Iran will not allow its universities to begin teaching certain disciplines it deems too \”Western\”, and existing courses will be revised, a senior education ministry official ruled.
After all, we\’re terribly short in courses on how to conduct a stoning, chop the hand off a thief or how to rape a young virgin so that she may be hung from a crane.
Food Addiction: Could It Explain Why 70 Percent of Americans Are Fat?
Yes, I think I would buy that. Not getting your regular fix of food does tend to lead to not being fat.
Skeletally thin even.
From an editorial:
A Republican-controlled Congress leapt at it, passing the Homeland Investment Act, which allowed companies to repatriate some $300 billion in 2005 and pay only 5.25 percent in taxes. As for all of those promised factories and jobs, they did not materialize. Research by three prominent economists, including Kristin Forbes, a former top economic adviser to President George W. Bush, found that between 60 and 92 cents of every dollar brought home found its way into shareholders’ pockets.
And what did shareholders do with that money? They spent, saved or invested it!
Jeebus. Money that gets paid to shareholders doesn\’t just disappear from the economy.
And there\’s absolutely nothing at all that says we actually want investment to be done by currently extant companies anyway. Indeed, we\’d largely rather it wasn\’t. We would prefer that money is returned to shareholders so that they get to decide where it\’s invested, quite possibly in entirely new companies.
Which is sorta what we want, isn\’t it? The creation of vibrant new compaines to drive the economy along?
By slashing government spending, by making half a million people in the public sector and as many again in the private sector redundant, he might be claiming to cut government cost but what he is actually doing is something much more sinister and dangerous. What he is doing is deliberately sucking demand out of our economy.
That is 1.6 million people won’t be paying tax any more. But they will be claiming benefits. Even if they are the new, reduced ones. So far from saving money, George Osborne’s so-called cuts will actually increase spending whilst massively reducing his tax income. The consequence is obvious. The deficit will go up, not down.
Which, according to that Keynes bloke, magically puts demand back into the economy.
So, if Osborne has cocked up, the seeds of the solution are in that very cock up that Osborne has made.
Most odd for a self-proclaimed Keynesian to be arguing that an increased deficit is a bad thing to have in a recession really, isn\’t it?
For a moment in 2008, it seemed that such lavish rewards would vanish. The bubble in football like the bubble in the economy would be replaced by an interlude of sanity. No such luck. Last week, as Rooney demanded a salary of £10.4m, the City prepared to gorge itself on a bonus pot of £7bn.
Why is it such a bad thing that the workers gather unto themselves the fruits of their labour?
I thought lefties rather liked this thing, that capital wasn\’t scooping this excess value off the top?
Tellingly, both are aware of the dangers of what Alan Sugar called the \”prune juice effect\” on the Premier League, where money pours in at one end from Sky and out the other to agents and players.
Not for the first time Alan Sugar has a decent grasp of basic economic thinking. This is true of any industry that depends upon human talent: the talent ends up with the money. True of banking, football and movies.
And yes, it is also a principal/agent problem and yet it\’s one that no one has really worked out how to solve: unless you want to start imposing either maximum wages or kill competition between different employers.
Now I realise that I don\’t share much of the lefty bewailing of high incomes to a favoured few: but even if I did, I\’d not be certain that the only possible solution, the imposition of a cartel, would be worth the pain and grief.
On its own terms it has to do everything in its power to achieve the economic growth on which its budgetary forecasts are based – not least the creation of some 2.5 million private-sector jobs over the next five years even as half a million public sector jobs are forecast to be lost. What will it do? And can it work?It\’s quite a challenge. According to accountancy firm PwC, Britain succeeded in generating 1.2 million private-sector jobs in the 1993-1999 recovery after the last big recession, but 900,000 of those were in financial and business services – which were hiring aggressively in the build-up of the credit and financial bubble.
Do stop, please, this is embarassing. You\’re a Director of the London School of Economics, remember? Used to be head honcho at the Work Foundation?
The private sector creates more than 2.5 million jobs each year.
You are quoting the net figures, the result after job creation and job destruction are paired off.
Most research seems to indicate that the rate of job destruction doesn\’t increase much in recessions: it\’s the rate of job creation that falls, leading to a net increase in unemployment. Coming out of recession (and as those peeps who got the Nobel this year, as Chris Dillow (pbuh) has reminded us, this is a lagging indicator for search and matching reasons) it does take time for the new jobs being created to be filled. But they are being created out there, each and every year, in the sort of volume that you\’re talking about.
The Bank of England, alone among the world\’s top central banks, refuses to buy any private sector loans from mainstream banks – a hyper-conservatism it justifies by saying any such purchases would be \”political\” (ie, choosing to take one company\’s loans over another\’s). It is not political for the Bank of Japan, the US Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank, all of whose banking systems are consequentially much more supportive of business than our own.
I\’m sorry, you what? Perhaps this is my own lack of knowledge but I\’m entirely unaware that any central banks anywhere buy private sector loans. Private sector bonds, yes, but not loans. And you can\’t just gloss over this difference: for one opf your constant mantras is that British banks don\’t lend enough to business….but you carefully avoid including what is lent in bond issues, counting only loans. You make this differentiation so you have to stick by it.
Entrepreneurs need to be able to find start-up capital more easily and finance themselves with loans that, like student loans, have repayment terms that vary with success….
We have this, it\’s called \”equity\”. It\’s one of the determining characteristics of Anglo-Saxon style capitalism, that much entrepreneurial activity is funded by equity, not by bank loans.
We need an infrastructure bank that can double the annual infrastructure spend from 2% to 4% of GDP.
Why? What merit is there to a particular target for inputs? We don\’t want to target inputs at all, we want to target outputs. What infrastructure do we need, how much will it cost? That\’s how to determine how much gets spent, not doodle some sums on the back of an envelope and insist that x% of everything we produce must be spent on train sets.
Ministers were accused last night of deliberately driving poor people out of wealthy inner cities as London councils revealed they were preparing a mass exodus of low-income families from the capital because of coalition benefit cuts.
Why should poor people be subsidised to live in expensive property?
Subsidised to live somewhere, sure, but there are parts of London where the housing subsidy alone to a family will be more than median household income for the country as a whole.
It\’s still £20k a year as the upper limit. Seriously, why should the taxpayers be putting their hands that deep in their pockets?
Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary, is expected to announce plans within days to dispose of about half of the 748,000 hectares of woodland overseen by the Forestry Commission by 2020.
But only one and a half cheers.
Why not sell the other half too?
The New York Times actually has a decent column in it.
Why would Democrats support a program that has such a deleterious effect on their most loyal constituencies? It is, in part, callous political calculus. It’s an easy and relatively cheap way for them to buy a tough-on-crime badge while simultaneously pleasing police unions. The fact that they are ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic men and, by extension, the communities they belong to barely seems to register.
This is outrageous and immoral and the Democrat’s complicity is unconscionable, particularly for a party that likes to promote its social justice bona fides.
No one knows all the repercussions of legalizing marijuana, but it is clear that criminalizing it has made it a life-ruining racial weapon.
In addition my tolerance of the comments that add little or nothing to debate (and that’s rather a lot of those that seek to oppose my views, I suggest) will be even lower than usual.
It\’s an interesting version of \”debate\” isn\’t it?
Developing the agenda this country needs does not require debate here with the right wing
Somewhat restrictive even if interesting.
So, this one that Caroline Lucas (the original calcs done by you know who) has come out with. That sacking 490,000 civil servants will cost more than employing them. For the benefits that have to be paid will be higher than the wages.
In any case, surely this cannot be right, if you consider the implied microeconomic situation. For if the government saves net salary but loses unemployment benefit and the total is negative, then the employee\’s calculation is identical but with a minus sign attached: in other words, the employee would be better off being sacked and going onto benefits. Of course, in the famed 490,000 there may be some for whom this is not true; but if Lucas is right, then there must be a great number for whom it most certainly does hold. But then, what to make of the fact that we do not see masses of public servants spontaneously deciding that they would be better off out of work?
Pisses all over Ritchie\’s chips, doesn\’t it?
Lord Ashcroft (Conservative)
To Ask Her Majesty\’s Government whether they expect citizens to organise their tax affairs in order to maximise tax payable.
Lord Sassoon (Commercial Secretary, HM Treasury; Conservative)
The Government expect citizens to pay tax that is due by law.
Note, due by law, not by \”spirit\”.
Yup, usual stuff. Entirely ignores that corporation tax is largely bourne by the workers, not the shareholders, and certainly not by the company itself.
Trots out his known to be wrong estimate of tax avoidance. This is fun too:
These big companies\’ tax rate will fall from 28% to 24% over the next four years – a move that seems generous, but quickly becomes ludicrous when it is appreciated that the effective tax rate of the largest companies in the UK is now 21%. This means that over the next four years, it is likely that their effective tax rate (that is, the rate they really pay) will fall to 17%.
And he\’s wrong there for the same reason that his estimate of tax avoidance itself is wrong. For of course some (according to taste, most, nearly all, a tiddly bit, but certainly not Ritchie\’s insistence that none of it is) of this difference between the headline rate and the actual rate is because of the various allowances that Parliament builds into the tax law.
And part of the deal over corporation tax being lowered as the headline rate is that those allowances are reduced as well. So this change will actually lead to a shrinking of the tax gap as Ritchie measures it.
Just seems odd that he\’s not celebrating what he\’s working so hard to achieve.
But the biggie?
This is all about profits that Vodafone made in Germany. And according to Ritchie\’s plans for the corporate taxation system, such profits should be taxed where they arise, where the economic substance of the transaction is.
In Germany.
So, if RitchieWorld were to be consistent there would be no money owed at all to the UK Treasury.
Ain\’t that interesting?
Urban areas will bear the brunt of the spending cuts announced this week with every major English city facing a triple whammy of the biggest job losses, council cuts and benefit withdrawals, a Guardian analysis of the impact of the key decisions reveals.
Local authorities with dense populations face the deepest cuts, according to a breakdown of the measures by George Osborne to slash council spending, reduce child benefit and cut the educational maintenance allowance. The predicted 490,000 job losses in the public sector will fall most heavily on cities.
The analysis also suggests that not only will the rural-urban divide widen, but that the worst hit areas are also largely Labour strongholds, with wealthier rural – and traditionally Tory constituencies – suffering relatively little.
Over the decade and a bit of Labour Party rule money was siphoned off from those rich areas (rural areas, the SE etc) and paid out to the Labour voting areas (inner cities, the North etc).
We have a change of government and a change in the \”I\’ll tax your voters to feed my voters\” redistribution.
Funny that, innit? And ever so surprising?
In Blood on the Trading Floor: Waste, Sacrifice and Death in Financial Crises, Dr Crosthwaite claims his anthropological study of investors and traders found evidence of an element of masochistic satisfaction in running up losses.
He maintains that the crisis was the modern equivalent to the traditional Native American practice of \”potlatch\”, a ritual ceremony in which the chiefs of rival tribes competed to destroy ever greater quantities of their own possessions as an expression of power and importance.
Dr. Crosthwaite\’s research interests are listed as:
Modernist and postmodernist fiction; psychoanalysis; literary and cultural theory; culture and financial markets.
Umm, Rushdie, Freud, Derrida…just what you\’d want as your base for studying the financial markets, no?
Nisar Ahmed was found to lack the \”basic skills\” of anyone entering the teaching profession by a General Teaching Council (GTC) disciplinary panel which believed he was incapable of ever improving.
While 13 other teachers have received temporary suspensions from teaching for incompetence Mr Ahmed, 46, is the only one to have no time limit imposed.
Hmm.
There are some 440,000 teachers in the UK. This is the first one fired forever for incompetence.
You can read this one of two ways.
1) We have an extraordinarily gifted and well trained teaching profession in the UK, so much so that we\’ve only ever had to get rid of one permanently for such incompetence.
2) There is no group of any 440,000 individuals anywhere on this planet that doesn\’t have more than one incompetent in it. This is evidence that we\’re not firing enough teachers.
Me, I\’ll go with explanation number 2 please, but I agree that there will be those not officials in teachers unions who will argue that number 1 holds true.
The explicable miracle of Hiware Bazar is just one example among many given in the UN report – dryly entitled The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity – to prove the point that looking after nature makes economic, as well as ecological, sense.
Not quite: what you example shows (an example of careful rainwater harvesting) is that some looking after nature makes economic sense. And, as usual, the definition of when it does is fairly simple: when we\’re talking about a scarce resource.
For economics only comes into play when we are talking about a scarce resource. We can talk about the economics of fisheries, for example, because we know that Huxley was wrong and that fish themselves, while renewable, are a scarce resource. We don\’t talk about the economics of seawater for there is no, in the face of current demand at least, no scarcity of seawater.
The trouble is that the costs are invisible to conventional economics. \”Not a single bee has ever sent you an invoice,\” says Pavan Sukhdev, the banker who led the study. \”And that is part of the problem – because most of what comes to us from nature is free, because it is not invoiced, because it is not priced, because it is not traded in markets, we tend to ignore it.\”
Entirely agreed that things external to markets aren\’t properly priced: this is why we, or at least I, argue that the thing to do is put a price on them. Something we\’ve known we should be doing since Marshall and Pigou back at the turn of the 20th century….you know, those mainstream neo-classical economists.
And as, in fact, is often done with bees. For we do talk about the economics of bees, there is a business underlying all of that pollination.
The pollination industry in USA is so highly mechanized that train trucks from state to state transport beehives and they are spread to plantations by forklifts and other contraptions. Fortunately, the experts in this country estimate that the cost of pollination to crop farmers is only 1% of the total value of their yield.
So while your basic point, that some environmental measures make good economic sense, is true, you\’re rather going overboard on how new and wondrous this finding is.
Oh, and this?
while some Chinese fruit growers are now having to pay people to pollinate their apple trees.
Sorry, you\’ve been had there by one of those little memes that the ignorant spread. Hand pollination of fruit trees is both normal and ancient. I think that what\’s happened here is that someone who doesn\’t understand historical farming methods has looked upon such an orchard, seen the hand pollination, and declared that it must be because of a lack of bees. Not knowing that, at least in places with low labour costs, it\’s an entirely nromal practice. It is, for example, entirely standard with date palms.
This:
Families who want to travel abroad during the half term break are having to pay almost 70 per cent more om average than they would the week after, according to fresh research that highlights how parents are being stung by travel companies.
Should read:
Families who want to travel abroad during the half term break are having to pay almost 70 per cent more om average than they would the week after, according to fresh research that highlights how fixed supply and variable demand interact.