Tim Worstall

the woman quoted just below is a student at Harvard University, one of several of whom recently walked out of Greg Mankiw’s EC10 course: “I’m someone who lives below the poverty line, my family’s extremely poor.  And having a class like this that promotes gaining at the expense of millions of people disturbs me and [...]

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Guardian headline: The markets distrust democracy. Just ask the masters of Beijing and Moscow Why is the democratic world faring so much worse in this crisis than its authoritarian rivals? One Freedland J goes on to say: Given that it is the markets who call the tune, the question then becomes one’s ability to dance [...]

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The DRC should be one of Africa‘s richest countries. It has a mineral wealth estimated to be around $24 trillion (£15tn). There are huge deposits of cobalt, diamonds, gold, copper, oil and 80% of the world’s supplies of coltan ore – a valuable mineral used in computers and mobile phones. So, “coltan” is the NGO [...]

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According to the OECD, France has higher productivity than the UK – $53.7 per hour worked compared to $45.4 – despite its less flexible labour markets, in large measure due to its excellent infrastructure. No, France has higher productivity per hour worked because of its less flexible labour markets. The numbers are here. English and [...]

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Companies will have to rotate the credit-rating firm they use every three years, with a four-year “cooling off” period. There will also be constraints on the ability and the type of advisory work that credit rating firms are allowed to provide. As well as forcing agencies to disclose the models, methodologies and key assumptions on [...]

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Oh, so that injunction hasn’t been lifted yet then? Hugh Bonneville, who plays the Earl of Grantham in Downton Abbey, has received a Walpole Medal of Excellence as “a shining example of Britain’s best creative talent”. At the ceremony, which celebrates luxury goods, the actor gushed: “I’ve admired these brands from afar for a long [...]

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There is now strong evidence that smoking in vehicles exposes non-smokers to high levels of second hand smoke which is known to be damaging to heath, the BMA said. Because of the small enclosed space inside a car, smoking creates 23 times more toxins than found in a smoky bar, it was claimed. This is [...]

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The German government believes Britain should be part of a Europe-wide tax on financial transactions, the proceeds of which could help prop up the single currency. That’s the first silliness: there will be no extra revenue. The second is that the direct revenue, before the losses from other taxes as the economy shrinks, would be, [...]

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BBC newsreader Jane Hill is to ‘marry’ a woman cameraman Jane Hill, the BBC newsreader, has accepted a ‘marriage’ proposal from her girlfriend, Sara, a television cameraman. What’s with the ‘ ‘ ? We don’t have or use the phrase “to civil partner” and marry and marriage are perfectly acceptable descriptions. Might not be the [...]

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Matthew Illsely, reader of this blog (and thus, of course, a good guy) has a thriller out on Kindle. More Dangerous State than Courageous and quite probably with more accurate economics in it. It’s not about economics, of course, it’s a thriller. Not that having more “accurate economics” is going to be difficult. The Pogo [...]

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I am aware that the terms neoliberal and neoclassical are technically the same in economic theory – but neoliberal does clearly imply a particular political approach to the issue which explains my preference for the term No, they’re not. Neo-classical is Jevons etc, encoded by Marshall: the bloke who taught Keynes. Neo-liberal is, when it [...]

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He had a profound insight that neoliberal economists do not share. He realised that markets, just like the rest of us, often have little or no clue at all about what is going on. That might sound like a statement of the obvious, but as I will explore in this book, neoliberal economics – and [...]

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It was built on the political logic of John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was a Cambridge professor of economics and a former civil servant. Was he? A Professor of Economics I mean. I know he was a Lecturer in economics, a Fellow (of Kings?) and so on. But did he ever actually hold a chair in [...]

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Meanwhile, in the financial markets speculation has replaced real investment. This is logical because investing in new technologies in manufacturing or services is a much less safe bet for individual businesses than just getting on one of two gravy trains, the first being public sector outsourcing and the second financial derivatives. Derivatives, for those who [...]

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easier to make profits from the certain commodities that people are always going to need, such as health, education, local government services, the utilities and so on that were once the preserve of government. So not only are these services now more costly because a profit margin has been or is being added into their [...]

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And it is a state that wants to hand control of one of the UK’s greatest achievements – the National Health Service – to the market so that we can copy the US healthcare model and double the cost of provision in exchange for worse healthcare outcomes It’s the French system they’re copying: not the [...]

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The economic crisis we are now facing is the legacy of Thatcher and Reagan because they introduced into government the neoliberal[iii] idea that whatever a politician does, however well-intentioned that action might be, they will always make matters worse in the economy. This is because government is never able, according to neoliberal thinking, to outperform [...]

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David Cameron and George Osborne led the way in the UK when, without an electoral mandate, they secured power From guess who? Yup, opening of his new book. I do wonder whether he actually knows how the UK electoral system works. Those who can command a majority of the elected members of the House of [...]

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Barack Obama faced a new and unpredictable hurdle to White House re-election next year when the US supreme court announced it is to rule on whether his healthcare bill, the major legislative achievement of his presidency, is constitutional. The court is to hear the arguments in March next year and is to expected to publish [...]

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What? Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway investment firm has been buying shares in IBM since March and now owns 64 million shares, or about 5.4% of the outstanding stock, Buffett said in an interview on Monday on the financial news channel CNBC. The investor was given permission by securities regulators to keep the purchases secret for several [...]

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