Tim Worstall

Our twelfth thing about capitalism that we're not told is a masterpiece of straw manning. We're told that the free marketeers insist that government can never pick winners and are then presented with a couple of examples of supposed winners that have been picked by government. QED, the free marketeers are wrong.

The tenth thing we have to understand is that actually Americans aren't as rich as all that. This is very important because if that sort of free market capitalist society did lead to the richest society on Earth then of course all the other strictures about how awful free market capitalism is would be rather wasted. We'd start to believe our own lyin' eyes rather than the Reader in Economics at Camdridge and that would just never do.

On Friday the AA hit the newspapers with the allegation that there are shadowy companies in the petrol market. Speculators even: they buy up petrol, sit on it until the price rises and then, horrors, make a profit!

A few days back I mused, almost as an afterthought, on whether the ultimatum game would be played the same way in all human societies. This is the game where player 1 gets to split $100, player 2 decidding whether or not to accept the split. If the division, 50/50, 60/40, 99/1, whatever, is accepted then both players get their money. If it's rejected, then neither gets any.

The ninth thing we're told is that even though manufacturing is becoming a smaller part of our economy, of all economies, it's still very important oh yes indeed it is! There's a certain sadness in watching the argument develop in this chapter in fact.

What Chang wants us to understand is that because we used to have protectionism and we still had economic growth and development then therefore we should have protectionism in those places where we want to have economic growth. In other words the poor countries should throw up trade barriers so that all the rich world megacorps cannot supply the people of those countries. Thus will industry develop and in the long term, wealth will be created.

Our fifth thing is this insistence that free market economists claim that everyone is greedy, therefore untrustworthy. But a market economy wouldn't actually work if this were true. Chang then goes on to point out that there are many more motivations to human action than simple greed: in which statement he is obviously correct. Risking your life to save that of a stranger is clearly not motivated by economic greed.

I'm afraid that this little piece from The Independent did make me smile:

This will surprise some but council housing causes unemployment. No, really, it does.

In our fourth chapter we get told that the washing machine has changed the world more than the internet. Something which we can all actually agree upon as long as we accept the conceit that the washing machine is standing in for domestic labour saving technology in general. We might quibble with the example of email not being much of an advance upon the telegraph: email allows you to broadcast to 5,000 or more which the telegraph certainly didn't. And I've run a software business that simply couldn't have happened without being able to send files and graphics.