HT: Catallaxyfiles
What Obama and China intend to do by around 2030
14 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in environmental economics, global warming, politics - USA Tags: climate alarmism, expressive voting, global warming
HT: Catallaxyfiles
The six-way 2015 British general election is warming up
14 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in politics, Public Choice Tags: British general election
The election is six way because the Scottish Nationalists are expected to sweep the Labour seats in Scotland, which will give them 40 seats or more at the expense of Labour. The Tories have one seat in Scotland.
The Greens are now polling enough to split enough votes away from Labour to allow the Tories or Liberal Democrats to win Labour seats. Many Liberal Democratic seats appear to be going back to the Tories now.
UK is pressing at the heels of the Conservative party in England. How that will work to the advantage of Labour coming through the middle in England is unknown.
Ed Miliband has managed to be more unpopular than Michael Foot.
George Stigler vindicated: Learning the Wealth of Nations
14 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in constitutional political economy, political change, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, Public Choice Tags: george stigler, Leftover Left, Milton Friedman, neoliberal conspiracies, public choice, Twitter left, Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen has drawn attention to a 2011 paper on policy learning in the 1970s and 80s by Francisco J. Buera, Alexander Monge-Narajo, and Giorgio E. Primiceri was published in Econometrica in 2011. Their paper found that:
1. Policymakers have priors about how good the market economy is, and they revise those views — and thus revise policy — as they observe their own growth results and those of their neighbors.
2. A simple learning model predicts about 97% of the policy choices observed in the data. The model accounts for more than 77% of the observed policy switches over a three-year time window.
3. Evolving beliefs — and not just the fixed demographic characteristics of countries — are critical for understanding policy decisions.
4. It was probably the growth collapse of the late 1970s for interventionist countries which led to a greater reliance on markets.
5. Adjustment toward better-performing policies is often quite slow. In part this is because policymakers attribute the superior performance of other countries to heterogeneity rather than policy per se.
This record of politicians learning from failure and success at home and abroad is a vindication of George Stigler’s views of the relative unimportance of economists in influencing public policy.
There was no neoliberal conspiracy that captured the hearts and minds of politicians through mass hypnosis in the 1970s and 1980s as both the Left over Left and the Twitter Left like to suggest
The policies of Friedman had to wait, as George Stigler predicted, for a market to develop among interest groups and the voting public. Once that market developed, Milton Friedman, FA Hayek and others looked like leaders of an opinion.
A few years earlier, Friedman and Hayek were just angry men in the wilderness.
The reason for this sudden change in their public profile and purported influence on the shape the course of public policy in th 1970s and 1980s onwards was political parties were yet to conclude that the existing policy regime had failed irretrievably, and that the successes of neighbours on economic reform might be worth imitating locally.
Once politicians, the voting public and interest groups concluded that new solutions are needed, just as Stigler predicted, the ideas for reform been around for a long time came to the front.
via http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/11/learning-the-wealth-of-nations.html
The Twitter Left is replacing the Left over Left
14 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, liberalism, Marxist economics, politics, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, technological progress Tags: Leftover Left, Twitter left
People brush over the fact that President Obama is a Nobel Peace Prize winner
13 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in politics - USA, war and peace Tags: American foreign policy, non-interventionist foreign policy
The Jonathan Gruber revelations, Obamacare and the honesty of politics
13 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in politics - USA, Public Choice Tags: Jonathan Gruber, Machiavelli, Obamacare, public choice, Yes Minister, Yes Prime Minister
Have @NZGreens accidentally published a chart showing substantial and pretty continuous real wages growth in recent decades?
12 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in labour economics, politics - New Zealand, poverty and inequality, welfare reform Tags: poverty and inequality, The Great Enrichment
Obama is doing a Clinton on climate change agreements
12 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in environmental economics, environmentalism, global warming, politics - USA Tags: climate alarmism, expressive politics, global warming, international law, Kyoto Protocol
Last week, I planned to write a blog about how Obama might do a Clinton: safe in the knowledge that Congress will never approve any of his climate change agreements, he will run round the world signing up to all sorts of ambitious carbon emission reduction goals.
The agreement Obama just signed today with the Chinese after the secret talks over the congressional election period is an example. This secret agreement goes to show that the Obama administration can actually keep a secret.
The agreement with China and any other futures similar agreements will win Obama brownie points with the Left of his party, but not bother anyone else in particular because they know they’ll never get through Congress.
The moment Bush took office in 2001, the Democrats started asking why wouldn’t Bush submit the Kyoto protocol to the Senate for ratification.
Bill Clinton had 801 days left in his administration after he signed the Kyoto protocol in December 1997 to submit it for Senate ratification. He did not lift a finger.
Clinton was safe in the knowledge that prior to the signing of the Kyoto protocol, the Senate voted 95 to nil in July 1997 to not ratify any treaty on climate change that did not impose mandatory obligations on Russia, China and other major developing countries.
President Clinton approved and signed into law appropriations bills for fiscal years 1999, 2000, and 2001 that included language prohibiting the Environmental Protection Agency from using its funds to “issue rules, regulations, decrees, or orders for the purpose of implementation, or in preparation for implementation, of the Kyoto Protocol” until the Protocol is ratified by the Senate and entered into force under the terms of the treaty.
The major feature of the Kyoto Protocol is that it sets binding targets for 37 industrialized countries and the European community for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. These amount to an average of five per cent reduction against 1990 levels over the five-year period 2008-2012.
Developing countries, including China and India, weren’t mandated to reduce emissions, given that they’d contributed a relatively small share of the current century-plus build-up of CO2.
The Europeans were happy to sign the Kyoto Protocol after the Americans pulled out because the emissions trading price in any such protocol would be very low because no American companies would have to buy emission credits.
U.S. and China Reach Climate Deal After Secret Negotiations – where are the protesters? Where is the hypocrisy?!
12 Nov 2014 1 Comment
in environmental economics, global warming, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA Tags: climate alarmism, expressive voting, global warming, international environmental law, international law, international trade law, Leftover Left, preferential trading agreements
The United States and China have unveiled a secretly negotiated deal to reduce their greenhouse gas output, with China agreeing to cap emissions for the first time and the US committing to deep reductions by 2025. Jointly announced in Beijing by President Obama and President Xi Jinping, includes new targets for carbon emissions reductions by the United States and a first-ever commitment by China to stop its emissions from growing by 2030.
https://twitter.com/CearaProut/status/531251207033982977
Will protestors take to streets about the secrecy that proceeded the negotiation of this international agreement?
- 10,000 protesters took to the streets of New Zealand at the weekend against the secrecy surrounding the Trans-Pacific partnership trade and investment talks. The air was thick with conspiracy theories and the demand for transparency in international diplomacy.
- Why were these treaty negotiations with China over carbon emissions kept from the watchful eye of the American public before the recent congressional elections?
The Left over Left picks and chooses the international law that it champion:
- International law on both human rights and the environment are both an addendum to the 10 Commandments and must be followed, come hell or high water. Even better if the UN is somehow involved – moral status is then beyond question.
- International trade and investment laws are the spawn of Satan. The fact that these trade and investment treaties are freely negotiated between sovereign states adds nothing to their moral standing and much to their conspiratorial origins.
- International criminal courts, the European Court of Justice and the World Court are all superior to national courts. International trade and investment dispute tribunals are the lackeys of multinationals.
State owned enterprises continue to be a bad investment for the NZ taxpayer
12 Nov 2014 2 Comments
in industrial organisation, Marxist economics, politics - New Zealand, public economics Tags: privatisation, state owned enterprises
In a Briefing to the Incoming Minister just released, the Treasury said that in 2013, total shareholder return from state owned enterprises to the taxpayer was just 3 per cent. This is a little bit better than leaving the money in the bank.
Note: KiwiRail is excluded because of significant changes in its valuation methodologies over the past few years, including the significant write down in its asset values in 2012. . Total shareholder return for 2012 has been restated to include Solid Energy.
KiwiRail lost $248 million in 2013, after a $174.4 million loss a year earlier. Solid Energy lost $182 million last year last year. This $182m loss follows a $335.4m loss in the June 2013 year and a $40m loss the year before that.
The Great Enrichment – wages growth in the post-war period version
10 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in politics - USA Tags: The Great Enrichment
Modern topology software does make for rather frightening gerrymanders
10 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in politics - USA, Public Choice Tags: gerrymanders
U.S. House of Representatives, 2008 and 2014
10 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in politics - USA Tags: 2014 U, S. election
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