The Martin Hutchinson Place
The Davos leaders last week bemoaned increasing protectionism, attacking opponents of globalization as economic illiterates. Yet there seems no reason a priori why trade should be less subject to tax than any other human activity, and with today’s gigantic governments the need for revenue is very real. Free trade benefits some countries much more than […]
We learned last week that Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) is investing $10 billion in OpenAI for 75% of its profits, a stake that will drop to 49% when Microsoft has recouped its investment. Since OpenAI’s principal asset has become the artificial intelligence writing software ChatGPT, this indicates the perceived value of AI applications. Yet we have also […]
The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland opens January 16, and that body’s anti-capitalist maunderings will once again be spread all over the media. However, the WEF’s Marxist/Thunbergist “Great Reset” approach is not simply due to its chief Klaus Schwab having the looks and outlook of Ernst Stavro Blofeld; it is structural. The […]
Moving into a new year, we naturally look for interesting anniversaries, from which lessons can be drawn. In 2023, there are no centenaries, bicentenaries or tercentenaries of interest, while I have written extensively recently about the 1970s, in which 1973 of the “Arab Oil Crisis” is the crucial year. However, 2023 is also the 150th […]
When you add constraints to a complex mathematical or engineering system, at first it does not change much. Then it begins to perform less well, but only gradually until suddenly, with the addition of an additional constraint that may itself be unimportant, the system collapses and either fails to produce a solution or produces one […]