Utopia, you are standing in it!

I have a four-part series (here, here, here, and here) that explains why it’s much better to focus on fighting poverty rather than fretting about inequality.

I also think that our friends on the left who fixate on inequality are mostly motivated by an ideological desire for bigger government (or an ideological desire to hurt the rich).

Helping the less fortunate seems to be – at best – a secondary concern for them.

But let’s not worry about deciphering their real motives and instead look at why their approach is misguided.

Here’s a tweet from Gabriel Zucman, who (along with Thomas Piketty) is one of the most widely cited crusaders for class-warfare policy.

He is upset that the richest people in the world earn a lot more than the poorest people, and he obviously wants people to view these numbers as scandalous…

The CPI for the December quarter was finally released yesterday – even later in the month than that other CPI laggard the ABS. The picture wasn’t pretty, even if at this point not particularly surprising. My focus is on the sectoral factor model measure of core inflation – long the Reserve Bank’s favourite – and if, as my resident economics student says “but Dad, no one else seem to mention it”, well too bad. Of the range of indicators on offer it is the most useful if one is thinking about monetary policy, past and present.

Factor models like this provide imprecise reads (subject to revision) for the most recent periods – that’s what you’d expect, especially when things are moving a lot, as the model is looking to identify something like the underlying trend. The most recent observations were revised up yesterday, and the estimate for core inflation for…

This BBC report trots out the usual evidence-free assertions about the supposed human causes of recent warming. But ignoring the role of natural variation and spending fortunes on the basis of poorly performing climate models looks little better than casino gambling. For waverers the threat of extreme weather is pulled out of the hat.
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Trillions of dollars need to be spent every year for almost three decades to hit net zero targets, according to consultancy McKinsey. — BBC News reporting.

On top of current spending, the equivalent of half of all corporate profits will have to be invested to tackle global warming, it says.

McKinsey highlights that gaining acceptance will be tough, especially from those paying energy bills.

But the alternative is more extreme weather, experts have warned.

Pope Clement VI (1291 – December 6, 1352), born Pierre Roger, was head of the Catholic Church from 7 May 1342 to his death in 1352. He was the fourth Avignon pope. Clement reigned during the first visitation of the Black Death (1348–1350), during which he granted remission of sins to all who died of the plague.

Pope Clement VI

Roger steadfastly resisted temporal encroachments on the Church’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction and, as Clement VI, entrenched French dominance of the Church and opened its coffers to enhance the regal splendour of the Papacy. He recruited composers and music theorists for his court, including figures associated with the then-innovative Ars Nova style of France and the Low Countries.

Like his immediate predecessors, Clement VI was devoted to France, and he demonstrated his French sympathies by refusing a solemn invitation to return to Rome from the city’s people, as well as from the…

Digging for cobalt [image credit: mining.com]
When was that, you may ask. Anyway, whoever thinks there was such a time is about to find out it’s becoming a memory only, according to this article. For one thing, the required mining has been exposed as lacking investor appeal due to its environmental footprint, so to speak. Also, demand is likely to accelerate and the mining industry could well struggle to keep pace.
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Supply chain disruptions, rising raw materials costs, and geopolitical tensions have jolted the price of solar panels, wind turbines, and EV batteries, and some analysts now think that the era of cheap renewable energy is over, says OilPrice.com.

The continual decline in production cost for wind, solar, and EV batteries was touted as the driver of their growing adoption and ultimate takeover of the global grid.

Up until two years ago, there was no other…

Last month I asked if travel was back. Air travel has recovered a lot from the depths of the pandemic, but it was still only about 80-85% of pre-pandemic levels.

Labor markets also plummeted during the worst of the pandemic, and have slowly (and sometimes quickly) clawing their way back. But are we back to pre-pandemic levels?

The national unemployment rate is now under 4%, a level which is rarely reached even in the best of times. But there is considerable variation across states.

The latest BLS release of state unemployment data shows that some states are at their historic lows, with one state standing out: Nebraska currently has the lowest unemployment rate a state has ever recorded at 1.7% in December 2021 (the data go back to 1976). Utah is also just below 2% in December — at 1.9% it’s the 2nd lowest in history (after Nebraska, of…

When contemplating the issue of school choice, it’s most important to focus on how we can improve educational outcomes, particularly for children from low-income communities.

But, as a fiscal economist, I can’t help thinking about how school choice is also good news for taxpayers.

And I also can’t help but notice that opponents are often very hypocritical.

• Such as Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who utilized private education for her offspring but endlessly fights against school choice for less-affluent families.
• Such as the high-level education bureaucrat from Alexandria, Virginia who sent his kids to private school while opposing educational options for less-affluent families.
• Such as the Democratic congressional candidate whose kids were enrolled in an elite private school, yet attacked his opponent for supporting choice for less-affluent families.
• Such as the head of a teacher union in California who had his daughter in a private school…

As we noted in September, natural gas prices are sky-high in Europe. Coal-burning power plants have been shut down and the windmills have not spun as fast as expected, which led to a drawdown of European natural gas stocks for electric power generation. The Russians are not sending as much gas as hoped through their pipelines, so Europe is scratching around for (very, very expensive) liquified natural gas to be shipped by ship from the U.S. and the Middle East.

As noted, this hurts European economies in various ways. Fertilizer plants and aluminum smelters have shut down because of too-costly natural gas feedstock, consumers are paying much more in utility bills, and some governments are going deeper into deficit by paying subsidies to partially cushion consumers. This energy shortage also makes Europe very vulnerable to Russia, at a time when Putin is menacing Ukraine with invasion.

France derives about

Wind and solar are said to be ‘cheap’, but then so’s talk. 2021 was the year when wind and solar were revealed to be thoroughly useless, thanks to their inherent intermittency and general lack of reliability.

Starting in September last year, for months on end, Europe’s wind power fleet struggle to produce any consistent power of any value, at all. Week after week, wind power output barely registered in Germany and the UK.

Unable to deliver even occasional bursts of power, Europe’s wind industry was relegated to the status of a laughingstock, while Germans and British fired up their old coal-fired power plants, the only thing preventing a wholesale grid collapse.

The renewable energy debacle wasn’t confined to Europe, as Robert Bryce details below.

Seven Top Energy Stories of 2021
Forbes
Robert Bryce
31 December 2021

It has been a chaotic year in the energy sector. And with just a…