I’ve just published my annual round-up of my non fiction reading for last year here. Do go and read the whole list, but here I’ll just mention my absolute favourites for the year (or at least the ones I keep telling people to go and read). A variety of topics, from history, to feminism, politics and risk culture, so I hope you’ll find one you like.  From each of the main themes I read this year, I’ve chosen one or two that I really loved.

With COP26, the global conference to achieve action on climate change, starting tomorrow, I’ve taken a quick look at the data (as opposed to the rhetoric) on Australia’s current progress on carbon emissions. Two great graphs recently caught my eye.

How do we balance the risks of vaccines and the benefits of our population being vaccinated? How do we balance the individual risks and benefits and the collective risks and benefits?

My view is that we should be asking people to take remote individual risks (such as vaccination complications) for the collective benefit (ultimately population immunity against Covid19). And we need to have this conversation as a society as population immunity becomes closer.

Sobering statistics on sexual harassment in Australia. Of the 20 million people in Australia over the age of 15, in the last 12 months approximately 1.6 million women and 840,000 men – nearly 2.5 million people – have experienced sexual harassment of any kind. Included in this are 148,000 women and 57,000 men who were sexually assaulted  – 201,000 people.

How should actuaries advise their companies on climate change? Increasingly all financial institutions need to consider the impact of the risks associated with climate change on their core businesses. Even if they aren’t exposed to the physical risks of climate change (as general insurers are), other risks are increasing and need to be managed.

As Australians rally across the country to protest against mistreatment and deaths of Indigenous people, inspired by the week of protests following the death of George Floyd in the US, I’m comparing the statistics in the two countries. It saddens me to find, as I expected (I’ve blogged about this before), that Indigenous people are treated overall much worse by the police and prisons in Australia’s judicial system than black Americans are by theirs.

Vietnam’s response to the coronavirus has been very effective, but for some reason it doesn’t make the headlines the way Taiwan, South Korea and New Zealand’s actions do.

Six weeks ago, I posted about the Coronavirus in China. Reading that blogpost now seems like reading something I wrote years ago. Since then, I’ve been reading obsessively and contributed a bit in the background to some of the Actuaries Institute material, and we now have more than 1,000 cases in Australia (there were 15 when I wrote the original blog post). This post is the start of my series of posts on the Coronavirus from an actuarial perspective.

The shocking murder of a woman and her three children by her ex-husband (and the children’s father) in Queensland this week has led to a lot of discussion of the statistics of family violence. The statistic I want to look at today is the deaths of children. The Drum on

Climate change affects extremes more than you think. If the distribution shifts even a little bit to be hotter/wetter/drier/windier, then even without changing the likelihood of extremes, the very rare extremes we were used to become much more likely.