Utopia, you are standing in it!

In my Labor Economics class, I do a lecture on empirical work and the minimum wage, starting with Card & Kreuger (1993). I’m going to quickly tack on the new working paper by Clemens & Strain “The Heterogeneous Effects of Large and Small Minimum Wage Changes: Evidence over the Short and Medium Run Using a Pre-Analysis Plan”.

The results, as summarized in the second half of their abstract are:

relatively large minimum wage increases reduced employment rates among low-skilled individuals by just over 2.5 percentage points. Our estimates of the effects of relatively small minimum wage increases vary across data sets and specifications but are, on average, both economically and statistically indistinguishable from zero. We estimate that medium-run effects exceed short-run effects and that the elasticity of employment with respect to the minimum wage is substantially more negative for large minimum wage increases than for small increases.

The variation in…

The Nobel Prize in Economics was announced this week. As usual, Alex Tabarrok has a great description of the contributions of the winners. But I have seen a number of commentators, mostly on “the right,” question this award, especially for David Card. Mostly they have focused on the highlighting of Card’s paper (with the late Alan Krueger) on minimum wages, saying that this paper has been heavily criticized and debunked, or as evidence that “economics has degenerated into socialist propaganda.”

Yikes! If true, these are serious charges against a profession in decline.

But hang on. What’s really going on with the award for David Card? Again, Tabarrok sums it up nicely: “what really made the paper great was the clarity of the methods that Card and Krueger used to study the problem.” What was this clarity?

(Japanese surrender on USS Missouri after WWII)

The death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in April1945 vaulted the inexperienced Harry S. Truman into the Oval Office.  As Vice-President Truman was kept in the dark by Roosevelt on many issues including the Manhattan Project which would later result in dropping two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945.  However, before the Enola Gay released its first bomb, American policy to end the war in the Pacific rested upon the phrase “unconditional surrender” a term uttered by Roosevelt at the Casablanca Conference attended by Winston Churchill in January 1943.  The policy was employed to avoid any possibility that the defeated powers of Germany and Japan would later question whether they were defeated militarily as occurred following World War I.

The application of “unconditional surrender” to the Pacific Theater is the subject of Villanova Professor Marc Gallicchio’s…

In our eternal quest to never let go of any effective rhetorical device that can double as a headline, the last 12-18 months have been dubbed The Great Resignation. Within voluntary job separations, a sizable chunk of which appear to be early retirements, many are young people transitioning from low-paying jobs to those that have seen fit to adapt to the labor shortage faster, offering some combination of higher wages, better benefits, or a higher quality of life, often through the channel of relaxed educational or experience prerequisites.

Some, generally from the political left, are framing this as a…

Constantine II (born June 2, 1940) reigned as the last King of the Hellenes, from March 6, 1964 until the abolition of the Greek monarchy on June 1, 1973.

Constantine is the only son of King Pavlos and Queen Frederica of Greece. Frederica was born a, Princess of Hanover, Princess of Great Britain and Ireland, and Princess of Brunswick-Lüneburg on April 18, 1917 in Blankenburg am Harz, in the German Duchy of Brunswick, she was the only daughter and third child of Ernst August then reigning Duke of Brunswick, and his wife Princess Viktoria Luise of Prussia, herself the only daughter of the German Emperor Wilhelm II.

Constantine acceded as King of the Hellenes in 1964 following the death of his father, King Pavlos. Later that year he married Princess Anne-Marie of Denmark the youngest daughter of King Frederik IX of Denmark and his wife Ingrid of Sweden. She is…

Want to make a small fortune? Then take a large one and put it into offshore wind power. The costs of generating sporadic electricity using wind are staggering; doing so offshore makes them astronomical.

And, it seems, the bigger the boondoggle, the more costly it becomes for the unwitting taxpayers, who are always left to pick up the monstrous bill.

The team from Jo Nova report below on work carried out by the Global Warming Policy Foundation that concludes the world’s largest offshore wind farm will soon become the world’s largest white elephant.

Dogger Bank wind farm: Big, New, and essentially worthless, with a value like minus £1 billion
Jo Nova Blog
Jo Nova
25 November 2021

Dogger Bank will become the World’s Largest Wind Farm and maybe the World’s largest white elephant too.

Despite years of research and hyperbole we can conclusively say that offshore wind is still a…

Paul Beaudry, Dana Galizia and myself have written a Vox column based on our recent paper on recessions, that can be seen as a reconciliation of Keynes’ and Hayek’s views of recessions.

The column can be found there: http://www.voxeu.org/article/reconciling-hayeks-and-keynes-views-recessions.

Carbon News reports:

THEY’VE declared a climate emergency and now the government is taking steps to ensure we can continue to drink chilled Sauvignon Blanc in a warming world.

Agriculture minister Damien O’Connor has announced the government is investing in a seven-year programme led by Bragato Research Institute to help future-proof the sustainability of New Zealand’s Sauvignon Blanc grapevines.

“Sauvignon Blanc comprises 87% of our wine exports. This new $18.7 million grapevine improvement programme will introduce genetic diversity into our vines, and ensure they continue to thrive in New Zealand conditions,” O’Connor said.

…

“Many of our existing vines will need to be replaced in 10 to 15 years in order to avoid a loss in productivity.

“The new variants could also lead to new flavour and aroma profiles, resulting in exciting new styles of wine that will add further value to the sector.”

Seriously?

The government also gifted

A letter in defence of science, published in New Zealand Listener in July, was signed by seven professors from the University of Auckland.  Emeritus Professor Robert Nola,​ one of the signatories, specialises in the philosophy of science.  But the Royal Society of New Zealand is investigating him over what it claims are “misguided” views regarding Māori knowledge. Graham Adams reports.

Professor Robert Nola’s bread and butter is analysing what makes science science. This has been his focus for more than 50 years. Yet, he is facing a disciplinary hearing by the Royal Society for expressing his views on science and mātauranga Māori (traditional Māori knowledge).

Nola was one of seven eminent professors from the University of Auckland who, in a letter to  New Zealand Listener in July, criticised plans to include mātauranga Māori in the school science curriculum and to give it equal standing with “Western/ Pakeha epistemologies”…

With another bitter winter biting and suicidal renewable energy policies, Germans are reaping the whirlwind. Suffering Europe’s highest power prices and routine power rationing, is just the beginning. Mass blackouts and deliberate power cuts, like those suffered last winter, are guaranteed. Such is life when you attempt to run on sunshine and breezes.

Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt was Managing Director of RWE Innogy GmbH – the renewable energy sector – from 2008 to 2012. Until 2019, he was the sole director of the German Wildlife Foundation. Vahrenholt, who holds a doctorate in chemistry, has been an honorary professor at the University of Hamburg. He has been signalling the obvious for years now: Germany’s obsession with wind and solar is destroying it from within.

Gross Energy Mismanagement: Energy Expert Warns Of Europe Power Blackouts, “Numerous Deaths”
No Tricks Zone
Pierre Gosselin
23 November 2021

In a recent interview with independent journalist Boris…

The Queen (Mary of Modena) and James Francis, Prince of Wales left for France on December 9, 1688 and King James II-VII followed separately on 10th. Accompanied only by Sir Edward Hales and Ralph Sheldon, James made his way to Faversham in Kent seeking passage to France, first dropping the Great Seal in the Thames in a last ditch attempt to prevent Parliament being summoned.

In London, his flight and rumours of a “Papist” invasion led to riots and destruction of Catholic property, which quickly spread throughout the country. To fill the power vacuum, the Earl of Rochester set up a temporary government including members of the Privy Council and City of London authorities, but it took them two days to restore order.

When news arrived James II-VII had been captured in Faversham on 11 December 11, by local fishermen, Lord Ailesbury, one of his personal attendants, was sent to…

As King Edward VIII was unmarried and had no children, Prince Albert, Duke of York, was the heir presumptive to the throne. Less than a year later, on December 11, 1936, Edward abdicated in order to marry Wallis Simpson who was divorced from her first husband and in the process of divorcing her second.

Edward VIII had been advised by British prime minister Stanley Baldwin that he could not remain king and marry a divorced woman with two living ex-husbands. He abdicated and Albert, though he had been reluctant to accept the throne, became king. The day before the abdication, Albert went to London to see his mother, Queen Mary. He wrote in his diary, “When I told her what had happened, I broke down and sobbed like a child.”

As mentioned yesterday the abdication document was signed on December 10, 1936 At Fort Belvedere. King Edward VIII signed his…

Yesterday, Rod Carr appeared before Parliament’s Environment Committee as Chair of the Climate Change Commission. Carr made the following statement (at 5:10):

I think the first thing to do is recognise not only as Chair but the Commission itself accepts that markets and prices will provide significant signals to producers, consumers and investors, that will play an important part in putting New Zealand on a pathway, which it is not currently on, to achieve the statutory targets for domestic emissions.

So, Carr told the Select Committee that New Zealand is not on track to deliver its “statutory targets for domestic emissions.”

There are two problems with his statement.

The first is that back in May the Climate Change Commission told the government that existing policies and an ETS price of $50 will deliver net zero emissions in about 2050.

Today, the ETS is at $68. At that higher price…

When the weather turns nasty, giant industrial wind turbines simply turn off. When there’s no wind, they produce nothing; when winds hit gale force, they produce nothing. It’s as if their designers included Goldilocks, the porridge thief who wanted things “just right” and snubbed her nose at all that wasn’t.

Modern industrial wind turbines do not operate when wind speeds hit around 25 m/s (90kph or 55mph) – when Hurricane Harvey hit Texas back in August 2017, he dished up a gale double that speed, and more.

In order to prevent their catastrophic disintegration (as seen in the video below) Texas’s wind turbines deliberately downed tools, en masse, (as they are deliberately designed to do) leaving the critical work of providing power to storm-battered Texans to its fleet of nuclear power plants.

America’s Great Plains are touted by wind power rent-seekers as prime territory for subsidy gouging; they claim the…