Today marks the 9th anniversary of the death of one of the greatest heroes mankind has ever known. Few have heard the name Norman Borlaug, but his actions truly changed the entire fate of humanity. This sentiment should not be taken as hyperbole, for Borlaug’s work saved the lives of approximately one billion people. Borlaug was […]
Frances O’Grady has made a speech to the TUC calling for the gains from new technology to be used to create a four-day week and higher pay all round. It’s good that key trade unionists are beginning to think about the future rather than just trying to insist that train doors should be opened by […]
I’ve never really understood the point of a think tank launching a commission full of high profile entrepreneurs, politicians, and trade unionists. To start with they tend to be rather dull. High-profile and time-poor individuals don’t back new ideas. Worse, these commissions tend to get dominated by the most politically active members with hobby horses. […]
A new study suggests commuters spend so much time attending to work emails on the train or the bus that their journeys should be counted as part of the working day. The report has been picked up by the BBC and there will no doubt be calls for a new law to be passed to […]
Goodhart’s Law tells us that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure”. It’s a good maxim to apply to nearly any macroeconomic theory. Just when we think we’ve worked out how it all works, real life starts to slither away from the theory. Consider the history of economic models. […]
Jeremy Corbyn and his merry bands of Marxists are at it again: a new tax on Facebook, Google and Netflix to subsidise the BBC licence fee and create a British Digital Corporation to take on those pesky Americans. This is yet another example of a solution in search of a problem from Team Corbyn. The […]
Imagine looking at Facebook and Google and Twitter and the rest of the new media world and thinking, “You know, what we need here is a state-owned digital rival to these companies, a kind of British Digital Corporation.” It tells you all you need to know about Jeremy Corbyn that this is what he called […]
Adequate nutrition is a basic requirement for human survival, yet historically food has always been scarce. The prevalence of food shortages can be gleaned from the profusion of commonly used idioms, such as “feast today, famine tomorrow,” children’s stories such as Hansel and Gretel, and scriptural references, such as the Biblical Four Horsemen of the […]
Most of us take modern restrooms for granted, but proper sanitation is a relatively modern phenomenon and is still far too rare in the poorest regions of the world. The need to keep human and animal waste away from human contact may seem obvious today, but for millennia that was not the case. Before the […]
Quite the most amusing part of the current debate about Artificial Intelligence is the manner in which we are recapitulating two of the big mistakes of the 20th century. These are the Socialist Calculation delusion and what we might call the New Soviet Man delusion. An example of the Socialist Calculation fallacy comes to us […]
Humanity is winning the war on HIV/AIDS. Deaths from the disease are down. The same goes for new infections. More people then ever have access to cheap and effective antiretroviral therapy. Chances are that, in the foreseeable future, a cure or a vaccine will deliver the once terrifying disease a final coup de grâce. Acquired […]
European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager’s job isn’t to pick winners. In fact, it’s the opposite – she’s tasked with enforcing the EU’s State Aid rules. Yet by hitting Google with a record €4.3bn fine, that is exactly what she’s done. Competition doesn’t only happen between products (e.g. Coke vs Pepsi), it happens between business […]
Another day, another bloodcurdling report about how robots are going to steal all our jobs and smash all that is holy about the dignity of work. This time it’s from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and they tell us that by the 2040s some 30 per cent of jobs will be automated, perhaps 44 per cent for those requiring a […]
It is perhaps unsurprising that the new powers recently added to the Counter-terrorism and Border Security bill have been met with criticism. While it remains an offence to keep, publish, or distribute extremist content – both online and offline – a new “three strikes” law will apply a penalty of up to 15 years in jail […]
It’s hardly news that political parties are using data to understand voters – what would you expect them to do? – but the sheer scale and speed in which they are accessing and using this data has been hard for regulators, and importantly consumers, to get to grips with. And it’s probably only just started. […]
In late May, the diamond company De Beers Group announced that Signet, the world’s largest diamond jewellery retailer, would sign on as the first participant in their Tracr pilot programme. This initiative uses blockchain technology and has the potential to combat human rights abuses in the diamond trade. Currently, consumers rely on supranational organisations to […]
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