Vale Ed Diener, Mr Happiness
Ed Diener, one of the best-known scholars of happiness died this week at the age of 76.
Articles from Club Troppo
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Lockdown cost-benefit analysis for Australia by Martin Lally
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 th
Common features of the Covistance
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 the events of 2020/2021.
Pyramids of lies: Some more from Stefan Zweig
I continue listening to Stefan Zweig’s description of the disasters of the twentieth century a passage of which I’ll reproduce below.
Australia or Sweden: which has had the better 2020?
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.
Lost Wellbeing years in Sweden and Australia due to covid and lockdowns
in 2020
beyond 2020
Australia
Sweden
Australia
Sweden
The more things change … Stefan Zweig on the difference in mood attending the outbreak the two World Wars
I’ve been listening to The World of Yesterday, the memoirs Stefan Zweig. Zweig was probably the best-known author in 1930s Europe and produced a mountain of material. Essays, fiction, history, poetry, translations, you name it. Today few know of him, though that may be different in the German-speaking world. He was known to my Viennese grandmother so it seemed like a great book to transport me into the world that produced my Dad.
On the nature of gods and inequality.
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 areas. The idea that humans will soon start constructing their own ‘minor gods’ has been such an idea for me in the last few years.
Joy Braddish on homelessness after the COVID measures
I’d like to introduce Joy Braddish who’s studying for a Master of Journalism at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism. She’s undertaking an internship at Lateral Economics where one of the things she’s helping us with is making some explainer videos. The article below is a project she did on homelessness.