Utopia, you are standing in it!

As regular readers know, I tend not to be particular upbeat about the New Zealand economic story.  For anyone new, there should be a hint in the very title of the blog.  If, by chance, you are still attracted to an upbeat take, only last week in a post here I critiqued a recent book chapter taking that sort of view.

And so I was a bit surprised when, more than a year ago now, I was asked to write a chapter for a forthcoming book on aspects of policymaking, and associated outcomes, in a small state (this one).  In principle, the book sounded potentially interesting, and they were approaching a bunch of pretty serious and senior people to contribute.  But it wasn’t clear there was much in it for me, and since the plan was for the introduction or foreword to have been written by the head of the…

This article at The Atlantic by Heidi Tworek had as a sub-title – Regulators should think carefully about the fallout from well-intentioned new rules and avoid the mistakes of the past.

This is an excellent article and fully repays the time spent reading it.

I will only quote a few points, as this really needs to be read in it’s entirety.

The history of radio, and in particular how it was regulated in interwar Germany, is more relevant than ever: Five years ago, the question was whether we would regulate social media. Now the questions are how and when we will regulate them. As politicians and regulators in places as disparate as Berlin, Singapore, and Washington—even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg—consider how best to do so, we should think carefully about the fallout from well-intentioned new rules and avoid the mistakes of the past.

This article is dated 27 May…

Today, the Knesset of Israel took the first step towards passing a bill to dissolve itself and set an early election, probably for 9 September. This came after Yisrael Beitenu leader Avigdor Liberman said he would not join an emerging government coalition that he claimed would be a halakha government. He was referring to the demands in such a coalition of the two Haredi Knesset factions, Shas and United Torah Judaism. (Halakha is Jewish law.)

It is still possible that this is all an elaborate ploy by PM Benjamin Netanyahu and his various allies to pressure Liberman into backing down. However, Liberman himself has said he welcomes new elections, and the preliminary reading of the elections bill passed with 65 votes, or exactly the number that the putative right/Haredi coalition would have if Yisrael Beitenu’s five seats are included.

In the 2019(a?) election in April, Netanyahu’s Likud won 35…

Few media-driven myths are as tenacious as the notion that Edward R. Murrow abruptly ended the communists-in-government witch-hunt of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

The myth dates to March 9, 1954, when Murrow’s 30-minuteSee It Now program on CBS television examined the campaign of innuendo, exaggeration, and half-truth that McCarthy had been waging for more than four years.

And the myth was invoked today at Minnesota Public Radio’s online site, in a commentary that declared:

“In the spring of 1954, McCarthy’s crusade of insinuation, innuendo and guilt by association was brought to an end by journalist Edward R. Murrow and Joseph Welsh, attorney for the U.S. Army.”

(The commentary mentioned Welsh because he dramatically confronted McCarthy at a congressional hearing in June 1954, pointedly asking the senator: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”)

As for Murrow, though, his

Models vs. Observations. Christy and McKitrick (2018) Figure 3

The title of this post is the theme driven home by Patrick J. Michaels in his critique of the most recent US National Climate Assessment (NA4). The failure of General Circulation Models (GCMs) is the focal point of his presentation February 14, 2018. Comments on the Fourth National Climate Assessment. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

NA4 uses a flawed ensemble of models that dramatically overforecast warming of the lower troposphere, with even larger errors in the upper tropical troposphere. The model ensemble also could not accommodate the “pause” or “slowdown” in warming between the two large El Niños of 1997-8 and 2015-6. The distribution of warming rates within the CMIP5 ensemble is not a true indication of a statistical range of prospective warming, as it is a collection of systematic errors. Despite a glib statement about this Assessment fulfilling…