Utopia, you are standing in it!

Image credit: BBC Scotland
Sooner or later, preferring ideology to practicality in electricity generation is going to cause trouble. But are leaders aware of the issues, or in Scotland’s case do they just assume the rest of the UK will bale them out in an emergency?
H/T The GWPF

Scotland faces being plunged into darkness for days says The Herald Scotland, possibly resulting in deaths and widespread civil disobedience, due to the country’s over-reliance on green energy, a new report has warned.

A massive gap in the electricity system caused by the closure of coal-fired power stations and growth of unpredictable renewable generation has created the real prospect of complete power failure.

Parents in Virginia continued to hold classes after segregationists successfully closed public schools. In September 1958,  UPI circulated this story about Virginia parents who opposed segregation and continued to hold classes in the home of economist Warren Nutter.

Nancy MacLean’s book, Democracy in Chains, on James Buchanan and public choice makes a very disturbing claim. Namely, that James Buchanan, and other public choice scholars, were aligned with segregationists. If true, this is very important to know. But if it is false, the record needs to be cleared up. Immediately.

Phil Magness has been on a year long mission to verify and critique MacLean’s book. More so than any other critic, Magness has spent hour after hour hunting down sources and finding  new materials. In case after case, he finds errors. Some minor, some egregious. Phil recently announced that he’s found direct evidence that one of MacLean’s major historical claims…

Data from New Zealand’s inflation-indexed bond market has been a bit of a mystery for some time.

If one looks at US data, the gap between conventional and indexed government bond yields –  the “breakeven” or implied inflation expectation – makes sense.  Here is the data for the last five years or so.

The US inflation target is around 2 per cent and for the last couple of years the breakevens have been pretty close to that.  There was a period of real weakness in 2015/16 but it didn’t last that long, and even then the breakevens were only averaging around 1.5 per cent.   If you were inclined to focus on the severe limitations US monetary policy will face in the next serious recession, you might even think 2 per cent breakevens for the average of the next 10 years is a bit high –  after all, the Fed…

by Michael Biggs

Michael Biggs is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Cross College. He researches social movements and collective protest.

The transgender movement has transformed cultural norms and social institutions at breathtaking speed. Most of us, becoming acquainted with the trans issue for the first time, are astonished to discover the extent of the gender revolution. The movement has accomplished in a few years what the movements for women’s and for gay and lesbian rights took many decades to achieve.

Part of the explanation is the amount of money behind transgenderism. The Gender Industrial Complex, as we may call it, has many components. Lucrative sponsorship comes from pharmaceutical companies and medical providers. Charities originally established to fight for homosexual rights (like Human Rights Campaign in the United States and Stonewall in Britain) wield large budgets. Last but not least, three American billionaires…

Thickness Of The Ice Sheets Compared With Modern Skylines

THE Laurentide Ice Sheet was a massive sheet of ice that covered millions of square kilometers, including most of Canada and a large portion of the northern United States.

THE last advance covered most of northern North America between 95,000 and 20,000 years ago.

THIS ice sheet was the primary feature of the Pleistocene epoch in North America, commonly referred to as the ice age. It was up to 2 mi (3.2 km) thick in Nunavik, Quebec, Canada.

PRIOR to the intervention of humans – when the climate was ‘stable’ – Chicago was buried under a mile of ice :

Before Mann Made Climate Change | Real Science

The maximum extent of glacial ice in the north polar area during the Pleistocene period included the vast Laurentide ice sheet in eastern North America.

*

SNOWPACK

IN order for glaciers and ice sheets to…

Straight Left.

“The hatred and contempt with which each side treats the others—as also the bewilderment and distress of the silent majority of Party loyalists—seems now to exceed that in the Labour Party at the height of Bennism. In the Eurocommunist camp, as then on the Labour Left, it is typically expressed in generational terms—‘Why don’t you just die?’ was the shout of one of the new wave ‘pluralists’ when, at a recent aggregate, an old-timer attempted to speak.

Whereas in previous Communist crises, such as those of 1939–40 or 1956, the factory branches remained solid or even increased in strength, while it was the ‘intellectuals’ who were then wracked by doubt, this time it is the industrial comrades who have been ready to put their Party loyalties in question. In their majority they seem to have rallied to the Morning Star. Trade unionists—‘white, male, middle-aged’, as they were recently…

Our major update to the CONUS normalized hurricane loss dataset has now been published, after several years of effort and an intensive review process by Nature Sustainability. Abstract in the image above.

Weinkle et al. 2018.Normalized hurricane damage in the continental United States 1900–2017, Nature Sustainability. (Link)

Email me at rpielkejr at gmail if you’d like a copy. Happy to take any questions via Twitter, rogerpielkejr.

A cornerstone of thoughtful and lazy criticisms of mainstream macroeconomics alike is the idea that macroeconomists have spent 40 years just writing infinitely lived representative agent models (in which all agents behave the same way and are eternal), and isn’t it a ridiculous assumption? To which mainstream macroeconomics invariably respond: “heterogeneous agent models are all over the place,” which is in turn invariably met with “yes, but this is a very recent development.” I have myself long considered the development of heterogeneous agent macro as a response to the 2008 crisis. Then I began working on the history of economics at Minnesota, and I realized that by the mid-1980s, heterogeneous agent models were alreadyall over the place. Much of the current discussions on the-state-of-macro are premised on a flawed historical narrative. And acknowledging that representative agent models have long coexisted with heterogeneous agent models of various stripes raises a…