applied price theory | Utopia, you are standing in it!

A Prosperity Contest: The United States vs. Europe

22 Sep 2022 Leave a comment

Many people are stunned by the data I shared early last year showing that ordinary people in the United States tend to be much richer than their peers in advanced European nations.

Here’s some more evidence, courtesy of the Manhattan Institute’s Chris Pope.

As you can see, the poorest people in America are about equal to the poorest people in Germany, France, Canada, and the United Kingdom, but Americans are ahead of their peers when looking at the top 90 percent of the population.

For the top 70 percent, Americans are comfortably ahead.

But not everybody agrees.

Here’s a tweet from John Burn-Murdoch of the U.K.-based Financial Times. He has a very negative portrayal of the United States (and the United Kingdom).

The tweet from Burn-Murdoch includes a link to an article he wrote.

Here are some excerpts.

…one good way to evaluate which countries are better places…

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Doobies over Butts: More Americans Now Smoke Marijuana Than Cigarettes

21 Sep 2022 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in applied price theory

Economist Writing Every Day

Gallup has polled Americans for many decades about their smoking habits. About 40-45% of adults smoked cigarettes from about 1945-1975, but the percentage has dropped steadily since then. A 2022 poll showed a new low of 11% being smokers. Roughly three in 10 nonsmokers say they used to smoke.

On the other hand, marijuana usage has climbed steadily since Gallup first asked about it in 1969. Some16% of Americans say they currently smokemarijuana, while a total of 48% say they have tried it at some point in their lifetime:

Younger adults (18-34) are much more likely to be current users, but the 55+ crowd tried it nearly as much (44%) as the younger cohorts:

Among all adults, opinion is about evenly split on whether marijuana has a positive or negative effect on society and on people who use it. However, opinion is skewed very positive among those…

View original post 163 more words

Documentary Review: A Glorious Celebration of the Wonder that was “Sidney”

21 Sep 2022 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in applied price theory

Movie Nation

Oprah Winfrey gets choked up and breaks down when remembering her inspiration, advisor and friend, the Black screen icon Sidney Poitier. No big surprise there.

But then you hear a little catch in the voice of Oscar winner Morgan Freeman, who doesn’t do sentiment unless he’s getting paid to fake it. And you take notice.

“I think of Sidney as this ‘big ass lighthouse,’ a bright light on a promontory,” Freeman says in the new documentary celebrating “Sidney.” “I spent my career focusing on that light.”

“Sidney” is instantly one of the great documentary love-ins in a year that has already produced “The Last Movie Stars,” focusing on Poitier’s contemporaries and one-time co-star, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Hollywood knows how to celebrate its own. And Reginald Hudlin, one of the legions of Black filmmakers (“House Party” to “Marshall”) who followed in actor, director and role model Poitier’s wake…

View original post 1,129 more words

Documentary Review: A Glorious Celebration of the Wonder that was “Sidney”

21 Sep 2022 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in applied price theory

Movie Nation

Oprah Winfrey gets choked up and breaks down when remembering her inspiration, advisor and friend, the Black screen icon Sidney Poitier. No big surprise there.

But then you hear a little catch in the voice of Oscar winner Morgan Freeman, who doesn’t do sentiment unless he’s getting paid to fake it. And you take notice.

View original post 1,129 more words

Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well .

21 Sep 2022 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in applied price theory

Sulfur: A potential resource crisis that could stifle green technology and threaten food security as the world decarbonises

21 Sep 2022 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in applied price theory

The termination of medieval Parliaments on the demise of the reigning monarch

20 Sep 2022 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in applied price theory

The History of Parliament

As much of the nation, and the world, continues to reflect on the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and accession of King Charles III, here Dr Hannes Kleineke from our Commons 1461-1504 projectexplores the now retired medieval practice of terminating Parliaments following the death of the monarch.

By modern convention, the death of a sovereign and the accession of their successor do not bring a parliament to an end. Rather, Parliament meets as soon as practicable after the event, and Members and peers take the oath of allegiance to the new monarch. This was not always so. In the case of the Parliaments of medieval England, the death or deposition of a King put an end to any Parliament summoned in his name. Thus, the proclamation of Edward IV as King on 4 March 1461 was deemed to have ended the Parliament summoned in Henry VI’s…

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David Starkey’s Historical Documentaries on the Monarchy

20 Sep 2022 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in applied price theory

James Bowden's Blog

For an excellent history of the monarchy in the United Kingdom, I highly recommend David Starkey’s series Monarchy, which he adapted from his latest book Crown & Country – The Kings and Queens of England: A History. He devotes a series to each major monarchy or dynasty (as in Royal House, like the Tudors, the Stuarts, and the Hanoverians) and narrates this history of this institution in his characteristic acerbic wit and wry historian’s sense of irony. At the risk of WordPress and SOPA shutting down Parliamentum, I’ll embed the main videos here.

The Middle Stuarts covers the Restoration to Glorious Revolution, Charles II and James II (1660-1689). History remembers the regicide of Louis XVI but forgets that England underwent similar political turmoil over 150 years before, but ultimately ended its republican experiment upon the Restoration of the Stuarts. The Parliamentarians had defeated the Royalists and committed the ultimate…

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Trudeau Faces Real Opponent At Last

20 Sep 2022 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in applied price theory

Science Matters

Newly elected Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, left, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greet each other as they gather in the House of Commons to pay tribute to Queen Elizabeth on Sept. 15, 2022. PHOTO BY SEAN KILPATRICK / THE CANADIAN PRESS

John Iverson reports at National Post Canada Scaremongering about Poilievre could be the only move Trudeau has left. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Trudeau set the tone for the fall parliamentary session
when he ‘congratulated’ Poilievre on his victory last week

Pierre Poilievre and his team will be gratified by the first public opinion poll since he was elected Conservative leader, which gives his party a healthy five-point lead over Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. While there was no sign of a surge in support from voters — Abacus Data has the Conservatives at 35 per cent support, up one point from its last survey —…

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Bizarre and Uninformed American Views on Monarchy

20 Sep 2022 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in applied price theory

James Bowden's Blog

This is what Americans like Conor Friedersdorf have in mind when they write erroneous opinion pieces on the Royal House of Windsor

In general, I really wish that Americans would stop commenting altogether on the Royal House of Windsor, especially after the demise of Crown and the death of Her Late Majesty Elizabeth II of happy memory. Americans lost your standing and legitimacy to opine on any of these matters when then rebelled in the 1770s and should stop clumsily grafting their particular American narratives onto a system which they neither appreciate nor understand and which their ancestors expressly rejected. Americans obsess over the Royal House of Windsor – but only in a superficial, banal, and vulgar way. Our Royal Family satisfies their worship of celebrity and their gargantuan appetite for Disney-like kitsch. They see the Windsors as mere celebrities for their amusement and as objects of condescending comments about…

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Lindsay Mitchell: On child poverty, racism and colonisation

20 Sep 2022 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in applied price theory

Point of Order

A table in an article posted on Bassett, Brash & Hide shows there are 53,000 NZ European compared to a total of 47,000 combined other ethnicities (using the most recent data reported in June 2021).

Poverty, plainly, has no colour. There are more New Zealand European children in material hardship than all other ethnicities put together.

Social commentator LINDSAY MITCHELL – the author of the article – writes:

A just-published Listener article asks, “Why doesn’t middle-class NZ care about child poverty?” It gathers views from half a dozen people including a principal, a teacher, an advocate against child poverty, a charity head, a Māori provider chair and Pasifika social worker. Apparently, they told the Listener that the middle-class has become indifferent to child poverty.

Yet a careful reading of the piece finds it is primarily the Child Poverty Action Group advancing the idea that,

“For middle white New Zealand…

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The Great Wind Power Swindle: Households & Businesses Being Crushed By Record Power Bills

19 Sep 2022 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in applied price theory

STOP THESE THINGS

If wind power is cheap, why does every country obsessed with it suffer rocketing power prices?

The game of smoke and mirrors played by renewable energy rent-seekers, has enabled them to avoid any critical scrutiny of the role heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar play in driving power prices into orbit. A decade of blame-shifting, obfuscation, concealment and downright lies have largely convinced the masses that the cause of their crushing power bills lies somewhere else.

Dr Benny Peiser has been studying and reporting on the causes and consequences of Britain’s self-inflicted renewable energy calamity since the disaster began. In the article and YouTube video below (which is well worth viewing), Dr Peiser pulls no punches, when he details and describes the greatest swindle of all time.

The great wind farm rip off: greedy energy giants sell us wind electricity at wholesale gas price
Scottish Daily Express
Ben Borland

View original post 871 more words

Court Again Refuses to Legislate Climate Policy

19 Sep 2022 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in applied price theory

Science Matters

Climatists again fail to get a judge to order their program and thus bypass lawmaking by elected representatives. Denise Lavoie reports at The Virginian-Pilot Virginia judge dismisses youth climate change lawsuit. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

RICHMOND — A Virginia judge on Friday dismissed a lawsuit filed on behalf of 13 young people who claim that the state’s permitting of fossil fuel projects is exacerbating climate change and violating their constitutional rights.

The lawsuit filed by Our Children’s Trust, an Oregon-based nonprofit public interest law firm, asked the court to declare portions of the Virginia Gas and Oil Act unconstitutional. It also seeks to find the state’s reliance on and promotion of fossil fuels violates the rights of the plaintiffs, who range in age from 10 to 19.

But Richmond Circuit Court Judge Clarence Jenkins Jr. granted the state’s request to dismiss the lawsuit, finding that the…

View original post 479 more words

Why the bankers’ bonus cap should be scrapped

18 Sep 2022 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in applied price theory

Plain-speaking Economics

The new Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, is said to be considering scrapping the EU’s cap on bonuses in the financial sector. This would be hard to sell to the public, but is still the right thing to do.

The ‘bankers bonus cap’ is part of the Capital Requirements Directive IV that was first applied to credit institutions and investment firms across the EU in 2014. It limits the discretionary bonuses that they can pay to senior managers and other “material risk takers” to no more than 100% of their fixed (basic) pay, or 200% with the approval of shareholders. It remains part of the UK rules after Brexit.

The case for scrapping the cap is straightforward. It is a clumsy rule whose costs outweigh any potential benefits. In particular, it has led firms to increase basic pay and made it harder for them to adjust variable pay, This has added to…

View original post 729 more words

Don Brash on the disingenuous Leftist radicals in parliament

18 Sep 2022 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in applied price theory

Waikanae Watch

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth has passed away, and the overwhelming majority of people in New Zealand mourn her passing.

Not, of course, because her death was unexpected, or a tragedy in the ordinary sense of that word: at the age of 96 and increasingly suffering “mobility issues”, she had outlived the great majority of her subjects by at least a decade and was able to perform her royal duties right up to the end. Not for her, prolonged physical incapacity or mental decline. Just hours before her passing, she asked Liz Truss, the new Leader of the Conservative Party, to form a new British Government.

But mourn her passing we do because she was, for seven decades, not only the Head of State of New Zealand but the wise and mature head of the Commonwealth, that loose agglomeration of countries which at one time or another were ruled by the…

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Utopia, you are standing in it!

A Prosperity Contest: The United States vs. Europe

Doobies over Butts: More Americans Now Smoke Marijuana Than Cigarettes

Documentary Review: A Glorious Celebration of the Wonder that was “Sidney”

Documentary Review: A Glorious Celebration of the Wonder that was “Sidney”

Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well .

Sulfur: A potential resource crisis that could stifle green technology and threaten food security as the world decarbonises

The termination of medieval Parliaments on the demise of the reigning monarch

David Starkey’s Historical Documentaries on the Monarchy

Trudeau Faces Real Opponent At Last

Bizarre and Uninformed American Views on Monarchy

Lindsay Mitchell: On child poverty, racism and colonisation

A table in an article posted on Bassett, Brash & Hide shows there are 53,000 NZ European compared to a total of 47,000 combined other ethnicities (using the most recent data reported in June 2021).

Poverty, plainly, has no colour. There are more New Zealand European children in material hardship than all other ethnicities put together.

Social commentator LINDSAY MITCHELL – the author of the article – writes:

The Great Wind Power Swindle: Households & Businesses Being Crushed By Record Power Bills

Court Again Refuses to Legislate Climate Policy

Why the bankers’ bonus cap should be scrapped

Don Brash on the disingenuous Leftist radicals in parliament

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A table in an article posted on Bassett, Brash & Hide shows there are 53,000 NZ European compared to a total of 47,000 combined other ethnicities (using the most recent data reported in June 2021).

Poverty, plainly, has no colour. There are more New Zealand European children in material hardship than all other ethnicities put together.

Social commentator LINDSAY MITCHELL – the author of the article – writes:

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Blog Stats

Follow Blog via Email

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Recent Comments

Categories

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