Utopia, you are standing in it!

On this date, February 6, 1952, George VI of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland died and was succeeded by his elder daughter as Queen Elizabeth II. This marks her 68th year on the throne.

The stress of the World War II had taken its toll on the King George VI’s health, made worse by his heavy smoking and subsequent development of lung cancer among other ailments, including arteriosclerosis and Buerger’s disease. A planned tour of Australia and New Zealand was postponed after the King suffered an arterial blockage in his right leg, which threatened the loss of the leg and was treated with a right lumbar sympathectomy in March 1949.

His elder daughter, Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh and the heir presumptive, took on more royal duties as her father’s health deteriorated. The King was well enough to open the Festival of Britain in May 1951, but…

In an amazing display of incompetence, we still don’t know whether Bernie Sanders or Pete Buttigieg won the Iowa caucus.

This has created some opportunities for satire, with people asking how a political party that can’t properly count 200,000 votes somehow can effectively run a healthcare system for 340 million people.

That’s a very good point, but today let’s focus on a contest that does have a clear winner.

As explained in this video, John Stossel and his team crunched the numbers and they have concluded that “Crazy Bernie” wins the free-stuff primary.

Senator Sanders doubtlessly will be very happy with this victory, especially since he trailed Kamala Harris when Stossel did the same calculations last summer.

America’s taxpayers, however, might not be pleased with this outcome. Especially if Bernie Sanders somehow gets to the White House.

Last week, I shared new numbers from the Congressional Budget Office…

On standard tests of empathy, libertarians score very low. Yet, the world’s “well-known libertarian bias” coupled with many people’s unwarranted pessimism makes us seem like starry-eyed optimists (“how could you possibly believe things will just work themselves out?!”).

Under the Moral Foundations framework developed and popularized by Jonathan Haidt, he and his colleagues analyzed thousands of responses through their YourMorals.orgtool. Mostly focused on what distinguishes liberals from conservatives, there are enough self-reported libertarians answering that the questionnaire to draw meaningful conclusions. The results, as presented in TED-talks, podcast interviews and Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religioncontains a whole lot of interesting stuff.

First, some Moral Foundations basics: self-reported liberals attach almost all their moral value to two major categories – “fairness” and “care/harm.” Some examples include striving for equal (“fair”) outcomes…

Here’s a long episode of Jonathan Pie (the alter ego of comedian Tom Walker), playing, as he often does, a reporter. But this time the story is about him, a “documentary” of Pie covering pro- and anti-Brexit marchers. (For Americans: “UKIP” is the UK Independence Party, a prime mover of the Brexit initiative that has, says Matthew, “mutated into a far-right home for Nazis.”)

The conceit is although Pie is a liberal, he’s taken down by social media, who decides to take his words and actions out of context and portray him as both a “Leave-r” and an “alt-righter”. And this is after he extols social media for being a boon to journalism (“journalism for toddlers”), enabling reporters to find just the right quote they want instead of having to interview a bunch of wankers.

In the end, Pie comes a cropper, and the coppers come for him—for perpetrating “hate…

Scott Sumner wrote a post commenting on my previous post about Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times last Friday. I found Krugman’s column really interesting in his ability to pack so much real economic content into an 800-word column written to help non-economists understand recent fluctuations in the stock market. Part of what I was doing in my post was to offer my own criticism of the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) of which Krugman is probably not an enthusiastic adherent either. Nevertheless, both Krugman and I recognize that EMH serves as a useful way to discipline how we think about fluctuating stock prices.

Here is a passage of Krugman’s that I commented on:

But why are long-term interest rates so low? As I argued in my last column, the answer is basically weakness in investment spending, despite low short-term interest rates, which suggests that those rates will…

Not long after I started blogging over two and a half years ago, Nick Rowe and I started a friendly argument about the money multiplier. He likes it; I don’t. In his latest post (“Alpha banks, beta banks, fixed exchange rates, market shares, and the money multiplier”), Nick attempts (well, sort of) to defend the money multiplier. Nick has indeed figured out an ingenious way of making sense out of the concept, but in doing so, he has finally and definitively demonstrated its total uselessness.

How did Nick accomplish this remarkable feat? By explaining that there is no significant difference between a commercial bank that denominates its deposits in terms of a central bank currency, thereby committing itself to make its deposits redeemable on demand into a corresponding amount of central bank currency, and a central bank that commits to maintain a fixed exchange rate between its currency and the…

For California, 2019 was a welcome reprieve from recent record-setting wildfire seasons. According to Cal Fire, approximately 260,000 acres burned across the state. A large area to be sure, this pales in comparison to the approximately 2,000,000 acres burned in 2018 and 1,500,000 acres in 2017.

However, state policy may lead to even worse fire seasons in the future. Despite the governor declaring a wildfire emergency last year, thereby lifting some regulatory obstacles to forest and grassland management, the state’s insurance regulator is frustrating efforts by insurers to have rates reflect real risks.

In California, insurance carriers require government permission to adjust their rates, introducing political considerations into what should be an economic decision. Unsurprisingly, rate increases aren’t popular with voters who have to pay them.

Although rates have increased, in some cases substantially, they remain capped. Consequently, the logical response for insurers is to continue offering coverage to customers…

The Conservative manifesto pledged to repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, but was silent about what, if anything, would replace it. Robert Hazell argues that it is not enough to simply repeal the Act; new legislation will have to be drafted, parliamentary scrutiny will have to take place, and the options for reform should be properly considered.

Can the Fixed-term Parliaments Act simply be repealed? The short answer is: no. As always, it is more complicated than that. But the commitment in the Conservative manifesto was unambiguous: ‘We will get rid of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act [sic] – it has led to paralysis at a time the country needed decisive action’ (page 48). And decisive action is what the government hopes to display through early repeal of the FTPA. It does not seem to be one of the issues to be referred to the new Constitution, Democracy and Rights Commission…