Tim Worstall

Have to say that these two consecutive (well, consecutive on my timeline or whatever) amused me: @spanneredbooks Bert Random @wood5y Pretty much – Worstall is a libertarian zealot, with a really unpleasant (and often hypocritical) view of the world… @alikichapple alikichapple @RegularGrrrl Don’t worry too much about Worstall, he is a hard-right authoritarian conservative who [...]

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Others d not share that view. The criticism that has arisen is that of the 100 who signed the letter to the Observer not all were ‘economists’. Some were social scientists, others accountants or in business schools and others, like me have professional and not academic post graduate qualifications. Those who make such comment utterly [...]

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Fukushima nuclear plant could take 30 years to clean up Removal of fuel rods and decommissioning of reactors could take decades, warns Japan’s atomic commission So, err, how long does it normally take to decommission a reactor? I have this vague sort of idea that you wait a decade or two anyway to get rid [...]

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It takes one tonne of rock to produce enough gold particles to fashion a wedding ring. Blimey, that’s a rich mine, no wonder they’re so keen to get digging in a national park. A more normal gold mine would be 1 gramme per tonne rock. And unless you’re at the very cheap end of the [...]

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So Silvio’s involved, eh? Mr Berlusconi, 75, is accused of having sexual relations with belly dancer Karima El Mahroug at one of the evenings he hosted at his lavish villa and at the time she was just 17 years old. Miss El Mahroug was one of 33 women who attended the parties and at which [...]

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What hope is there when even the newspaper writers, the specialists, don’t understand what is going on? Richard Tyler is the Telegraph’s (both daily and Sunday) “Enterprise Editor“. European leaders remain under immense pressure to provide more detail about the terms of last week’s refinancing proposals, which are set to cut Greek debts by 50pc, [...]

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Mr Truell, founder of the Pensions Corporation, a pensions buy-out firm, said research by the London School of Economics estimated the public sector pension liability at £1.3 trillion. If the Treasury issued gilts to plug the gap, the resulting fund could bankroll infrastructure projects that would generate returns used to meet the pension liabilities as [...]

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Still not quite right. “Appropriate” is the wrong word. “Market clearing price” is the right phrase.

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No, I don’t understand this. Don’t know how to use Excel. But apparently some do care more than others…..

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The coveted Doublefacepalm has been awarded to the EFSF. They’re thinking of borrowing in yuan…..

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At the ASI. Why we’ll have to abolish the licensing of pharmaceuticals.

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Oh dearie me. 100 economists sign up for this? This is not to argue that the deficit can be ignored indefinitely. But if demand could be restored and the employment rate increased, a significant portion of the structural deficit would disappear, leaving the rest to be financed through a combination of controls on spending at [...]

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Letter to the Observer here. All the usual tosh from all the usual suspects. Just about the entire economics department from SOAS. Prem Sikka (yes, they are counting an accountant as an economist), R. Murphy (ditto), the bird who writes Gaian Economics, various nef-ites, Gregor Gall (professor of industrial relations I think, not an economist?). [...]

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Greece’s debts are still unsupportable, even though the country is relieved of half of them. This is nonsense, tripe. Why is this man paid to write columns? Greece has not been relieved of half of its debts. Leave aside his opinions in this column (erm, current travails in the eurozone show that Britain should join [...]

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When the #Occupywherever crew express some inchoate rage about how the system just isn’t working and we need to rethink the whole thing from the ground up they’re regarded in some quarters as expressing the obvious wisdom of the people. When the eurosceptic crew express some inchoate rage about how the system just isn’t working [...]

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One understands the anger etc. but it’s not really quite the same is it?

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The new Chinese divorce law: Since August 13th, when China’s Supreme People’s Court reinterpreted the country’s marriage law, many of the women leaving marriage registry offices like the one in Chaoyang have more than just the end of their marriages to bemoan. According to the new law, residential property is no longer to be regarded [...]

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A man who divided opinion without ever appearing to care much what anyone thought of him, he was simply an odd chap. Yes, yes, he was. And this country needs more odd chaps. As does every country, of course. We’ve just lost one and who is going to step up?

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Lucky man has found paradise on this earth. Bastard, of course. How dare he when we haven’t/can’t/ inequality of happiness etc etc cont. pg 94 Grauniad

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A quite astonishing finding. If you define Scandinavian social democracy as being social justice, when you go and measure social justice you find that the Scandinavian countries are socially just. Who would have thought that such an outcome would be possible?

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