This week CapX is republishing some of our favourite articles of the year. This piece first appeared on October 30. In a now-famous essay, “What is Seen and What Is Not Seen”, the great economist Frederic Bastiat warned against judging the value of any activity in a vacuum. Bastiat’s “broken window fallacy” brilliantly exposes a common […]
Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx theorised that Britain, the country in which capitalism was most advanced, would be the likeliest, most desirable location for Communist revolt. As we know, his predictions didn’t come to fruition. Though there were eruptions of popular unrest and state repression in the mid-nineteenth century, none materialised into the kind […]
Around the world, growing numbers of governments are using economic sanctions as a tool to influence the behaviour of other countries. Their tactics are nothing new. Sanctions and embargoes have a long and chequered past, dating back to antiquity, when the Athenian statesman Pericles issued the so-called “Megarian decree” in response to the abduction of […]
In a now-famous essay, “What is Seen and What Is Not Seen”, the great economist Frederic Bastiat warned against judging the value of any activity in a vacuum. Bastiat’s “broken window fallacy” brilliantly exposes a common tendency to focus on the visible, tangible benefits of an action – the “seen” – while neglecting the “unseen” penalties […]
We tend to conceptualise the housing crisis in terms of affordability – and justifiably so. Over the last two decades, the ratio of median house prices to earnings in England and Wales has more than doubled. Back in 1997, house prices represented, on average, around 3.6 times workers’ annual gross full-time earnings. By 2016, however, […]
Top-down attempts to “rebalance the economy” have failed so many times that politicians proposing further interventions should think twice before doing so. Unfortunately, they show no sign of stopping. Philip Hammond and Ruth Davidson have both lent their support to a new tax on business. Both floated the idea of an “Amazon tax” — a […]
It’s no secret that ambitious public infrastructure projects often end up running monumentally over budget. Recent transport history is littered with such examples, like the Jubilee Line Extension in the late 90s, which exceeded initial forecasts by over £1 billion. Or the Channel Tunnel, which ended up costing more than twice as much as originally […]
Though the ongoing Brexit tussles in Parliament and Brussels have unsurprisingly created something of a policy vacuum, there is perhaps no greater crisis in contemporary British politics than housing. The extent of the problem is truly staggering. Since 1995, average house prices in the UK have increased by an astonishing 300 per cent – rising […]
On this day in 1776, the thirteen colonies of America, then at war with Britain, declared themselves to be states of a new nation. For almost as long, Americans all over the world have celebrated Independence Day, with barbecues, beer and – of course – fireworks. Nearly 250 years on from that climactic moment, there […]
If you’re under 30 — or have a child in their teens — then chances are you’ve heard of a game called Fortnite. Fortnite, a “survival shooter” video game released last year, has quickly become one of the most popular online games in the world — a towering cultural phenomenon on a par with Minecraft […]
Chuka Umunna landed himself in hot water last week, after it emerged that his office had advertised a year-long “placement” for students, which is unpaid except for travel expenses. The Streatham MP was swiftly and snarkily reprimanded in a message from the Leader’s Office to the entire PLP, highlighting that their party policy is to […]
“One million students call for vote on Brexit deal,” reported The Observer on Sunday, in response to the news that a group of NUS representatives had thrown their weight behind calls for a second referendum. It is the headline writer’s prerogative to employ a little linguistic sleight of hand from time to time, but even […]
The Labour Party hasn’t looked especially thoughtful in recent years. With a once-great party now in the hands of conspiracy theorists and increasingly hostile to internal dissent, even vaguely sensible ideas are in short supply. It is in this climate that Labour MP Angela Eagle and former Labour adviser Imran Ahmed have tried to articulate […]
It’s David Ricardo’s birthday. Or at least it would have been were he still alive. The classical economist has been dead for nearly 200 years, but his insights and theories remain immeasurably valuable today. Yet Ricardo was, in many ways, an unlikely economist. Born into a large Sephardic Jewish family, he received little formal education, […]
Is Brexit sexist? That’s certainly the view of the authors of a new report from feminist campaign group the Fawcett Society, who detail the supposed impact of the UK’s departure from the EU on British women. In leaving the European Union, they claim, “We risk turning the clock back on gender equality.” They examine the […]
From fears that a trade agreement with the US will lead to an American takeover of the NHS, to hand-wringing over the “wrong” products entering our market, public hysteria about a US/UK trade deal has reached epidemic levels. And now, anti-American sentiment, long a hallmark of the chattering classes, has found its way into the […]
During the 2015 General Election, Ed Miliband’s flagship pledge to cap energy prices was derided by conservatives as a deranged idea from the 1970s. The then-PM David Cameron accused “Red Ed” of “wanting to live in a Marxist universe”. Yet within two years, the idea had found its way into the Conservative election manifesto, along […]
Earlier this week, Jeremy Corbyn indulged in an extraordinary, and highly contradictory, rant. In a video uploaded to Twitter, the Labour leader accused the press of having gone “a bit James Bond” in their response to the allegations surrounding Corbyn’s visit to Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1980s. In the last few days The Sun, The […]
