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.

Penguins, those birds so innately classy they lend their name to fancy clothing normally worn only at ambassador's parties and wannabe-impressive drunken corporate events, are apparently in reality no better than the rest of us. Despite the common sense being that humans are the only creatures to enjoy sexual frolicking (aside from dolphins, certain monkeys, and maybe some pigs some would have, but there is a limit to the search phrases the Poorhouse is willing to type into Google on this topic), it seems sex is so hot in the penguin world that the world's oldest profession - delicately referred to by some as "whoring" - works wonders there too.

Yes, "Antarctic dolly-birds are turning tricks to get rocks off their menfolk" reports the BBC.

When things go wrong, there's nothing like the ability to laugh at yourself. However, the Poorhouse didn’t actually cause the current credit crunch economic destruction, so instead, let's laugh at someone else. There's a silver lining to every cloud.

What's the difference between an Investment Banker and a Pigeon?
A pigeon can still make a deposit on a new BMW.

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