Utopia, you are standing in it!

The following is an updated and revised version of the penultimate section of my paper with Ron Batchelder “Pre-Keynesian Theories of the Great Depressison: What Ever Happened to Hawtrey and Cassel?” which I am now preparing for publication. The previous version is available on SSRN.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, empirical studies of the effects of money and monetary policy by Milton Friedman, his students and followers, rehabilitated the idea that monetary policy had significant macroeconomic effects. Most importantly, in research with Anna Schwartz Friedman advanced the seemingly remarkable claim that the chief cause of the Great Depression had been a series of policy mistakes by the Federal Reserve. Although Hawtrey and Cassel, had also implicated the Federal Reserve in their explanation of the Great Depression, they were unmentioned by Friedman and Schwartz or by other Monetarists.[1]

The chief difference between the Monetarist and the Hawtrey-Cassel explanations of…

So what happened to “go hard, go early”? Does anyone expect house prices (which have risen more than $100,000 since early 2020) to start falling?

The Ardern government’s housing package aroused curiously mixed reactions, hardly any of them providing a glimmer of light to would-be first-home buyers that house prices will be falling any time soon.

From one side, the warning came that rent controls could not be far behind. From the other, “market forces” and the evils of neo-liberalism had at last been corralled.

Over on the Left, Chris Trotter sees a housing crisis ripping apart the country’s weakest and most vulnerable communities.

“While the detail of the Labour government’s housing package has been sufficient to unleash the very worst impulses of NZ’s landlord class – whose screams of rage and wild threats of social vengeance have pretty much confirmed the rest of NZ society’s worst fears concerning‘property…

Voltaire was born François-Marie Arouet in Paris in 1694. He was raised with a Jesuit education (Latin, theology, rhetoric, and so on) but he quickly became a thorn in the side of the French establishment. He was a brilliant student who wrote extensively about the lavish corruption of 18th century French society. His blistering satires and critiques were largely directed at the decaying Catholic French monarchy and its rigid censorship laws as well as its self-aggrandizing ecclesiasticism. Voltaire is known to us today as the essential Enlightenment man. Victor Hugo said likened Voltaire to the whole of the 18th century -Voltaire contained within himself both a Renaissance and a Reformation. He carried on the skepticism of Montaigne and the humor Rabelais. He was a more potent enemy of superstition and religious fanaticism than either Erasmus

He had a rocky relationship with his father. As a young…

If wind and solar power are so cheap, then why is it that Germany now suffers Europe’s highest power prices? And equally wind power obsessed, Denmark is right behind it?

On the one hand, the wind and solar cult point to Germany as the shining example of our inevitable transition to an all wind and sun powered future and wax lyrical about what’s been achieved. However, the same characters tend to quietly crab walk away from the hard facts about the effect of subsidised and unreliable wind and solar on power prices, a connection that is pretty obvious in Germany and Denmark. Inconvenient truths, and all that.

The same crowd of zealots also assert that nuclear power is so expensive as to be unaffordable.

The French obtain around 75% of their electricity from nuclear power plants.

So, why is it that the French enjoy power prices half those suffered in…