James Price

James Price is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.

Articles

Government

The Price Mechanism: Who will come to our rescue?

By the 1970s, a few generations of the brightest minds in Britain had been utterly flummoxed by our national decline, and felt that managing it was the best they could do in a situation that was inevitable. It took heroic thinkers from outside the Civil Service to diagnose the problems, and come up with the […]

Immigration

The Price Mechanism: Stop the blob to stop the boats

As CapX fan favourite Karl Marx once said: ‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.’ This may be one of the only correct statements ever uttered by that awful little man, but it really has proven true this week as Labour’s latest attempts to ‘stop the boats’ have run aground. This week, an […]

Ideas

The Price Mechanism: Don’t emigrate just yet

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are. This stirring end to Ulysses fills me with such a sense of mission that Mrs Price and I named our cocker spaniel Tennyson. Much has been taken […]

Ideas

What cheese rolling can teach us about the state

A solid tactic for how to open opinion pieces is to start with a famous or meaningful quotation. I can think of nothing better than this: ‘I just remember hitting my head, and now I have the cheese’. Wise words, indeed. For this is a piece about what we can learn from one of the […]

Technology

Boom! Heroes are still building the future

What do high-flying LinkedIn profiles and literal air travel have in common? They both want to show a smooth, seamless ascent, with no turbulence and definitely no bumpy landings. It’s true that on LinkedIn, you can often view someone’s career journey taking off and the twists and turns they take. A promotion here, a glossing […]

Economics

The death of the death tax would not be mourned

‘Nothing else in the world… not all the armies… is so powerful as an idea whose time has come’. Clearly, Victor Hugo never envisioned the power of Treasury brain. Despite the manifold reasons as to why inheritance tax should have died long ago, HMT’s apparent allergy to dynamic modelling means that the taxman still inserts […]

Technology

Britain risks becoming a tech pariah

By now, we all know that the Prime Minister has the laudable aim of making the UK a science and technology superpower. Well, someone should tell the Home Office – and fast. The much-maligned Online Safety Bill is going through legislative ‘ping pong’ this evening, and yet many elements of it are going to have […]