According to the bloggers who speak for our ruling elite (such as Matthew Yglesias) Norway is wonderfully well run. But according to the terrorist Breivik, it is run much like Chicago, where the ruling party’s political mobilization of the disproportionately criminal underclass has produced a criminal party. (more…)
Archive for the ‘economics’ Category
How well run is Oslo?
Thursday, July 28th, 2011The curious solvency of Japan
Monday, July 18th, 2011By any objective measure, Japan is more broke than Italy. Indeed, nearly all the advanced countries are as broke as each other, but some of them are in trouble, and some of them are not. Japan can borrow money at low interest. Italy cannot.
Looking at past financial crises, there is no objective level of solvency at which a country goes down the tubes. They get along fine until they do not. Even when it is obvious that a country is trouble, people continue to lend it money on the assumption that an even bigger idiot will lend it more money with which to repay the first idiot. And they are always right, until they are wrong.
Retrodicting climate
Saturday, July 9th, 2011Warmist climate models do a fine job of retrodicting the climate, yet a woefully bad job at predicting the climate.
Their prediction tends to be doom in the next few years, while their modeling of the past is perfectly spot on. Thus their predictions grow old fast. (more…)
Solving the immigration problem
Tuesday, July 5th, 2011But what is having disastrous consequences is not open borders by themselves, but open borders combined with democracy and the welfare state.
Even if the government had the will to stop the flood of low IQ migrants, the effect would be limited. Does not stop drugs. (more…)
Taxing beyond the laffer maximum
Saturday, July 2nd, 2011Why do governments tax beyond the Laffer maxium?
You have probably read about the California’s Amazon tax. Amazon said it would flee the tax, promptly did so, and so, predictably, instead of gaining two hundred million, the state lost taxes on something like one hundred and fifty million of income.
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Poorer, dirtier and shabbier
Friday, July 1st, 2011In the comments, some have disagreed with my proposition that BLS statistics are unbelievable because the US is becoming dirtier and shabbier. Dirtier and shabbier is rather subjective, so reasonable people can disagree.
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Quantitative easing comes back again from the undead
Thursday, June 30th, 2011QE2 was supposed to end, and it has. However, as it ends, the federal reserve opens up open ended dollar lending to foreign central banks. Supposedly there is no risk, since these are central banks, and we all know central banks always repay their debts.
More fake violence in Greece
Wednesday, June 29th, 2011A little of the violence is real, indeed more and more of it is real, but the vast majority of it is still imitation violence by astroturf, which I conjecture is imitation riot theater instigated by the government against itself to dramatize its imitation austerity theater.
Observe the trash fires at 0:14. Real rioters burn stuff more valuable than trash, and light bigger fires.
Observe at 0:24 the group of protestors armed with white sticks, all the sticks identical, and all rather small and light, suitable perhaps for disciplining a woman or a small boy, but definitely not the sort of thing that one should strike a man with, particularly a man wearing armor. That the sticks are light, indicates pretend violence. That the sticks are identical, indicates astroturf. Someone has got in a big batch of mass produced sticks, and handed them out. The sticks are white, for maximum visibility, to make a good image, rather than to shatter the bones of one’s enemies.
At 0:51 , observe some real violence – directed, of course, at a non state enemy.
At 1:06, observe the police detonate a noisy teargas canister a couple of feet downwind of their own feet, rather than at the protestors. Similarly at 1:16, where the police are almost teargassing themselves.
At 1:42 observe a little petrol unsurprisingly fail to set a stone building on fire – someone has thrown a tiny little molotov at a target that it cannot possibly harm. Indeed, places where it is so obviously safe to place a molotov are few and far between. Someone set this molotov for the least possible risk of damage.
At 2:10, another white stick, absolutely identical to every other white stick we saw in the video. The whole riot evidently has a single weapons supplier, a strong indication that this is an astroturf rent-a-mob riot. Observe the way he is carrying the stick, revealing how light it is.
You can’t trust bankers
Wednesday, June 29th, 2011“You can’t trust bankers” says Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”
Taleb is an econometrician and trader – meaning he makes his money betting on financial instruments, like a professional poker player. (more…)
real inflation
Monday, June 27th, 2011There is precision, and there is accuracy. It is unwise to attain more precision than accuracy, for one is apt to fool oneself, and worse still to attain precision at the cost of accuracy.
You cannot measure inflation on goods that are changing, without making questionable subjective judgements. Goods that are not changing are stuff like food and fuel. An accurate measure of inflation would not include goods that apt to change, which measure would understate the difficult to define or measure improvement of standard living, but accurately state the cost of living.
So how is inflation going on stuff that we can measure accurately?
It is starting to look a lot like hyperinflation:
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