Tim Worstall

It has been a staple of the Great British diet for centuries and reinvented itself with orange and purple varieties but the once popular cauliflower is feeling the heat. A bristly upstart from an Italian branch of the family is threatening to capture cauliflower’s place between the roast potatoes and carrots on Sunday dinner plates. [...]

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In the end that means you and me, since business passes on its share of the tax bill through lower wages, higher prices or reduced dividends. That’s Richard Murphy’s argument that businesses carry the economic burden of corporate taxes buggered once again then, isn’t it? We then need to move on to decide which of [...]

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Or so it is said. A study in the US found a link between soaring marijuana use and increased incidence of the disease for the first time. The link is limited to the aggressive nonseminoma types of testicular cancer which strike earlier than other varieties, affecting men aged between 20 and 35. At the risk [...]

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Alistair Darling was ridiculed last night after it emerged that the Treasury’s new review into City bonuses will not be completed until the end of the year – by which stage some banks will have already partially paid out their 2009 rewards. Thankfully we can trust a bureaucracy to act with the appropriate urgency in [...]

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Managers now seek their ‘bonuses’, arguing that their unique skills are needed to dig the bank out of the hole they created. This is a little like the managers of a hospital with a terrible record of poor hygiene and premature deaths surviving the sack, then demanding more money as an incentive to improve. That [...]

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My word: At Le Gavroche, the two-star Michelin restaurant in London, the chef-patron Michel Roux feeds his staff on potato peelings. This information, so in tune with our thrifty times, appears in Roux’s new autobiography. I asked how exactly he cooked them. The answer is that the peel is twice-fried in animal fat, like the [...]

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Which alternative universe does Will Hutton inhabit? The worst postwar recession was between 1979-81. Then, unemployment rose to 5.5% of the workforce and did not materially fall for eight years. 5.5%? We’d dream of that rate in a recession!  

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Under the current rules for measuring growth, only activities that involve some transfer of money are economically relevant. Thus the work of the world’s poor and of those raising children and building communities are considered unproductive by economists. It’s true that GDP only measures a subset of activity and that it does not measure everything. [...]

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Not convinced about these figures: The ramps – which cost between £20,000 and £55,000, depending on size – consist of a series of panels set in a pad virtually flush to the road. As the traffic passes over it, the panels go up and down, setting a cog in motion under the road. This then [...]

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This poses an interesting dilemma: Tests carried out in 1980 and again in 2008 show that the IQ score of an average 14-year-old dropped by more than two points over the period. Among those in the upper half of the intelligence scale, a group that is typically dominated by children from middle class families, performance [...]

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The report, The Essential Guide to EU Quangos 2009, will estimate that British taxpayers alone contribute £103 million a year towards the organisations’ budgets. Dan Lewis of the Economic Research Council, one of the report’s authors, said: "There is huge duplication with organisations we already have in this country. "There is the Food Safety Authority, [...]

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French fighter planes were unable to take off after military computers were infected by a computer virus, an intelligence magazine claims. They were, umm, using Windows and not adding the necessary patches. Egad!

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So RBS is about to announce their bonuses for last year. We will not doubt get some screaming that Obama has it right, that no one should get over $500,000. Worth noting that the RBS bonuses will pretty much match Obama’s strictures actually. People can be paid more than $500k if the payments are in [...]

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At the ASI. On this rationing of flights nonsense.

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At the ASI. If only there were profits in green energy systems.

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Prof Nutt’s article in the latest edition of the Journal of Psychopharmacology is entitled "Equasy — An overlooked addiction with implications for the current debate on drug harms". He writes: "The point was to get people to understand that drug harm can be equal to harms in other parts of life. There is not much [...]

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Always amusing to see Polly discussing the details of business. For she always, but always, gets such details wrong. Barack Obama’s thundering words resounded around the world this week. He castigated "disgusting payoffs" and "lavish bonuses", fixing a $500,000 pay cap on bailed-out banks and firms. Actually, no, he didn’t. That is the maximum for [...]

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For the first time, the General Teaching Council for England – the profession’s regulator – wants staff in the independent sector to be subjected to the same code as those in state schools. It would mean all 45,000 teachers being forced to sign up to rules governing their behaviour. At the moment, independent schools are [...]

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Cinema tickets offered in exchange for sexually transmitted infection test. I realise that I’m some decades away from my own teenage mating rituals but isn’t this slightly the wrong way around? Offering a free ticket if you get tested for an STD? Isn’t that date at the cinema a prelude to the opportunity to acquire [...]

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The boys are letting off the big guns in the park again. Not really quite sure what it’s all about so I had a quick look at the "on this day in history" part of my diary. "Britain declared war on France in 1778." Worth celebrating, certainly.  

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