Utopia, you are standing in it!

EXCELLENT article written by a ‘Vegan Democrat’ and former CAGW believer, highlighting the reasons why many remain sceptical of the “settled science” of climate change…

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What is your position on the climate-change debate? What would it take to change your mind?

If the answer is It would take a ton of evidence to change my mind, because my understanding is that the science is settled, and we need to get going on this important issue, that’s what I thought, too. This is my story.

More than thirty years ago, I became vegan because I believed it was healthier (it’s not), and I’ve stayed vegan because I believe it’s better for the environment (it is). I haven’t owned a car in ten years. I love animals; I’ll gladly fly halfway…

“Social distancing” – reducing the number of daily close contacts individuals have – is being encouraged by policymakers and epidemiologists. Why it works, and why now rather than for other diseases, is often left unstated. Economists have two important contributions here. First, game theoretic models of behavior are great for thinking through where government mandates are needed and where they aren’t. Second, economists are used to thinking through tradeoffs, such as the relative cost and benefit of shutting down schools versus the economic consequences of doing so. The most straightforward epidemiological model of infection – the SIR model dating back to the 1920s – is actually quite commonly used in economic models of innovation or information diffusion, so it is one we are often quite familiar with. Let’s walk through the simple economics of epidemic policy.

We’ll start with three assumptions. First, an infected person will infect B other people…

To begin our day-by-day retelling of the trial of Charles I over on twitter, Philip Baker, Research Fellow on the 1624 Parliamentary Diaries project, discusses the circumstances behind the trial and its later interpretation…

The trial of King Charles I – which began on this day in 1649 – remains arguably the most dramatic and famous trial in English history. Monarchs had been deposed, and even murdered, before, but Charles was the first to be placed on public trial for his life by his own subjects, charged with waging war against the English people in a bloody civil war. His court, which served as both judge and jury, was a specially commissioned high court of justice of 156 civilians and soldiers, of whom – no doubt due to the status of the accused – only 101 attended any sessions of the trial. The most conspicuous absentee was

Want to know how important electricity is to modern life? Try living a comfortable and civilised life without it.

More than a billion humans struggle through daily life without access to power at all, and two billion more are limited to a meagre trickle, because in developing countries it’s both unreliable and too expensive for all but the wealthy elites.

The wind and solar obsessed in the first world are quite prepared to ensure that it stays that way. With economic development agencies peddling ridiculously expensive solar panels – seen as ‘fake electricity’ by those lumbered with it – and forcing tinpot governments to sign up to costly and pointless wind and/or solar power schemes, the ratio of haves to have-nots is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

The relationship between economic development and reliable and affordable electricity is the subject of Juice: How Electricity Explains…

As mentioned by Sandeep Baliga over at Cheap Talk, Debraj Ray has a particularly interesting new essay on Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. If you are theoretically inclined, you will find Ray’s comments to be one of the few reviews of Piketty that proves insightful.

I have little to add to Ray, but here are four comments about Piketty’s book:

1) The data collection effort on inequality by Piketty and coauthors is incredible and supremely interesting; not for nothing does Saez-Piketty 2003 have almost 2000 citations. Much of this data can be found in previous articles, of course, but it is useful to have it all in one place. Why it took so long for this data to become public, compared to things like GDP measures, is an interesting one which sociology Dan Hirschman is currently working on. Incidentally, the data quality complaints by the Financial Times seem…

Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson was mentioned in despatches during the week, in a post which dealt with MPs’ air travel expenses.

We mention her again today because of her eagerness to have taxpayers become more generous to the unemployed, no matter – apparently – how feckless or disinclined to find work they might be.

Our earlier mention of Davidson and the Greens was triggered by Taxpayers’ Union data, gleaned from the latest Parliamentary expense disclosures, which showed the list MPs from the Greens (on average) are spending more than a third more than Labour’s equivalent.

Average air travel spending for non-ministerial list MPs by party:

Greens – $9,816
NZ First – $8,059
National – $7,332
Labour – $6,499