Whatever happened to all those miners? Shocks and economic resilience
Where have all the miners gone? To judge by the rhetoric of the BBC and other Leftist media outlets, whole swathes of Britain lie devastated, plagued by rickets, unemployment and endemic poverty – nearly thirty years after the pit closures under Lady Thatcher! The reality is different. There is indeed a small number of local […]
Sovereign debt and Euro zone reality
The recent debacle in Cyprus has essentially been shrugged off by the markets. The European Central Bank vigorously asserts the crisis in the Euro zone is over. So why is there continued unease about the financial viability of countries such as Spain and Portugal, a morass into which even the French are now being dragged? […]
Are economics graduates fit for purpose?
Are economics graduates fit for purpose? This is a hot topic in policy making circles. A year ago, the Bank of England hosted a day conference on the topic. Diane Coyle has edited the proceedings in a neat little book What’s The Use of Economics: Teaching the Dismal Science After the Crisis. There was a […]
The Market for Speeding Points
What is it worth to take someone else’s speeding points? The Huhne-Pryce case has brought this into sharp focus. Setting aside the moral issues, the question raises interesting topics in economics. It turns out that there is a market in these points. The Daily Telegraph discovered that prisoners are willing to take points. By the […]
Hip Hop and Why Some Things Succeed
Just over a month ago, a group of young men from a fairly yokel part of Australia posted a video on YouTube. Nothing remarkable about that. Except that the video now has over 21 million viewings. More than 170,000 variants of the original theme have been posted on YouTube. A few have received even more […]
How expert are experts? Time to end the independence of the Bank
The Bank of England has held short-term interest rates very close to zero for several years, with devastating consequences for the incomes of millions of frugal people. The Bank’s latest wheeze suggests that savers pay the banks for the privilege of holding their money. The Bank has pumped hundreds of billions of pounds into the […]
What would Keynes have said? Ouija board active!
The loss of triple A status on UK government bonds has intensified the demands for a Plan B. So-called Keynesians demand an increase in both public spending and the public sector deficit. What might Keynes himself have said about the current situation? Lacking a Ouija board, I am unable to communicate directly with the great […]
Networks, the North and Prosperity
What can be done about the North? The gap between London and the South East grows and grows. The response of many in the political class in the North is the dispiriting whinge of entitlement. The Leader of Newcastle Council has recently attracted national publicity for his decision to cut all arts funding in the […]
Entrepreneurship and the filthy rich
Peter Mandelson famously said that he was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’. As was the case with many aspects of New Labour, he was working firmly in the Leninist intellectual tradition. Some 20 years earlier, the then leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Deng Xiaoping, stated that ‘to get rich is glorious’. The […]
Today Singapore and Japan, Tomorrow China
It has suddenly become fashionable to be concerned about China’s growth rate slowing down. This is not a matter of a short-run cyclical downturn, with normal service being resumed shortly as the economy roars ahead once more. It is a worry that there will be a permanent slowdown by the end of this decade. Instead […]
