Utopia, you are standing in it!

Written with Aurélien Saïdi

(draft version with more footnotes and full references here)

The 2018 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was given for “addressing some of our time’s most basic and pressing questions about how we create long-term sustained and sustainable economic growth.” It was shared by Yale’s William Nordhaus for bringing negative externalities due to greenhouse gas emissions in growth models and New York University’s Paul Romer “for integrating technological innovations into long-run macroeconomic analysis.” The press release concludes that their contributions are “methodological . . . Laureates do not deliver conclusive answers.” Yet the methods rewarded are very different in kind. Nordhaus is praised for his development of a quantitative “integrated assessment model” of how climate and economic growth affect each other, a model then largely used to run simulations. Romer was crowned for a 10-years effort to endogenize growth culminating…

The Guardian is adept at amplifying, and failing to critically scrutinise, the unsubstantiated claims and accusations of anti-Israel NGOs, and today’s article about the Israeli Supreme Court decision on Human Right Watch’s regional director Omar Shakir – a long time BDS activist – follows this pattern.

First, as we predicted in a tweet before the article by Oliver Holmes (“Israel can deport Human Rights Watch official, court rules”, Nov. 5th) was published, the piece uncritically cites Shakir’s simply unhinged response to the court’s decision:

Shakir wrote on Twitter that if he was kicked out, Israel would join the ranks of Iran, North Korea and Egypt in blocking access to Human Rights Watch staff. “We won’t stop. And we won’t be the last,” he said.

The truth is that democracies all over theworld reserve the right to deny entry to those seen as intent on harming the state. Moreover…

It’s a year to the US presidential election.  With an unconventional president, a crowded field of Democratic party hopefuls and the possibility of an impeachment trial, American politics appear even more uncertain than usual.  

But a survey of 15,000 American voters undertaken by opinion polling guru Lord Ashcroft (a rich and maverick member of Britain’s Conservative party) throws up some interesting nuggets.

You might not be surprised that the poll finds Trump is unpopular (56% disapprove of his performance versus 40% who approve) – or even that 44% of all those polled strongly disapprove.

Nazism and fascism, in the popular imagination, are associated with evil, immoral, inhumane treatment across conquered groups and their own subjects alike. These evil actions loom even larger because the thought of an entire society dedicated to military industry, extending its reach across and beyond Europe, inspires ghastly fears not only of evil intent but also astonishing military might that could overwhelm the Allies with the technological wonder of the V2 rocket, the deadly and ever-present U-boat threat, and the German “Royal Tiger” tank that was so well armored that Sherman-fired shells literally bounced off of it. This vision of the Nazis as conquering through technological and industrial superiority is not just a mistake of modern historians, but is actually based on the overestimation of their foes by the Allies and on the disastrously misplaced overconfident messaging of the Germans, Italians, and Japanese that their technology, industrial power, and elan

Mr Burkhard Balz of the Deutsche Bundesbank in a recent speech compared why Germany and Japan both love cash:

Not a good look…

I’ve now taught social theory at the undergraduate level for over a decade, and I am now teaching social theory at the graduate level. I am also conversant, but no means an expert, in the history of what is considered canonical social theory. Here is an observation. While non-progressives do actually have fabulous careers in sociology (e.g., Robert Nisbet), their work tends not to “stick.” It doesn’t get remembered or canonized and seems to fade rather quickly.

For example, you might think some of the major figures of late 19th century laissez-faire, such as Herbert Spencer or William Graham Sumner, might be candidates for sociology’s “hall of fame.” Spencer’s evolutionary theory certainly feeds into Durkehim and Sumner was president of the American Sociological Association. Later, you might pick up on someone like Robert Nisbet whose book, The Quest for Community, is considered a touchstone for…

View of Oil Well Pumpjack (Horsehead) at Sunset Oil Industry GETTY

Michael Lynch writes at Forbes The Peak Oil Denier Takes A Victory Lap. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Monday’s New York Times includes a story titled “Flood of Oil Is Coming, Complicating Efforts to Fight Global Warming,” which (presumably unintentionally) mimics the title of my 2016 book, “The Peak Oil Scare and the Coming Oil Flood.” Which provides a good reason to look back at the debate and some of the arguments countering my own.

Although I have spent decades writing about oil supply and the tendency of forecasters to be too pessimistic (see references at end of column), for many it was my 2009 New York Times op-ed, which the paper titled “Peak Oil is a Waste of Energy,” that brought attention to my heretical views. And unleashed a heap of opprobrium. Of…

I’m too busy watching glaciers go by in the Beagle Channel to post much today. The Channel was in fact where Darwin saw his first glacier, and it’s cool to think that I’m seeing the same glaciers that he did.

But on to the opinion of the day. This time it’s a beef about Obama’s recent critique of “cancel culture.” You might remember that the ex-Prez said stuff like this at a meeting of the Obama Foundation in Chicago:

Mr Obama told the audience: “I get a sense among certain young people on social media that the way of making change is to be as judgemental as possible about other people.

“If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself because ‘Man did you see how woke I was? I called…

The European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill is intended to give effect in the UK to the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) agreed by the UK with the EU-27 on 1 October 2019. The Bill received its second reading on 22 October 2019 and is currently in ‘limbo’ pending the start of the committee stage. If and when it is adopted, the Bill will make significant amendments to (inter alia) the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (EUWA).

Attempts will naturally be made to amend the Bill as it passes through Parliament. At present, it makes no provision for a further referendum to be held before the WA is ratified. Some may seek to change that. It would, however, be futile for amendments to be sought that would require to be done something that lies outside Parliament’s control, such as creating an EU/UK customs union. This would require the WA to be reopened, which

Australia’s embattled power consumers thought they were about to get a break, then their PM decided to throw another billion dollars in subsidies to wind and solar. And it’s not like taxpayers and power consumers weren’t already on the hook.

The Federal government’s Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target (LRET) is costing all Australian power consumers over $3 billion a year – when the cost of the Small-Scale Renewable Energy Scheme is added – that hidden power tax adds up to almost $5 billion a year. The total cost of both the LRET and SRES will top $60,000,000,000.

On top of that massive stream of subsidies to wind and large-scale solar outfits, and households with panels on their roofs, comes billions in handouts and soft loans from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the ARENA fund.

The CEFC already had control of $10 billion of taxpayer’s money, ladling that out to…

Let me say at the outset, this is not a book that anyone would read for pleasure.  The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard is raw and confronting, written by a man struggling to maintain his mental health in an environment designed to brutalise him.  I read it for Vishy’s Red October Russian Reads, and it is indeed a very salutary reminder of the extremes of the Soviet experiment…

It has relevance today because there are, no doubt, similar situations in repressive regimes such as China’s, but also in places like Australia’s detention centres where we know from media reports that it is not just the detainees who suffer mental health problems.  (But we only know this about Australian guards, there are only hostile media reports about PNG local guards and yet it would be surprising if some of them were not also gravely troubled by their work and…

On the evening of November 1^st residents of Sderot and surrounding communities had to abandon their Shabbat dinner tables when terrorists in the Gaza Strip launched two barrages of missiles, with one home in Sderot taking a direct hit.

“According to the IDF, seven projectiles were fired during the first barrage. All were intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system. Following the first barrage, Palestinian media reported that an IDF tank shelled a Hamas observation post in the Strip.

Shortly afterward, three more projectiles were fired during a second barrage. Only one was intercepted.

The Sderot municipality spokesperson confirmed in a statement that a home sustained damage, but there were no injuries as all of its residents were in a bomb shelter.

“When I arrived at the street, there was chaos,” said Magen David Adom (MDA) paramedic Alex Kosinov. “Nearby there were numerous vehicles with shattered…

John le Carré
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
(Hodder & Stoughton, 1974)

Some years ago, the London branch of an American investment bank was busy ‘migrating’ financial data from one computer to another. In the process, it made the distressing discovery that erroneous information some years earlier had led the bank to believe it was a million or more pounds better off than was, in fact, the case.

I wrote a line or two in the Guardian suggesting that everyone would have been a lot happier had the data stayed on the old computer and the discrepancy never been discovered. The bank could have continued acting richer than it actually was, to the benefit of staff and shareholders.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy opens with MI6 (‘the Circus’) on a roll. An exhausted and scandal-ridden old regime has been replaced with dynamic new management that has signed up a solid-gold top-category Soviet…