Today the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) handed down judgment in the appeal of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson), partially allowing the appeal and directing a rehearing at the Crown Court.
What does this mean? Has Tommy been proven innocent? Is this a victory for freedom of speech?
Let’s break it down.
How did this all start?
Yaxley-Lennon was committed to prison for 13 months on 25 May 2018, after attending a trial at Leeds Crown Court and streaming a live-feed on Facebook in which he broadcasted details of the trial and of the defendants. That particular trial was subject to reporting restrictions imposed by the judge, prohibiting reporting of the details until the conclusion of the trial, and of other linked proceedings. By broadcasting in the way that he did, Yaxley-Lennon was in breach of the reporting restriction, an act which amounts to contempt of court. A year earlier…
Global trade data for periods prior to WWII are notoriously incomplete and unreliable. This column describes a new dataset of historical world trade that addresses many of these flaws. The World Trade Historical Database comprises imports and exports for polities beginning in 1800, and also includes international prices for 190 products, freight rates, and exchange rates, where available. Though focused on aggregate trade, the data include information on the composition of trade from numerous sources.
Trade grew very fast in the ‘long 19th century’ from Waterloo to WWI, recovered from the wartime shock in the 1920s, and collapsed by about a third during the Great Depression. It grew at breakneck speed in the Golden Age of the 1950s and 1960s…
Angus Deaton, the Scottish-born, Cambridge-trained Princeton economist, best known for his careful work on measuring the changes in wellbeing of the world’s poor, has won the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics. His data collection is fairly easy to understand, so I will leave larger discussion of exactly what he has found to the general news media; Deaton’s book “The Great Escape” provides a very nice summary of what he has found as well, and I think a fair reading of his development preferences are that he much prefers the currently en vogue idea of just giving cash to the poor and letting them spend it as they wish.
Essentially, when one carefully measures consumption, health, or generic characteristics of wellbeing, there has been tremendous improvement indeed in the state of the world’s poor. National statistics do not measure these ideas well, because developing countries do not tend to track data…
Whether it’s budget cuts or ‘ruin’, the financial consequences of using the courts to promote their so-called climate policies have so far not been as desired by the US city authorities concerned. As the writer points out: ‘The risk that municipal plaintiffs will have to pay defendants’ cost of the trial, plus a penalty, depends on whether courts find the lawsuits to be frivolous.’
I spent a long time thinking about a way to explain the what/why/how’s of Bitcoin to general audiences (my Mom) in a way that doesn’t frustrate Engineers (no hand waving). I feel that all existing Bitcoin videos contain jargon that scares away the typical viewer. In this video I made a point to avoid using a single word that might confuse people. I don’t know if I succeeded but I tried my very very best…
Please share this video with anyone who still doesn’t “get it” – as it might fill in some gaps.
They try figure decline in Northern England compared to Southern England. They use surnames to figure migration and development which raced in South but not North:
The obvious ignorance of the paper by the Treasury economists on women in economics is modern labour economics was founded on the study of women. Men are boring. They get a job in their teens, retire at 65 and then drop dead. There is an immense amount of variation in female labour supply and educational choices which has been the foundation of hundreds of PhDs and thousands of economic articles.
You might have thought that there were real and important issues for The Treasury to be generating research and advice on. Things like, for example, the decades-long productivity underperformance and the associated widening gap between New Zealand and Australia. Or a housing and urban land market which renders what should be a basic – the ability to buy one’s own house – out of reach for so many New Zealanders. Or even just preparing for the next recession. Analytical capability is a scarce resource, and time used for one thing can’t be used for others.
But instead…..
In a post last night about various papers presented at the recent New Zealand Association of Economists conference, Eric Crampton alerted his readers last night to a contribution from Treasury’s chief economist (and Deputy Secretary) Tim Ng and one of his staff.
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
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