Utopia, you are standing in it!

The following is a guest planting by Dr. Yuhui Li. I suggested Dr. Li draft something for this blog about his recently published book. (Note: I was the Ph.D. committee chair for Huey at UC Davis.)

You can buy the book by clicking here, and taking advantage of a discount! You can get 30% off by entering the code, UMCYCLING (for a limited time).

I’m grateful that Matthew offers to post this introduction of my book Dividing the Rulers: How Majority Cycling Saves Democracy. I hope it may interest some fellow political scientists.

The initial thought about the project originated from a debate I had years ago on Chinese social media regarding the choice of political systems. It appeared to me that many people were skeptical about the idea of democracy out of the fear that the majority, at least in theory, could be as tyrannical as individual dictators…

Andrew Cuomo: when one disaster is barely enough.

With the coronavirus pandemic laying them to waste, New Yorkers have plenty to worry about. Now their power supply is under threat, thanks to their wind and solar obsessed Governor, Andrew Cuomo.

At Indian Point (situated north of New York City) nuclear power plants have been providing safe, reliable and affordable electricity 24 x7 to New Yorkers since 1962.

In an astonishing move, Cuomo has determined to progressively shutdown both of the plants, with a combined capacity of 2,069 MW, on the delusional premise that he can replace what he destroys with wind and solar backed up by gas ‘peakers’ – highly inefficient open cycle gas turbines, which are basically jet engines strapped to generators.

The wind cult and renewable energy rent seekers are, of course, delighted with the outcome. However, as Robert Bryce points out, New Yorkers can look forward to…

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in the US state of Louisiana. The hurricane caused enormous material destruction and about 2,000 people perished.

While Katrina obviously cannot be compared to Covid19 in terms material devastation and death it nonetheless is comparable in terms of the sudden the “shutdown” of the economy.

Katrina was a very clear case of a supply shock. Production facilities were simply shut down. And in the same way as today, it happened from one day to the next.

But nothing really had happened to the fundamentals of the economy – this to a large extent is also the case in terms of the Covid19 around the world.

Katrina was a huge, but very short-lived economic shock

If we look at how things were going for Louisiana’s economy in 2005-6, then you will see that in economic terms, it was a huge negative shock, but the…

NASA’s MSU satellite measurement systems, generate the RSS and UAH datasets, which measure the average temperature of every cubic inch of the lower atmosphere (0-10 kms), which happens to be the exact place where anthropogenic global warming is meant to occur, according to anthropogenic global warming theory.

AUS MAY TEMPS -0.4C BELOW AVERAGE

UAH temperature anomaly for May was almost half a degree centigrade (-0.4C) below the 4o year average!

AUSTRALIA Lower Troposheric Temperature Anomaly 1978-2018

SATELLITES Vs LAND TEMPS

SATELLITES have the obvious benefit of measuring only the atmosphere and the effect that carbon dioxide emissions may be having on the atmosphere. Satellite data is not polluted by UHI (Urban Heat Island effect) – artificial heat generated from city infrastructure; asphalt carparks, airpots, highways, AC vents etc.

UHI (Urban Heat Island effect)

TONY Heller did a survey of the ten oldest stations in New South Wales And Victoria, circled below. Three rural…

This excellent article was contributed by New Zealand journalist Peter Drew who is clearly concerned & wants the word out. Please do share it far & wide. EWR

NOTE: the article has had over 10K views since posting … & 2.5K FB shares. It’s pleasing to see that many Kiwis are awake to what is going down.

By Peter Drew

Jacinda Adern

Prime Minister – New Zealand

Dear Jacinda,

I write this letter as a patriotic Kiwi with best intentions for my country and for the future health and welfare of my fellow Kiwis. You have a very difficult job at this moment in time. There can be no doubt about that.

There is a famous saying. “The first casualty of war is the truth”. Well, from what we are seeing around the world, the first casualty of a pandemic is not only the truth, but also rational thinking. That…

It’s time for libertarian wonkery! My friend Jeremy posted a link to libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick’s Tale of the Slave on Facebook and I guess most of his Facebook friends are not libertarians as it stirred up a bunch of controversy.

If you haven’t read it I’d recommend doing so. It’s only about a two minute read. But nonetheless I will summarize it here.

Nozick starts by describing a typical case of slavery and then in subsequent steps modifies the terms of the slavery to be slightly less bad than the previous step. After a handful of modifications he ends up at representative democracy and asks “At which step did this become no longer a tale of a slave?”.

The intuitive response you’re supposed to have is that it never really stopped being a tale of a slave. The only difference is a matter of degree. This is reminiscent of…

(1918 Spanish Flu Epidemic)

As I sit at my desk and examine the latest Covid-19 statistics and fantasize about what might have occurred had the Trump administration carried out its constitutional duties to care for American citizens instead of fomenting a civil war against democratic governors and denying their role in the current pandemic I am appalled and overwhelmed.  At this moment there are 927,000 cases of people testing positive for the virus in the United States out of 2,790,000 worldwide.  The death rate is 52,400 in the U.S. out of 196,000 worldwide, and each day we add thousands to the total.  Words like mitigation, social distancing, ventilators, and numerous others have entered our everyday vocabulary.  The questions that pervade the news are when we will “open up” the country? what happens if we do it too fast? and what will happen if each state goes its own way?  Writer…

When I put forth the “The Case for Social Security Personal Accounts” in early 2011, I pointed out that the program’s long-run fiscal shortfall was more than $27 trillion.

We should be so lucky to have that problem today.

The Social Security Administration just released the annual report on the program’s finances, so I went to to Table VI.G9 of the “Supplemental Single-Year Tables” to peruse the yearly projections for future revenue and spending (which are adjusted for inflation so we have a more accurate method for comparisons).

The bad news is that an ever-increasing amount of our income is going to be grabbed by payroll taxes. The worse news is that Social Security’s spending burden will climb at an even-faster rate (historical data to the left of the red line, future projections to the right of the red line).

For those who focus on

Edward II (April 25, 1284 – September 21, 1327), also called Edward of Carnarvon, was King of England and Lord of Ireland from 1307 until he was deposed in January 1327.

Edward II was the fourth son of Edward I, King of England, Lord of Ireland, and Infanta Eleanor of Castile, Countess of Ponthieu in northern France.

Infanta Eleanor of Castile, Countess of Ponthieu was born in Burgos, daughter of King Fernando III of Castile and Joan, Countess of Ponthieu. Her Castilian name, Leonor, became Alienor or Alianor in England, and Eleanor in modern English. She was named after her paternal great-grandmother, Eleanor of England.

By his first wife Eleanor of Castile, King Edward I of England had at least fourteen children, perhaps as many as sixteen. Of these, five daughters survived into adulthood, but only one son, and last child, outlived his father, King Edward II (1307–1327).

Here are the…

There are few economists that have had a bigger influence on my thinking about monetary matters than former Richmond Fed economist Robert Hetzel.

Bob is not only one of my biggest intellectual heroes, but also a very a good friend and I am therefore extremely happy that he has allowed to publish some of this insights and thoughts on Fed’s 50bp ’emergency’ rate cut today.

Lars Christensen

Fed and Covid19

By Robert Hetzel

Cutting the funds rate just before an FOMC meeting sends a strong but not necessarily appropriate message.  The fact that the cut came without the discussion from the regional Bank presidents of their respective regions that would come routinely at an FOMC meeting suggests that the FOMC was responding to the decline in the stock market.

That turned out badly for the Fed in October 1987 when the market fell 20% and the FOMC cut the funds…

As an economist I am not happy about going into having strong views on the causes of why people die from Covid19, but at least I can have a look at correlations.

It has been very clear for some time that very few people younger than 50 years old die from Covid19.

In fact the average of people dying with Covid19 have been around 80 years in most countries and men are more likely to die than women.

These simple facts made me think – how much of this can explain the different mortality rates we observe across countries?

Why has so many people died in Italy and Spain, while mortality rates have been much lower in for example Scandinavia? Similarly why are mortality rates so low in most developing countries?

Can the age composition explain this? The graph below give us the answer.

In the graph I have plotted…