Proper economics

After listening to some standard economic blather abiut how we need to increase spending and how we need people to do low paid jobs on radio 4's Today programme this morning, my ears pricked up at an item (at 07:49) based on the Royal Society's new People and the planet  report.

"The BBC's listen again page says "The Today programme's Tom Feilden reports on the challenge population growth represents and Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sir John Sulston outlines the Royal Society's is major new report,"and Sarah Montague seemed to want to focus onthe issue of trying to reduce population growth, but Sulston was prepared to consider allowing population to grow naturally and criticised our obsession with growth in GDP - which as he pointed out is an attempt to consume more faster when in fact we have a finite amount of resources.

Peer reviewing is not necessarily as serious as it sounds.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9292000/9292853.stm


"Science Correspondent Tom Feilden describes some of the cheerful comments made by scientific papers reviewers. Chief editor of Nature Protocols Chris Surridge and neuroscience professor Colin Blakemore discuss the witty side of peer reviews."

This was an item on Radio 4's today programme on Thursday 16 December. Headed on the website "The scientific sense of humour", the item was presented as a bit of a laugh, but towards the end a key point emerged that was rather a concern. There was reference to scientists being rivals, and later, towards jobs being on the line. The idea that someone's scientific opinion should in any way be influenced by their need to keep their job is really quite a concern. I'm not blaming the individual scientists - I'm blaming the monetary system. What we want from our scientists is pure, objective science. Money distorts objectivity.