Tim Worstall

So, in conclusion, our writer says: No, it’s about listening and giving people the gift that costs the most: time. Quite right. In the headline the sub has turned this into: Listening to people and giving your time costs nothing Err, no. Really, no.  

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This woman’s vying for the Laurie Penny Award. Because this is not solely about stamping out the under-represented but over-reported incidents of violent protest. Taking part in peaceful civil disobedience will become much more frightening as those arrested at protests are dragged through the courts system. Eh? Despite the piecemeal nature of sentencing for those [...]

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John Liu, a film-maker who has been documenting the transformation, told a conference on “human security” in Caux, Switzerland, this week that the results had “far exceeded expectations”. Other speakers had similarly surprising experiences. Yacouba Sawadogo – an innovative, illiterate and eloquent small farmer from Burkino Faso – experimented with digging holes every metre across [...]

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“If the European Union could monetise the value of the credibility it has destroyed it would be richest organisation on earth,” said one major credit manager. Reading more of the story, it seems that they deliberately did not include any consequences of a sovereign default….ho hum.

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Male Organ and Economic Growth: Does Size Matter*? Abstract This paper explores the link between economic development and penile length between 1960 and 1985. It estimates an augmented Solow model utilizing the Mankiw-Romer-Weil 121 country dataset. The size of male organ is found to have an inverse U-shaped relationship with the level of GDP in [...]

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So, I finally notice that Amazon does free delivery to Portugal. I also note that Amazon does groceries. Woo Hoo! 2 litres of HP, a 2 kg pack of Marmite , Pataks Pickles, here we come! Ah. Groceries sold by Amazon are not deliverable to Portugal. Groceries sold through Amazon but not by Amazon do [...]

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Our average debt in the UK is 14 years old. No. Our debt has, on average, 14 years to maturity. There is, you know, a difference between how long ago we borrowed the money and how long we’ve got until we have to pay it back. A fairly important difference even.

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THE three Crown Dependencies are in danger of going bankrupt, tax avoidance campaigner Richard Murphy claimed yesterday. And there I was thinking that Mr. Murphy had been telling us for years that countries can’t go bankrupt, however much they borrow.

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Anyone who can make comedy out of economics has something going for him! Entirely so. Then again, the standup economist is doing so intentionally unlike…..

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OK, yes, the Coastguard does excellent work. But Dear Lord in Heaven, how can you write an entire editorial about the rescue of mariners at sea without mentioning the RNLI? I mean seriously? The Coastguard answers the telephones, it’s the RNLI that puts out the vast majority of the boats. Yes, of course, I’m seeing [...]

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At this perilous juncture, there’s not much to be gained from saying that monetary union was always a daft idea. Nor is it helpful to bemoan the fact that the architects of the single currency left the edifice half-finished when they provided Europe with a central bank but not a finance ministry. The question is [...]

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At the ASI. The problem with “Nudge” is that all the nudging is about the prejudices of those doing the nudging.

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I’ve never understood why we allow our print media to support a particular political viewpoint. Words fail.

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Why Keynesianism doesn’t work in the here and now.

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This is quite fun: Tax evasion, tax avoidance, crime and corruption cannot be differentiated: Weird that we have different words for things that cannot be differentiated really. Even weirder that we have different laws, different punishments (ranging from none to a lot) for them as well. 4. The UK’s domicile rule, that helps make this [...]

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Yesterday we published a blog entitled “Murdoch: when it comes to taxes, instead of rendering unto Caesar, Murdoch has Caesar rendering unto him.”   It was based on some reporting, done in good faith, by David Cay Johnston, one of the U.S.’ top tax reporters and a Pulitzer prize winner. It was published by Reuters. [...]

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Increased resources to be made available to HM Revenue & Customs to tackle tax haven / secrecy jurisdiction abuse as well as tax avoidance and evasion in general; Spend more on the taxmen who belong to the taxmans’ union that paid Ritchie to write the report. My word, that is a surprising thing to find [...]

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Berlusconi’s not to blame for Italian problems. But we should blame him anyway. There is no doubt that the Italian economy is in deep trouble. The huge state debt has been in place for decades. Right, predates Silvio then. The sooner Berlusconi goes, the better, although the deep structural problems inherent in the Italian economy [...]

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Former Wall St Journal owners: ‘We wouldn’t have sold if we had known’ Bancroft family members, who controlled Dow Jones & Company, say they would have resisted Murdoch bid in 2007 Bollocks, they were gagging for the money, desperate for someone to buy them out.

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Fukushima workers brave radiation and heat for £80 a day Fears grow for inexperienced contractors working in Japanese heatwave to bring stricken nuclear reactors under control Then when you read the story there’s absolutely nothing at all about the radiation being dangerous. It’s actually about the fact that Japoan in the summer is a hot [...]

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