Birthday parties and the NHS: We Need More Markets
Many outrageous things happened around the world during the course of last week. But, judging by both the level of popular interest in the story and reaction to it, the most heinous was the decision of a mother to send an invoice to the parents of a boy who did not turn up to her son’s […]
What the Emily Thornberry saga tells us about macroeconomic policy
It has been a wretched week for Emily Thornberry. The high-flying MP for Islington was sacked as Shadow Attorney General, and widely pilloried in both social media and conventional newsprint for tweeting a picture of a white van and England flags in Strood. Yet the saga tells us more about perception, about the narrative which […]
Is Ed Miliband secretly a Rational Economic Person?
Recently, we have seen a very effective piece of forward guidance. Ed Miliband’s statement that Labour would bring in a mansion tax on properties worth more than £2 million has had a dramatic impact. The market for expensive properties in London has more or less ground to a halt, with very few transactions taking place. […]
The Happy Band of the Self Employed
How many workers does the typical American firm employ? Actually, it is a trick question. The answer is ‘zero’. More than 50 per cent of all companies in the United States are one person operations – the owner, and no-one else. This fragmentation of size is increasingly reflected in the UK. Here, the main growth […]
Can Nanny make you stop drinking?
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has been the butt of much ridicule over the past week. A pill designed to reduce alcohol consumption among problem drinkers will be made available across the NHS. But the concept of problem drinkers is so wide that it embraces people who enjoy a couple of […]
Low or zero inflation is normal: competition keeps it that way
Fears of deflation are rising across Europe. Inflation keeps edging down to lower and lower rates. Eurostat estimates the rate of inflation in the Euro zone in the year to August to be only 0.4 per cent, compared to 1.3 per cent in the year to August 2013. Negative rates were observed in seven EU […]
Coping with Uncertainty: the Red Hot Topic in Economics
After months of Trappist silence, a whole plethora of large companies has pronounced on the adverse consequences for Scotland of a Yes vote tomorrow. The sectors span the economy, from oil to banks, from supermarkets to phone companies. But what will be the effect of these interventions? From the perspective of a rational economic person, […]
Employment is rising because labour is cheap
The latest employment figures confirm the buoyancy of the UK labour market. In the quarter April-June of this year, employment rose by 167,000 on the previous quarter, to an all-time high of 30.60 million. Unemployment also fell, by no less than 132,000. Taking a somewhat longer perspective, the low point for employment was reached in […]
Open Data: Britain leads the world
The UK economy is doing well. Even so, it is not often that we are placed unequivocally at the top of a world ranking of any kind. But a team of economists led by Nicholas Gruen of Lateral Economics in Melbourne has done just that. In their recent report on the economic potential created by […]
More ideas like HS3 are needed to solve our regional problems
In London and much of the South East, the recovery has been well under way for a considerable time. House prices boom and restaurants are packed. The economic data for the UK as a whole looks just as encouraging, with employment being at its highest ever level. Yet there are persistent complaints that the recovery […]
Psychology, not hard line maths, tells us why Osborne’s strategy is working
So, International Monetary Fund, wrong again! At the end of last week, the IMF abandoned its criticism of the UK government’s economic strategy. Christine Lagarde, the IMF chief, said her organisation had ‘underestimated’ the strength of the recovery in Britain. The IMF now believes that the UK will be the fastest growing of any major […]
Obama allies lead the way on a positive approach to climate change
The fracking debate continues apace, with the announcement by the British Geological Survey that there are over 4 billion barrels of oil in the shale rocks of the South of England. The government has proposed new rules of access to land in order to speed up the exploitation of this oil, with payments of £20,000 […]
Forget the hype. Capitalism has made the world a more equal place
Metropolitan liberals love to be able to criticise Western society. Recently, their lives have been brightened by the extensive discussion on the rise in inequality since the 1970s, especially in the Anglo-Saxon economies. There is a danger that this essentially anti-capitalist narrative will come to dominate the media, paving the way for increased regulation and […]
New ideas are needed in economics, but not the tired old statist one
The annual Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) conference was held in Toronto earlier this month. INET was created by George Soros in the autumn of 2009 in response to the economic crisis. Mainstream economics bears a heavy responsibility for creating the intellectual climate prior to the crash that the problems of boom and bust […]
Supply-side growth, not inflation, is the cure to the debt overhang problem
In the year to March 2014, consumer prices in Sweden fell by 0.4 per cent. This has prompted the central bank, the Riksbank, to abandon the normally cautious language used by such institutions. Over the same period, inflation was negative in a further seven European countries, such as Greece, Portugal and Spain. In eight other […]
