Tim Worstall

As Will Hutton doesn’t like “unregulated capitalism”, preferring instead the more Rhineland Model, run by grandees such as himself through the regulatory system, of course he doesn’t like hedge funds. He thus blames them for the current problems, even though they had pretty much bugger all to do with it. This really takes the biscuit [...]

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William Leith tells us that he became ill because he didn’t sleep either enough or with any regularity. This is of course all the fault of the modern capitalist and consumerist society. Hmm….perhaps if he’d just had the odd siesta?

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More women should endure the agony of labour because pain-relieving drugs, including epidural injections, carry serious medical risks, diminish childbirth as a rite of passage and undermine the mother’s bond with her child. These claims from Dr Denis Walsh, one of the country’s most influential midwives, have prompted a furious reaction, with other experts saying [...]

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At the ASI. People tend not to realise quite how much medical innovation depends upon the current structure of the US health care market.

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Gosh, there’s so much here: Teachers need to do more work to improve children’s vocabulary and make it clear when the use of slang and colloquialisms are not acceptable, academics have found. That is, do not let it all hang out as everyone’s been told for the past few decades. There is a formal language [...]

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Was it simply that a “charity” (actually, spending taxpayers’ money) was looted for the pet projects of the directors? Is that it?

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The fallacy is that there ain’t no man in charge.

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Ben Goldacre’s noted an interesting little paper. They took 48 students and got them all to play a game for money: players could earn cash if they co-operated, but a player who did not co-operate could make more money, at the other players’ expense, as a “free rider”, by appearing to co-operate, and then reneging [...]

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The measures we see are, of course, averages: A property based in East Anglia, which was valued at £246,995 in April 2006 would be worth around £225,000 today, a fall of 9pc, according to the Nationwide House Price Index calculator on its website. But the house price index does not differentiate between a new-build property [...]

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No, no, our Lenin, not the Russian one. I spent about six years working in call centres, Explains a hell of a lot really.

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Someone, somewhere, should be hit repeatedly in the face with a mallet for this. I don’t even particularly care who.

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A question. Cuba is said to have a very good health care system. WHO and other international statistics seem to bear this out. However, WHO and other international health care statistics are based solely on the information that the Cuban Government releases. There is no independent verification. The Cuban Government is, as we know, a [...]

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The average British household spends £470 a year on fruit and vegetables and £147 on unhealthy snack food. But London households spend, on average, £523 on fruit and veg and £124 on unhealthy snacks. Those in the North-east have the least healthy shopping baskets, according to price-comparison website mysupermarket.co.uk. They spend £403 on fruit and [...]

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It is important to understand what is leading this economic downturn. Its driving force is a collapse in private investment in the US and all major economies. I’m not sure that I agree but what do you propose to do about the problem you have identified? Introduction of a more progressive system of taxation Lessee, [...]

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I’ve asked this before but still lacking an answer, will ask again. Just in case there’s a banking tax expert who reads this. I’ve got wandering around the back of my mind the thought that Gordon Brown changed the way that bank provisions (for loan losses) were taxed at some point. He thought they were [...]

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It is of course one of my pet peeves, repeated to the point of nauseam, that jobs are a cost of an enterprise, of an adventure. Despite being one of my pet peeves, it is also true that jobs are a cost of an enterprise. Europe’s digital economy has tremendous potential – the roll out [...]

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Drunken teenager phones through a prank bomb hoax to the White House switchboard. Yes, very naughty. However: In a statement read to the court the operator said she had been “emotionally and psychologically affected” by the call which had triggered memories of September 11 2001. Are you sure you’re in the right job? Every looney [...]

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They claim the “Use of Mathematics” qualification, which shows students how to solve realistic problems, lacks academic rigour. … It is designed to give teenagers a grounding in the use of maths in everyday situations. Trial exam papers include questions on issues such as population growth, road distances, income, the weight of babies and even [...]

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The government is to single out Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons, the British National party’s two newly elected representatives in the European parliament, for special treatment, denying them some of the access and information afforded to all the other 70 UK MEPs. Under new guidelines drafted in Whitehall and in the Foreign Office following the [...]

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Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., has said his committee needs to come up with $600 billion in new taxes to deliver on President Barack Obama’s goal of sweeping changes to the nation’s health care system to bring down costs…. Sorry? It costs $600 billion to reduce costs? Where’s Alice with those pills when [...]

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