Utopia, you are standing in it!

As  the world  awaits  the  development of  a  vaccine  for  the  novel coronavirus causing Covid-19,  reports   in the past week   of  successful  treatment of severely ill patients at  a Chicago  hospital  with the antiviral  medicine  Remdesivir   were headlined in the US  and  caused a bounce on global sharemarkets.

Remdesivir was one of the first medicines identified  in lab tests as having the potential to impact SARS-CoV-2.  Results from US  biotechnology firm Gilead  Science’s  clinical trials  have been  eagerly  expected  as the  world looks for  positive outcomes which could  lead to fast approvals by the Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies.

If safe and effective, it could become the first approved treatment against the disease.

The University of Chicago Medicine recruited 125 people with Covid-19 into Gilead’s two Phase 3 clinical trials.  Of those people, 113 had severe disease.

All the patients have been treated with daily infusions of…

This post is not about WuHanFlu, but about New York’s insane decision to close nuclear power plants in favor of wind farms.  Robert Bryce writes at Forbes New York Has 1,300 Reasons Not To Close Indian Point. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

At the end of this month, the Unit 2 reactor at the Indian Point Energy Center in Buchanan, New York will be permanently shut down. Next April, the final reactor at the site, Unit 3, will also be shuttered.

TOMKINS COVE , NY – MAY 11: The Indian Point nuclear power plant is seen from Tomkins Cove, New York … [+] CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES But the premature closure of the 2,069-megawatt nuclear plant is even worse land-use policy. Here’s why: replacing the 16 terawatt-hours of carbon-free electricity that is now being produced by the twin-reactor plant with wind turbines will require 1,300 times as much…

Finance Minister Grant Robertson trots out the phrase “go hard, go early”  in the battle against  Covid-19,  as  often as he used to declare  the  underlying fundamentals of  the  NZ  economy  are  “strong”.

Meanwhile   Health Minister  David  Clark   says   responding to  Covid-19   is a  “marathon,  not a  sprint”.

But  New Zealand  didn’t  “goearly”.   The  Ministry  of   Health  on  January  24,  the  day after China  locked down  the  huge  city of  Wuhan because of the  outbreak of the disease,  said the  likelihood of a  sustained outbreak in  NZ  is  “low”.

It maintained that  line for  a month.  There was no  visible sign of the  ministry calling on ministers to scale up  stocks of relevant equipment, take precautions in retirement  homes,   or   increase the  number of Intensive Care Unit beds  and ventilators.

 I am still reading this much discussed research by Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein where they estimate the impact of Obama plan (Econbrowser has a nice graph which explains the impact in a nutshell). Both head Council of Economic Advisors of President elect Obama, so it is a must read. Another thing to read is CBO’s estimate of the US economy (I will try and do a comparison later on; for insights read Krugman’sblog).

Coming back to Romer/Bernstein estimation, NYTpoints:

Christina Romer, whom Mr. Obama has designated to be his chief economist, concluded in research she helped write in 1994 that interest-rate policy is the most powerful force in economic recoveries and that fiscal stimulus generally acts too slowly to be of much help in pulling the economy out of recessions, though associates said she now supports a big stimulus package if policy…

I came across this paper by Lee Ohanian of Minneapolis Fed , who has done some great work on  Great Depression. The paper is a review of this book – The Defining Moment (free to download chapetrwise)-  written on Great Depression by various economists and edited by Michael D. Bordo, Claudia Goldin, and Eugene N. White.

The abstract of the paper is quite interesting and apt for today’s times:

This paper reviews The Defining Moment, edited by Michael D. Bordo, Claudia Goldin, and Eugene N. White. The volume studies how the Great Depression changed government policies, including changes in monetary policy, fiscal policy, banking policy, agricultural policy, social insurance, and international economic policy.

I argue that a theory of policy evolution is required to answer how the Great Depression affected these policies. In the absence of this theory, the contributors provide insight into the question by showing how policies changed sharply…

There is an intriguing paper by Douglas Irvin on the topic. Voxeu has a nice summary (one of the best things to have happened on web for economics students- voxeu. Most economists use it to summarise key papers/thoughts/ideas etc)).

He says:

South Korea had its assembly election on 15 April, with various covid-19 precautions in place. The Democratic Party of President Moon Jae-in (elected in 2017) won a majority of seats.

As discussed previously at F&V, the electoral system was changed from mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) to, at least partially, mixed-member proportional (MMP) prior to this election. It is only partially MMP not mainly because the number of compensatory list seats is so small (30 out of 300 total), but because there remain 17 seats that are, apparently, allocated in parallel (i.e., as if it were MMM).

There was some discussion in various media accounts (and in the previous thread) of the major parties setting up “satellite” parties to “game” the MMP aspect of the system. Under such a situation, a big party will contest the nominal tier seats and use a separate list to attract list votes and seats. By not…

I’ve mentioned in posts over the last few days The Treasury’s estimate that the current “Level 4” restrictions will have reduced GDP by about 40 per cent relative to normal levels and the Reserve Bank’s estimate of a 35 per cent reduction.    Both estimates seem a lot more realistic than some of the private sector estimates that were still doing the rounds early in the week.  But I still reckon the Reserve Bank estimate, in particular, is almost certainly too low –  especially if we are concerned, as we should be, with the “true” reduction in the volume of economic activity, not with what SNZ may initially report (accurate measurement is going to be a challenge).

What makes me sceptical?  Well, there is the fact that our partial lockdown seems to be more restrictive, particularly (but not exclusively) on economic dimensions, than those in many other countries.  Thus ANZ…

Coverage in Searchlight (May 2000)

On 11 April 2000, Mr Justice Gray found in favour of Penguin Books, who had been sued for libel by David Irving after the publication of Deborah Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust, which stated:

Irving is one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial. Familiar with historical evidence, he bends it until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political agenda. A man who is convinced that Britain’s great decline was accelerated by its decision to go to war with Germany, he is most facile at taking accurate information and shaping it to confirm his conclusions. A review of his recent book, Churchill’s War, which appeared in New York Review of Books, accurately analysed his practice of applying a double standard to evidence. He demands “absolute documentary proof” when it comes to proving the Germans guilty, but he relies on highly circumstantial evidence to…

Adding wind and solar capacity is a bit like pushing on string; the outcome never matches the effort applied.

Across the globe, it’s true to say that there has been a massive expansion in wind and solar power capacity. However, as Rafe Champion points out below, there’s a yawning gulf between the notional capacity of the world’s wind and solar plants and what they actually deliver.

And, of course, where output from the former depends upon ‘just right breezes’ and output from the latter’s determined by the time of day (eg, there’s never much happening at midnight) predicting just when that capacity might be delivered makes betting the house on roulette seem like a canny investment.

Windpower advocates lying with statistics
Catallaxy Files
Rafe Champion
9 April 2020

Windpower Roundup reports.

Roughly 176GW of new renewable energy capacity was added last year, accounting for 72% of global power growth.

The coronavirus pandemic is, of course, first and foremost a social crisis. It is testing the limits of the NHS, bringing out the best in our doctors, nurses and carers, and many others on whom we all rely. But it is also a huge challenge for policymakers who are trying to protect businesses, jobs and incomes, so that the economy can quickly reboot once the lockdown is lifted. And while the saving of lives is rightly the priority, the extent and duration of the economic disruption could also have significant impacts on our health.

Fortunately, history does provide a few pointers. Perhaps the least surprising conclusion is that vicious diseases cannot be allowed to run unchecked. One particularly grim study of the longer-term economic consequences of 15 pandemics, all the way back to the Black Death in the 14th century, found that the fallout persisted for as long as 40…