TweetWant to get a few hours’ worth of solid learning in less than 35 enjoyable minutes? Listen to my Mercatus Center colleague David Beckworth’s podcast (from October 2022) with George Selgin on the New Deal. Seriously. It will be 34-plus minutes very well spent. George’s book – False Dawn – is forthcoming from the University…
George Selgin on the New Deal and Recovery (and Relief and Reform)
George Selgin on the New Deal and Recovery (and Relief and Reform)
18 Nov 2023 Leave a comment
in budget deficits, business cycles, economic growth, economic history, fiscal policy, great depression, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, monetary economics, unemployment
America’s top one percent has not been seeing a rising income share
18 Nov 2023 Leave a comment
in labour economics, Public Choice, entrepreneurship, human capital, occupational choice, public economics, income redistribution, labour supply, economic history, poverty and inequality Tags: top 1%
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. The opener is this: Can a single self-published paper really refute decades of work by three famous economists? If the paper is the modestly titled “Income Inequality in the United States: Using Tax Data to Measure Long-Term Trends,” then the answer — with qualifications — is yes. And…
America’s top one percent has not been seeing a rising income share
Queensland University of Technology completely ditches merit-based hiring, favoring gender, “looks”, and personality
18 Nov 2023 Leave a comment
in discrimination, economics of education, gender, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice, poverty and inequality Tags: affirmative action, sex discrimination

This gem of a story is about how one Aussie university went to the logical endpoint of the diversity-trumps-merit controversy: Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane is apparently about to hire solely on the basis of diversity, and has erased any mention of the word “merit” in its hiring policy. This of course is ridiculous, […]
Queensland University of Technology completely ditches merit-based hiring, favoring gender, “looks”, and personality
Forever Cancelled: Escalating Costs Crippling Giant Offshore Wind Power Projects
18 Nov 2023 Leave a comment
in energy economics, environmental economics, global warming Tags: celebrity technologies, wind power

The laws of economics don’t discriminate: where the costs of any venture outweigh its benefits, investors stay at home. Originally lured with the meme about wind power being free, and getting cheaper all the time, plenty of hopefuls poured cash into wind power outfits like NextEra, Avangrid and turbine manufacturers like Siemens. Lately, however, the […]
Forever Cancelled: Escalating Costs Crippling Giant Offshore Wind Power Projects
Litigation Only Way to Protect Communities & Environments From Wind Turbine Rollout
18 Nov 2023 Leave a comment
in energy economics, environmental economics, global warming

Holding hands and waving placards just doesn’t cut it. If you want to protect the environment or your community from the industrial wind power onslaught, then litigate. In this post, we contrast a community off the coast of New South Wales, Australia where a rally of surfers gathered to stave off the threat of an […]
Litigation Only Way to Protect Communities & Environments From Wind Turbine Rollout
An Undersea Oil Pipeline to Beat the Nazis – WW2 Documentary Special
18 Nov 2023 Leave a comment
in defence economics, war and peace Tags: D-Day, World War II
Heavy Action At The Somme – The Fight For Monastir I THE GREAT WAR Week 121
17 Nov 2023 Leave a comment
in defence economics, war and peace Tags: World War I
Mugabe: Power, Plunder and the Struggle for Zimbabwe by Martin Meredith (2007)
17 Nov 2023 Leave a comment
in defence economics, laws of war, war and peace Tags: Zimbabwe
‘Africa for Africans’ ‘In Africa, the African is supreme’ (p.230) (Mugabe slogans) ‘This is not about correcting a colonial imbalance. This is about punishing your enemies and rewarding your friends. This is about staying in power no matter what the damage is to your country or its economy.’ (Philemon Matibe, MDC i.e. Zimbabwe opposition candidate, […]
Mugabe: Power, Plunder and the Struggle for Zimbabwe by Martin Meredith (2007)
The Disqualification of Donald Trump and Other Legal Urban Legends
17 Nov 2023 Leave a comment
in politics - USA Tags: 2024 presidential election

Below is a slightly expanded version of my column in The Hill on the increasingly popular theory that former president Donald Trump is already barred from office under the 14th Amendment. It is a theory that, in my view, has a political appeal that outstrips its constitutional support. In a constitution designed to protect free […]
The Disqualification of Donald Trump and Other Legal Urban Legends
ELE LUDEMANN: Does reset need a referendum?
17 Nov 2023 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, economic history, law and economics, politics - New Zealand Tags: constitution law
Act wants a referendum to define the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. The principles do need redefining and that redefinition will almost certainly result in a reset that reverses a lot of the insertion of the undefined principles in areas which many think have nothing to do with the Treaty. It is 23 years […]
ELE LUDEMANN: Does reset need a referendum?
Out of Africa
17 Nov 2023 Leave a comment
in economic history, economics of education, economics of media and culture Tags: Africa
My Conversation with the excellent Jennifer Burns
17 Nov 2023 Leave a comment
in Austrian economics, business cycles, economics of education, Euro crisis, F.A. Hayek, global financial crisis (GFC), great depression, great recession, history of economic thought, macroeconomics, Milton Friedman, monetarism, monetary economics
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode description: Jennifer Burns is a professor history at Stanford who works at the intersection of intellectual, political, and cultural history. She’s written two biographies Tyler highly recommends: her 2009 book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and her latest, Milton Friedman: The […]
My Conversation with the excellent Jennifer Burns
BLOOD AND IRON: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE 1871-1918 by Katja Hoyer
17 Nov 2023 Leave a comment
in economic history Tags: Germany

(German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck) It might surprise most of you that Germany has only been a country since 1871. By the mid-19th century Germany was a series of states, thirty nine to be exact. The dominant principalities were Prussia and Bavaria, one dominated the Lutheran north, the other the Catholic south. The question must […]
BLOOD AND IRON: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE 1871-1918 by Katja Hoyer



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