Ahead of next Tuesday’s Parliaments, Politics and People seminar, we hear from Alfie Steer of Hertford College, University of Oxford. On 11 February Alfie will discuss the Campaign Group of Labour MPs, 1982-2015. The seminar takes place on 11 February 2025, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person […]
Newsroom has a summary of taxpayer money spent on Mt Ruapehu: How often have we been told this is the final assistance. We are now deep into the sunk cost fallacy.
Economic growth – and the lack of the sustained productivity growth that underpins it – is again briefly in focus. 70 years of relative economic decline still shows no sign of being durably reversed, but the last few years have been particularly tough and there is an election next year, and so the government’s rhetorical […]
Street lighting is often believed to influence street crime, but most prior studies have examined small-scale interventions in limited areas. The effect of large-scale lighting enhancements on public safety remains uncertain. This study evaluates the impact of Philadelphia’s citywide rollout of enhanced street lighting, which began in August 2023. Over 10 months, 34,374 streetlights were […]
The Climate Change Committee, the UK’s official Net Zero advisory body, has told the Government that to hit Net Zero it must impose radical lifestyle changes on the UK population. The Mail has more.
The government’s commitment to the Paris Accord has garnered opposition from farmers and farming organisations. Federated Farmers is not supportive: The Government’s announcement today of a 2035 climate target of a 51-55% emissions reduction has signed New Zealand up for a decade more of planting pine on productive land, Federated Farmers meat and wool chair […]
Chris Lynch Media reports – Health Minister Simeon Brown says he will demand an explanation from the Pharmacy Council over its competence standards for pharmacists, which have been described as “deeply disturbing.” It follows inquiries to his office by chrislynchmedia.com over the standards, published on 15 June 2023 and enforced from 1 April 2024, which require […]
Boom, the supersonic startup, has announced that their new jet reaches supersonic speeds but without creating much of an audible boom. How so? According to CEO Blake Scholl: It’s actually well-known physics called Mach cutoff. When an aircraft breaks the sound barrier at a sufficiently high altitude, the boom refracts in the atmosphere and curls […]
As the courts hash out the legalities of the orders supporting the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the public appears to support the effort despite the almost universal condemnations in the media. Despite the prediction from James Carville that the Trump Administration will collapse within 30 days, a recent Harvard CAPS/Harris poll shows that most […]
Jon Klick finds that when courts in CA surprisingly invalidated a set of DEI laws, the market value of firms subject to those laws increased: California mandated that firms headquartered in the state include women (SB 826) and underrepresented minorities (AB 979) on their corporate boards. These laws, passed in 2018 and 2020 respectively, were […]
Below is my column in the Hill on the new American emigres: “disinformation experts” who are finding themselves unemployed with the restoration of free speech protections. Here is the column:
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
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