It pains me to have to admit this but this is from someone who purports to teach economics in a British university : ...
Blog - Sunday 20 May 2012
A nice little story here about Air India. It illustrates the dangers of having either state run or monopolistic companies . ...
Blog - Saturday 19 May 2012
I was able to snag a copy of the new Limits to Growth report to the Club of Rome. The 40 year update of that one that said we'd all be dead already, our skeletons rocking gently in the winds that whip a shattered planet. ...
Blog - Sunday 13 May 2012
We do all, at least occasionally, need to poke our heads up from the readings of our own dogmas and do a little reality check. Have a look at the real world and make sure that the effects are indeed as we would have theory predict. That neoliberal ...
Blog - Saturday 12 May 2012
I've said before here that I'm deeply unimpressed with macroeconomics, stating that as the man didn't say in the long run it's all microeconomics. However, I'm coming around to the idea that the situation is worse than that. We ...
Blog - Monday 07 May 2012
You don't have to go far into NGO land to find people arguing that poor countries need to protect their baby industries from the big bad wolves of international capitalism. That trade barriers are a good idea, that infant industries need to be ...
Blog - Sunday 06 May 2012
We've been told, by a man with impeccable economic credentials no less, that red tape and regulation just isn't important to the economy at all : ...
Blog - Saturday 05 May 2012
China continually surprises: it's ever so slightly odd to find yourself outflanked on the free market, capitalist, side by the remnants of a communist state. But that's what has just happened in China and it gives us the example of what we ...
Blog - Sunday 29 April 2012
I know, I know, we're told that stock markets are short termist in outlook, obsessed only with the next quarter's results. This is an appalling indictement of neoliberal capitalism and must be stopped immediately by putting politicians who only ...
Blog - Saturday 28 April 2012
Via The Guardian I find a paper doing the usual bleating about how it's simply just terrible that Apple works the way it does, gets all that grubby manufacturing work done in China. True, this paper is a little more sophisticated than the usual ...
Blog - Wednesday 25 April 2012
This is just glorious from Red Ken : ...
Blog - Sunday 22 April 2012
We face something of a dilemma here. For it's certainly true that we need government but it's also true that we need those doing the governing to understand the governing they're doing. And we have evidence that those we have at present ...
Blog - Saturday 21 April 2012
Yes, it's wrapped up in unlovely jargon but this is what we exist to do: shift the Overton Window. Chris Dillow : ...
Blog - Monday 16 April 2012
As we all know inequality in the UK is higher than it is in almost every other European country. We must know this because people have been shouting this point at us from the pages of The Guardian (and other points left) for more than a generation now. ...
Blog - Sunday 15 April 2012
I've never been very taken with the arguments in favour of subsidising various forms of renewable energy. I've qlways far preferred the idea that if we really do have an externality in the form of CO2 emissions then the answer is a Pigou Tax on ...
Blog - Saturday 14 April 2012
So, knowing that drugs are bad for human beings is not a compelling reason for advocating their prohibition. Actually, the prohibition paradigm that inspires mainstream global drug policy today is based on a false premise: that the global drug markets ...
Blog - Monday 09 April 2012
I was slightly puzzled to see this piece stating that the Club of Rome's predictions about the Limits to Growth have been updated. Further, guess what, civilisation is still going to fall over around 2030. For, you see, we're going to run ...
Blog - Sunday 08 April 2012
This is slightly disturbing, finding myself agreeing with Francis Maude on something. But he's absolutely correct here : ...
Blog - Saturday 07 April 2012
Is, as we know, all that is required to lift a nation from the lowest barbarism to, well, to riches untold by earlier standards in fact. However, once we've got rich we can't just sit back and assume that we'll continue to do so as Italy ...
Blog - Friday 06 April 2012
There are two standard answers to this question of who carries the cost of the minimum wage. The first is our one, the one from the economic realists, that the true pain is felt by those who cannot get a job at all as a result of employers economising on ...
Blog - Sunday 01 April 2012
A very odd paper has just been published by a couple of sociologists concering the outcome of the various different privatisation regijmes at the end of communism . ...
Blog - Saturday 31 March 2012
I'm afraid that I don't struggle at all, like Sam did , to find something to say about minimum alcohol pricing. This is the most monumentally insane, stupid and illiberal nonsense that we've had imposed upon us in years. There have been ...
Blog - Sunday 25 March 2012
The standard economic reaction to an externality is to tax it so as to include it into the price system. We'll then get the appropriate amount of said externality, a balanacing of the costs and benefits of it. In economic terms the argument is well ...
Blog - Saturday 24 March 2012
An near endless number of loons are insisting that we must have greater State direction of bank lending in this country. We've even loons light in the current Government insisting that this should be so: to say nothing of the true loons further left ...
Blog - Friday 23 March 2012
There's a rather odd idea common among lefty and greenish types about markets and their scale. Partially based on the ideas of Karl Polanyi, the thought is that if we restrict our trade, the market we deal in, to those we know and with whom we have ...
Blog - Sunday 18 March 2012
