Tim Worstall

Almost all of it is money deemed to have been saved by reducing travel times. Business customers, it says, will save £17.6bn by getting there faster; leisure customers £11.1bn. Nowhere in the documents are these figures explained or justified. I spent the whole of Monday pressing the Department for Transport, asking for an explanation of [...]

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This piece in The Guardian: A $95,000 question: why are whites five times richer than blacks in the US? OK, interesting question. And we get to this report (and this reads like the press release from it rather than an actual report but I can’t see a fuller version of the report around). There’s not [...]

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One point that fans of the original story might note is that Drewe, who in the original story is a columnist and interviewer for an unspecified newspaper, has been given a job at the Independent for the purposes of the film. Frears said he had consulted the Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, and suggested she might [...]

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Delightfully done. If you’re not reading him you should be.

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But what occurred to me is that it would be a good strategy to bribe a key member of an opposing country’s bid to get him or her to accuse other countries of bribery, thus derailing the original country’s proposal amid FIFA’s embarrassment and clearing the field. This maybe would be cheaper than bribing a [...]

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Ritchie: FT.com / Currencies – Bets against the euro hit record levels. Short-term speculators have raised their bets against the euro to record levels. Positioning data from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, often used as a proxy for hedge fund activity, showed speculators extended their short positions in the euro from 103,400 contracts to 113,900 contracts, [...]

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Well, at least one organisation seems to have realised that the money from the taxpayers has run out.

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excludes 12 peers who are on leave of absence, 16 disqualified, senior members of the judiciary and 1 disqualified as an MEP OK. I know about the MEP and the judges. Didn’t know you could have a leave of absence but no matter. But those 16 disqualified? Reasons for diqualification are few and far between. [...]

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So, err, strange question, I know. Umm, anyone got a thousand tonnes or so a year of tin slags they’d like to let me have? You know, maybe someone owns an old tin smelter site, or has some rolling around the back of the sofa or something?

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Would love to have a copy of this paper…… Well, that was fast. One of Mike Munger’s peeps (well, OK, he teaches at the same university at least) has already sent it over. 6 minutes that took……

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Over at Hopi Sen’s we have an example of economic gloriousness. From Left Outside. “If they instead put it up to say 7k with promises of increases in future years, then the measures that they’ve announced balance.” Of course if they do that, it may still impact on current spending in the economy. If people [...]

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Here.

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The most recent liberty-abridging, Terrorism-justified controversies have focused on diluting the legal rights of American citizens (in part because the rights of non-citizens are largely gone already and there are none left to attack).  A bipartisan group from Congress sponsors legislation to strip Americans of their citizenship based on Terrorism accusations.  Barack Obama claims the right [...]

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‘half the public are below average intelligence’ Seems like a statistical impossibility to me, unless the other half are 50% above the average intelligence. steveb at Liberal Conspiracy.

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The first thing we might ask is, do we really believe that a financial crisis permanently depresses the trend line of economic growth? Yes, I know that the IMF has statistical analyses that seem to say that; but it’s not clear what the mechanism is, it’s not what standard growth models would say, so we [...]

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Keep practising folks. For as we know, practice makes perfect.

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This is a rather strange case: A BRITISH chemicals firm is involved in a secret MI5 inquiry into the illegal export to Iran of material that could make a radioactive “dirty bomb”. HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) raided the Essex home of the firm’s former sales manager after a tip that potentially lethal chemicals, including [...]

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At the ASI. A most amusing observation by one on the American left. The growth of government since Keynes’ day means that simplistic Keynesianism no longer works.

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That Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution was a wondrous thing to consider from afar at first, how it declined into a nationalist authoritarianism that betrays those first fond hopes. Yes, of course, us horribly aged cynics said this would happen all along. But the author of this piece is as yet only 19. He seems rather to [...]

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Britain’s cult of youth is out of control We celebrate the fortysomethings, but forget the sagacity of older generations The author, Emma Soames, is 61.

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