Utopia, you are standing in it!

German coal operation
H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

Government attempts to interfere in power generation markets can and do have unintended consequences, including undermining their own intentions. The expert interviewed here says ‘eight times as many wind and solar power plants as today’ would be needed in Germany by 2050, to meet policy targets. Many of the obstacles that lie in the way also apply to other countries that want to pursue the ‘CO2 controls climate’ delusion.

German economist Johannes Bachmann explains the so-called ‘Green Paradox’ — when unilateral climate policies accelerate the worldwide extraction of fossil fuels and global CO2 emissions.
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Yesterday, 20 September, the so-called “Climate Cabinet” of Germany’s federal government met to set the course of German climate policy for the coming years. Christoph Kramer spoke with Johannes Bachmann about the so-called Green Paradox and the economic concepts that fuel it.

Dr…

As I discuss in this recent interview, a higher minimum wage is a terrible idea if we care about facts and evidence (and also want to help poor people).

In the interview, I mentioned that minimum wage mandates aren’t good news for workers who lose their jobs.

One of them, Simone Barron, wrote in the Wall Street Journal about her unfortunate experience after the minimum wage was increased in Seattle.

This city’s minimum wage is rising to $16.39 an hour on Jan. 1. Instead of receiving a bigger paycheck, I’m left without any pay at all… That’s because the restaurant where I’ve worked for six years is closing as a consequence of the city’s harmful minimum-wage experiment. …When rent is too high, labor costs too much, and customers don’t want to pay $40 for a roast-chicken entree, the only way for many operators to ease the pain is to…

There is no rational excuse to have blasphemy laws on the books anywhere, yet, as I wrote in my Jesus and Mo foreword, they’re prevalent:

69 of the world’s 195 countries have laws on the books against [blasphemy], though in places the laws are vestigial and unenforced relics of an earlier time. But you can still be fined for criticizing religion in Italy, Brazil, Switzerland, Austria, Finland, and the Philippines, jailed in Germany, Poland, El Salvador, India, Finland, Ireland, India, Turkey, Morocco, and Algeria, and put to death in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan.  That doesn’t count places where sharia courts can pronounce death sentences not enshrined in civil law, nor acts of murder committed by offended believers in countries like the Netherlands.

One of the most notorious blasphemy laws was in Ireland, as it was enacted in a Western country and was clearly on the books to…

The Stranger is an “alternative” biweekly newspaper in Seattle, and contains a blog called “The Slog”. And it is there that, last June, ex-Muslim activist Sarah Haider was interviewed about the troubles that Western liberals cause for her agenda. What is that agenda? Haider is Executive Director of Ex-Muslims of North America (ExMNA), and her organization “advocates for acceptance of religious dissent, promotes secular values, and aims to reduce discrimination faced by those who leave Islam.”

Haider, born in Pakistan but brought up since age 7 in the U.S., was raised as a Muslim but gave up the faith as a teen, since nothing about it made sense to her. Since then, she and ExMNA President Muhammad Syed have campaigned tirelessly and strategically to call out the dangers of Islamic doctrine as well as provide support and welcome to those who become apostates.

I hadn’t seen this interview, but was…

I see my craft as an economic historian as a dual mission. The first is to answer historical question by using economic theory (and in the process enliven economic theory through the use of history). The second relates to my obsessive-compulsive nature which can be observed by how much attention and care I give to getting the data right. My co-authors have often observed me “freaking out” over a possible improvement in data quality or be plagued by doubts over whether or not I had gone “one assumption too far” (pun on a bridge too far). Sometimes, I wish more economists would follow my historian-like freakouts over data quality. Why?

Because of this!

In that paper, Michael Clemens (whom I secretly admire – not so secretly now that I have written it on a blog) criticizes the recent paper produced by George Borjas showing the negative effect of immigration…

New Year is a time for predictions to be made by commentators bemusingly confident they can foretell what the year ahead will bring, and for last year’s predictions to be checked.

On her blog today, Lindsay Mitchell has gone back a bit further than January 2019 to check on a prediction she made in September 2017  that Jacinda Ardern would increase child poverty if she became Prime Minister.

So how has that turned out?

On 7 of 9 measures introduced under the Child Poverty Reduction Act, to June 2018 poverty had increased. That’s fairly out-dated data now and not a particularly useful measuring stick.

But also now known is that children in benefit dependent households rose between June 2018 and 2019.

Steve Greenhut writes at Spectator California’s Year in Review: Missing Jerry Brown Already. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

A new progressive administration and Democratic legislative super-duper majorities put California on a collision course with reality.

Basically, the Brown era signaled the last years of traditional liberal governance. The new governor, former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, comes out of the party’s progressive wing. Democrats have long controlled the Capitol, but an anti-Trump backlash hastened the state GOP’s long-coming meltdown. A couple of GOP lawmakers even recently jumped ship. That means no check on Democrats, which makes this shift even more noteworthy.

Looking back at 2019, we get a vision of the future — and there’s reason for concern.

Newsom was stuck dealing with raging wildfires and a bankrupt public utility that began shutting down parts of the electrical grid to prevent even more fires. This brought back…