Utopia, you are standing in it!

Eric Crampton had a post this morning drawing attention to recent posts on TPP by Brian Easton (“to the left of the NZ economist punditsphere”) and me (“to the right of the same”).

In our posts we primarily asked slightly different questions.  Brian posed the question “Can we afford not to adopt the TPPA?” .  He doesn’t express a strong view one way or the other on the economic merits of the deal itself (but, as Eric notes, he doesn’t come across as overly enthusiastic).  Instead, his focus is on the fact that the deal has already been agreed, and that if New Zealand were not to ratify it now, it could be deeply damaging to a range of international relationships.

The logic in this column is that we now do not have much choice about the TPPA. The government is trapped into agreeing to it because rejecting it has…

There has been much debate in recent years (on this blog and elsewhere) on the validity of a second referendum on an independent Scotland. Defence of the Union has often been by reassertion of the unitary nation-state model. Michael Keating argues that this demonstrates a fundamental misconception of what union means, and that the nationalism implied by the nature of a union maintained by law, rather than the consent of its people, represents a threat to the continuing Union of the United Kingdom.

In its 2020 White Paper on the Internal Market, the British government described the United Kingdom as a ‘unitary state’. Although, for many at Westminster, this might sound rather banal, it betrays a serious misunderstanding of what is, and always has been, a plurinational union. Such misunderstandings are pulling the Union apart.

Four dimensions

In my book State and Nation in the United…

Last year, our economics department launched a data analytics minor program. The first class is a simple 2 credit course called Foundations of Dats Analytics. Originally, the idea was that liberal arts majors would take it and that this class would be a soft, non-technical intro of terminology and history.

However, it turned out that liberal arts majors didn’t take the class and that the most popular feedback was that the class lacked technical challenge. I’m prepping to teach the class and it will have two components. A Python training component where students simply learn Python. We won’t do super complicated things, but they will use Python extensively in future classes. The 2nd component is still in the vein of the old version of the course.

I’ll have the students read and discuss “Big DataDemystified” by David Stephenson. He spends 12 brief chapters introducing the reader to…

Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century
by John A. Farrell
776 pages
Little, Brown and Company
Published: Mar 2001

Published in 2001, John Farrell’s biography remains the definitive review of Tip O’Neill’s life. Farrell is a former correspondent for The Boston Globe and has written biographies of Clarence Darrow and Richard Nixon (which was a 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist). Farrell is currently working on a biography of Ted Kennedy which is expected to be published in the fall of 2022.

Tip O’Neill (1912-1994) is a colorful, larger-than-life political figure and anyone interested in his brash, back room style of politics will find much to enjoy in this biography. During O’Neill’s five-decade political career, he served in the Massachusetts House as well as the U.S. House of Representatives (where he ended his career with ten years of service as Speaker).

Farrell invested five years researching his subject’s life and his knowledge…

The Minister of Finance yesterday afternoon finally announced the rest of the members of the new Reserve Bank Board that takes office, under its new authorising legislation yesterday. In my post earlier this week, I highlighted a number of weaknesses in the legislation around the (dis) qualifications of the Governor and other Board members. None of the appointments to the Board appear to be in breach of the Act, but several are questionable on various counts, and taken together (and one should think about the composition of the Board as a whole) the new Board represents a poor, and grossly inadequate, start to the new regime. It could have been a great opportunity for a really impressive fresh start for the governance of the Bank. Instead, the Orr-Robertson degrading of the Bank continues.

As one gets older, rose-tinted glasses about aspects of the past are a risk. I do recall…