Tim Worstall

Go on, watch it, I get beer money if you do……

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Richard Murphy: That is the reality of much of life. Advertising sells the lie of choice when it is actually selling a person dissatisfaction with their state of compliance with societal norms. Economics as taught at present says we are all free to choose when that is absurdly and obviously wrong. And Nudge offers the [...]

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The area around us here in Southern P (or the Northern Algarve as it might be called) is pretty rural stuff. It’s also pretty bad soil: fruit trees are the only commercial crop for most of the area and in fact, most of the land is left pretty much fallow. It used to be farmed, [...]

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The Agincourt database. Nope, not a single one. Not all that hugely surprising as at that time we were all French, Irish, Inca (allegedly) and in fact, absolutely anything other than English or Welsh.

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Market socialism is impossible he says. Well, that puts paid to a large and entirely respectable set of philosophic musings, doesn’t it? Oooooh, Look! John Lewis just disappeared, winked out of existence, the mission entirely frustrated by the philosophical conundrum of a worker owned firm competing successfully in a free (ish) market. Sigh. Markets, the [...]

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Wonky piece in CiF about how, well, gosh, lots of journalists are losing their jobs and we’ve got to do something about it. You know the sort of thing, when it’s the people writing the papers in danger then the papers get filled with the danger. There’s a call for, wait for it, “A National [...]

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So, China has been able to provide huge fiscal stimulus while the US has not. Partly because the Chinese Government has a huge banking industry which it controls. The sad truth is that in spite of our more developed system of governance, the rule of law, and a much more developed economy, the US government [...]

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Sigh. The world’s first government-run swine flu diagnosis website could not cope with the volume of traffic when it opened for business at 3pm today. Designed to handle 1,200 hits a second, the service was suspended just four minutes later when 2,600 people tried to access it every second. Face/ Palm.

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Mr Miller, better known by his stage name Afterlife, is unable to use trains, stay in hotels or visit his local high street because of his sensitivity to the “electrosmog” cause by wireless internet waves. He is among around two per cent of the population who suffer from Electromagnetic Hypersensetivity, while the number of people [...]

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Scale down the UK. To 99 football pitches. All built up areas plus gardens would be 6 of those football pitches. Hmm, we really don’t seem to have concreted over all that much of the place in the last millenia, do we?

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Geoff Martin of London Health Emergency said: ‘It’s a scandal that any company could use the swine flu pandemic as an opportunity to jack up profits. ‘The Government should step in and impose a windfall tax on private companies that have hit the jackpot as a result of the flu crisis.’ What would be the [...]

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Phillip Collins (Who he?- Tim): However, the most conspicuous finding is that social mobility does not vary much between countries. Different policy regimes do not lead to very different rates. Australia, Japan and the US tend to be quite fluid; France, Germany and Italy less so. Britain sits in the middle. Doesn’t this rather undermine [...]

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Foreign criminals have been awarded compensation of £500,000 for being kept in custody beyond their release date. The prisoners were held while the Government considered whether to deport them. Under our system you can’t be held in gaol without a court having approved a reason for you being there.  You’ve been sentenced, you’re on remand, [...]

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Ministers who ignore evidence when framing policy should be named and shamed by the Government’s Chief Scientist, a parliamentary report says. Government departments should be exposed by their own scientific advisers when they base decisions on political considerations rather than the findings of research, say MPs. So that’s Harry Harperson on the gender pay gap, [...]

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You know, someone really ought to be doing a proper fisking of these things (I can’t, I’m unemployed again and am therefore far too busy). For example, from a College Lecturer, we get a glimpse of why the education system is so crap: I could never be anything but left wing – my mother is [...]

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Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian‘s editor in chief, tonight threw his support behind a plan to give public funding to Britain’s national press agency to allow it to provide news from public authorities and courts as local newspapers withdraw because they can no longer afford it. Rusbridger, speaking at a seminar on the future of journalism [...]

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Umm, well, you know? But that drives out the able teachers and demoralises those who remain: 30-50 % leave the profession in the first five years or throughout the career an average of 12 percent abandon teaching. I don’t think we’ll be taking advice on academia from one capable of committing to paper quite such [...]

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A Royal Navy frigate has seized cocaine with an estimated wholesale value of £33 million from a speedboat off the coast of South America. Hmmm. 750 kg they got…..they’re valuing it at £44 a gramme. That might be the wholesale value inside the UK (don’t know, sorry, not my milieu really) but it sure as [...]

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HMS Iron Duke stops traffickers of coast of South America. Tsk, it’s just soooo ilegal to be selling the actual coast itself, isn’t it?

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Slightly cheeky perhaps but I do mean it. Why I’m on the left.

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