Utopia, you are standing in it!

News reports can sometimes be the most depressing things we see and hear on a daily basis. So much information is pumped out and consumed by the general public. The advent of social media and constant sharing of facts and misinformation has made communication among the people a harsh landscape. Stories and images shape our perception of the world and its people so we must be careful of what we internalize. Fifty years ago, news stories that occupied major time blocks prominently featured the Vietnam War. Given the divisiveness of the Vietnam War, many have argued that media and news outlets played a prominent role in the United States’ negative outcome. The high amount of reporting on stalemates, low troop morale, and coverage of the anti-war movement fostered conditions where the American public killed any support and led to the collapse of South Vietnam. This attitude amongst historians, journalists, and…

How should the education and training sector respond to the Tiriti o Waitangi provisions in the Act?

The education sector must respond to Tiriti o Waitangi provisions outlined in S9 of The Education and Training Act 2021.

High-level expectations include honouring Te Tiriti, acknowledging its principles, andsupporting Māori-Crown relationships. Plans, policies and curricula are expected to reflect tikanga Māori, mātauranga Māori and te ao Māori. Instruction in tikanga Māori and te reo Māori are encouraged. Schools are expected to achieve equitable outcomes for Māori students.

The challenge is to understand Te Tiriti, including its context and limitations, and draw on guidance it can offer to achieve better outcomes for students and learners, including in workplace learning.

Anne Salmond’s Iwi vs Kiwi: Beyond the Binary offers insights into Te Tiriti and the issues associated with it. Te Tiriti can also be seen as a foundation for inclusive democracy in New…

A key principle of economics is convergence, which is the notion that poorer nations generally grow faster than richer nations.

For instance, battle-damaged European nations grew faster than the United States in the first few decades after World War II.

But, starting in the 1980s, that convergence stopped. And not because Europe reached American levels of prosperity. Even the nations of Western Europe never came close to U.S. levels of per-capita economic output.

Moreover, European countries then began to lose ground for the rest of the 20th century.

And that process is continuing. Here’s a recent tweet from Robin Brooks, the Chief Economist of the Institute of International Finance, which shows that the United States was growing faster than Europe before the pandemic and is now growing faster than Europe after the pandemic.

In other words, we’re seeing divergence.

Sven Larson addressed this same issue in a new…

Two committees of the Australian Federal Parliament examining proposed legislation on religious discrimination handed down their reports on Friday 4 February, 2022. Both committees recommended that the Bills introduced in November 2021 be passed by the Parliament, with some minor amendments. The report of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights (“PJCHR”) can be found here, and that of the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee can be found here.

While each report mentions a number of objections to the legislative package, it is significant that these cross-party committees both end up by recommending the enactment of the laws in substantially their current form. In my view this is an encouraging sign, that may signal that the legislation might find sufficient support to pass the Parliament before an election is called this year.

(There were “additional comments” made by ALP members of both Committees, but they did…

I wrote last month about a tax-and-spend proposal for single-payer healthcare in California (sort of a state version of “Medicare for All“).

I also analyzed the scheme in this discussion with Gene Tunny of Australia.

What’s remarkable, as Gene mentioned in his preface, is that the left’s push for single payer failed – even though Democrats have complete control of the Golden State, including more than three-fourths of the seats in both chambers of the state legislature.

So why didn’t those politicians hasten the state’s slow-motion economic suicide?

Almost certainly, the biggest reason is that even folks on the left have second thoughts about the enormous tax increase that would have been required.

As I noted back in 2016, big government is only fun when somebody else is picking up the tab.

Which motivates me to unveil a Twelfth Theorem of Government.

Let’s take a closer…

This is a timeline of the Roman Republic, cobbled together from various sources with some details added from Mary Beard’s history of Rome, SPQR.

As you can see, it consists almost entirely of wars because Rome was one of the most aggressive and relentlessly militaristic states in the ancient world, which is the basic reason for its eventual world domination. And when, by about 80 BC, they’d run out of people to conquer, they started fighting each other.

Military campaigning was a defining feature of Roman life and Roman writers organised the history of this period…around its succession of wars, giving them the shorthand titles that have often stuck till the present day.

…the Roman tradition [viewed] war as the structuring principle of history…

The Romans directed enormous resources to warfare and, even as victors, paid a huge price in human life…somewhere between 10 and 25 per cent of the…