Obviously, this shouldn’t be taken too, indeed at all, seriously, but I did a little playing around to try to discover which nation did best at the Olympics. I’m told (or at least, I read in the _Times_ the other day) that some US commentators favour an assessment based on total medals won divided by population. Well they would, wouldn’t they? But obviously, some medals are worth more than others and you want to take some account of relative economic development. So here’s what I did: I assigned 7 points for gold, 3 for silver and 1 for bronze and then divided by Gross National Income in $billion (PPP adjusted) as given by the Nationmaster site. GNI is going to vary positively by population and by economic developement, thereby capturing both relevant facts. The GNI figures are probably not completely accurate, and I had to plug in a figure for Cuba. I also discarded all nations that scored less than 50 points (there’s a pretty big an convenient gap below that score). The result is in the table below. So well done Jamaica, and, among the OECD countries, Australia. 
From the monthly archives:
September 2008
On the strength of my mighty “Back to the Futura” post, I got an offer from the Prospect Magazine to review Font. The Sourcebook
The review got entitled “Building A Better Futura”, so I’m maxed-out on Futura-future puns for the rest of the month. I concluded the review by squeezing in a quick note on my ongoing would-Obama’s-poster-have-been-illegal researches. (Executive summary: the Nazis were crazy.) Now I’ll just sweep together a few other bits and scraps that ended up on the cutting room floor. [click to continue…]
Following on from my stock-picking post of a couple of days ago, it appears that the people selling Obama into the convention were right in as much as they didn’t expect a post-convention bounce.
However, the Obama WTA contract was offered around 54 when I wrote the post, and remained at that level all day. CT readers who bought on my advice can now close out at 59.8 and make a quick 10% turn. So at least I haven’t cost you money.
Two points (I realise I’m getting sucked back into a debate I had sworn to give up, but there you go). First, there was no convention bounce in the polls but there was in the IEM numbers. So was there a convention bounce? I think the fact that this question doesn’t obviously have an answer rather underlines the fact that the IEM market prices aren’t giving us very much useful additional information over and above the daily tracking polls (which are themselves not incredibly useful). Second, all the action is in the WTA contract; the vote share contracts have hardly moved at all over the last few days.
Update: I’m now seeing reports of an “8-point convention bounce, which would make the IEM action seem more sensible, albeit at the cost of rather demonstrating how pointless this short-term horse race coverage is.
I’d like to put an empirical claim on the table for discussion. The claim is that people who have never done a significant amount of informal carework, are extremely likely to underestimate the burdens of care. In this claim I include care for small children, severely disabled people, dependent elderly, or any other human being in need of significant amounts of informal caring. And with burdens of care I mean all sorts of burdens – they can be physical, or psychological, or emotional, or another dimension, or (most likely) a mixture of these.
Now, I am not entirely sure where to look for empirical evidence which can confirm, refute or help me to refine or revise this claim. Perhaps in a psychology or sociology of care literature? I have come across plenty of anecdotal evidence, but haven’t come across a study that has investigated this claim in a qualitatively-grounded quantitative way (or a similar claim, perhaps focusing on just one type of care situation). Anyone suggestions for literature? Anyone views on the plausibility of this claim?