Whatever I feel like talking about.
I'm speaking at Libertycon in Tbilisi on April 20th, will probably either go or come via London. Anyone interested in a talk? I'll probably be in Europe (including UK and Iceland) for about two weeks, don't yet have a schedule. This post assumes there may be some people still reading my blog, although for most purposes it has now been replaced by my substack.
I now have a substack and have been posting regularly to it; I am keeping this blog up for the archives and as a link to my substack posts. Long time readers will realize that many of my substack posts are based on ideas in past posts here. Substack Posts Sorted
As most of you probably know, I started a substack a few weeks ago. So far I have kept both blog and substack going, although most of my posts have been on the latter. The question is whether there is any reason to continue to do so. Are there readers of the blog who can't, or for some reason prefer not to, read the substack? Are there people who would find the blog but not the substack? Of my two…
I am going to be in Lisbon on April 22nd and 23rd, speaking at Oxford about a week later, probably Dublin at some point, flying home about May 4th. If anyone would like to set up a talk sometime between April 23rd and May 4th and is prepared to pay my expenses let me know.
Hume's law or Hume's guillotine [1] is the thesis that, if a reasoner only has access to non-moral and non-evaluative factual premises, the reasoner cannot logically infer the truth of moral statements. ( Wikipedia ) I do not claim that I can infer the truth of ought statements from is statements but I claim that it would be possible to do it if a suitable set of is statements turned out to be…
The 2022 Human Freedom Index is out, combining ratings on economic and personal freedom. The ten freest countries, in order, are: Switzerland, New Zealand, Estonia, Denmark, Ireland, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The U.S. is 23 out of 166. The page has a scatter plot showing nations rated by economic and by personal freedom. On the live version you can hover your…
Part of the reason Republicans want less immigration is that they expect immigrants, once they become citizens, to vote for Democrats. That is also, in the view of many Republicans, part of the reason Democrats want more immigration. Venezuelan immigrants are fleeing a failed socialist state. So were the Cuban immigrants to Florida. Presidential Vote: Florida I admit that my view of the subject…
I decided to set one up, both to get more people reading what I write and to give me an incentive to write more — in recent years I largely shifted to commenting on other people's blogs or forums. The URL is: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com One of the first post is derived from one here, the other two are not. I expect I will continue this blog, at least for a while.
For the past several days, USA Today has had a post up with the headline: Fact check: Biden did have the authority to declassify documents as vice president It goes on to say: Legal experts told USA TODAY that Biden had the authority to declassify documents as vice president as the result of a 2009 executive order signed by President Barack Obama. Further down there is a link to the executive…
[Spoilers for the third book] My previous post was about inconsistencies in the books' worldbuilding. Working those out and arguing about them, treating the fictional world as if it were real, is fun but not very important. In my view there is only one thing significantly wrong with what are, in most ways, very good books. A major theme of the series is the undesirable and unattractive…
This post is for fellow fans of the Scholomance books. I have been reading and rereading them — I find them addictively good — and in the process have picked up a number of what appear to be inconsistencies in the world building. At the beginning of the second book it is claimed that they will not know if the cleansing worked or the seniors survived until they themselves get out, but it isn't…
This time it took less than a week. But the message telling me the account was back still contained no explanation, no apology, and the clear implication that I had done something wrong and had to be careful not to do it again.
As I mentioned recently, Amazon-KDP has for the second time shut down my account, which means that my self-published books are mostly no longer available. The exceptions I know about are the Kindle of The Machinery of Freedom , which was put up on Amazon by my agent not by me, the print copy of Legal Systems Very Different from Ours , which I put up on Barnes & Noble the first time this happened,…
As I mentioned in my previous post, Amazon-KDP has shut down my account, which means that my self-published books, including the print versions of The Machinery of Freedom , are currently not available. When I went on Amazon to check I discovered what appears to be a pirate edition. The page says the publisher is Harper&Row, who published the first edition in paperback. What it actually is is the…
Amazon KDP cancelled my account some months ago with the claim, never explained, that I have multiple accounts, which is a violation of our Terms and Conditions. Also, this account is related to an account that was terminated due to violations of our Content Guidelines. They restored the account about two months ago with no explanation. They have now canceled it again, with the same claim. If this…
As I have mentioned here before, I have been working on a critique of a recent Nature article that finds a very high value for the social cost of carbon, the net cost from now to 2300 produced by an additional ton of CO2. I argue that the article greatly exaggerates the cost by errors which should be obvious to a careful reader, one of them being the implicit assumption that there will be no…
I plan to attend the SFL Libertycon in Lisbon on April 22nd and 23rd and am interested in setting up other talks in Europe. My usual policy is to limit speaking trips to about two weeks. Libertycon could be at either the beginning or the end, so possible dates are from April 10th to May 4th. Let me know if you are interested either by a comment here, an email to ddfrATdaviddfriedmanDOTcom, or a…
One of my chief criticisms of Rennert et. al. 2022 is that it calculates the cost imposed by an additional ton of CO 2 by summing costs from now to 2300 while almost entirely ignoring technological change, in effect assuming technological stasis. That raises the question of how one ought to model technological change in trying to calculate costs over a long period of time. My initial response was…
Henry George and his modern followers propose an LVT, a land value tax, a tax on the site value of land equal to what the rent on the land would be in the absence of any improvements. From an economic standpoint, the chief attraction of the LVT is that, since it is taxing something in perfectly inelastic supply, taxing it does not lead to any inefficient economic decisions. The site value does not…
As mentioned in previous posts, I am working on an article criticizing Rennert et al. , a recent Nature piece that calculates a cost of carbon by summing costs from now until 2300. One of my criticisms is that, given the rate of technological change in recent centuries, we have almost no idea what the world will be like in 2300, what features of the climate will be costs or benefits and by how…
In my previous post I sketched my criticisms of Rennert et. al. 2017, a recent Nature article that attempts to calculate the total cost imposed by an additional ton of CO2. I have now written an article on the subject that I plan to submit to the EPA in response to their request for comments on Rennert and have webbed the current, I think almost final, draft. Comments welcome.
Comprehensive evidence implies a higher social cost of CO 2 is a recent article in Nature which claims to calculate how much worse off humans will be for each additional ton of CO2 released. The costs are summed over a period of almost three hundred years, from now to 2300. As best I can estimate from Extended Data Figure 2, about two thirds of their social cost of carbon is incurred after 2100.…
KDP is again willing to do business with me and now offers a hardcover option, so it occurred to me that I might want to publish some of my books in hardcover as well as paperback, kindle, and audiobook formats. I plan to start with The Machinery of Freedom and thought it would be worth collecting opinions here on which, if any, of my other books I should bring out in a hardcover version. My…
My previous series of posts describes the sequence of events. They sent me an email saying that, because I had multiple accounts and my accounts were connected with one that had violated their guidelines, they were terminating my account, would not permit me to open another, would not pay me royalties accumulated between the last payment and the date when the account was terminated. All of the…
I conjecture that the case finally reached a human being, whether due to my efforts, someone else's efforts, or random chance. The response is still a form letter, given the reference to other titles that do not comply with the KDP content guidelines. The previous messages never claimed that any of my titles did not comply with their guidelines. They have not told me whether they are paying me the…