The road to wealth
To make people in the UK wealthier, the government would need to balance short-term growth stimulus with long-term productivity improvements.
What do we do now, given the Establishment’s gone mad?
Guardian editorials are the closest Britain’s liberal establishment gets to the Sermon on the Mount - the irreducible minimum of the belief system.
No news is good news
Many sources point to a pronounced decline, especially among younger people, in the UK’s news consumption since 2015.
No, really, this time is different. Honest
The phrase you never do want to hear in a financial market is “This time is different”.
We do think this is most, most, impressive from Tax Justice UK
We know they’re eager to have a wealth tax and they want one despite all the serious people telling ‘em it’s a nonsense.
Save Britain from pinheads with potty policies
As we’ve noted before economic growth is people doing new things - or old things in new ways.
Government fails the Bernard Levin obituary test
There's an old Bernard Levin line. He asked, rhetorically, whether it is better to have a tombstone marked “He always kept his word” or “He always acted from the best intentions”.
Better without lockdowns
As more data emerges about the impact of the Covid pandemic and its associated lockdowns, it becomes clearer that the UK lockdown, which had huge costs to the economy, to education, to civil liberties and to mental health, had little impact on mortality.
Democracy is also the Tyranny of the Majority
Walking down their local high streets, people in Britain are increasingly unlikely to come across a local butcher, baker or grocery shop, and more likely to find betting shops, casinos, adult gaming centres (AGC) and so-called bingo venues, where traditional bingo is muscled out by money-sapping slot machines.
A Strategy of Fear
Some commentators have observed that people in the UK seem more afraid of things than they used to be.
Stamp duty on houses increases the unemployment rate
Transactions taxes are a bad idea - that’s a central finding of basic thought about taxes.
Future Progress
If we look at historical trends, current research pipelines, and plausible technological leaps, the next 25 years are likely to bring advances in what humans can do along several dimensions: physical capability, cognition, creativity, and societal-scale problem solving.