Lucky People Research Articles

How I Became a Canadian History Buff

As a budding young broadcaster, and while working in the public system, I was fortunate to be enlisted as a member of a select group of communicators. We were about to learn a lot more about our country. Canada was approaching its Centennial in 1967; there would be many special programs to mark the occasion. One of our supervisors told us: You lucky people are about to embark on the most meaningful few years of your careers. He was certainly right about that! One of the icons of the times, the late broadcast commentator Byng Whittaker, growled at us got to go out there and get this country in your blood. If you intend to broadcast to it, and about it, you've got to know it. And that's a challenge I've tried to heed through the years. In the two-year period leading up to the Centennial and continuing through all of 1967, I had what amounted to a cultural and political history tour of this glorious land. I put together programs in places like Frobisher Bay, now Iqualuit, where, for the first time, I stood on muskeg and later, at Resolute, marveled at the snow still sitting on the low sand hills in the middle of summer. On the way across the western Arctic to Inuvik and Yellowknife, I was able to piece together remarkable stories of natives and newcomers to the region who had stayed on to conquer the challenges of living in the north and then couldn't be pulled away from the land they had come to love. In British Columbia, and on the Prairies, I was able to rhapsodize about the awesome beauty of the mountains and the endless sky over Edmonton, Moose Jaw, and Winnipeg. Toronto and Montreal, although entirely different, still captivated in the same way with their distinctive cosmopolitan charms. Atlantic Canada stirred the soul and calmed the spirit with the easy charm of the people and a landscape that alternated between the rugged and the pastoral, much of it rimmed by the quixotic Atlantic. At the same time, I became more aware that Sir John A. MacDonald's comment about Canada being a hard country to govern, echoed since by several other political leaders, has been a fact of our existence for as long as we've been around as a nation. The West, Quebec, and the Atlantic regions have very different histories and, as such, often see the nation's problems from different perspectives. Ontario, home ground to so many whose ancestors fled the American Revolution, has always looked upon itself as the great unifier. That approach is often resented by the others who rail at the media and corporate elites who have gathered in the country's most populous province. Yes, it takes skill, patience, and often daring to run Canada, but that doesn't necessarily make us any harder to govern than several other federations across the world that also face the push and pull of regional differences. What struck me during my first foray across the country, and on the many others since then, is the way we keep growing and evolving into a modern, tolerant nation in the face of many threats to our unity. These challenges, the direct ones coming through Quebec referendums, have not diminished the appeal of the Canadian idea. In fact, it can be argued that over the last few years, with the country's finances under control, we are more secure than ever. At least, it can now be said to those who complain: Hey, Canada works. During Lester B. Pearson's days as Prime Minister in the sixties, someone in government suggested that as many young people as possible should have a chance to travel across the country. …

Klaus Stöhr: preparing for the next influenza pandemic

Klaus Stöhr: preparing for the next influenza pandemic

Personal accounts: a truly invisible handicap.

Personal accounts: a truly invisible handicap.

Two lucky people: Memoirs

Two lucky people: Memoirs

Down and Dirty Due Diligence

The pseudonymous Mr. Smithee, as a due diligence hired gun, describes the weapon in his work for “lucky and smart business people” as “an unhealthy dose of cynicism.” The lessons he demonstrates here include: Challenge everything that doesn9t fit. Get face to face with the raw data. Respect everyone; be intimidated by no one (the meek shall avoid all bad deals). To evaluate investments in a company or a process, he provides ten-plus-a-bonus down and dirty tactics for your own on-site visits, ending with: “the dumber you look, the smarter you are…I cannot think of an instance when I pushed forward after an insult that I did not find the manager was flat wrong or had exceedingly little to back him up.”

The Friedman Memoirs

Reviews Milton and Rose D. Friedman’s, Two Lucky People: Memoirs, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998, $35 (£24.95), ISBN 0‐226‐26414‐9. Focuses on how the memoirs illuminate the main contributions Friedman has made to political economy and the economics literature.

Books

Book review in this articleInstitutional Economics Social Order and Public Policy The Locke Institute Series W. Kasper and M. E. Streit Gerard RadnitzkyDebt and Delusion: Central Bank Follies That Threaten Economic Disaster Peter Warburton David KernWinners and Losers: The Business Strategy of Football Stefan Szymanski and Tim KuypersUnderstanding Regulation: Theory, Strategy and Practice Robert Baldwin and Martin CavesOpen‐Economy Macroeconomics for Developing Countries Akhtar Hossain andThe Independent Commission on the Voting System Edward CollinsInternational Year Book of Industrial Statistics 1999 Graham BannockAsia Meltdown–The End of the Miracle? Leo GoughEuropean Monetary Unification: Theory, Practice and Analysis Barry EichengreenNew Ideas from Dead Economists: An Introduction to Modern Economic Thought Todd G. BuchholzThe Theory of Monetary Institutions Lawrence H. WhiteTwo Lucky People: Memoirs Milton Friedman and Rose D. Friedman

Two lucky people: memoirs

This is an autobiographical account of the lives and influence of economist Milton Friedman and his wife Rose, who sought to change intellectual opinion in the USA by their belief in personal freedom. It covers their involvement with world leaders and important public policy issues. Through their books and television programmes, and Milton's columns in Newsweek, the Friedmans' views have been influential, widely debated and gradually accepted. When Capitalism and Freedom was published in 1962, it was ignored by the national media. By contrast, Free to Choose, published the year Ronald Reagan was elected, became a bestseller. Together the Friedmans experienced many of the major events that have shaped the history of the modern world - from the Great Depression to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Milton Friedman served as unofficial adviser to Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and Presidents Nixon and Reagan. Apart from providing an account of two productive careers, the book is laced with entertaining details of life on the academic and ideological high wire.

Work Rehabilitation: Looking to the Future

Rosemary was a patient in the admission ward of a large psychiatric hospital. When I stopped to talk to her one day, she told me that she was just returning from her fortieth job interview. It is very hard to imagine what that must be like although, in fact, Rosemary was one of the lucky people who actually received an answer to her job application. Some months later, she did obtain a job with the post office. It is important to reflect on how many patients have to tread this path of seemingly endless and fruitless searching for work that the current economic climate dictates.

1982 Sylvia Docker Lecture Occupational Therapists must be Facilitators not Inhibitors of Action

After briefly reviewing the lecturer's 30 years as an occupational therapist, the proposition is discussed that occupational therapists are lucky people because of the role they have played and must continue to play as active people in professional associations and in the community. The need to extend therapists influence more widely in the community both as members of their own profession and of multidisciplinary teams is discussed. Reference is made to new and different areas of concern in South Australia in which occupational therapists have been and are actively involved.

Equality: On Sen's Weak Equity Axiom

Utilitarianism has a reputation, some say ill-deserved, as an egalitarian social theory. Deserved or not, the reputation has at least something to be said for it. If society aims at the greatest sum of individual utilities, and if the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility holds, and if individual utility functions are more or less the same, then society ought to take from the well off and give to the poorly off until the utility that each receives from the last unit of every good is equal. A flaw in the reputation, however, is that both of the factual assumptions are false. The first one-the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility-holds widely but not universally. The second assumption-that individual utility functions are more or less the same-is a gross oversimplification. It is not just that people's tastes differ. The point is rather that there are unfortunate people who, because of, say, a handicap, derive less satisfaction from various things than a normal person, and that there are also lucky people who derive more. I do not think that the failure of the first assumption, the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility, creates serious difficulties for utilitarianism. But the failure of the second assumption, it seems to me, does.

A very personal view

I am 56 next birthday and until three years ago I was one of those supremely lucky people who had never been ill. Now there was nothing clever about that and nothing for self-con gratulation?perhaps I came from healthy stock or enjoyed some equally vague inherent resistance?perhaps I'd just been lucky. Anyhow, there it was: unassailed by illness or accident, my reservoir of reliability seemed inexhaustible, and in this I revelled, strong and secure. While others might fall beside me, I was impregnable, always ready to step in. With this I must own came a certain attitude of mind that really amounted to a deep-rooted dislike?no, even almost a contempt?of pills and tablets, medicines and lotions, and, if I am honest, a sort of tolerant forbearance of those who, through no fault of their own, seemed to need such things. Certainly they were not for me. At any rate, not until I sneezed. Now for some curious reason I have always had a truly remarkable sneeze?not one of those poor-quality jobs that can be stifled and trapped in a rapidly drawn handkerchief, but a colossal, house-shaking, unpredict able explosion, with a measurable, noisy echo. Assailed by one such explosion as I stood shaving one morning, I was transected across my back by a pain such as I never dreamed could have existed, and worse?the agony down one leg floored me as I shouted for mercy. But none came, and over the next few days no amount of pulling and injecting made any difference, and that somewhat notorious investigation the myelogram clearly showed why : a full-blown disc protrusion. Well, I could hardly call this illness' after all. Surely this was just something traumatic?yes, that was right?just as traumatic as a road accident. And so to a lumbar laminectomy, and?absolute magic?all the pain gone. So I settled my operation-ruffled feathers and made a rapid, straightforward recovery, firmly resolved to control my volcanic sneezing. All this happened three years ago. But then another trouble started. On a short lakeland holiday I got a swollen ankle, then knee, then the other ankle. So what ??these things passed. I thought that I must have sprained them somehow, though I knew I hadn't. Oh well, out of sight, out of mind. body had other ideas, and suddenly I awoke very early one morning, knowing that something really was wrong: both my hands and fingers looked like sausages, and were stiff and tingling with pain. So away to the experts : My dear chap, you have an acute arthro pathy. Blood tests: well, the uric acid will be in the skies? that's it?no. But the Rose-Waaler?well, that was it: positive. Such a lot seems to have happened since then. Firstly, and I suppose this must be good for me, I have been