Tim Worstall

And equally irrelevant. The near ten-fold rise in bank chief executives’ pay from an average of $2.4m (£1.5m) in 1989 to $26m by 2007 could have been restrained to $3.4m if pay had been linked to the return made on assets said Andrew Haldane, executive director of the Bank. Mr Haldane said the return on [...]

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The camp forced St Paul’s to close for the first time since the Blitz and is costing local businesses thousands of pounds a day. But most of the protesters are heading home to sleep in their own beds at night. Infra red images taken by a police helicopter during the early hours show that only [...]

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See, we can so do this community thing with having to be told or directed to.

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I don’t really see myself as a mixed-race person, I see myself as an Englishman. It’s just such an unnecessary detail, I think. Seal. Quite, having gained the first prize ticket in the lottery of life why qualify it?

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We’ve this musing on public or private provision of public goods. For some reason I was musing on this earlier this morning when well before dawn I was out walking with my dogs and a simple question occurred to me, which was who pays for street lights in the right wing libertarian model of society? [...]

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Well, perhaps not, but his economic analysis is certainly on our side: But such action, we keep being told, is off the table. The statutes … supposedly prohibit this kind of thing, although one suspects that clever lawyers could find a way to make it happen. The broader problem, however, is that the whole euro [...]

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while massively increasing the priority and resources for family planning and women’s empowerment programmes in developing countries, enabling the 215 million women with an unmet need for contraception to control their own fertility. All the woe is doom merchants about population, they’re all always going on about contraception. As I’ve said all too often before, [...]

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I knew the word, knew what it meant, but hadn’t known (or perhaps had bothered to find out) where it came from. charity muggers Ah, OK. This is an intriguing typo as well: Critics argue Norris is a loose canon Senior priest on the rampage sort of thing…..  

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If the banks called the EU-ECB-IMF troika’s bluff, they would potentially face nationalisation. A “credit event” would risk triggering credit default swaps – the scale of losses from which cannot be accurately quantified. I would have thought that we would know the scale of losses from a credit event. Say the Greek default leads to [...]

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At the ASI. The over subsidised US solar panel industry is calling for tariff barriers on Chinese solar panels. Because the Chinese get subsidies.

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At Elderjuice,  a new and fun place to be. Why clean coal is such a problem and why G Brown could have had clean gas running already if only he’d been willing to lower a tax rate.

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So promoting economic and social policies that support the family, community and society so that people can achieve their own goals is fascist, is it? It’s exactly what Mussolini, Salazar and Franco all said they were doing. There is one irony though: when he also wants ( as no doubt he will) to cast it [...]

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But the way we analyse and discuss our plight is crazily upside down. The Department for Business, which does have some interesting ideas for how to promote innovation, is browbeaten by the wider politics into making it a priority to take the “burden” off business, allegedly to stimulate growth. Yet on most benchmarks, the UK [...]

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8-7

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I agree asbolutely that public health is important. Lipkin says societies need to be more proactive in combating the dangers. “People need to understand that science is critical to address these kinds of challenges and respond in real time,” he said. “We need to be prepared. We need better bio-surveillance, with better detection and better [...]

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I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that Equatorial Guinea is a vile dictatorship but this little bit of copying of one of the worst ideas from elsewhere in Africa leapt out at me: A teacher told me schools used to make a little money by selling uniforms to parents. Last year, however, Obiang’s family [...]

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Two hundred people, most of them elderly, will die in Britain of cold-related diseases every day this winter, according to calculations by Britain’s leading advocacy group for old people, Age UK. “The fact that these ‘excess’ deaths occur in winter makes it clear that they are due directly to cold,” the organisation’s research manager, Philip [...]

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Something to be aware of. The United Nations will warn this week that the world’s population could more than double to 15 billion by the end of this century, putting a catastrophic strain on the planet’s resources unless urgent action is taken to curb growth rates, the Observer can reveal. That figure is likely to [...]

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Europe’s leaders are threatening to trigger a formal default on Greek debt and risk a “credit event” if banks refuse to accept losses of up to €140bn (£120bn) on their holdings. Hardline eurozone members, backed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), delivered the ultimatum this weekend after an official report found that in a worst-case [...]

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The squeals of indignation as the politicians meet reality. Compounding the trauma, Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister turned IMF chief – and one of the few key players who appeared to be enjoying herself in her new headmistress-like role – issued a grim warning to her former European peers. The IMF would no longer [...]

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