Utopia, you are standing in it!

A coronation is the act of placement or bestowal of a crown upon a monarch’s head. The term also generally refers not only to the physical crowning but to the whole ceremony wherein the act of crowning occurs, along with the presentation of other items of regalia, marking the formal investiture of a monarch with regal power.

Aside from the crowning, a coronation ceremony may comprise many other rituals such as the taking of special vows by the monarch, the investing and presentation of regalia to the monarch, and acts of homage by the new ruler’s subjects and the performance of other ritual deeds of special significance to the particular nation.

Western-style coronations have often included anointing the monarch with holy oil, or chrism as it is often called; the anointing ritual’s religious significance follows examples found in the Bible. The monarch’s consort may also be crowned, either simultaneously with…

At his coronation, Charles III will swear an oath to uphold the Protestant religion in a ceremony overseen by the Archbishop of Canterbury. However, while many European monarchs retain a link to their national church, the UK is alone in continuing to have a coronation ceremony. Frank Cranmer discusses how monarchies throughout Europe have attempted to reconcile their historical religious traditions with the reality of modern multi-faith societies.

In addition to the United Kingdom, there are 11 other monarchies across Europe, with varying constitutional arrangements when it comes to religion: Andorra, Belgium, Denmark, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden – and, of course, Vatican City, where the Pope is head of state. In Andorra, the Bishop of Urgell and the President of France are co-Princes and its constitution gives special recognition to the Roman Catholic Church. Under the constitution of Liechtenstein, the Roman Catholic Church is the ‘National…

In past columns on the topic of basic income, most of my attention has focused on how universal handouts would undermine the work ethic.

To be succinct, I fear that a non-trivial share of the population would exit the labor force if they received a big chunk of guaranteed money from government.

But there’s another side to the fiscal equation, which is the tax burden would be needed to finance a basic income.

Thanks to some research from Germany, we have at least one answer to that question.

But I suspect that most people won’t like the results, which were put together by a team led by Professor Frank C. Englmann of the Institute of Economics and Law (IVR) at the University of Stuttgart.

…introducing a UBI that guarantees a livelihood while eliminating social benefits (e.g., unemployment benefits, old age security, and family allowance) would considerably simplify the German…

Our recent History of Parliament / University of East Anglia conference on ‘Politics before Democracy’ featured over 30 papers on topics ranging across the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Over the next few weeks we’ll be posting some summaries as part of a guest blog series. To start us off, Professor Sarah Richardson explores how widows, many of whom could vote in local elections, assumed a central place in some of the earlier debates about giving women the parliamentary vote.

According to the Earl of Salisbury in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part III, among the heinous crimes that should not be pardoned, even if enacted under solemn oath, were rape, murder, robbery and wringing ‘the widow from her customed right’. The widow’s ‘customed right’ was of course her property or dower, and with property ownership came the right to vote, or did it? Women’s suffrage campaigners in the 19

Along with Phil Magness, John Moore and Phil Vøn Schløsser, I assembled a series of concerns that we have regarding the measurement of income inequality in the US before 1945 as pictured by the Piketty-Saez U-Curve. We argue that the pronounced left-hand side of the U-Curve is sensitive to minor changes in assumptions as well as minor improvements in data quality. We argue that income inequality probably did fall and rise over the 20th century, but not in the proportions presented in the Piketty-Saez papers. The paper is available here on SSRN and the abstract is below:

In this article, we reconsider the level and trend of the income inequality series produced by Piketty and Saez (2003, 2015) for the United States using tax data for the period prior to 1945, which forms the left-side of a century-long distributional U-curve. We argue that there are reasons to doubt…

On Monday I wrote about the MPC membership of Caroline Saunders, whose four-year term had expired on 2 April 2023 and who appeared to be continuing to serve only at the day-to-day pleasure of the Minister of Finance. The Reserve Bank’s website on Monday said that her term had expired, and there was no statement from the Reserve Bank or from the Minister of Finance to the effect that she had either been reappointed or told to go away. That all seemed less than desirable (fact, and lack of transparency).

As I noted in that post, it all seemed rather odd. The election is approaching and the Minister of Finance had already last year reappointed one member, Peter Harris, to a term expiring in October. Under the conventions around elections, no new appointment could be made by the current government when the new term would start smack in the middle…