Utopia, you are standing in it!

Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse battled over whether America would run on DC or AC power, but they never had to battle with the chaotic intermittency of wind and solar.

Celebrated in the recently released film, The Current War, Westinghouse and Edison fought a pitched battle over technology, patents, media approval and the support of legislators in their efforts to dominate the generation and distribution of electricity across the USA. Spoiler alert: Westinghouse won and AC remains the delivery system of choice.

In wind and solar obsessed Australia, the battle raging today about power generation and delivery is simply about keeping the lights on.

Rafe Champion takes a look at how the chaotic delivery of heavily subsidised wind and solar is the real Current War.

How intermittent energy kills coal-fired power and the grid
Catallaxy Files
Rafe Champion
16 March 2020

The damage inflicted by a good wind day. The…

by Mario J. Rizzo and Glen Whitman

Book description

The burgeoning field of behavioral economics has produced a new set of justifications for paternalism. This book challenges behavioral paternalism on multiple levels, from the abstract and conceptual to the pragmatic and applied.

Behavioral paternalism relies on a needlessly restrictive definition of rational behavior. It neglects nonstandard preferences, experimentation, and self-discovery. It relies on behavioral research that is often incomplete and unreliable. It demands a level of knowledge from policymakers that they cannot reasonably obtain. It assumes a political process largely immune to the effects of ignorance, irrationality, and the influence of special interests and moralists.

Overall, behavioral paternalism underestimates the capacity of people to solve their own problems, while overestimating the ability of experts and policymakers to design beneficial interventions. The authors argue instead for a more inclusive theory of rationality in economic policymaking.

Gerd Gigerenzer (Director of the…

Environment  Minister   David  Parker  has directed  officials to find ways  to fast-track consents  for infrastructure and  development  projects. He says   his  goal  is to  help create a pipeline of projects  so that some can  start immediately once  Covid-19 restrictions  are  lifted “so people can get back into work as fast as possible”.

Parker sees the Covid-19 pandemic as a serious global crisis that will have a wide ranging and lasting impact on almost every part of  the economy for some time.

He recognises many New Zealanders have lost their jobs, or may do so in coming months, and many businesses are doing it hard.

“These are extraordinary times that need extraordinary solutions. We need to support NZers through this crisis, and position our economy for recovery”.

 His  aim  is  to   short-circuit  the standard  Resource Management Act  consenting  processes  and  he wants   Cabinet to  put its stamp of approval on…

Choices that matter are often hard.  That is one of the messages of Matthew Hooton’s lengthy column in the Herald this morning, which people really should read if you possibly can.  It isn’t that Hooton is saying anything particularly new, but he is putting it firmly in a contemporary New Zealand context.  He poses the choices around handling the coronavirus pandemic as primarily those for the Prime Minister (and Cabinet), but really we should think of them as choices for New Zealanders as a whole, for which elected leaders –  none of whom here was seriously chosen for their ability to confront the gravest crisis in many many decades – really should primarily be there to facilitate and articulate, but perhaps help shape too, our collective view; the choices we wish to make on matters that affect life and death –  perhaps for many – and the functioning of our…