We\’re in a market that is forced to trade only one way – downwards. House prices are falling, so sellers have little incentive to put their property on the market
Umm, falling prices is a great reason to put your house on the market. Sell, bank and rent. It\’s rising prices that are a disincentive to sell an asset.
As living costs rise, jobs are axed and debts escalate, there is a price being paid behind the bedroom door
What, people can no longer afford post coital showers?
Do these people know nothing?
but will be less comfortable with high-Tory claims a reunited British Empire could have fared better still.
High Tory? Mr. Eugenides?
Pah!
So, Muphry\’s law?
Too clever to spell
Lexicographers find misteaks often made because we know too much
Or a joke by subs?
It\’s possible that over time, an energy tax, by making some computers, Web sites, blogs and perhaps cable TV channels too costly to maintain, could reduce the supply of information. If Americans are finally giving up SUVs because of high oil prices, might we not eventually do the same with some information technologies that only seem to fragment our society, not unite it? A reduced supply of information technology might at least gradually cause us to gravitate toward community-centered media such as local newspapers instead of the hyper-individualistic outlets we have now.
No, really. She\’s arguing that we should have high energy taxes so as to reduce the amount of information available to us.
How in buggery bollocks did this get published in a newspaper….erm, well, come to think of it….
A question perhaps.
We\’ve got lots of laws about photos of kiddies, lots of laws about how possession of such is the mark of the very demon etc, sufficient to have the holder thrown out of polite or any other society forever.
What actually is the age at which someone is a child? The age of consent? 16?
In which case, are these sorts of pics from the Olympics paedophilia?
He is, after all, 14…..
Good grief, we\’ve got something interesting here:
Social mobility is one great question raised in these studies. Why were the 1958 children more likely to move upwards than those born just 12 years later, in 1970? The right claimed it was the demise of grammar schools, while the left blamed it on 1970 children entering secondary school during Thatcher cuts and unemployment. Research said it was neither: there was a one-off sudden demand for more white-collar workers, pulling up the 1958ers regardless of education.
So social mobility has not stalled because the camel train is coming apart? It\’s not because the gap is ever wider and thus harder to cross? It isn\’t globalisation, the destruction of manufacturing industry (Ha!), taxes that are too low nor the structure of the education system? Not even private schools?
Nope, according to Polly we\’re now at natural levels of such mobility, the comparison everyone is making is to a simple one off event, one due to a structural change in the economy, not something anyone planned or meant.
Well, OK, if you say so (I\’ve posited this before): but that does mean that we can stop all of those plans to restart social mobility by playing with the tax system, blaming inequality or shafting the schools system, doesn\’t it?
Which, err, rather invalidates some 50% of Polly\’s columns.
The rest of the column though is extolling the merits of social research, longtitudinal cohort studies and the like. I agree, excellent work is done on these and excellent results can be garnered from them.
This is a little off though:
More valuable is the also blindingly obvious discovery that economists\’ reductionist view of humans as rational economic units is nonsense: people\’s motivations are just as often not financially motivated, which explains why economists are not very good at predicting even tomorrow\’s stock market movement, let alone the next crash.
Economists never assume that people\’s interests are only financially motivated. There might be a reductionism to money, yes, but that\’s as a method of comparing apples with apples. What is the value of leisure time as against the extra income garnered by more hours at work? That\’s a most interesting question, one that thousands upon thousands have researched answers to. One that, by its very structure, is both acknowledging and researching the fact that economists already assume that people are not motivated purely by financial returns.
They\’re motivated by utility maximisation. Sex, food, time with the kinds, time to sit outside and stare at the stars, cars, dosh, bling, status, novels, sport….all make up (along with thousands of other things) the motivations of human beings and there\’s not a single economist out there who would try to argue differently.
But there is one much larger question. If Polly assumes (rightly) that great things can be learnt from the social sciences, why is she so resistant to the idea that great things can be learnt from the social sciences? That incentives matter, that there are always opportunity costs, that the Laffer Curve really does exist, public choice……?
There\’s not a lot to the piece, to be sure. It\’s a perfectly decent bit about having several children from Wife in the North.
But for the paper to call it "puff" seems a little dismissive.
Songwriters are being feted by the European commission which wants to extend musicians\’ royalty rights from 50 years to a very generous 95 years.
The EU is making no proposals at all about songwriters\’ royalties. They are currently protected to 70 years after death. The mooted change is that mechanical rights, the rights to a specific recording of a song, should be extended from the current 50 years after recording to 95 years after such.
On the (not too outlandish) assumption that a recording falling out of mechanical copyright will be sold, bought and played more as a result of the fall in price (and yes, there are companies that specialise in releases of such recordings just moving out of copyright), and that such sales and plays will still pay the songwriters\’ royalties, the EU\’s change will in fact reduce songwriter\’s royalties.
Classic Guardian letters page here.
Maddy Bunting, in brief, said that one of the reasons the Nordics work (for said Nordics) is that the society itself emphasises the communal over the individual. But that this wouldn\’t work here as our society emphasises the individual over the communal.
At which point all the letter writers insist that we should indeed be more communal.
Which might even be true (not that I believe so) but they\’ve entirely missed her point. That because we\’re not communal in that sense, the Nordic model won\’t work here.
Jackie, you\’re rather leaving a window open there:
But almost all prizes are "unfair". Nobel peace prizes aren\’t available to most people either. Not every kid can win the sack race. I couldn\’t write a Booker-winning novel however long I sat at the keyboard. But prizes and competition raise our sights.
Scientists dream of recognition and work longer hours because of them; authors try harder; companies compete for pieces of plastic with engraved names, handed out at drunken award dinners. All this is human nature, and part of how we try to do better.
Entirely true, but people are also motivated by huge wads of cash. This might also be considered "unfair", indeed, your newspaper seems to exist to proclaim such unfairness. But it is part of human nature and it is part of how we try to do better.
Newspaper Ombudsmen are being fired from newspapers across America.
Newspaper ombudsman writes article insisting upon how important newspaper ombudsmen are.
A really quite stunning development, don\’t you think?
Polly comes out in favour of personal carbon trading. A cap on each individuals\’ use. Clearly this is an idea we can reject out of hand then.
Odd that a government with computers thinks it can\’t introduce a simple credit system, when a Nectar or Oyster card shows how easily home and car fuel bills and airline tickets could be deducted.
NHS Spine, ID cards, national database, child support agency….well, do you want to extend that list of computer projects?
Historian Mark Roodhouse of York University draws comparisons with his work on wartime rationing. Back then the state provided ration books for all, covering not just fuel but coupons valuing virtually every individual item in the shops from clothes to food. Have we become more administratively incompetent since then?
Erm, not aware of how much more complicated the world has got since then? Leave aside the complexity of the issuing and trading of credits. You\’ve also got to calculate the carbon content of every good, service and activity. Composting produces NOx. How are we going to count that? Organic farming has higher emissions than conventional, what about the CO2 in beer (it\’s as much of an issue as bottled water is and people do indeed complain about that)?
But the real reason Polly\’s in favour is this:
It would be a powerful but voluntary agent for redistribution.
Ahh, redistribution. It\’s a tax rise of course. Polly loves tax rises. Ever heard of the Lafffer Curve? Want to see those who can stampeding for the exits when this system is imposed?
Directly contradicting myself (hey, my blog, I can do that) I\’m not sure that anyone\’s actually understood the numbers here. What\’s likely to be the cost of such tradeable permits? We can actually see that by looking at the EU ETS…..around €30 a tonne CO2 perhaps. Call it the £25 a tonne that Defra (is it still called that?) uses for the social cost of carbon. Average emissions are 10 tonnes a year or so per capita.
We\’re talking £15 billion for the country then, the total value of these carbon credits that we\’re going to trade. Anyone think that the government can set up such a system for less than this cost? Monitor everyone\’s carbon usage (plus all those CO2-e things) for less than that number per year?
Quite, so the deadweight costs of the system are going to be huge.
Especially if we compare it to the alternatives:
They were offered three possible government actions. First, a carbon tax could be added to all energy not generated from renewables. Second, a cap on the amount of carbon that companies could emit in selling their energy to consumers would force them to generate more from renewables: they would pass on the extra cost to consumers.
Me, in comparison with either of those alternatives, I think that the deadweight costs of the system entirely bury the personal allowance trading scheme.
To undo the contradiction there: either the scheme will have very tight carbon limits (which for any number of reasons aren\’t a good idea right now) and thus very high prices….in which case we see a stampede for the exits. Or the limits are set at rational levels (mild now, slowly reducing) and the costs are minimal….in which case the scheme is too expensive compared to the alternatives.
It simply doesn\’t make sense.
Jack Heath from Australia set up Inspire, a web-based organisation designed by and for young people that supports the 75% of youth who have mental health problems and who don\’t seek help and encourages civic engagement.
75% of youths have mental health problems? Or 75% of youths who have metnal health problems don\’t seek help? Or 75% of youth with mental health problems encourage civic engagement?
Bit clunky for a professional journalist, don\’t you think?
![\"\"](\"https://www.timworstall.com/wp-content/uploads/image/ixmidc.jpg\")
You might want to look into your use of aged stock photos….
If you\’ve got an article which is talking about how the bingo industry is being changed by the smoking ban (at least, in part):
In the past year, the bingo club industry has been beset with closures caused by the smoking ban,
Then perhaps the teaser photo shouldn\’t show someone playing bingo with a lit cigarette?
Mebbe?
Our obituary of Alekandr Solzhenitsyn (page 30, August 5), said that after the mid-1960s his works were never republished while the Soviet regime remained in power. In fact in the perestroika period several were republished, including The Gulag Archipelago.
Actually, the publication of Gulag in the perestroika years was the first (non-samizdat) publication in the Soviet Union.
Do they run a corrections to the corrections page page?
From the Daily Mail, (which for those who don’t know, is kind of a cross between the New York Post and the Weekly World News):
You mean that authoritative? Really?
Rather shows his attitude towards Israel in this one phrase:
There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and that is Israel.
I agree that Israel is the only nuclear power between the Med and Pakistan: but "rampant" seems a little over the top really.
I also find it really rather amusing that while he\’s such a fan of international law he failes to mention an interesting point. Iran has signed the IPT, meaning that if it is developing a bomb (and I personally have no doubt that it is trying to, there is no other reason to pursue highly enriched uranium other than that) then they are in breach of their treaty committments. Israel has not, so, however much one might not like the fact that it has nuclear weapons, it has every legal right to have them.