Utopia, you are standing in it!

Robert Barro, a noted Growth Economist had written an article in WSJ on the fiscal multipliers. His main idea is that tax cuts are better than government spending and a fiscal stimulus should focus on the former. The government spending works but only in war times.

Why tax-cuts are more stimulative?

I don’t think it is really confusing at all, because when you cut taxes there are two different effects. One is that you cut tax rates, and therefore give people incentives to do things like work and produce more and pay more — maybe, depending on what kind of taxes. And then you also maybe give people more income. This income effect is the one that’s related to this Keynesian multiplier argument, where it’s usually argued that government spending should have a bigger effect. So that’s the income effect. But the tax-rate effect, inducing people to do things…

We can rephrase the question about the world’s inequalities as follows: why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? (p.16)

The 1990s saw an explosion in popular science books and this one won prizes (the Pulitzer Prize, over a million copies sold) for its skilful interweaving of a wide range of specialisms – biogeography, archaeology, anthropology, molecular genetics, linguistics and more – to answer an apparently ‘simple’ question. In his introduction Diamond calls it ‘Yali’s Question’, after a New Guinea native he knows (Diamond has spent a lifetime studying the birds of New Guinea) and who once asked him: ‘Why did you white people develop so much “cargo” and bring it to New Guinea and we black people have so little “cargo” of our own?’ where ‘cargo’ stands for the full range of marvellous inventions the white man brought with him.

The jokey sub-title of the book…

It is a failing of our species that we ignore and even despise the creatures whose lives sustain our own. (p.294)

Edward Osborne Wilson was born in 1929 and pursued a long career in biology, specialising in myrmecology, the study of ants, about which he came to be considered the world’s leading expert, and about which he published a massive textbook as well as countless research papers.

As well as his specialist scientific writing, Wilson has also published a series of (sometimes controversial) books about human nature, on collaborative species of animal (which led him to conceive the controversial theory of sociobiology), and about ecology and the environment.

(They’re controversial because he considers humans as just another complex life form, whose behaviour is dictated almost entirely by genetics and environment, discounting our ability to learn or change: beliefs which are opposed by liberals and progressives who believe humans can…

Call it the ‘luck of the Irish’. Over the last few months locals have racked up a string of victories against wind power outfits for all manner of sins, crimes and misdemeanours.

In November the Irish government was slammed with a €5 million fine for failing to apply its very own environmental standards at a wind farm in County Galway, which turned into an environmental disaster: Irish Government Slammed with €5m Fine Over Wind Farm’s Environmental Disaster

Following that rather embarrassing setback, a wind power outfit in Waterford was brought to heel for pushing the envelope over the size of its turbines: Busted: Irish Wind Project Slammed For Breaching EU Environmental Directives

Now, in an effort to avoid the grinding, thumping cacophony these things generate, a couple of horticulturalists, Klaus Balz and Hanna Heubach have taken a wind power outfit all the way to the Supreme Court. And they’ve won!

Central to…

Vijay Jayaraj explains how weather is created around the Indian Ocean in this article Record Heat and Cold Expose Climate Alarmists’ Bias. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

Australia was literally on fire in December. Record heat made headlines in global media. So did the extreme rainfall in east Africa.

You and everybody else on earth can guess what climate alarmists blamed for both: man-made global warming, a.k.a. climate change.

But record cold in northern India at the same time didn’t make headlines in any major media in the United States or the United Kingdom.

Why? Because it didn’t fit expectations.

It’s a perfect example of climate alarmists’ obvious bias that’s seldom brought to light.

In December, east Africa received extremely heavy rainfall, causing widespread floods in Kenya and Djibouti. The floods impacted more than one million people and killed scores already challenged by extreme poverty.