Bizarre question in a Labour Party survey: we’d like to know how you feel about our values as a nation. Please complete this sentence: “Above all, I believe Britain should be…” The options were: Compassionate Diverse Fair Pioneering Respectful What are they up to? Presumably “Respectful” is meant to identify Hazel Blears fans, the sort…
Read More Respectful. Diverse. Compassionate. Fluffy. ThunkfulTony Blair: He called on leaders to consider the “absurdity” of spending billions of dollars on security against an ideology which is being “advocated” in the schools and institutions of “countries with whom we have intimate security and defence relationships”. “Some of those countries of course wish to escape from the grip of this ideology,…
Read More A bit of retro Tony Blair bloggingOK, the net neutrality. Just to set down how I think about this. The fundamental issue here is the termination fee regime on the Internet, or rather the lack of one. So what is termination? When a phone call (remember them?) goes from network A to network B, network B charges network A for “terminating”…
Read More My correct views on net neutralityYou know I was saying about us being an emerging low-trust society an’all? Well. Well. Looky here. Via Jared Bernstein, the correlation between inequality and the demand for security guards. Look ma! There’s our kid next to Italy and Greece. And there’s something weird about Belgium, but everyone knows that.
Read More a data pointHere’s an interesting idea: a version of the job guarantee, in its strong form, with decentralised implementation. Am I right in thinking this is actually very similar to the Future Jobs Fund?
Read More decentralised job guaranteeSome more books. Like everyone, I’m reading The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Actually I read it in January, sketched out a review, and lost the notebook, so reading it again. (Spoiler: there isn’t a happy ending.) Fascinatingly, Christopher Clark swaps the powers around; traditionally, the Germans are evil, the Austrians weird,…
Read More Booooks.Show me your Kim Philby and I’ll show you your concerns. Ever since his defection, British writing on the iconic spy has always reflected the anxieties of society at the time of writing, modulated by the latest lot of declassified documents. What else could it do, faced with such a character, a man who couldn’t…
Read More Kim Philby and a web of trustI recently read William Langewiesche’s Aloft (Penguin Modern Classics), his collected essays on flight. One of these, justly regarded as a classic, deals with the loss of Valujet 592 near Miami in 1996, an accident which bears a strong resemblance, in his telling, to the parallel experience of rail privatisation in the UK. Deregulation permitted…
Read More AloftSchuller pointed out that, if the economic theories of Mises’ book Human Action really are derived by painstaking and valid deductive argument, then it should be possible to set the book out in a formal symbolic form in which all axioms, premisses, and deductions are shown formally and proven. No Austrian has ever done this……
Read More A short post