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 […]
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 […]
Closing the gender pay gap
Those who were lucky enough to attend the Wimbledon Tennis Championships recently cannot have failed to take in the sense of tradition that surrounds those who pass through the gates of the All England Lawn Tennis Club. But in one important sense, Wimbledon is a beacon of progress in the UK – since 2007, the […]
Who plays better poker? Cameron, Sturgeon or Varoufakis?
The gracious Palladian architecture of Edinburgh has often led the city to be described as the Athens of the North. If the referendum result had gone the other way, much closer parallels would have rapidly emerged. A high spending left-wing government, faced by a collapse in revenues with the fall in the oil price, would […]
Supply side success is a cure for the drug of deficit finance
George Osborne’s plan to run financial surpluses and use them to pay off government debt has been met with the usual set of whinges and whines, mainly from academic economists funded by the taxpayer. Of course, their arguments are based purely on what they believe to be the intellectual merits of their case. One of […]
Markets are good, but we need clear signals
Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of the general election result is the abuse which is now being heaped on the metropolitan liberal elite from many quarters. Theirs is truly a difficult mind set to comprehend, based as it is on an unshakeable belief in their own omniscience. Yet this is confounded on an almost daily […]
Opinion Polls, Financial Crashes and Groupthink
The election is done and dusted, but many interesting questions remain. Was there a swing to the Conservatives at the very last minute, or was it indeed possible to foresee the victory in advance? Snippets are emerging which suggest that the electorate had made up their minds well before polling day. Rod Liddle, the entertaining […]
The election, the polls and why someone was always going to be eating their hat….
Paddy Ashdown had to eat his hat. Alastair Campbell had to eat his kilt. In fact, the majority of the electorate has eaten a piece of metaphorical clothing. The inaccuracy of the pre-election polls has been blamed on the shy Tory voter and the influence of the pre-election polls themselves; I’m sure the former played […]
The Subtle Costs of a Mansion Tax
An exciting email pinged into my inbox at the end of last week. It was a link to the contents of the latest issue of the American Economic Association’s journal ‘Economic Policy’. For most people these are not usually as gripping as, say, a Ken Follett novel. But there, nestling amongst thickets of algebra, is […]
