Tim Worstall

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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Perhaps he should retitle his blog unlearning logic: Economics is the study of how we allocate scarce resources, but the fact that the economy is ultimately constrained by scarce resources does not factor into it. If the economy were not constrained by scarce resources then we’d not have to study the allocation of that scarcity [...]

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George Osborne is wrong. Austerity is for the boom years, not the slump But given that we didn’t have austerity during the boom years, given that during the longest bopopm the country has ever known we have a monocular Scot pissing our money in every direction, we don’t in fact have much of a choice, [...]

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So pretty soon the point arrives when there’s a middle-class stranglehold on the jobs that people want to do – notably in politics, the media and the third sector. When the desirable jobs are spending other peoples’ money, reporting on spending other peoples’ money and lobbying to spend other peoples’ money then you know that [...]

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It relly does pain me that Willy Hutton is a Governor of the old Alma Mater. Here’s the intro to his Ownership Commission: The Commission’s starting point is that we believe that companies should be more than networks of contracts, and at their best they can be living, breathing human institutions held together by trust [...]

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Millions of teachers, nurses, civil servants and other public sector workers are to lose their right to national pay rates, the Chancellor George Osborne will announce in next week’s Budget. On of the glaring problems with the UK eonomy is to be addressed. Excellent stuff! As we know, national pay rates for nurses kill people. [...]

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We are richer in 2012, but are we happier? Swing skirts were in vogue, the Royals dominated the front pages, and Germany was shelling out lump sums to Europe in reparations. Was 1952 really that different to life today? Umm, I believe that by 1952 Germany was having money shovelled at it under the Marshall [...]

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I think it’s fair to say that Alex Harrowell doesn’t like me very much. For the first time on record, the share of Spanish GDP accounted for by profits exceeded that accounted for by wages. This isn’t true as I pointed out: “For the first time on record, the share of Spanish GDP accounted for [...]

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And it isn’t “things I don’t like“. The slow death of Greece was a political project from the start, with politicians accepting the prescriptions of neoliberal economics. The country has become the guinea pig for the future of a Europe ruled by German capital and Eurocrats. In what paranoid fantasy is what is happening in [...]

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An Observer editorial: and address what is the sharpest decline in manufacturing of any advanced economy over the past 30 years, And my comment there: Umm, excuse me, but what decline of manufacturing? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/22/manufacturing_figures/ Manufacturing output is well over twice what it was in 1950. Heck, it was higher when Maggie left office then when [...]

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You know, other than making the society rich enough that it can pay you to protest in a tent in London?

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I am big and ugly enough to stand accusations of being patronising and naive, of not understanding economics and having a beard. The economics bit that is. Real wages in this country have been falling since 1968. God alone knows where you got that idea from but it’s such an absurd one that I can’t [...]

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“The role of the private sector is critical because innovation at the technology frontier is quite different in nature from catching up technologically. It is not something that can be achieved through government planning.” That’s about China but it applies everywhere. The technological frontier is where, by definition, you don’t know what’s going to work, [...]

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I think anyone who reads the passage above is going to end up sympathising with the people in the economics department who say that you really can’t organise a modern industrial society on the basis of organising a wife-swapping party every time you want to buy a blanket. Quite. It just makes it all so [...]

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So high in fact that you don’t want the long term unemployed even for free. A must read. And no wonder there’s so many unemployed given what it costs to employ someone.

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I fear what’s happening here is that the world is making the 1930s mistake and the ratings agencies are partly responsible for this. Even though it is clear in Greece, in Ireland, in other countries, in Britain too (that) this austerity isn’t working, the message is ‘Plough on, dig a deeper hole, carry on with [...]

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Now let’s look at the economy. Initially, the challenge came from the United States and Germany, but after the second world war the UK was also eclipsed in terms of growth rates and living standards by France, Italy and the Scandinavian nations. More recently, the threat has come from the bigger emerging economies of India [...]

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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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