Utopia, you are standing in it!

The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill is controversial for many reasons – not least the sweeping powers it grants the executive to change a swathe of laws. Lisa James and Alan Renwick discuss recent Constitution Unit survey results, which suggest that members of the public instinctively favour a central role for parliament in law making.

The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill – or REUL Bill – is a complex and controversial piece of legislation. Its focus is the law which arose from the UK’s membership of the European Union. This ‘retained EU law’ is significant in both scale and scope: the government currently lists over 3700 pieces of such legislation, much of it implementing regulatory regimes across a number of major policy domains. Areas such as environmental protection, consumer rights and employment law are particularly affected.

The REUL Bill would automatically repeal most retained EU law…

From The Emperor’s Desk: Today is the anniversary of the death of King Charles II of England, Scotland and Ireland on February 6, 1685. Instead of doing a usual biography of the king, today I will examine, in two parts, this philosophical question of when did Charles II become king after the execution of his father King Charles I.

May 29, 1660 is the traditional date of the Restoration to the throne of Charles II as King of England, Scotland and Ireland marking the first assembly of King and Parliament together since the abolition of the English monarchy in 1649.

Charles II was born at St James’s Palace on May 29, 1630, as the second but eldest surviving son of Charles I, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, and his wife Princess Henrietta Maria de Bourbon of France, sister of King Louis XIII of France and Navarre, and the…

How well have countries recovered from the declines in the pandemic? It’s actually a bit difficult to answer that question, because it depends on how you measure it. Even if we agree that GDP is the best measure, how do we measure recovery? One possibility is to simply ask whether the country has exceeded its pre-pandemic GDP level. Exactly which quarter to use as the baseline is debatable, but here is a chart that Joseph Politano made for G7 countries using the 3rd quarter of 2019 as the baseline.

But we know that absent the pandemic, most countries would have continued growing (absent a recession for some other reason), so just getting back to pre-pandemic levels isn’t necessarily a full recovery. But how much growth should we have expected? It’s a hard question, but here’s a chart along those lines from the Washington Post, using the CBO’s measure of…

George V (George Frederick Ernest Albert; June 3, 1865 – January 20, 1936) was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India, from May 6, 1910 until his death in 1936.

King George V’s relationship with his eldest son and heir, Edward, deteriorated in the later years. George was disappointed in Edward’s failure to settle down in life and appalled by his many affairs with married women. In contrast, he was fond of his second son, Prince Albert (later George VI), and doted on his eldest granddaughter, Princess Elizabeth; he nicknamed her “Lilibet”, and she affectionately called him “Grandpa England”.

In 1935, George said of his son Edward: “After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself within 12 months”, and of Albert and Elizabeth: “I pray to God my eldest son will never marry and have children, and that nothing will come between Bertie…

The first graph appeared in the IPCC 1990 First Assessment Report (FAR) credited to H.H.Lamb, first director of CRU-UEA. The second graph was featured in 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) the famous hockey stick credited to M. Mann.

A previous post Rise and Fall of CAGW described the process that began with Hansen’s flashy Senate testimony in 1988, later supported by Santer’s flashy paper in 1996. This post traces a second iteration that ensued following Michael Mann’s production of the infamous Climate Hockey Stick graph in 1998. The image at the top comes from the 2001 IPCC TAR (Third Assessment Report) signifying the immediate embrace of this alarmist tool by consensus climatists.  The message of the graph was to assert a spike in modern warming unprecedented in the last 1000 years.  This claim of a “Modern Warming Spike” required a flat temperature profile throughout the Middle Ages (since 1000…

On January 8th 1935, two baby boys were born in Tupelo, Mississippi, to Vernon Elvis and Gladys Love, Jesse Garon Presley and 35 minutes later Elvis Aaron Presley. Jesse Garon was a stillborn, Elvis would live to become the Man who would be King.

Elvis’ first name comes from his father, Vernon Elvis Presley. However, the origins of Vernon’s middle name remain unclear to this day. One theory is that the name was an homage to a 6th-century Irish saint.

Elvis’ first big hit, “Heartbreak Hotel,” was inspired by a newspaper article about a man who killed himself by jumping from a hotel window in Florida. His suicide note read, “I walk a lonely street.”

On his 11th birthday, Elvis was really hoping for a new bike (some say a rifle), but much to his disappointment, was given a guitar instead.

Elvis Presley met Richard Nixon on December 21, 1970…

There’s still a few more days left in the year, but at this point it is safe to say, unfortunately, that it was a very bad year for investing. This Google chart shows most of the bad news. Note: nothing in this post is investment advice about the future, just a summary of the past.

The S&P 500, the typical benchmark for US equities, was down 20%. Bonds, usually a safe haven, were down over 14% as measured by the Vanguard Total Bond fund (more on bonds later).

Gold, the traditional hedge against bad times, was flat. I guess that’s not so bad. But gold is also traditionally considered a hedge against inflation, and inflation will probably end up being somewhere in the range of 5-7% this year (depending on your preferred index). So in real terms, even gold was down. And the supposed new hedge against fiat currency? Bitcoin…

In a May post I described a paper my student my student had written on how college majors predict the likelihood of being married and having children later in life.

Since then I joined the paper as a coauthor and rewrote it to send to academic journals. I’m now revising it to resubmit to a journal after referee comments. The best referee suggestion was to move our huge tables to an appendix and replace them with figures. I just figured out how to do this in Stata using coefplot, and wanted to share some of the results:

You should read this article by the co author of a book on the pandemic with Matt Hancock, former UK Minister of Health during the pandemic. It is utterly revealing that the reaction was driven by politics from non medical professionals rather than “the science”. It is clear that the US reaction was driven by a similar kind of anti trump political reaction rather than genuine medical sceince.

As early as 3 February 2020 – long before anyone outside the Department of Health was taking the prospect of a pandemic seriously – ministers were told the masks make no significant difference. In April 2020, the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) reiterated this advice. At the end of that month, the Sage committee said much the same thing, telling ministers that it would be unreasonable to claim a large benefit. An ‘obsessed’ Cummings was the driving force…

Remember the “Fight for $15”? It’s a 10-year-old movement to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. While there hasn’t been any increase in the federal minimum wage since the movement began in 2012, plenty of states and localities have done so.

I won’t rehash the entire debate on the minimum wage here, but I will point you to this post from Joy on large minimum wage changes, and here are several other posts on this blog on the same topic. But lately I have seen an increasing call for even larger minimum wage increases, well beyond $15.

A prominent recent call for a higher wage comes from the SEIU, the second largest labor union in the nation. They are calling for a $25 minimum wage in Chicago, where the legal minimum wage just recently crossed $15 last year. Again, without getting into the detailed debates about…