Utopia, you are standing in it!

A carbon dividend takes the revenue from auctions of emissions units for the ETS and gives it back to households. This year, the sale of emissions units will raise around $1.3 billion.* That is around $750 per household.

The following two charts show a) low-income households spend more of their incomes on carbon than other households, but b) have a smaller carbon footprint.

Source: Figure 4.3, Report 2.

Source: Figure 4.2, Report 2.

The charts come from a UK analysis by the London School of Economics. I know of no equivalent analysis for New Zealand, although these findings from Infometrics appear consistent.

So what does this mean?

Carbon pricing is generally thought to be regressive because low-income households spend a higher share of their incomes on goods and services which produce or lead to emissions.

However, a carbon dividend reverses this, making carbon pricing progressive. Giving…

In the sixteenth century, parliaments were not only summoned but also prorogued at the behest of the monarch. In this blog, Dr Andrew Thrush, editor of our Lords 1558-1603 project, discusses an exceptionally large but often overlooked number of prorogations that took place during the mid-Elizabethan period…

Before the Long Parliament of 1640-53, the Parliament of 1572-81 bore the distinction of being the longest in English history. It was even longer than one might suppose, as it was not formally dissolved until 1583. Unlike the Long Parliament, this assembly, the fourth of Elizabeth’s reign, did not sit continuously, but sat over three short sessions, in 1572, 1576 and 1581. These lasted just over seventeen weeks in total, meaning that the intervals before and after each session were considerably longer than the individual sessions themselves.

Or to give the book its full title, The Money Illusion: Market Monetarism, the Great Recession and the Future of Monetary Policy.

I was engrossed in the 2008/09 recession – and the associated financial crises – at the time it happened, as an official at the New Zealand Treasury, and it must have been very early in the piece that I started reading Professor Scott Sumner’s then new blog, also The Money Illusion. I’m not a regular reader now, but found much of what Sumner had to say about the conduct of monetary policy – mostly in the US – stimulating and thought-provoking, even (perhaps especially) when I didn’t end up agreeing. So I was keen buyer when his 400 page book appeared.

It is an interesting mixture of a book – partly textbook, partly personal intellectual autobiography, and partly a tract championing a different approach to policy…

This is a list of titles of Kings and Queens of the Kingdoms of Wessex, Anglo-Saxons and England prior to the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain.

After the fall of the Roman Empire in Britain many small kingdoms arose. The Kingdom we will address is the Kingdom of Wessex, also known as the Kingdom of the West Saxons. Wessex was an Anglo-Saxon kingdom in the south of Great Britain, from 519 until England was unified by Æthelstan in 927.

The Anglo-Saxons believed that Wessex was founded by Cerdic and Cynric, but this may be a legend.

Cerdic is described in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a leader of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, being the founder and first King of Saxon Wessex, reigning from 519 to 534 AD. Subsequent Kings of Wessex were each claimed by the Chronicle to descend in some manner from Cerdic.

Arms of the Kingdom…

Dr. Jordan Peterson and author Michael Shellenberger exchange ideas about the Apocalyptic Environmentalism that is getting mainstream coverage. Shellenberger also sheds light on the true impact of climate change and the theory of nuclear peace.

A reader yesterday linked to the recently-published United Nations World Cities Report.  Sceptical as I am of most UN things, out of curiosity I dipped into a few chapters of the report.

On doing so, I stumbled on this chart

In a quite striking way it makes the same point made in an early post on this blog: as countries become richer, the cities in those countries tend to become less densely populated.  Here was the chart from the earlier post showing data for London as far back as 1680 (just over a decade after the Great Fire).

These numbers shouldn’t really be a surprise.  Space is a normal good –  people typically want more of it, all else equal, when they can afford it –  and technological advances make longer distance commutes feasible.

No doubt there will be some issues with how the data are compiled/estimated –  quite…