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 way for the foreseeable future.

The relationship between economic development and reliable and affordable electricity is the subject of Juice: How Electricity Explains…

As mentioned by Sandeep Baliga over at Cheap Talk, Debraj Ray has a particularly interesting new essay on Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. If you are theoretically inclined, you will find Ray’s comments to be one of the few reviews of Piketty that proves insightful.

I have little to add to Ray, but here are four comments about Piketty’s book:

1) The data collection effort on inequality by Piketty and coauthors is incredible and supremely interesting; not for nothing does Saez-Piketty 2003 have almost 2000 citations. Much of this data can be found in previous articles, of course, but it is useful to have it all in one place. Why it took so long for this data to become public, compared to things like GDP measures, is an interesting one which sociology Dan Hirschman is currently working on. Incidentally, the data quality complaints by the Financial Times seem…

Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson was mentioned in despatches during the week, in a post which dealt with MPs’ air travel expenses.

We mention her again today because of her eagerness to have taxpayers become more generous to the unemployed, no matter – apparently – how feckless or disinclined to find work they might be.

Our earlier mention of Davidson and the Greens was triggered by Taxpayers’ Union data, gleaned from the latest Parliamentary expense disclosures, which showed the list MPs from the Greens (on average) are spending more than a third more than Labour’s equivalent.

Average air travel spending for non-ministerial list MPs by party:

Greens – $9,816
NZ First – $8,059
National – $7,332
Labour – $6,499

A new paper (Faiss et al. 2020) reports that 15% of male and 22% of female endurance athletes at the 2011 and 2013 IAAF World Championships engaged in “blood doping” — defined as the use of prohibited methods to boost red blood cell amounts. No athletes are identified by name or country in the analysis, and no specific athlete is implicated in this post. However, the aggregate numbers are stunning.

With the publication of the final volume, Never Flinch, Never Weary, October 1951-January 1965, the official biography of Winston Churchill has been completed. As determined by the Guinness Book of World Records (the arbiter of such things), it is the longest biography in history. The completed project consists of eight narrative volumes and 23 document volumes. It has both physical and intellectual heft. Together the volumes, which have been acclaimed as a “classic of English scholarly biography,” total over 42,000 pages, measure 72 linear inches, and weigh 108 pounds. As Larry Arnn, the biography’s final editor, has commented its mammoth size is “befitting one of the largest lives ever lived.”

The story of the “Great Biography” starts in 1960 as the then 85 year-old Winston Churchill selected his son Randolph to write his biography based on his voluminous personal papers. Randolph Churchill had proven himself capable by researching and…

by Ross McKitrick

Challenging the claim that a large set of climate model runs published since 1970’s are consistent with observations for the right reasons.

Jan 26, 2020

Zuby, the self-styled “Jordan Peterson of rap”, is this week’s guest on “So What You’re Saying Is…”.

The weight-lifting hip hop artist became an unlikely feminist icon for demonstrating that athletes who are genetically male should not be competing alongside women. In 2019 he was filmed smashing the British women’s deadlift record, in which the weights are raised from the ground to thigh level, while he said he was “identifying as a woman”.

The video went viral on the Internet. The Oxford University graduate beat the UK women’s bench press record too, joking that his work was “strong, stunning and brave”.

The Painful Truth About Affirmative Action

Introduction

“The Painful Truth About Affirmative Action” is an editorial published by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. in magazine The Atlantic. Sander is a law professor and economist at the University of California- Los Angeles and has published several works studying the effects of racial preferences. Taylor is a contributing editor for National Journal and teaches news media and law at Stanford Law School. The content of the editorial is a criticism of affirmative action in college admissions and how it is inherently unfair and ineffective.

Summary

To begin the persuasive piece, the authors introduce the audience to a concept called “mismatch”. As they defined and explained, mismatch is a problem wherein students get admitted to incredibly selective universities where they would not have been accepted to had it not been for affirmative action, and thus do not perform or fit in as…

In January 1629, Charles opened the second session of the English Parliament, which had been prorogued in June 1628, with a moderate speech on the tonnage and poundage issue. Members of the House of Commons began to voice opposition to Charles’s policies in light of the case of John Rolle, a Member of Parliament whose goods had been confiscated for failing to pay tonnage and poundage. Many MPs viewed the imposition of the tax as a breach of the Petition of Right.

When Charles ordered a parliamentary adjournment on March 2, 1629 members held the Speaker, Sir John Finch, down in his chair so that the ending of the session could be delayed long enough for resolutions against Catholicism, Arminianism and tonnage and poundage to be read out and acclaimed by the chamber. The provocation was too much for Charles, who dissolved Parliament on March 10, 1629 and had nine…