Basketball shows high banker pay not a slam dunk
The highwayman who offers “your money or your life” leaves you free to choose – in a sense. There is a spectrum, not a sharp distinction, between free exchange and coercion.
View ArticleBeware of Franklin’s Gambit in making decisions
When we make hiring decisions, or construct risk maps, or undertake investment appraisals we complete templates, the purpose of which is not to help us manage or decide but to rationalise what we...
View ArticleNotes on a divided Europe from the Finnish frontier
To pass the watchtowers and barbed-wire fences on the Finnish-Russian border is to be reminded of how fragile, and how recent, are the stability and security we take for granted today.
View ArticleWhen storytelling leads to unhappy endings
We deal with that world by constructing simplifying narratives. We do this not because we are stupid, or irrational, or have forgotten probability 101, but because storytelling is the best means of...
View ArticleThe welfare state’s a worthy Ponzi scheme
The only bread fit to eat is bread baked today: but why should today’s bakers feed the retired bakers of yesteryear?
View ArticleHigher pay boosts economics and politics
Wouldn’t it be simpler if poor people in work were just paid more in the first place? That is, apparently, predistribution.
View ArticleThe monumental folly of rent-seeking
The activities of Shah Jahan epitomise rent-seeking – the accumulation of a fortune not by creating wealth through serving customers better but by the appropriation of such wealth after it has already...
View ArticleThe allies who moulded the welfare state
Social policy would, in the long run, owe far more to Eleanor Roosevelt’s claim that “everyone has the right to a standard of living” than to Beveridge’s assertion that “management of one’s income is...
View ArticleThe limits of what money can buy
Should there be markets for sperm, surrogate motherhood or transplant organs?
View ArticleFor a stimulus, boring is best
The objective of monetisation has not been to put money in the hands of consumers and businesses but to put money in the vaults of banks.
View ArticleOn the brink of a shadow drink industry
Restriction of business on moral grounds is not always unsuccessful but measures have to be applied with great care.
View ArticleProsperity requires more than rule of law
When the Chinese ask how to establish the institutions to support a stable, prosperous economy, it is not enough to mumble: “Property rights and rule of law – go to Denmark and see.”
View ArticleSinister or silly, protest politicians are united in grievance
The inability of democratic politics to handle the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis has threatened to undermine the apparent consensus on liberal democracy and lightly regulated capitalism that...
View ArticleDarwin’s humbling lesson for business
The match between capabilities and environment is the key to the success of the tortoise. It is also the key to successful business strategy, the effectiveness of institutions, and to personal...
View ArticleQuantitative easing and the curious case of the leaky bucket
In the modern financial economy, the main effect of QE is to boost asset prices, as market gyrations of recent weeks have clearly illustrated. But is the pursuit of higher asset prices an effective or...
View ArticleLondon’s mayor is half right on envy, greed and inequality
Envy is both inseparable from economic progress and destructive of social cohesion. Some inequality is inevitable, and there seem to be three principal factors that make it more tolerable.
View ArticleEconomists: there is no such thing as the ‘economic approach’
Economics is not a method but a subject – one defined by the problems it sets out to tackle not the techniques it uses.
View ArticlePhilistines may carp but scientists should reach for the sky
Anthropology helps us understand the world, in ways that are helpful whether we are talking about the internal contradictions of communism or the pathologies of financial crises.
View ArticleEconomic abstractions conceal the true contours of human life
No economic model can describe “the world as it really is”.
View ArticleA stealthy step towards abolishing income tax
The man who “laboureth much, and sparing the fruits of his labour, consumeth little” should not, Hobbes argued, pay more “than he that liveth idlely, getteth little, and spendeth all he gets”.
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