Tim Worstall

That’s 20% of managers doing non-jobs that can be dispensed with. Useless, wasted bureaucracy. And then they say the public sector is inefficient. Now, why is that? Err, because the public sector never does go out and fire 20% of middle managers? Never does attempt to cut out the deadwood and become more efficient?

[Read more →]

And he’s shocked I tell, shocked. He finds that the direct tax system is progressive, the indirect system highly regressive and the allocation of benefits is progressive. Gini on market incomes is somewhere over 0.5 and at the end of the money shuffling is 0.34 or so (don’t take those as being too accurate, I’m [...]

[Read more →]

Write about political blogging.

[Read more →]

I suppose it was never on the cards that any of them was going to order a black-and-tan.

[Read more →]

The reason why the vast majority of people who buy organic food – including myself – are prepared to pay a premium (and, by all means, let’s discuss why supermarkets still continue to cynically mark up their organic food)… Because there are prats like you who are willing to pay the mark up. Honestly, some [...]

[Read more →]

The challenge is to offer proof that the unicorns don’t, in fact, exist. Hmm. Given that we’ve run out of virgins, we’ll never know, will we?

[Read more →]

No, you don’t have to believe this. Yes, you can mock this all you like. Until it sorts out in its own minds what exactly it is about homosexuality that offends it and is able to explain its reasons in intellectually rational, credible and convincing terms to outsiders, the church (all churches, actually) will continue [...]

[Read more →]

Progressives need to get clear on our answer now because we haven’t had the potent combination of a serious crisis and a clear progressive democratic mandate for change since the 1930s. We use this opportunity, or we lose it. Precisely and exactly the opposite of her thesis in The Shock Doctrine. Consistency, only for righties, [...]

[Read more →]

Anyone with access to Science or the AAAS out there? Would you like to send me the .pdf of this article? My knee jerk reaction is that those fisheries that are seeing stocks rebound are those that have sorted out property rights. I’d like to see how well the old knee is jerking at the [...]

[Read more →]

I’m very impressed with their basic idea. Can a group sponsor a small region onto a better development path? Absolutely fascinating to find out if it is indeed possible. However, in detail I’m not sure. A considerable number of pupils in the majority of primary schools in Katine still study in poor conditions, making it [...]

[Read more →]

The National Centre for Social Research study, which surveyed just under 7,100 parents found that two thirds say they have to work because they need the money. Simply astonishing, eh? To turn the old phrase around, work is like exports, simply the boring shite we have to do so that we can consume.

[Read more →]

The UK should and will breach EU law on organ transplants. Now, whether you or I believe they should is another matter….but the EU is certain to have something to say about it in time. What I think about it all of course is that the two organs which can be done from live donation, [...]

[Read more →]

Right, well, that’s that then, liberty is dead. All four copies of the 1215 Magna Carta – the celebrated civil liberties document – have been granted World Heritage status by the United Nations. When they start putting things in museums you know that the next stage is to say that it’s not relevant to the [...]

[Read more →]

The country’s first “workplace parking levy” will come into force in Nottingham in 2012 and is likely to be adopted by other councils. Under the scheme, any firm with 11 or more staff parking spaces will be charged £250 a year for each. That cost could rise to £350 within two years. I admit that [...]

[Read more →]

A fall in the monetary volume of purchases on Visa cards and a rise in the number of transactions shows that, umm, the apocalypse is just around the corner. From the FT: Visa said consumers spent less during the quarter as the global recession inspired greater thriftiness, resulting in a 7 per cent decline in [...]

[Read more →]

And for those Englishmen who believe in an afterlife, the prospect of arriving on your host’s doorstep an hour early to be greeted by a strained smile is surely just too awkward to be contemplated.

[Read more →]

We must find the new Ashes heroes now England’s future depends on reviving cricket in schools. And that will have other benefits too Wasim Khan

[Read more →]

Finally, someone’s getting the point: Householders will earn up to £150 a year from recycling their rubbish under a scheme designed to reward those who put waste in the correct bins. Sorting to recycle takes time. Your time is worth money. Thus those insisting you recycle should pay you for your time in sorting to [...]

[Read more →]

Interesting piece about how silicon fabs ar getting more and more expensive and so we might see Moore’s Law slow down. I’m not sure he’s entirely right in detail, I think there might be some confusion between cramming the transistors on closer together and using bigger disks to make the chips from. From what I [...]

[Read more →]

Human nature, however, is such that we crave certainty. When we discover something that looks like a feasible theory, we stick to it doggedly, until something proves us wrong. This was our collective error a few decades ago, when economics was hijacked by something called the efficient markets hypothesis, a seductive theory that both tied [...]

[Read more →]