Utopia, you are standing in it!

I spoke at the excellent Woman’s Place UK conference  at University College London on 1 Febuary 2020  — in the opening plenary with Pragna Patel of Southall Black Sisters and Joanna Cherry QC MP, Chaired by Professor Sophie Scott.

Wow! This is going to be an  be an amazing conference.

I am overwhelmed to be here on a panel with Pragna and Joanna.  It is an unexpected turn in my life

• I am not an academic feminist
• or professional feminist.
• I am not a radical feminist.
• I am not a socialist feminist,

I am just a feminist

I am an ordinary woman who knows what a woman is and who refused to shut up about it. 

Ross McKitrick writes at National Post ‘Believing the science’ on climate change doesn’t mean any policy goes.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds

Mainstream science and economics do not support much of the current climate policy agenda and certainly not the radical extremes demanded by activist groups

There’s an assumption out there that if you “accept” the science of climate change, you are obliged to support drastic measures to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This is not true. The one does not follow from the other. Mainstream science and economics do not support much of the current climate policy agenda and certainly not the radical extremes demanded by activist groups.

Elements of Integrated Assessment Models, or IAMs.

In a recent peer-reviewed paper, my co-authors and I proved this using one of the economic models governments and academics around the world rely on. Policy-makers compute the social costs of GHG emissions…

h/t Joe

Anshel Pfeffer knows better. 

The Times’ British-born Jerusalem correspondent and long-time Haaretz journalist – though one the most moderate and lucid contributors to the hard-left Israeli daily – is an extremely well-informed reporter and analyst on Israeli politics.

So, we were scratching our heads when we saw the following passage in Peffer’s March 3rd Times column on the Israeli elections (“Israeli election exit poll: Benjamin Netanyahu two seats from victory after stunning comeback”).

Israel’s left-wing parties,with the exception of the Arab-dominated Joint List, have been trounced. Mr Netanyahu is rampant and no one should now bet against him forming a government and staying out of jail.

As Pfeffer surely must know, there is little that’s “left-wing”, progressive or woke about the Joint List. 

As Liel Leibovitz demonsrated in an article at Tablet, Joint List is made up of four different parties, including Muslim Brotherhood supporting Islamists…

In October 1452, an English advance in Aquitaine retook Bordeaux from the French and was having some success, but by 1453 Bordeaux was lost again leaving Calais as England’s only remaining territory on the continent. Upon hearing of the final loss of Bordeaux in August 1453, Henry VI of England experienced a mental breakdown and became completely unresponsive to everything that was going on around him for more than a year. He even failed to respond to the birth of a son and heir, who was christened Edward.

Henry VI, King of England and Lord of Ireland

Henry may have inherited a psychiatric condition from Charles VI of France, his maternal grandfather, who was affected by intermittent periods of insanity during the last thirty years of his life. During his bout of insanity, Henry was attended by the surgeons Gilbert Kymer and John Marchall. Thomas Morstede had previously been appointed…

Back in 1983 the American Wind Industry Association claimed that solar and wind would be “competitive and self-supporting on a national level by the end of the decade if assisted by tax credits and augmented by federally sponsored R&D”. That was 36 years ago.

There has been no lack of assistance in the form of tax credits and federally sponsored R&D, along with a whole bunch of other punitive mandates and targets designed to cripple conventional generators and favour chaotically intermittent wind and solar. And yet, the contribution to world energy demand from wind and solar remains trivial, at best.

Notwithstanding $trillions in subsidies, no country has ever powered itself entirely with wind and solar; no country ever will. Ronald Stein explains why.

U.S. Government continues to dump funds into an electrical sinkhole
Fox & Hounds
Ronald Stein
27 January 2020

When I read the WSJ article “The Best-Laid Energy Plans”

In a very helpful blog post, Paul Krugman tries to make sense of Wal-Mart’s recent statement that it is already reaping some gains from raising wages via reduced turnover costs. Krugman’s main point is as follows. If worker productivity is a function of the wage (through improved morale, lower turnover, etc.), and Wal-Mart was initially maximizing profits, then a small change in wages will leave profits largely unchanged.

As Krugman points out, this is logic of the “envelope theorem.” What I want to clarify in this post is that the logic behind this argument is more general than the particular efficiency wage model Krugman works through.  Any time firms are choosing wages to balance various concerns—as opposed to simply accepting a “market wage” as a constraint—the logic of the envelope theorem applies.  What’s more, two types of empirically relevant models of the labor market—monopsonistic competition and efficiency wages—look pretty similar in this regard, and can be thought of as…

Mercatus Center Associate Director of Academic and Student Programs Rosolino Candela joins the podcast to talk about price theory. In an example-filled episode, we discuss free parking at shopping centers, lighthouses and lightships in 18th-century Britain, and the sugar contents of Fanta. Dr. Candela also talks about who he considers the best price theorists: Mises, Hayek, Buchanan, Tullock, Alchian, and Demsetz. Marcus Shera cohosts.

Loose, Vague, and Indeterminate is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Podcast Addict, Overcast, RadioPublic, PocketCasts, and Breaker. You can listen and catch up on old episodes on any of those platforms in addition to our Anchor page at go.gmu.edu/LVI.

Federal lands are governed by a complex thicket of laws built up over more than a century, often with too little thought to how the different generations fit together. The Supreme Court confronted that problem last week, when it considered whether federal permits for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline are void because the pipeline would pass several hundred feet below the Appalachian Trail.

The challengers argue that only Congress can approve a pipeline right-of-way because the trail is the equivalent of a national park. Because Atlantic Coast’s permit was from the Forest Service, they argue, it is invalid. From there, things get complicated quickly.

The trail isn’t a national park. But the Secretary of Interior has delegated the trail’s management to the National Park Service. So the challengers argue that the trail is “lands in the National Park System”–which, they further argue, means it has to be treated as if a…

Warning: This blog post contains strong and sometimes challenging imagery, including depictions of slavery, violence and suffering.

Baroque Britain

When I visited the Baroque Britain exhibition at Tate Britain I was surprised that there was a Content Warning at the entrance to the second room. This warned us that some of the images were disturbing and might upset visitors. Specifically, a massive painting by Benedetto Gennari the Younger which shows black people in collars and chains. Slaves, in other words.

Portrait of Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin by Benedetto Gennari the Younger (1674)

A handful of other paintings show rich people – men and women – being served or accompanied by black servants, but this is the only one where the black people (all boys, I think) are wearing very obvious metal slave collars round their throats.

William Blake

This is the second warning notice I’m aware of Tate putting…

The figure above provides an update (to 2018) on global decarbonization rates (that is, rate of reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels divided by global GDP, in 2011$ PPP).

• Annual decarbonization 2000-2018 = 1.6%
• Implied by a 50% reduction (from 2000 emissions) by 2030 = 8.4%
• Implied by an 80% reduction (from 2000 emissions) by 2050 = 6.0%

For details on methods and significance, see The Climate Fix (2010).

It is election day in Israel. Again. I probably have not followed an Israeli election so loosely since some time before the 1990s. If I am feeling this indifferent, I can only imagine how the average Israeli voter feels.

Polling throughout the period since the last election–only last September–shows little sign of any fundamental change in the political deadlock that has been a feature since the elections of last April. That is why I put “2020a” in the tile above. It is not inevitable that there will be a “2020b” election, but it is unclear how it will be avoided.

The potential governing scenarios are about the same now as they were when I last wrote, in November. Maybe one of these will happen this time, or maybe today’s results will surprise and the bargaining situation will be markedly different.

The lineup of parties is pretty much the same as