It appears that Trump wants to repeat the mistakes of the 1930s with a global trade war. That is going to be very bad news for workers, consumers, taxpayers, manufacturers, farmers, and exporters. But there are two bits of good news. At least for small slices of the populations First, lobbyists will get rich as […]
This was the post I was planning to write this morning to mark Orr’s final day. That said, if the underlying events – deliberate attempts to mislead Parliament – were Orr’s doing, the post is more about the apparent uselessness of Parliament (specifically the Finance and Expenditure Committee) in holding him and the rest of […]
This was in 1994, right after the Aristide regime was restored by Clinton. I had traveled a good deal by that time, mostly in North America, Europe, and southeast Asia. But I had never been anywhere truly dangerous. It seemed impossible to visit such places. It is not that I did any serious risk calculation, […]
See ‘Mellon vs. Churchill’ Review: The Payback Problem by Benn Steil. He reviewed the book Mellon vs. Churchill: The Untold Story of Treasury Titans at War by Jill Eicher. Excerpts:”In a nutshell, the debt story of the 1920s goes like this. Following World War I, 10 countries owed the U.S. more than $10 billion ($190 billion…
While the psychological dispositions that underlie conspiracy thinking are well researched, there has been remarkably little research on the political preferences of conspiracy believers that go beyond self-reported ideology or single political issue dimensions. Using data from the European Voter Election Study (EVES), the relationship between conspiracy thinking and attitudes on three deeper-lying and salient […]
Chris Trotter writes – What does India want from New Zealand? Not our dairy products, that’s for sure, it’s got plenty of those. Indeed 45 percent of the Indian population are small-scale farmers, most of them running a few head of cattle – not to eat, you understand – but to milk. If it once […]
The two new studies from Antarctica and Poland indicate that the natural climate factors still need to be much better understood in order to be able to incorporate them faithfully into climate models. Currently, the simulations do not attribute a major role to natural climate events, which is a serious mistake.
The chronometer, one of the greatest inventions of the modern era, allowed for the first time for the precise measurement of longitude at sea. We examine the impact of this innovation on navigation and urbanization. Our identification strategy leverages the fact that the navigational benefits provided by the chronometer varied across different sea regions depending […]
100,000 asylum seekers a year is massive, especially when you consider the many countries one has to pass through to get to the UK. The right of asylum is an ancient right to flee a government or ruler that persecutes you. It goes back thousands of years. In the modern era the UDHR says: Everyone […]
Mark P. Mills and Neil Atkinson blow the whistle on projections written in International Energy Agency’s (IEA) latest report, the World Energy Outlook. Below is the announcement of the report findings, key exhibits and Executive summary, excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images. Link to full study at the end. Overview Industry players […]
How can I not link to a new Sam Peltzman piece on such a topic? Here goes: Since 1972, the General Social Survey has periodically asked whether people are happy with Yes, Maybe or No type answers. Here I use a net “happiness” measure, which is percentage Yes less percentage No with Maybe treated as […]
TweetHere’s a note to the Highland County Press. Editor: Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick asserts that NAFTA allowed U.S. automobile producers to “screw” American auto workers by shifting auto-industry production to Mexico and Canada (“Trump Cabinet members: Tariff plans are working; tariffs could eliminate federal income tax for those earning less than $150,000,” March 20). Mr.…
Once again we have a conflict between science and the unevidenced claims of superstition. This time it’s from Australia. Some of the “Willandra lakes fossils” from New South Wales, which include the famous “Lake Mungo remains” (three sets of hominin fossils that are the oldest ones known from Australia), have been or are scheduled to […]
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.”
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
Recent Comments