As I reported in September of last year, every entering student at New Zealand’s Auckland University was required to take an “indigeneity” course—and that includes prospective science majors. As I noted: . . . . at the University of Auckland—New Zealand’s most prestigious university—every student has to take a mandatory course related to indigenous knowledge, […]
Jerry Coyne writes – As I reported in September of last year, every entering student at New Zealand’s Auckland University was required to take an “indigeneity” course—and that includes prospective science majors. As I noted: . . . . at the University of Auckland—New Zealand’s most prestigious university—every student has to take a mandatory course […]
There are several visual ways of helping people understand how fiscal policy (and especially marginal tax rates) can change behavior. The philoso-raptor meme. The questioning worker. Supply-and-demand curves. The Wizard-of-Id parody. To augment these examples, I’ve started a series that is based on real-world examples. Part I of the series highlighted how the capital gains […]
This week, my ECONS102 class covered inequality, and social security. Which is timely, because I have been meaning to blog about this Treasury Analytical Note from 2024, by Tod Wright and Hien Nguyen, for some time. Wright and Nguyen look at the distributional impact of taxes, transfers, and government spending (on healthcare and education).Importantly, they distinguish…
Poor and developing nations need to band together, finance their own energy infrastructure, development, health and prosperity – and tell the carbon colonialists to take a hike.
The Public Office (Accountability) Bill was introduced into the House of Commons on 16 September 2025. It gives effect to the Labour Party’s 2024 Manifesto commitment to introduce a ‘Hillsborough Law’ which will ‘place a legal duty of candour on public servants and authorities and provide legal aid for victims of disasters or state-related deaths’. As the Government’s ‘Duty of […]
Paul Krugman has a recent post defending the exchange subsidies and tax credits that the Republicans wish to cut, talking with Jonathan Cohn about the “premium apocalypse” (and here). Whether or not one agrees with Krugman normatively, the arguments if anything convince me that Obamacare probably is not financially or politically stable. To recap some […]
REASON: Starting Today, Electric Vehicle Buyers No Longer Get a Federal Tax Credit. It’s bad news for upper-income motorists wanting a deal, but good news for taxpayers. In 2022, then-President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law…,[awarding] up to $7,500 for purchasing an electric vehicle. …Donald Trump [terminated the subsidy] on September…
The End of Truth: In 1944, Friedrich Hayek warned that traveling down the anti-liberal road would lead us into serfdom under rogue government. One chapter, “The End of Truth,” explained the kit necessary to sustain the new feudalism, the kit of propaganda and clientelism promoting big lies that must be protected by censorship, intimidation, and […]
Bill Maher is on a winning streak with his 7-8-minute politics and comedy bits on his “Real Time” show. Here’s the one from yesterday, called “New Rule: Long Division”: This one’s about gender (he means “sex”), with Maher saying “Until the Democrats come to grips with that, they’ve not going to have much success winning […]
Tweet… is from page 196 of Arnold Kling‘s excellent 2004 book, Learning Economics: [O]utsourcing is symmetric. For every job that we outsource to India, India outsources a job to us. That giant sucking sound you hear is jobs being created in the U.S. to meet the needs of Indian consumers. That is guaranteed to happen.…
Welcome to Thursday, October 2, 2025, and Yom Kippur, which occupies all day and ends at sundown (it began at sunset yesterday). Considered the holiest day of the year by religious Jews, it’s the Day of Atonement, marked by fasting, praying, and confessing. There is no work for the very observant: no turning on ovens […]
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
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