Utopia, you are standing in it!

In his book Political Pilgrims (Oxford University Press 1981), Paul Hollander talks about alienated Western intellectuals who visited Communist countries such as the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and North Vietnam in search of a better society. These intellectuals poured out praise for regimes that had killed large numbers of their own people, put political prisoners in labor camps, and indoctrinated the average citizen. As Hollander says “It seemed that they (the intellectuals) had a tendency for a selective preoccupation with various historical and social events and issues while allowing others to bypass them completely. I was struck by a puzzling juxtaposition of insight and blindness, sensitivity and indifference.”

How could these political pilgrims not see the underlying reality of the countries they visited? Hollander quotes a former admirer of Mao’s China, Jonathan Mirsky, who wrote in 1979 of his attitudes in 1972: “Throughout our trip…we sheathed the critical faculties which…

Brilliant post by Prof George Selgin:

A very insightful essay written by UK Telegraph columnist James Delingpole. In it he points out that if someone is an environmentalist (or on the Left in general), they can expect to be given a pass on their awful behavior since they are members of the Church of the Left. Delingpole states:

“The latest to be exposed is, of course, New York’s ex- Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

When Schneiderman wasn’t busy – allegedly – choking, beating and threatening women, he was busy bullying the people he calls “climate deniers”.

Here he is on a video in 2014 declaring that “climate deniers have no place in public life.”

He was also one of the lead instigators of a scheme by liberal Attorneys General to use lawfare to harass fossil fuel companies such as Peabody Energy and Exxon Mobil. In 2016, he hosted 16 fellow Democrat AGs and former Vice President…

I never read Edward Tufte‘s book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information before. (I have a lot of practice but almost no training in visual presentation of data.)

How do you describe the change in one variable between two points in time? Here’s an example of a “slopegraph” of the kind Tufte likes (many examples here). He takes a list of 15 countries’ government receipts as percentage of GDP for 1970 and 1979, and produces this simple graph:

He likes it because all the ink is data (he’s inexplicably invested in the conservation of ink). And he likes how it’s easy to see the change for each country, as well as the two ranked lists for each time point, and those with unusual changes, such as Britain, the only country with a decline. Those are strengths, and this kind of graph is often great. An alternative is a change scatter plot. Here…

According to all accounts, Karl Marx was not an easy person. Basically, he had the habit of making the life of all around him miserable. However, as Joseph Schumpeter (himself far from being a Marxist) loved to point out, he was extremely well read. This allowed him to build a complex economic theory focused on factory workers, without ever (or almost ever, at least) stepping into a factory. Life for a factory worker in 19th century Britain was not easy, and Marx was very able in pointing that out. His economic theory, however, was a complete failure, as Ludwig von Mises aptly pointed out.

Marxism should have died in the mid-20th century when it became clear that all socialist countries are poor and oppressive. However, it survived as cultural Marxism. People like Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and everybody in the Frankfurt School were not interested in economics. Instead, they wanted…

There have plenty of stories in the last couple of days about the expressed wish of the New Zealand Superannuation Fund to become owner, or part-owner, of new light rail projects.

There has been a range of reactions, from the gushingingly enthusiastic to the rather more sceptical.  Count me at the extremely sceptical end of that spectrum.  In fact, it is the sort of story that confirms – again – my longheld fears about NZSF.

Towards the gushing end of the spectrum was Stuff politics journalist Henry Cooke, whose piece ran under the heading “Super Fund gives huge vote of confidence to light rail plans”, when it is nothing of the sort.

This is a massive vote of confidence in the viability of the project from some of the savviest investors in the country.

But

Their proposal would see another huge sovereign wealth fund – Quebec’s – join them…

Environmentalists of the kind lovingly called ‘tree huggers’ (rather than wind turbine worshippers) are finally cottoning on to the fact that the wind industry is anything but the ‘clean, green’ energy source its proponents claim it to be.

Real eco-warriors aren’t happy to bury inconvenient wind industry facts, instead, they’re furious at the fact that what the wind industry is actually burying millions of tons of toxic waste, among a list of other environmental sins.

Wind turbines don’t run on wind, they run on subsidies: cut the subsidies and once these things inevitably grind to a halt, they’ll never be replaced.

With an economic lifespan of something like 10-12 years (rather than the overblown 25 put forward by turbine makers and wind power outfits), over the next decade countries like Germany will be left with hundreds of thousands of 2-300 tonne ‘problems’ littering the landscape. With hundreds of turbines already…