The Poorhouse is a big fan of acronyms, and here's a new one that surely is about to take the world by storm: WILB. Researchers (well, a researcher) use it to mean "Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing". You might have heard of it under other guises - perhaps "skiving", or "taking another break", or "squandering company resources, you're fired."

Only perhaps you shouldn't be. In fact, maybe you should be promoted. Raw hard science (kind of) proves it. Thank you Dr Coker, and your University of Melbourne study.

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.