Utopia, you are standing in it!

This morning’s Dominion-Post features a full page advert, notionally inviting people to make submissions on the resource consent application to extend the runway at Wellington Airport.

In fact, the advert is mainly an opportunity to tout the case for the hugely-expensive proposed extension –  in what must be one of the most expensive locations in the world in which one could add 300 metres to a runway (and still not comfortably meet international safety guidelines).  The pretty graphic highlights 20 Pacific Rim cities which planes could reach from Wellington –  without ever mentioning that the most likely outcome, if the project succeeds at all, is flights once or twice a week to one or two of them.

All one really needs to know about the proposal is that the owners of the airport think the project is sufficiently unattractive that there is no way they would proceed with the extension if…

To emphasize, I do not actually believe that assortative mating is the cause of the obesity epidemic.

A major challenge to any theory, however, is that it has to operate as a multiplier. The heritability of obesity is seemingly constant. That is, what we mean when we say “Whatever is happening, its seems to be happening to all of us”

If that were not true then presumably some people would be protected not only by their genes but by their environment. In which case heritability would fall.

For example, suppose that it is fast food. Well some people may be adopted into families which don’t eat fast food. This person should have a large degree of protection that is not genetic. Yet, the data don’t bear that out. Environment has not become more important.

Suppose it was watching TV, or drinking Soda, or any of those things. Then some sort…

I just stumbled on this interesting discussion between Eugene Fama and Richard Thaler – they talked about whether markets are efficient or not.

Thaler argues that markets are not efficient. Fama agrees, but nonetheless are argue that we have no better model of the world. It shouldn’t be a surprise to my readers that I agree more with Fama than Thaler.

What I particularly notice is just how little evidence Thaler is able to present that markets are not efficient. Yes, he comes up with anecdotes, but that is not evidence. With billions of investors and billions of different markets and prices you will always be able to come up with some example of pricing behavior, which in someway looks inefficient or irrational, but that does not mean that you generally can say markets are inefficient rather than efficient.

My own view is very much based on my experience from…

With oil prices being at historically low levels, oil exporting countries have been struggling to generate the revenue that was once apparent not so long ago. In Venezuela, for instance, oil accounts for 95 percent of Venezuela’s export earnings and plummeting world prices have severely hit the government’s revenue stream. The Middle Eastern countries with their abundant supply of oil and the ease at which it extracts it, are starting to look at alternative revenue streams as the rent from oil is no longer sufficient to sustain public goods and services. As noted in The Economist the Arab world can be divided into three broad categories:

1. Resource-rich, labour-poor – Gulf sheikhdoms with lots of oil and gas but few people;
2. Resource-rich, labour-abundant – Algeria and Iraq, that have natural resources and larger populations;
3. Resource-poor, labour-abundant – Egypt, that have little or no oil and gas but lots of mouths to feed…

I recently suggested that conservatives like to associate themselves with the libertarians because it looks cool, even if these groups believe very different things. There is more evidence that the conservative/libertarian fit is bad. From an article about a survey done by the Public Religion Research institute:

Sixty-one percent of libertarians do not identify themselves as part of the Tea Party, the survey showed. About 7 percent of the adult population is consistently libertarian and that includes 12 percent of those who describe themselves as Republicans.

“There’s largely agreement on economic issues – the gap is in how libertarians approach social issues, ” said Robert P. Jones, CEO of PRRI, which conducts an annual “American Values Survey” on political and social issues.

And:

Libertarians are more opposed to government involvement in economic policies than those affiliated with the Tea Party and Republicans overall, the survey found. For instance, 65…