Utopia, you are standing in it!

by Judith Curry

Draft of article to be submitted for journal publication.

Introduction

Under our system of responsible government, the Sovereign or Governor General exercises his prerogative powers on the advice of the Crown-in-Council, and his constitutional powers relating to Parliament on the advice of the Prime Minister alone. Responsible government means that “Ministers of the Crown are responsible for acts of the Crown” and responsible to the House of Commons.[1] The Sovereign or Governor General acts as a neutral figure and remains above partisan politics. The Prime Minister is the Governor General’s principle constitutional advisor, and while his government commands the confidence of the House, the Governor General must carry out the Prime Minister’s advice. Under no circumstances can the Leader of the Opposition, the leader of the third opposition party, or any other government or opposition backbencher offer legitimate, binding constitutional advice to the Governor General.

The Crown-in-Parliament (Tidridge 2011, 63)

We must also situation this constitutional relationship between…

Introduction

Ring of Steel sets out:

1. to explore how popular consent for the First World War was won and maintained in Austria-Hungary and Germany from 1914 to 1918
2. to explain how extreme and escalating violence radicalised both German and Austro-Hungarian war aims, leading to the institution of slave labour and the stripping of agricultural and industrial resources in the occupied territories, and encouraging plans for the permanent annexation of Belgium, northern France and west Russia
3. to describe the societal fragmentation caused by the war, especially in an Austria-Hungary already deeply fissured by ethnic tensions and which eventually collapsed into a host of new nation states; Germany was more ethnically homogenous and had been more socially unified in support of war so the end, when it came, unleashed a flood of bitterness and anger which expressed itself not along ethnic but along class lines, leading to street fighting between parties of…

This is another very short book, one of the popular Seminar Studies in History series. These all follow the same layout: 100 or so pages of text divided up into brisk, logical chapters, followed by a short Assessment section, and then a small selection of original source documents from the period.  It’s a very useful format for school or college students to give you a quick, punchy overview of a historical issue.

This one opens by summarising the central challenge faced by the Austro-Hungarian Empire as it entered the twentieth century: how to take forward a fragmented, multi-cultural empire based on traditional dynastic and semi-feudal personal ties into the age of nationalism and democracy where every individual was, in theory at least, a citizen, equal before the law.

On page one Mason locates four key failures of late imperial governance:

1. the failure to solve the Czech-German conflict in the 1880s…

The 2019 Federal election was billed as a referendum on Climate Change, with Labor’s Bill Shorten pitching up a 50% Renewable Energy Target and a whopping carbon dioxide gas tax, to boot. Bill also promised that he would eradicate Australia’s frequent and punishing droughts, with the aid of windmills and solar panels. Although no one, save Bill, was quite sure how this novel and ingenious ‘plan’ would make it rain on cue.

Instead of the Labor landslide predicted by all and sundry, the proletariat gave a pretty fair indication as to where Shifty Shorten could stick his 50% RET.

The broad mass of the great unwashed in Australia’s suburbs and regions worked out long ago that heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar represent a problem, rather than a solution.

Watching their power prices go through the roof, with much worse to come, the ambitious working classes were clearly…

I had a popular post in 2013 called, “Why taller-wife couples are so rare,” a title given it by my old Atlantic editor, who ran it under a picture of Nicole Kidman (5′ 11″) with her second shorter husband. I also put a version of it in my book Enduring Bonds, and reference it in The Family. In it I used data from the 2009 PSID to show that people are more likely to pair up as taller-man-shorter-woman than would be expected by chance. I’ve now updated it with the 2017 PSID data. This is a revised version of that post with the new data.

Men are bigger and stronger than women. That generalization, although true, doesn’t adequately describe how sex affects our modern lives. In the first place, men’s and women’s size and strength are distributions. Strong women are stronger than weak men, so sex…

Australia, or, more specifically, the ever-infuriating John Howard, wants to impose a test of proficiency in English as a requirement for citizenship (he also wants to test ‘Australian Values’, but the idea is just too ludicrous to spend any more time on).

I remembered reading Mike Carlton’s take on the concept of language proficiency tests in Australian history and stumbled upon a particular case that I thought must have been a joke. Alas, it turns out to be factual.

Australia’s immigration policy while Howard’s hero, Robert Menzies was Attorney General, included a clause (section 3(a) of the Immigration Act of 1901) that immigrants and visitors could be subject to a dictation test in an unspecified European language. If you don’t believe me, here‘s a facsimile of the act itself.

This wasn’t used much, it seems, but in 1934, an anti-fascist, anti-war Czech intellectual by the name of Egon Kisch…

Timothy Egan is a liberal op-ed columnist for the New York Times, and has the credentials to prove it, including a share in the Times’s Pulitzer Prize for its series “How Race is Lived in America”. (He also has a National Book Award for nonfiction for his 2009 book The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America.)

It would be hard, then, for leftists to dismiss Egan as an alt-righter or white supremacist, though I suppose that, as he was born in 1954, he could be denigrated as a “boomer.” (That, of course, is ageism.) But I suppose they’ll try, as is always the case when somebody writes a piece like Egan’s latest for the NYT (click on the screenshot below):

The exemplar of someone who’s turned off by “insufferable wokeness” is Egan’s sister, who works cleaning toilets at Wal-Mart:

No matter how…

Philippe Aghion, Sergei Guriev and Kangchul Jo in this piece:

In the last few years, California experienced a long, severe drought. It was extremely  painful, but not as painful as it might have been because California has water markets that helped the water flow to those who needed it most. Strengthening and expanding water markets could have furthered reduced this pain.

Courtesy of Jose Manuel Suarez

Yet in Water Deeply, environmental activist Gary Wockner bemoans that so many environmentalists are embracing markets to resolve environmental conflicts. His critique says more about the growing schisms between environmentalists than the merits of water markets.

Wockner offers three criticisms of water markets: (1) they commoditize water; (2) he hasn’t seen a quantified analysis of whether they are successful, under a test that he has devised but does not articulate; and (3) they, along with other free market environmental reforms, are pushing environmentalists away from his preferred model of lobbying and litigation (political…

One of the greatest strengths of free market environmentalism approaches to environmental problems is that they facilitate the development of new information about the environment and provide an effective means for people to act on that information. Where there’s a market for some environmental benefit, the people who value it have a strong incentive to discover more information about it and, thanks to the price signal, others can act on that new knowledge without having to know it themselves.

For instance, suppose a plucky environmentalist discovers that a farmer’s practices reduce water quality to a distant stream through a complex hydrological process. If there’s a cost effective substitute or a means of mitigating its effects on the stream, the environmentalist can pay the farmer to change his behavior. If the price is right, the farmer will change his behavior without having to understand the complex process by which his…