Sam Bowman

I’m in today’s City AM debating about whether we can trust social networking sites with our data. My basic point is that, if we want it, they will provide it:

Nothing summed up the farcical nature of Ireland’s referendum campaign on the European Fiscal Compact Treaty better than the Finance Minister Michael Noonan’s assurance that Ireland’s only contact with Greece was “feta cheese and holidays”.

Scott Sumner had another must-read post on his blog, The Money Illusion, last week.

As you may have noticed, we've been pretty preoccupied with the nanny state this week.

David Henderson makes the crucial point about privacy concerns about Facebook versus government agencies:

[Blog commenter] figleaf is right that FB is contemptuous of privacy. I'm not sure that the U.S. Census Bureau is less contemptuous. Its handing over Census data to the Secret Service so the federal government could round up Japanese Americans and imprison them was pretty contemptuous of privacy, to put it mildly.

A pamphlet by John Mills arguing for currency devaluation was recently sent to the "3,000 most influential Britons" (whoever they are). Thankfully, Prof Kevin Dowd and Gordon Kerr of Cobden Partners (Helping Nations Solve Banking Crises) and author of our paper The Law of Opposites have penned a short response rebutting the points made in the pamphlet:

The Institute for Justice, an American libertarian think tank that focuses on legal issues, has just released a superb report on occupational licensure. Charting how many occupations require state permission in each state, the most striking result is how regulated low-skilled parts of the market are, and how high the barriers are. 

Paul Krugman posted the graph above on his New York Times blog the other day. It charts change in GDP against austerity as % of GDP in European countries. Krugman claims that this proves that austerity is directly related to GDP contractions, making the basis error of confusing a correlation for a causation.