Integration won’t save the struggling Eurozone
Olivier Blanchard, the recently retired Head of Economics at the International Monetary Fund, has something of a track record with his predictions. In 2013, he warned George Osborne that he was “playing with fire” with the UK’s recovery from the financial crisis. Austerity had to be relaxed. We now know that we were actually nowhere […]
CEO compensation and Jamaican demands for reparations: two sides of the same coin
David Cameron’s visit to Jamaica last week led to vociferous demands for the UK to pay the Caribbean island billions of pounds in reparations for slavery. Most people here reacted with predictable eye-rolls and sighs. Slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833, nearly two centuries ago. Jamaica has been independent since 1962, over […]
Um Bongo: a spotlight on modern social and economic behaviour
Readers who either had young children or were children themselves in the 1980s will recall the Um Bongo jingle. The advert assured us it was drunk in the Congo. A survey published last week to mark the 60th anniversary of British television advertising showed that no fewer than 32 per cent of the total sample […]
How do you deal with someone who thinks the Earth is flat?
Imagine you are relaxing at a bar enjoying a drink after a hard day’s work. The person next to you strikes up a conversation. Initially he seems reasonable. But soon he begins to go on at length about how the Earth is flat and how a misguided cabal of scientists hides this truth from us. […]
The national accounts are the new JK Rowling
A potential candidate for the world’s most boring book is the Office for National Statistics’ National Accounts: Sources and Methods. This book, all 502 pages of it, is currently available in hardback on Amazon for just 1p. It does exactly what it says in the title. It gives a detailed description of how the data […]
Why economics can prevent Europe’s refugee crisis from becoming even worse
Emotions are running high over the refugee crisis, with heart-breaking images arousing waves of compassion across Europe. As ever, however, economics lurks in the background. The tragic stories of refugees coming to Europe rightly elicit a call to help those in need, but we must understand the underlying realities to truly do something about this […]
History shows why robots won’t destroy our jobs
Economics is often described as the dismal science, but it often contains cheerful material. A paper by the leading American economic historian Joel Mokyr made for exuberant holiday reading. Written for the top Journal of Economic Perspectives, it is entirely in English and contains not a single mathematical symbol. Mokyr examines the history of anxieties […]
A-levels, culture, and the great regional divide
Last week saw the ritual tears and joy of the announcement of the A level results. An encouraging aspect was the increase, albeit small, in the percentage of entries in traditional academic subjects, now standing at 51.2 per cent. This is yet another example of incentives at work. The universities have been signalling that non-academic […]
Keynesians are wrong: Cutting public spending can boost economic growth
The key aim of George Osborne’s economic policy has been to eliminate the financial deficit of the public sector. The main way of trying to achieve has been to squeeze public spending. The orthodox economic textbooks maintain that this withdraws demand from the economy, and so leads to the growth rate being slower than it […]
Response to Cecil the Lion’s death is a sad lesson in the irrationality of public opinion
Alas poor Cecil! Close personal friend of mine, sadly dead now. The catchphrases of the Scottish comedian Bob Doolally capture the outpourings of grief among the Twitterati at the death of the now famous lion. The mourning is mixed with incoherent rage, as long-standing opponents of torture and capital punishment demand that the American dentist […]
