Tim Worstall

Coase: “I can tell you– I was helping when Britain was trying to get a loan from the United States immediately after the war, and I was talking to one of Keynes’s assistants. And Keynes came in the room and walked over to us and the man I was talking to us said, ‘This is [...]

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As a student, lawyer and business person I never doubted capitalism as an engine of growth and prosperity for the whole of society. In my career I have started and built several companies across the US, Europe and Asia, benefiting from a system that – to borrow Yuval Levin’s words – lets markets set prices, [...]

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From Ben and Jerry’s ice cream: He insists that focusing on “shared values” – rather, presumably, than share value – is “very profitable”. Whereas conventional companies “pay a whole bunch of money to advertising agencies to come up with a made-up story to try to make the public feel good about their brands, a value-led [...]

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7. Sin taxes don’t discourage addicts because they need the products that much. High taxes on the rich, however, will discourage them, despite the fact that they are the most driven and innovative individuals in society. Because elasticity. Look it up. We can and do impose high taxes on those so called sin products because [...]

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There is no inherent contradiction between delivering higher returns to investors and addressing society’s most pressing unmet needs. Well of course there bloody isn’t. If you are making high returns you are, by definition, adding great value to the resources you are using to create your production. Adding value is how unmet needs are met. [...]

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Inflation is predicted to stay obstinately high while wages lag, shrinking demand in households with ever less to spend. Imagine that you were a country worried that the amount that must be paid locally for labour made the production of that country uncompetitive on the world markets. No, go on, really, imagine it: you’re Germany [...]

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Apparently cash incentives do not always work….in the sense of bringing about the desired result. Excellent, so let us continue to study this question and use such cash incentives where they do work and not where they don’t. My suspicion (OK, call it what it is, prejudice) is that they do work in many fields [...]

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The insight that the fiscal policy stance in the periphery prior to this crisis was insufficiently countercyclical Talkin’ about Spain and Ireland although the same was true of our own G. Brown in smaller measure. Let us, for a moment, accept the basic Keynesian premise, that we should run great big stonking deficits to provide [...]

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Here’s the problem: what does this have to do with income distribution in a modern capitalist economy? The answer is as follows: nothing. Absolutely nothing. In this island there is no state; people do not cooperate (actually they appear not to have any relationship whatsoever); there is no injustice; there is not even trade. So [...]

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It is especially annoying that Banerjee was put back in the committee two years after he gave the award to his colleague and lover (not a secret any more now that they have a baby). About the award of the John Bates Clark Medal by the American Economics Association to the best economist under 40. [...]

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Too few understand that what besets capitalism is unknowable risk – the risk of transformative new technologies, the risk of making epic business mistakes, or the risk of there being no demand for the goods and services a business produces. The task of government is to mitigate those risks – funding new technologies and actively [...]

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just think of the way Henry Ford raised wages so Ford workers could buy his cars. Dear God, this miserably stupid story again? How is it that such obviously false fold tales persist?

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The wealth tax raises its head again. Just charge the 10% richest 20% of their wealth and pay off the national debt. As explained by an A level student at a 6 th form college. So what are the figures? Well the total personal wealth in the UK stands at around £9,000bn (compare that with [...]

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Non-economists don’t seem to have much to say about economics. Next week we discuss how chemists aren’t adding much to the scholarship of Elizabethan sonnets. It wasn’t always like this. One way of characterising what has happened in America and Britain over the past three decades is that people at the top have skimmed off [...]

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Poverty is shifting from inner to outer London, report finds Sure, we’d all prefer that there wasn’t any poverty at all (which to a large extent there isn’t in the UK, this is talking about relative poverty, not absolute). But if poverty there is going to be then we’d rather it was in cheap places [...]

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However, it is increasingly the case that the economy is dominated by non-marketed services, such as public health and education provision. These are included in GDP, but the fact that output in these areas is difficult to measure means GDP is now a less-r eliable representation of the economy. … Furthermore, some activities that increase [...]

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The IPPR seem to have managed to actually note something of interest. Only a decade behind everyone else but still, good to see lefties catching up: However Nick Pearce, the IPPR’s director, voiced concern at the implications of the study. “This shift has implications for inequality, as well-educated, higher earners marry each other and then [...]

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The economic divide between north and south that is: A fourth phase now looms because up until 2008-09, regional policy – such as it was – involved redistributing tax revenues from the south into higher public spending in the north. As work by Karel Williams and Sukhdev Johal for the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural [...]

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Your inviting Our Wullie over to advise you on how to get out of your economic mess is amusing to say the least. For the Japanese economy is the end state of Huttonism. Hutton thinks that if clever people like Wee Willy Hutton tell everyone else to do then the economy will grow off into [...]

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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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