Below is a slightly expanded version of my column on Fox.com on the attacks on the Court for granting review of the immunity challenge brought by former president Donald Trump. The scheduling of oral argument has unleashed the familiar voices against the justices and allegations of political machinations. The claims of “slow walking” the appeal […]
The Housing Theory of Everything has one of those wonderful self-explanatory titles. A good title matters. The recent and thorough essay explains how the anglosphere’s unnecessarily expensive housing affects, well, everything. Or at least almost everything.Zoning makes it too hard to build houses where people want to build. Urban containment policies block new subdivisions, so…
The Productivity Commission will cease operations tomorrow, to make way for the new Ministry for Regulation. On the same day, the Waitangi Tribunal will begin an urgent inquiry into the government’s proposal to disestablish the Māori Health Authority. But legislation passed under urgency by Parliament will result in the authority being shut down by the end […]
The Productivity Commission closes its doors on Thursday and goes out of existence. There have been a couple of recent articles on the demise of the Productivity Commission, and the chair (Ganesh Nana) has even put out his own statement (not exactly compelling) on productivity, and policy options for improving New Zealand’s dismal performance. There […]
In general, one can’t say that chromosomes “determine sex” in animals, as there are other genetic or environmental features that determine what sex an individual becomes. As Coyne and Maroja (2023) note: Different sexes can determined during development bybe based on different chromosomes and their genes (e.g., XX vs. XY in humans, ZW vs. ZZ in birds, […]
The appointment of Grant Robertson as Vice-Chancellor of Otago University has raised hackles – and questions – among academics. Robertson’s credentials for the job is one issue. The appointment process is another. University of Auckland economics professor Rob MacCulloch has posted these three articles in the past few days on Down To Earth Kiwi… […]
[This is the first in a series of posts that will look at the key institutions of the British constitution. A version of this particular post first appeared on my personal blog.] Americans don’t really understand the British Monarchy. Our pundits often portray the Queen as a powerless figurehead who does little more than cut ribbons and unveil plaques. […]
The Supreme Court today unanimously threw out the convictions of Bridget Kelly, a former aide to Christie, and Bill Baroni, a former Port Authority official, for their role in “Bridgegate.” The dispute involved the controversial closing of lanes on the George Washington Bridge to create traffic problems for the mayor of Fort Lee, N.J., who […]
Interpreting the agreement made at Waitangi as a social contract is a way to move forward on treaty issues (This column follows ‘Our Understandings Of Te Tiriti Has Evolved Organically’.) Brian Easton writes – Te Tiriti is in the form of a social contract of the sort that political theorists have discussed since the seventeenth […]
Here’s a new one-hour interview of Steve Pinker by John Tomasi, inaugural president of the Heterodox Academy. Here are the YouTube notes: Are our higher education institutions still nurturing true intellectual diversity? Our guest today is Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, and today, we’ll be exploring the growing concerns within higher ed that […]
By Paul Homewood From The Telegraph: Labour’s green U-turn reflects the shifting sands of climate policy If you want to see how the politics of climate change are shifting, compare today with late 2009. In both cases, a general election was approaching. In October 2009, with the Copenhagen climate summit […]
Three years ago a friend of mine who’s a District Court Judge asked me if I would be guest speaker at the annual DCJ shindig, scheduled that year for the Hilton in Taupo. Despite a feeling of significant intellectual inferiority, I accepted on the condition that all I would talk about were personal experiences from…
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
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