Today’s apologists for socialism still won’t acknowledge the lessons of the Berlin Wall
The media has been awash over the past week with stories about the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. My favourite vignette concerns a couple living in East Berlin who were delighted to have a telephone installed in their apartment only weeks before the Wall came down. They had been on the […]
Like the myth of a flat Earth, the socialist conspiracy theory never dies
The idea that the Earth is flat is a rapidly growing trend on social media. The Flat Earth Society’s Twitter feed has the best part of 100,000 followers. The fact that the planet is a sphere has been known since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. The astronomer Eratosthenes demonstrated it with a […]
From Venezuela to East Berlin, people will always choose capitalism over socialism
How many people across the world in the history of humanity have fled from a capitalist country to a socialist one? There was much amusement at the height of the long miners’ strike of 1984/85. A National Union of Mineworkers official from Yorkshire, a crony of Marxist trade unionist Arthur Scargill, sought sanctuary in the […]
From Korea to Germany, experiments with socialism show markets always win
A red-hot topic in economics is randomised controlled trials (RCT). Esther Duflo, the MIT academic who has really driven this idea, has surely put herself in pole position for a Nobel Prize at some point. The idea of RCTs has been imported from medicine.One group of people are selected at random to be subject to […]
Blame Jeremy Corbyn for the increasing number of public sector strikes
The total number of working days lost through labour disputes last year was, at just 170,000, the second lowest annual total since records began in 1891. What a difference a year can make. Southern Rail commuters have endured months of misery due to the prolonged series of strikes called by the RMT. Union members on […]
Child poverty is thankfully not rising – but the archaic definition needs to go
David Cameron is feeling the heat. This is not just a consequence of the sudden dramatic rise in London temperatures. The need to extract something meaningful from our EU partners and the increased threat of terrorist attacks are sleep-depriving problems. But the Prime Minister did have one good result during the past week. Despite widespread […]
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 […]
Does Miliband understand the importance of incentives?
Ed Miliband has long had a problem with voters not perceiving him as “normal”. His famous struggle with a bacon sandwich in some ways says it all. But at a much more important level, he seems to have little or no empathy with one of the most fundamental of human motivations. The most profound insight […]
Popular culture is the driving force of inequality
The Oscars have come and gone for another year. Winning an Oscar is very often the basis for either making a fortune, or turning an existing one into mega riches. Jack Nicholson has an estimated worth of over $400 million, and stars like Tom Hanks and Robert de Niro are not far behind. Even winners […]
Crocodile tears for the poor
INEQUALITY is now a buzzword in Britain. Scarcely a week goes by without a new publication by an academic or journalist lamenting the levels of poverty facing swathes of the population. They are bolstered by a complicit metropolitan liberal elite, who shed crocodile tears for the poor, while ruminating on the current situation. Unfortunately, much […]
Economists are not impressed by Piketty’s views on inequality
The financial crisis has undoubtedly created a demand in popular culture for works which portray capitalism in a bad light, such as the recent best seller by Thomas Piketty. Piketty’s writing has gathered increasing attention from economists, and his arguments do not really bear scrutiny. The focus of Piketty’s work is the long-run evolution of […]
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 […]
“It’s not the economy, stupid, it’s the narrative!”
The improvement in the economy has seen a narrowing of the gap in the opinion polls between the Conservatives and Labour. In the key marginal seat of Bury North, a Tory gain in 2010 by just 2,200 votes, they recently took a council seat from Labour. Bill Clinton famously said about elections “It’s the economy, […]
Trends in Inequality: Truth and Myth
Concern about inequalities of income and wealth is now a fashionable topic. It featured strongly in the gathering of the world’s top brass at Davos earlier this year. Much of the popular coverage of the topic gives the impression that not only is inequality at record highs, but that it is confined to the wicked […]
Psychology, not economics, is the key if we leave the EU
Poland is the only European country to avoid a recession during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. Polish GDP is 36 per cent higher than it was in 2005. To put this in context, the comparable figures for the UK and Germany are 5 and 12 respectively. The Polish economy has been a stunning success by […]
