Utopia, you are standing in it!

Stolen shamelessly from a famous American article published in 1996.

The author, John Tierney, later said that he got more hate mail for that piece than anything else he or anybody ever wrote for the New York Times Magazine.

The article can be found here.

The article starts off with a scene of school kids gathering rubbish and shows the problem right from the start:

Miss Aponte finished emptying the last bag. “We’ve been learning about the need to reduce, reuse and recycle,” she said, and pointed at the pile.
”How does all this make you feel?”
”Baaaad,” the students moaned.
The pile of garbage included the equipment used by the children in the litter hunt: a dozen plastic bags and two dozen pairs of plastic gloves. The cost of this recycling equipment obviously exceeded the value of the recyclable items recovered. The equipment also seemed to be a…

The poll was conducted by Senate Opportunity Fund, a not-for-profit 501(c)(4) organization, to test public opinion regarding congressional bill H.R.1, called The Lower Energy Costs Act.  A national sample of 800 likely voters were contacted by phone during March 21 to 23, 2023, with questions regarding a number of public policy issues.  Responses are shown by self-identified political leanings, and by participants located in battleground states. Note that the final question showed about 80% approval by all cohorts.

While speaking last week at the Acton Institute in Michigan, I responded to a question about the perpetual motion machine of Keynesian economics.

For purposes of today’s column, let’s try to understand the Keynesian viewpoint.

First and foremost, they think spending drives the economy, whether consumer spending or government spending.

Critics like me argue that the focus should be on income and production. We want to increase saving, investment, entrepreneurship, and labor supply. Simply stated, money has to be earned before anyone spends it.

Keynesian economists, by contrast, think it is very important to distinguish between the long run and short run. In the long run, they generally would agree with the previous paragraph.

But they would argue that “stimulus” policies can be desirable in the short run if there is an economic downturn.

More specifically, they argue you can stop or minimize a…

On 22 February 2023,the judgment of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission(‘SIAC’ or ‘the Commission’) was published, upholding the Home Secretary’s decision to deprive Shamima Begum of her British citizenship under section 40(2) of the British Nationality Act 1981 (‘‘the BNA 1981’’) on the ground that it would be conducive to the public good to do so, because her return to the United Kingdom would present a national security risk.

The present post considers the judgment in relation to the issue of Ms Begum being a victim of trafficking and her rights under article 4 ECHR. There were nine grounds pleaded before SIAC. Particularly relevant to the issue of trafficking are grounds 1 and 2. Ground 1 was that the Secretary of State failed to take into account a mandatory relevant consideration and/or failed to undertake proper inquiries into it – namely that Ms Begum may have been a…

The Nashville Police have released bodycam footage of their officers taking on the woman who invaded a school and shot three adults and three little kids.

It’s an incredible six minutes from the time Officer Engelbert drives up to when he puts down the woman shooter. The last part includes footage from one of the other officers who also fired on the woman.

It’s also a massive, if implicit and unstated rebuke to the gutless Uvalde Police who loitered around for literally hours while little kids were being shot in that school and they talked of the need for body armour. You’ll not that these officers went in without it, knowing the risks but also knowing that time was of the essence.

Actually it’s also a silent rebuke to our crowd who stood around at Albert Park last Saturday watching the Trannies get their rocks off assaulting woman.

As…

What is one to think of a book whose closing line is a quote from John Dowd, who resigned as President Trump’s lawyer in March 2018, that states “the president is a fucking liar.”  The book in question is FEAR: TRUMP IN THE WHITE HOUSE by Bob Woodward, and like his other books it is based on his own reporting, extensive interviewing, gathering information directly and indirectly from other publications and news accounts.  Woodward’s narrative covers the Trump presidential campaign through the resignation of Dowd, and presents, perhaps the most dysfunctional White House in American history.

Recently, the public has been bombarded with books dealing with the rise of the Trump presidency.  What sets Woodward’s monograph apart is the author’s reputation and history of access to sources that others do not employ.  The book presents an administration that Trump’s Chief of Staff, John Kelly describes as “crazy town,” and the…

This week I have tackled Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s exceptional account of the Trump administration, THE DIVIDER: TRUMP IN THE WHITE HOUSE, 2017-2021.  As I was reading the book I tried not to pay attention to the news of an impending indictment of the former president, but it was impossible.  Baker and Glasser’s narrative are almost encyclopedic in its detail and as I pushed on words describing the Trump presidency kept going through my mind; scary, unimaginable, unprecedented, unbelievable, inconceivable, overwhelming, mind-boggling, etc.  Today I find myself comparing events and comments related to the Trump presidency with the barrage of racist, anti-Semitic tropes that the former president is currently bombarding the airwaves and it seems he is willing to foster violence and say or do anything that will protect him.  It is the Roy Cohn playbook on steroids and there is no daylight concerning Trump as president and…

There will be many posts summarizing the modern market design aspect of Roth and Shapley, today’s winners of the Econ Nobel. So here let me briefly discuss certain theoretical aspects of their work, and particularly my read of the history here as it relates to game theory more generally. I also want to point out that the importance of the matching literature goes way beyond the handful of applied problems (school choice, etc.) of which most people are familiar.

Pure noncooperative game theory is insufficient for many real-world problems, because we think that single-person deviations are not the only deviations worth examining. Consider marriage, as in Gale and Shapley’s famous 1962 paper. Let men and women be matched arbitrarily. Do we find such a set of marriages reasonable, meaning an “equilibrium” in some sense? Assuming that every agent prefers being married (to anyone) to being unmarried, then any set of…

From the Emperor’s Desk: for some reason I am unable to post with pictures. I am looking into it and hopefully pictures will be back soon!

Charles I (November 1, 1600 – January 1649) was King of England, Scotland, and Ireland from March 27, 1625 until his execution in 1649. He was born into the House of Stuart as the second son of King James VI of Scotland, but after his father inherited the English throne in 1603, he moved to England, where he spent much of the rest of his life.

He became heir apparent to the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1612 upon the death of his elder brother, Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales. An unsuccessful and unpopular attempt to marry Charles to the Spanish Habsburg Infanta Maria Anna culminated in an eight-month visit to Spain in 1623 that demonstrated the futility of the marriage…

Shortly after the death of King Edward IV, Bishop Robert Stillington, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, is said to have informed Richard that Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was invalid because of Edward’s earlier union with Eleanor Butler, making Edward V and his siblings illegitimate.

Bishop Stillington asserted Eleanor Butler had had a legal precontract of marriage to Edward, which invalidated the king’s later marriage to Elizabeth Woodville. According to Richard Duke of Gloucester, this meant that he, rather than Edward’s sons, was the true heir to the throne.

A precontract is a legal contract that precedes another; in particular it can refer to an existing promise of marriage with another. Such a precontract would legally nullify any later marriages into which either party entered. The practice was common in the Middle Ages, and the allegation of a precontract was the most common means of dissolving a marriage…

In September last year, former Bank of England Deputy Governor Sir Paul Tucker published a substantial discussion paper suggesting paying a sub-market, or zero, interest rate on some portion of the huge increase in bank deposits at the central bank that had resulted (primarily) for the large-scale asset purchase programmes central banks had been running (in the Bank of England’s case since the 2008/09 recession, but in some countries – including New Zealand and Australia – just since 2020).

In late October, I wrote about Tucker’s paper, and you will get the gist of my view from the title of that post, “A Bad Idea”. The Herald’s Jenee Tibshraeny picked up on that post and the following day ran an article on the Tucker tiering proposal, with sceptical quotes from several people including me. There was a difference of view in those quotes. As in my post, I argued that…