“I am opposed to the UK government’s key policy (Brexit), but then so, until recently, was she (Theresa May). There’s a job that doesn’t need doing and, increasingly, it feels like she is just the person not to do it.” (David Mitchell, Guardian Weekly, April 13) Meanwhile, a friend pointed out that the ineffectiveness of …
In recent months, there has been a surge in the number of immigrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Immigrant rights advocates say that is because they’re fleeing extreme violence in their home countries — violence that shows no signs of abating. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has broad powers over the nation’s immigration courts, …
Continue reading ‘Immigration again: victims of domestic and gang violence’ »
“Here’s some advice to my fellow liberals: If you want to defend liberal democracy in this age of “noisy populist movements”, stop condemning people who disagree with you about immigration. In both America and Europe, liberal commentators tend to treat every call for immigration curbs as a xenophobic assault on democracy. “Yet the conflation of …
Continue reading ‘Are you being a “fascist” if you want to curb immigration?’ »
What’s the point of learning maths? For some it reveals the beauty of underlying patterns in the world. But for most of us the point of maths is to help deal with real-life problems – something maths teaching today signally fails to do. You bone up on trigonometry yet seldom encounter it again once you’ve …
Continue reading ‘Most Math teaching is functionally useless’ »
All across the developed world, mainstream centre-left parties are in decline. In France, the Netherlands and Greece, they have ceased to be even remotely relevant. In countries like Ireland and Italy, they have been replaced by left-wing populist movements- Sinn Fein and M5S respectively. In France and to a lesser extent Spain, they have been …
It may sound crazy, but “Brexit has saved the EU”. Think about it. After the 2016 referendum, many sensible people thought Britain’s departure would spark a “stampede” out of the bloc. Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders schemed to duplicate the result in France and the Netherlands. Donald Trump’s promises of a “glorious” UK-US trade …
Continue reading ‘Britain saves the EU from falling apart!’ »
Grizzly bears today occupy only about three percent of their historic range in the lower 48 states. Yet last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service took the Greater Yellowstone grizzly off the Endangered Species list, relinquishing management to the states of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, which border Yellowstone National Park. The result? The Wyoming …
A few days ago, Trump gave a press conference regarding the state of America’s economy. He announced that American GDP had expanded by an annualised rate of 4.1%. This, along with a range of figures including a low unemployment rate and decent wage growth, seemed impressive. Trump predictably credited the economic buoyancy to his policies …
Continue reading ‘Trump’s economic delusions: Why the current boom won’t last’ »
The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy provides a total of £3bn per year – more than half of all farm income – which on average supplies 50-80% of a British farmer’s income. The EU also protects its farmers with tariffs on agricultural imports from outside the bloc of 12.2%, rising to as much as 51% on …
Continue reading ‘Brexit and British agriculture (a bit long but a window into the Brexit muddle)’ »
The Trump administration has dramatically increased the number of legitimate shipments of prescriptions it seizes at the border. The Food and Drug Administration is seizing shipments of cheaper, legal medications from legitimate pharmacies around the world. High drug prices in the U.S. have long driven Americans to look internationally for cheaper medications. Historically, the federal …
Robots modelled on the human hand could soon be deployed on British farms to pick cauliflowers and other vegetables. Harvesting cauliflowers is not straightforward: each head must be assessed, to ensure that it is suitably white and compact, and then carefully prised from its stem, with a few outer leaves still attached to protect the …
Continue reading ‘Hurry up – the human workers will soon be gone!’ »
One dark chapter in the American story gets left out of the history books: the American Plan, which detained tens, and possibly hundreds of thousands of women from the 1910s through the 1950s. Under the plan, conceived during World War I to protect soldiers from “promiscuous” women and the diseases they possibly carried, women were …
Ten years ago, Richard Thaler, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, and law professor Cass Sunstein, published a book that suggested a brilliant idea: by exploiting simple quirks of human nature – our susceptibility to peer pressure; our tendency to put off coming to a decision – you can nudge people into making the right choices. Indeed …
Ireland is to hold a referendum on a clause in its 1937 constitution that implies that a woman’s place is in the home – and not in the labour market. Article 41.2 says that “by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved”, …
80% of private wealth in the United States is inherited. The richest 1% now own 41.8% of the wealth, while the poorest 90% hold only 22.8%. When you look at the differences between white and black citizens the gap is stark. For every dollar owned by a white family, a black family of colour earns …
