Utopia, you are standing in it!

This week my ECONS102 class is covering externalities. An externality is the uncompensated impact of the actions of one person on the wellbeing of a third party. Externalities can be negative (they make the third party worse off) or positive (they make the third party better off). We call them externalities because they lie outside…

Forestry slash, externalities, and the Coase Theorem

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson 688 pages Simon & Schuster Published: Sept 2023 “Elon Musk” is Walter Isaacson’s long-anticipated biography of the mercurial entrepreneur behind SpaceX, Tesla and, most recently, the website formerly known as Twitter.  Isaacson is an author, journalist and professor at Tulane University who has written popular biographies of Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, […]

Review of “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson

Battle of the “experts”. Who are Newshub’s “Highly Regarded Economists” trying to discredit the Nats? The economics news has been dominated the past couple of weeks by Newshub insisting that the National Party’s tax plan doesn’t “add up”. Here’s the headline the outlet has been running, “National’s foreign buyer tax costings likely have a roughly…

ROB MacCULLOCH: Who are Newshub’s “Highly Regarded Economists” trying to discredit the Nats?

It is a long time now that I wanted to have a deeper look into the cost of systems based on intermittent power sources, but didn’t know where to begin. That is why I was very interested when I came across a cleantechnica article by Georg Nitsche who created a renewable electricity calculator in order […]

Looking into a 100 percent Renewable Electricity Calculator for the United States: overview

It is remarkable but true that per capita US economic growth has hewed close to a trendline of 2% per year for the last 150 years. Here’s a recent figure showing this pattern from Charles Jones in his paper “The Outlook for Long-Term Economic Growth,” as prepared for the annual symposium at Jackson Hole hosted…

The Remarkable Steadiness of US Economic Growth

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson 688 pages Simon & Schuster Published: Sept 2023 Despite my bias against biographies of people whose lives are still unfolding, Walter Isaacson’s review of Elon Musk proved irresistibly tempting. I was lured by the prospect of gaining insight into Musk’s entrepreneurial magic and the possibility of understanding what makes this […]

Unrelated Reading: “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson

Operation Market Garden was a failed operation by the allied forces, which would have dire consequences for the Netherlands in the winter that followed. Irish journalist and author, Cornelius Ryan wrote the book “A Bridge too Far” about the operation. Market Garden was divided in two parts. Market: airborne forces of Lieutenant General Lewis H. […]

Market Garden

Wind and solar have lost their ‘social licence’; the masses no longer believe the ‘clean and green’ propaganda. Wrecked communities, wrecked environments and wrecked economies are too difficult to hide or spin away. Once people get a grip on the great wind and solar scam, their conversion is irreversible. The original trope had it that […]

Clean, Safe & Reliable Nuclear Power the Environment’s Best Friend

James Francis Edward Stuart (June 10, 1688 – January 1, 1766), nicknamed the Old Pretender by Whigs, was the son of King James II-VII of England, Scotland and Ireland, and his second wife, Mary of Modena, (Maria Beatrice d’Este), the second (but eldest surviving) child of Alfonso IV, Duke of Modena, and his wife, Laura […]

September 16, 1701: Prince James, the Prince of Wales claims the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland. Part I.

The problem with taking GST off of food has little to do with the revenue cost of the policy, it’s that it’s just dumb to begin with. Any gains to households are smaller than those that could be achieved through other instruments, and there’s long-term cost to the integrity of the tax system. So I […]

ERIC CRAMPTON: Foreign buyer taxes

If Labour ministers and our left-leaning media knew more about New Zealand’s political history they would stop giving so much publicity to National’s tax-cut plans, ill-advised though they might be. The attacks are only increasing the likelihood that National will be elected. In one celebrated election, 1928, the government and the media concentrated so much…

MICHAEL BASSETT: OUR MEDIA STILL DON’T GET IT

I recently wrote a column about five facts that justified the start of an impeachment inquiry. While I have stressed that I do not believe that there is currently sufficient evidence for an actual impeachment, I am mystified by the claim that there is not ample evidence to warrant an inquiry into possible impeachable offenses.…

CNN’s Makes the Case for an Impeachment Inquiry