Utopia, you are standing in it!

An obsession with chaotically intermittent wind and solar has sent Victorian power prices through the roof: a 16% increase in 2018 follows a 12% increase the year before that.

Given its Labor government’s push for a 50% RET, Victorians will soon catch up with their neighbours in Australia’s wind and solar capital, South Australia – the place that suffers the world’s highest power prices.

The relationship between heavily subsidised and inherently unreliable wind and solar and spiralling power prices is pretty clear: see above the graphic from Dr Michael Crawford.

Making it evident that ‘green’ energy virtue signalling is a rich man’s sport, RE zealots still trumpet the purportedly ‘inevitable’ transition to an all wind and sun powered future: to hell with the cost, and to hell with those who can no longer afford electricity.

With power prices rocketing out of control, no end in sight, there are already

A paper that I wrote with Alexander Salter entitled, “A Theory of Why the Ruthless Revolt” is now forthcoming in Economics & Politics. Here is the abstract:

We examine whether ruthless members of society are more likely to revolt against an existing government. The decision of whether to participate can be analyzed in the same way as the decision to exercise an option. We consider this decision when there are two groups in society: the ruthless and average citizens. We assume that the ruthless differ from the average citizens because they invest in fighting technology and therefore face a lower cost of participation. The participation decision then captures two important (and conflicting) incentives. The first is that, since participation is costly, there is value in waiting to participate. The second is that there is value in being the first-mover and capturing a greater share of the “spoils of war” if…

A week or two back I foreshadowed a forthcoming paper by my former colleague Ian Harrison reviewing the Reserve Bank’s proposals under which the banks would have to greatly increase the volume of capital simply to carry on doing the business they are doing now.

Like me, Ian spent decades at the Reserve Bank.  But much of his time was spent specifically in the area of banking regulation and bank supervision, including leading much of the modelling work done a few years ago as part of the Basle III process, which resulted in something like the current bank capital requirements.   He knows the detail in this area, has consulted on this sort of stuff since leaving the Bank, and has invested a great deal of time and effort over the last couple of months in getting to grips with the Bank’s proposals, reviewing the various papers they’ve published, and…

I became aware of this video from a tw**t by Richard Dawkins sent me by reader Merilee. Clearly Richard thought it was a very important film, so I watched it.

At only 28, Stacey Dooley has a substantive record of investigative journalism, and in this film wanted to profile two groups that she considered “extremists”: the radical Muslims of Luton and the members of the right wing “English Defense League” (EDL) who protest Islamists’ attempt to impose their values on British society. The film is not new; it was posted on YouTube in May, 2013 and was broadcast by the BBC a year before that. It’s thus about 3½ years old, though I doubt it’s out of date.

Here are the YouTube notes.

Stacey Dooley investigates what is going on in her hometown of Luton and finds out why it is known as the extremist capital of Britain.

Stacey has spent her whole life in…

The Herald’s economics columnist Brian Fallow devoted his column last Friday to the Reserve Bank’s proposal to massively increase the proportion of their balance sheets banks would have to fund by equity.  He ended on what seemed to be a moderately sceptical note.

So we are left trying to weigh a highly debatable but significant cost against an incalculable benefit.

As I’ve noted here, the sort of cost-benefit calculus we can glean from various Reserve Bank publications just doesn’t stack up at all.    In his speech the other day (which a couple of readers have suggested I was too generous towards), the Deputy Governor indicated that the level of GDP might be up to 0.3 per cent lower (permanently) as a result of these change.    Call it an annual insurance premium of 0.25 per cent of GDP (and bear in mind that the estimates Bascand is using don’t…