Tim Worstall

What I’m looking for is a simple, handy, metric, which would tell me when solar power was actually cost effective. Forget subsidies and carbon costs. OK, so I see around the place that solar panels (panels note, not cells themselves) cost $1.40 or so per watt at present. (A$, US$, no real difference, call this [...]

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This week’s Shelter report found average private rents were now beyond the reach of ordinary working families in 55% of English authorities, costing well over a third of their income, No Polly, that’s not what the report said. It said that private rents were above a third of median income in 55% of local council [...]

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David Cameron ordered a judicial inquiry into the press after the worst details of the phone hacking scandal came to light, but has he learnt anything from his own intimate dealings with controversial media figures? Mandrake hears that the Prime Minister is entertaining Richard Desmond, the porn baron, at Chequers this weekend. All entirely true. [...]

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Speaking before a group of protesters in Zuccotti Park, Nobel economics prize winner Joseph Stiglitz urged on the crowd, telling them they are “right to be indignant.”  Professor Stiglitz goes on to explain, correctly in my view, that we have a financial system of socialized losses and privatized gains. What the good professor fails to [...]

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Concerns that contamination from the Fukushima Daiichi plant had spread to Tokyo subsided on Friday after high levels of radiation recorded along a street in the city were linked to old bottles of radium stored beneath the floorboards of a nearby house. Researchers had recorded radiation of 3.35 microsieverts per hour along a street in [...]

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How dare they? How damn dare they? Tell everyone that the NHS is not very good at preventing mortality amenable to health care? There is no evidence for this, envy of the world it is! http://www.bmj.com/content/327/7424/1129.full 2003 report in the British Medical Journal. The NHS comes 18 th out of 19 systems studied in the [...]

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So, you’re a bright lot. Point me at stories and sources for why we subsidise fir and spruce plantations in the UK. Yes, I know quite a bit, but would love to see what you can point me at.

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Or if you prefer, removing the fourth wall. As part of their ongoing campaign to get us all drinking their beer, especially their Light version, Heineken have once more hired this blog to point you at a video. Point: In it we get taken behind the scenes of a video shoot . You know the [...]

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Anyone surprised that the Eye has screwed up on a tax story again?

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I thought everyone knew this already? Wasting Lives is a statistical analysis of WHO mortality data to estimate the number of deaths that could plausibly have been averted by the NHS since the 1980s.  The measure used is known as “mortality amenable to healthcare”. The NHS does badly by this measure. But surely, come on [...]

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I’ve said for a long time that SOAS probably isn’t where you’d go to get an education in economics. let’s have a Eurozone Ministry of Finance (Treasury) with the necessary fiscal muscle to deliver European public goods like more jobs, better wages and pensions and a sustainable environment. Jobs, wages and pensions simply are not [...]

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@RyanCPS I was talking all schools – from private to local comp- all seem to have one goal, which is conformity. No wonder we don’t innovate @RyanCPS Free schools are an elitist abuse of the state that will never solve education problem. We need universal solutions Perhaps five minutes apart. I’m against conformity but everything [...]

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 We are taught by Cameron to regard small businesses as the engine room of entrepreneurial spirit in the UK. We are led to believe that their inventions, wealth creation and profits lead to employment and growth. But this is the stuff of fantasy. Three quarters of the 4.5million businesses in the UK employ no one.  Their wealth [...]

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Via.

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The Olympic stadium fiasco laid bare How did the saga begin, how has it gone wrong and how will it end? It began with politicians spending other peoples’ money it went wrong as politicians spent other peoples’ money and it will end badly and expensively. Because, y’know, politicians have been spending other peoples’ money.

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Second, that such wholly independent states can still effectively defend the interests of their people, even in an interdependent world increasingly dominated by non-European powers. Both claims fly in the face of evidence from past and present. …. My evidence for disputing the second claim is the emerging world of the 21st century, in which [...]

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HMRC has been accused of forgiving Goldman for millions of pounds of tax that should have been paid on remuneration and bonus payments that were paid through an off-shore company in the British Virgin Islands. After a clamp-down on the loop-hole by Gordon Brown, 21 firms settled with HMRC. Goldman held out because HMRC had [...]

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see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz! The Ritchie method of inductive proof.

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Third, there’s no evidence at all that companies can necessarily pass on all tax they pay to customers. If they can then it is very obvious that competition is not working - because if it were that would not be true. So free-marketeers can’t have it both ways. Either competition prevents generic passing on (generic VAT rises perhaps apart) of the fact that tax [...]

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All this stuff about the vote on the EFSF. For every mention of Slovakia I’ve been reading Slovenia.

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