Tim Worstall

Speaking before the event, protester Mark Bergfeld said: “This college will be nothing more than a bastion of the rich. It represents the full marketisation of higher education.” Err, yes? Another protester, who gave her name as Rosa, said: “It’s a symptom of the new system the Tories want to introduce where education is just [...]

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Scottish Power became the first of the six major suppliers to disclose a new round of price rises. It told five million customers that gas and electricity bills would go up by 19 per cent and 10 per cent respectively. The increase, which will take effect on Aug 1, will push households’ average annual bills [...]

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Greenpeace activists dressed as Ken dolls abseiled down the side of Mattel’s headquarters on Tuesday to unfurl a banner saying Barbie packaging contributes to rainforest destruction. No, not publicity for the rainforests, the environment of Gaia, but publicity for Greenpeace? Wonder how much protesting Barbie gains in donations?

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Two from Ritchie: There has been some publicity over the last few days about H M Revenue & Customs  having secured the names of 500,000 people in this country who have offshore bank accounts. Interesting number. OK. How come HMRC has 500,000 names of tax evaders but there’s been no action? Eh? What is the link [...]

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Other banks such as Barclays got in on the act, but commodity funds remained a pretty small business – until the turn of the millennium, when two things happened. First, the US Congress rushed through a piece of legislation that permitted pension funds and others to invest in these new commodity indices. No. The CFMA [...]

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In contrast, the real wages of top professionals such as doctors and lawyers has more than doubled. The pay of many relatively unskilled and semi-skilled workers (including bakers, forklift-truck drivers, packers and bottlers) has actually fallen in real terms since the 1970s. Yes, that’s what happens in an economy. As technology changes the demands for [...]

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Carbon emissions have risen at most of the UK’s universities over the past five years, a new league table published by the Guardian reveals, prompting concern that institutions will fail to meet strict targets for reductions by 2020. …. According to milestones set in the higher education sector’s carbon reduction strategy, a maximum increase in [...]

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Here’s something that would be amusing for a bored blogger to research. AC Grayling’s new college (erm, New College) will be offering London University International Degrees. That’s the sort of external degree that many places around the world offer. I think I’m right in saying that the LUID in economics is overseen by the LSE [...]

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Is it possible to get those who know to confirm this about pay rates? Based on the information published by the university so far, Tim Leunig, chief economist with the thinktank Centreforum, calculates that the New College of the Humanities could expect to pay its academics £75 for a one-to-one tutorial and £250 for a [...]

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Money. It’s icky, innit?

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But when a group of 2,000 elderly British cruise ship passengers docked at Los Angeles for a short stop-off during a five-star cruise around America it was, in the words of one of them, more like arriving at Guantanamo Bay. During their £10,000, two-and-a-half month “Alaska Adventure” tour from the Arctic to the Caribbean, the [...]

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As the Mail ponted out, Hugh Bonneville is so uxorious as to be known as the Ryan Giggs of the thespian world. So it’s with great interest that we follow the interesting stories about this great actor through the press. The actor, who has become a family favourite for his role in the 1910s costume [...]

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You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh over this one. So Our Amanda comes out in The Guardian telling us all that Anthony Weiner just didn’t send pics of his (covered but excited) genitals to various women, oh no, this is just the righties manufacturing a scandal about good little [...]

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That well known dance move: But after its experts visited Britain for their annual survey, the IMF also warned of “significant” risks that growth will remain feeble and unemployment “unacceptably high”. Some economists have said that, if the economy does stall, Mr Osborne should be prepared to relax his programme of cuts to borrow more [...]

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AnnPettifor Ann Pettifor Sign now to defend media diversity and independence. Say no to Fox News in the UK. Eh? Banning a TV channel is defending media diversity?

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D_Blanchflower David Blanchflower by RichardJMurphy Economic growth comes from bank lending or government spending. Osborne’s plan provides neither. His change in rhetoric is telling… Eh? Economic growth comes from moving an asset or resource from a lower valued use to a higher valued one. Which can be done with the aid of bank lending, sure. [...]

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At El Reg. Hating on Oxfam.

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Here’s our man: And the outcome  of this mantra, often imposed on developing countries as a consequence of IMF loans?  It’s always an economic disaster:  the fact that the developing world has not made little or no progress in the last 30 years is almost entirely the fault of the IMF imposing such absurdly inappropriate [...]

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Sadly, he doesn’t. The truth is that the NHS is actually a stunningly cost-effective supplier of high-quality healthcare, So let us look at the actual report, from the Commonwealth Fund. To start, we should note that the Commonwealth Fund is about as independently minded as Compass is. They’re actively campaigning for “single payer” in the [...]

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In 1960, the assets held by the top 10 banks (see Figure 4) were equivalent to 40 per cent of national income. By 2010, they had grown to almost five times the size of the economy. Such expansion might have been beneficial if it had improved the productive base of the economy. Fair point. Over [...]

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