Tim Worstall

This was salient for a number of reasons: for a start, that month followed one of the worst quarters on record for new private sector jobs, with just 5,000 posts filled between June and September 2011. From an economist’s perspective, that is as good as standing still. Err, no, from an economist’s perspective that would [...]

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While both countries had the same sorts of export surplus in the early 1990s, they have diverged massively since the D-Mark and franc were fixed in perpetuity. Germany has a current account surplus of 5pc of GDP: France has a deficit of 2.7pc, anathema for Colbertistes. You can see from IMF data that the silent [...]

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Yes, this is the damn point.

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An especially interesting comparison is between the United States and the United Kingdom, which implemented a package of austerity measures in 2010. That’s interesting, don’t you think? For I’m rather wondering, just where is that austerity. As far as I know the budget deficit is still about 10% of GDP isn’t it? The lab experiment [...]

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Apparently, Mr. Daisey is an actor, author, commentator and playright. Perhaps I should have heard of him too. He’s getting shouty about this, saying that I’m a racist neoliberal who knows nothing about the issue and therefore I should shut up. Or something. Just as a little stylistic note: We have no idea what the [...]

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BERKELEY – Neville Chamberlain is remembered today as the British prime minister who, as an avatar of appeasement of Nazi Germany in the late 1930’s, helped to usher Europe into World War II. But, earlier in that fateful decade, relatively soon after the start of the Great Depression, the British economy was rapidly returning to [...]

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But Labour will adopt one good policy. They will bring back rent controls. Facepalm. Second only to aerial bombing in a major war as a successful method of reducing the available housing stock. Doesn’t anyone actually remember? The 70s, early 80s? When it was near impossible to find rental property anywhere in the country? Who [...]

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A minimum wage can be beneficial … as long as it’s set at the right level   So is Tidjane Thiam right about minimum wage rules? The chief executive of the Prudential was outspoken in his criticism of minimum wage legislation at a high profile debate at the World Economic Forum in Davos. 10 Comments [...]

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Government must therefore set a policy framework that forces the close collaboration of monetary, financial and fiscal policy to induce a sustained rise in credit from our very wounded and risk-averse financial system. The British government, along with other western governments, must replace its redundant inflation target with a target for the growth of the [...]

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Or should I use the more obvious word? It is a tradition of redistribution, intervention and socialism equally as compelling as Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” (which, one should remember, was a satirical attack on laissez-faire morality, drawn from Shakespeare’s Macbeth). It’s got bugger all to do with laissez faire morality. It’s about how the merchant [...]

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This is just too good a comment to pass up. I’ve had to study Public Choice Theory as part of my economics degree, and it really is the biggest load of rubbish I’ve ever read, and sums up how economics is not a science, but simply a pseudoscientific enterprise designed to promote the interests of [...]

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Senior bankers, private equity moguls and hedge fund managers appear cut off from the rest of us. They often pay little or no tax, Eh? What is this little or no tax? Is this some distand memory of the hedgie paying less tax than his cleaner? Which is really he pays a lower marginal rate [...]

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This is becoming an increasingly common mantra, that the payment of in work benefits is a subsidy to the profits of companies. Who wins, when the government makes up the shortfall, between the poverty pay a shelf-packer earns and what he or she needs to live on? Not the worker, evidently; not the taxpayer, who [...]

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China’s glorious growth shows how infrastructure spending through state owned banks is glorious. Alternatively we could note that GDP per capita (at PPP) in the US is $47,200 a year, in China $7,600 a year. Catching up after decades of insane economic policy is generally thought to be easier than growing when you’re already at [...]

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If you add together nonfinance executives, “financial professions”, real estate, and lawyers, you’ve got more than 70 percent of the total; plus some of the other categories are probably essentially business executives too. Basically, the top 0.1 percent is the corporate suits, with a few token sports and film stars thrown in.

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So I’m in Dresden overnight for a 6.30 am flight. No way to get from Freiberg to here by that time in the morning. And having had a look around the area of this cheapo hotel (now’t wrong w’i’t, just cheapo) nothing really appeals as a dining venue. Or even a drinking one. However, there’s [...]

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So George has found an argument which he thinks is terribly persuasive. Libertarians, right wing loons generally, face a horrible problem because they believe in property rights. The problem being that pollution affects property so therefore libertarians should be very much against pollution because of property rights but they’re not. In fact, they go all [...]

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Her government’s savage deflation destroyed a fifth of Britain’s industrial base in two years, hollowed out manufacturing, and delivered a “productivity miracle” that never was, and we’re living with the consequences today. Strange that manufacturing output was higher when she left office than before she took it really. What she did succeed in doing was [...]

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Made from bronze and smaller than a ten pence piece, the coin depicts a man and a woman engaged in an intimate act. Experts believe it is the first example of its kind to be found in Britain. It lay preserved in mud for almost 2,000 years until it was unearthed by an amateur archaeologist [...]

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We face the same challenge today – to develop a morally acceptable form of capitalism. As Keynes feared might happen, much business is now seen as no more than profiteering. Many people object to the bonus culture of the banking system because they don’t believe those bonuses are earned. We have also learned that inequality [...]

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