The Martin Hutchinson Place
The news last week that our closest star, Proxima Centauri, has a planet Proxima B orbiting it that could possibly support life is immensely encouraging. As I have written frequently, our current economic and political arrangements are so bad that eventual collapse seems inevitable. However, like the Pilgrim Fathers, we may have the opportunity to […]
The death of Antonin Scalia throws the future of the U.S. Supreme Court into flux, while Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are achieving some electoral success while proudly flouting their contempt for property rights. With year upon year of zero or even negative interest rates worldwide, Maynard Keynes’ “euthanasia of the rentier” seems ever closer. […]
Donald Trump currently looks likely to win the Republican Presidential nomination and it appears Bernie Sanders has a decent shot at the Democrat one. The two candidates have unexpectedly strong support from voters who normally do not participate in elections and, although they are nominally from opposite political poles, their economic nostrums have a lot […]
The COP-21 global climate talks ended this weekend, with a treaty that won’t have much practical effect. Yet regulations to combat “climate change” have already inflicted trillions of dollars of economic damage and there seems no prospect of ending their depredations. In other areas, the regulatory state set up since the 1960s expands steadily, with […]
Modern commentators, including Yuval Noah Harari in his interesting book “Sapiens – a brief history of humankind” (Harper, 2015) believe that the coming of agriculture around 10,000 years ago was a disaster for humanity, forcing people to work much harder than the previous hunter-gatherers for a less stable and reliable subsistence. Yet when you […]
No less than six sovereign borrowers are now paying negative nominal interest rates on their two-year borrowing in euros – in other words they are making money by going into debt. In real terms, medium-term US TIPS and British index linked gilts have had negative interest rates for several years. Contrary to the views of […]
Non-farm business productivity fell by 3.2% in the first quarter of 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ revised data. Most commentators have rather ignored this number. You expect productivity figures to be bad when GDP drops unexpectedly, as it did in the first quarter —after all the last such bad number was in […]
Nobel Prize winning (1992) economist Gary Becker, who died last weekend, extended economic theory into areas such as racism, crime, and family formation in which it hadn’t been thought relevant. Critics, whether of religious or other persuasions, complained that Becker’s analysis dehumanized us by leaving out many other factors that were of equal or greater […]
First Peoples Worldwide is an organization devoted to the “indigenous movement” in economics, whereby competition will be replaced by co-operation and resource exploitation by harmony with nature. To simple minds schooled by modern Western education systems, this is a very attractive idea, and First Peoples’ YouTube video “Enoughness: Restoring balance to the economy” is a […]
President Obama’s intransigence on economic matters is increasingly clear, so compromise seems unlikely and a succession of tax increases and wasteful spending programs seems inevitable. Meanwhile Ben Bernanke’s Fed enables this dangerous course by massive “quantitative easing.” Assuming Bernanke is succeeded by a like-minded colleague (more on that below) we will thus suffer this economically […]