Killer swine! Yes, those notoriously filthy beasts have been at it again, only unfortunately this time they've been mixing it up and cavorting with pigs would you believe? Hence, mutated viruses, yada yada, resulting in a human-contagious swine flu sweeping the world. To an extent at least. As yet, the World Health Organisation isn't declaring it a proper pandemic, but it has caused 6497 cases of illness including 65 confirmed deaths, spread between 33 countries as of yesterday apparently.

The UK Government even made a little booklet about it to send to every citizen, so it must be pretty much as serious as terrorism no less. And yes, the book is not all that far off being as pointless and patronising as the terrorism handbook was – suggesting such wacky concepts as not sneezing a nose full of infected bogies into your dearly beloved's face. Still, the previous Governmental advice to walk away from, not towards, a roaring fire in a building has kept the Poorhouse alive so far, so can't complain.

The Poorhouse is a big lover of pop-economics, the sort of stuff famously published in tomes such as The Undercover Economist or Freakonomics. The quantitative inter-relation of sometimes disparate-seeming topics, but mostly concentrating on cold hard money, is a fascinating insight into how the world really works. The more popularised writings on such topics may be a little dumbed down for the masses, but on the other hand they are actually interesting to read.

Nonetheless, there are some activities that at first it is hard to see that they would innately relate to financial incentives such as taxation in a consumer-driven way. The truly mortal stuff, births and deaths, one can see easily would relate strongly to wealth - if you have the money for good medical care, you'll likely live longer - but at the end of the day generally people don't have a lot of active choice over exactly which day they are born or die in a way that they can choose their brand of cola...or do they? Work by Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh indicates maybe there are more active - financially incentivisable - choices going on that one might expect.