Utopia, you are standing in it!

It is the final Friday before Shemini Atzeret, also known as Election Day in Canada this year, And what an interesting campaign it has been! The polls have moved quite a lot, especially recently. The New Democrats (NDP) seem to be enjoying a surge. Not on anything like the scale of 2011, but still something notable, as it was not long ago that there was talk about the Greens possibly passing them for third place. The Greens have slipped somewhat, as has been the case in past campaigns. No longer do they look likely to win as many as four seats; two (which is their current number) looks most likely.

The striking thing is that the poll aggregate at CBC (compiled by Éric Grenier) shows both major parties–incumbent seat-majority Liberal and opposition Conservative) barely above 30% of the vote (31.7-30.8 at my latest check). From 1949 to present, the largest party…

Wind industry victim: the endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle.

Cars, cats and skyscrapers don’t kill Eagles – like the critically endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle, but 60m wind turbine blades with their tips travelling at 350Kph routinely smash them out of existence.

The current crop of well-fed and poorly educated teens raging against the evil patriarchy and its grand conspiracy to cook the planet and demanding immediate ‘climate action’ – code for carpeting the planet in windmills and solar panels – either have no idea about the carnage caused by these things, or they couldn’t care less.

Millions of tonnes of beneficial bugs get splattered annually, along with millions of birds and bats, some of them being among the last of their kind.

All, as we’re constantly berated, in the name of ‘saving’ Mother Earth. [Note to Ed: with friends like that, who needs enemies?]

Denial, obfuscation and outright lies…

Expect  the  old  campaigner Winston  Peters to be at  his belligerent  best as he   gears  up for another election.  He’s kept his party alive for 27 years  and  he  shows  no sign  of quitting.

The  omens  may be  bleak—polls  this week  showed  his party below  the  5% threshold– but  Peters  insists   NZ  First’s  own polling puts the party  “comfortably  in the  zone”  to do well.  He told   Radio NZ the  party   is getting  “enormous  support” in the provinces  and  he’ll use  the   conference  to  outline a winning  strategy.

As  for  those  political commentators  who say NZ  First  won’t make it back  into Parliament,  they are   “moronic”.

Yet  even  when  Peters  fires   up,  as  he  did  in  that interview,  the  odds   are stacking up against  NZ  First.    He  can brush off the polls, dismiss  leaks of  sensitive party documents  pointing to questionable  internal administrative issues,  and  assert   his  party …

This is one of those issues where I can sort of see a point, but in general think it’s also overblown. In fact, it was the subject of an NBC Today show post and tv segment. It turns out that a nine year old Utah girl named Rhythm Pacheco was asked to answer a math question in which the weights of various students (females) were compared. In particular, as you see below, it was a simple subtraction question, one that Rhythm answered but then expressed anger, saying she “wont right this its rood” (committing four errors in five words). Here’s her answer.

In the NBC video on the site, the hosts get all upset and see the question as sexist (or otherwise offensive).

Now Rhythm wrote a nice note to her teacher, and the teacher responded nicely (and corrected Rhythm’s writing in brown ink!:

Here’s a television report from…

It’s NBER Summer Institute season, when every bar and restaurant in East Cambridge, from Helmand to Lord Hobo, is filled with our tribe. The air hums with discussions of Lagrangians and HANKs and robust estimators. And the number of great papers presented, discussed, or otherwise floating around inspires.

The paper we’re discussing today, by Wyatt Brooks at Notre Dame and Kevin Donovan at Yale SOM, uses a great combination of dynamic general equilibrium theory and a totally insane quasi-randomized experiment to help answer an old question: how beneficial is it for villages to be connected to the broader economy? The fundamental insight requires two ideas that are second nature for economists, but are incredibly controversial outside our profession.

First, going back to Nobel winner Arthur Lewis if not much earlier, economists have argued that “structural transformation”, the shift out of low-productivity agriculture to urban areas and non-ag sectors, is fundamental…

It is Nobel Prize season once again, a grand opportunity to dive into some of our field’s most influential papers and to consider their legacy. This year’s prize was inevitable, an award to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer for popularizing the hugely influential experimental approach to development. It is only fitting that my writeup this year has been delayed due to the anti-government road blockades here in Ecuador which delayed my return to the internet-enabled world – developing countries face many barriers to reaching prosperity, and rarely have I been so personally aware of the effects of place on productivity as I was this week!

The reason for the prize is straightforward: an entire branch of economics, development, looks absolutely different from what it looked like thirty years ago. Development economists used to be essentially a branch of economic growth. Researchers studied topics like the productivity of large…

Superb Timothy Taylor on his super blog links to these intro econ videos:

On 14 October 2019, the Upper Tribunal (UT) handed down judgment in SSHD v De Souza, immediately dividing commentators both in and outside Northern Ireland. Briefly, the UT had heard the Home Secretary’s appeal against the First-tier Tribunal (FTT) decision which had declared that the American claimant (respondent in the UT) was entitled to apply to reside in Northern Ireland under the EU Citizen’s Directive because his wife was permitted to self-identify as an Irish national in accordance with the provisions of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA). British nationality, the FTT declared, could not be “imposed” on her at birth, flying in the face of the British Nationality Act 1981 (BNA), section 1 of which, it was argued, does precisely that. The UT allowed the appeal and overturned the FTT judgment, revealing a tension which goes far beyond immigration law.

Constitutional
logic

The claimant’s case involved a…

As the dust settles following Miller (No. 2)/Cherry, tension inevitably mounts over the next instalment of the Brexit saga, and how the Prime Minister will interpret his commitment to respecting the Benn Act. Against this backdrop, it is interesting to speculate as to whether recent events in Spain will have any impact upon his decisions, because the Tribunal Supremo in Madrid has just sentenced the Catalan politicians who chose to disregard both the Spanish Constitution and the courts. In short, although cleared of the most serious charge of rebellion, the majority were convicted of the lesser (but still extremely grave) offence of sedition, whilst others were found to be guilty of misusing public funds.

Even though the incarcerated separatists and their followers argue that this was a political decision, maintaining that they are prisoners of conscience, there is no evidence to support such an allegation. Indeed, it flies…