I’m back on deck, sort of, after the Budget lockup in Canberra on Tuesday. The event was quite an experience, though maybe not one I’d choose to do every year. It started with a scrum in one of the big halls in Parliament House where the assembled journos +me gathered to await our chance to look at the Budget paper. Then we were sorted into committee rooms, some equipped with elaborate preinstalled computer networks (AAP for example) and some with one power cord for two computers (Crikey!).

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In case any readers are medical practitioners, I’d like to alert them to this startling story. Apparently Merck and Elsevier have produced something called the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine which looks like a peer-reviewed journal but is actually a marketing exercise for Merck. If you receive any marketing material citing this “journal” you should consign it to the circular file, and consider whether it is sensible to prescribe medicines that need such snake-oil tactics in their marketing.

This is utterly inexcusable, and no-one involved can retain any credibility in either academic or medical terms. Following on from the arms fair fiasco

Feast the movie

a while back, this exercise is forcing me to consider, again whether publishing in Elsevier journals can be justified.

Anzac day was not a big one in our family. My father, who served in New Guinea, was never keen to talk about it. Both my grandfathers, who were in the Great War, were much the same as far as I can remember – one never fully recovered from being gassed. But it’s important to remember and honour all those who risked, and often gave, their lives in answer to calls made in all our names.

For as long as anyone who took part survived, their memories on Anzac Day and similar occasions served to remind us what a tragic disaster was the Gallipoli expedition, and indeed the whole Great War. Now that we have to rely on the words of those who have passed, Bert Facey’s wonderful book, A Fortunate Life is one of the best.

Now that the Anzacs, and most of the survivors of 1939-35, are gone, I hope that we can remember their sacrifice and do our best to end the wars that still cause so much grief and suffering around the world.

I’ve spent a very enjoyable Easter Weekend at the National Folk Festival in Canberra . Lots of great music (longer post if there’s interest) but a very pleasant surprise was listening to Warren Fahey and the Larrikins, when Warren launched into one of my songs. It’s old, but the theme is, as it were, evergreen.

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I’ve been thinking about the impact of the financial crisis on retirement income policy and individual strategies, and have come up with a reasonably simple way (I hope) to illustrate the core problem. Pre-crisis, it seemed reasonable to base a retirement strategy on the idea that a long-term investor, focusing on stocks could average a 7 per cent real return over 30 years, with relatively little risk. Now it’s clear that assumption has been proved wrong for lots of people. So it seems reasonable to ask how retirement strategy would look if, instead, you assumed a 2 per cent real return (what you might get with a portfolio of government bonds and the safest stocks).

To answer this question, we can use the magic of compound interest. At 7 per cent, money doubles in 10 years (the rule of 70), so a dollar invested today will be worth 8 dollars in thirty years time. That means someone with a stable real income, who starts saving 10 per cent of their income at age 25 and retires 30 years later at age 55, with a further life expectation of 30 years, can retire on 80 per cent of their pre-retirement income, as compared to 90 per cent net of saving in the working years. Quite attractive!

At 2 per cent, though, money doubles in 35 years. To get a more less stable consumption stream you need to change the balance above by a factor of four. A simple way to do this is to double contributions, to 20 per cent of income and shift the work-retirement balance, so that you work from 25 to 65 to finance an expected 20 years of retirement income.

Among other things, this means that the flow of savings into superannuation will have to increase a lot in the medium term which may help to resolve some of our many macroeconomic imbalances. But how this is to be brought about remains to be seen.

From The Onion, naturally

• Black Book download

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I was in Sydney for a fascinating conference on Evidence, Science And Public Policy. It was worth the trip just to hear John Worrall on evidence-based medicine point out this paper on remote retroactive intercessory prayer [1]. Assuming, as appears to be the case, that the study was totally legit (no data mining etc), the obvious question for me was why anyone would think it worthwhile (ex ante) to test this out.

But that’s not the subject of this post.

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For the last time in my life I am prime-aged in both the mathematical (prime number) and labour-market (25-54) senses of the term.

According the Wikipedia front page today “… author Guillaume Prévost created The Book of Time series to help children understand that history can be fascinating?”

I wonder how many readers, at the halfway point in this sentence, expected “econometrics” in the place of “history”? I think I need to get out more.

Clubbed video

We may not have mutated beavers (jokes on this topic to CT, please!), but life in Australia is still interesting. I’ve never had a roo in the house, but I once had to remove a green tree snake which had come in through the window. And that reminds me of my favourite Australian tourist promotion.