Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider posts this chart as an exoneration of the Obama administration’s recovery efforts. The Eurozone has the Eurocrisis, and Obama has Congress, so I suppose it’s a fair match.
Jeff Weintraub then packages the chart together with a riff on Nick Clegg’s decision to form a coalition with the Conservatives rather than Labour. Brad deLong sums it up with a new version of the chart (below) and the headline “Nick Clegg Is a Wizard! He Makes Economic Recovery Disappear!”
Home delivery of groceries produces far lower CO2 emissions than driving to the supermarket: Erica Wygonik and Anne Goodchild find this in a recent study of the Seattle area (thanks to Tanya Snyder at Streetsblog for the reference). Wygonik and Goodchild cite similar findings from Sally Cairns in the UK, Hanne Siikavirta and colleagues in Finland, and Tehrani and Karbassi in Iran.
These studies find that the CO2 savings can be as high as 80-90% Continue reading
While we’re on taxes: several counties in Maryland (if your knowledge of American geography is limited, that’s Baltimore and The Wire) will now tax impervious surface cover. That’s rooftops, driveways, decks, etc. The contributions impervious surfaces make to urban heat islands, groundwater depletion, building subsidence, flooding, and water pollution are well understood (the wonkish may want to see Arnold & Gibbons, “Impervious surface coverage: The emergence of a key environmental indicator”). Taxing impervious surfaces is a simple and elegant solution, because there are very often simple, cheap, low-tech fixes (like replacing impervious surfaces with …. pervious ones!, or getting your rooftop exempted from the tax by collecting rainwater in a cistern for garden use): the tax provides an incentive for property owners to go fix these problems themselves.
Now, in honor of UKIP and of the general Brussels phobia that is sweeping Britain and much of the rest of Europe, here’s the connection between this wonderful tax, and federalism: Continue reading
Andy Hull, a councilor just down the road from here in the London borough of Islington, is advocating a land tax (thanks, Liberal Conspiracy). This is one of those excellent old ideas that seem to disprove the maxim that inventing a better mousetrap will lead the world to your door – Hull cites Adam Smith, Tom Paine, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Henry George, David Lloyd George
and Winston Churchill in its favor, yet most places in the world have never had it. For a nice statement of the land tax’s virtues, see this piece by Martin Wolf, three years ago in the Financial Times. Continue reading
Zoe Heller’s book reviews are skillful, gleeful demolitions, and fun to read. Hence the title of this post, which has no other connection to Heller. This artilce by Afiya Shehrbano comes close to Heller’s standard, and does so in the difficult territory of polygamy, provoked into action by Jemima Khan’s recent BBC program.
You have to love that title, which comes from a paper by Christopher Ferguson and Moritz Heene, which the excellent Andrew Gelman parses, and passes on to the rest of us. Any field that uses statistics is susceptible to publication bias (i.e., not publishing statistical analyses that find “no effect”). It is notorious in pharmaceutical research, where money talks shouts. I am guessing that the reason psychology gets a particularly bad reputation for publication bias, compared with other social sciences, is that it deals with a lot of small experimental data sets – so you really do have a situation where nearly identical experiments can be run twenty times by different researchers, and the one that gets a significant effect gets published. Statistical work in economics and political science tends to keep re-using a small number of mostly public data sets, so the problems are different.
Richard Murphy reports that the OECD’s deliberations on [tax] base erosion and profit-shifting (BEPS) are showing familiar signs of going nowhere. He points to the disproportionate emphasis given to the views of “business” stakeholders – I put business in scare quotes because I doubt that SMEs have much input here, this is going to be mostly the same multi-national businesses who are evading tax in the first place – read the report, and correct me if I’m wrong. So, if you hold a lot of shares in companies that record all their profits in places where they don’t have to pay tax, you can take some comfort. Otherwise, prepare for further austerity.
In Germany much more than in the UK, according to Simona Iammarino.
Available as a poster from Copenhagenize.com.
Frederick Guy 