Utopia, you are standing in it!

On 8 May, 1973, the controversial psychologist Hans Eysenck attempted to deliver a lecture at the London School of Economics, but faced heavy protests from students. A group of Maoists stormed the stage and assaulted Eysenck. Alongside a sit-in the following month to protest a lecture by US academic Samuel Huntington at the University of Sussex, the shutting down of Eysenck was seen as an example of the grave danger free speech faced at British universities. Occurring less than a year before the ‘no platform’ policy was introduced by the National Union of Students, the Eysenck incident shows that claims that the freedom of speech was under threat at universities has existed for decades and that there has long been debate about the appropriate action to be taken against right-wing speakers who weren’t explicit fascists.

 Cartoon from the Daily Mirror

Before the NUS formalised its ‘no platform’ policy and put…

When making the case against socialism, I’ve pointed out how that coercive ideology is an evil and immoralfailure.

But maybe the best argument is contained in this very short video that was shared by a group of Tory activists in the United Kingdom.

Ms. Badenoch is now a member of the United Kingdom’s Parliament, and she was describing what it was like to grow up in Nigeria, a country where capitalism was not allowed to flourish.

Given the upside-down incentive system created by socialism, it’s no surprise that she endured hardship.

And while her story is just an anecdote, there is overwhelming evidence that nations with more economic liberty generate much better outcomes for ordinary people.

If you’re interested in learning more Ms. Badenoch, the U.K.-based Daily Mailprofiled her back in 2017.

Kemi Badenoch is black; although British-born, she was raised in Nigeria by African parents…

(These notes are just the tip of the iceberg. “Economics in One Lesson” is one of the most brilliant, yet approachable, books on economics ever written, and you can download it in PDF format for free HERE.

Note: All notes below are direct quotations from the book unless surrounded by parentheses.)

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The whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups. (5)

[The argument that war helps the economy] confuses need with demand. The more war destroys, the more it impoverishes, the greater is the postwar need. Indubitably. But need is not demand. Effective economic demand requires…

At least in terms of Expected Value it is far better to be a dentist than a rock star, because dentists earn consistently large salaries while the majority of rock stars earn very little, and even those that do become successful and make millions don’t swing the profession’s average salary to the level of dentists.

And if lack of variance is valuable to you, than being a dentist becomes even more attractive!

Statistical example of the lack of variance in the long-term relative to the short-term: “A 15% return with 10% volatility (or certainty) per annum translates into a 93% probability of success in any given year. But seen at a narrow time scale, this translates into a mere 50.02% probability of success over any given second” (65)

“(T)here are Monte Carlo generators designed to structure such texts and write entire papers. Fed with ‘postmodernist’ texts, they can randomize phrases…

“It is not very difficult to hit a target from an altitude of 30,000 feet.”

Theodore H. Barth, Norden Bombsight Co.

Great advances are seldom the products of a single mind; rather they arise from lore and facts previously known. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch draper in the seventeenth century was working in his father’s shop when he wanted a better way of seeing the quality of threads they were using than the then current magnifying lenses. His curiosity led to one of the most significant and technical developments in the history of science: the microscope with its magic enlargements. Countless scientists have profited by van Leeuwenhoek’s curiosity and subsequent knowledge.

Two hundred years after Leeuwenhoek, Joseph Lister, a professor of surgery at Glasgow University, learned more about the French chemist Louis Pasteur’s experiments which showed that fermentation and food spoilage could occur under anaerobic conditions if micro-organisms were present…

I noticed last evening that the Bank of England had released its Monetary Policy Report with some rough and ready GDP estimates/forecasts.  They reckon UK GDP probably fell by about 3 per cent in the March quarter (which would be a smaller fall than in quite a few other big European countries) and then by about a further 25 per cent in the June quarter.   In previous comments both the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility had estimated that during the lockdown itself GDP would be perhaps 35 per cent less than normal.

The Bank of England described their numbers as rough and ready.  I pulled out an old envelope and sketched out on the back of it some week by week stylised “rough and ready”) numbers for New Zealand.   In part I was curious to see what it would take to produce a similar…

Ideologies never die, they metamorphose and are reborn in a new form just when they are thought buried forever.

– Pascal Bruckner, French philosopher and writer (2006)

In 2010, sociology professor Rick Fantasia, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, struggled to explain the results of US Congress elections that were disastrous to democrats and that, at that time, brought a majority to the republicans.  Fantasia was part of a Social Forum, a 15,000-strong army of left activists who gathered in Detroit, Michigan.  Observing this convention, he noted that most people who arrived at this convention mostly represented various minority organizations that were either involved into identity politics or represented immigrant workers.  Fantasia also noted a heavy presence of countercultural and environmentalist elements, including New Age seekers.  Yet, the activist scholar pointed out that one important element was missing: working-class people, especially white workers.  With frustration, Fantasia noted…

They seemed to be  busy, busy, busy in the Beehive yesterday (or some of them were),  using the flow of press statements as our measure.

But much of what emerged related to the same issue – the prospect that Covid-19 constraints on what we can do will be lowered to Level Two.

The PM said Cabinet on Monday will consider moving to the next stage of the Covid-19 response but cautioned that the virus has bounced back in some countries where restrictions have been relaxed. 

Her detailed statement emphasised the need to continue to playing it safe, noting that public health measures remain unchanged, the border remains closed except to Kiwis, and the government wants us to stick to the social distancing rules. But – 

The Palace of Versailles was the principal royal residence of France from 1682, under Louis XIV, until the start of the French Revolution in 1789, under Louis XVI. It is located in the department of Yvelines, in the region of Île-de-France, about 20 kilometres (12 miles) southwest of the centre of Paris.

The site of the Palace was first occupied by a small village and church, surrounded by forests filled with abundant game. It was owned by the Gondi family and the priory of Saint Julian. King Henri IV of France went hunting there in 1589, and returned in 1604 and 1609, staying in the village inn. His son, the future Louis XIII, came on his own hunting trip there in 1607.

Henri IV, King of France and Navarre.

After he became King in 1610, Louis XIII returned to the village, bought some land, and in 1623-24 built a modest…

Across the globe, all manner of businesses have been forced to shut their doors and their owners and employees now find themselves in forced lockdown at home, devouring Netflix and junkfood delivered by Uber-eats.

The COVID-19 responses might vary in severity country by country, but the wholesale reduction in air-travel, transport, traffic, the movement of people and goods should give punters a taste of what a net-zero carbon dioxide emissions target will look like.

Except that weather-worriers are pursuing that object, as well as their broader plan of delivering (occasional) power from subsidised windmills and solar panels that’s so expensive as to be prohibitive to all but the elite. Well, that’s the plan anyway.

For now, though, electricity is still being delivered, and a fair proportion of those lucky enough to be still hooked to the grid can still afford it.

But, as Dr John Constable details below, Boris Johnson’s…

In mid-April, The Treasury released some economic scenarios for how things might play out as the country and economy work through –  and perhaps beyond – Covid-19.  I wrote about that document here.  The focus of those scenarios was on peak levels of (for example) unemployment, and on the multi-year path back to full employment.  It was a quite limited exercise –  although valuable for what it was –  in that all the variation across the scenarios was about the degree of government (a) restrictions, and (b) stimulus.

A day or two later, the Reserve Bank appeared before the Epidemic Response Committee and they gave the Committee some numbers for the estimated GDP losses at each level in the government’s (then) schema of alert levels –  this was before the current “Level 3” rules were adopted, let alone the new (“Level 2”) ones to be announced today.   The…

The path out of poverty is always and everywhere about reliable and affordable energy. And entrenched poverty is best explained by its absence.

Want to know how important electricity is to modern life? Try living a comfortable and civilised life without it.

More than a billion humans struggle through daily life without access to power at all, and two billion more are limited to a meagre trickle, because in developing countries it’s both unreliable and too expensive for all but the wealthy elites.

The wind and solar obsessed in the first world are quite prepared to ensure that it stays that way. With economic development agencies peddling ridiculously expensive solar panels – seen as ‘fake electricity’ by those lumbered with it – and forcing tinpot governments to sign up to costly and pointless wind and/or solar power schemes, the ratio of haves to have-nots is likely to stay that…

Prorogation is a quintessentially political power, sometimes deployed toward some of the most brazen of political ends. Charles II prorogued Parliament several times to prevent discussion of the Exclusion Bill. John Major (in)famously prorogued Parliament in order to prevent a report by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards on the cash-for-questions scandal from being tabled before the 1997 general election. In 2003, the Canadian Parliament was prorogued to delay the tabling of a report by the Auditor-General into a major sponsorship scandal. In 2011, the New South Wales Parliament was prorogued in order to prevent the production of State papers pursuant to Standing Orders of the Legislative Council. Numerous other examples abound (see Gerard Horgan, “Partisan-Motivated Prorogation and The Westminster Model” (2014) 52 Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 455-472; “Prorogation as a Tool of the Executive in Intercameral Conflict” (2014) 29 Australasian Parliamentary Review 159-76). Oh, if only the loyal opposition –…