Yesterday, John McDonnell gave a stark warning to the British public about the Government’s upcoming “chaotic breakfast”. Of course, breakfast – or as McDonnell meant to say, Brexit – does pose challenges for the UK economy in the short term. However, it pales into insignificance when compared to those posed by McDonnell himself. The fact […]
In an article for CapX last week, I discussed Johan Norberg’s new book, Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. As Norberg notes, over the last two centuries, humanity has made massive improvements in terms of nutrition, sanitation, life expectancy, poverty, violence, literacy, environmental quality, political freedom and child labour. Today, I want to discuss […]
It was Giles Wilkes, now of the Financial Times, who said that the New Economics Foundation should stand for “Not Economics, Frankly”. And reading today’s Guardian, I could see what he meant. The paper carries an op-ed by Anna Coote, a senior fellow at the think-tank. She’s making the remarkable claim that as productivity rises, […]
The Belgian region of Wallonia was once called the crossroads of Europe. It sent arms to Spain in medieval times, then became the first place on the continent’s mainland to have an Industrial Revolution, aided by an influx of English industrialists. Wallonia was famous for making fine lace and chocolate, using cocoa imported from colonial holdings […]
Often radical social innovations come from seeing the opportunity to address a previously unsolved problem. For many years, we thought that micro-credit was reaching people living in the harshest forms of extreme poverty. It wasn’t until researchers looked more closely in the 1990s that they found that in fact, it had failed to reach the […]
No one will ever abolish boom and bust. Not while human beings are driving the business cycle. So our reaction when the inevitable downturn comes is important. This past recession shows the value of the neoliberal – Thatcherite even – insistence on a flexible labour market. For when GDP dropped so did productivity – rather than employment. The Sheffield Political Economy […]
It is perhaps an understatement to say that we live in an era of great pessimism. This pessimism, while not distributed evenly across the world, appears to be felt most acutely in many Western countries, including the United States. Some two-thirds of Americans, for example, feel that the United States is heading in the wrong […]
It’s not exactly news that capitalism has an image problem. Say the word “capitalist” and the image that comes to mind is of a rapacious, self-interested robber baron – less Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett, more Charles Montgomery Burns. Among young people, the problem is even more severe. For the generation who came of age […]
Last month, the Fraser Institute in Canada released its Economic Freedom of the World: Annual Report. According to the report, Anglosphere countries continue to dominate global rankings of economic freedom, thus showing the persistence of British values and institutions in the former colonies – long after the British Empire came to an end. Together, these countries […]
Everybody hates neoliberalism. The term has become a term of abuse, mostly by those who consider themselves anti-neoliberals. Critics also allege that the world is currently run under neoliberalism. In George Monbiot’s words, it is “the ideology at the root of all our problems“. But the world is in a pretty good state, and since the introduction […]
Harold Wilson is alive and well and running Britain’s post-Brexit economic policy. He is telling us why Brexit already means we are worse off and will eventually mean recession, and how that will happen. When Wilson devalued the pound by nearly 15 per cent against the dollar in November 1967, he declared, to later notoriety, […]
Back in 2013, I voiced concerns about the way in which China Development Bank (CDB) was running its infrastructure spending and foreign lending. Chen Yuan, then governor of the CBD, had turned the bankrupt bank into a vital instrument in the Chinese economy. By increasing its lending both within China and overseas, it became the world’s biggest development lender. […]
Last night saw a “flash crash” in the value of the pound: sterling’s value fell, suddenly, by around 6 per cent, within a few minutes, rising back again. Such sudden crashes are often attributed to a “fat finger” effect, basically a transcription error. That might mean the order was supposed to be for the sale […]
In this week’s column, I am delighted to introduce CapX readers to a new project that we have developed at Human Progress which maps how on every major metric people’s lives have improved around the world over the last 50 years. It is called Your Life in Numbers, and it allows users to see how countries […]
Throughout the West, patriotism is on the rise. Theresa May is a strong advocate. She took the opportunity in Birmingham to make the case that a passion for one’s country is not the threat some think it is. She’s right. But this attitude should go hand in hand with a vigorous global outlook. While internationalism and patriotism are […]
A quarter of a century ago, it might have sounded like madness to predict that China would today consume half the world’s output of commodities, or that almost a third of bonds issued by the rich developed nations would have negative yields. The reason why this is happening is largely because global capital is shifting […]
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