Tim Worstall

Eh? In December, I wrote about the concept of the balanced-budget multiplier and of raising taxes and government expenditure by the same amount, dollar for dollar…, such a policy would be one-for-one expansionary… Yer what? Because of the multiplier effect, it is possible to change aggregate demand (Y) keeping a balanced budget. The Government increases [...]

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At the ASI. Being against licensure.

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Willy Hutton says it’s been saved. Must be dying then. Hutton is, as you will remember, the man who insistied that we should have a Gordon Mac to shore up the housing market: mere weeks before Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae went bust. The man’s an infallible lodestone pointing to what not to do. A [...]

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Kristen Hawkes of the University of Utah, after studying the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, has proposed that grandmothers must have played an important role in the ascent of Homo sapiens. “Good foraging grannies mean healthy Hadza kids – and that was also true for our ancestors,” she said. Hawkes argues that when our apeman ancestors [...]

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Or a branch, come to that? The proposed £2.5bn sale of 632 Lloyds Banking Group branches has been thrown into doubt after it emerged that only two formal bids have been filed. Apparently the opportunity to be a mid-sized retail bank isn’t worth all that much.      

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One of the shorthand ways in which you can describe the English Revolution is the wresting of financial powers from the Monarchy by Parliament. It’s a pretty long revolution too, the apotheosis of monarchical financial power possibly being the system set up by William the Bastard after 1066. Slightly ameloirated by Simon de Montfort’s Parliament, [...]

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As you regular readers will know, I’m the scandium man. And as the scandium man I’ve been working on a new source for scandium, demand currently being higher than supply. In the last three days I’ve had people looking for multi-year supplies….note, this is just the enquiries of the last three days…..of $12 millions’ worth. [...]

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Please note this well: Gentzkow and Shapiro have studied this question in the US. Using an objective (if imperfect) measure of bias, they found that newspapers closely match the political biases of their potential readers, as measured by votes cast in the 2004 presidential election, and by the source of campaign contributions to each party. [...]

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At the ASI. It could be that the way to make Keynesianism work is to make sure the politicians don’t get to decide how the fiscal stimulus is spent.

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It’s all ideology: new research in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine this week shows the UK is among the most efficient health services in the world, in lives saved per pound spent. Umm, no, the report doesn’t in fact show that. At least, if I’m reading it right, I don’t think it [...]

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Yet it is time that foreign churches, as well as sending money and priests to the Middle East, used their influence to reform family law in the region. Who will bring pressure to bear to modernise the dense muddle of Christian personal status laws in the Middle East? The majority of the 14 million Arab [...]

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The poster boy for feudal Britain has lost his job. It was not before time, but even Prince Andrew’s departure from his role as the UK’s special trade envoy was cloaked in the muted deference that characterises so much of the coverage of the royal family. The palace stated only that he would “undertake trade [...]

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Chris Huhne has ordered a private inquiry into which fossil fuel lobbyists “got to” the Conservative MEPs who defied David Cameron and voted down an ambitious carbon emissions target in the European parliament on 5 July. “I have asked for a full analysis of what happened,” said the energy and climate change minister, speaking at [...]

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“I actually don’t like music that much,” Phil Collins admits at the Glenfiddich Mojo Awards. “I don’t really listen to music.

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Wealthy, upper middle class, lefty, Eton and Cambridge, reports on what a very nasty man Rupert Murdoch is, from his holiday home in Tuscany. To beat that we’d need the son of a senior Conservative writing columns on how bad capitalism is, the son of the ex-head of the BBC telling us all Trotsky was [...]

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German taxpayers will pay the Greeks’ bills and aid Europe’s banks as they continue to profit from 20% interest on their sovereign loans. Are we sure that Sir Simon knows what he’s talking about? First error: no one at all is getting 20% on sovereign loans. A loan is not a bond: very different things. [...]

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The term “genetic modification” provokes widespread fears about the corporate control of agriculture, and of the unknown. However, results from 25 years of EU-funded research show that there is “no scientific evidence associating GM plants with higher risks for the environment or for food and feed safety than conventional plants and organisms”. This of course [...]

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Cash-strapped governments have long wanted to grab a bigger share of the wealth we hold in housing, now the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says Britain should adopt a Continental European-style property tax. Pier Carlo Padoan, chief economist of the OECD, says George’s Osborne’s cuts are “appropriate,” but the Chancellor must do much [...]

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The same happens with speculative investments in tangible commodities like oil or wheat. Again, speculators have no use for the commodity in question, but they drive up prices for those who do. We all contribute to the unearned wealth of speculators each time we put fuel in our cars. And in poor countries, hungry people [...]

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Blue Labour is about more than just Maurice Glasman. But Maurice Glasman………. still has a great deal to offer Labour. Let’s allow him this mistake and move on. If a Tory (or UKIPper or BNP or…) said it then we’d never, ever, forget the racist little xenophobe. But Maurice is one of us so let’s [...]

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