Tim Worstall

Much ink is being spilled as people try to work out how to reconcile two conflicing economic statistics. GDP is still going down yet so is unemployment. If more people are employed they should be producing more thus GDP should be rising. Unless, of course, productivity is falling at the same time but that would be very odd indeed.

It's not unusual to hear the economically illiterate insisting that companies must pay more in taxes. This is illiterate because companies do not pay taxes. They cannot, for only people can bear the burden of a tax: someone's wallet has to get lighter and that wallet must belong to a person.

I'm not going to do my reputation as a b'stard neoliberal here any good (hmm, well, it might increase it perhaps) but CityUnslicker makes an interesting point: why shouldn't we be closing the libraries?

So some swarthy foreigner sidles up to you and offers a deal on something you desire. A very good deal, real cheap. Clearly the correct response is to take the deal: you're getting what you want cheaper than you can elsewhere and are thus being made richer. If this swarth foreigner was an agent of the Sultan of Constantinople and was being subsidised by hte Sultan in order to create work for his subjects to do: the answer is still the same. Take the deal for it is a deal. Your own resources have been increased and you are richer.

One of the things that people often miss (or at the very least, underappreciate) is how the mechanisation of daily tasks in the past century has made us both hugely richer and also increased our leisure time. Further, it's less the mechanisation of industrial tasks that has done so: the mechanisation of the household has probably had more to do with it than anything else. In one of the few things that he's observably got right even Ha Joon Chang has cottoned on to this.

I think we've noticed that this summer hasn't been all that good. Farmers have also noticed and a number of crops have suffered from the weather.

For a Friday afternoon, something entirely different. The American economist Art Carden has been using some of the various internet memes (err, this won't make sense to some/may but bear with me) to produce economically instructional posters. The full set is here. And here is an example.

Which is very good I think you'll agree. As these others.

Sometimes there's just something where the stupid is so bad that it hurts: not just the inability to see the forest for the trees but a concentration upon the twig at the expense of the branch. So it is with the latest whine about the cost of housing in the UK:

Employers are just so beastly, aren't they? Attempting to get around their responsibilities to the workers. Why, some of them even decide to hire temporary workers instead of loading up on full time long term peeps that they have to pay extra costs to employ!

This example comes from the US:

Sam and I have been patting ourselves on the back for working out that the best and simplest way of increasing the incomes of the poor is to stop taxing them so bloody much. Raise the income tax and NI limits so as to pull all of those we define as poor out of such tax nets. We were thinking around the level of the minimum wage, around the £12,000 a year sort of level. And now I find out that we're being outflanked by people even more liberal than we are: