumption of marijuana...

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https://vimeo.com/90297488 (For the full 27 minute video from which this 6 minute video has been extracted, click here .) Family by Family about which you've heard before is spreading its wings. We've started in Mt Druitt where we've scoped the program investigating how it sho...

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I recall going to a lecture by Naomi Wolf at the Australian National Gallery in Canberra when she burst onto the scene as the author of The Beauty Myth which seemed to promise some new beginning after the sixties' and seventies' 'second wave' feminism. The obsession with women...

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I didn't know this - until my son told me. From this website . Sometimes it is necessary for doctors to get access to the heart either for diagnosis or treatment. The simplest way to do this might seem to be to hack open the chest and have a look at the organ itself. Obviously...

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Do Stimulant Medications Improve Educational and Behavioral Outcomes for Children with ADHD? by Janet Currie, Mark Stabile, Lauren E. Jones http://papers.nber.org/papers/W19105?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ntw Abstract: We examine the effects of a policy change...

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Prelude: Lento It's after midnight and the other members of the household are either asleep or pursuing their own consolations in the silence of their own rooms. So, much as I might desire the consolation of recorded orchestral music played at concert hall volume, it just woul...

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ASIDE from war, corruption is probably the biggest obstacle to economic and social development in poor countries. But it's best we see ourselves as being on a continuum with them, rather than as having solved the problem. Even if no law was broken, Wall Street financiers impos...

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Economists love tradeoffs. Indeed, their basic model of the world breaks down where such tradeoffs don't occur. Lucky for them since the world really is full of tradeoffs. If you want more carrots, you'll have to do with fewer of something else. Here they're substitutes. But,...

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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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The Anglophone countries often cluster together on various measures of national greatness or depravity - such as household savings (we haven't been doing much of it - until recently). But it's quite dramatic how much worse we're doing on obesity than anyone else. And boy do th...

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Herewith my op ed from the Herald and Age today. What is the good life and are we living it? Assessing and measuring wellbeing has vexed us since ancient times. But a funny thing happened on the modern world’s way to the answer. The metric that economists used to dampen down t...

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I cam across this post in my morning Google reader perusal: A ballot measure that StateImpact Ohio (a creation of local public media and NPR) describes as “a referendum on a constitutional amendment…aimed at keeping the national health care reform law from taking [e]ffect” won...

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Disappointed Troppo readers everywhere have gradually come to a realisation - upon which I came clean on in a recent thread . Troppo is really an 'eyeballs' play as we say in the trade and things haven't been this good for eyeballs since Tim Blair sent some brownshirts our way...

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From Supersizing supercenters? The impact of Walmart Supercenters on body mass index and obesity, by Charles Courtemanche and Art Carden, Journal of Urban Economics 69 (2011) 165–181 Researchers have linked the rise in obesity to technological progress reducing the opportunity...

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I never fully understood Google Health . It seems to be a consumer product, inviting you to input your data and track your health, set health goals and so on. Certainly there could be some benefits in this and in the aggregation of information, but the amount of effort maintai...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="640" caption="Cartoon purloined following Patrick's excellent advice @ comment 8. "] [/caption] As I've said at least once before, my own approach to economics could be described as looking for $100 bills on the pavement. I think they'r...

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We examine how multitasking affects performance and check whether women are indeed better at multitasking. Subjects in our experiment perform two different tasks according to three treatments: one where they perform the tasks sequentially, one where they are forced to multitas...

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Saul Eslake asked a bunch of people for comments on the recent Grattan Institute study of productivity and I sent him back a long email which I reproduce with some editing here. Nothing very surprising for people who are regular visitors here, but perhaps worth posting in case...

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How could you compare the health systems of the world in terms of outcomes with plausible verisimilitude, in other words by making assumptions that don't just give you junk? I was sceptical when I read of this index, but think it's a pretty good, though like any such exercise...

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Not so long ago economist Paul Frijters mused about drug legalisation here at Troppo. It seems that Paul is an international trendsetter. Now economist elder statesman Gary Becker and the world's most prolific judge/legal academic Richard Posner are musing on the same topic at...

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From the NBER digest. U.S. hospitals were excluded from collective bargaining laws for three decades longer than other sectors because of fears that strikes by nurses might imperil patients' health. Today, while unionization has been declining in general, it is growing rapidly...

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So Obama got his modest and compromised health care bill through Congress. For those who are more interested in policy than process, there's a pretty helpful summary of the legislation here . However, I hold the desirabilty of the reforms to be self-evident. The only serious i...

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Fear Strikes Out, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times The day before Sunday’s health care vote, President Obama gave an unscripted talk to House Democrats. Near the end, he spoke about why his party should pass reform: “Every once in a while a moment comes where you have a c...

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The High Court has ruled that people serving alcohol are not at risk of of massive claims for damages if a drinker comes to grief on the way home. One would hope that commonsense will prevail and folk will conform with responsible serving guidelines. Some of the claims were a...

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Republican Death Trip By PAUL KRUGMAN I am in this race because I dont want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I dont want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America. So declared Barack Obama i...

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Exciting stuff! Infrastructure For A Learning Health Care System: CaBIG In his proposal for a new cancer care policy in a data-rich future (Jan/Feb 09), Lynn Etheredge correctly notes that the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has built the requisite infrastructure for a learnin...

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It it not necessary to be a fan of the Rudd administration or the alcopops tax to deplore the horse-trading that is going on to hold the Government to ransom on legislation to ratify the tax. Abuse of the Senate is not a novely and the man from Tasmania was probably the worst...

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A feed on US road accidents summer vs winter etc . A feed from Organizations and Markets. Does the inclement weather have you worried about sliding off the road to an icy death? If so, Ive got some good news for you. On a per-mile driven basis (or per-trip or per-minute travel...

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This is an interesting article on things at the cutting edge of healthcare (if you're a free market type). If you're not such a free market type, there may be some things at the other cutting edge of community medicine and other things - feel free to let us know in comments. I...

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In writing this article , it occured to me that one way to describe my own approach to economics is the search for the $100 bill on the pavement. That is, if you can find ways of bringing new ideas into some well developed framework (well new-ish ideas or just ideas that are c...

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One of the best investments my wife and I ever made was $1,000 for a midwife for the delivery of our second child. For this we got a stream of advice and a few visits before the delivery and then she was with us throughout the delivery. The woman in question had been head nurs...

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Subject to my own reservations outlined in the introduction to Kevin's first guest post, here's his second. Improving the Health Industry Market Place by Kevin Cox The general theme in this set of blogs is how to overcome market failures or to create markets with tagged money...

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A fascinating review of Craig Venter's autobiography . Naturally I'm sympathetic to this guy who looks like he values scientific creativity and achievement above other things, and will improvise through the miasma of institutions that exist to further science to get what he's...

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I've just been asked by the Department of PM&C to nominate someone to go to the 202o Summit. Who should I nominate - and why? This post will be moderated strictly. Suggestions should be serious and I hope you'll provide good reasons. Of course there will be people who want to...

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Andrew Leigh and Joshua Gans' latest attack on the Howard Government is causing collateral damage. According to Helen Smart , the publicity surrounding their latest Baby Bonus paper "spawned a disgusting hatefest on news.com.au and similar forums, with all the usual suspects g...

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Peach's longest serving employee is pregnant! Isn't that good! Well I think so and so does she. But she now has a problem. She's a vegetarian because she hates eating meat (not because she's strict about it on principle). But she's very very tired a lot of the time given her p...

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