How Canberra rates with the world and other news and views for Tuesday 8 October

• OECD Regional Well-Being
• No, ISIS Is Not a Threat to the US – “The terror-mongers are at it again, but dangers to the ‘homeland’ are vanishingly small. “
• The U.S. acted to save Iraq’s Kurds. Why not Syria’s?
• Washington’s Secret Back-Channel Talks With Syria’s Kurdish ‘Terrorists’ – “As the town of Kobani appears poised to fall to the Islamic State, exclusive, previously classified, State Department cables show how U.S. officials tried to both engage and undermine its Kurdish defenders.”
• Scientists Dissected the Brains of 79 NFL Players. What They Found Is Disturbing. – “Of the 79 deceased NFL players examined, 76 showed evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. The researchers at the Boston University CTE Center have examined, in total, the brains of 128 people who played football at all levels—from high school to the pros—and 101 showed evidence of CTE. The numbers buttress a growing body of evidence that suggests that playing football at any level can lead to grave health consequences.”
• We are trapped in a cycle of credit booms – “The eurozone seems to be waiting for the Godot of global demand to float it off into debt sustainability.”
• Slow Steaming and the Supposed Limits to Growth – “Environmental pessimism makes strange bedfellows. We seem to be having a moment in which three groups with very different agendas — anti-environmentalist conservatives, anti-capitalist people on the left, and hard scientists who think they are smarter than economists — have formed an unholy alliance on behalf of the proposition that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is incompatible with growing real GDP.”

• Trying to glimpse the ‘grey economy’ – “Despite the growth of online and card payments, the ratio of currency to GDP in the UK has been rising. This column argues that rapid growth in the grey economy has been a key cause. The authors estimate that the grey economy in the UK could have expanded by around 3% of UK GDP since the beginning of the Global Crisis.”