Friends and enemies in the middle east. Nice visualisation via @infobeautiful theguardian.com/news/datablog/… http://t.co/LHnF2hDoiq—
mark rice-oxley (@markriceoxley69) September 24, 2014
Friends and enemies in the Middle East flow charted
26 Apr 2015 Leave a comment
in politics - USA, war and peace Tags: ISIS, Middle-East politics
Today Washington time, 70 years ago, Henry Stimson on briefing Truman on a “highly secret matter”
25 Apr 2015 Leave a comment
in politics - USA, war and peace Tags: Atomic bomb, Truman, World War II
Secy. of War Henry Stimson 70 years ago today asks Pres. Truman to brief him on “highly secret matter”—atomic bomb: http://t.co/xCvYCB4DvI—
Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) April 24, 2015
World War I – the initial Australian response was expressed in its September 1914 general election
25 Apr 2015 Leave a comment
In another neo-liberal victory, health and welfare spending shares have doubled in the last 50 years
24 Apr 2015 Leave a comment
in income redistribution, politics - USA, Public Choice, public economics Tags: Director's Law, Leftover Left, median voter theorem, neoliberalism, tax reform, welfare state
The impact of the top tax rate in the depth and severity of the great depression
24 Apr 2015 Leave a comment
in business cycles, fiscal policy, great depression, macroeconomics, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, public economics Tags: capital taxation, New Zealand, taxation and the labour supply, top tax rate
Source: Ellen McGrattan.
There were large differences in increases in the 1930s in the top marginal income tax rate between Sweden, the UK, France with Australia and New Zealand and between the USA and Canada and the rest as McGrattan explains:
These data show that there is a strong negative correlation, roughly −94%, between the change in the top income tax rates and the deviation in per capita real GDP relative to trend in 1933.
Why don’t GOP presidential candidates address climate change? Because they want to win.
24 Apr 2015 Leave a comment
in environmental economics, global warming, politics - USA, Public Choice Tags: 2016 presidential election, climate alarmism, global warming, median voter theorem
Republicans furthest to the right are also most likely to reject the scientific consensus that human activity is to blame.
Why does this matter for 2016? Because conservative voters turn out heavily in primaries.
In 2012, two-thirds of the Republican primary electorate identified itself as conservative or very conservative in exit polling. Only one-third identified itself as being moderate or liberal Republicans.
When two-thirds of voters overlaps with the group that’s most likely to reject the idea that we should address climate change, that’s a strong disincentive to hold your ground on the subject.
Company tax rates around the world
24 Apr 2015 Leave a comment
in international economics, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, Public Choice, public economics Tags: company tax rate, tax competition
The role of new taxes in the Great Recession
24 Apr 2015 Leave a comment
in economic growth, fiscal policy, great recession, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, politics - USA Tags: great recession, obama, Obamacare, taxation and entrepreneurship, taxation and investment, taxation and labour supply
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Presidential voting demographics
23 Apr 2015 Leave a comment
in politics - USA Tags: 2016 presidential election
Could the 2016 presidential race change typical demographic voting trends? brook.gs/1GHP69t http://t.co/lfMt72MHFJ—
Brookings (@BrookingsInst) April 15, 2015
The economic and educational psychology case against making Te reo Māori compulsory in NZ schools
23 Apr 2015 1 Comment
in discrimination, economics of education, human capital, labour economics, politics - USA, poverty and inequality Tags: do gooders, economics of languages, Maori economic development, network economics, Te reo Māori
The Race Relations Commissioner Dame Susan Davoy has called for Te Reo Māori to be compulsory in New Zealand schools. She said being bilingual would be “a real added advantage” to young Kiwis and more people knowing Te reo Māori would help race relations.
Learning another language is not a priority for the Pākehā children or Māori mokupuna when you consider the poor literacy rates among Māori, Pasifika and Pākehā. The priority for children in an English speaking country is to master English. Too many children leave school with inadequate reading and writing skills.
Figure 1: Prose literacy by ethnicity, 2011
Source: Literacy skills of young adult New Zealanders | Education Counts.
Lower levels of literacy and numerously are much higher among Māori and Pasifika children. Pākehā consistently having a larger proportion in the higher levels of prose literacy.
Figure 2: Prose literacy rates by ethnicity, 1996 and 2006
Source: Indicator 9: Literacy rates — Office of the Auditor-General New Zealand.
60%of Pākehā are above the minimum level of competence to meet the prose literacy requirements of a knowledge society. This contrasts with the majority of Māori and Pasifika who are below the minimum level of competence.
Furthermore, requiring children who do not have an aptitude for language or school in general to learn a language will reinforce in those who are not doing well that they are not very smart. This will give them more reasons to hate school and leave as soon as possible and never go back.
The key to helping children who do not have an aptitude to succeed greatly at school is to find the subjects where they do do well so they can get a good start to life. If students are not good at academic subjects, requiring them to do more academic studies such as study language is fool-hardy.
Taking resources, and more importantly, students learning time away from basic literacy skills will do little for a Māori economic development and race relations. This is because this taking resources and student learning time away from literacy and basic education will slow the closing of income gaps between Māori and others.
Language is a network good. It pays to join the largest network so you can communicate and do business with more people. The wage premium for immigrants learning English in English-speaking’s countries is about 15%.
Learning Te reo Māori will not help children in their other subjects. The psychology of the transfer of learning was founded 100 years ago to explore the hypothesis that learning Latin gave the student muscle to learn other subjects, both other languages and generally learn faster.
Educational psychologists found that Latin does not help much in studying other languages and other subjects. No significant differences were found in deductive and inductive reasoning or text comprehension among students with 4 years of Latin, 2 years of Latin or no Latin at all.
The looming fiscal crisis in the USA
22 Apr 2015 Leave a comment
in fiscal policy, global financial crisis (GFC), great recession, macroeconomics, politics - USA Tags: ageing society
US, UK and Japanese inflation adjusted for new good and quality bias, 1994-2014
22 Apr 2015 Leave a comment
in econometerics, inflation targeting, macroeconomics, politics - USA Tags: CPI bias
All agree that the consumer price index (CPI) is biased and overstates inflation. In 1996, economists hired by the Senate Finance Committee estimated that the U.S. CPI overstates annual inflation by 1.1% (Boskin et al. 1996). That estimated CPI bias has not gotten smaller with time. It is now up to 1.5%, even 2%.
The main biases in the consumer price index everywhere come from how to handle changes in the quality of goods and services and how to deal with completely new goods and services.
I thought I might see what happened if I took account of this one and a half percentage point annual bias because of new goods, quality variation and other known biases in the CPI estimates for the USA, UK and Japan in the relevant OECD StatExtract database for annual CPI inflation.
Source: OECD StatExtract.
Taking into account new good and quality bias, Japan is been in serious deflation for quite some time now – at least 20 years. Japanese inflation went positive in the last year or two because I believe they increased their consumption tax.
The USA has a low inflation for about 20 years. The UK had no inflation for about seven years from 1997 then it started to rise again until 2012.
People get hot and bothered with deflation. Breathless journalism aside, fears of inflation are just a legacy of the great depression in the 1930s.
The only depression where deflation was accompanied by mass unemployment was the Great Depression. Mild deflation with good growth is a common phenomenon as Atkinson and Kehoe found:
Are deflation and depression empirically linked? No, concludes a broad historical study of inflation and real output growth rates. Deflation and depression do seem to have been linked during the 1930s. But in the rest of the data for 17 countries and more than 100 years, there is virtually no evidence of such a link.
Earth Day activists are now victims of the mass kidnappings
22 Apr 2015 Leave a comment
in environmental economics, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA Tags: Earth Day
Mass kidnappings is the only charitable explanation for their failure to be dancing in the streets by Eart Day activists over the greening of the planet courtesy of capitalism since Earth Day 1970?
The first Earth Day was celebrated 45 years ago today. nyti.ms/1IDVPyC http://t.co/Zpg7zJc8V6—
NYT Archives (@NYTArchives) April 22, 2015
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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