Tim Worstall

Now you might say, if this stuff is so out of fashion, shouldn’t it be dropped from the curriculum? But the funny thing is that while old-fashioned macro has increasingly been pushed out of graduate programs – it takes up only a few pages in either the Blanchard-Fischer or Romer textbooks that I am assigning, [...]

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Workers in the rural employment program aren’t allowed to use machines, for example, and have to dig instead with pick axes and shovels. The idea is to create as many jobs as possible for unskilled workers.

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Why Are General Motors Shares Stuck in Reverse? Because it’s a shitty company making shitty products. Next?

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So, Ritchie tells us that: First we need to eliminate those wasteful market mechanisms. Yers, you see that competition thing is just so terrible isn’t it? Damn near trade! Then we can see what people who actually know what they’re talking about say about competition in health care. You know, people who bother to go [...]

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At the ASI. Even in the US, the poor are getting richer.

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Says Johann Hari. As a recommendation.

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Few yet realise the scale of the conservative revolution in progress. Professors Peter Taylor-Gooby and Gerry Stoker have just revealed that by 2013 public spending will be a lower proportion of GDP in Britain than in the US. The paper is here. They actually predict it by 2015 (page 6). And at 41% of GDP [...]

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Why Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, not Oxford? Because there is already a title associated with Oxford, the Earl of Oxford and Asquith. And no, you can’t go around making someone a Duke of a place when you’ve already got an Earl of that place. Good grief. Yes, they might be odd rules but rules [...]

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When even The Guardian says you’ve been numpties then yes, you’ve been numpties: It is not yet known how many groups have been affected in total. A Facebook spokeswoman explained that the profiles were suspended because they had not been registered correctly and denied that the removal of pages was politically motivated or instigated by [...]

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For one reason or another, we don’t seem to read much about the House of Windsor these days. Yet while the monarchy keeps a determinedly low profile, America provides the most compelling argument ever advanced for the institution to survive until doomsday. Its name is Donald Trump. For while venal, egomaniacal and repulsive leaders are [...]

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Britain’s accounting authority, the Accounting Standards Board, is consulting on plans to replace UK standards for private businesses, first published in 1971, with a new version based on international standards. However, two of the country’s leading accountancy membership bodies – the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) and the Association of Chartered [...]

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Typical politics: when you don’t like what a market is telling you, investigate the market. The investigations are relatively trivial: does Markit (a market reporting agency) have privileged, illegally privileged, access to market data and have the major players ganged up to make sure that trades are cleared through one specific clearing house rather than [...]

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These scions of the Guinness family: More recently, in 2004, Kindersley went into his local branch of Waitrose . Asked by the checkout girl if he would like some cash back, Kindersley (who was unfamiliar with this transaction) replied: “That’s really awfully sweet of you, how kind.” He suggested £50, which he took across the [...]

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From our favourite retired accountant we get this hysteria: Whilst lots got excited by the royal weeding more than 50 Facebook pages were shut down against their owners will. The full list is here. So much for freedom of speech in this country. Do you note any right wing ones in there? Well, actually, to [...]

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But the monarchy as a whole also promotes the norms of heterosexuality Can’t say that I find that all that convincing, to be honest. Given that 97% of the country is heterosexual I think that counting it as “the norm” seems fair enough. Further, given that we’ve had more than one King into a bit [...]

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Bloke’s put possibly more effort into translating and commenting on this than I did in writing it: Une autre façon de voir la chose, encore plus déprimante, est que la plus grande barrière à surmonter le problème des changements climatiques est le mouvement Vert. Ils (NDT: les Verts) ne nous laissent pas faire ce qui [...]

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Nice to see him admit it: Unlike most businesses hospitals pay VAT, and quite a lot of it, because what they supply is VAT exempt but what they buy still has in many cases (including on agency staff) VAT charged on it. So what has happened is that the VAT paid by hospitals has increased and as [...]

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My contribution to the Royal Wedding over at The Register: Di and Charlie did the aisle tango back in 1981 and now their son is about to follow suit……(…)…..That father and son have a 30-year gap between their being able to go gonad to gonad with their respective brides in lawful matrimony rather points up [...]

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