This DeLong vs Krugman post, and the comment from James Galbraith, raise an interesting issue regarding redistribution of income, free trade, and globalisation. Namely, as trade creates both winners and losers, but with a positive sum, it is both just and politically necessary that the winners compensate the losers. You could consider it a side-payment…
Read More Who needs remote control?What is it with sodding “electrosensitivity”? Why has it suddenly achieved escape-from-reality velocity this spring? What is it with columnists like the Obscurer‘s Jasper Gerard, who this week chose to announce that, if you include the long-term sick, the total number of unemployed people in Britain is over 3 million. Wasn’t it like that under…
Read More We’re so pretty…we’re vacant!Remember this post on Maglev, managerialists, and creationist technology? Heavily-blogged Myers links to equally heavily-blogged article on the market for Kalashnikov rifles. Apparently, everything he reads only makes sense in the light of evolution. Funny that – think process. This is also why the Chinese textile industry wants to reopen an old mill in Wigan,…
Read More Kalashnikovs, trousers, squid, pies..How could the principles in this post be put into effect? Here’s an opportunity. Legendary trade reporter Roger Ford discusses the situation at GNER, where the company’s franchise to operate the East Coast Main Line has been withdrawn because the parent company, Sea Containers, is in financial difficulty. The details of the difficulty can be…
Read More A practical example?This post from PZ Myers raises a very important point about decentralisation and local accountability. What if the quacks get control? Families and schools are always a problem with regard to liberty – no-one has the right to experiment on the public without their consent, but youth is the one experiment that is performed on…
Read More Go to school, learn the rules, don’t be no faker!It’s fairly usual that big infrastructure systems should be regulated or publicly owned if there is no realistic competition to them. Defining that is more difficult – Railtrack presumably thought it was competing frantically with roads, after all. I propose a different way of looking at it. What if the distinction were framed in terms…
Read More Rates of changeEveryone’s vexed (h/t to Dan Hardie) about the spankin’ new city academy in Peterborough that, courtesy of Perkins Engines, will be offering education with a total ban on “unstructured play”. It’s the most expensive state school ever built at £46.4 million, but hey! Perkins put up all of £2 million out of that, always assuming…
Read More Libraries gave us powerSo Lord Browne is gay. Who knew? Well, I did, simply because people have googled and hit this site at a rate of 20 a day since March, 2004. Think digital privacy doesn’t matter? Think again. But let’s ask another question. Back in 2005, BP killed a dozen workers at its Texas City refinery, in…
Read More MoralityBacon Butty piles on to one of the notions I criticised here. Food miles are, if anything, less useful than embodied energy as a policy target – after all, a whacking 22 per cent of CO2 attributed to UK food transport originates from sea and air transport. Obviously, the first place to start, especially as…
Read More More silly metricsAll you need to know about Gordon Brown is contained in this story in the Financial Times. Specifically, this response to criticism of his decision to fund the 2% tax cut for basic rate income tax payers by extending the basic rate downwards: The Conservatives argue, of course, that the complex set of income tax…
Read More Gordon Brown: no better