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Category Archives: Public Policy

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold … A post somewhat about China

Historically, taxing land (rents) and trade have been the dominant income sources of rulerships not reliant on labour service (not to be confused with taxes on labour income, which have a different dynamic).* Trade was a particularly attractive source of income because it often involved taxing outsiders. But trade was also mobile–too much tax for [...]

Go refract yourselves

“Law-abiding” citizens have “nothing to fear” from the British intelligence services, the foreign secretary says. William Hague said reports that the UK’s eavesdropping centre GCHQ had circumvented the law to gather data on British citizens were “nonsense”. But he refused to confirm or deny claims GCHQ has had access to a US spy programme called [...]

Bubble trouble: all information is not equal

This post is partly prompted by this comment and this paper (pdf) (via) on the US housing price bubbles and busts and (greatly) extends this comment by myself. It is also a response to the work of mathematician-turned-historian Andrew Odlyzko. In a previous post, I argued that easy monetary policy was not to blame for the asset booms [...]

The $34m Question

US car giant Ford Motor will shut all its Australian manufacturing plants by October 2016, after more than 85 years of making vehicles in the country. About 1,200 workers are expected to lose their jobs from the Broadmeadows and Geelong plants, in Victoria state. Ford said its Australian operations had lost A$600m ($580m; £385m) over [...]

Bubble trouble: not an easy money problem

The notion that “easy money” created asset booms is levelled (famously by Austrian school economists such as von Mises and Hayek) against the 1920s boom and by a range of commentators about the Great Moderation boom. In both cases, the Fed (dominated by Benjamin Strong as New York Fed Governor up to 1928 and by Alan Greenspan as Fed Chair 1987-2006) is held to be to [...]

MSE vs MOD

The UK may not be able to afford projected levels of spending on military equipment over the next decade, MPs are warning. The Commons Public Accounts Committee said it did not “yet have confidence” the planned £159bn equipment budget between now and 2022 could be paid for. It urged the Ministry of Defence to be [...]

Smart Growth = Constipated Cities

Smart Growth is a term of art. In the words of Wikipedia(tm), Smart Growth: is an urban planning and transportation theory that concentrates growth in compact walkable urban centers to avoid sprawl. It also advocates compact, transit-oriented, walkable, bicycle-friendly land use, including neighborhood schools, complete streets, andmixed-use development with a range of housing choices. The term ‘smart growth’ is particularly used in North America. In Europe [...]

Please Reconsider

The Turkish government has signed a deal with a Japanese-French consortium to build a new nuclear power station. The $22bn (£14bn) contract is Japan’s first successful bid for an overseas nuclear project since a tsunami wrecked the Fukushima power station. The deal was signed by visiting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Turkish Prime Minister Recep [...]

Against free markets

The term that is. There seem to be few usages that are a greater barrier to clear thought and debate than free markets. Whether used as a term of sneering abuse to create straw-person arguments or as a slogan of the right and proper, it is ready-made to close minds and abstract away from the issues [...]

Human societies as studies in relative scarcity: the price of children, the cost of capital

That modernising societies experience a “demographic transition“–a change from high fertility and high death rates to low fertility and low death rates with an intermediate period of high fertility and low death rates–is well known. The likely reason is lags in adjusting to changes in death rates. The price of children Having children is a [...]