Utopia, you are standing in it!

A portion of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation [image credit: R. Curry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution @ Wikipedia]
This article starts off confident that the researchers are right – ‘we now know’ etc. – but later retreats and says ‘the cooling appears to have’ etc. But as the Little Ice Age is an interesting topic it’s worth a look.
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New research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst provides a novel answer to one of the persistent questions in historical climatology, environmental history and the earth sciences: what caused the Little Ice Age?

The answer, we now know, is a paradox: warming, says Phys.org.

The Little Ice Age was one of the coldest periods of the past 10,000 years, a period of cooling that was particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region.

This cold spell, whose precise timeline scholars debate, but which seems to have set in…

Despite the now well-established academic interest in homicide, criminal justice historians have paid relatively little attention to a sub-group of murderers with whom the media has long been obsessed: the so-called serial killers. Whilst there remains a debate about how many victims a killer must claim before the ‘serial killer’ label is applied,[1] and a distinction should be made between spree and serial killers,[2] for our purposes it is more important to note that the term is now used mainly to describe male sex killers of the type personified by the infamous Jack the Ripper of 1888.[3] Those who kill successive victims for purely financial reasons tend to inspire less enduring fascination. However, they too are serial murderers and, as such, offer historians valuable insights on the investigative and legal tactics used to identify and convict uniquely dangerous repeat offenders. In Britain, poisoners were among the earliest…

Insanity is doing that same thing over and over again and expecting different results, which is why STT raises an eyebrow (or two) at Boris Johnson’s persistent love affair with heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind power. His belief that taking it all offshore will make a difference, only confirms that this man has a tenuous grip on reality. Indeed, the belief that a modern, industrialised economy can rely upon a stone-age power source is positively bonkers.

Boris and his fellow travellers have now had the benefit of Europe’s Big Calm – a period when winds slackened across Western Europe and the UK – leaving thousands of these things completely idle. And yet, the amorous obsession remains.

Then there’s the astronomical cost of trying to generate occasional electricity tens and even hundreds of kilometres offshore and returning it to terra firma using cables prone to failure, and difficult and costly…

I don’t have too much to say about yesterday’s HYEFU, but two things caught my eye.

The first was a bit of attention on the $6 billion “operating allowance” the government has given itself to increase spending (or, I suppose, cut taxes) at next year’s Budget. It is a big number, but it doesn’t mean a great deal. In principle, the operating allowance covers things where the government has some discretion (whereas, by legislation, tax revenue tends to rise each year as nominal GDP does, and welfare benefits rise each year as inflation/wages do, and without new legislation the government of the day has no choice in the matter).

But governments tend to care about purchasing/delivering real goods and services, and they need actual people to work for them. And when there is inflation, the dollar cost of purchasing goods, services, and labour tends to rise. Governments don’t have to…

The rampant slaughter of millions of birds and bats, including America’s iconic bald and golden eagles, is met with a shrug by wind power acolytes, everywhere. When confronted, the wind industry simply resorts to lies and obfuscation and – when the corpses can no longer be hidden and the lying fails – issue court proceedings in an effort to literally bury those facts (see our post here).

Cars, cats and skyscrapers don’t kill Eagles – like the critically endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle, but 60m wind turbine blades with their tips travelling at 350Kph routinely smash them out of existence.

For concentrated carnage, though, California’s Altamont Pass takes the cake. With thousands of turbines slicing and dicing dozens of golden eagles, owls, hawks, and kites every day, it’s more like an abattoir than a power generation facility.

Finally, America’s Audubon Society has lawyered up in an effort to…

First thing this morning the Reserve Bank fronted up at Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee for their Annual Review hearing.

The Governor kicked off with some introductory remarks that were celebratory (the focus of the hearing was notionally on the last financial year) but superficial. In some cases barely even honest. He was “very proud” of all the Bank had achieved, talked up monetary policy as having been “highly effective in preventing deflation”, claimed (wrongly) to have been one of the first central banks to have raised policy interest rates again, and ended with a paean to “diversity and inclusion” talking of having “many plans” and “much action” on that front. There was no mention, for example, of the $5 billion of taxpayers’ money they had lost, or of the continuing churn at the top of the organisation.

Last evening they had had to announce that two more senior managers…

George VI (Albert Frederick Arthur George; December 14, 1895 – February 6, 1952) was King of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Commonwealth from December 11, 1936 until his death in 1952. He was concurrently the last Emperor of India until August 1947, when the British Raj was dissolved. King George VI was the father of the United Kingdom’s current monarch, Queen Elizabeth II.

The future George VI was born at York Cottage, on the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk during the reign of his great-grandmother Queen Victoria. His father was Prince George, Duke of York (later King George V), the second and eldest surviving son of the Prince and Princess of Wales (later King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra).

His mother, the Duchess of York (later Queen Mary), was the eldest child and only daughter of Francis, Duke of Teck, and Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, Duchess of…

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…