Utopia, you are standing in it!

In my previous post, which itself followed up an earlier post “General Equilibrium, Partial Equilibrium and Costs,” I laid out the serious difficulties with neoclassical theory in either its Walrasian or Marshallian versions: its exclusive focus on equilibrium states with no plausible explanation of any economic process that leads from disequilibrium to equilibrium.

The Walrasian approach treats general equilibrium as the primary equilibrium concept, because no equilibrium solution in a single market can be isolated from the equilibrium solutions for all other markets. Marshall understood that no single market could be in isolated equilibrium independent of all other markets, but the practical difficulty of framing an analysis of the simultaneous equilibration of all markets made focusing on general equilibrium unappealing to Marshall, who wanted economic analysis to be relevant to the concerns of the public, i.e., policy makers and men of affairs whom he regarded as his primary audience.

‘Niama! Niama!’ (‘Meat! Meat!’)
The excited cry of cannibals on the Congo river when they saw Stanley’s expedition approaching (p.197)

Jeal’s exemplary and hugely researched biography (winner of the Sunday Times Biography of the Year award 2007) takes 570 pages (including notes, index etc) to given an immensely detailed narrative of the life of Henry Morton Stanley, widely acknowledged to be the greatest European explorer of Africa. There’s a huge amount about his disastrous childhood, his adventures as a young man, his numerous romantic attachments ie the various engagements which collapsed because he kept on disappearing off to Africa for years , speculation about his psychological profile and needs (an orphan in search of a father who created surrogate families of younger men on his various expeditions).

What interested me more was the general light Jeal’s book shed on the Africa of the 1870s. The French owned Algeria and had…

Public finance theory teaches us that the capital gains tax should not exist. Such a levy exacerbates the bias against saving and investment, which reduces innovation, hinders economic growth, and lowers worker compensation.

All of which helps to explain why President Biden’s proposals to increase the tax burden on capital gains are so misguided.

• He wants a radical increase in the tax rate on capital gains – from 23.8 percent to 43.4 percent, the highest burden in the world.
• He wants to impose capital gains tax on assets when people die, even if assets aren’t sold and there are not any actual capital gains.

Thanks to some new research from Professor John Diamond of Rice University, we can now quantify the likely damage if Biden’s proposals get enacted.

Here’s some of what he wrote in his new study.

We use a computable general equilibrium…

Smoke from a California wildfire [image credit: BBC] Factors such as poor forest management policies, as mentioned by the previous US President, and arson don’t get a look in here, as it’s all about ‘fighting climate change’ and ‘the climate crisis’ and suchlike pop slogans. Nevertheless the author makes a good point about some of the hazards of so-called carbon offsets. Quote: “We’ve bought forest offsets that are now burning” – Microsoft’s carbon program manager at a carbon removal panel earlier this month.
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California’s emissions reduction program is going up in smoke because regulators severely underestimated the impact of climate change–fueled wildfires, claims Jacobin mag.

In 2013, California passed a landmark law that capped greenhouse gas emissions, but let companies offset their pollution overages by investing in forest preservation throughout the country — the idea being that trees absorb excess carbon from the atmosphere.

The statute…

If we seek the roots of the success of European imperialism, we must be off to the Middle East, to Abraham, to Gilgamesh and the cultural ancestors of all of us who eat wheaten bread, smelt iron, or record our thoughts alphabetically… We – you who read and I who write this sentence – are part of that continuity; these words are in an alphabetical form of writing, a very clever Middle Eastern invention produced by peoples even more directly influenced by the Sumerian example than we are. The Sumerians and the inventors of the alphabet, and you and I, no matter what our genetic heritage, are in one category: heirs of post-Neolithic Old World cultures. All Stone Age peoples, including the few living, and all pre-Columbian Amerindians, however sophisticated, are in another. The indigenous populations of the Neo-Europes were in the second category until Europeans arrived from beyond the…

The workhouse boy in paradise… (p.104)

When news broke that the large and expensive expedition led by the American journalist Henry Morton Stanley and funded by the biggest newspaper in America, the New York Herald, had succeeded in locating the ‘lost’ Scottish missionary, Dr David Livingstone, in deepest darkest Africa (in fact, at the town of Ujiji on the shores of Lake Tanganyika on 10 November 1871) it was telegraphed round the (developed) world and overnight made Stanley one of the most famous men on the planet.

Over the next 15 years Stanley would lead a series of epic expeditions through central Africa, making important geographical discoveries, drafting maps, establishing contact with local inhabitants, naming lakes and waterfalls and founding settlements which last to this day, especially along what developed into his main area of activity the enormous Congo river.

Stanley’s later expeditions were financed by King Leopold II of…

There aren’t many New Zealand political memoirs/autobiographies – and even fewer diaries (although I was recently reading John A Lee’s for 1936-40) – and most of them aren’t that good. Voracious book buyer that I am, I usually don’t buy them until they turn up very cheap in a charity shop or community book sale. After all, sometimes there are interesting snippets and you never know when some angle on some event might prove at least somewhat enlightening.

But I thought I’d make an exception for Michael Cullen. He had, after all, been an academic historian in an earlier life, and was unquestionably smart and funny, and had been Labour’s finance/economics spokesman for 17 years and Minister of Finance for nine years (terms really only rivalled in modern New Zealand by Walter Nash and Rob Muldoon). I’d probably have been better off waiting for the charity shop copies to turn…

Casino Royale (1967) Directors: John Huston, Ken Hughes, Robert Parrish, Joseph McGrath, Val Guest

★☆☆☆☆

Very loosely based on Ian Flemings’ inaugural James Bond novel, 1967’s Casino Royale is a silly, pitiful, chaotic, parody of the spy film genre. The production is now somewhat legendary for being complete pandemonium, with no less than five different directors who were cycled through disparate segments of the film (in addition to at least one uncredited director), along with an army of script writers (which at one point included Billy Wilder). Casino Royale is a haphazard, disjointed consolidation of various unconnected plot-threads that really would have been better served as a series of Saturday Night Live skits than a complete movie.

During production Peter Sellers apparently had a major falling out with Orson Welles, perhaps owing to an invitation for Princess Margaret to visit the set (Sellers had boasted about his relationship with the…