Tim Worstall

But the flaw in your logic is that most European universities are entirely shit.

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The Joseph Rowntree Trust made something of an error (and only the truly *ahem* cynical would call it a deliberate one) when they started to compile their Minimum Income Standard. The basic idea, as I’ve pointed out before, is just fine. Poverty is indeed defined by the society around you. As Adam Smith pointed out, [...]

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We can either just send the clever kids to Uni like we used to and afford to pay them a grant, so that they leave with very little debt; or we can allow all the duffers to go, in which case we can’t afford to subsidise every one of them,

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Prompted by this, another in our series of idiot questions. Umm, isn’t the point of the system that those who are making the best profits, those profits reflecting their delivery of the most value with the least use of inputs, expand, while those losing money, reflecting their production of less value with greater use of [...]

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So, the bloke got his end away, pissed off the wife, the mistress got pregnant….and now, years later, he finds out the kiddy’s not his. A married TV star who won a court order to hush up an affair has discovered the ‘love child’ he thought he had fathered is not his after all. The [...]

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Luis Enrique and I pulled up The Guardian’s economics leader writer yesterday for making a hash of an economic explanation. Getting very confused between principal/agent problems and who actually is the principal with which the agent will have problems. He’s come back and answered us: TimWorstall and LuisEnrique: thanks for your responses. You both make [...]

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In Nordic nations, women live longer, have high employment rates and often enjoy generous maternity and paternity schemes. There are more than 1.5 women for every man enrolled in tertiary education. Gender equality, claim the report’s authors, boosts growth in both rich and poor countries. When gender equality is proclaimed by pointing to gender inequality.

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In Hungary, anxiety is focused on another red sludge reservoir on the banks of the Danube at Almasfuzito, 50 miles north of Budapest. The waste here is similarly produced by turning bauxite into aluminium. Seven pools hold 12m tonnes of hazardous waste, including an estimated 120,000 tonnes of heavy metals. Well, it depends on what [...]

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Yanayev famously appeared at a press conference to announce that he was replacing Gorbachev who, he claimed, “is undergoing treatment, himself, in our country. He is very tired after these many years and he will need some time to get better.” But Yanayev could not produce a medical certificate to support his claims and the [...]

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Rodney O’Brien bought Springfield House, in Kingsdon, Somerset, a six bedroom mansion dating from the 1840′s and set in 6.31 acres, in 1997. At the High Court in London he said he felt “lucky” when he moved in, but he later discovered the Grade 2 listed, £1.75 million, property was under the flight path of [...]

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Here.

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Oh Dear Lord: I’ve already noted Sir Philip Green’s report on supposed government purchasing inefficiency, and the gaping holes in it, here and here. But then it occurred to me – if he’s so good at buying why do his stores ever have sales? After all, aren’t sales just an opportunity for a store to [...]

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This, the authors claim, helps explain what Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers have called the paradox of declining female happiness. I refute it thusly: Opportunity Costs. It is not that when there are a larger number of choices that we choose to do those things which make us unhappier. It is that having a greater [...]

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David Friedman would like your views.

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To be somewhat nerdy about it, the deadweight loss of a tax rises with the square of the tax rate.  Thus, increasing or decreasing a tax rate by 1 percentage point has a small effect on economic well-being if the initial tax rate is low, but it has large effect if the initial tax rate is high.

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Aditya Chakrabortty: In just a few minutes, he summed up what economists call the principal-agent argument: the belief that companies should be run solely to secure rewards for their shareholders – and that considerations such as workers’ welfare, customer loyalty or doing right by business partners came way way down the agenda. Err, no, the [...]

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Yes, I’m against the death penalty anyway but this just makes the gorge rise: and Iran waits until juvenile offenders are 18 before executing them, Happy Birthday, eh?

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At Channel 4 News we enjoy digital engagement. Our website is built for it, we tweet away all day and blog whenever we have something to say. Twitter is for when you don’t have anything to say.

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A host of psychological experiments demonstrate that it doesn’t work like this. Instead of performing a rational cost-benefit analysis, we accept information that confirms our identity and values, and reject information that conflicts with them. We mould our thinking around our social identity, protecting it from serious challenge. Confronting people with inconvenient facts is likely [...]

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From blog to blog: It’s a cast-iron case of Ritchiebollocks.

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