Tim Worstall

Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, has called for the NHS to give out heroin on prescription to addicts where other forms of treatment have failed. Why? The pilot schemes used pharmaceutical diamorphine imported from Switzerland in a supervised clinic prescribed by a doctor. Three-quarters of users “substantially reduced” their use of street drugs, and their [...]

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And get Madsen Pirie’s new book 101 Great Philosophers. It’s something of a follow up to his book “How to Win Every Argument” which of course has a hallowed place on every bloggers bookshelf. Essential for divining which logical fallacies are being committed by which Guardian column. Find out more about Great Philosophers here. 101 [...]

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The report also warns that Labour’s target to send at least 50 per cent of school leavers to university should be abandoned to focus on “quality not quantity”. Quite: there’s no point in trying to punt 50% of the population through universities. All we’re doing at present is indulging in the grossest form of credentialism. [...]

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At the ASI. Globalisation reduces child poverty: well, doh!

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Quite fun to start off a column with an error of fact, don’t you think? The Soviet Union used to judge itself on how much iron and how many tractors it produced. The Soviet Union used to measure the weight, the tonnage, of tractors it produced. It’s one of the interesting little stories that Richard [...]

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Diamonds begin to sparkle again That’s really a rather large amount of pearls to use to illustrate a story about diamonds, isn’t it? They’ve even named the file “diamonds”.

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At CiF. Basically winding people up by insisting that happiness research shows that a flat tax with a high personal allowance is the tax system which will maximise happiness.

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British couples who travel abroad for IVF treatment and buy other women’s eggs are engaging in a form of prostitution, a fertility conference was told yesterday. Stupidity of the highest order. Professor Pfeffer said that even using the term “donation” in relation to the exchange of eggs was inappropriate. “It sounds as though it’s a [...]

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If he were wholeheartedly aiming to capture angry Labour voters with nowhere else to go, then his flags would be redder and there would be no boasting of savage cuts. He would be storming Labour citadels and summoning angry Labour voters to his cause. His flag would be an economic policy that didn’t parrot the [...]

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This is interesting: The SEC will also remove references to ratings from some of its own rules and forms in an attempt to make investors less dependent on agencies’ actions. As I’ve been arguing all along, matters might mean that we should have different regulation: but they don’t necessarily mean that we should have more. [...]

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The Government has said that guaranteed bonuses contribute to irresponsible deals by bankers, I wish that someone could explain this to me. I can get the idea (although am not wholly convinced of it) that striving for a bonus can make, on the basis of bonus if you win the shareholders eat the losses if [...]

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Economists and Tories who argue against inrtervention in the economy say that this is OK becasue recessions indicate people do not want to work. What? I know of people who claim that structural unemployment is in part because some people don’t want to work. I know of people who claim that the incentives on offer [...]

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Yes, like this one: When something has crossed the parody horizon, it becomes impossible to parody (that, of course, is a common idiom) for the simple reason that any parody would be indistinguishable from the original. Similar to “jumping the shark” perhaps. “Polly has crossed the parody horizon”….yes, works for me.

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Of course, you need to accept some version of the efficient markets hypothesis for this to be true (ie, that in markets prices reflect the information available to the participants in said market, to use a very weak EMH version): The key indicator of scientific progress is not the opinion of a seasoned practitioner (with [...]

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One of his throw away lines: “some departments have shockingly few young tenured scholars in this important field (including large departments like Harvard and Princeton [and Berkeley]).” And this may explain why Krugman (and Delong) have a hard time appreciating the current state of macroeconomics. They don’t know any modern macroeconomists.

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Seven climate protesters dressed as suffragettes dumped horse manure on the Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson’s front lawn yesterday under a banner reading: “This is what you’re landing us in”. I’m rather hoping it will be “Excellent, just what I need for the roses”. Ah: TOP Gear star Jeremy Clarkson THANKED eco protesters who dumped [...]

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Investment into Britain fell by half to £97bn, while outflows, or British companies making investments abroad, collapsed to £111bn from £275bn the year before. That has to be simply some subset to the capital account, not the whole of it. For as far as I’m aware we’re still running a trade deficit and the current [...]

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Five months ago, world leaders came together and agreed a unique response to the unprecedented challenges of the global economic crisis. United in our determination for a co-ordinated programme of measures to ease the worldwide recession, a historic deal was signed by countries representing two thirds of the planet’s population. Forget the content for a [...]

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Oh dear, there’s sense in here but nonsense as well: The annoying thing about economics is that nearly all issues of any importance can convincingly be argued either way. It is only the long passage of time that validates one line of analysis over another, and even then, established orthodoxies get periodically overturned according to [...]

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The sports minister Svilen Neykov ordered a special review after 4, 15, 23, 24, 35, and 42 were drawn on Sept 6 and again on Sept 10 in consecutive lottery rounds. The probability of this happening is 4.2 million to one, according to the Bulgarian mathematician Mihail Konstantinov, although he added that such coincidences can [...]

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