Tim Worstall

It’s in Brazil so it might have both beer and titties.

Ed Balls, in his infinite fucking wisdom, has decided that Latin is a useless subject in schools. Like Boris Johnson, I am outraged, not least because this is my livelihood at stake.

The joy and value of Latin being taught in schools and the defence of it being of course entirely separate from this Libertarian’s sustenance being drawn from teaching Latin in schools.

Even Homer nods and all that.

* That should perhaps be Bellae, Bellum, Bellam, dunno….for my Latin education was cut cruelly short. On arrival at prep school I was greeted with the Cambridge Latin Course. The first parts of which were set around the Bay of Naples, whence I had just come to attend said prep school. The second part is when the family moves to Bath, my new home town after Naples. I really never did quite work out why all these people were talking about home in this funny language. My solution was to take the Latin exam at the end of my first year at senior school while woozy on the cider traditionally offered to the scorer of the Masters/Pupils cricket match (although it could have been the Old Boys match, the First XI or Eton/Harrow for all I can recall. Cricket being about the only thing worse than Latin.) and thus for proven incompetence I was allowed off to do something interesting, like Italian.

Paul Krugman (yes, Paul friggin’ Krugman) is advocating a trade war.

In 1971 the United States dealt with a similar but much less severe problem of foreign undervaluation by imposing a temporary 10 percent surcharge on imports, which was removed a few months later after Germany, Japan and other nations raised the dollar value of their currencies. At this point, it’s hard to see China changing its policies unless faced with the threat of similar action — except that this time the surcharge would have to be much larger, say 25 percent.

Smoot Hawley here we come……

At the ASI.

In which I solve the Greek debt crisis.

At the ASI.

Why murder rates aren’t the gold standard of measuring crime.

There’s a PR Agency just hugging themselves with glee today. Ugg Boots have got themselves a bargain:

HEALTH experts have blasted cheap Ugg boots as disastrous and warn they are harming the feet of a generation of young women.

Hey, it may even be true but what a glorious thing to get into the newspapers.

Don’t buy the cheap knockoffs, only the full price brand. For the cheapies will cripple you.

All for the price of a few thousand in a research grant and sending a few emails around the papers.

Dunno who the agency is but they’ve just played a blinder.

Seems that she’s getting a bit of a bollocking this morning:

Persistent claims that only six per cent of rapes end in conviction was seen as a useful “campaigning tool ” by some but was “extremely unhelpful”, warned Baroness Stern, the cross-bench peer who carried out a six month review in to tackling rape.

She said it has dominated the debate “without explanation, analysis and context” to the “detriment of public understanding” over the rape issues.

She said the figure, which compares the number of convictions against total reports to the police, is based on calculations not used for any other offence.

Once a rape case reaches the courts, almost 60 per cent of defendants are convicted – a rate higher than some other violent attacks.

The Government has constantly used the six per cent figure to argue rape has appalling prosecution rates and more action is needed.

Miss Harman referred to it when she launched the Stern Review in September.

The Equalities Minister has been the driving force behind the rape review and was at the centre of an alleged Cabinet rift last August amid claims she wanted to announce it then while standing in for Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister.

But Lady Stern today demanded the figure no longer be used.

Other findings in her wide-ranging report include:

:: as many as one in ten rape allegations could be false

Good….as among all the people who have succumbed to the policy based evidence making bug she’s among the worst.

At The Times.

Of much greater importance, though, is what such lower limits will do to our opinion of the law in general. A pint at lunchtime could put you over that 20mg limit in the evening commute. A law that punished a man for driving after a pint of shandy would be regarded widely as silly. Such a law would be to the detriment of our reputation as a law-abiding people, a reputation built on the general agreement that we aren’t scofflaws because we tend not to have laws at which we scoff. We most certainly do not want to make the drink-driving laws an object of derision — not after the past few painful decades of convincing everyone that the ones we have are sensible and reasonable.

When there was as an attempt to reduce the permitted level of alcohol consumed in Portugal, the bus drivers took action. They drove in convoy through Lisbon and surrounding towns, bringing the traffic to a halt. The reduction in the limit was scrapped once they had pointed out that it would have abolished every Portuguese man’s God-given right to a copa of vinho with his lunch.

Yes, there really are things that Johnny Foreigner can teach us. Not how to reduce deaths on the road perhaps, but the correct way to react to politicians passing stupid laws.

Looks like it’s internationally agreed:

2. Service discrimination by race?  (Warning: Daily Mail story)

Fun fact of the day: MIT releases its undergraduate admission decisions at 1:59 pm today.  (That is, at 3.14159).

The nef’s case for moving to a more equitable and leisurely sharing of work is not based on an assumption that the amount of work is fixed. There is, I repeat, NO EVIDENCE for the taunt that it is. If Mr. Stanley, Mr. Lockwood (or any one else) can produce conclusive evidence that the assumption of a fixed amount of work is inherent in the case for work time reduction as a policy tool for job-creation or preservation, I will forthwith personally send them a cheque for $5,000 Canadian. My money is safe because they can’t do it.

Must be someone out there willing to take that on?

Here.

Sorry, but that’s the only way to describe this piece about the Robin Hood Tax:

The plan is to tax certain transactions between financial institutions. It would not burden the high street banks or the private currency transactions of holidaymakers, but would target the hundreds of billions that flow between the big players in the financial industry.

The problem is that it would affect, even if that is not the target aimed at, high street banks and the private currency transactions of holidaymakers.

Clearly two such eminent men cannot be ignorant therefore they must be lying.

Concerning this:

THE government has signalled that it plans to cut the drink driving limit to less than a pint of beer or a glass of wine.

Lord Adonis, the transport secretary, expects an official review of the law to recommend reducing the legal limit from 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood to 50mg.

Note this:

The drink-drive changes — which would not require new legislation — would bring Britain into line with almost all other European countries, which have a limit of either 50mg or 20mg.

Yes, it’s all part of a driove to “bring us in line with Europe”. Yes, there have indeed been discussions at EU level to make the limit the same everywhere.

The only problem of course is that this equality is going the wrong way.

You can have two methods of dealing with what I agree is a real problem. You can have a limit which clearly delineates those drunk from those not. The current couple of pints sort of level. And then back it up with serious, even draconian, penalties. Roughly the UK system at present,

You can have a much lower limit, that single glass of wine one, and much lighter penalties. Roughly the system being suggested.

We might even say that yes, everyone should be moving to the same system. OK, now the important question is, which is the best system?

Given that the UK roads are some of the safest in Europe, given that the rate of deaths caused by drunk driving is lower here than elsewhere, everyone should be adopting our system, yes? The one that reduces the problem the most?

Buit we’re not doing that, are we?

Why?

George Irvin tries to sort out the global economy.

Is there another answer? John Maynard Keynes proposed a perfectly sensible solution at Bretton Woods in 1944, namely, forcing surplus countries to spend their extra money in deficit countries, thus both their private spending and export capacity. The “Keynes solution” as is has been dubbed by the US economist Paul Davidson, was unfortunately vetoed by the Americans. In fairness, one must add that America rechannelled part of its surplus at the time into the Marshall Plan, thus enabling Europe to grow and to overcome its deficit.

There’s a distinct problem with this idea.

Countries don’t trade with other countries.

Individuals, those accumulations of individuals we call companies, they trade with other individuals and said accumulations. To say that “Britain” trades with “Germany” is reification….and while reification is sometimes useful, in this instance it isn’t.

There’s a company based in Britain that makes one third of the world’s jet engines. Rolls Royce. People don’t buy these jet engines because they come from Britain. They buy them because they’re among the best in the world. And they also don’t buy them because of (or in spite of) what the politicians who run Britain do.

So saying that the politicians must direct how the money earned from such jet engine sales be spent doesn’t pass the basic logic test.

This is going to be one of those economics papers which will be waved in our faces:

Complex economic formulas developed by two professors of economics, Curtis Eaton and Mukesh Eswaran, and published in the current edition of the Economic Journal, suggest that greater affluence can seriously damage a nation’s health. Based on their mathematical modelling, the economists advance the theory that once a country reaches a reasonable standard of living there is little further benefit to be had from increasing the wealth of its population. Indeed, it could make people feel worse off.

Veblen Goods….conspicuous consumption. Once we get to a certain level of wealth most extra spending goes on positional goods. So extra wealth doesn’t make us happier.

Thus, and you can see the thus arriving, we shouldn’t be trying for economic growth. We should do the equality bit, whatever the hit to growth, for that does make us happier.

Politically, this is the point (no, not the reason the research was done, rather, the use to which it will be put). The grand argument against some (most, all, to taste) redistribution effoprts is that there is an economic cost in the form of growth and wealth foregone. Deadweight costs of taxes and so on.

However, if we can say that a) that growth doesn’t make us happier and b) that happier is the aim, then we can now ignore that lost growth and go for the equality….whatever the cost in lost wealth.

So you can see the political impact of such a paper.

However, there’s two major problems with this view.

The first is that the Easterlin Paradox itself (the idea that happiness does not increase with wealth, once past a certain point) has been recently refuted. Richer people in richer countries are indeed happier.

The second is that few (I don’t claim this as an original thought of my own but it is few who even consider it) consider the following point.

It’s not the level of wealth that endows happiness…it’s the increase in it that does. Growth of, say, 2% or 3% in average living standards (about right for capitalist economies over the past couple of hundred years) doesn’t mean that tomorrow will be better than today. Variance around the trend is too high for that. But it does mean that next decade is going to be better than this, that the lives of our children will be better than ours, that our grandchildren will live in what would seem from our own childhoods to be the very lap of luxury. For growth of that sort of level means a doubling of living standards each generation or so.

This is something which causes happiness….and the absence of this “things can only get better” will, I submit, cause unhappiness.

All of which brings back into the argument the point that we cannot, whatever this new paper says, go for the equality at whatever cost to growth. For it’s the existence of the growth itself which causes the happiness, not the level of wealth.

No tries please, we’re British

Hmm. Not that I approve of course.

But I’m off to make sure my UKIP membership is up to date…..for any form of PR is near certain to elect some UKIP “senators”.

About Australia, the convicts and so on.

Although I find myself forced to point out that I’m descended from someone who a) went there voluntarily and b) then left.

According to gg grandma, Australia was a place to visit, not a place to go to.

How the income tax system has become markedly more regressive over the years.

I’m pretty sure that it has you know.

Time was when only the rich paid income tax. Then the middle….now people working part time on minimum wage.

For the personal allowance is only ever raised in line with retail inflation (and sometimes is not raised at all). While wages of course grow, over time, faster than retail inflation.

So, over the decades, the income tax system has been reaching further and further down the income scale. So we’ve been taxing poorer and poorer people as time goes on.

So, is there a paper out there which explores this?