Tim Worstall

Here. Almost worth moving to Edinburgh just so that you can vote for him. Almost, but it is in Scotland, isn’t it?

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But there will come a point when the labour and capital have been fully mobilised and the technological frontier more or less reached. And the question is: then what? Historically speaking, the answer is clear—growth slows to 2-3% per year. Because faster growth can’t be achieved from more intensive use of inputs (thanks to diminishing [...]

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As the Federal Government does for the Indian tribes? But, it is the exception – many tribes still lack access to even the most basic of human necessities. Some haven’t the infrastructure to provide running water, let alone business opportunities. The federal government continues to breach its trust responsibility, evidenced by staggering statistics: Native Americans [...]

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The closest experiment along these lines is probably Argentina’s exit in 2002 from its dollar exchange-rate peg (embodied in its currency board) to a floating regime that depreciated the peso by 300% in the first three months. I don’t think you can, can you? Depreciate by 300%? I think I know what they mean, the [...]

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When Williams made this argument for what he called moral luck, it provoked huge controversy. Wasn’t an act either moral or immoral, regardless of the consequences? Would Gauguin’s abandonment of his family have been justifiable if he’d drowned on the way to Tahiti? Or if he’d been simply a bad watercolourist? The argument is being [...]

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Sion Jenkins, the former deputy head teacher cleared of murdering his foster daughter Billie-Jo, has been refused compensation for the time he spent in jail before he was released. This may be how the system does work but it most certainly isn’t how it should work. Mr Jenkins was eventually cleared of killing Billie-Jo in [...]

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Here.

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So, just to recap: a woman who used to live with a lord in a 365-room mansion, now in a household with a combined income of some quarter of a million pounds a year, has read a PR puff commissioned and paid for to advertise a price comparison website, and uses this as evidence that [...]

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The distinction between sexuality itself and the submissive, identikit heterosexual performativity currently demanded of young women and girls is a crucial one. Only when we accept that girls have sexual agency can we ask why it is so often stripped from them by structures of violence, shame and abuse. Only when we understand that young [...]

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Accounting firms have offices in places where accountancy takes place. I don’t know how he comes up with these insights, I really don’t.

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How about you?

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At the ASI. Who really benefits from the Russian ban on grain exports?

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And sometimes it’s great for Stephen Fry going on a rant about something. For instance, during a discussion of Witchcraft he discusses how most witches put on trial in England were acquitted – and fewer than 500 hundred were killed for being witches, he says this about The Da Vinci Code… “We were much gentler [...]

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So, when he asked the canteen at HM Treasury to send up a fish-and-chips lunch for himself, Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of ­England, and four aides, he was astonished to be told that it would cost £148.58. A quick phone call from Mr Osborne established that if the men who run Britain’s economy [...]

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Nick Cohen on the Spirit Level stuff. Their arguments, buttressed by decades of research from around the world, seem self-evident to him. Once countries reach a certain level of wealth, what affects the citizenry is not the growth in GDP but the level of inequality. Man is a social primate and people who worry about [...]

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Since when was giving people a choice a good idea? The coalition’s obsession with self-determination, whether on schools or GPs, penalises the least able In short, no one should have choice because some are too ignorant to make use of it. If uncertainty about preserves is a problem one can probably live with, or possibly [...]

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Nearly a quarter of all people playing, coaching or refereeing professional football personally know a gay player, according to new research into attitudes towards homosexuality in the game.

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Here. Aerial view looking up Milsom Street to George Street and then Alfred Street behind it. Anyway, if you ever do go to Bath there’s a great little pub about 25 yards away from the bottom right hand corner of that photo.

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Within 10 years, the Gates Foundation is projected to have a GDP bigger than 70 per cent of the world’s nations. The Gates Foundation won’t have a GDP of course. But even if we were to compare the size of the fund to the size of a country’s economy it would still be nonsense. So, [...]

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Lordy be, painfully naive eco-wibble. Clones are bad because, well, industrial farming is bad. Industrial farming might well be bad but that’s got bugger all to do with whether cloning is bad or good. There is only one valid point that she manages to make: Both the US Food and Drug Administration and the European [...]

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