Time to branch out. Not least on the dynamic Business and Politics Blog, where my first (albeit somewhat laconic) Diplomatic Despatch has just been posted. More to come…
Time to branch out. Not least on the dynamic Business and Politics Blog, where my first (albeit somewhat laconic) Diplomatic Despatch has just been posted. More to come…
Perusing the website of the British High Commission in Malta (as of course one does) I found this link to a letter written by PM Gordon Brown to Dr Alan Williams MP of the Liaison Committee on the way forward after the Copenhagen Climate Change summit. It also is on the […]
Another look at Ayn Rand, this time dwelling (reasonably) on her Russian roots and their literary impact on her books. That said, I think Anthony Daniels misinterprets a number of the examples he quotes from her novels to make his point, namely that Rand was clever and perceptive but above […]
Now and again (and again) I rail against the Precautionary Principle (PP) as do others: Once you get past the table-pounding, any rationale for rapid emissions abatement that confronts the facts in evidence is really a more or less sophisticated restatement of the precautionary principle: the somewhat grandiosely named idea that […]
I continue to be baffled and enraged by the cost of e-books. Why should a text whose distribution/printing/packaging costs are close to zero (not to mention the fact that all that horrid carbon is being saved by not printing it on paper) cost almost as much in an e-version as […]
Robert Lucas. Some readers will have heard of him. He won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Economics, in part for pioneering work in the field of ‘rational expectations’: One important implication of Lucas’s work, which was confirmed by Thomas Sargent is that a government that is credible—that is, a government that […]
As we are talking of boats shooting over the edge, have a look at this eloquent – and scary – analysis of the current economic situation by John Mauldin. It takes as its theme the subtle issue of Confidence, drawing on a new book This Time is Different, by Carmen […]
If you think that your canoe is in a current heading swiftly towards a steep and dangerous waterfall, which is best? To shrug, accept the inevitable and paddle all the faster, hoping to survive your crazy dive into the Unknown? To change course and paddle furiously towards calm waters to look for a […]
Ed Miliband, ‘climate secretary’, declares war on climate change sceptics: "I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it’s somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture that’s there," he said. "We know there’s a physical effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leading to higher temperatures, […]
Via the excellent Browser, here is a significant and subtle article by Lawrence Lessig about how changing technology creates unfathomable complications and difficulties for sorting out legal rights to books and films made decades ago under very different circumstances. The key point is that for films especially, the array of […]
