Utopia, you are standing in it!

By Pei Gao (NYU Shanghai) & Eric B. Schneider (LSE)

The full article from this blog is forthcoming in the Economic History Review and is currently available on Early View.

HMS Indefatigable with HMS Diadem (1898) in the Gulf of St. Lawrence 1901. Available at Wikimedia Commons.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the average height of adult British men increased by 11 centimetres. This increase in final height reflects improvements in living standards and health, and provides insights on the growth pattern of children which has been comparatively neglected. Child growth is very sensitive to economic and social conditions: children with limited nutrition or who suffer from chronic disease, grow more slowly than healthy children. Thus, to achieve such a large increase in adult height, health conditions must have improved dramatically for children since the mid-nineteenth century.

Our paper seeks to understand how child growth changed over time…

Last week and with another hat of mine on I was engaged on some case work for the Ministry of Social Development. The departmental officials I was working with were bemoaning the dearth of private rental accommodation in Northland. They said there was an increasing trend that saw private landlords selling up and exiting the market.

And then over at Kiwiblog today a guest post on the Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill being pushed through parliament this week under urgency so I decided to have a look at the Bill. You can access it at http://legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2020/0218/latest/LMS294929.html Two observations …

Clause 36 amends Section 51 of the principal Act and provides that a landlord may only seek to terminate a tenancy if the tenant has been in at least five working days in arrears the rent over three separate occasions in a period of 90 days.

Clause 37 inserts a new Section…

Having lost the un-loseable election in May last year, an angry rump of Labor backbenchers is keen to ditch the party’s suicidal renewable energy policies, with a view to recovering the ground they lost trying to win the sandalista vote in the inner city goat’s cheese circle.

Australia’s economic future depends, in no small part, on getting the ALP to decouple itself from the lunatic fringes of the hard-green left, and to start thinking about reliable and affordable power, of the kind that fuels industry growth and jobs.

Whatever policies are directed at recovering from the coronavirus lockdown, without reliable and affordable power Australia’s energy hungry businesses are doomed. With rocketing power prices, and an intermittent supply, mineral processors and manufacturers are terminal, and have been for years.

Politicians and academic boffins have been giving lip service to improving Australia’s “resilience” and “self-sufficiency”, resulting in the renaissance of Australian…

There are some remarkable stories of the private sector showing initiative when governments fail to maintain infrastructure.

• In response to dithering by government, residents and businesses in Hawaii put up $4 million to fix an important community road.
• Smugglers in Russia repaired a road to facilitate untaxed trade between Russian and Belarus.
• I also wrote about a guy in England who was fed up with the slow pace of road repairs and built a private toll road.

Regarding the final example, here’s a video on his project.

I’m particularly amused that this example of practical libertarianism (I’m guessing without the cost overruns that are inevitable with government) was made possible because zoning laws (normally an obstacle to sensible land use) basically allowed the organizer to ask for forgiveness afterward rather than permission beforehand.

To be sure, these isolated examples are hardly a sign that infrastructure is going to be…

By Anton Lang ~

This Post details the daily wind power generation data for the AEMO coverage area in Australia. For the background information, refer to the Introductory Post at this link.

Each image is shown here at a smaller size to fit on the page alongside the data for that day. If you click on each image, it will open on a new page and at a larger size so you can better see the detail.

Note also that on some days, there will be a scale change for the main wind power image, and that even though images may look similar in shape for the power generation black line on the graph when compared to other days, that scale (the total power shown on the left hand vertical axis) has been changed to show the graph at a larger size to better fit the image for that…