Finally, after fourteen days, Todd Russell and Brant Webb are free from the mine in which they’ve trapped. It’s a great achievement for the rescuers, and an amazing story of unlikely survival. Watching the TV coverage, it looked like they were both careful enough to clock off on leaving the mine – think of the overtime!

Meanwhile, the funeral of Larry Knight, killed in the cave-in, will be held today. Our thoughts will be with his family and friends.

If anyone in Brisbane & the Gold Coast is interested in learning karate in a traditional style, with a genuine All-Japan champion, Seiyushin karate is the place. All welcome!

John Kenneth Galbraith has just died. Here’s an NYT obit. Galbraith wasn’t exceptionally influential as an economic theorist, but he had a huge (and I think, generally positive) influence as a public intellectual. He’ll always be remembered as someone willing to challenge the “conventional wisdom”, one of many phrases he coined that have gone into general usage.

This report on a recent outbreak of mumps in the US midwest makes the point that the US has a far more stringent and effective system of universal vaccination than most European countries. For example, it’s impossible for a child to attend school without up-to-date vaccination records (at least that was my experience when I lived there).

Australia dropped the ball on this a decade or so ago when the Keating government (IIRC) passed responsibility to the states, but now seems to have restored effectively universal vaccination.

All of this is surprising to me. I would have expected that health scares about vaccination would be at least as easy to run up in the US as anywhere else, that objections on the grounds of individual liberty would be taken more seriously in the US than elsewhere, and that the complex patchwork of state and local management of health policy would lead to large gaps.

Is my general expectation wrong, or is there something special about the case of vaccination? Or is thus just an illustration of the fact that every predictive model fails sometimes?

I’ve been at the National Folk Festival in Canberra, which has suggested a few possible posts to me. I had a great time, met lots of old friends as well as consuming much song and a fair bit of wine.

I suppose it says more about my social circle than about the crowd, but I met a surprising number of economists there – half a dozen or so.

I hope everyone is having a good Easter break, like me, and looking forward to the visit of the Easter bilby.

Today’s AFR (subscription required) has a piece on Gen X and so on by Deirdre Macken. It’s a bit more sceptical than usual, partly because Macken is no fool, and partly because it links to the discussion at Catallaxy of Ryan Heath’s Please Just F* Off: It’s Our Turn Now. also discussed here. As I mentioned, I doubt that we’ll ever see a better title for a generation game book than this one.

Generational and other forms of categorization (whether or not it’s of any value) is essential to marketers trying to pitch their services to those with goods and services to sell. And the “Angry Young Man” genre stretches back to the dawn of writing (angry young women seem mostly cast their arguments in terms of feminism, or anti-feminism, rather than explicitly generational politics). So I don’t suppose it’s going to go away, no matter how many times the silliness of it all is pointed out.

Today is my 50th birthday! Unless the Singularity arrives ahead of time, I’m past the halfway mark but at least I’m still enjoying myself!

Thanks to a tip from Tim Dunlop, I find that beards are coming back in. Perhaps the fashion for beardless men will prove to be one of the many aberrations of the 20th century. Also in the news, ponies for everyone.