Tim Worstall

Historically, over the history of the species that is, we think that something like 80% of women had children. One in five women is childless by age of 45 So we seem to be bang on the long term average then.

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There is a touch of PJ O’Rourke in how Tim likes to use a quip to make a serious point. Given that I have done my best to steal that writing style…….

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Especially, speculation via the CDS market good says EU: You can see why the EU might have wanted to keep the report secret: it concludes that the sovereign CDS market is a force for good, and that curtailing it in any way is likely to be a bad idea. The full report is here. Eat [...]

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This woman is 51. She is a TV “health guru” advocating a holistic approach to nutrition and ill health, promoting exercise, a pescetarian diet high in organic fruits and vegetables. She recommends detox diets colonic irrigation and supplements, also making statements that yeast is harmful, that the colour of food is nutritionally significant, and about [...]

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This we knew, but look which paper is carrying the news?

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see more Failbook

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Yup. Still, we have good reason to believe that there is a whole lot of causation at work here. Not least because of what we like to call the Jersey Disease, whereby financial inflows from the financial sector tend to crowd out and tilt the exchange rate against other sectors. Stunning, eh? They’ve just found [...]

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Tee hee, they really have managed to get themselves into a twist here. We are sorry to report that journalists up and down the country swallow and regurgitate this puffery. This is PWC’s Total Tax Contribution rearing its ugly head once more. As we have remarked before, it is just bogus. Bob Mcintyre of Citizens [...]

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I’ll continue to enjoy Lennon’s music.  But his political ‘philosophy’ is to human enlightenment what, say, a rock concert by Milton Friedman would have been to human entertainment. Don Boudreaux

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On the veneration of John Lennon: Don’t knock it. There’s not many cargo cults that have an actual airport.

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Interesting piece of research: that if we mimic other people’s accents when talking to them, we understand what they are saying better. As if by using their accent (as best we can mind) we’re training our own ears to understand them better: not, as some might think, in order that they understand us better (you [...]

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Residents of Scottish hamlet Altnaharra remain stoical in face of temperatures as low as 21.1C That global warming’s come on a bit, hasn’t it?

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Different languages have different rules about word order. Some modify the endings of words so that it doesn’t really matter all that much where they are in a sentence. Others make word order highly important. English is a bit of a mish mash in this (as it is in so many other aspects of language). [...]

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Y’know this thing we keep being told? That we should just borrow our way out of the slump? For there’s no way that anything else will work: all this talk of a bond buyers’ strike, of interest rates rising to offset any stimulus just not being about to happen? The yield on 10-year Treasuries – [...]

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Baptists and bootleggers is the phrase meaning two wildly unlikely allies pursuing the same goal for their own reasons. Baptists are in favour of prohibition because it stops peeps from consuming the demon booze: the bootleggers are in favour of prohibition for the profits to be made from supplying that now illegal demon booze. Thus [...]

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A senior family court judge allowed a British couple to keep a newborn child even though they had technically broken the law by giving more than “reasonable expenses” to the American natural mother. Mr Justice Hedley said the existing rules on payments were unclear, and that the baby’s welfare must be the main consideration. Only [...]

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Well, Andrew likes it.

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An anecdote if you prefer. A member of the extended family (recently divorced, young children, part time at uni training to be a teacher and currently on benefits….and yes, of course, familial support) was advised that actually, (and I don’t pretend to understand the details of the benefits system in sufficient depth to work this [...]

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Here’s a nice little admission from Ritchie: Now we can argue forever about whether tax is a disincentive to work, or not. I happen to think it probably is – but only when tax rates persistently above 50% at higher rates of income, although accept that this can also be the case at lower tax [...]

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Despite the claims made by some company directors and some apologists for this abuse, company directors are under no obligation to minimise their tax bills. I think it would be a very strong argument that for a company not to take the tax deductions and allowances as allowed by law would be a breach of [...]

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