Jerusalem Surrenders – Bolsheviks Consolidate Control I THE GREAT WAR Week 177
19 Feb 2022 Leave a comment
in defence economics, war and peace Tags: Russian revolution, World War I
What Is “Rent Seeking”?
18 Feb 2022 Leave a comment
I’ve written columns about wonky economic concepts such as “deadweight loss” and “public goods.” Today’s topic is “rent seeking,” which is part of “public choice” and is described by Professor Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University.
To elaborate, here’s a video from Professor Michael Munger from Duke University.
The basic message of both videos is that “rent seeking” occurs when interest groups manipulate the political system to obtain undeserved riches.
And there are all sorts of examples of policies that exist solely because interest groups get politicians to tilt the playing field – including trade barriers, farm subsidies, occupational licensing, and bureaucrat salaries.
As pointed out in the videos, these rent-seeking policies reduce prosperity.
But what’s the origin of the term? In the modern era, it’s often associated with Gordon Tullock, one of the founders of public choice…
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THE GUNS AT LAST LIGHT: THE WAR IN WESTERN EUROPE, 1944-1945 by Rick Atkinson
18 Feb 2022 Leave a comment
In the third volume of his “liberation trilogy,” THE GUNS AT LAST LIGHT: THE WAR IN WESTERN EUROPE, 1944-1945 Rick Atkinson has written a comprehensive history of the last year of the war in the west highlighted by incisive analysis, personality portraits, and clashes beyond the battlefield pitting remarkable characters against each other as they dominated allied and axis planning implementing wartime strategy. Atkinson begins his narrative with a scene at the St. Paul School in west London on May 15, 1944, where allied strategists gathered to finalize plans for the cross channel invasion of France. In this last volume of his trilogy Atkinson continues opus from Operation Overlord, through the liberation of France, the last Nazi attempt to thwart allied plans at the Battle of the Bulge, to finally entering Berlin and ending the war in Europe. In so doing Atkinson employs…
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What went wrong in New Zealand?
18 Feb 2022 Leave a comment
in health economics Tags: economics of pandemics
Evacuation of Industry: That Time the Soviet Union Moved 1,500 Factories
18 Feb 2022 Leave a comment
in defence economics, war and peace Tags: World War II
How The New York Mafia Actually Works | How Crime Works
18 Feb 2022 Leave a comment
in economics of crime, law and economics
Is Global Capitalism Increasing Poverty?
17 Feb 2022 Leave a comment
A few days ago on Twitter, Nathan Robinson made the claim that global capitalism wasn’t reducing poverty. In fact, it appears that poverty, using the threshold of $10/day (rather than the usual lower numbers) has increased from 1981 to 2017:
While there were a lot of critical responses to him on Twitter, he’s not wrong about the data: in 2017, there were 1.3 billion more people living on less than $10 per day (we’re going to assume in this post that the underlying data is basically correct, and correctly…
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There Is No Plan B: Why Battery Storage Can’t Save Intermittent Wind & Solar
16 Feb 2022 Leave a comment
Carpetbaggers profiting from hopelessly intermittent wind and solar still claim that mega-batteries are the solution to their obvious lack of reliability.
But it only takes a moment’s reckoning to appreciate that the grid-scale storage electricity generated by wind or solar is a perfect nonsense.
It hasn’t occurred anywhere in the world; nor will it.
David Wojick explains why below.
VCEA makes Virginia’s electric grid dangerously unreliable
CFACT
David Wojick
21 January 2022
The oddly named Virginia Clean Economy Act or VCEA mandates the phaseout of fossil fueled power generation by 2045, with deadlines all along the way. Dominion Energy, Virginia’s primary electric utility, recently filed what is called an Integrated Resource Plan. In their recent IRP, Dominion’s Alternative Plan C is designed to comply with the VCEA.
This design is not sufficient to maintain reliability. The inevitable result will be price spikes and blackouts.
The basic problem with the Plan…
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2nd Battle Of The Marne – Turning Point On The Western Front I THE GREAT WAR Week 208
16 Feb 2022 Leave a comment
in defence economics, war and peace Tags: Russian revolution, World War I
Expertise and the MPC
16 Feb 2022 Leave a comment
I’m yielding to no one in my low view of the Reserve Bank Monetary Policy Committee. I’ve been writing about the problems – structural and personal – since the new Potemkin-village model (designed to look shiny and new, but to change little) was set up three years ago, and it was (for example) one of my Official Information Act requests that got the written confirmation that the Minister, Governor and the Bank’s Board had formally agreed that no one with ongoing expertise in monetary policy or macroeconomics, or likely future interest in researching such matters, would be appointed (as an external member) to the new Monetary Policy Committee (three relevant posts here, here, and here). It was a simply extraordinary exclusion, which reflected very poorly on all involved, but which never seemed to get the scrutiny from media or MPs that it deserved. In no other modern…
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Anti-science left
16 Feb 2022 Leave a comment
in economics of education, liberalism, Marxist economics Tags: Anti-Science left, conjecture and refutation, philosophy of science
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