Tim Worstall

Here. Prayers or not at your discretion: but best wishes most certainly.

[Read more →]

From Compass: Our campaign for a High Pay Commission continues to receive widespread coverage in the media and the blogosophere. High profile signatories including (…), Clive Efford MP (PPS), Kate Green… Who in buggery are those two?

[Read more →]

Jonathan Freedland simply doesn’t get what it is that banks do. Let’s replace those nasty banks with Zopa and other peer to peer lending sites. What if our man in Dundee can’t or won’t pay back the loan? Zopa’s answer is that would-be borrowers undergo the same credit checks as imposed by any bank. Ah, [...]

[Read more →]

Worse than that, Compass are innumerate. Here is their calculation of how much you get on the minimum wage. Calculation: £44.16 per day. This works out as £220.80 per week or £11481.60 per year. 5 days a week, 40 hours per week (age 25). That link there takes you to the TUC calculator which, when [...]

[Read more →]

The, umm, argument about American health care is that it’s very expensive, isn’t it? At least in part? And the people who are pointing to this as proof that the American health care system is very bad indeed are the same people who say that: 1) We should all pay more for our food because [...]

[Read more →]

Turns out that trains aren’t all that non-polluting after all. Defra also recalculated its figures for rail travel. It concluded that the average figure for “national rail” travel was 60.2 gCO2/pkm. Coaches are much better. Defra’s new figure for coaches is 29.0 gCO2/pkm – twice as efficient as going by train and almost six times [...]

[Read more →]

It’s win-win: if families know their children will join a social mix, not be left stranded in a low-ability school, that eases middle class anxiety – while the mix raises all children’s chances. The old GLC system used to band London children by ability at 11, so that every school got a fair share of [...]

[Read more →]

For a party that has promised a “bonfire of the quangos”, turning Britain’s best-loved institution into the biggest quango in the world – responsible for a £100bn budget and 1.4 million staff – is an idea that has had dangerously little scrutiny to date. I was under the impression that El Gordo had already slipped [...]

[Read more →]

Err, this doesn’t make sense: “Of course,” he drawled, “you’ll offer your properties as collateral.” “No,” I replied. “We’re not giving personal guarantees. We have a good business plan and we’re offering a small stake. You’ll have to take the risk with us, if you want the reward.” The spider press-ups froze. I might as [...]

[Read more →]

Can new growth save the Amazon rainforest? Vegetation is reclaiming agricultural land and might save us from consequences of deforestation You mean like, trees and plants grow? Awsome man!

[Read more →]

America has the best health care in the world. In one respect, at least.

[Read more →]

Mogg senior: The Attorney-General had a salary of £7,000, plus fees that had amounted to £8,183 in the previous year. Judges had a salary of £5,000 a year, equal to the Prime Minister, the four Lords of Appeal had £6,000. More surprisingly bishops were very handsomely paid and archbishops were getting the equivalent of City [...]

[Read more →]

List of signatories to a letter in The Guardian. Seeing this lot you just know that it’s got to be howling lunacy. Caroline Lucas, Sunny Hundal, Richard Murphy, Prem Sikka, Gregor Gall, Brendan Barber, Andrew Simms, Neal Lawson, Johann Hari, John Harris, Chuka Umunna, teh stupid hurts, no mas, no mas. They’re calling for a [...]

[Read more →]

Observer leader: What conclusions can be drawn from such a confusing picture? One might be that, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues on these pages, we should be wary of experts. Alternatively, we might be in awe of how tough a job it is making sense of the global economy. OK, Hayek’s old game: the economy [...]

[Read more →]

I’d known he was a journo in Russia during the revolution but not about the allegations that he was a spy for the Russians as well. He did a very good collection in English of Russian folk tales which is worth looking out. This is excellent: In 1919, he was arrested as he alighted the [...]

[Read more →]

So a possible customer comes along and asks for some squiddlepop oxide. Fine, fine, what purity? Umm, well, …..so we discuss and settle on a high purity. So what will the price be? So we discuss, and over the course of about 18 months this potential customer has been running around the world trying to [...]

[Read more →]

The lesson of the latest recession is that far too many well-qualified young people have been wasting their talents in insecure, low-paid service jobs with limited prospects. If we’ve not got the jobs that require all these shiny new polytechnic degrees then clearly, we shouldn’t be educating people at these shiny new polytechnics.

[Read more →]

a supreme court decision to brand any constitutional referendum unlawful has been used by US and Latin American conservatives to give an entirely spurious veneer of legality to Zelaya’s overthrow. So it was legal then Seumas?

[Read more →]

Deflation, not inflation, is the swine flu that risks infecting the economy; quantitative easing is its Tamiflu. That is, something we’ve not really tried before, certainly not on this scale, and something which we know to have side effects which may or may not be worse than the original disease we’re trying to treat. Enjoy [...]

[Read more →]

Larry Elliott, Guardian economics editor, makes a fairly silly statement: The banks are not exactly helping King and his colleagues on the monetary policy committee; they are hoarding cash and rebuilding profits decimated by ill-judged investments in fancy derivative products by gouging their customers. Over the last two years, the bank rate has come down [...]

[Read more →]