According to the Guardian Weekly (November 11th) the world’s 1,542 billionaires increased their wealth this year by 17% to $6tn, a return impossible to get on most stock markets and rather a distance from the average interest income of 0.35% offered normal people by normal banks. The IMF has told western governments to increase taxes …
More than 6 million Britons owe 8000 pounds ($10,550) on a day to day basis, and that is in addition to mortgages. Almost a quarter of them say they are struggling to survive financially, while 62% say they are often worried about their levels of personal debt. 10% of the respondents to a recent survey …
Brendan O’Neill is perhaps one of my least favourite British columnists. I disagree with him on almost everything, from Brexit to student politics and the populist right. But his article this week is really interesting. O’Neill laments the effect of legalised cannabis on the culture of Los Angeles. He decries how it has become all …
A “disorderly Brexit” is now seen as “almost inevitable” by the world’s biggest banks. That, at any rate, was the gist of the observations sent to the Chancellor by the City of London Corporation’s Catherine McGuinness, after days of meetings with Wall Street bosses and Washington policy wonks. With continued access to the single market …
“I am a gun rights advocate and firmly support the Second Amendment. I own handguns. I learned to shoot at an early age from my father, who was in law enforcement. I am an infantry combat veteran of the Korean War. I am absolutely opposed to civilians owning any form of assault weapon or multi-round …
Continue reading ‘Ah, hah! A voice of reason and common sense!’ »
I’m aware the topics I’ve been posting on have been very wonkish and policy-orientated recently. I’ll do something less serious next time, but I thought I’d give my take on an increasingly popular idea amongst economics. Also be warned, the post is necessarily lengthy. Perhaps the most glaring contradiction of present-day ‘late’ capitalism is the …
As a general rule, I don’t believe in high taxes. Partly because I believe they make economies less vibrant by discouraging investment and reducing disposable income. But also because of the principle that people, for the most part, have a right to keep what they have earned. Governments should only take what is necessary to …
Continue reading ‘The under-taxation of tech companies and online retailers’ »
For those of you who don’t know, Robert argued in favour of the abolition of private education at his old school. Since Sherborne is a private school, he was understandably met with a frosty reception. So today I will outline my views on private schools. Unlike Robert I was state educated, but my sixth form …
In the 19th century, the railroad connected people across distances so great that time zones needed to be implemented to align rail schedules. In the 20th century, the aeroplane eliminated all time zones, at least for pilots and airport personnel. Time is about coordination. Some people think that daylight saving time (DST) nowadays does more …
Continue reading ‘Why do we still change our clocks in Autumn and Spring?’ »
Continued. from yesterday: Writer Huval Noah Harari sees three broad directions for humankind: 1. Humans will lose their economic and military usefulness, and the economic system will stop attaching much value to them. 2. The system will still find value in humans collectively but not in unique individuals. 3. The system will, however, find value …
Continue reading ‘The end of liberal democracy and humanism? (Part 2)’ »
What is the job of a university? To produce people who can think laterally, not literally; who can think critically and for themselves; who can mentally assemble information in a logical way, and transmit the information to others in a clear, concise manner. It is not the job of universities to reflect the racial make-up …
Continue reading ‘Are Oxford and Cambridge being racist? Part 2’ »
“Oxford and Cambridge Universities are being accused of a form of “social apartheid”. More than 80% of their offers go to “the top two social classes, the children of barristers, doctors and CEOs”, many of them privately educated pupils from the south-east. In 2015, one in five colleges at Cambridge and one in three at …
Continue reading ‘Are Oxford and Cambridge being racist? Part 1’ »
Anyone who supports fair taxation has heard this line a million times: “If you raise taxes on the rich, they’ll just move away.” The argument sounds commonsensical. Opponents of higher taxes on the wealthy make it without much fear of contradiction. But new research exposes this argument for what it really is, a fabrication. A …
There’s been a lot of attention given to income and wealth inequality in politics recently. In particular, left wing populists like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders blame income inequality for the rise of authoritarian populism. The political establishment has pursued ‘neoliberal’ economic policies, which have only enriched the wealthiest at the expense of the wider …
“The war on coal is over.” So declared Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt, as he announced plans to repeal the Obama-era law limiting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. China, meanwhile, is moving in completely the opposite direction. That country, which suffers more than a million deaths a year because of poor air quality, …
Continue reading ‘China is way ahead of us on clean energy’ »
