Utopia, you are standing in it!

Warning to parents! College is the most dangerous place you can send your kid. And I’m not talking about physical danger. I’m talking about mental danger.

At some point you may not know your kid when he comes home. 18 years of raising your kid could be thrown away in no time at all. Your kid will be taught ‘what’ to think or else. Is your kid strong enough to stand up to the kind of pressure he will face from the Post-Modernist indoctrinators who teach in and run the Universities?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS ARTICLE

In this article, Colleges: A Force For Evil, Walter E. Williams states: “Many of the nation’s colleges have become a force for evil and a focal point for the destruction of traditional American values.”

“The threat of our future lies in the fact that today’s college students are tomorrow’s teachers, professors, judges, attorneys, legislators…

Dianne Feinstein has been sitting on a claim from one Christine Blasey Ford PhD, a psychology instructor at Palo Alto University, which is a school of psychology and counseling in Palo Alto, that she was assaulted by Justice Brett Kavanaugh at a high school party 36 years ago, but she can’t remember where the party was, who was there, or just when it was. But supposedly 30 years later when she and her husband were in couples counseling, she remembered, but not very much. Dianne Feinstein could have raised the question of the accusation back in August, or several years ago, or at Kavanaugh’s earlier hearings, or in her private meeting with Kavanaugh, but surprisingly, she saved the accusation until after the Kavanaugh hearings and just before the actual vote. Uh Huh.

Democrats have pulled stunts like this twice before. (Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas) Their goal is control of…

I’ve been thinking about James Buchanan again in light of Jennifer Burns’ new critical review of Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains. (Steve Teles and Henry Farrell both defend their own positions — and their independence from Charles Koch — one last time as well.)

I’m done talking about Democracy in Chains, but Buchanan was on my mind today. I don’t know how much direct influence he had on public policy. He hasn’t come up that much in my work, although obviously public choice arguments bolstered the case for deregulation.

Recently, though, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around health policy a little bit, in part to test whether arguments I’ve worked out looking at other social policy domains apply there as well. And here Buchanan plays an interesting — though quite indirect — role.

Health economics as a field only emerged in the 1960s. After federal health…

by Ross McKitrick

I sat down to write a description of my new paper with John Christy, but when I looked up a reference via Google Scholar something odd cropped up that requires a brief digression.

Roger Farmer has an interesting essay on evolution of macro thought (HT: Cafe Economics). It is actually an extract from his book Prosperity for All.

He reviews the history of macro thought and says New Keynesians miss a basic point from Keynesian view:

The program that Hicks initiated was to understand the connection between Keynesian economics and general equi­librium theory. But, it was not a complete theory of the macro­economy because the IS- LM model does not explain how the price level is set. The IS- LM model determines the unemploy­ment rate, the interest rate, and the real value of GDP, but it has nothing to say about the general level of prices or the rate of inflation of prices from one week to the next.

To complete the reconciliation of Keynesian economics with general equilibrium theory, Paul Samuelson introduced the neoclassical synthesis in 1955. According to this theory…

Green blob [credit: storybird.com]
It seems some people in the US with money to burn are queuing up to try and buy the weather they think they want, with fossil fuels their primary target. The concept of natural variation of the climate has either totally escaped them, or they must think it belongs in the past only.
H/T The GWPF

Major foundations handed nearly $4 billion to global warming activists, anti-fossil fuel campaigners and other environmentalists over the past eight years, according to a database debuted Monday, writes Michael Bastasch.

The website Big Green, Inc. tracked $3.7 billion in commitments from major grant-making foundations to environmental causes from 2008 to 2016.

Guardian contributor Avi Shlaim is an Oxford Universityanti-Zionist “historian” who’s been roundly criticized for his shoddy research and clear political biases and has characterised Zionism as the greatest single threat to Jews, blaming Israel – and not anti-Semites – for the upsurge of antisemitism throughout the world. 

Shlaim’s latest Guardian op-ed on the 25th anniversary of Oslo (“Palestinians still live under apartheid in Israel, 25 years after the Oslo accord”, Sept. 13), consistent with the denial of Palestinian agency seen in so much British media coverage of the region, manages to erase the actions of Palestinians, and the decisions of their leaders, almost entirely from the equation.

Shlaim places the blame for Oslo’s failure almost entirely on Benjamin Netanyahu, who he accuses of having ‘froze, distorted, subverted, and undermined’ the accords during his first stint as prime minister, and blocking peace talks with unrealistic demands during his second stint.  What Shlaim…

On the upside, Goldin (2006) showed that women adapted rapidly over the 20^th century to changing returns to working and education as compared to options outside the market. Their labour force participation and occupational choices changed rapidly into long duration professional educations and more specialised training in the 1960s and 1970s as many more women worked and pursued careers. The large increase in tertiary education by New Zealand after 1990 and their move into many traditionally male occupations is another example.

The key is what drives the rapid changes in the labour force participation and occupational choices of women. Some of the factors are global technology trends such rising wages and the emergence of household technologies and safe contraception and antidiscrimination laws. All of these increased the returns to working and investing in specialised education and training.

Up until the mid-20^th century, women invested in becoming a teacher…