Utopia, you are standing in it!

Cross-posted from I-CONnect blog.

Towards the end of the 1990s I was invited to a workshop just outside of Berlin at which a group of young academics gathered to discuss the future of the European Union.  The workshop was funded by a German think-tank that had generously, if perhaps misguidedly, provided significant amounts of food and drink to assist the process of contemplation.  We had a great time, but by the end of the two days the future of the Union was, if anything, rather blurrier than it had been at the start.

One conversation I had at the workshop has stayed with me.  An earnest German doctoral student tackled me about Britain’s position on the Eurozone.  He wanted to know why Britain had decided not to join, and voiced a dark suspicion as to the answer. Was it true, he asked, that Britain planned to wait, see how…

By Andrew Bolt ~

There are many troubling things about Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s submarines deal and on Monday I will reveal perhaps the most dangerous.

Meanwhile, Alan Mitchell of the Financial Review on the sheer waste:

Photo: A Shortfin Barracuda Block 1A pre-concept design released as part of the DCNS pitch. (Supplied: DCNS)

Can there possibly be an upside to Malcolm Turnbull’s decision to squander billions of taxpayers’ dollars building 12 French submarines in South Australia?  It’s hard to think of one.

Of course, there are potentially critical South Australian seats at stake in the coming election and Turnbull no doubt believes it’s worth every penny to ensure that the Australian people are not deprived of his greatness. But surely there were cheaper ways to buy off the South Australians.

With a 30 to 40 per cent local cost premium as a starting point and the history of…

The John Bates Clark Award, given to the best economist in the United States under 40, was given to Princeton’s Yuliy Sannikov today. The JBC has, in recent years, been tilted quite heavily toward applied empirical microeconomics, but the prize for Sannikov breaks that streak in striking fashion. Sannikov, it can be fairly said, is a mathematical genius and a high theorist of the first order. He is one of a very small number of people to win three gold medals at the International Math Olympiad – perhaps only Gabriel Carroll, another excellent young theorist, has an equally impressive mathematical background in his youth. Sannikov’s most famous work is in the pure theory of dynamic contracting, which I will spend most of this post discussing, but the methods he has developed turn out to have interesting uses in corporate finance and in macroeconomic models that wish to incorporate…

On a far smaller scale that currently being experienced in Europe, Australia has had an issue with asylum seekers arriving on its shores by boat. The issue is politically contentious and has featured prominently in a number of federal election campaigns. It is Australian policy that asylum seekers who arrive by boat will never be settled in Australia; those who are found to be refugees are to be settled in third countries.

Australia operates a system of offshore processing of asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat. Asylum seekers arriving by boat are taken (against their will) to ‘regional processing centres’ where their applications for refugee status are assessed. There is currently a regional processing centre in the small Pacific island nation of Nauru and a centre on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.

Until recently, asylum seekers were detained, as opposed to simply housed, at these centres. The…

Don’t drive distracted, okay? Now for some more updated facts. (Follow the whole series under the texting tag.)

The Diane Rehm show on NPR (Washington station WAMU) did another full episode on the perils of distracted driving. The extremely misleading title of the episode was, “Distracted Driving: What It Will Take To Lower Fatalities.”

The guests were researcher David Strayer; Jeff Larason, director of highway safety for Massachusetts; Joan Claybrook, former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; and Ben Leiberman, the co-founder of Distracted Operators Risk Casualties (DORCs), which is trying to develop the technology (and legislation) to allow police to scan phones at the scene of an accident to determine whether they were being used at the time of the crash.

I am pretty sure that every one of these guests knows that our roads are safer now than they have ever been, and that accident…

The New Zealand government is cracking down on those anti-social youths:

“Images of young people using their cars to race, intimidate, make excessive noise, generally threaten the public, are an unwanted feature of many communities in this country.” [Prime Minister John Key] says. He says his government will not watch by without trying to combat it.

Key says he makes no apologies for the harsh consequences either. (…)

Transport Minister Steven Joyce, who introduced the Enforcement Powers Bill, said illegal street racing was a national problem.

“As well as threatening public safety, illegal street racers cause excessive noise, disruption and intimidation.” (…)

“The Government and the public have lost patience with drivers who use their vehicles in an anti-social manner.”

The Vehicle Confiscation and Seizure Bill will:

-Allow vehicles to be seized and destroyed as a new penalty for illegal street racing
-Allow vehicles repeatedly used by people…

Spurred by a Herald article yesterday, my kids and I went for a walk (well, we do most days but this one had a specific purpose).  The newspaper was reporting  new Auckland university research showing –  shock, horror – that.

“Sixty-nine per cent of urban schools have a convenience store within 800m and 62 per cent have a fast-food or takeaway shop in that distance”

Frankly, I was surprised the number was that low, but then in Wellington one finds small schools in all sorts of odd nooks and crannies.  My three kids now go to three different schools, and each of the schools has shops nearby.  But, as it was nearest, we walked around the area that encircles my youngest child’s decile 10 primary school.  And what did we find?

On the first corner:

• a dairy
• a specialist pie shop

On the next corner:

• two dairies
• the Empire Cinema, with…

Here’s a preview of talk today at Brown University’s population center.

My basic argument is that policies intended to prevent poverty by delaying parenthood are mostly misplaced, especially with regard to Black women. Not that delaying parenthood is bad per se, but delaying parenthood in the absence of other improvements in people’s conditions is ineffectual in the aggregate, and actually harmful for some populations.

The delayed childbearing argument features prominently in the recent “consensus” on anti-poverty strategy reached by the American Enterprise Institute / Brookings working group I wrote about here. They say:

It would be better for couples, for children, and for society if prospective parents plan their births and have children only when they are financially stable, are in a committed relationship (preferably marriage), and can provide a stable environment for their child.

Isabel Sawhill, a leading proponent of delayed childbearing as anti-poverty strategy, says in her book Generation Unbound