Tim Worstall

Good drugs lead to support for the market system. Umm, no, not that sort of recreational pharmaceutical, that's not what I mean. Rather, that the system which produces good pharmaceuticals is an example of how and why a market based system is superior to a planned one. Take this from Corante, discussing Nassim Taleb's view of finance:

Peak Oil is the idea that one day there just won't be any oil left and civilisation will fall over. Or for the more discriminating but no less wrong, that one day we'll be producing less oil than the oil that is demanded and thus civilisation will fall over. The major problem with these and other flavours of the same prediction is that they ignore price. If demand for oil is greater than supply of it then the price will rise. Thus there never actually is a possible position where there is no oil and civilisation falls over.

I've said this before and no doubt I'll say it again. But inequality in the UK just isn't quite what people generally say it is. We're in an unusual situation: we've in London one of the great commercial cities on the planet. The rest of the UK is pretty standard high income European stylee. A goodly part of the recorded inequality in the UK is between these two economies. We can see this in this report on the latest ONS figures:

I can't say that I've ever really understood this idea that we must all eat only the things that have been grown in our own region. "Region" of course is a variable thing. It seems to depend on how deep the green of the fool recommending it is. Something from "the nation" to "your back yard" is the spectrum. But as I say, I've never really understood the point.

Tim Taylor has a nice piece about the extension of human lifespans. Mortality has, as we know, fallen dramatically (or lifespans have extended, same thing) since the hunter gatherer days. We all know they exercised regularly, had no chemicals, little pollution and ate organic food. And were all dead by 35. We have all of the chemicals, lots of pollution, eat polluted chemical muck and live into our late 70s. But here's the fascinating fact:

David Cameron is doing something very important at the United Nations. Well, as far as anything a politician ever does is important. He's talking about what is necessary to aid development in the poor countries. I thought it would be interesting to look at what a development expert thought about what Cameron was saying. Worth reading this in full if you're into this sort of thing.

It sounds rather odd really for no one really notes that anything does die from opportunity costs. But I think that it might well be possible that that's what does in the BBC in the end. I'm prompted in these thoughts by Bill Quango. He notes that it's becoming less unusual for people not to have a TV.

In his series of reasons to be cheerful (yes, he is indeed a Blockheads fan, why do you think he lets me hang around the place?) Madsen tells us this about copper and other mineral resources:

Today's example comes from Canada but I get hugely and vastly irritated by very much the same thing over here. Quite simply the blind refusal of many in the environmentalist movement to understand what it is that economists are trying to tell them. Mike Moffatt (both an economist and a Green, so something of an unusual mixture) tells of his experience here.

I suppose we'll just have to swallow hard and accept it, this award of the Peace Prize to the EU. That's after we've recovered from the fits of hysteria and laughter. Quite by chance the same day the news came though this was said about Owen Paterson: