Utopia, you are standing in it!



In 1942, when Earl Tupper was given inflexible pieces of black polyethylene slag from his supervisor at DuPont Chemical, the seed was planted for unlikely success. Of course, most people wouldn’t see this as an historic exchange at the time: The slag was nothing more than a waste product of the oil-refining process. In other words, it was garbage. But Tupper didn’t see garbage. He saw an empire.

By purifying the slag and molding it, he was able to create lightweight, non-breakable containers, tableware and even gas masks that were used in World War II. This paved the way for thefounding of Tupperwarein 1946.

However, despite advertising and a showroom on Fifth Avenue, Tupper wasn’t faring very well financially. That all changed when Brownie Wise began hosting the Tupperware Home Party in 1948. By 1951, Tupper realized that the Tupperware parties were more effective than selling…

This piece is the result of a collaboration between the Economic History Review, the Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History and the European Review of Economic History. More details and special thanks below. Part A is available at this link 

Man and women with the bubonic plague with its characteristic buboes on their bodies — a medieval painting from 1411.
 Everett Historical/Shutterstock

As the world grapples with a pandemic, informed views based on facts and evidence have become all the more important. Economic history is a uniquely well-suited discipline to provide insights into the costs and consequences of rare events, such as pandemics, as it combines the tools of an economist with the long perspective and attention to context of historians. The editors of the main journals in economic history have thus gathered a selection of the recently-published articles on epidemics, disease and public health, generously made…

Reader Sue Davies sent a report from Australia on how they’re handling the pandemic, and gave me permission to post it. While much of her information comes from two sites (a Guardian Australia site and an Aussie federal government site), the summary and words are her own, and I’ve indented them:

I thought you might like to know how we in Australia are handling the crisis.

The Prime Minister has set up a “National Cabinet” made up of Premiers and Chief Health Officers of all six states and the Northern Territory.  This meets daily to make decisions affecting the whole country.  All the states are implementing the same laws to ensure that the response is the same everywhere.

Presently the rules are these:

1).  No more than two people can congregate outside at any one time (excluding family members). There are stiff on-the-spot fines ($1600) for people caught flouting…

John Tamny writes at Real Clear Markets ‘Studies’ Indicate Disappearing Beaches. Markets Think Studies Idiotic.Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

As USA Today recently reported, a new study from the European Union’s Joint Research Center warns that a global catastrophe looms due to “the near-extinction of almost half of the world’s sandy beaches by the end of the century.” Hmmmm. Really?

It seems the only individuals who never get the message about the “near-extinction” of beaches are those who actually live at those beaches, along with those who yearn to live at beaches. Stop and think about it.

Presumably the desirability of Malibu, Laguna, La Jolla, the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, Newport (RI), Ibiza, St. Tropez and other glamorous coastal locales has something to do with these destinations existing essentially on the beach. In other words, land and the housing that sits on said land is quite…

Talk about a survivor: this is unbelievable! The story (h/t Malgorzata) comes from the Jewish Journal (first headline) and Forbes (second) and you can see it by clicking on the screenshots. But I’ll reproduce the whole short report from JJ below.

The report:

A 101-year-old man, identified as ‘Mr. P’ has been released from isolation after recovering from COVID-19 in the Italian city of Rimini. Mr. P., a WWII and Spanish Flu survivor was admitted last week to a hospital in northeast Italy after he was tested positive for the Coronavirus.

According to Gloria Lisi, Vice-Mayor of Rimini, as the patient began to recover it became “the story everyone talked about” in the hospital.

“Everyone saw hope for the future of all of us in the recovery of a person more than 100 years old,” Lisi said in a televised interview.

“Every day we see the sad stories from these weeks…

I’ve spent the afternoon reading the most-recent materials from the lawsuit between U.S. women national team soccer players and the U.S. Soccer Federation (USSF). And in a word, they are incredible …

The question posed in the headline is apparently the basis of a theory being advanced by the U.S. Soccer Federation in the lawsuit brought by U.S. Women’s National Team players seeking equal pay. To the extent that this theory is accepted by the courts, it has the potential to reshape all women’s sport in the United States.

From a USSF filing yesterday (emphasis in original):

“To prevail on their motion, Plaintiffs must show, based on the facts when viewed in the light most favorable to U.S. Soccer, that any reasonable juror would conclude that U.S. Soccer intentionally paid Plaintiffs less money that it otherwise would have, simply because they are women.”

One need look no further than page 11 of the filing to see USSF making an argument that women are inherently inferior to men, concluding: “Plaintiffs have cited no case (there is none) suggesting that two jobs…

The hysteria generated by COVID-19 is nothing compared to the panic that’s broken out among renewable energy rent-seekers in the USA. With the Federal government channelling $2 trillion into a coronavirus stimulus package, wind and solar outfits appear to be suffering a #metoo moment; they’ve missed out on the cash and they’re crying foul.

The Republican-controlled Senate remains unmoved by tales of the imminent doom of the renewable energy sector in the US. Whereas, the Democrats are pulling out all stops to try and snaffle a substantial slice of that pie in order to redirect it to their benefactors in the wind and solar industries.

U.S. wind, solar industries plead for tax credit ‘tweaks’ to keep projects alive during virus outbreak
Reuters
Nichola Groom
25 March 2020

Wind and solar companies, facing project delays that threaten their ability to tap lucrative green energy subsidies, are pleading with lawmakers for help…

There was a thoughtful short piece in the BNZ’s weekly commentary yesterday on economic prospects for the next few years.  Perhaps there are others around that I missed – I only heard of this one when my son drew this report of it to my attention

BNZ’s head of research Stephen Toplis is warning that economic activity won’t return to pre-crisis levels till some time in 2023, while unemployment might not get back below 5% before 2025.

I gulped. I hadn’t quite thought about it in those specific terms.  But as I did, I realised it probably wasn’t an implausible story (as Toplis notes in his piece, and as everyone must, precise numbers/forecasts have little meaning at present; the issue is more about broad orders of magnitude and the nature of the supporting story).

Toplis’s own short-term story seemed, if anything, insufficiently bleak, although he may just have been making…

This post has been updated to include a discussion of what is a “vulnerable person” (31 March 2020 7:50am)

On Sunday evening the Prime Minister announced further restrictions on social gatherings, limiting them to two persons, or to the members of a household. It was up to the individual states and territories whether or not these restrictions would be merely advisory, or whether they would be made mandatory by government regulation. At a press conference on Monday morning, the Premier of NSW announced that these restrictions would be mandatory in NSW from midnight tonight.

The NSW Government Gazette has just (ie at around 11pm) published the Public Health (COVID-19 Restrictions on Gathering and Movement) Order 2020, the effect of which is described below.

Definitions

Firstly, some important definitions:

• household means any persons living together in the same place of residence.
• indoor space means an area, room or other premises…

A fearful Britain hunkers down to face the foreign invader. An eloquent Prime Minister sets out to rally the nation with stirring speeches. Parliament is presented with an emergency bill to monitor and restrict the people the like of which it has never seen before.

For 2020, read 1940.

Most of us may not have experienced it, but this feels like wartime. The threats that Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Boris Johnson faced may be entirely different, but there are intriguing comparisons to make in the new legislation that now governs our everyday lives. In May 1940 it was the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, now it is the Coronavirus Act, which received Royal Assent only last Wednesday.

‘A Bill to make provision in connection with coronavirus – and for connected purposes’. It is the second part of that description that worries civil libertarians. Of course the bill’s sponsor, Health Secretary…

The pandemic experience shows us how greatly a real emergency differs from an imaginary one.  His article at The Hill is The coronavirus pandemic versus the climate change emergency.  Excerpts in italics with my bold and images.

Today’s coronavirus pandemic puts into some perspective the climate emergency, which has been running for nigh on 32 years. The climate emergency was first announced in June 1988. “Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war,” the Toronto climate conference declared that month.

One way of assessing the reliability of a body of science with major policy implications is whether the experts in the field are prone to over-predicting the severity of the problem. Take smoking: In 1953, Richard Doll, one of the pioneer epidemiologists in discovering the link between tobacco smoking and lung cancer, predicted

‘In politics one should be guided by the calculation of forces.’ (Stalin at Potsdam)

Alliance is a thorough, insightful and gripping account of the wartime meetings between ‘the Big Three’ Allied leaders – Roosevelt and Churchill and Stalin – which determined the course of the Second World War and set the stage for the Cold War which followed it.

In actual fact the three leaders in question only met face to face on two occasions:

1. Tehran 28 November-1 December 1943
2. Yalta, 4-11 February 1945

The third great power conference, Potsdam July 1945, took place after Roosevelt’s death (12 April 1945) and with his successor, former vice-president Harry Truman

There were quite a few meetings between just Roosevelt and Churchill:

1. Placentia Bay, Canada – 8 to 11 August 1941 – resulting in the Atlantic Charter
2. First Washington Conference (codename: Arcadia), Washington DC, 22 December 1941 – 14 January 1942
3. Second Washington Conference…