Utopia, you are standing in it!

The lawlessness of the Board of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand never ceases to amaze me,  Just in recent years, there was clear evidence that the Board simply ignores the requirements of the Public Records Act.   There was their facilitation of what was almost certainly an unlawful appointment of an “acting Governor” in the run up to the election (decent outcome in the abstract, but unlawful nonetheless).   And, of course, they play fast and loose with the Official Information Act, apparently confident that the Ombudsman is largely toothless.  It is all the more extraordinary in that since 2013 the Bank’s Board has had a senior lawyer as a member.  I’d not paid much attention to him, not knowing anything about him, but when I finally met him last week –  where he told us he “trains judges” – it reignited my interest in just how a…

Last week, I received news that the International Review of Law and Economics accepted my paper (co-authored with Rosolino Candela) titled “Why Consider the Lighthouse a Public Good?”. The abstract is below and I will update this blog post to add the link to the article once it is online:

Was the lighthouse ever a public good? The lighthouse is presented as the quintessential public good as it was inherently non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Since the work of Ronald Coase (1974) on the lighthouse, economists have used debated the extent to which the private provision of public goods is possible. In this work, we highlight recent findings in the history of lighting services (especially private provision of said services) in order to argue that it may be incorrect to consider the lighthouse as a public good. First, we argue that lighthouses are probably better seen as a complement to other maritime…

States which have not been invaded by the British (white)

At some point in it’s history, Britain has invaded about 90% of the countries of the world. While most of these states were not a part of the British Empire, all the countries in red sustained some kind of British military presence or government sanctioned incursion. The list of 22 non-invaded countries, which includes São Tomé and Príncipe (though not pictured on the map), was put together by Stuart Laycock in his 2012 book, All the Countries We’ve Ever Invaded: And the Few We Never Got Round To.

The Cummings: what real environmentalists look like.

The faux environmentalist is easy to spot: he loves industrial wind power and couldn’t care less about the environmental destruction it causes. Faced with the rampant slaughter of birds and bats, he initially denies the evidence and then pushes the moral equivalence button, claiming that more birds are killed by cats, cars and skyscrapers. Ignoring the fact that cats, cars and tall buildings don’t kill apex predators like Eagles, Hawks and Kites. And also ignoring the fact that cars and skyscrapers deliver benefits in the form of transport and accommodation that make modern, civil societies possible. Whereas, heavily subsidised wind power delivers nothing but chaotically intermittent electricity and rocketing power prices, as a result.

In Tasmania its rare and endangered Wedge-Tailed Eagle is already being sliced and diced by wind turbines and, with more on the way, it faces a rapid extinction…

The Opposition in the Australian Federal Parliament that is.

In my post yesterday, I noted  that Simon Bridges’s latest speech continued the pattern in which our Opposition pretends there is no real structural problem in the New Zealand economy: no decades of productivity underperformance, no near-complete absence of any productivity growth in the last several years (whether under National or Labour).

And so it was some mix of refreshing and depressing (would that it were so in our country) to yesterday read a new paper by the Australian Shadow Assistant Minister for Treaasury on “tackling Australia’s productivity crisis”.  No doubt it helps that the Shadow Assistant Minister was previously a professor of economics at the Australian National University (I wrote about a paper he gave in New Zealand last year here).   And perhaps the political context is different: it is now six years since the ALP was in…

Barry Eichengreen and Peter Temin are two of the great economic historians of our time, writing, in the splendid tradition of Charles Kindleberger, profound and economically acute studies of the economic and financial history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most notably they have focused on periods of panic, crisis and depression, of which by far the best-known and most important episode is the Great Depression that started late in 1929, bottomed out early in 1933, but lingered on for most of the 1930s, and they are rightly acclaimed for having emphasized and highlighted the critical role of the gold standard in the Great Depression, a role largely overlooked in the early Keynesian accounts of the Great Depression. Those accounts identified a variety of specific shocks, amplified by the volatile entrepreneurial expectations and animal spirits that drive, or dampen, business investment, and further exacerbated by inherent instabilities in market…

The Hands Off Our Tamariki Network has an admirable ring to its name. Here’s hoping everybody gets the message because if whanau members kept their hands off their tamaraki … well, there would be no need for a state agency to intervene and get its hands on the victims of domestic violence.

The reasons why the Oranga Tamariki agency becomes involved in caring for children has been somewhat downplayed by speakers at protest meetings who demand the state leave their mokopuna alone and insist Māori be the ones caring for their children.

Yet while they call for the state to stay away when Maori children are involved, paradoxically they want the government to do something:

Genetically altered insects could save millions from malaria but are anathema to ‘agroecologists.’

A child under 5 dies from malaria about every two minutes world-wide. Yet radical environmentalists are mobilizing against an important measure to stop mosquitoes from spreading the disease.

Target Malaria is a Gates Foundation-supported research effort to develop genetically modified sterile mosquitoes. Its approach is to drive modified genes through a mosquito population to produce sterile females or cause the breeding of only males. The goal is to reduce mosquito populations so much that the malaria parasite cannot be spread from person to person.

This spring Target Malaria ran a carefully controlled experimental release in Burkina Faso. The test followed years of research and similar successful releases in Latin America and the Caribbean. None of that mattered to the coalition of 40 leading environmental and “civil society” organizations demanding the project be shut down immediately.

The activist…

Here we have Michelle Goldberg, a New York Times staff writer, making a deeply misleading argument about why anti-Zionism isn’t always anti-Semitism. And indeed, I agree with that premise, but not with Goldberg’s interpretation of what has happened and what’s happening now. The kind of “anti-Zionism” Goldberg apparently favors is indeed anti-Semitism, for it’s a recipe for the elimination of Israel and a bloodbath of Jews.

First, Goldberg notes that both Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, the two new female Muslim Congresswomen, are in favor of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, which is true. Tlaib, however, didn’t endorse BDS until after she was elected (that’s a slimy move), and even before her election she wasn’t in favor of even a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine problem.

Goldberg seems to favor BDS as a way to solve the issue—by pressuring Israel. But she doesn’t dwell on the fact that BDS, and…

If you don’t know about B.D.S. (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement, the New York Times article below, from Saturday, will give you the basics. As for the title question, well, it’s not answered; the article gives the views of both supporters and detractors of BDS.

I’ve always thought the movement was anti-Semitic, but even if you don’t agree, it’s clearly aimed not just at pressuring Israel to arrive at a land settlement with Palestine—an aim, if not a tactic, that I agree with—but to eliminate the state of Israel completely, at least as a Jewish state. In the end, the movement’s aims will result in a big “Israel” with an Arab majority, and that would be the finish, not just of a Jewish state, but of the Jews themselves. And that is the movement’s aim.

Here are the aims of BDS as the Times shows them: