Remember this posting on the Cost of Stupidity? My conclusions: Small sustained differences in performance mean big differences in absolute outcomes. • •The steady and quite rich get steadily quite a lot richer. The poor have to be more than steady to start to close the gap. • The stupid […]
Russia’s gloomy demographic trends are a fascinating subject. For years now Russia has been losing some 750,000 people per year. Poor birth rates, high death rates: horrible abortion, HIV, accident and TB statistics, the accumulation of decades of communist mal-investment and then studied unwillingness by successive post-communist administrations to face […]
My observations on President Obama’s inauguration speech picked up his strange claim that the question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works… Ilya Somin at Volokh Conspiracy goes into this matter with some energy: Taken seriously, this argument leads to […]
At last. Someone intelligent looking at first principles: The concentration of surplus assets in the hands of the state is a negative aspect of anti-crisis measures in virtually every nation… Nor should we turn a blind eye to the fact that the spirit of free enterprise, including the principle of […]
Recalling my posting a few days ago about moral hazard I espied this glum account of the Eurozone’s woes: For a long time, they all looked the same. The reckless and the virtuous, the sneaky and the upfront, all the member countries of the euro-area were treated identically, or nearly […]
We customers just sit back and let the torrent of astonishing cheap electronic devices keep coming, each generation more wonderful than the last. It’s all down to Moore’s Law: crudely speaking, the idea that every two years or so the amount of computer bang you get for your buck in fact […]
Grotesque as it seems even to express things in such a way, there are only two questions about the mass destruction of European Jews during WW2 (the Holocaust): Did it happen? Yes/No How to assess it? Good/Bad The mainstream line for anti-semitic and anti-civilisational fanatics of all stripes has been to […]
Is the best hope for mass communication in a globalised world a boiled-down version of the English language called Globish? A Frenchman Jean-Paul Nerriere has been trying to codify this phenomenon into some 1500 words and simplified expressions. The crafty French sub-plot seems to be to concede a historic linguistic defeat […]
The BBC: US President Barack Obama has used his first formal TV interview since taking office to reach out to the Muslim world – saying Americans are not its enemy. Most ‘respectful’. Not that many similar broadcasts by his predecessor made much difference. Meanwhile that vasty Stimulus Package is working its […]
Tom Miller (Widely settled law graduate, novice new media geezer. Apologist for equality. Influenced by both traditional european social-democracy and bits of post-marxism) plunges in: One of the more ridiculous arguments often seen flying around the blogosphere, often from Libertarian Ron Paul fans and other idiots, but just as often […]
