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 […]
Somebody had to dilute the intoxicating cocktail of Brexit triumphalism being served up at the Conservative Party conference, and the new chancellor Philip Hammond was the man. Never the most dazzling of orators, he nonetheless managed to fill the hall of the International Conference Centre in Birmingham, so the audience had to spill over to […]
This article was taken from CapX’s weekly briefing email. Sign up to get the most interesting stories of the day delivered straight to your inbox This week on CapX, we’ve been arguing about inequality. Are the global rich pulling away from the global poor? And if they are, how do we stop it? We’ve had contributions […]
It is wonderful that Oxfam recognises the “astonishing progress in poverty reduction” over the past few decades, and that “business can be a great force for good” in this respect. But I want to be greedy. I want Oxfam and all those other organisations which, rightly and commendably, want to see a reduction in global […]
‘Crash Bang Wallop: The Inside Story of London’s Big Bang and a Financial Revolution that Changed the World’ by Iain Martin (Sceptre) In 1986, at the height of the greatest deal-making frenzy the City of London had ever seen, the US brokerage giant Salomon Brothers was in advance negotiations to buy the venerable British firm […]
In recent years, concerns over inequality have increasingly gained traction. Just this week, President Obama said that inequality was “the defining challenge of our time”. Earlier this year, the Times columnist Matthew Parris wrote: “If the free market is to be defended in the new century, these inequities are no longer something from which the […]
Critics of liberalism and the market economy have made a long-standing habit of inventing terms we would never use to describe ourselves. The most common of these is “neo-liberal” or “neo-liberalism,” which appears to mean whatever the critics wish it to mean to describe ideas they don’t like. To the extent the terms have clear […]
Tomorrow, Jeremy Corbyn will be re-elected as leader of the Labour Party. It is a sentence – and a turn of events – that still boggles the mind. If the initial election of Corbyn as leader confirmed that Labour had lost contact with electoral reality, his reappointment confirms that the party has lost contact with […]
In recent years, I have given a number of presentations to high-school and college students on the importance of economic freedom and persistent threat of socialism – as witnessed, for example, by the recent economic meltdown in Venezuela. One problem that I have encountered is that young people today do not have a personal memory […]
Well, this is awkward. For the last few months, the hottest thing in economics has been the “elephant chart”. Produced by economists Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic, it showed how global income has changed over the past 20 years. The chart shows the poorest people in the world on the left and the richest on […]
There were gasps of horror this week when a new poll confirmed that Marine Le Pen, of the far-right Front National, was maintaining her place among the favourites in the race to replace Francois Hollande in the Elysee Palace. It is now almost certain that Le Pen will make it through to the final round […]
Since the 1990s, Sweden has had a thriving welfare sector in which private firms, through vouchers or public contracts, carry out the provision of many welfare services. This has worked out well overall, as the for-profit schools, care for the elderly and health services are popular with the general public. Additionally, the public sector can […]
Ever since the times of Karl Marx, left-wing economists have focused on capital – who owns it, and how can they use it to exploit the working class to make a buck. Thankfully, Marxist predictions of the proletariat rising up in revolution and seizing ownership of the means of production have rather spectacularly failed to […]
It can be hard to remember that even in wealthy countries, food has not always been abundant, and in many parts of the world hunger remains a problem. Fortunately, we are making great headway towards solving it. Here are five charts summarizing the incredible progress that humanity has made against hunger. 1. According to data […]
Renationalising the railways? That is the new Labour leader’s “new politics”. Jeremy Corbyn advocates a reheated Andy Burnham policy of taking each line into public ownership as the franchises expire. A policy of returning to the glorious past of British Rail. Oh but it is popular, they say. So are One Direction. It doesn’t make […]
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