Tim Worstall

History may mark this as the moment when financiers passed beyond democracy, thumbing their nose while rubbing our nose in it. How puny the G20 deal looks, delaying bonuses for three years when everyone wanted them banned. Everyone wanted them banned? Shall we amend that slightly to “everyone I know” wanted them banned? For clearly, [...]

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Besides, it all depends on the dates picked: 1998 was anomalously hot because of an exceptionally strong El Nino, which always warms up the weather. Using it as a starting point produces a very different result than choosing the much cooler 1996, 1997, 1999 or 2000. On any long-term basis, temperatures have risen fast. Well, [...]

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Almost half of all fathers are stay-at-home Dads Hmm. Somehow I rather doubt it. As many as 14 per cent of the 2,000 fathers surveyed said they chose to stop working altogether following the birth of their children, while 26 per cent said they decided to work part-time and 24 per cent said they started [...]

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Watch or don’t watch: I already have the beer. Sir David Attenstuff Attenscarf on the subject of the Arctic.

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Buy me beer or don’t as the case may be. Something to do with Trivial Pursuit. There was a version of this game (and a time) when I would have to go around the board 6 times to have a 50/50 chance of winning while my competitors had to go around once. Becoming a stockbroker [...]

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Watch this video and buy me beer. Or don’t, as the case may be. It’s a video about a new computer game, Alien v Predator.

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I’ve just had a Facebook request (no, I don’t log into it) asking that the “The Daily Mail should retract Jan Moir’s hateful, homophobic article”. This one. OK, it’s a bit strong but…..I can imagine the same writer saying exactly the same things about someone who was in an open heterosexual relationship and then died [...]

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In Moby Dick, Herman Melville included a drinks list for a whaling voyage that included “550 ankers of Geneva (gin) and 10,800 barrels of beer”. Taking a barrel to be 9 gallons that’s nearly 400 tonnes of beer. The Essex (the ship that Melville used as his real life starting point for Moby Dick) weighed [...]

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She’s going to make world farming better. Excellent. Step 1: kill the US Farm Bill. Step 2: Kill CAP. Strangely, she doesn’t mention either of those two, both of which need to happen before anyone goes on to the more trivial things she does.

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But, but, using the market to provide health care means that we cannot plan the provision of health care! One problem is that market reforms have been accompanied by a hollowing out of the intelligent public health information that is required for healthcare planning and ensuring fairness of distribution of resources. What the public, politicians, [...]

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Libby Brooks today. It seems that we should use incentives (bungs, bribes or bonuses) on the poor because incentives work on the poor. Not sure that really works in logic.

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We’ve just had a Nobel Prize awarded for explaining exactly this sort of thing: The Pennine Way took another 33 years to inch its way across the Dark Peak. Arguments against access were built on the premise that the wilderness would be overwhelmed by the likes of Benny Rothman’s British Workers’ Sports Federation, which rallied [...]

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There’s a reason for this: “People have told me, ‘you could just go out there and play guitar and sing your songs like Paul McCartney’, but I’d be too bored,” she says. “Most of the joy of the shows is the magic of creating them: theatre. I’m a perfectionist. I like hard work. I like [...]

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A spokesman told The Sun: “The UK had the longest time. We found no major difference in those who used condoms. But men who drank alcohol before sex tended to last longer.” Also, perhaps I should invest in a couple of Union Jack t shirts for those trips down to the nightlife? British men have [...]

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This is going to help Nigel Farage in Buckingham, ain’t it? John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, is to pay back almost £1,000 he wrongly claimed in his MP’s expenses, he has announced.

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Women who do not have children should be allowed to take maternity leave, allowing them time off from the workplace, according to a study. Why would it be only women who would be aloowed to take a sabbatical?

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About hoax stories being placed in the newspapers: Atkins defended his project, saying the onus was on the newspaper to corroborate what it publishes. “Had those fake stories been fact-checked by the newspapers before they were printed, they would have realised – I think within minutes – that they were about to publish complete and [...]

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The basis of public choice economics is that politicians and bureaucrats do things which benefit politicians and bureaucrats, not the wider polity. Just because you’re elected or appointed doesn’t remove the basic human regard to self interest in other words. An example: One senior figure said: “We were led up the garden path by Gordon. [...]

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Former Bank of England policymaker Charles Goodhart, who is now professor emeritus of banking and finance at the London School of Economics, told the committee that the worst financial crisis since the second world war could have been prevented if more women were on the boards of major companies. “Women tend to be more cautious [...]

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You can see how this is going to play out: Alistair Darling is ready to hand over up to £5bn of taxpayers’ money to the part-nationalised Lloyds Banking Group in order to shore up its finances. Lloyds, 43% owned by the taxpayer, is seeking £25bn of extra capital so it can escape the multibillion-pound cost [...]

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