Publications, May

I'm back to spreading my writing around a little more, after some weeks with a heavy focus on covid-19 and AIER.

Hands-down the coolest thing that happened this month was that I was cited, by name in the Financial Times! In an article about cities and the coronavirus, Camilla Cavendish in her column at the FT named me and linked my Sweden-article from a few months back:

Because of it, I was cited in a whole bunch of echo sites in numerous languages. My poor monitoring service went bananas.

Otherwise, here's a round-up of published material:

CapX

• [1] 'In a big city pandemic, comparing countries has limited value', where I reported corona death rates in cities and regions instead of entire countries. That nuance changes much of the tired media discussions we've had recently.  

HumanProgress.org

• [2] The Rousseauian Myth of a Passenger Pigeon, where I discuss the iconic environmental-decline story of the Passenger Pigeon - the vast natural bounty of North America that mankind in its hunt for forests and riches destroyed. Apparently, that's not the full story! The passenger pigeon was, when colonists started to notice it, an "outbreak population" - a symptom of an ecosystem in complete disarray, as the previously dominant species on the continent (Native Americans) had been eradicated with disease and with colonial warfare. Nothing was left to keep a check on passenger pigeons, and so they multiplied unsustainably. 
• Translated into Spanish and published at Cato's Spanish-speaking cite "Elcato.org"

Medium

• [3] 'Webinar Complement: Corona in Scandinavia', a statistical appendix and summary-of-argument for the Webinar I gave before the Bastiat Society's D.C. chapter in early May.  
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AIER: 

• [4] 'Matt Ridley on Innovation', my review of the great Matt Ridley's latest book How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom. No words left: just read it. 
• Retweeted by Mercatus Center Research Fellow Adam Thierer and Matt Ridley himself. My life is complete <3. 
• Republished by Crusoe Research.
• Listed and shared by Real Clear Markets, May 6. 
• Translated and Republished in Italian on MiglioVerde. 
• [5] 'Governments Don’t Have Magic Wands To Ward off Asymmetric Information', where I discuss some reasons for why the "asymmetric information bogeyman is a pretty weak concept. 
• Praised by the wonderful Don Boudreaux. I'm speechless. 
• Republished on Capitalism Magazine
• [6] 'There Will Be No New Bitcoin Man', where I attacked some ideas that prominent bitcoiners often advance. In the Brave New World that bitcoin will remake from the ashes of fiat money bubbling central banks (yes, sarcasm), we will 1) spend less, save more, and use debt less carelessly, 2) be much less bothered by price uncertainty and so be happy to have prices for rents or our wages fluctuate as do portfolio balances:
  "bitcoiners believe that if we just had a better monetary regime, fallen men would see the errors of their fiat ways and reestablish some long-lost monetary Eden"

That strikes me as unlikely. Fiat monetary regimes are to blame for many things, but not those (or at least not single-handedly). 

• Translated and re-published at the French site CGSP-silver.
• Republished on Capitalism Magazine. 
• Ridiculed and attacked on Reddit, so I must have done something right. 

• [7] 'The Guns of August: A Look Back at the Financial Shock of the Great War', with a beautiful picture over London Bridge! In this piece I looked at the Bank of England's actions in August of 1914 when the war outbreak sent intricate European financial markets into a tailspin. Remarkably, considering the economic freeze and hibernation that governments and central banks are pursuing in these corona times, the Bank of England took over assets that had fallen behind enemy lines, such that the private sector could move on. That's an interesting comparison to make today. 
• Republished on Capitalism Magazine.  
• Republished at Property Chronicle.
• [8] 'The Climate Impact of Meat', where I gave some nuance to the remarkably bad and unfitting arguments made against meat by Jonathan Safran Foer in the New York Times. Take-away: 

"meat is not the greatest threat to the climate; meat is not a uniform category of emissions, strictly dominated by vegetarian (or vegan) diets; livestock are not a horror, easily and prudently replaced by fields of soy and corn. But ideologues have no patience with nuances like that. It’s “go vegan” or “go home.” It doesn’t matter much what the facts are, as long as The Cause is advanced."

• Republished at The Property Chronicle. 
• [9] 'You Can Stop Rio Tinto Mining... By Paying For It!', the beauty of markets and subjective value condensed into a controversial topic: mining companies vs Aboriginal ancestral land. Here's the key paragraph:

"If you want to be the one to make decisions about the use of a resource, we have an established system for that: tradeable property rights; If you want to decide whether a plot of land is farmed, deforested, or subdivided for real estate, you must first buy the land. If the archeologists and activists and Aboriginal tribes value the site more than the money offered, giving up the dough is a great gain for them.

Altogether a pretty good month, with quality and breadth, over quantity concentrated to single outlets.