Utopia, you are standing in it!

Millions of British households face another bitter winter, unable to meet their rocketing power bills. An obsession with chaotically intermittent wind power (both off and onshore) has sent power prices spiralling. And, adding to the misery, the annual cost of renewable energy subsidies, Feed in Tariffs, fixed contract prices for wind and solar etc to British households will soon reach £12,000,000,000. The current cost is already nudging £10,000,000,000.

While their parliamentarians squabble about the terms on which Britain will sever its ties with Europe, ordinary Brits are fretting about how they might light and heat their homes as temperatures plummet. Heading into winter, some 3,000,000 households are already in “energy debt” and collectively owe nearly £417,000,000 to their suppliers.

Here’s a roundup on the consequences of Britain throwing all to the wind.

Current Costs of British Renewables Subsidies per Household
Global Warming Policy Forum
John Constable
14 October 2019

The…

Working out what households pay for subsidies to wind and solar is a task, in itself. Naturally, the crony capitalists that profit from the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time, are keen to conceal the extent of the state-sponsored larceny from their unwitting victims.

To the same end, their political enablers often talk about the cost of wind and solar subsidies – and other hidden green levies – per household, in terms of the cost of a cup of coffee or scoop of ice cream.

Which might make sense, if the metaphorical cup was the size of an Olympic sports stadium and the scoop of vanilla swirl was big enough to fill it.

Dr John Constable has been on a quest to reveal the true cost born by British households for their government’s renewable energy obsession, for years.

Here he is again, with a tally of what can…

A guest post by Yoram Barzel.

Doug North, Some Reminiscences

| By Yoram Barzel |

By the time I arrived at the University of Washington in 1961, Doug had been there for a decade, and he stayed for two more. Moving from one Washington (the University of Washington in Seattle) to another Washington (Washington University in St. Louis) is confusing. Most people associate Doug’s career with Washington University in St. Louis, but it was in Seattle that he did the bulk of the work for which he won the Nobel Prize. His work is well known, and I focus on other aspects of his career and on personal memories.

Doug got his PhD from Berkeley, and he was the first to admit that he hadn’t learned much there. Throughout his time in Seattle, when he needed advice when it came to economic analysis, he asked for it with great humility…

| Nicolai Foss |

Here is a recent MIT Sloan Management Review piece by Peter and me, “Why Managers Still Matter.” We pick up on a number of themes of our 2012 book Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment. A brief excerpt:

“Wikifying” the modern business has become a call to arms for some management scholars and pundits. As Tim Kastelle, a leading scholar on innovation management at the University of Queensland Business School in Australia, wrote: “It’s time to start reimagining management. Making everyone a chief is a good place to start.”

Companies, some of which operate in very traditional market sectors, have been crowing for years about their systems for “managing without managers” and how market forces and well-designed incentives can help decentralize management and motivate employees to take the initiative. . . .

From our perspective, the view that executive authority is increasingly passé is wrong. Indeed, we have found…

I’ve been researching Nozick and his commentators for the MA course I’m giving next semester on Contemporary Political Theory (details on my university web page, see right hand column). The most vicious critics of Nozick are certainly his fellow Libertarians, including Murray Rothbard who Nozick refers to as important in converting him to a Libertarian point of view. Libertarian in this context means the capitalist version in which if the state exists at all, it should only exist to uphold property rights based on voluntary contract, and protect individuals from violence. In the Anarchist, or near Anarchist version, of which Rothbard is the best example, these laws emerge in a voluntary way without any need for a state.

Though I was already acquainted with the idea that Capitalist Libertarians/Anarcho-Capitalists are a quarrelsome lot and that most of them are on the fringe of the academic world, I was startled by…

Rawlsekian is a word that was first used, to the best of my knowledge, in the headline of a piece by Will Wilkinson for Cato@Liberty (part of the website of the libertarian foundation, Cato), ‘Is Rawlsekianism the Future?’, posted on 4th December 2006.  The item builds on an idea floated by Brink Lindsey (like Wilkinson now an ex-Cato employee) of ‘liberaltarianism’, that is an alliance between libertarians and liberals (as social democrats are known in the United States) rather than the more familiar alliance between libertarians and conservatives.  Hopes of a liberaltarian moment around Barack Obama’s election have now been obliterated, but the idea lives on, and is gaining influence, at the more philosophical and theoretical level, which is where Rawlsekianism enters the stage.

Rawlsekianism is one way of referring to the combination of the ideas of the political philosopher John Rawls with the ideas of the economist…

| Peter Klein |

I haven’t seen anything from our sociologist friends at orgtheory.net about Wilfred McClay’s piece in last Friday’s WSJ, “Twilight of Sociology,” so I’ll take a stab. (The gated version is here; this public link should work for a few days.) Ruminating on Seymour Martin Lipset’s death in December, McClay wonders “whether the discipline of sociology itself may now be ebbing away, as so many of its leading practitioners depart the scene without, it seems, anyone standing ready to replace them.”

McClay blames the decline of sociology on two factors: politics and scientism.

| Peter Klein |

I’m very excited about Doug Allen’s forthcoming book The Institutional Revolution(University of Chicago Press). Trained by Yoram Barzel (and hence part of the Tree of Zvi), Doug is a leading contemporary scholar on property rights, transaction costs, contracting, and economic history. His work on agricultural contracting with Dean Lueck, including their 2002 book The Nature of the Farm, is a classic contribution to the economics literature on economic organization. He also has a very good introductory textbook. More information is at Doug’s informative (and amusing) website.

Here’s the cover blurb for the new book:

Few events in the history of humanity rival the Industrial Revolution. Following its onset in eighteenth-century Britain, sweeping changes in agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and technology began to gain unstoppable momentum throughout Europe, North America, and eventually much of the world—with profound effects on socioeconomic and cultural conditions.

In The Institutional Revolution,

Queen Elizabeth II this year celebrates her Platinum Jubilee, commemorating 70 years as monarch. UCL recently hosted an event to discuss why we have jubilees, what they say about monarchies, what the process of starting the next reign will look like, the future of the monarchy at home and abroad, and what lessons can be learned from other European monarchies. A summary of the discussion is below.

On Thursday 17 March 2022, UCL hosted a webinar entitled The Platinum Jubilee and the Future of the Monarchy, chaired by Professor Robert Hazell, founder of the Constitution Unit. Robert was joined by four panellists: Dr Bob Morris, an Honorary Senior Research Associate at the Unit, Dr Craig Prescott, Lecturer in Law at Bangor University, Dr Carolyn Harris, a royal historian at the University of Toronto, and Professor Helle Krunke, Head of the Centre for European and…

There was a high production of electricity from solar and wind previous weekend (weekend of April 23-24). As expected, there was the usual cheering and celebrating of this event. One of the many was this tweet from a member of the Flemish Green party (translated from Dutch)

Still need arguments for the roll-out of renewable energy?

Electricity price briefly below zero thanks to sun and wind

He links to a newspaper article with the same title and brings forward these negative prices as a decisive argument for more solar and wind: if you weren’t convinced yet, then this surely is the argument that will.

I don’t really agree with that. Those negative prices over the last weekend are not an argument for the roll-out of solar and wind (maybe even the contrary) and it shows his poor understanding of why exactly electricity prices dipped below zero in that weekend.