Tim Worstall

Over the last 30 years, twice as many Britons are earning less than the median wage than before 1977. Facepalm. And please do note, this is after an earlier error was pointed out to him and this is his correction.

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Committing Worstall’s Fallacy even: Take a look at the astonishing chart of property wealth published by the New Economics Foundation and you get an inkling of why attempts to challenge the concentration of private property are denounced as fascism. The graph, using government statistics, suggests that the average property wealth of the top 1% of [...]

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Their report on the living wage. While the direction of the living wage campaign is ultimately a decision for campaigners themselves we recommend that: The government funds an independent research unit, be based in a university or in Whitehall, to support further rigorous analysis of the costs and benefits of living wages. Yes, the usual [...]

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“Furthermore, a tax-cutting strategy also weakens the UK’s already precarious tax base and totally ignores the underlying drivers of low pay, including the falling share of GDP going to workers (especially those at the lower end of company pay scales).” That is, of course, a hugely enjoyable argument. For the falling wages component of the [...]

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The opening line of their report on childcare in the UK: As a result of significant investment over the last decade, the affordability of childcare as a percentage of disposable family income has improved for most families, although costs remain among the highest in the OECD. There has been no fucking investment in childcare. There [...]

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They really should have thought a little more about this: Clair Beattie, who lives in Nottingham and works part-time as a hairdresser, looks back to her parents’ generation and wishes things could be like that now. Her father had a good profession: he was a builder who brought home a decent wage. Her father-in-law, working [...]

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Living standards for low- and middle-income households will fall until 2020, even if the country enters a golden period of steady economic growth, according to an incendiary analysis of deepening income inequality in Britain. Scary, eh? Why? The study identifies several reasons for the deepening divide in living standards. While new jobs are being created, [...]

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Would be interesting to know.

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Over at the ASI. We’d like your Lolcats/internet memes on matters economic. Can’t have some American professor doing it all!

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The aim is to rubbish the poverty measure accepted by all international organisations and to call for new measures that ignore inequality. All of those international organisations use a definition of poverty which is about inequality, not poverty. So if you wish to insist, as is perfectly reasonable even if you don’t happen to agree, [...]

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Record number of council staff paid over £100,000 a year A record number of council officials are paid over £100,000 a year, new figures show. In an inflationary environment this will always be true given that they’re using nominal amounts. OK, cheap shot, because we’ve not in fact got wage inflation at present and the [...]

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Firstly what do we mean when we say ‘capitalism’? Well there are many perspectives on this but most cohere around certain key constructs which themselves drive capitalism’s core growth requirement. It is an economic system in which specialised producers produce commodities for markets but not for their own subsistence. Capitalists have a monopoly of ownership [...]

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To illustrate a piece on youth unemployment in Wales they use this picture:   Hmm. According to the 2001 census, 96% of the population was White British, and 2.1% non-white (mainly of British Asian origin).[205] Most non-white groups were concentrated in the southern port cities of Cardiff, Newport and Swansea. Welsh Asian and African communities [...]

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Not actually very smnart Our Cormac over at Left Foot Forward. In fact, you might says he’s showing himself to be ignorant. Recent commodity price rises in the UK mean we need similar information here. For example, why is it that for the past year, UK oil prices – the Brent oil price – has [...]

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Received an interesting email this morning. From a union funded editor of a major political website. It’s an incredible insight into the standards of current political discourse in this country. You’re an idiot. Laurence Durnan Editor, Political Scrapbook Voted #2 left wing blog 2011-12 for Total Politics magazine Yes laydeezn’gennlemn, the eight year olds have [...]

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I rather like the Cato Institute. Swap emails with a couple of the guys there. I think they do good work. However, this. To be honest, all I can think of is laying in stores of popcorn. It’s going to be a hell of a show.

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The unelected 26 clerics in the Lords can have a major impact on the way the country is run. For instance, when there was a vote in 2006 on allowing terminally ill people the right to die, they organised and voted against the reforms. Eh? So the Bishops insisted that terminally ill people would not [...]

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Sigh, And lurking in the background we have the Oxford Centre for Business (Non) Taxation with their cloud cuckoo notion that businesses shouldn’t pay tax in the first place since they simply pass the cost on to consumers or workers (but never to shareholders, oh no!). Twats. The Incidence of Corporate Income Tax on Wages [...]

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A Work Foundation report: Beyond the personal costs of being NEET, each young person not in employment, education or training bears a cost to public finances (through benefit payments, lost tax revenues, and healthcare and criminal justice costs), and a public resource cost (due to loss of economic productivity from un- or underemployment, lost personal [...]

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How dare they? How damn dare they? Tell everyone that the NHS is not very good at preventing mortality amenable to health care? There is no evidence for this, envy of the world it is! http://www.bmj.com/content/327/7424/1129.full 2003 report in the British Medical Journal. The NHS comes 18 th out of 19 systems studied in the [...]

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