Tim Worstall

So, what I want to know is, what will be the demand for gallium, germanium and indium if multi-junction solar cells become the industry standard? I don’t need accurate figures: to somewhere around an order of magnitude is just fine. First question is why can’t I work it out myself? Well, partly because my brain [...]

[Read more →]

Mr. Hutton: allowing destabilising and economically valueless financial transactions to balloon in value to many times world GDP Come along now, even you stayed awake long enough in the economics lectures to know that this is impossible. GDP measures value. So it’s impossible for the value of something which makes up GDP to be greater [...]

[Read more →]

Far more reviled, it seems, was his second wife Laila, a feisty brunette more than 20 years his junior, who was dubbed “The Regent of Carthage” for her power behind the throne. A former hairdresser from a humble background, she stands accused of using her marriage to Mr Ben Ali to turn her family, the [...]

[Read more →]

Werl, gotta larf, aint yer? New figures published by The Sunday Telegraph show that 2010 was, by one authoritative measure, the least windy year since 1824. It appears that as we pout up ever more windmills we have ever less wind to power them. This number is well known among those who have been staying [...]

[Read more →]

At the ASI. How short selling works and why markets tend to self regulate.

[Read more →]

What is the alternative to an economy built on finance? It’s a good question too. The answer being the economy we’ve got. The City is 3-4% of the economy, the wider financial sector (car and life insurance, pensions etc) around 8 or 9%. So, given that 91-97% of our current economy is not finance I’d [...]

[Read more →]

Pretty good, hunh?

[Read more →]

I thought it was Dave C who was supposed to have had the coke habit? Note to Guardian: he’s not been Secretary of State for anything for some time now, he’s the Leader of the Opposition. If you’re not willing to get a new photo done, at least change the name of the .jpg

[Read more →]

Tee hee: It was a moment of acute humiliation for the Russian Academy of Sciences. When the learned body produced an English language version of its website last year, the results caused a stir. The Institut Belka (Institute of Protein Research) was translated as the Squirrel Institute (Institut Belki), while Yury Osipov, the mathematician who [...]

[Read more →]

Something I’ve grumbled on about for some time now. Yes, medical treatment is largely a service and given Baumol’s Cost Disease one that is going to increase in price relative to manufactures over time. The problem is that productivity in services increases more slowly than productivity in manufactures and yet wages are set on the [...]

[Read more →]

The unprecedented scale of undercover operations used by police to monitor Britain’s political protest movements was laid bare last night after a third police spy was identified by the Guardian. News of the existence of the 44-year-old male officer comes as regulators prepare two separate official inquiries into the activities of this hitherto secret police [...]

[Read more →]

At the ASI. Noting that Denmark and Sweden, those much admired social democracies, are in many ways more classically liberal than we are.

[Read more →]

see more Failbook Guess they’re not from West Virginia then

[Read more →]

The FT has reported that KPMG is planning to give up its graduate recruitment programme in the UK, and is instead planning to recruit before young people go to university. It is intending to take on 75 school leavers a year and send them on a four-year accountancy degree at Durham University, for this which [...]

[Read more →]

Yes, he goes a bit awry here: A culture where taxes seem to be “a bad thing” has been allowed to develop within the political parties of the UK, best exemplified by the fear of increasing the rate of income tax even when fiscal and social policy might require it.   In this environment politicians [...]

[Read more →]

Biodynamic farming is, as we know, organic farming taken to a higher state of woo. Field preparations, for stimulating humus formation: 500: (horn-manure) a humus mixture prepared by filling the horn of a cow with cow manure and burying it in the ground (40–60 cm below the surface) in the autumn. It is left to decompose [...]

[Read more →]

There are plenty of examples: the other three nations enjoy proportional representation, the scrapping of failed policies such as the private-finance initiative and SATs tests in schools, an officially sanctioned network of credit unions in Wales, land reform in Scotland, fairer energy pricing in Northern Ireland. In these respects, the three smaller nations of the [...]

[Read more →]

It doesn’t matter how many mass killings take place; the constitutional right of all Americans, even mentally unstable ones, to bear arms is now generally accepted as inviolable. Because that’s what constitutional right means you see, that the right is inviolable.

[Read more →]

There is, however, an even more radical approach to pay transparency that would have a profound impact on our remuneration culture. That is to require all employers, by law, to disclose the remuneration of all their workers, in whatever form that remuneration may be paid. Wouldn’t that come up against some combination of the data [...]

[Read more →]

Clive Aslet doesn’t seem to know whether he wants to scare us out of our shorts or whether it’s all going to be just fine. Couple of minor quibbles: Since 1997, the UK dairy herd has shrunk by 500,000 (22 per cent), vegetable production is down by 36,000 hectares and there are 3 million fewer [...]

[Read more →]