Tim Worstall

Through the person of its US “finance and economics editor”, Heidi Moore. Would you believe it she’s even worse than the Guardian’s UK economics nutters? For the first time, the US is changing the way it measures its economic growth, the measure we call our gross domestic product. Starting in July, the keepers of US [...]

[Read more →]

‘Tis always the same, isn’t it? To an engineer everything is engineering. To a politician all is politics, to a Marxist all is class. Thus we find ourselves with Lord Browne telling us how the economy works: The state of a nation is no more and no less than a function of what its people [...]

[Read more →]

The Labour leader will use a keynote speech to argue that Britain needs a new economic model that rejects the “orthodoxies of the 1980s”, such as the dominance of the financial services sector over heavy industry. Finance, wholesale finance as in The City, provides some 4% of GDP. Industry provides 12% or so. What dominance?

[Read more →]

”We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism. It is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of life is now going to slow down – at any rate in Great Britain; that a decline in prosperity [...]

[Read more →]

The UK outstrips the United States, Germany, France and Japan for overall progress in living standards, infrastructure and individual opportunity according to the index designed by a team of US economists. Only Sweden scores more highly overall in the new “Social Progress Index” (SPI), which ranks 50 leading countries by combining figures on everything from [...]

[Read more →]

Minimum wage could be frozen or cut if it starts to cost jobs or damage economy, Government suggests The minimum wage for millions of people could have to be capped or frozen in future if it risks damaging jobs or the economy, the Government has said. What they’re really saying is that the Low Pay [...]

[Read more →]

And almost 900,000 have dropped their claim to the taxpayer-funded benefits rather than undergo a new medical test as part of the Coalition welfare reforms. We all knew that the various incapacity/invalidity benefits were being used as a way to disguise unemployment. It’s been something of a deliberate policy since Maggie’s day. But the numbers [...]

[Read more →]

Such complaints are normally dismissed as “Luddism”. But just because the 19th-century Luddites were wrong about the original industrial revolution destroying jobs and living standards does not mean that their successors must always be wrong. Sensible economists worry about automated manufacturing replacing factory workers, Google’s autonomous cars replacing lorry and taxi drivers, and automatic online [...]

[Read more →]

News in from China: At the recently built head office of Zhejiang Hongyu Medical Commodity Co.Ltd – the medical supplies firm which also sells to the UK’s 99p Stores and Castleford-based firm OTL – factory workers said they put in 10-hour days, with two days off each month. For that, they are paid around £320. [...]

[Read more →]

And this is just one indication among many that the poor may not, after all, always be with us, in what is one of the great under-reported developments of our time. Last week the UN’s blue-chip Human Development Report confirmed that governments have surpassed their target, three years early, of halving the share of the [...]

[Read more →]

A successful budget tomorrow would be one that signals the Treasury understands that investments in human capital, infrastructure and education are essential to growth. Hardly a surprise, could even be right, but “Give me more money” isn’t the most convincing of submissions.

[Read more →]

Wealth taxes only deliver 5.9% of revenues, mostly in council tax And that’s still well above the percentage of tax revenue that other OECD countries get from taxing property/wealth. Your little statistics there is showing us how much more of this we do than other countries.

[Read more →]

The most famous episode of austerity was during the interwar years, as Germany, Britain, France and Japan all fought to stay on the Gold Standard even amid the Great Depression. The deflationary impact of keeping their currencies pegged to gold, along with the austerity policies they followed to do so, was disastrous. In Britain, unemployment [...]

[Read more →]

I can remember arguing with a very distinguished economist that the tax burden on the poor should be reduced. He accepted that this might be morally desirable but he was adamant that it would have no affect on the wider economy because, he said, the poor do not spend enough to have an impact on [...]

[Read more →]

So, as we know, the great shout from the left is that if we just spend more money through hte government then everything will be peachy once again. And then along comes a lefty econopmist to prove that this won’t actually work. Not that he says so out loud you understand, but it is the [...]

[Read more →]

Take a gander at this. Comparing the size of African economies to those of English counties. London roughly equals Nigeria for example, the Seychelles the Isle of Wight, Zimbabwe Northumbria. One point to be made being that we would consider someone entirely mad if they tried to suggest trade barriers in between English counties. Or [...]

[Read more →]

One a Telegraph slide show at the top we get: Value of money slides 30pc in 30 years as cost of goods rockets And in the caption, on the same page, we get: The value of money has plummeted by 67pc over the last 30 years as the cost of everyday goods has rocketed, research [...]

[Read more →]

Dozen homes worth £500,000 each on the brink of collapsing into the sea after appalling weather speeds up cliff erosion Land owned by John Radford, 62, for 45 years eroded by 15 metres in weeks He and his wife feel ‘trapped’ because dangerous houses are ‘unsellable’ If they’re unsellable then they’re not worth £500,000 each. [...]

[Read more →]

Then, of course, I remember our actual counterfactual is feudal serfdom

[Read more →]

Neo-liberals need to understand that while, sure, economies need entrepreneurs and innovators, economies also need customers – lots of customers, with lots of disposable income. That’s the real crisis in the neoliberal west: a crisis of consumption. Too many people are not rich enough for capitalism to function properly. Lessee. Capitalism functioned pretty well in [...]

[Read more →]