Tim Worstall

Please celebrate Earth Hour by turning the lights on.

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Nuclear power can’t happen without subsidy. So it shouldn’t happen. Facepalm. There is absolutely no argument where this is true of nuclear but not of renewables.

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At the ASI. When sociologists do economics.

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This is one of those things where I simply cannot understand why anyone is complaining. The current method of assessing the impact of tax changes on the real economy is relatively primitive. Six years ago, a senior Conservative politician complained that Treasury officials assumed, in effect, that any change in tax rates would lead to [...]

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I’ve been taking a lot of music lessons just recently. Becoming quite the multi-instrumentalist. I’ve quite nailed the vocal line from Jessica, have the drum part to Eruption down pat and even the lead guitar part in Birdland sorted. I think I’ll move on to the Hammond organ part in Freebird next unless anyone has [...]

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This has been puzzling me for some time. Re the Danny Dorling question really: just what is a social geographer? Intensive pondering has allowed me to come to a conclusion. A social geographer is a geographer too stupid or politically biased to be able to teach sports.

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I see they’re still trotting out the suicide nonsense: Wang Ling was 25 years old when she ended her life on 7 January 2011 by jumping from her brother’s high-rise flat, days after being dismissed from her job as an engineer at Foxconn’s Longhua factory. An employee of over six years’ standing, she had recently [...]

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The coalition agreement promised “limiting donations and reforming party funding in order to remove big money from politics”. Sir Christopher Kelly was duly asked to find a solution, which he did back in November. Donations would be capped at £10,000 per individual, Labour must sign up trade union members as individual subscribers and the state [...]

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The backlog of fuel deliveries caused by yesterday’s panic buying could mean a wait of up to three days for supplies to be replenished after motorists filled up over fears of a strike by tanker drivers. Entirely and totally down to the government being so damn stupid. It just doesn’t make sense to have such [...]

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Bit of a surprise, eh? Wonder if he’ll bother turning up to the Commons this time around?

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Dear Lord this is pitiful: Now, at the meeting at the Social Market Foundation I attended this week HMRC director Judith Knott confirmed that HMRC have accepted another key element of right wing tax dogma – which is that companies can’t pay tax and only people do. She explicitly questioned as a result why we [...]

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Pay children to attend top private schools, Government told Dozens of top private schools are calling on the Government to provide state subsidies to allow bright pupils to be admitted irrespective of family background, it emerged today. The actual idea is pretty good, effectively, give them back the tax they’ve paid for the State school [...]

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Fuel strike: pumps go dry as ministers provoke a panic Umm, didn’t I mutter something about the fuel tanks of the car fleet possibly holding more than the wholesale system itself? Yes, I saw the comments about strategic reserves but they are of crude, not refined products. So, Timmy 2 Cameron 0 here I think. [...]

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Hmm. That the economics blogosphere is as close to a global free market* as we can get shows the need for more local production. Hmm….. * Zero cost at the point of consumption, zero transport costs, 7 billion potential providers etc

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The economist’s notion of public goods has lost currency in this age of commodities, not just in the EU but particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world. Unlike today, two generations ago, economics undergraduates were taught that such goods were different from soap flakes and hamburgers. Public goods and services are things which need to be supplied [...]

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But perhaps not Danny Dorling economist. Hundreds of thousands more jobs could be afforded if there were a little more austerity among the rich, a report just published by IPPR shows. It would not take a near-halving of top salaries – just a slight and gradual reduction of income inequalities would make huge savings every [...]

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Well, yeah, sorta. Only ultra-scarce yttrium, which is used in precision lasers and to stabilise rockets, may present a problem. It’s not actually that rare. And it’s also a hell of a lot easier to find and refine than the lanthanides are. If you seriously wanted a few tens of tonnes, hundreds of tonnes, on [...]

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Sharon Bowles, the UK Liberal Democrat MEP who chairs the EU parliament’s economic affairs committee, also proposed that “golden hellos” should be clawed back if performance fell short. Dear Lord, you’d think these people would be able to understand their own arguments, wouldn’t you? And the argument here is that a bonus encourages people to [...]

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Motorists should consider stockpiling fuel for strike, suggests No 10 Motorists should consider stockpiling petrol in case a strike by tanker drivers disrupts supplies, the Government has suggested. Hmm. There’s a possibility that this would actually cause the shortage that it is hoped can be averted. It depends upon the relative sizes of the two [...]

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Umm, sorry, but what is this guy being accused of doing? Albert Hall debentures are a capital investment. The yield from them is the tickets. So what’s the problem?

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