Tim Worstall

I’m travelling tomorrow so a couple of pieces at the Speccie today.
ONS statistics and the value of a degree.

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At the ASI.
The silly things that NGOs suggest to aid development.

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Who is this Susan Hill character?

The novelist Susan Hill wrote passionately about this in a recent blog. "A recession," she writes, "will sort out the kids who have been brought up to think you not only have to have a new pair of trainers, you have to have the designer brand costing £200, and next [...]

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Lifting stories again without attribution.

UKIP leader Nigel Farage is all The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee despises: a Right-wing, chauvinistic Little Englander.
So she’ll choke on her muesli to discover this year’s UKIP rally in Bournemouth is sponsored by the British Humanist Association of which she’s president. Dog is relishing the Polly and Nigel seaside love-in.

Vindico spotted it [...]

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So house prices are going down, hundreds of thousands sit around unsold.

Moreover, with housing supply a continuing issue, we can scarcely afford to let the house building industry, already severely in debt and landed with thousands of unsold houses for which there are no sign of buyers, sink into bankruptcy. Without a functioning building industry, [...]

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Alasdair Palmer rather comes up with a shameful argument in his attempt to castigate the Law Lords over their rejection of the government’s restrictions upon "sham marriages".
Firstly, he seems to have caught the "planning" bug.

About the only thing everyone agrees is that deciding the optimum level of immigration is a crucial element of public policy, [...]

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Writing about spies and Stalin’s bomb program:

But the knowledge that the Soviets, relying on their Siberian uranium and plutonium deposits, could theoretically build an unlimited number of H (hydrogen) bombs and A (atomic) bombs, meant that such international brinkmanship would henceforth always herald the possibility of [...]

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Been reading some of the American political blogs about McCain and the Sarah Palin choice (OK, yes, I too have made the VPILF joke).
There’s something that none of them seem to get at all. Go back and read Tom Wolfe’s "The Right Stuff".
There’s one group of people on this planet that even the most hot [...]

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So Barack Obama can promise tax cuts by “the closure of corporate tax loopholes and tax havens.”
He’s right: he can.

No he can’t.
He can close loopholes and tax havens (well, at least in theory he can) and thus raise the effective tax rates that corporations pay, thus leaving room to lower other taxes on other people. [...]

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No, you’re a bad man Clive.

VPILF?
No, no, a very bad man indeed.

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This is a bet that you should take at absolutely any odds.

“Large Hadron Collider will destroy Earth.”

You bet that it won’t of course.
If you lose, how are you going to pay off?

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But my Dear Mr. E: why would anyone want to spin this entirely welcome news?
The more exposure to sensible political ideas that Polly and her ilk get the better, surely?
As in:

We will take 4.5 million people out of tax with a simple Flat Tax (with National Insurance) starting at £10,000.

And:

…taking the lowest-paid out of tax [...]

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Like most people, I guess, I’m still coming to terms with John McCain’s decision to select a running-mate young enough to be his wife.

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GM corn in Africa produces four times as much corn per acre (and the corn can be protected from witchweed, unlike the previous varieties).

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Bugger the arties:

Who the hell cares? Art is not about ownership or geography. It is about values greater than time and space. I don’t give a damn where a work of art is. I just care that it is. The Taj Mahal is in India (presumably) and the Mona Lisa in Paris, but I don’t [...]

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A leading General Motors executive has called for government loans of up to $50bn to help American car markers build more fuel-efficient cars.

They’re going bust (rather in slow motion, to be sure, but they are) so they’d like to pick he taxpayers’ pockets.
How amazingly surprising.
No, let them go bust, let the legacy costs be wiped [...]

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To the blokes with the green eyeshades at the Telegraph.

Noble winner slams ECB
Economist claims Europe is on cusp of deep recession.

Umm, Professor Solow is indeed a noble man, but that’s not quite what you meant, is it?

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Owner of an organic deli in London:

“We have customers who travel from Brighton and Oxford to shop here. There might be a few people who shop organically out of fashion, but a lot of our customers are what I call deep greens – [...]

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At the ASI.
On the stupidity of "energy independence".

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Mr O’Leary was joined in his assault by fellow introvert Julie Burchill…

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