Tim Worstall

What bugs me here is these people not getting the implications of the very things they themselves are saying. Actors from black, Asian or other ethnic minority groups appeared in only 5% of the almost 35,000 TV ads screened in the UK last year, according to a report. The report by Clearcast, the body that [...]

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The notorious Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, or CRS, are outraged at an official decree stating they can no longer drink wine or beer with their meals. The idea that the riot police would even think of having a glass with their lunch will blow the minds of most Americans. Slightly surprise most English too. I’ve [...]

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The Prime Minister expressed unease about the way the judiciary was riding roughshod over the democratic process and using human rights legislation to introduce a privacy law by the back door. “What ought to happen in a parliamentary democracy is that Parliament, which you elect and put there, should decide how much protection we want [...]

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margaretd: @S8mB @worstall Oh god, yes! Hm, what’s rare in Cuba? Can you become a trader of freedom? That’s the question over on Twatter. So, what should a good little capitalist be thinking of doing to make some cash out of the newly liberalising Cuba? Actually, it’s not finding out what’s rare in Cuba and [...]

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I used to think that those who describe the Coalition Government as ‘Maoist’ in its overall approach were just a little over the top. Now I’m not so sure. Even after one year in power, its continuing contempt for anything that worked before, and its readiness to get rid of things long before it’s got [...]

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As so many tell us, Cuba really is freer than the UK. However, Raúl was at pains to point out that this was not “privatisation” but rather a release of the state from the need to manage what he called “non-strategic” activities. He actually delineated what he saw the state’s responsibilities to be: to protect [...]

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On the subject of shale gas: “Any money and investment that is going to gas is money that is not going to renewables,” said Brook Riley, campaigner at Friends of the Earth. “This is a threat to renewables.” Could be, yes. This is the concept known as opportunity cost. We can only use an economic [...]

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My, isn’t this good news? Central to the lobbying effort is a report claiming that the EU could meet its 2050 carbon targets €900bn more cheaply by using gas than by investing in renewables. The argument is all over whether we should use shale gas or not. If we do, we can meet the targets [...]

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This an interesting one. David Cameron is under pressure to block a demand from Brussels for British taxpayers to give an extra £682 million next year to the European Union budget. Simple answer: bugger off matey. But the interesting thing is what was then said. Janusz Lewandowski, the EU budget commissioner who announced the increases [...]

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The Guardian prints an article saying that not everything is peachy in Cuba. And of course, we all count down, 3…2…1…..to see how quickly the comments section starts to slag it off. A child born in Havana will still live longer than a child born in Washington. But apparently the Amerikan ‘freedom’ to choose from [...]

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I’ve been getting questions about what happens when the Fed wraps up QE2 — related especially to Bill Gross’s public view that interest rates will shoot up. OK. Gross has famously sold his entire Treasuries holding and is in fact short them. He is positioned for a fall in Treasury prices. If you believe that [...]

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Ed Balls that is: First he made the extraordinary claim that Britain could have gone the same way as Portugal if it were not for his deficit reduction plan. Leave aside the fact that Portugal is locked into the eurozone – so has no exchange-rate flexibility and the same interest rates as growing countries like Germany [...]

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This democracy thing, it’s just fine until it hits the things that I believe in: So far, it would seem, people are most interested in talking about equalities – by a very wide margin. Can we find a way to enable people to discuss how the still very young Equality Act can be helped to [...]

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As Bill McKibben said, the Chamber “spends more money lobbying than the next five lobbies combined …” “It spent more money on politics last year than the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee combined, and 94% of that went to climate deniers.” Interesting, no? Here’s the list of the top ten donors to [...]

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There’s a special type of radioactivity you see, much more dangerous than the type that everyone’s talking about. No, really, there is. In his article on “the confusing world of radiation exposure”, readers’ editor Chris Elliott was right to point out that getting a whole year’s sunshine in an hour would fry him to a [...]

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If true, this is of course very naughty. FTC Capital, which is based in Vienna, claimed the banks colluded to artificially depress the cost of borrowing and limit trade in Libor-based derivatives during the period. But do note what the allegation is. That the banks depressed LIBOR. That is, everyone with a mortgage tied to [...]

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For what it’s worth, I thought that the general moral standards I encountered in industry rather higher than those I encountered in the universities. A retired academic from one of the world’s great universities.

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What? “There is also the issue of prestige. By introducing a free market in to higher education and forcing universities to compete with each other for students, institutions are afraid that if they charge less than their next door neighbour students will see their courses as inferior.” It’s amazing how that works out, isn’t it? [...]

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As detailed here, from the OECD. Another is that economic growth is the answer to poverty; if you believe that inequality fuels growth, then living with inequality is the best way to defeat poverty. However, economic growth and poverty have not been strongly related within the OECD in the past generation. There is little evidence [...]

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The Murphmeister pronounces again: As he argues, strength is in diversity, as  real sciences recognise but economics does not. You what? No, seriously, where on earth does any even the tiniest teensiest piece of economics argue that diversity is a bad thing? It’s certainly not this neo-liberal part of is, that’s for sure. You know, [...]

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