Utopia, you are standing in it!

Gary Becker, as you must surely know by now, has passed away. This is an incredible string of bad luck for the University of Chicago. With Coase and Fogel having passed recently, and Director, Stigler and Friedman dying a number of years ago, perhaps Lucas and Heckman are the only remaining giants from Chicago’s Golden Age.

Becker is of course known for using economic methods – by which I mean constrained rational choice – to expand economics beyond questions of pure wealth and prices to question of interest to social science at large. But this contribution is too broad, and he was certainly not the only one pushing such an expansion; the Chicago Law School clearly was doing the same. For an economist, Becker’s principal contribution can be summarized very simply: individuals and households are producers as well as consumers, and rational decisions in production are as interesting to…

The first Speaker?

The remarkable account in the Anonimalle Chronicle of the so-called ‘Good Parliament’ of 1376 provides what is generally taken to be the first reference to a ‘Speaker’ of the Commons, Sir Peter de la Mare. The account is extraordinarily detailed and circumstantial – so unusual for an account of any event in the fourteenth century, let alone a Parliament, that many have been tempted to call it an eyewitness account, though it’s impossible to tell. (The Chronicle is available in digitised form from the University of Leeds website here: the account of the Good Parliament starts about f. 313; you can get at an edited version of some of the original Norman French text here, from p. 83; and there is a translation of the bit relating to the Good Parliament available on the California State University website .) The Chronicle describes how once the…

The modern practice of prorogation and adjournment is in theory, at least, clearly enough understood. Prorogation is an act of the Crown, usually used to mark the end of one session and fix a date for the start of another. Adjournment is an act of each House of Parliament, used routinely to end each day’s sitting, and to interrupt the normal succession of daily sittings, so that the House can take a break for its holidays, or some other purpose. In modern political memory, prorogation is a brief pause that acts as a routine way of marking the end of one parliamentary and political year and the start of another. There are plenty of earlier instances – leaving aside the much argued-over case of 1997 and the rather sui generis case of 1948 – in which prorogation is said to have been used in order to block one or other…

An astonishing rumour has been current of late. A certain section of the Unionist party is said to be encouraging the idea that it is possible, as a matter of practical politics, for the King to refuse the Royal Assent to the Home Rule Bill next May, when for the third time it has passed the House of Commons and has complied with all the requirements of the Parliament Act. … The danger may seem fanciful to many. It is impossible, it will be said, that so mad an idea could be entertained for a moment by responsible politicians. But it comes from Ulster, and though constitutional doctrine from Ulster requires very cautious acceptance just now, Ulster is strong in the councils of the party.

‘Auditor Tantum’, ‘The Veto of the Crown’, Fortnightly Review, Sept. 1913

In the last few weeks an increasingly abstruse but sometimes irritable debate has…

The principle that an administration can only function if it has the backing of a majority in the House of Commons is acknowledged to be a fundamental part – perhaps the fundamental part – of not only the British, but of any parliamentary constitution. It expresses the idea that Parliament itself cannot exercise executive power, but gives its authority to a smaller group who can, trusting them to use it wisely. The meaning of a vote of no confidence – indicating the withdrawal of that trust – is obvious enough in principle. But as arguments mount about what might happen in September, what it means in practice has come to seem considerably more complicated and uncertain; and the idea of a vote of no confidence has come under a degree of scrutiny that it is scarcely able to bear. For although it has now acquired a specific meaning as incorporated…

Image: UK Parliament via Flickr CC

The earliest description of the ceremony in which the Commons are summoned to the Lords by Black Rod comes in a notebook that belonged to Sir Thomas Duppa, who filled the position between 1683 and 1694, and had been deputy to his predecessor, Sir Edward Carteret, from 1675. The description is part of a set of procedural notes dated 14 August 1679, presumably given to Duppa in anticipation of his having to fulfil the role at the opening of the new parliament, only recently elected. The note reads:

When the King is sett [seated], either he or my Lord Great Chamberlain gives you Order to call the House of Commons. Then you go immediately, and when you come there, you knock with the end of your rod four or five times, and when the Doors are open, and [you] come in as high as…

Malcolm Turnbull’s miserable presence endures in the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project, a white elephant that’ll cost taxpayers at least $10billion.

Before he was ditched as PM by his Liberal Party over his pitch to expand subsidies to chaotically intermittent wind and solar and to extend those subsidies until the end of time, Malcolm Turnbull and his son, Alex were considered the dynamic duo among renewable energy rent seekers.

Turnbull the Younger managed to throw $millions at a nearly bankrupt wind power outfit (Infigen) just before daddy signed the Paris Climate Agreement, which lifted Infigen’s stocks and made the canny young investor a veritable fortune. Talk about lucky!: Born Lucky: Stars Align Perfectly for PM’s Son with Mammoth Bet on Wind Power Outfit Infigen

There’s plenty to dislike about Malcolm Turnbull, a man who should have headed up the Greens, rather than Australia’s notionally conservative party, the Liberals. He secretly assisted…

In 1944 the RLM issued a requirement for an aircraft with a range of 11000 km (6835 miles) and a bomb load of 4000 kg (8818 lbs). This bomber was to be able to fly from Germany to New York City and back without refueling. Five of Germany’s top aircraft companies had submitted designs, but none of them met the range requirements for this Amerika Bomber. Their proposals were redesigned and resubmitted at the second competition, but nothing had changed. The Hortens were not invited to submit a proposal because it was thought that they were only interested in fighter aircraft.

After the Hortens learned of these design failures, they the went about designing the XVIII A Amerika Bomber. During the Christmas 1944 holidays, Reimar and Walter Horten worked on the design specifications for their all-wing bomber. They drew up a rough draft and worked on weight calculations, allowing for…

Blog Post by Joe Babaian

Today’s blog is inspired by the so-called human-centered waves of the current pandemic. Attribution and design credits to Victor Tseng @VectorSting for the amazing work seen here.

Take a look at Dr. Tseng’s graphic – it’s representative and not keyed to precise times as of today. He created this to be a start to conversation – it’s wonderful for that purpose and more. Or particular concern is the 4th Wave – what comes after. What comes after is going to define and change society in ways we are just beginning to grasp.

• 1st Wave: Immediate mortality and morbidity of COVID-19.
• 1st Wave Tail: Post-ICU and admission recovery for many patients.
• 2nd Wave: Impact of resource restrictions on non-COVID conditions – all the usual urgent things that people need immediate treatment for – acute.
• 3rd Wave: The impact of interrupted care of chronic conditions (people stayed…

A point that interests me greatly is the status of the concept of truth in contemporary intellectual thought. Insofar as postmodern and poststructuralist modes of thought remain hegemonic in intellectual culture, truth has very little currency. Similarly with our pluralistic and multicultural politics, which privilege a very relativistic approach to issues, rather than an insistence on a particular truth. Terry Eagleton writes, “No idea is more unpopular with contemporary cultural theory than that of absolute truth” (After Theory, Verso, 2004, p. 103). Rather than offer a devastating and unanswerable critique of this position in this blog post, I can only begin by noting that this idea has never been acceptable to me. I cannot do without the notion of truth.

The absurdities of a position entirely dispensing with the notion are well illustrated by the famous anecdote about Wittgenstein and the Rhinoceros in the Room. On one…

There’s a clamour from retailers for government (you and me) to subsidise their shop rentals.

The Risk-Monger understands that his articles can be long and he often includes a special lexicon with novel vocabulary to develop his ideas. Concerning two related articles, I was asked to just republish several key points so it can be more widely read and understood how the precautionary COVID-19 lockdowns were not risk management at all, but rather a result of the failure and incapacity of western risk managers. It is urgent to understand how ill-prepared our risk managers have been as we are falling into deeper, more serious crises including famines, a deep economic depression and supply chain collapse. It is urgent to understand how we need to stop the activists demanding even more precaution and more lost social benefits in the post-COVID-19 world.

How the Precautionary Principle works

While there are many definitions of the precautionary principle, its most common expression today claims that a practice, substance…

Anne Boleyn (c. 1501 – May 19, 1536) was Queen of England from 1533 to 1536 as the second wife of King Henry VIII. Their marriage, and her execution for treason and other charges by beheading, made her a key figure in the political and religious upheaval that marked the start of the English Reformation.

Anne was the daughter of Thomas Boleyn, 1st Earl of Wiltshire, and his wife, Lady Elizabeth Howard, and was educated in the Netherlands and France, largely as a maid of honour to Queen Claude of France. Anne returned to England in early 1522, to marry her Irish cousin James Butler, 9th Earl of Ormond; the marriage plans were broken off, and instead she secured a post at court as maid of honour to Henry VIII’s wife, Catherine of Aragon.

Anne, Queen Consort of England

Henry VIII and Anne formally married on January 25, 1533, after…

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

 A brief recap

Wilde debuted with a volume of slender and derivative poems in 1881 and was promptly invited to undertake a lecture tour of America in 1882 which proved fabulously successful. Throughout the 1880s he established himself via essays, reviews and articles (not least for The Woman’s World magazine which he edited for a spell) as a flamboyant journalist, leading representative of the Aesthetic movement, as well as fashioning himself into one of the London’s most notorious and newsworthy personalities.

Tiring of makepiece journalism, towards the end of the decade he made the transition to becoming a full-time writer of prose with a series of short stories and essays:

• The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)
• The Decay of Lying: A…