Tim Worstall

Eaten by bugs apparently. A little too soon to say for sure but the “world’s worst environmental disaster” might turn out to be a few months of murky water.

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As every party promises to rebalance Britain’s economy away from finance, the creative industries are a fast-growing sector. Between 1997 and 2007, they created two million new jobs and £16.6bn in exports. There’s about 30 million people in the UK labour force. So the claim is that the “creative industries”, which Polly seems to be [...]

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Although this is really rather strange: The case is being compared to that of Anna Chapman, a suspected Russian spy who was arrested in New York and then returned to Russia under a “spy swap exchange” earlier this month. There is no evidence that the two women knew one another. It has been reported that [...]

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Or, why it’s right to have markets in the public services. As Paul Krugman said, productivity isn’t everything but in the long run it’s pretty much everything. So these aren’t good numbers: The ONS calculates public service productivity by counting the number of procedures carried out in hospitals, pupils taught in schools and elderly people [...]

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A rigorous new analysis for the Rockefeller Foundation shows that Americans are more economically insecure now than they have been in a quarter of a century, Given that we’re in he worst recession in 25 years, that really is a surprise. But that’s just a cheap shot of course. What’s more interesting is the measure [...]

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George Lakoff is a professor of linguistics at Berkeley. Berkeley being a fine university this does of course mean that he very much more than simply an adequate linguist. However, excellence in one field does not, necessarily, flow over into excellence in another. For example, excellence in linguistics clearly does not flow over into knowledge [...]

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Here.

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At the ASI. More on how Chris Huhne’s being less than frank (ha ha, ‘coz his name’s Chris, see?) about subsidies to nuclear.

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He’s just so wonderful, calling out the masses to strike, to agitate, to demand: To that Kaleckian lesson, however, we want to add a Gorzian one, especially in the United States: take productivity gains more in the form of gains in disposable time than in the form of more consumption. That’s our socialist ticket out [...]

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Playwright says that arts subsidies should be spent on playwrights not the marketing department! Surprise, eh?

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But of course, it is true: For in Western economies, to keep the level of employment constant, with normal increases in productivity, GDP must grow by 2pc-3pc. This is the flip side of all those arguments that increased economic wealth does not make us all happier. We do actually know that the presence of economic [...]

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Reports on this paper from the Sutton Trust. The richest independent schools have been criticised for devoting a smaller portion of their income to bursaries for poor students than their less well-off counterparts, according to new research. Some journo, commentator, politician, is going to say that it’s appalling that Eton behaves this way. That would [...]

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He will propose a “carrot and stick” approach to ensuring that banks maintain lending to struggling enterprises. The strangenesses: 1) We all now agree that lending money to people who cannot pay it back is a terribly bad idea. We’re in a recession (well, not technically, but you know what I mean), there are more [...]

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At the ASI. A little extra piece on Huhne’s no nuclear subsidy argument.

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From a German book 100 years ago: “Everyone will be a member of parliament,” she assured readers, “even the idiots.” We ended up with only the idiots of course.

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An organisation such as the BBC, committed to impartiality and accuracy, is seen as a last bulwark against populist government by the mob. Lord forbid that the demos, the common people, might be allowed to get a word in edgeways, eh?

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Here. Invention moves faster than innovation. Peeps invent new gadgets and geegaws faster than people actually innovate by using them. No one would think that the 88 year old William Baumol has been pointing this out for decade upon decade really. Guy Dammann is the music critic of the Times Literary Supplement and writes on [...]

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If it was good enough for Errol Flynn it’s good enough for me Amy Winehouse

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Trafigura founder Graham Sharp’s £3m gift to Oxford university causes anger Donation linked to scandal-hit oil trading company should be rejected, say Oxford students and teaching staff Twits. Cash the cheque and use it to educate people. It’s the education that counts, not where the money came from. Adam Bouyamourn, a second-year politics, philosophy and [...]

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At the ASI. It’s not so much what the law is it’s whether the law is impartially applied.

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