Utopia, you are standing in it!

A reader yesterday linked to the recently-published United Nations World Cities Report.  Sceptical as I am of most UN things, out of curiosity I dipped into a few chapters of the report.

On doing so, I stumbled on this chart

In a quite striking way it makes the same point made in an early post on this blog: as countries become richer, the cities in those countries tend to become less densely populated.  Here was the chart from the earlier post showing data for London as far back as 1680 (just over a decade after the Great Fire).

These numbers shouldn’t really be a surprise.  Space is a normal good –  people typically want more of it, all else equal, when they can afford it –  and technological advances make longer distance commutes feasible.

No doubt there will be some issues with how the data are compiled/estimated –  quite…

No posts here for a while as I’ve been bogged down in trying to make sense of some events – little more than one week in history – from 30 years ago, where the uncertainty as to what actually happened (a precondition for making sense of what the events mean) is greatly magnified by really poor documentation and recordkeeping by….the Reserve Bank.

I was planning to return with something a bit more longer-term (perhaps tomorrow) but wasn’t yesterday’s inflation number interesting? It seems to have taken almost everyone – notably the people who do detailed components forecasts, including the Reserve Bank – by surprise to some extent.

Almost all the media focus has been on the headline number – 2.2 per cent increase for the quarter, 4.9 per cent for the year – because (I guess) it makes good headlines. (Excluding the two quarters when the GST rate was increased)…

With its Emissions Reduction Plan released last week, the government is promising unprecedented control over every aspect of your life.

How you move. What you eat. Where you live. How you heat your home.

It is little short of a revolution. Between its emissions plan and next year’s Budget, which will also be about climate change, future governments of this country will have more to say about everything.

The problem is that existing policies already have this country firmly on track to deliver emissions targets.

In both its draft and final reports, the Climate Change Commission said current policies and a $50 carbon price will be enough to deliver net zero emissions in 2050. Its analysis did not show undue reliance on removals by exotic trees, although Ministers and officials have repeatedly made misleading statements about the Commission’s findings.

Today’s carbon price is $65. So we are ahead…

The Hunt For Red October (1990) Director: John McTiernan

★★★★☆

The Hunt For Red October, the first film in the Jack Ryan film franchise and the fourth book in Tom Clancy’s “Ryanverse” novel series, is an excellent white-knuckling submarine thriller of deep-sea espionage. It is a classic of high stakes political brinkmanship. Coming off the backs of 1987’s Predator and 1988’s Die Hard, The Hunt For Red October was John McTiernan’s last classic film before a string of mostly forgettable movies and his impending legal troubles.

The story takes place in 1984 during the Cold War (two days after the film was released in 1990 Boris Yeltsin came to power and marked the collapse of the Soviet Union). In the film, the Soviets have developed a nuclear submarine capable of operating without being traced by sonar. Captain Marko Ramius (brilliantly played by Sean Connery) has gone rogue from…