2018

I have been blogging quite a lot about Ronald Coase and the problems of outsourcing but this is ridiculous. DHL announced in November that it had been appointed alongside QSL to manage the supply and distribution of food products and packaging for more than 850 KFC outlets in the UK. DHL said it would manage…

Read More Pants On Fire: John Major and the crisis of the state

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is the relationship between the Leave/Remain split and the Labour Party’s spectrum from left-of-centre through soft left to hard left. There is a great German word that comes in handy here: Deutungshoheit, or “interpretative superiority”. Something – some inchoate and contingent historical event – happens, and then politicians struggle…

Read More Why Corbyn is the only effective Remainer

What have US healthcare, British railways, the shipwreck of Carillion plc, and the F-35 got in common, and why should you care? Well…none of them work terribly well, they all cost vastly more than expected, and nobody can put their finger on why. Cash seems to leak out of them by a thousand cuts, without…

Read More In The Eternal Inferno, Fiends Torment Ronald Coase With The Fate Of His Ideas

From Marwood Lennox’s post: Someone reading a draft has pointed out that this proposal is to make the whole of the UK into Northern Ireland. Just as well then the DUP are now close to the government, they are the experts in building up a bureaucracy to its advantage using other people’s money You know,…

Read More GFI The GFA

This, rather good, post from Simon Wren-Lewis brings up what has become a trope – the distinction between people who are “pro-market” and those who are “merely pro-business”. The idea is that some people believe that economic problems are best solved through the market mechanism, while some other people pretend to believe this but actually…

Read More Pro-market, pro-business, or just pro-wealth?

I’ve had various feedback about the Two Cultures 2017: Merit vs. Brilliance post – ranging from “Yes…yes…now I see it” to “How dare you call these people brilliant?!” However, over Christmas, events gave us something better than another wall of text. They gave us a visceral object lesson, like so: Langan was kidnapped by the…

Read More Merit vs. Brilliance: A Brutal Demonstration