Utopia, you are standing in it!

Movie Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

In the world of spy fiction, there’s John le Carre, and legions of mere mortals, the men and women who give us “Bourne” this and “Bond” that.
And “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” le Carre’s spin on the days when Britain’s spy service was staggering from one “mole” scandal to another — almost fatally compromised for decades — is his masterwork, a subtle and somber thriller about realistic spies engaged in genuine spycraft.
The Oscar nominated film of it, by the Swedish director of “Let the Right One In,” glories in le Carre’s nuances, the intricate mental work of umasking a traitor. It revels in the long, studied pauses of its anti-hero, George Smiley, a disgraced spymaster working outside of the agency, nicknamed “The Circus,” trying to puzzle out/trip up whichever former colleague was actually working for the Soviets the whole time the rest…

Consumption is the largest component of GDP. In 2019, it composed 67.5% of all spending in the US. During the Covid-19 recession, real consumption fell about 18% and took just over a year to recover. But consumption of services, composing 69% of consumption spending, hadn’t recovered almost two years after the 2020 pre-recession peak. For those keeping up with the math, service consumption composed 46.5% of the economic spending in 2019.

We can decompose service consumption even further. The table below illustrates the breakdown of service consumption expenditures in 2019.

I argued in my previous post that the Covid-19 pandemic was primarily a demand shock insofar as consumption was concerned, though potential output for services may have fallen somewhat. When something is 67.5% of the economy, ‘somewhat’ can be a big deal. So, below I breakdown services into its components to identify which experienced supply or demand…

The literature on cost overruns for infrastructure projects is rich, much more so than that for absolute costs. The best-known name in this literature is Bent Flyvbjerg, who in the early 2000s collated a number of datasets from the 1980s and 90s to produce a large enough N for analysis, demonstrating consistent, large cost overruns, especially for urban rail. Subsequently, he’s written papers on the topic, focusing on underestimation and on how agencies can prospectively estimate costs better and give accurate numbers to the public for approval. This parallels an internal trend in the US, where Don Pickrell identified cost overruns in 1990 already, using 1980s data; Pickrell’s dataset was among those analyzed by Flyvbjerg, and subsequent to Pickrell’s paper, American cost overruns decreased to an average of zero for light rail lines.

But a fundamental question remains: are cost overruns really a matter of underestimation, or a true…

Let me preface this post by saying I have nothing against Bent Flyvbjerg or his research. My problem is purely with how it’s used in the public media, and frequently even in other academic studies, which assume overruns take place even when they do not.

Stephen Smith sent me a link to an article in The Economist complaining about cost overruns on the California HSR Central Valley segment. The article gets its numbers wrong – for one, the original cost estimate for Merced-Bakersfield was never $6.8 billion, but instead was $7.2 billion in 2006 dollars and $8 billion in YOE dollars, according to CARRD, and as a result it portrays a 25% overrun as a 100% overrun. But the interest is not the wrong numbers, but the invocation of Flyvbjerg again.

Nowhere does the article say anything about actual construction costs – it talks about overruns, but doesn’t…

John Madden (“Shakespeare in Love,” “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”) directs Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly MacDonald, Penelope Wilton, Johnny Flynn and Jason Isaacs in this story of a spy game played with a corpse meant to fool Gerry into thinking the Allies were about to invade…Greece.

It’s true, one of the great yarns of spycraft during WWII, and it comes to Netflix May 6.

Looks cracking, wot wot?

Richard I (September 8, 1157 – April 6, 1199) was King of England from 1189 until his death in 1199. He also ruled as Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine and Gascony, Lord of Cyprus, and Count of Poitiers, Anjou, Maine, and Nantes, and was overlord of Brittany at various times during the same period.

Richard was born, probably at Beaumont Palace, in Oxford, England, son of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. As a younger son of King Henry II, he was not expected to ascend the throne.

Henry II and Eleanor’s eldest son William IX, Count of Poitiers, died before Richard’s birth. He was a younger brother of Henry the Young King and Matilda, Duchess of Saxony. He was also an elder brother of Geoffrey II, Duke of Brittany; Queen Eleanor of Castile; Queen Joan of Sicily; and John, Count of Mortain, who succeeded him as king.

I’m not a fan of the government-distorted health system in the United States.

Various laws and programs from Washington have created a massive problem with third-party payer, which makes America’s system very expensive and inefficient.

But it’s possible to have a system that is even worse. Americans can look across the ocean at the United Kingdom’s National Health Service.

Our British friends are burdened with something akin to “Medicare for All.”

But it’s even worse because doctors and nurses are directly employed by government, which means they have been turned into government bureaucrats.

And government bureaucrats generally don’t have a track record of good performance. That seems to apply to health bureaucrats, as captured by this Alys Denby column for CapX.

Numbers are no way to express a human tragedy, but those in the Ockenden Report into maternity services at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital…

Fracking: note the deep shaft
Can they get over the paralysis induced by their climate obsessions and get on with what the US has done successfully for years, or are they just looking for another report to hide behind? The days of thinking gas could always be reliably imported at moderate cost are over.
– – –
Senior Tories are calling for an end to the ban on shale gas extraction to help secure energy supplies, says BBC News.

The government has ordered a new report on the impact of fracking, days ahead of publishing its energy supply plan.

Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng has given the British Geological Survey (BGS) three months to assess any changes to the science around the controversial practice.

Fracking was halted in the UK in 2019 amid opposition from green groups and local concerns over earth tremors.

Among the mantras that feature in wind industry propaganda is the line about Australians being all in favour of renewable energy.

That may well be.

However, the wind cult are having a hard time convincing the thousands of South Australians who are often left sitting freezing or boiling in the dark – whenever wind power output collapses on a routine, total and totally unpredictable basis – that its fleet of whirling wonders represents any kind of future, at all.

And now it seems that, despite the ‘love’ they are purported to have professed to pollsters, the vast majority of Australians are not prepared to pay one red cent more for that warm fuzzy feeling that is said to come from knowing that your fridge, air-conditioner and giant flatscreen TV is being run on either sunshine or breezes.

Newspoll: 45 per cent won’t pay more for energy renewables
The Australian
David…

That the big end of town is keen to profit from the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time, is no secret.

Banks have been attempting to wreck reliable and affordable power supplies, for the best part of 20 years, dressing it up as “corporate social responsibility”.

There’s nothing moral about it; it’s all about ensuring the massive subsidies to wind and solar continue to roll until kingdom come.

So, it should come as no surprise that the suits that run the finance sector are doing everything in their power to stack the odds in favour of hopelessly unreliable wind and solar, where the massive mandated subsidies guarantee over-the-market returns to rent-seeking investors.

As NSW’s Premier during the 1920s, Jack Lang quipped “Always back the horse named self-interest, son. It’ll be the only one trying.”

If this country were better governed, these characters would all be charged with treason…

“I heard you paint houses.”

In an homage to old gangster films –like Scorsese’s own Goodfellas— TheIrishman plays out like a solemn farewell to the mobster movies of yesteryear. And yet, it is also a forward looking picture with a deliberate embrace of new possibilities, like the decline of old cinemas in favor of the online streaming revolution, the biggest shift in the industry since the rise of talkies –in fact, the film was released on Netflix. With some wonderful acting, editing, score, and directing, in my view one piece of criticism is that TheIrishman is nevertheless a tediously lengthy movie clocking in at nearly four hours. It is a late career reflection upon the passing of time by one of America’s more popular living directors. It comes at a unique moment in the United States with a general widespread dissatisfaction with elites…

Three years ago, I shared two videos explaining taxation and deadweight loss (i.e., why high tax burdens are bad for prosperity).

Today, I have one video on another important principle of taxation. To set the stage for this discussion, here are two simple definitions

• The “average tax rate” is the share of your income taken by government. If you earn $50,000 and your total tax bill is $10,000, then your average tax rate is 20 percent.
• The “marginal tax rate” is the amount of money the government takes if you earn more income. In other words, the additional amount government would take if your income rose from $50,000 to $51,000.

These definitions are important because we want to contemplate why and how a tax cut helps an economy.

But let’s start by explaining that a tax cut doesn’t boost growth because people have more money to spend.

I want…

Modern tax systems tend to have three major deviations from good fiscal policy.

1. High marginal tax rates on productive behavior like work and entrepreneurship.
2. Multiple layers of taxation on income that is saved and invested.
3. Distortionary loopholes that reward inefficiency and promote corruption.

Today, let’s focus on an aspect of item #2.

The Tax Foundation has just released a very interesting map (at least for wonks) showing the total tax rate on dividends in European nations, including both the corporate income tax and the double-tax on dividends.

Because it has a reasonably modest corporate income tax rate, some of you may be surprised that Ireland has the most onerous overall burden on dividends. But that’s because there are high tax rates on personal income and households have to pay those high rates on any dividends they receive (even though companies already paid tax on that income).

It’s less…

Rise to power

Soon after Walpole returned to the Cabinet, Britain was swept by a wave of over-enthusiastic speculation which led to the South Sea Bubble. The Government had established a plan whereby the South Sea Company would assume the national debt of Great Britain in exchange for lucrative bonds. It was widely believed that the company would eventually reap an enormous profit through international trade in cloth, agricultural goods, and slaves.

Many in the country, including Walpole himself (who sold at the top of the market and made 1,000 per cent profit), frenziedly invested in the company. By the latter part of 1720, however, the company had begun to collapse as the price of its shares plunged.In 1721 a committee investigated the scandal, finding that there was corruption on the part of many in the Cabinet.

Among those implicated were John Aislabie (the Chancellor of the Exchequer), James Craggs…