Utopia, you are standing in it!

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…

Typical electric car set-up
Welcome to the EU’s plan to strong-arm its way to victory in the electric car game, in the name of imaginary climate benefits. What happens if the manufacturers all start posting heavy losses due to poor EV sales, as a result of this coercion, is not yet clear. As the article says, tens of billions of euros are at stake.

Long-awaited light-duty vehicle emission rules will hit light-duty vehicle makers working in EU member countries on January 1, and automakers will soon have to deal with the consequences, says OilPrice.com.

Vehicle manufacturers will have to sell many more hybrid and electric vehicles or pay costly fines, a situation similar to China’s rules.

For automakers with product lineups with few EV offerings, they’ll need to sell lots of conventional cars and trucks, and use the profits to pay the fines.

Industry analysts expect plug-in hybrid, battery…

W.E.B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) was a sociologist and historian. He helped co-found the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and was author of the seminal book, The Souls of Black Folk. He was one of the most important black activists and intellectuals of the 20th century.

The commission

His status was confirmed when, in 1900, Du Bois was invited to create an exhibition for the world fair in Paris – the Exposition Universelle – about the condition of black people in contemporary America.

Du Bois and his sociology students from the University of Alabama were well aware that black people were going to be overwhelmingly portrayed at the world fair as primitives and savages, living in mud huts in Africa and photographed wearing picturesque tribal costumes, with long descriptions of their customs and rites which were all written to underpin and justify…

During my little vacation recently from writing about monetary policy, it seems that there has been quite a dust-up about endogenous money in econo-blogosphere. It all started with a post by Steve Keen, an Australian economist of the post-Keynesian persuasion, in which he expounded at length the greatness of Hyman Minsky, the irrelevance of equilibrium to macroeconomic problems, the endogeneity of the money supply, and the critical importance of debt in explaining macroeconomic fluctuations. In making his argument, Keen used as a foil a paper by Krugman and Eggerston “Debt, Delevereging, and the Liquidity Trap: A Fisher-Minsky-Koo Approach,” which he ridiculed for its excessive attachment to wrong-headed neoclassicism, as exemplified in the DSGE model in which Krugman and Eggerston conducted their analysis. I can’t help but note parenthetically that I was astounded by the following sentence in Keen’s post.

There are so many ways in which neoclassical economists misinterpret non-neoclassical…