Utopia, you are standing in it!

EPW edit points to the challenges of monitoring digital elections.

The campaigning for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections has been perhaps the most “digital” so far with parties across the spectrum now using, and often abusing, the digital tools available to them such as social media, mobile apps, online discussion forums, and mass messaging.

Last week, social media platforms came together with the Internet and Mobile Association of India to release a “Voluntary Code of Ethics” in consultation with the Election Commission of India (ECI). Through this, Facebook, Google, Twitter and others will monitor and take action against election-related paid advertisements that violate the ECI guidelines. This code claims to ensure that there is no misuse of the platforms that can “vitiate the free and fair character” of the electoral process.

Over the last decade, social media has developed from being a networking tool to becoming an important mode…

by Liya Palagashvili

About two weeks ago, City Council in New York City voted to ban ride-hailing services (Uber, Lyft, Via, Juno) from adding new drivers for a year—with the exception of wheelchair accessible vehicles. The main justification for this cap is that ride-hailing services have been leading to reductions in vehicular speeds and causing road congestion in Manhattan’s busiest areas.

Listeners to the BBC’s domestic station Radio 4 had been prepared in advance for what the corporation apparently believed was going to be a major news event on Saturday, March 30^th.

The March 29^th edition of BBC Radio 4’s flagship news and current affairs programme ‘Today’ included a pre-emptive report (from 1:14:55 here) by Jerusalem correspondent Tom Bateman which utilised the standard framing of the ‘Great Return March’ to which BBC audiences have been exposed for an entire year.

That framing includes:

• Erasing the fact that around 80% of those killed during the violent rioting at the border have been shown to be affiliated with various terror organisations – primarily Hamas.
• Erasing or downplaying the violent nature of the events by failing to provide audiences with a representative view of the number of attacks using firebombs, IEDs, grenades and guns, the number…

The word choice by Guardian editors in a headline accompanying a March 29th article – by their Jerusalem correspondent Oliver Holmes – of this weekend’s Gaza border riots is telling:

You typically “brace” for some dangerous incident likely to occur that you’re unable to control, like a hurricane.  But, this is more than just a quibble over one word, as the headline accurately reflects the Guardian’s malfeasance in covering the year of weekly riots as if they’re acts of nature, rather than the result of decisions made by Hamas leaders.

Recall that on March 15th, that weekend’s planned demonstrations were cancelled in order restore calm in the aftermath of 12-hours of violence that included two rockets launched at Tel Aviv, demonstrating would what be obvious to any neutral observer: that Hamas exercises near total control of the strip and can turn the violence on and off at will. As…

I posted a joke about this last year, but this video makes the point much more effectively. When you tax and redistribute income or grades, you penalize those who achieve and work hard.

Kudos to the college kids who put this together. The message comes through loud and clear.

Bryan Caplan is an optimist. He thinks that economists do many errors in estimating GDP (overall well-being). He is right in the sense that we are missing many dimensions of welfare improvements in the last half-century (see here, here and here). These errors in measurements lead us to hold incorrectly pessimistic views (such as those of Robert Gordon). However, Prof. Caplan seems to argue (I may be wrong) that all measurements problems and errors are greater than zero. In other words, they all cut in favor of omitting things. There are no reasons to believe this. Many measurement problems with GDP  data cut the other way – in favor of adding too much (so that the true figures are lower than the reported ones).

Here are two errors of importance (which are in no way exhaustive): household output and adjustments for household size.

Household Output

From…

Adding wind power generating capacity is one occasion when ‘more’, truly means ‘less’. No matter how much of other people’s money gets spent spearing wind turbines all over the countryside, the result is the same: whether it’s 10,000 or 100,000 MW of available wind power capacity, when calm weather sets in, the combined output adds up to nothing.

Like pushing on string, eventually there is absolutely no return on the effort expended.

Germany is a case in point. No country went harder or faster, when it came to throwing its resources at heavily subsidised wind and solar.

Faced with rocketing power prices and a grid on the brink of collapse, instead of retreating, Germany has doubled down. However, as Pierre Gosselin explains, you wouldn’t know it from the paltry output being (occasionally) delivered.

Unreliable Power Source…Adding Capacity Does Little To Solve Germany’s Green Energy Power Gaps
No Tricks Zone