Month: June 2016

The Bear’s Lair: Britain’s Overton Window must reopen to Liverpool

Now that the brave British have voted by a small majority to exit the European Union, they need a new philosophy of government. To get one, they must think more broadly, open the Overton Window of permissible discourse beyond the spendthrift Keynesian globalism of the immediate past, the hard-left socialism of Jeremy Corbyn, the social […]

The Bear’s Lair: A Brexit vote could liberate the world

The purely economic costs and benefits of a British vote next Thursday to exit the EU are quite finely balanced. There are undoubted advantages to membership of a large free trade area, which it will be a pity to lose. While the EU leaders are pushing the union in a direction Britain does not and […]

The Bear’s Lair: Will the 21st Century resemble the 16th?

According to global purchasing power parity GDP data developed by Angus Maddison and others, the 16th and 17th centuries were the last so far of very slow GDP growth per capita, with the century 1550-1650 probably showing a slight decline in living standards. When Maddison produced his estimates in 2004, it appeared that those days […]

The Bear’s Lair: The world needs a Maytag cellphone

Moore’s Law is responsible for many of the defects in today’s quality of life. Whereas a typical U.S.1950s appliance – say, a Maytag washing machine — lasted for 30 or 40 years without major repairs, modern electronic gadgetry is lucky if it survives intact until its third birthday. With Moore’s Law slowing gently to a […]