Electric Vehicles: Cellphones, EVs, and Pete Buttigieg

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Something tells me that those forever talking up the qualities of electric vehicles (EVs) are becoming a little anxious. With clear signs that the growth in EV sales is failing to meet central planners’ expectations, Pete Buttigieg appeared on Fox News with a new tactic to persuade reluctant buyers to jump on the EV, uh, train. The new tactic was mockery, vaguely reminiscent of the tack taken by candidate Barack Obama in 2008, when he talked about those “bitter” Rustbelt folk “clinging” to their guns, religion, or worse.

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Electric Vehicles: The EPA’s Fast Track to Fiasco

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Helmuth von Moltke (1800-91), the greatest of Prussia’s nineteenth century generals, so the old (unreliable but enjoyable) story goes, laughed only twice in his life. Once when told that a certain French fortress was impregnable and once when told that his mother-in-law had died.

He would surely have at least permitted himself a smile at the over-confidence with which the EPA is attempting to reorder the American automobile industry….

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Remembering the Nameless

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If there were to be only one symbol of the Holocaust, it would be of a concentration camp dedicated solely to industrialized killing. A total of 2.7 million Jews were murdered at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, and, within the Auschwitz complex, Birkenau. The extermination camps were the logical endpoint of Nazi genocide, a “solution” that was not only final but also efficient and, to a degree, out of sight…

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AI: Corporate Governance – Who’s in Charge?

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In last week’s Capital Letter, I wrote about the drama at OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company and creator of ChatGPT which has the eventual goal of designing an AGI (artificial general intelligence), an automated system that could reason as well as Homo sapiens, before, presumably, overtaking us all. 

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AI: A Coup, a Cult, and Corporate Governance

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On Friday November 17, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was fired. OpenAI is the artificial intelligence company formed to engineer an AGI (artificial general intelligence), an automated system that could reason as well as Homo sapiens, before, presumably, overtaking the old dullard. Ambitious! 

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ESG, Wokeness, and Morality

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Increasing criticism of ESG (an often incoherent investment “discipline” under which actual or portfolio companies are scored in part by how they score against various environmental, social, and governance measures) and the pushback against it in certain (red) states are worrying those in the ESG ecosystem who have done so well politically and economically (or both) out of it. Newspapers such as the Financial Times complain about elected politicians meddling in topics such as ESG, even though ESG is nothing if not political. Billionaires such as Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer have issued warnings that those who oppose ESG just don’t understand capitalism, as has (more or less) Al Gore, climate change “prophet” and profiteer.

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ESG: Warren Buffett Scrambles the Narrative

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With the pushback against ESG (an investment “discipline” under which actual or prospective portfolio companies are measured against various environmental, social, and governance benchmarks) gathering momentum, its proponents have finally had to mount a credible defense of a once seemingly irresistible concept that, up to now, has had no need of one.

That’s not proving easy…

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Yellen and China — Reality and Illusion

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Although the “rules” that governed the Cold War were never so clearcut as many now imagine, they were a model of clarity compared with how America’s relations with China are currently run. The frank acknowledgment that the U.S. and the USSR were enemies made that contest easier to “manage”— and so, thanks to determination, luck, and the courage of one Soviet lieutenant-colonel, here we still are.

Our relationship with China, by contrast, is an updated version of pre-1914 great power rivalry that has evolved into something that may be more dangerous, not least because our tangled economic relationship makes it hard to say aloud how things really stand. And so it is to Treasury Secretary Yellen’s credit that in a speech at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies on April 20, she attempted to do just that. Her talk was an interesting mix: combining realism with an attempt to cling to older illusions that went, I suspect, beyond mere politeness.

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Lessons from Nigel Lawson

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April 3 saw the death of one of the last Thatcherite greats, Nigel Lawson. He was ninety-one. Serving as Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister) between 1983 and 1989, Lawson played a vital part in creating a British economic revival so strong that it took the combined efforts of both the Conservative and the Labour parties decades to destroy it…

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