Tim Worstall

There are fewer Americans working than at any time since 1979. Ummm:

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Breaking up the major banks would require that they transform how they operate. At root, a bank should do little more than provide somewhere safe to place savings, and create some credit. Localising banks, diversifying ownership structures, and placing greater democratic and public control over banking functions will all help lead them towards that ideal. [...]

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Umm, but what are people complaining about here? The big six, which include SSE and RWE, already under fire for increasing domestic bills during an economic downturn, but the latest weekly Ofgem projections show dual-fuel retail bills are now up to an average of £1,420 a year, delivering £95 in profit per customer – a [...]

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Next month the University of Bath launches the Institute for Policy Research (IPR), a new voice for inter-disciplinary research addressing national and international policy challenges. In the run up to the launch on May 14 we are sending you a series of policy briefings demonstrating the impact our research is already having. The first briefing [...]

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Margaret Thatcher made Britain a less, not more, desirable place to do business Hmm. If that were true then there would have been a flood of capital out of the country trying to do business elsewhere then. As it is, we’ve been running a trade deficit just about every year since Thatcher came to power. [...]

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Much is being said about how to eradicate poverty. Allow me to translate some of this for you: To eradicate poverty, the international community should pursue a wider and more far-reaching approach to development than was captured in the millennium development goals (MDGs), European thinktanks said on Tuesday. Although poverty should remain a core focus [...]

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Bitcoin passes $200 mark for the first time Bitcoin, the controversial electronic currency, has passed the $200-mark for the first time, setting new records despite talk of a bubble. No one, no one at all, is stating definitively that Bitcoin is a bubble. Rather, an awful lot of people are looking at the price and [...]

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Today’s absurdist piece of political logic: There was a time when to live a life virtuously was well understood. It embraced personal integrity, commitment to a purpose that was higher than personal gain, a degree of selflessness and even modesty. Those at the top may have got there through ruthlessness and ambition, but they understood [...]

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Where voluntary association is forbidden. Universities should ban country-specific student societies to encourage international students to integrate, a professor has claimed. Tosser.

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This is a lovely little piece of logic from one of the loons to the left of us. The assertions he makes in the section cited just above here are, as far as they go, significantly (but not wholly) true. As we’ve noted many times in the past, British tax havens, for example, provide, among [...]

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Finally, among those who should have known better who uncritically repeated the claim, Tim Worstall deserves special mention http://timworstall.com/2013/04/01/interesting-number-eh/?utm_source=twit… simply because he accused another blogger, and indeed all ‘lefties’, of being ‘lying scumbags’ http://timworstall.com/2013/04/01/yes-of-course-lefties-are-lying-scumba… while failing to locate, let alone understand, the original data.] Sadly, no. Steve Walker’s claim was that Shapps must be wrong [...]

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The government’s latest statistics on some aspects of disability claimants does, of course, go up to the recent past. But the government’s statistics on the drop in claimants when Incapacity Benefit (IB) was replaced by Employment Support Allowance (ESA) only goes to 2008. Sigh. IB statistics go to Aug 2012. They show a drop of 900,000 from [...]

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I’m not entirely convinced that it’s this one. But what does the banking system do that we actually need? In the present system, banks perform a number of functional requirements. Commercial banks operate as a clearing house for bills of exchange, thus reducing the costs of circulation and ensuring the quality of those bills as [...]

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So, the personal allowance is to rise to £10k. This means that the Living Wage should fall. For the Living Wage is a pre-tax wage: obviously, if taxes fall on such low wages then the amount that is needed to live that decent life also falls. Hands up everyone who thinks that they will lower [...]

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You know, I’m less than convinced by this: For eight months last year Danielle got by without a fridge, putting milk and her son’s medication (which is meant to be refrigerated) out on the windowsill of her flat. In the summer the doctor refused to prescribe any more of the growth hormone her son needed [...]

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As Feynman said, I believe that when a scientists speaks outside his own subject he’s just as dumb as the next guy. “Engineering is the foundation of our economy. Almost £500bn is the gross value added of sectors where engineering is an important component – about a third of the economy – and yet there’s [...]

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A paragraph: No, I say this because, like some of the most radical theory, the concept of ‘intersectionality’ poses a profound epistemological challenge, a challenge to ways of knowing. If the feminist challenge to traditional forms of knowledge seeks to expose and counter its androcentric biases, intersectional feminism finds a plethora of other biases (class, [...]

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So this bloke’s weebling about what bastards the food industry are for making everyone fat. Then he says this: But, little by little, they strayed from the honorable business of feeding people appropriately to the deplorable mission of “increasing shareholder value” by enticing people to consume more and more high-margin, low-nutrition branded products. But low [...]

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Woo being, of course, all those strange claims that are made about the medical effects of coffee enemas, fruitarian diets, Freudian psychoanalysis and all the rest. And one of them is of course that the merest hint of radiation will kill us all in our beds. Another is that natural stuff is better for us [...]

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Or more importantly, what has neoliberalism ever done for the poor? It identifies “star performer” nations such as Rwanda, Nepal and Bangladesh as places where deprivation could disappear within the lifetime of present generations. Close on their heels with reductions in poverty levels were Ghana, Tanzania, Cambodia and Bolivia. The study comes after the UN’s [...]

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