Alex Hill

@alexlizhill.com

872 Followers 349 Following

Former logician. Aspiring health economist. Research fellow @lshtm-gheco.bsky.social. Thinking about philosophy, public health, econ, stats, feminism, & lots of other things! https://alexlizhill.com

Child's drawing of two stick figures - a girl in pink dress with brown hair, and a man all in black with no arms or legs and a sad face
Mug with a picture of a graph that resembles a woman dressed like a stripper, with words: economists do it with models because there's no shortage of demand for the curves that the supply.
Silver statue of a tiny naked woman on top of what looks like a mound of shaving foam. Inscription reads: for Mary Wollstonecraft.
Meme with person choosing between 2 buttons that read: 1. AI is going to replace my job as an elite intellectual 2. AI is garbage technology that produces nothing of value
Plaque reading: Mary Wollstonecraft, 1759-1797, philosopher, human rights pioneer, travel writer, educationalist
Bar chart from Statista, showing sex disaggregated smoking in China per year between 2000-2020. 49.4% of men and 1.7% of women smoke in 2020.
Bar chart showing women as a share of all authors, by paper's research field, 2011-20. Macroeconomics, monetary, & finance 13.68% Econometrics 13.96% Public 18.87% Microeconomics 20.61% Industrial organization 22.58% Energy, environment, & urban 24.55% Economics profession & education 27.35% International 28.65% Labor 42.89% Health & education 46.26%
Kösem Sultan was the most trusted advisor of Sultan Ahmed I. Historians credit her with persuading him to spare the life of his younger half-brother, Mustafa, thus putting an end to the centuries-old practice of fratricide in the Ottoman Empire. After Ahmed died in 1617, she was instrumental in the enthronement of Mustafa I and become regent during the minority of her son, Murad IV, in 1623-1632 and her grandson, Mehmed IV, in 1648–1651. As valide sultan and regent of the two sultans, Kösem wielded unparalleled political power and influenced the empire's foreign and domestic policies.
Intentional communities were founded across the US, probably the most famous being the Oneida Community. Oneida was started in 1848 by a preacher called John Humphrey Noyes. Communism and Darwinism were major influences on their philosophy, as well as the Christian perfectionist doctrine that humans can live free from sin. Property was communal, and so was sex; Noyes probably coined the term “free love”.
To the extent that hypotheses of a macrotrend were entertained, they were usually based on a premise of deterioration. We have here the idea of a "fall": an exclusion from a garden of plenty or a secular decline from an earlier imputed "golden age".
Black and white photograph of a man with a long stick knocking on someone's window
But the case fatality risk for flu is not comparable to the infection fatality risk for COVID, because many flu infections will go unreported. A few years ago, we used antibody data to estimate how many people were actually infected with seasonal influenza each year. We estimated 40-50% of younger groups were infected annually, and 15-20% of older groups. Data from a very detailed study in South Africa has since found similarly high values, with at least 35% of participants having a PCR confirmed flu infection during the year. So if we’re calculating the risk that a seasonal flu infection is fatal, we need to compare total flu infections – potentially a third of the population – with annual deaths. Based on the above US values, this would suggest that roughly 0.02-0.05% of flu infections are fatal, i.e. ten times lower than for COVID.
Excerpt from Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy.
Oil painting on canvas. A young white woman with brown hair lies in bed, with sleepy eyes half open. A chubby toddler with curly hair sits upright on the edge of the bed, her mother's arms around her. There is a cup of tea or coffee on the bedside table, and the child has some kind of food in their fist.
Excerpt from Mike Huckabee's wikipedia page: Huckabee is a strong supporter of Israel, opposing Palestinian statehood and rejecting Palestinian identity. Huckabee has also condoned West Bank settlements which are illegal under international law.
Graph of fatal occupational injury rates, 2000 to 2022, from Our World In Data. Shows downward trends in Mexico, Turkey, Thailand, Russia, Argentina and Spain, a flat low trend in the UK and a low but slightly increasing trend in the US.
Screenshot from Polymarket showing a downward trend line and the text: Trump nominates RFK Jr to Cabinet? 29% chance