Utopia, you are standing in it!

To call Europe’s rapid embrace of nuclear power ‘passionate’ is not overstatement. Much to the horror of wind and solar acolytes, a growing number of EU members are ready to declare nuclear power is not only clean and green, but wholly sustainable.

Wind and solar-obsessed Germans and Brits are watching power prices go into orbit and the pro-renewables camp has been forced to grapple with months-long wind droughts when so-called ‘green’ energy couldn’t be bought at any price.

Necessity may well be the mother of invention, but the stark realisation that wind power output can collapse for days and weeks on end is certainly the mother of a renewed attraction to nuclear power.

After months of watching wind power output barely register across Europe, the French President announced a wholesale reversal of their anti-nuclear power plant policy, no doubt driven by the need to ensure that they will never…

UF dashboard to end of 2021. Now retired.

Michael Lauzardo wrote at Washington Post We stopped tracking coronavirus cases at the University of Florida. Here’s why. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Our covid ‘dashboard’ had reported more cases than any other university in the country.
But the data was increasingly unreliable.

For nearly two years, I oversaw the coronavirus “dashboard” at the University of Florida. On that site, we posted the number of tests performed at the university each day, the percentage that were positive and the total number of cases. We also relayed how many students and faculty members were in isolation or quarantine. The dashboard was a tool that people on our campus referred to, and that the national media monitored (along with similar dashboards at hundreds of other schools) as they tracked the coronavirus situation at colleges and universities. In a typical…

One reason van Reybrouck describes his history of the modern Congo as ‘epic’ is because so much happens that it becomes quite bewildering. Possibly you can break it down into two main parts:

Part one – pre-independence

Pre-history

The slow spread of Bantu tribes from central west Africa about 1,000 BC. The slow arrival of limited agriculture but without the pack animals or variety of farmed animals found in Eurasia resulting in subsistence farming. The permanent toll of fierce diseases carried by the tsetse fly killing humans and animals. The rise of the relatively small kingdom of Kongo around the mouth of the Congo River from the 14th to 19th centuries. It was this kingdom that the first Portuguese explorers encountered around 1500 and whose name came to be applied to the river and then the larger region.

European exploration 1850 to 1885

The tentative probing of David Livingstone into…

The Laffer Curve is a method for illustrating the relationship between tax rates, taxable income, and tax revenue.

But it’s important to realize that there are actually lots of varieties.

The Laffer Curve for capital gains taxes, for instance, will look different than the Laffer Curve for payroll taxes. Or corporate taxes. Or marijuana taxes.

In every case, the shape of the curve will depend on what’s being taxed and the ability of affected taxpayers to alter their behavior.

And the shape of the Laffer Curve also will depend on whether one is measuring the short-run revenue impact of tax changes or the long-run impact of tax changes.

Given all these varieties, no wonder so many people, both right and left, sometimes misstate its meaning.

Let’s try to expand our understanding of the Lafffer Curve by looking at some new research.

Professor Aaron Hedlund of…

Caution – alarmist brainwashers at work. Never mind the ‘unrealistic’ climate models.
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Thirty-eight emails released under a recent FOI request provide an interesting insight into the way Government science advisers plotted to change Boris Johnson’s mind over the causes of climate change, ahead of a Cabinet Office presentation, says The Daily Sceptic.

The event on January 28th 2020 was led by the Government’s Chief Scientific Officer Sir Patrick Vallance and presented, using 11 slides, by the Chief Scientist of the Met Office, Professor Stephen Belcher.

According to Belcher, the stated goal of the presentation was to “stabilise climate which requires net zero emissions”.

My favorite two economists are Ludwig Von Mises and Milton Friedman. They might consider one another from very different schools of thought, though there is reason to think that they are not so different. As an undergraduate student, I liked them both, but I became more empirics-minded in graduate school and as a young assistant professor.

As I progressed through graduate school and conducted empirical research, my opinions and policy prescriptions changed and were refined from what they once were. In graduate school, I didn’t study Austrian Economics, though it was certainly in the water at George Mason University. Recently, as an assistant professor with a few years under my belt, I picked up Bureaucracy (1944) and read it as a matter of leisure.

One word:

I periodically get asked who should be in the White House.

Since I’m a policy wonk rather than a political pundit, I generally sidestep the question.

Though it probably isn’t too hard to figure out my preference if you peruse what I’ve written about previous presidents.

I’m a huge fan of both Ronald Reagan and Calvin Coolidge, for instance.

But I’m definitely not partisan. I’ve also said nice things about John F. Kennedy and even Bill Clinton.

And to further demonstrate my independence, it’s time for me to endorse another Democrat.

Yes, you read correctly. The person I want in the White House is….(drum roll, please)…the 22nd and 24th President of the United States, Grover Cleveland.

He’s mostly famous for being the only President to serve non-consecutive terms (he won in 1884, lost in 1888, and won again in 1892). And perhaps also for marrying a 21-year woman…

I’ve repeatedlyheaped praise on Ronald Reagan.

I’ve also lauded Calvin Coolidge on severaloccasions.

And I even once extolled the virtues of Grover Cleveland.

Today, we’re going to celebrate the fiscal achievements of Warren Harding.

Most notably, as illustrated by this chart based on OMB data, he presided over a period of remarkable spending discipline.

Harding also launched very big – and very effective – reductions in tax rates.

And his agenda of less government and lower tax rates helped bring about a quick end to a massive economic downturn (unlike the big-government policies of Hoover and Roosevelt, which deepened and lengthened the Great Depression).

In an article for National Review last year, Kyle Smith praised President Harding’s economic stewardship.

In a moment of national crisis, Warren G. Harding restored the economic health of the United States. …America in 1921 was in a state of…

Yesterday’s post was a bit discursive. Sometimes writing things down helps me sort out what I think, and sometimes that takes space.

Today, a few more numbers to support the story.

I’m going to focus on what the experts in the macroeconomic agencies (Treasury and Reserve Bank) were thinking in late 2020, and contrast that with the most recent published forecasts. The implicit model of inflation that underpins this is that even if the full effects of monetary policy probably take 6-8 quarters to appear in (core) inflation, a year’s lead time is plenty enough to have begun to make inroads.

Forecasts – and fiscal numbers – in mid 2020 were, inevitably all over the place. But by November 2020 (the Bank published its MPS in November, and the Treasury will have finalised the HYEFU numbers in November) things had settled down again, and the projections and forecasts were able…

Many of the world’s biggest companies are failing to meet their own targets on tackling climate change, according to a study of 25 corporations.

They also routinely exaggerate or misreport their progress, the New Climate Institute report says.

Google, Amazon, Ikea, Apple and Nestle are among those failing to change quickly enough, the study alleges.

Corporations are under pressure to cut their environmental impact as more consumers want green products.

Some of the companies told BBC News they disagreed with some of the methods used in the report and said they were committed to taking action to curb climate change.

The firms analysed account for 5% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, the report says – which means although they have a huge carbon footprint, they have enormous potential to lead in the effort to limit climate change.

“The rapid acceleration of corporate…

The National Party, in particular, has been seeking to make the rate of inflation a key line of attack on the government. Headline annual CPI inflation was 5.9 per cent in the most recent release, and National has been running a line that government spending is to blame. It is never clear how much they think it is to blame – or even in what sense – but it must be to a considerable extent, assuming (as I do) that they are addressing the issue honestly.

I’ve seen quite a bit of talk that government spending (core Crown expenses) is estimated to have risen by 68 per cent from the June 2017 year (last full year of the previous government) to the June 2022 year – numbers from the HYEFU published last December. That is quite a lot: in the previous five years, this measure of spending rose by only…