The net worth of the world’s 62 richest people is equal to the total wealth of the poorest half of the global population.
Oxfam/The Times

Since David Cameron became Prime Minister of The UK more than 400 full-time libraries have closed in the UK; around one in seven library books have gone.
CIPFA/The Daily Telegraph

Why are human beings making such a hash of governing themselves? Has common sense disappeared forever, or are we just going through some kind of temporary fit or convulsion?
Epicureanism stands for calm and rational thought. It is necessary to have around in the world a still, small voice of reason and a spirit of moderation and consideration for others. Money cannot be our prime preoccupation. (By the way I believe old-fashioned, printed books will return to popularity. Don’t destroy them).

To The Daily Telegraph
For the past five years I have focused my recreational fishing on the pursuit of sea bass in Britain’s coastal waters. I have caught a few, but only one of legal size for me to take home for my supper. The rest have all been returned to the water to grow bigger.
The EU has now banned recreational fishermen from such activity, as we are apparently endangering stock levels. I can be fined up to £50,000 if I am caught with a bass. However, commercial trawlers can take up to 1.3 tons of the legal size of bass per month. I am no longer undecided about the In/Out referendum.
Alan Belk, Leatherhead, Surrey

The question to be asked is, “Is the writer correct?”

The ban is on sea bass sea bass fishing for six months (only) from January to help halt a “dramatic decline” in stocks. A statement on proposed EU fishing quotas said that sea bass was a “special case”, and extra measures were needed to “halt the dramatic decline in this important stock”. For the second half of the year a one tonne catch limit for boats and a one fish bag limit for recreational anglers was recommended. The commission also proposes to maintain the closure for commercial fishing around Ireland.

There are 80 commercial boats who fish for sea bass in continental waters and they are being banned as well as the amateurs. It clearly affects the livelihoods of a number of, mostly Welsh, fishermen, there is no doubt about that. But the point is that anti-EU sentiment is fuelled by lies and disinformation. My own company, as pointed out previously, was affected by a ban that turned out to have originated from the bloated British health and safety industry, and had nothing to do with the EU. But the EU was conveniently blamed.

I suspect that the letter writer has likewise discovered a convenient stick with which to beat the EU, and has misrepresented what the rule actually says. This is very common indeed. The fact is that the European waters are being fished out and the EU is right to restrict fishing if there is to any vestige of a future fishing industry. It is people like the letter-writer who will take Britain out of the EU, often for petty and bogus reasons. Who will they blame when living standards fall in the UK and the country ends up with a level of influence not seen in Europe since the the 15th Century?*

* For the non-historians I refer to the period of the Wars of the Roses, when England was of no account, indeed, a laughing stock, to continental powers.

Supporters of TPP generally insist it’s absolutely worth doing, despite any infelicities it might contain, because of the huge overall economic benefit it will bring to participants. But when challenged, they are unable to cite any credible evidence for that claim. We now have a new report from the World Bank, which takes into account all aspects of the proposed deal. Here’s the summary of what it found:

The model simulations suggest that, by 2030, the TPP will raise member country GDP by 0.4-10 percent, and by 1.1 percent, on a GDP-weighted average basis. pThat’s a little vague: 10% GDP increase is very different from only 0.4%, so it really matters who gets what. The detailed figures are as follows:

Vietnam — 10%
Malaysia — 8%
Brunei — 5%
New Zealand — 3.1%
Singapore — 3%
Japan — 2.7%
Peru — 2.1%
Mexico — 1.4%
Canada — 1.2%
Chile — 1%
Australia — 0.7%
US — 0.4%

But those figures too are misleading, because they refer to the cumulative GDP gain from TPP by 2030. It’s not clear when the World Bank econometric model assumes TPP will come into effect, but by 2030 it’s clearly been running for at least ten years, and maybe even 12. That means all of the figures above need to be divided by at least a factor of 10 in order to arrive at the annual boost to growth, which provides a better measure of TPP’s impact than the overall figure.

So according to the World Bank’s figures, the US will gain an extra 0.04% GDP per year on average, as a result of TPP; Australia an extra 0.07% annually, and Canada a boost of 0.12% per year. In other words, they differ from the USDA’s earlier projection of “no measurable impacts on real GDP” by amounts that are so small they will be swamped by the general imprecision of the model — trying to predict what will happen to a big chunk of the global economy out in 2030 is hard, and that’s putting it mildly.

The fact that two econometric models of TPP’s effects, both from highly-respected institutions, predict that TPP will produce vanishingly-small economic benefits for key countries, including the US, could explain why there are so few such studies. A cynic might suggest that others were started but generated such inconveniently-awful outcomes that they were quietly dropped and never published.
(Source: Techdirt https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160112/07433333306/world-bank-report-tpp-will-bring-negligible-economic-benefit-to-us-canada-australia.shtml Glyn Moody!)

It is the mechanism for handling disputes that I, and most people who know about it, most heartily detest. But this bit of information makes one wonder who has been fooling who? Why hasn’t the (highly intelligent) president asked some searching questions? Or is it really just a China Containment Treaty, with little or no economic benefits involved or expected?