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Links I Liked

May 24, 2021

     By Duncan Green     

Snouts in the pharma trough. Covid has created 9 new pharma billionaires, yet we’re failing to vaccinate billions of people. Covid vaccines, funded by public cash, should be first and foremost a global public good. Oxfam.

Relative support of left and right leaning parties by education and income in the 1970s and 2010s. Short version – in the 1970s richer/more educated people were right wing, poorer/less educated people voted left wing. By the 2010s that had reversed. Does that mean spreading university entrance will lead to a long term swing to the left? Ht John O’Brien

Income and education divides in Western democracies in the 1970s
Income and education divides in Western democracies in the 1970s

The coming financial crash? Good long read from the LSE’s Robert Wade

For those of you who have suffered the modern-day inquisition of academic review, do you recognize any of these species?

Peer review

Some mind-blowing stuff in this review about the problem solving powers of fungi, which apparently can even find the exit at Ikea (wish I could say the same):

‘The mycologist Lynne Boddy once made a scale model of Britain out of soil, placing blocks of fungus-colonised wood at the points of the major cities; the blocks were sized proportionately to the places they represented. Mycelial networks quickly grew between the blocks: the web they created reproduced the pattern of the UK’s motorways (‘You could see the M5, M4, M1, M6’). Other researchers have set slime mould loose on tiny scale-models of Tokyo with food placed at the major hubs (in a single day they reproduced the form of the subway system) and on maps of Ikea (they found the exit, more efficiently than the scientists who set the task). Slime moulds are so good at this kind of puzzle that researchers are now using them to plan urban transport networks and fire-escape routes for large buildings.’

Notes on global income inequality: excellent non-technical primer from Branko Milanovic

This is how you beast a Pharma rep, should you ever get the chance. US Rep Katie Porter shows how, with her ‘whiteboard of justice’.

May 24, 2021
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Duncan Green
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