Utopia, you are standing in it!

Robert Barro, a noted Growth Economist had written an article in WSJ on the fiscal multipliers. His main idea is that tax cuts are better than government spending and a fiscal stimulus should focus on the former. The government spending works but only in war times.

Why tax-cuts are more stimulative?

I don’t think it is really confusing at all, because when you cut taxes there are two different effects. One is that you cut tax rates, and therefore give people incentives to do things like work and produce more and pay more — maybe, depending on what kind of taxes. And then you also maybe give people more income. This income effect is the one that’s related to this Keynesian multiplier argument, where it’s usually argued that government spending should have a bigger effect. So that’s the income effect. But the tax-rate effect, inducing people to do things…

We can rephrase the question about the world’s inequalities as follows: why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? (p.16)

The 1990s saw an explosion in popular science books and this one won prizes (the Pulitzer Prize, over a million copies sold) for its skilful interweaving of a wide range of specialisms – biogeography, archaeology, anthropology, molecular genetics, linguistics and more – to answer an apparently ‘simple’ question. In his introduction Diamond calls it ‘Yali’s Question’, after a New Guinea native he knows (Diamond has spent a lifetime studying the birds of New Guinea) and who once asked him: ‘Why did you white people develop so much “cargo” and bring it to New Guinea and we black people have so little “cargo” of our own?’ where ‘cargo’ stands for the full range of marvellous inventions the white man brought with him.

The jokey sub-title of the book…

It is a failing of our species that we ignore and even despise the creatures whose lives sustain our own. (p.294)

Edward Osborne Wilson was born in 1929 and pursued a long career in biology, specialising in myrmecology, the study of ants, about which he came to be considered the world’s leading expert, and about which he published a massive textbook as well as countless research papers.

As well as his specialist scientific writing, Wilson has also published a series of (sometimes controversial) books about human nature, on collaborative species of animal (which led him to conceive the controversial theory of sociobiology), and about ecology and the environment.

(They’re controversial because he considers humans as just another complex life form, whose behaviour is dictated almost entirely by genetics and environment, discounting our ability to learn or change: beliefs which are opposed by liberals and progressives who believe humans can…

Call it the ‘luck of the Irish’. Over the last few months locals have racked up a string of victories against wind power outfits for all manner of sins, crimes and misdemeanours.

In November the Irish government was slammed with a €5 million fine for failing to apply its very own environmental standards at a wind farm in County Galway, which turned into an environmental disaster: Irish Government Slammed with €5m Fine Over Wind Farm’s Environmental Disaster

Following that rather embarrassing setback, a wind power outfit in Waterford was brought to heel for pushing the envelope over the size of its turbines: Busted: Irish Wind Project Slammed For Breaching EU Environmental Directives

Now, in an effort to avoid the grinding, thumping cacophony these things generate, a couple of horticulturalists, Klaus Balz and Hanna Heubach have taken a wind power outfit all the way to the Supreme Court. And they’ve won!

Central to…

Vijay Jayaraj explains how weather is created around the Indian Ocean in this article Record Heat and Cold Expose Climate Alarmists’ Bias. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

Australia was literally on fire in December. Record heat made headlines in global media. So did the extreme rainfall in east Africa.

You and everybody else on earth can guess what climate alarmists blamed for both: man-made global warming, a.k.a. climate change.

But record cold in northern India at the same time didn’t make headlines in any major media in the United States or the United Kingdom.

Why? Because it didn’t fit expectations.

It’s a perfect example of climate alarmists’ obvious bias that’s seldom brought to light.

In December, east Africa received extremely heavy rainfall, causing widespread floods in Kenya and Djibouti. The floods impacted more than one million people and killed scores already challenged by extreme poverty.

Sweden ended its negative rate policy recently. Bernanke recently spoke on how consequences of negative interest rates have not been that bad.

Daniel Lacalle gives an Austrian school perspective:

Negative rates are a huge transfer of wealth from savers and real wages to the government and the indebted. A tax on caution. They are the destruction of the perception of risk that always benefits the most reckless. The bailout of the inefficient.

Central banks ignore the effects of demography, technology, and competition on inflation and the growth of consumption, credit, and investment, and with the wrong policies they generate new bubbles that become more dangerous than the previous ones. The next bubble will again increase the fiscal imbalances of the countries. When central banks present themselves as the agents that will reverse the effect of technology and demographics, they will be creating a greater risk and bubble.

PROFESSIONAL climate alarmist, Tim Flannery was head of Australia’s Climate Commission. For his $180,000, three day, part-time working week, he made decisions that affected billions of dollars of Australian taxpayers money.

A MUST WATCH! And, ask yourself one question while viewing: Would you want this freak show in charge of your hard-earned? …

See more Flannery :

• TIM FLANNERY – Professor of Dud Predictions and Climate Falsehoods | Climatism
• Tim Flannery | Climatism
• Flannery sacked | Herald Sun (Great look at Flannery’s impressive ‘CV’)

Prior to the general election, several of the parties’ manifestos called for the creation of a codified constitution for the UK. In December, the Constitution Unit hosted an event to debate the merits and downsides of such an exercise. Harrison Shaylor summarises the discussion.

What did the 2019 Liberal Democrat election manifesto and the Brexit Party’s ‘Contract with the People’ (from the same election) have in common? Both advocate the need for a written constitution in the UK. So too did the Green Party manifesto, and that of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland. Meg Russell took part in a discussion on a written constitution in The Briefing Room on Radio 4 in September, and on 28 November, the Constitution Unit held its own event entitled ‘Do we need a written constitution?’. Two distinguished law professors – Sionaidh Douglas-Scott of Queen Mary University of London…

I posted on my “current work” page a new paper “Technological Diffusion News, A comment on “Whither News Shocks?” by Barsky, Basu & Lee” It is forthcoming in the NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2014, Volume 29

As written in the abstract,