It’s easy to understand Socialism’s emotional appeal. It’s undiminished, even now, despite it all, because it touches something deep — something good — in the human soul. Read Oliver Twist and you’ll see it right away. Or if Dickens isn’t your thing, do an image search for Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives. It’ll break your heart. No matter if their parents are gutter drunks […] no child deserves to live like that.
And the material side of Socialism is technically feasible. Obviously so, and indeed it was obvious by 1865. Consider what the Union Army had to do to keep one million men in the field, simultaneously, spread over hundreds of thousands of square miles. This was not without its problems, of course — soldiers finally receiving their back pay spurred a minor economic boom in 1865-6 — but it was not just possible, but an everyday occurrence, for hundreds of thousands of men, dispersed over a huge geographic area, to receive their entire subsistence from the government. Clothes, shoes, food — the stuff Riis’s “street Arabs” would’ve killed for — all at public expense, delivered with clockwork efficiency.
If Socialism were just that, then indeed we could’ve “built Socialism”, as the Bolsheviks would have it, by the end of the 19th century. And cheaply, too — by the late 1880s, the US Treasury’s massive surplus was a major campaign issue for both parties. The “Yankee Leviathan“, as political historian Richard Bensel put it, was as close to actual Fascism as has ever been put into practice (alas, the term hadn’t been invented yet), and it was just aces at delivering the material goods. (It’s Alanis-level ironic that the Confederacy was even more actual capital-F Fascistic than the Union, given the whole “states’ rights” thing, but that’s what happens in totaler Krieg — win first, sort the theory out later).
Severian, “Purpose”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-06.
June 20, 2025
June 12, 2025
Why it’s economically impossible for Walmart to “eat the tariffs” as Trump demands
At FEE, Peter Jacobsen shows the clear financial reason why Walmart and other big US retailers are passing along the price increases due to Trump’s tariffs rather than “eating them”:
Recently, a post from President Trump on Truth Social went viral. An attempt to convince retail giant Walmart to keep prices down despite the tariffs, it read:
Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, “EAT THE TARIFFS”, and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!
Trump’s demand here is, simply put, unreasonable, and it reflects a basic misunderstanding of how pricing decisions are made in a market economy. Let’s unpack why.
Walmart’s Thin Margins
The biggest problem with the President’s view is that it doesn’t pass a basic numbers test. To break it down, let’s look at Walmart’s financials.
It’s true that Walmart generates billions of dollars in revenue each year, but revenue alone doesn’t tell us how much Walmart makes.
To understand that, we need to consider profit, which accounts for the company’s costs. More specifically, we want to look at Walmart’s net profit margin, because that’s an extremely important indicator of whether Walmart could realistically “eat the tariffs”.
Depending on the source, Walmart’s net profit margin is somewhere between 2% and 3%. Let’s split the difference and say it’s 2.5%. What does that mean?
That means, if Walmart sells you $1 of goods, it only keeps 2.5 cents in profit. That’s right, 97.5 cents goes toward inventory, employee wages, store maintenance, and a variety of other operating costs.
Put another way, if you spend $100 at Walmart, they make $2.50 in profit.
Now let’s say you buy a $100 television that Walmart imports. A $20 tariff is imposed — an added cost Walmart has to pay to import the TV. Before the tariff, Walmart was making $2.50 in profits. After the tariff, it’s now taking a $17.50 loss.
The only way Walmart can still sell this TV is by raising the price.
At this point, a tariff supporter might respond: “The easy way to fix this is to buy US-made TVs instead!”
Sure — you can avoid tariffs by only buying domestic, but the problem is that domestic TVs tend to be more expensive. If they weren’t, Walmart wouldn’t be importing them in the first place. So even if Walmart pulls international TVs off the shelves and replaces them with US-made ones, the prices still increase.
Here’s the key point: “eating” the tariffs is not an option. Walmart operates on slim margins, barely making pennies on the dollar — there isn’t room to eat 20% cost increases!
There definitely used to be a gender pay gap
I’m sure activists will keep slinging around the “women are paid 82 cents for every dollar men are paid” factoid, because it’s politically useful (if statistically untrue in the way most people interpret it). But it used to be true that women were systematically paid less for doing the same work as men:
Dame Stephanie Shirley, entrepreneur, IT pioneer, philanthropist, at her 80th birthday party in September 2013.
Photo by Lynn Hart via Wikimedia Commons.
At which point enter Dame Stevie:
Dame Stephanie Shirley, 91, is a tech pioneer and philanthropist who came to Britain on the Kindertransport in 1939. She built a £3 billion business, Freelance Programmers (later renamed F International), and 70 of her staff became millionaires due to its shared ownership structure. Since retiring in 1993 she has donated more than £70 million to charity. She was made a dame in 2000 and became one of the prestigious few members of the Order of Companions of Honour in 2017.
Back when she was building F1 the sexism in industry was such that she called herself Stevie, not Stephanie. You know, deniably pretending to be male sorta thing. Also, given that background, something of a tough nut and certainly nobody’s fool. F1, among other things, did the programming on the Black Box for Concorde. Proper, serious, company.
The sexism in industry was such that there really was a gender pay gap. A general assumption — to the point of rigid rule — was that wimmins didn’t work after marriage and certainly not when they had children. So, Stevie went out and hired all those birds who had been programmers before parturition, set ’em up with a home terminal and paid ’em peanuts. Then went around winning vast contracts with her price advantage.
This worked. To the extent that Stevie is on record as saying the Equal Pay Act was the worst thing ever for her business (note, not societally wrong, but bad for her business).
Which actually gives us a nice test of something that bastard neoliberals like me insist upon. Or as Gary Becker pointed out. If it is true that wimmins is underpaid in our capitalist bastardry patriarchal society then it must also be true that it’s possible to deliberately and specifically hire women and so gain a price advantage.
Dame Stevie did this and did so very successfully. Which is a nice proof that the first part of the contention works. If women are underpaid then hire them and make a fortune. Cool!
The apparent fact that nobody else has done this is a strong indicator that there isn’t a significant gender wage gap these days.
June 11, 2025
The coming “Dissolution of the Universities”
At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter provides a useful summary of the situation in England at the time of the Reformation which brought King Henry VIII to seize the wealth and property of the monasteries and other Christian establishments and why he was probably right to do so. Then he shows just how the modern western universities now find themselves in a remarkably similar position today:
The well-preserved ruins of Fountains Abbey, a Cistercian monastery near Ripon in North Yorkshire. Founded in 1132 until dissolved by order of King Henry VIII in 1539. It is now owned by the National Trust as part of the Studley Royal Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Photo by Admiralgary via Wikimedia Commons.
Our own university system is on the cusp of a similar collapse. This may seem outrageous, given the size, wealth, and massive cultural importance of universities, but at the dawn of the 16th century, the suggestion that monasteries would be dismantled across Europe within a generation would have struck everyone – even their opponents – as absurd.
The Class of 2026
The rot in academia is already proverbial. Scholarly careerism, declining curricular standards, the replication crisis, a demented ideological monoculture, administrative bloat … a steady accumulation of chronic cultural entropy has built up inside the organizational tissue of the academy, rendering universities less effective, less trustworthy, less affordable, and less useful than ever before in history. We see a parallel here with the moral laxity of 16th century monastic life, where religious vows were more theoretical than daily realities for many monks. Does anyone truly think that Harvard professors take Veritas at all seriously?
At the same time, universities have become engorged on tuition fees, research grants, and endowments, providing an easy and luxurious life for armies of well-paid and under-worked administrators, as well as for those professors who are able to play the social games necessary to climb the greased pole of academic promotion. Everyone knows that academia is in a bubble, and as with any bubble, correction is inevitable, and the longer correction is postponed by the thicket of interlocking entrenched interests that have dug themselves into the system, the uglier that correction was always going to be.
Just as the printing press rendered the monastic scriptoria entirely redundant, the Internet has placed universities under increasing threat of obsolescence. Libraries and academic publishing have already been rendered useless by preprint servers. It is no longer, strictly speaking, necessary to attend a university to learn things: the Internet has every tool an autodidact could desire, and insofar as it doesn’t – for instance, university presses and private journals charging outrageous fees for their books and papers – this is due to the academy jealously guarding its treasures with intellectual property law rather than any limitation of the technology. One can easily make the argument that academia has become an obstacle, rather than an organ, of information dissemination.
Still, universities have so far managed to hold on to their relevance due to their lock on credentialization: no one really cares how many How-To videos you watched at YouTube U, because – in theory – a university degree means that there was some level of human verification that you actually mastered the material you studied.
Large Language Models, however, are delivering the killing blow. Just as the printing press collapsed the cost of reproducing text, AI has collapsed the cost of producing texts. This is actually worse news for universities than Gutenberg was the monasteries: movable type made scriptoria unnecessary, but LLMs haven’t only made universities obsolete, they’ve made it impossible for universities to fulfil their function.
Universities rely on undergraduate tuition fees for a major part of their income. Large research schools derive a significant fraction from research grants, and the more prestigious institutions often receive substantial private donations, but for the majority of schools it is the fee-paying undergraduate that pays the bills. This is already a problem, because enrolment is already declining, partly for demographic reasons (the birth rate is low), and partly because academia has been increasingly coded as women’s work, leading to young men staying away.
In theory, undergraduate students are paying for an “education”. They are gaining essential professional skills that will make them employable in well-remunerated white collar professions, or they are broadening their minds with a liberal arts education that provides them with the soft skills – critical thinking, the ability to compose and parse complex texts, a depth of historical and philosophical understanding of intricate social and political issues – that prepare them for careers in elite socioeconomic strata.
Everyone, however, has long since understood that this narrative of “education” is a barely-plausible polite fiction, like those little scraps of fabric exotic dancers wear on their nipples so everyone can pretend they aren’t showing their boobs. Students know it’s a lie, professors know it’s a lie, administrators know it’s a lie, and employers certainly know it’s a lie. What students are actually paying for is not an education, but a credential: they could not possibly care less about the “education” they’re receiving, so long as they receive a piece of paper at the end of their four years which they can take to an employer as evidence that they are not cognitively handicapped, and are therefore in possession of the minimal level of self-discipline and intelligence required to handle routine tasks at the entry-level end of the org chart. Thus the venerable proverb among students that “C’s and D’s get degrees”. It doesn’t matter if you did well: employers don’t generally care about your GPA. All that matters is that you do the minimal possible level of work to squeak through. As a general rule, your time as a student is better spent grinding away in the library as little as possible while enjoying yourself to the maximum extent that you can in order to develop social networks you can draw upon later.
Until recently, graduate school ensured that there was still some vestigial motivation for genuine intellectual engagement. Corporate America might not care about your transcript, but if you wanted an advanced degree, graduate schools most certainly did. Those students with greater academic ambitions than a Bachelor’s degree could therefore generally be relied on to actually apply themselves, thereby making the professoriate’s efforts delivering lectures, preparing homework assignments, and grading exams somewhat less of a pantomime. DEI, however, was already eating its way through even this. As graduate school admission became more about protected identities and less about intellectual mastery, and as graduate programs were themselves rendered easier in order to improve retention of underqualified diversity admits, it started to become less important to study hard even if one wanted to enter grad school.
To the point. In 2022, ChatGPT became available. Almost overnight undergraduate students began using it to write their essays for them. Its abuse has now become essentially ubiquitous, and not only for essays: ChatGPT can write code or solve mathematical problems just as easily as it can generate reams of plausible-sounding text. It might not yet do these things well, but it doesn’t have to: remember, C’s and D’s get degrees.
June 7, 2025
QotD: The decline and fall of the Soviet experiment
The early communists, including Marx, looked at work and the pursuit of material goods as a burden on mankind. Capitalism turned men into slaves to their own desires for wealth and property. This crude desire for material goods made them easy to exploit by the capital class. The point of overthrowing the capitalist system and replacing it with communism was to free man from that burden. The resulting material prosperity of communism would allow mankind to reach its full creative potential.
The Soviet empire that emerged from the Second World War was noticeably short on talk about mankind reaching its full potential. The practical necessity of feeding, housing and clothing its people consumed the regime. The great dream of a post-scarcity world of mankind united in brotherhood had given way to figuring out how to produce enough necessities to prevent rebellion. The last half of the 20th century was communism trying to keep pace with capitalism in the production of consumer goods.
The Z Man, “Human Progress”, The Z Blog, 2020-04-27.
June 2, 2025
The progressive case for unlimited immigration
Theophilus Chilton takes on the progressive arguments for bringing in as many “high quality” immigrants as humanly possible from his own professional background:
One of the constants that you can count on in any debate about the value of immigration (of every sort) is the inevitable assertion about the NECESSITY of immigration. Immigrants POWER AMERICA. Without them, NOTHING WOULD HAPPEN! They are ELITE HUMAN CAPITAL without which the White American chuds who did things like build the atom bomb and otherwise created modern technological civilisation would barely be able to keep the lights on in their single-wides. It’s not just that immigrants want a new life or might be useful — they are an absolutely necessity and the ones coming here are the cream of the world’s crop.
As a result, the recent move by Marco Rubio and the State Department to revoke visas from Chinese students in American universities (especially those associated with the CCP or who are in positions to commit especially damaging industrial espionage) will certainly not be well-received by this crowd. For example, witness Alex Nowrasteh, who’s whole schtick is to burble on about “meritocracy” and whine about “affirmative action for White Americans” while filling a useless sinecure at the Cato Institute that he got by being the token immigrant. He is appalled that we’d act in our own national interest rather than in the interests of a bunch of random foreigners.
Immigration man have big sad
Many people who know me on X already know this, but most readers here may not. Before I made a radical life-changing vocational choice a few years ago, I used to be a scientist in Big Pharma. For a little over two decades, I worked in the biotech/biopharma industry, covering a wide range of drug development stages and product types. I’ve developed vaccines (which is why I was skeptical about the Covid vaxx from the very beginning). I’ve developed small molecule drugs. I helped to bring to market several of the pharmaceuticals that millions take regularly and which you see advertised on television. I’ve done everything from bench scale analytical work to protein purification on 5000-liter batches used in support of human clinical trials. I’m proficient in literally dozens of different analytical techniques. Before that, in both undergraduate and graduate school, I specialised in synthetic organic small molecule development across a number of different subspecialties. And I’m good at all of this.
One other thing that I did throughout was work side-by-side with, and later manage, LOTS of visa holders and immigrants, especially from “tech heavy” countries like India and China, the stereotypical “H1-Bers”. As a result, I consider myself to be a pretty good judge of the value which visa holders bring to tech fields.
My judgment is, and has been for decades, that their value is minimal and it certainly does not live up to the hype. Indeed, one of the constants that I observed among most Indian, Chinese, and other visa holders was that they did not really, truly understand the science that was involved with the products being developed and the techniques being used to develop and test them. Most of these folks were the living embodiment of cramming to pass the test. When the test methods and the SOPs being employed were straightforward, these folks were great. They had a robot-like efficiency that comes with repetitively doing the same thing over and over and over again. Unfortunately, for anything requiring innovative or independent thinking, they’d be totally lost. If results from a test deviated from expectations and required some commonsense interpretation? That’s where the wheels came off. I mean, there was little to no capacity to deal with anything that wasn’t completely textbook.
Even basic scientific sense was often missing. At one job, there was an Indian guy who would takes dumps in the bathroom and then walk straight out back to his manufacturing suite in the cell line division without even washing his hands. I know this because I observed it for myself several times. I mean, even if you don’t care about getting fecal coliform bacteria all over door handles and whatnot, at least don’t carry them back into the suite where you’re helping to grow batches of genetically engineered E. coli. I assume he was properly gowned before going in, but still, there’s just that basic lack of sense there.
And then there are the ethics (or lack thereof) displayed by many visa holders (especially Chinese and Middle Eastern). Data manipulation, tweaked results, etc. etc. These tend to occur because both of those groups are under intense social pressure within their own cultures to “get the right results” rather than just dealing with the results you get. The “tiger mom” mentality carries over into the workplace. There is a reason for why these two groups are disproportionately overrepresented on the FDA’s debarment list. Indians can be subject to serious lapses in integrity as well, though theirs tend to revolve more around cutting corners and mistreating underlings, as I illustrated in a thread on X about three years ago where I recounted my time working for an Indian-owned company.
Over the years, my observations have been substantiated and reiterated by any number of people in various tech-heavy industry to whom I’ve related them. Whether it’s pharma or IT or medicine or metallurgy or whatever else, the familiar story is told. It’s really, really difficult to reconcile this mass of lived experience with the theoretical assertions made by people like Nowrasteh that immigrants are this valuable resource that we absolutely need to be or remain competitive in world markets.
In effect, the goal with this type of white-collar mass immigration is to “roboticise” tech fields which can’t be given over to AI or actual robotics just yet. The formula is to import masses of workers who can simply follow a script and save companies money on labour costs. If you think about it, this is really a low IQ, high time preference approach by corporations whereby they sacrifice real innovativeness and future competitiveness for short-term savings. I’d argue that the entry of H1-B and other visa holders in large numbers into American tech industries which accelerated around the late 2000s-early 2010s has actually led to a slowdown in real innovation. We may have tons of new apps for our phones, but fewer truly groundbreaking advances in tech across the board.
May 31, 2025
“U.S. libertarians [are] the best friends Canada doesn’t know it has”
In the National Post, Colby Cosh sings the praises of American libertarians for their work in trying to dismantle some of Donald Trump’s dubiously Constitutional extensions of presidential power:
The James L. Watson Court of International Trade Building at 1 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, New York City.
Photo by Americasroof via Wikimedia Commons.
The U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) issued a decision Wednesday that annuls various salvos of surprise economic tariffs, including ones on Canada, that have been enacted by President Donald Trump since his inauguration in January. I won’t lie to you: I had the same initial reaction to this consequential news that you probably did, which was “Hooray!” and then “Huh, there’s a U.S. Court of International Trade?”
This court is surely unfamiliar even to most Americans, no doubt because much of its work involves settling issues like “Do hockey pants count as ‘garments’ or ‘sports equipment’ under customs law?” Nevertheless, the CIT does have exclusive jurisdiction over civil actions involving U.S. trade law. It’s just that no president has ever before rewritten the tariff schedule of the republic in the half-mad fashion of a child taking crayons to a fresh-painted wall.
The American Constitution, from day one, has unambiguously assigned the right to set international tariffs to Congress. Congress is allowed to delegate its powers to the president and his agents for limited or temporary purposes, but it can’t abandon those powers to him altogether. Defining this legal frontier is what the CIT was asked to do, and their demarcation of it will now swim upward through higher appellate courts (its decision has been put on hold in the meantime).
The lawsuit was actually two parallel suits raising overlapping objections to the tariffs. One was brought forward by 12 U.S. states, and the other was filed by a group of tariff-exposed American businesses, including manufacturers of bikes, electronics kits and fishing equipment. The latter set of plaintiffs was roped together by the usual posse of heroic libertarians and legal originalists, including George Mason University law prof Ilya Somin.
About 24 hours after Trump originally announced the “Liberation Day” worldwide tariffs, Somin quickly blogged about how insanely unconstitutional the whole idea was, and concluded his article essentially by saying “I’m darn well gonna do something about this nonsense”. I don’t mean to suggest he deserves primary credit; I only intend to call attention, once again, to U.S. libertarians being the best friends Canada doesn’t know it has.
May 30, 2025
Was Germany Really Starved Into Surrender in WW1?
The Great War
Published 10 Jan 2025From 1914 to 1919, Allied warships in the Atlantic and Mediterranean controlled maritime trade to and from the Central Powers – stopping shipments of weapons and raw materials, but also food, from reaching their enemies. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of German civilians died of hunger-related causes. Often, these deaths and even the outcome of the war are attributed to the naval blockade – but did the British really starve Germany into surrender in WW1?
(more…)
May 29, 2025
QotD: FDR and Herbert Hoover in the Great Depression
He had already met with congressional leaders and learned, as he had suspected, that they would not change their stance without Roosevelt’s support. Seized with the urgency of the moment, he continued to bombard his opponents with proposals for cooperation toward solutions, going so far as to suggest that Democratic nominees, not Republicans, be sent to Europe to engage in negotiations, all to no avail. Notwithstanding what editorialists called his “personal and moral responsibility” to engage with the outgoing administration, Roosevelt had instructed Democratic leaders in Congress not to let Hoover “tinker” with the debts. He had also let it be known that any solution to the problem would occur on his watch – “Roosevelt holds he and not Hoover will fix debt policy”, read the headlines. Thus ended what the New York Times called Hoover’s magnanimous proposal for “unity and constructive action”, not to mention his 12-year effort to convince America of its obligation and self-interest in fostering European political and financial stability …
During the debt discussions and to some extent as a result of them, the economy turned south again. Several other factors contributed. Investors were exchanging US dollars for gold as doubt spread about Roosevelt’s intentions to remain on the gold standard. Gold stocks in the Federal Reserve thus declined, threatening the stability of the financial sector … what’s more, the effectiveness of [Hoover’s bank support plan], which had succeeded in stabilizing the banking system, was severely compromised by [Democrats’] insistence on publicizing its loans, as the administration had warned. For these reasons, Hoover would forever blame Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress for spoiling his hard-earned recovery, an argument that has only recently gained currency among economists.
And:
Alarmed at these threats to recovery, Hoover pushed Democratic congressional leaders and the incoming administration for action. He wanted to cut federal spending, reorganize the executive branch to save money, reestablish the confidentiality of RFC loans, introduce bankruptcy legislation to protect foreclosures, grant new powers to the Federal Reserve, and pass new banking regulation, including measures to protect depositors … He was frustrated at every turn by Democratic leadership taking cues from the President-Elect … On February 5, Congress took the obstructionism a degree further by closing shop with 23 days left in its session.
In mid-February, there is another run on the banks, worse than all the other runs on the banks thus far. Hoover asks Congress to do something – Congress says they will only listen to President-Elect Roosevelt. Hoover writes a letter to Roosevelt begging him to give Congress permission to act, saying it is a national emergency and he has to act right now. Roosevelt refuses to respond to the letter for eleven days, by which time the banks have all failed.
Then, a month later, he stands up before the American people and says they have nothing to fear but fear itself – a line he stole from Hoover – and accepts their adulation as Destined Savior. He keeps this Destined Savior status throughout his administration. In 1939, Roosevelt still had everyone convinced that Hoover was totally discredited by his failure to solve the Great Depression in three years – whereas Roosevelt had failed to solve it for six but that was totally okay and he deserved credit for being a bold leader who tried really hard.
So how come Hoover bears so much of the blame in public consciousness? Whyte points to three factors.
First, Hoover just the bad luck of being in office when an international depression struck. Its beginning wasn’t his fault, its persistence wasn’t his fault, but it happened on his watch and he got blamed.
Second, in 1928 the Democratic National Committee took the unprecedented step of continuing to exist even after a presidential election. It dedicated itself to the sort of PR we now take for granted: critical responses to major speeches, coordinated messaging among Democratic politicians, working alongside friendly media to create a narrative. The Republicans had nothing like it; the RNC forgot to exist for the 1930 midterms, and Hoover was forced to personally coordinate Republican campaigns from his White House office. Although Hoover was good (some would say obsessed) at reacting to specific threats on his personal reputation, the idea of coordinating a media narrative felt too much like the kind of politics he felt was beneath him. So he didn’t try. When the Democrats launched a massive public blitz to get everyone to call homeless encampments “Hoovervilles”, he privately fumed but publicly held his tongue. FDR and the Democrats stayed relentlessly on message and the accusation stuck.
And third, Hoover was dead-set against welfare. However admirable his attempts to reverse the Depression, stabilize banking, etc, he drew the line at a national dole for the Depression’s victims. This was one of FDR’s chief accusations against him, and it was entirely correct. Hoover knew that going down that route would lead pretty much where it led Roosevelt – to a dectupling of the size of government and the abandonment of the Constitutional vision of a small federal government presiding over substantially autonomous states. Herbert Hoover, history’s greatest philanthropist and ender-of-famines, would go down in history as the guy who refused to feed starving people. And they hated him for it.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Hoover”, Slate Star Codex, 2020-03-17.
May 24, 2025
Forget it, Fraser Institute: as Trudeau explained, there’s no business case for Canadian LNG
In the National Post, Tristin Hopper reports on a recent Fraser Institute study on the benefits of expanding the production of Canadian liquid natural gas, but as the meme might put it, the feds don’t want benefits, they want to eliminate Canadian LNG production:
A new report says that if Canada really wanted to save the climate, the most effective thing it could do would be to sell as much natural gas to Asia as humanly possible.
The 46-page study, published on Thursday by the right-leaning Fraser Institute, is premised on the notion that Canadian natural gas exports could singlehandedly reduce Asian dependence on coal.
If Canada could double its LNG production, write the authors, it would divert enough coal from Asian power plants to stop 630 million tonnes of greenhouse gases per year from entering the Earth’s atmosphere.
For context, that nearly represents Canada’s entire carbon footprint. According to the most recent figures from Environment and Climate Change Canada, the country was responsible for 694 million tonnes of carbon emissions in 2023.
“Instead of focusing on reducing domestic GHG emissions in Canada by implementing various policies that hinder economic growth, governments must shift their focus toward global GHG reductions and help the country cut emissions worldwide,” the report says.
The Fraser Institute’s calculation is based on the simple fact that natural gas is an easy substitute for coal, and can produce the same amount of energy with far lower emissions.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration maintains a ranking of fossil fuels by the quantity of emissions they produce for every one million BTUs (British Thermal Units) — roughly the amount of power needed to heat a standard house for several days.
Generating one million BTUs by burning coal will produce between 93 and 103 kilograms of carbon dioxide. Doing the same with natural gas will produce just 53 kilograms.
Canada currently produces about 17.9 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas. Most of this is consumed domestically, while 39 per cent is exported, mostly to the United States via pipeline.
The Fraser Institute calculated that if Canada could double production and “send the surplus … to Asia”, it could potentially supplant more than 200 million tonnes of coal every year.
QotD: Comparing living standards and technology between the Roman period and medieval western Europe
While I am convinced that the evidence suggests there was a drop in living standards and some loss of technology in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, most of that drop was fairly short-lived. But exactly when development in medieval Europe meets and then exceeds the same for antiquity (typically we’re comparing the second century height of the Roman Empire) also depends on exactly what kind of measure is being used.
If the question, for instance, is agricultural productivity on a per capita basis (the most important component of per capita economic production), medieval Europe probably moves ahead of the Roman Empire fairly quickly with the introduction of better types of plow and widespread use of watermills for grinding grain. My understanding is that by c. 1000 AD, watermills show up fairly frequently in things like monastic charters, suggesting they were reasonably widespread (the Romans used watermills too, though their spread was uneven) and by that point, plow technology had also moved forward, mostly through the development of plow types better suited to Europe’s climate. So as best we can tell, the farmer of c. 1000 AD had better tools than his Roman predecessors and probably had such for some time.
If the question is technology and engineering, once again what you see depends on where you look. Some technologies don’t appear to have regressed much, if at all, ironworking being one example where it seems like little to nothing was lost. On the other hand, in western Europe, the retreat in architecture is really marked and it is hard to say when you would judge the new innovations (like flying buttresses) to have equaled some of the lost ones (like concrete); certainly the great 12th/13th century Cathedrals (e.g. Notre Dame, the Duomo di Sienna and I suppose the lesser Duomo di Firenze, if we must include it) seem to me to have matched or exceeded all but perhaps the biggest Roman architectural projects. Though we have to pause here because in many cases the issue was less architectural know-how (though that was a factor) as state capacity: the smaller and more fragmented states of the European Middle Ages didn’t have the resources the Roman Empire did.
If one instead looks for urbanization and population as the measure of development, the Middle Ages looks rather worse. First and Second century Rome is probably unmatched in Europe until the very late 1700s, early 1800s, when first London (c. 1800) and Paris (c. 1835) reach a million. So one looking for matches for the large cities and magnificent municipal infrastructure of the Romans will have rather a long wait. Overall population is much more favorable as a measurement to the Middle Ages. France probably exceeds its highest Roman population (c. 9m) by or shortly after 1000AD, Italy (c. 7.5m) by probably 1200; Spain is the odd one out, with Roman Hispania (est. 7.5m) probably only matched in the early modern period. So for most of the Middle Ages you are looking at a larger population, but also a more rural one. That’s not necessarily bad though; pre-modern cities were hazardous places due to sanitation and disease; such cities had a markedly higher mortality, for instance. On the flip-side, fewer, smaller cities means less economic specialization.
So one’s answer often depends very much on what one values most. For my own part, I’d say by 1000 or 1100 we can very safely say the “recovery” phase of the Middle Ages is clearly over (and I think you could make an argument for setting this point substantially earlier but not meaningfully later), though even this is somewhat deceptive because it implies that no new technological ground was being broken before then, which is not true. But the popular conception that the whole of the Middle Ages reflects a retreat from the standards of antiquity is to be discarded.
Bret Devereaux, “Referenda ad Senatum: August 6, 2021: Feelings at the Fall of the Republic, Ancient and Medieval Living Standards, and Zombies!”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-08-06.
May 22, 2025
QotD: Public goods
Or, the internet was originally set up to provide a secure comms network when the bombs all went off — that routing in packets was the whole point, being able to route around the polished glass that used to be Indianapolis. GPS was funded by the Navy to have precise coordinates to lob our own bombs at. Both difficult things to profit from so government did them.
Then along came some entrepreneurs and they saw that it was good. Some use could be made of the existence of those things. And this is — it’s essential to understand this — exactly what an entrepreneur is. Someone who takes extant assets and resources, possibly combining them in new ways, and sets out to end up with hot and cold running Ferraris from having done so. We consumers then end up vastly richer than our starting point. One, wholly serious, measurement of the value of search and free email (so, roughly, Google) is $18,000 per person per year. No, there are not too many zeroes there, eighteen thousand of those big fat United States dollars per person per year.
OK. So we institute government to gain public goods. We get public goods from government. Entrepreneurs then do their job, picking up extant assets to use in novel ways that enrich all of us out there. Excellent, the system is working. The system is making us out here the richest society living highest on the hog that has ever existed.
Tim Worstall, “Mazzucato: ‘BUT WHERE IS MY SECOND DOZEN PAIRS OF LOUBOUTINS?'”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2025-02-12.
May 20, 2025
Gen Z is blaming Capitalism for the sins of Cronyism
Lika Kobeshavidze at the Foundation for Economic Education explains why angry Gen Z’ers are blaming capitalism but should instead be blaming crony capitalism for the economic plight they find themselves in:
Image Credit: Custom image by FEE
Across college campuses, on TikTok feeds, and in everyday conversations, a familiar narrative is gaining steam: capitalism is broken.
Rising rents and stagnant wages fuel the claim among some young people that free markets have failed an entire generation. According to a 2024 poll by the Institute of Economic Affairs, more than 60% of young Britons now view socialism favorably. In the United States, the trend is similar, with Generation Z increasingly skeptical of capitalism’s promises.
But much of this idealism is rooted in distance — many of the young people romanticizing socialism have never lived through the economic dysfunction or political repression it often brings. For those who experienced Soviet shortages, Venezuelan collapse, or East Germany’s surveillance, the word socialism doesn’t suggest fairness or opportunity — it suggests fear, failure, and control. There’s a reason so many fled those systems to come to freer countries. What sounds utopian in theory has too often turned dystopian in practice.
But blaming capitalism misses the mark. The real culprit is cronyism, the unholy alliance between big government and big business that twists markets, blocks competition, and rewards political connections over genuine innovation.
[…]
Cronyism is not limited to one country or one political party. Across the United States and Europe, the symptoms are the same.
In the US, Canada, and the UK, the dream of homeownership slips further away for young people. Sky-high housing prices are blamed on “market failure”, but the real cause lies in layers of government-imposed barriers: restrictive zoning laws, burdensome permitting requirements, and endless bureaucratic delays. Big developers who can afford to navigate or influence the system survive. Everyone else gets locked out.
In Europe, the pattern repeats. France’s labor laws, designed to protect workers, instead stifle opportunity. Hiring becomes risky and expensive, especially for young people. Large corporations, with the resources to manage compliance costs, consolidate their dominance. Small firms and startups never get off the ground.
There’s also a persistent myth that big business fears government intervention. In reality, the largest corporations often embrace it, because it keeps them on top. Tech giants like Facebook and Google now lobby for more regulation, knowing that complex new rules will strangle smaller competitors who can’t afford fleets of compliance officers. Green energy subsidies, meant to combat climate change, often end up showering billions on well-connected firms while locking out emerging innovators.
Cronyism doesn’t reward the best ideas. It rewards the best lobbyists.
May 19, 2025
The Roman Empire and climate change
Sebastian Wang considers “what we all know” about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire in the light of more recent research (not all of it politically motivated) into climate change:
The approximate extent of the Roman empire circa 395AD.
Before we get into climate, and for those who tend to the wholly ignorant spectrum of my readers, we need a quick sketch of Roman history. The Empire officially began in 27 BC, when Octavian — better known as Augustus — became the first emperor. It ended in the west in AD 476, when the last western emperor was kicked out. As said, the eastern half, based in Constantinople, carried on for another thousand years.
Broadly, we can divide Roman history as follows:
- 27 BC – AD 180: The golden age. Augustus and his successors took over and further expanded a huge empire. There was peace (mostly), trade flourished, and cities grew. People call it the “Pax Romana“.
- AD 180 – 284: Everything starts to fall apart. This is called the Crisis of the Third Century. Civil wars, foreign invasions, plagues, and economic collapse all hit at once.
- AD 284 – 395: The empire pulls itself together. Emperors like Diocletian and Constantine bring in reforms. But the empire is now divided for administrative convenience — east and west.
- AD 395 – 476: The west goes under. It’s invaded. It’s conquered and broken up. Very quickly, it disappears. Though, once again, a parochial view of history, we call this the Fall of the Roman Empire.
The standard histories still blame bad rulers or too many wars. That’s fair enough. There were some very bad rulers, and the wars without number. But if you look at the climate data — tree rings, ice cores, sediment levels — you start to see another pattern underneath what may be called the political and economic superstructure of Roman history.
When Rome came to greatness, the climate was unusually good. From around 200 BC to AD 150, there was a long phase of stable, warm, and mostly wet conditions. Scientists call this the Roman Climate Optimum. In Egypt, the Nile flooded regularly and well. That meant lots of grain. In the Alps, glaciers shrank. In northern Europe, people were growing grapes in places too cold for vineyards today. In the Middle East, the Dead Sea stayed high, showing good rainfall.
This kind of weather made everything easier. Crops were reliable. Surpluses could be taxed. Cities could be fed. Roads and aqueducts could be built and maintained. And because the army was well supplied, the Empire was protected, and could even continue a modest expansion. But, as McCormick and his team point out, the high phase of Nile flooding correlates exactly with the high point of Roman prosperity — and once those floods became less predictable, problems followed.
The good times came to an end. By the mid-second century, a wave of volcanic eruptions thew great masses of dust into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight. Solar activity dropped. The climate became less stable. Then came the Antonine Plague in AD 166. It probably started in the east and spread quickly. Some think it was smallpox. Whatever it was in terms of microbiology, it was almost certainly brought on by changes in the climate. It may have killed a third of the Empire’s population.
Worse was coming. By AD 200, climate records show more erratic rainfall and cooling. In Gaul and the Balkans, harvests became less predictable. Glaciers began to advance again. Speleothem data from Austrian caves shows sharp shifts in rainfall patterns.
At the same time, the empire started to shake. Between 235 and 284, Rome had over twenty emperors. Most were generals who seized power, then got killed. Civil wars broke out. Trade declined. Foreign tribes pushed harder at the frontiers. Coin hoards — money buried for safety — increased in number. That’s usually a sign of fear and instability. Cities shrank. The economy shrivelled.
Was this all because of climate? No — not wholly. A good definition of historical crank is someone who tries to explain everything in terms of one cause or set of causes. But as McCormick et al. argue, bad weather made everything worse. It weakened agriculture, strained supplies, and made people more likely to panic or rebel. In a world without modern logistics, you couldn’t afford bad harvests two or three years in a row.
The empire buckled in the third century, but didn’t collapse. And its survival probably was an effect of human agency. A line of competent Emperors rose from the army and stabilised the frontiers. This line culminated in the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine, who restructured the Empire. They fixed taxes. They reorganised the army. Constantine built his new capital in the east. His successors found Constantinople safer and more strategically useful than Rome.
This being said, around AD 290, climate records suggest a small rebound. Warmer temperatures and better rainfall returned — especially in the east. That helped the eastern provinces recover faster. They had stronger governments and better infrastructure. But climate helped. Dead Sea levels remained relatively high, which meant steady rain in the Levant.
The west wasn’t so lucky. Italy and parts of Gaul stayed unstable. In Britain, pollen records show that farmland was being abandoned. The archaeology matches this, with fewer building projects and shrinking urban centres. The killing shock for the west came in the fifth century. In Central Asia, a long drought began around AD 370. Steppe tribes like the Huns were hit hard. They migrated west, pushing other tribes like the Goths ahead of them. In AD 376, the Goths crossed the Danube into Roman territory. Two years later, they crushed a Roman army at Adrianople. This all happened in the eastern half. But greater wealth and better leadership allowed the government in Constantinople to push the barbarians west. Over the next century, the western empire was hit again and again.
Meanwhile, the weather got worse. Europe cooled. Rainfall patterns shifted. Flooding and crop failures increased. Volcanic sulphur levels spike in the ice core record from Greenland.
Rome was sacked in AD 410. Again in 455. Finally, in 476, the last western emperor was deposed. That was it. The western Roman Empire was gone.
The east survived. But was hardly untroubled. In AD 536, a huge volcanic eruption darkened skies around the world. The sun barely shone. Crops failed. Famines spread.
A few years later, the Plague of Justinian broke out. It probably started in Egypt and spread through trade routes. Some say it killed half the population in affected areas.
Climate and disease worked together. Hunger weakened people. Infection finished them off. As McCormick et al. put it, the event of 536 and the plague that followed created one of the worst demographic shocks in recorded history.
May 16, 2025
QotD: Marxist and socialist revolutions
The collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, which he is happy to call revolutionary, also does not support his rough schema. It is not that the communist regime refused to reform, it is that it was incapable of reform for the same reason that a woman can’t be a little bit pregnant. If a regime makes the kind of claims for itself that the communist regime made, even if the leaders had themselves long since ceased to believe them, namely that it is the ineluctable denouement of all history, if not that of the universe itself, it cannot retreat, all the more so because its crimes, which one could and would have been claimed as a step in the march of history, would thereafter be seen for what they were: the choices of fanatical psychopaths avid for total power.
Professor Chirot seems to have a slight soft spot (admittedly only implicit) for socialism, that is to say for something more than mere social democracy. In his discussion of the case of Angola, in which a revolutionary movement emerged triumphant, but whose post-revolutionary regime was a pure kleptocracy under cover of Marxist rhetoric, he says: “Much more could have been done through either a market-friendly or a genuinely more socialist approach to economic development”.
This surely implies that somewhere, at some time, there was a socialist regime that would have handled Angola’s oil bonanza better, in which case one would have liked an example that it might have followed. Norway, perhaps? But Norway is not socialist, it is social democratic. Besides, Norwegians and Angolans are scarcely the same in a very large number of ways. I would have thought that the chances of Angola following the Norwegian model were, and are, approximately, and perhaps even exactly, zero.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Longing for Revolution”, New English Review, 2020-05-13.
