Category Archives: Uncategorized
Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1929
Over at the DT, Pritchard gets it bang on: It is not remotely a fiscal union. There will be no joint debt issuance, no EU treasury, no shared budgets, and no fiscal transfers to regions in trouble. “The agreement hard-wires … Continue reading
In which Janet Daley is inconsistent…
Economic recovery is doomed because consumers, are cutting back, paying off the credit cards, and buying less. Yet the solution apprently is not further QE, or fiscal expansion but, to increase real household income is by letting people keep more … Continue reading
Jobs vs Welch
I converted to Apple products nearly 20 years ago at University when working in the student union. They weren’t my first computer by any means – I was part of that generation of BBC/Spectrum users and I went to a … Continue reading
Living your philosophy – an observation on Apple
Like probably hundreds of thousands of people yesterday, I watched a short video of Steve Jobs’ commencement speech st Stanford University in 2005. What struck me was not really what he said – after all commencement speeches pretty much follow … Continue reading
Sylvia Nasar’s “The Grand Pursuit”
Great review from Bob Solow. Best line: I remember thinking that, if Hayek were right, I should live to see Norway and the Netherlands at least halfway to tyranny. It seemed implausible then and it seems embarrassing today.
The Globalisation Paradox – a review
There is, wrote David Glasner of the FTC recently, ”no other proposition in economics that students hate or find harder to reconcile with their notions of common sense”. Paul Krugman, quipped that it’s the closest thing the profession has to … Continue reading
2013: We didn’t try austerity hard enough
So in a few years, when we’ve sunk further into this mess, will the rentiers, with cheeky glint in their eye, tongue in cheek and a nod & a wink to Krugman, proclaim that we didn’t try austerity hard enough? … Continue reading
Take one gun, a moon landing…..
Why didn’t anyone see fit to fire a gun on the moon and film it. It strikes me that though the physics may have been understood well enough to render such an experiment completely useless, it nevertheless would have made … Continue reading
Review of Tim Harford’s “Adapt”
Originality, said Goethe, is not advancing what is new, but saying something as though it had never been said before. By that standard, Tim Harford’s “Adapt” is highly original, and a departure for the Undercover Economist. In this ambitious work … Continue reading
First impressions of ‘Nudge’ by Thaler & Sunstein
It’s funny and goes out of its way to stress it libertarian credentials – many of the policy examples they give have been implemented by the private sector. The Government interventions they advocate aim to modify the role of the … Continue reading