Utopia, you are standing in it!

(Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney)

In reassessing the results of the Iraq War one thing is clear, the United States made a terrible error invading Saddam Hussein’s kingdom in 2003.  If one looks objectively at the current state of the Middle East one can honestly conclude that the ultimate victor was Iran.  Iraq was a state that was held together by an authoritarian regime that dealt with Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds.  Once the war brought “shock and awe,” or devastation the country split apart into civil war eventually allowing Iran to ally with Shiite forces and influence its government, fostered the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS), contributed to the Syrian civil war, reinforced Turkey’s goal of destroying the Kurds, and diminished the American presence and reputation in the region.  One could argue that looking back after fifteen years that the mess that was created…

I remember years ago when I saw David Lean’s film “Dr. Zhivago,” leaving the theater with the name Lara rebounding in my psyche.  This led me to read the novel that just floored me.  Now so many years later I have read Peter Finn and Petra Couvee’s monograph THE ZHIVAGO AFFAIR: THE KREMLIN, THE CIA, AND THE BATTLE OVER A FORBIDDEN BOOK that choreographs Boris Pasternak’s journey from poetry to fiction, the Kremlin’s attempt to prevent its dissemination within and outside the Soviet Union, and the role of the CIA in trying to weaponize the novel as a vehicle in the Cold War.  The book itself appears professionally researched but there are a number of gaps, i.e., Pasternak’s experience during World War II is covered in a page or two, among others.  Overall, the book is well conceived, but I believe the authors could have done more with the topic.

Every so often, I’ll grouse about media sloppiness/media bias, most often from the Washington Post or New York Times, but also from other outlets(Reuters, Time, ABC, the Associated Press, etc).

Let’s add to the collection today by perusing an interesting – but frustrating – article in the New York Times about Venezuela’s near-decimated oil industry.

Authored by Sheyla Urdaneta, Anatoly Kurmanaev and Isayen Herrera, it provides a thorough description of how the energy sector in oil-rich Venezuela has collapsed.

For the first time in a century, there are no rigs searching for oil in Venezuela. Wells that once tapped the world’s largest crude reserves are abandoned… Refineries that once processed oil for export are rusting hulks… Fuel shortages have brought the country to a standstill. At gas stations, lines go on for miles. …The country that a decade ago was the…

I’ve started reading Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942).

Why? Because of the Big Tech anti-trust hearings. I’ve heard that:

(a) U.S. anti-trust policy is based on a theory of monopoly pricing which is not bearing out with todays Big Tech monopolies,

(b) possibly those monopolies are justified on the basis of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” competition, wherein one monopoly gets upended by another in sequence, rather than having many firms competing all at once on the market,

(c) one of the major shots taken at Amazon in the hearings is that it would acquire companies that it saw as a threat, indicating a strategic understanding of Schumpeterian competition on the part of e.g. Bezos, and also how one can maintain a monopolistic position despite that competition,

(d) this idea of capitalism and entrepreneurship seems both fundamentally correct, still somehow formally undertheorized, and tractable with some of the simulation…

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was long anticipated, for the CRISPR/Cas9 system of gene editing was a tremendous accomplishment in biology and chemistry. It promises a lot, including curing human genetic disease (see the first five posts here). Remember, Nobel Prizes in science are designed to reward those who made discoveries potentially helping humanity, not those who just made general scientific advances.

A prize for developing the editing system was, then, almost inevitable. The only question was “who would get it?”, since several people contributed to the work that led to CRISPR/Cas9.  It turns out that the Prize—in Chemistry—went to the two frontrunners, Jennifer Doudna of UC Berekeley and Emmanuelle Charpentier at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin.  Other serious contenders were George Church of Harvard, Virginijus Šikšnys at the Vilnius University of Biotechnology, Francisco Mojica of the University of Alicante, and Feng…

Wind & solar ‘powered’ South Australians pioneered sweating in the dark.

Once upon a time Australians enjoyed reliable and affordable power, but that was before heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar entered the scene.

Over the last few summers, Australians have been treated to power rationing and load shedding, as well as the odd mass blackout. These events have an uncanny correlation with dead calm days/nights and sunset that coincides with bursts of warm weather and rising mercury.

Summer heatwaves are part and parcel of Australian life.

Over the last four or five decades, though, an increasing number of Australians have enjoyed the benefit of reverse cycle air-conditioning, warming homes in winter and taking the ferocity out of their often-blistering summers.

Now Australians are being told to turn off their air conditioners and/or to leave home and go back to work in order to keep the grid from…

Alice Evans in this piece (HT: MR blog):

Everyone knows that Southern and Northern India are very different in culture, language, and socio-economic development. But the most dramatic regional disparity may be in gender relations.

Southern and North-eastern women are more likely to

Social Credit ideas have a long history in New Zealand.  The originator, Major Douglas, even visited New Zealand in 1934 and testified to a parliamentary committee.  The ideas influenced Labour in particular in the 1930s, and some who later played very prominent roles in National.  We got our very own political party – the Social Credit Political League – in 1954 and from time to time Social Credit did very well in the polls (and under FPP even managed four MPs at the different times from the 1960s to the 1980s).  I recall a time –  perhaps 1980 –  when Social Credit briefly polled ahead of Labour.  There had been an entire Royal Commission in the 1950s, mostly intended to debunk them, but  they weren’t deterred –  as a young economist at the Reserve Bank, a fair amount of my time was spent responding to letters, to us or the…

Renewable energy rent seekers claim converting useless, unpredictable and unreliable wind and solar power into hydrogen gas is a cinch. Sure, the notion of turning useless electricity into something that can be used as and when consumers need it – rather than something that depends on the whims of mother nature – makes sense – at a conceptual level.

But that’s the point when the reality carriage detaches from the dream caboose.

If converting chaotic wind and solar into hydrogen gas was as cheap and easy as its proponents suggest, then market forces would have brought the process into being, years ago. However, rent seekers pushing the hydrogen line are already putting their hands out for government ‘assistance’ – so get set for yet another crony capitalist playground, where massive and endless subsidies are the endgame.

Like every other country suffering from the wind and solar obsession, Australia’s Federal government…

A couple of years ago I had my arm twisted and agreed to write a chapter for a new book on New Zealand public policy being edited by a couple of Victoria University academics. My chapter was to be on the economy, and although the general tone of the book was to be rather upbeat, about the public policy and governance frontiers New Zealand had marked out, there wasn’t very much to be upbeat about in the longer-term New Zealand economic story. And so I wasn’t.

The published book finally turned up in the mail last week and I’ve started reading it (there might be a post later about some of the other chapters). In my chapter (a slightly longer version of which is here) I’d highlighted the continuing relative decline in New Zealand’s economic performance. I’d forgotten that I’d ended the chapter this way (emphasis added)

Looking ahead…