Utopia, you are standing in it!

One “justification” put up by the wind industry and its parasites for the social and economic chaos caused by spiralling power costs and – in places like notionally wind ‘powered’ South Australia – load shedding and blackouts (caused by daily wind power output collapses) is the claim that investment in wind power would create a “new” economy with millions of groovy “green” jobs.

No better case study to debunk that myth than Germany, which went into wind power harder and faster than anyone else: the cost of doing so is catching up with a vengeance. The subsidies have been colossal, the impacts on the electricity market chaotic and – contrary to the purpose of the policy – CO2 emissions are rising fast (see our post here).

True it was that Germany saw an increase in renewables related employment – the bulk of it in the development and manufacture…

Before I left Minnesota I was asked by a Representative in the Legislature how to improve Department of Transportation project selection (following up on this presentation in February). I wrote back this (I revised and extended my remarks for the blog):

What are transport “needs”? It’s simple, a project is a “need” when the full benefits exceed the full costs. [Clearly very few projects are a “need” in an existential sense, but what we are talking about are more than “wants” in that they are net benefits for society, by definition.]

Measuring benefits and costs can be tricky, but it is not impossible to get a first order estimate, and the general principle is straight-forward. Sadly almost no agency requires actual benefit/cost analysis.

So I would suggest rules something like:

1. All highway, transit, airport, and port projects that are considered in project-selection processes involving expenditure of state or federal funds above $5 million…

The Fall of Capital Punishment and the Rise of Prisons: How Punishment Severity Affects Jury Verdicts

By Anna Bindler (University of Gothenburg) and Randi Hjalmarsson (University of Gothenburg and CEPR)

Abstract: This paper studies the effect of punishment severity on jury decision-making using a large archival data set from the Old Bailey Criminal Court in London from 1715 to 1900. We take advantage of three natural experiments in English history, which result in sharp decreases in punishment severity: The offense specific abolition of capital punishment in the 1800s, the temporary halt of penal transportation during the American Revolution, and the abolition of transportation in 1853. Using a difference-in-differences design to study the abolition of the death penalty and pre-post designs to study the temporary and permanent halts to transportation, we find that decreasing expected punishment (especially via the end of the death penalty), had a large and significant impact on…

The History of Professional Road Cycling

by Jean-François Mignot

Abstract:

Why did cycling become professional as early as the late nineteenth century, while other sports (such as rugby) and other sport events (such as the Olympic Games) remained amateur until the 1980s? Why are the organizers of the most important bicycle races private companies, while in other sports such as soccer the main event organizer is a nonprofit organization? To what extent have bicycle races changed since the late nineteenth century? And how does cycling reflect long-term economic changes? The history of professional road cycling helps answer these questions and understand many related phenomena. This chapter provides a long-term, historical perspective on (1) professional road cycling’s economic agents, i.e., the public, race organizers, team sponsors and riders, and the relationships amongst them; (2) cycling’s governing body, the International Cycling Union; and (3) professional cycling’s final product, i.e., the show of…

Negative Shocks and Mass Persecutions: Evidence from the Black Death

by Remi Jedwab (George Washington University), Noel D. Johnson (George Mason University) and Mark Koyama (George Mason University)

ABSTRACT- In this paper we study the Black Death persecutions (1347-1352) against Jews in order to shed light on the factors determining when a minority group will face persecution. We develop a theoretical framework which predicts that negative shocks increase the likelihood that minorities are scapegoated and persecuted. By contrast, as the shocks become more severe, persecution probability may actually decrease if there are economic complementarities between the majority and minority groups. We compile city-level data on Black Death mortality and Jewish persecution. At an aggregate level we find that scapegoating led to an increase in the baseline probability of a persecution. However, at the city-level, locations which experienced higher plague mortality rates were less likely to…

Westminster Abbey was an extremely popular Sanctuary.

In medieval England, a criminal could go to a church and claim protection from the law. The authorities and the processes of criminal justice could not reach him. This was based on the idea that no force could be used on the consecrated and holy ground of the churches.

This privilege, called sanctuary, could be taken up by any criminals, ranging from murderers, rapists and thieves to the simple debtor who owed a sum of money.

The common law of the time stated that the privilege of sanctuary could only be used for up to 40 days. However, there were in existence some large sanctuaries (such as Westminster Abbey) that could house hundreds of criminals and had the facilities for them to stay indefinitely. When the criminals attempted to continue their criminal activities from the Abbey, the practice of these large sanctuaries was…