Utopia, you are standing in it!

Today we find that immigration reform and related issues like DACA and a southern border wall are at the forefront of our election debate aside from Covid-19. Immigration has been a very controversial issue throughout American history and one of the most contentious involved what to do with the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons that were a result of Nazi racial policy and their conduct during World War II. By the end of 1945 roughly one million displaced persons remained in Germany: Jews, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, among other groups who refused to return to their home countries or had no homes to return to. This group labeled the “Last Million” by author David Nasaw in his latest book, THE LAST MILLION: EUROPE’S DISPLACED PERSONS FROM WORLD WAR TO COLD WAR follows these individuals from three to five years as they lived…

Recently, I came across this outstanding interview with Eugene Fama published by The Market / NZZ. Besides the main subject discussed -the inability of central banks to control inflation-, the interview is intertwined with gripping assertions about the limits of knowledge, such as the following ones:

Bubbles are things people see in hindsight. They don’t identify them in advance. Sure, you can look at the behavior of prices, and you may be able to identify cases where they are too high. But if you only look back and say: «Oh, stocks went down a lot, so that was a bubble», then that’s 20/20 hindsight. At the time, there was no evidence that there was a bubble.

I don’t say markets are completely efficient, but they’re efficient for most questions that I address. Models are never a 100 % true. If they were, we would call them reality…

Environmentalists sue to halt logging, controlled burns, and forest thinning efforts that can reduce the likelihood of forest fires, and when the forests catch fire, the results can be devastating. Now, environmentalists in California use the destruction from the fires they largely contributed to in order to halt housing construction so people have places to live. It’s so much easier to tell others how or where people should live when environmentalists do not run the risk of not having a home.

Environmentalists use wildfire danger as new weapon against housing development

By J.K. Dineen, October 19, 2020, San Francisco Chronicle

From steep terrain in Napa Valley to the windswept hills of Contra Costa County, California environmentalists opposed to development in semi-urbanized areas are increasingly fighting projects with a weapon that would have been rare a few years ago — the dangers of wildfire.

Over the past three years…

As we approach Bonfire Night on 5 November, Dr Paul Hunneyball of our Lords 1558-1603 project ponders whether we should be remembering a much more prestigious figure than Guy Fawkes…

The Gunpowder Plot is one of the great ‘what ifs’ of British history. For more than four centuries we’ve commemorated the scheme’s failure – but if it had succeeded, and the House of Lords had been blown up during the state opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605, it would have been a devastating blow to England’s ruling elite. Potential casualties included the king, James I, his principal ministers and courtiers, almost the entire leadership of the Church of England, and many of the men who controlled local government. As the plotters calculated, political chaos would have ensued, opening the way for a possible Catholic rising and a dramatic change of regime. The Plot’s ambition and audacity was astonishing, and…