During our Capitalism versus Socialism debate, Scott Sehon argued that Scandinavia really is quite socialist. Since I’m not on expect on Scandinavia, I asked Johan Norberg, author of the short book The Mirage of Swedish Socialism, as well as the recent The Capitalist Manifesto, to weigh in. Norberg kindly agreed. With great interest I have…
The Mineta Institute — named after a San Jose congressman who was Secretary of Transportation in 2001 through 2006 — has a new report claiming that high-speed rail will produce huge economic and environmental benefits. Rather than being based on any careful analyses, it basically repeats old claims that are … Continue reading →
While wind and solar advocates reckon we’ll all soon be driving electric vehicles charged up using sunshine and breezes, it’s ‘dirty’ old diesel that’s doing all the hard work. In Australia, those seemingly virtuous souls with EVs are really being propelled by coal, because 85% of the electricity passing through its Eastern grid comes from […]
Just recently Ayaan Hirsi Ali announced, after years of professing atheism (and rejecting her earlier Muslim faith(, that she’d become a Christian. This was announced in an article in Unherd, but she also discussed it briefly on a video, both of which I posted. Although she wasn’t explicit about what exactly she believed about Christianity, it’s […]
TweetWant to get a few hours’ worth of solid learning in less than 35 enjoyable minutes? Listen to my Mercatus Center colleague David Beckworth’s podcast (from October 2022) with George Selgin on the New Deal. Seriously. It will be 34-plus minutes very well spent. George’s book – False Dawn – is forthcoming from the University…
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. The opener is this: Can a single self-published paper really refute decades of work by three famous economists? If the paper is the modestly titled “Income Inequality in the United States: Using Tax Data to Measure Long-Term Trends,” then the answer — with qualifications — is yes. And…
This gem of a story is about how one Aussie university went to the logical endpoint of the diversity-trumps-merit controversy: Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane is apparently about to hire solely on the basis of diversity, and has erased any mention of the word “merit” in its hiring policy. This of course is ridiculous, […]
The laws of economics don’t discriminate: where the costs of any venture outweigh its benefits, investors stay at home. Originally lured with the meme about wind power being free, and getting cheaper all the time, plenty of hopefuls poured cash into wind power outfits like NextEra, Avangrid and turbine manufacturers like Siemens. Lately, however, the […]
Holding hands and waving placards just doesn’t cut it. If you want to protect the environment or your community from the industrial wind power onslaught, then litigate. In this post, we contrast a community off the coast of New South Wales, Australia where a rally of surfers gathered to stave off the threat of an […]
‘Africa for Africans’ ‘In Africa, the African is supreme’ (p.230) (Mugabe slogans) ‘This is not about correcting a colonial imbalance. This is about punishing your enemies and rewarding your friends. This is about staying in power no matter what the damage is to your country or its economy.’ (Philemon Matibe, MDC i.e. Zimbabwe opposition candidate, […]
Act wants a referendum to define the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. The principles do need redefining and that redefinition will almost certainly result in a reset that reverses a lot of the insertion of the undefined principles in areas which many think have nothing to do with the Treaty. It is 23 years […]
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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