The Martin Hutchinson Place
This column is increasingly convinced that economic policy peaked in quality some 200 years ago, to give us the Industrial Revolution. Contrary to Whig historians’ fantasy, the government that produced that policy was elected on a relatively broad franchise, of property-holders possessing a “40-shilling freehold” – a fairly low requirement. While returning to such a […]
As the celebratory editorials note, it is now 20 years since Goldman Sachs’ Jim O’Neill propounded the concept of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and proclaimed that the four emerging market economies would outgrow massively the major Western states and become a dominant factor in the world economy. The idea was naively optimistic, […]
The sale to a Chinese company in 2016 of one of the world’s largest cobalt sources, controlled by a U.S. company Freeport McMoran (NYSE:FCX), is emblematic of U.S. national weakness, “wokeness” and decline. However, one underlying cause of that sale was the blizzard of stock buybacks and unsound acquisitions made by FCX in the years […]
Looking back on past critical elections, those readers generally agreeing with this column will have a number of “turning point” elections in which they could wish the more “conservative” candidate had won, although our definitions of “conservative” may differ. In one case, however, one could wish that the more liberal (in the American sense) candidate […]
The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced last week that U.S. non-farm business sector productivity unexpectedly fell 5.0% in the third quarter of 2021 and was 0.5% lower than its level in the third quarter of 2020. This returns the U.S. economy to a pattern of ultra-low productivity growth that first became evident in the Obama […]
Facebook chairman Mark Zuckerberg announced last week that he was changing the company’s name to Meta, because he believed that the “Metaverse” of virtual reality would become the company’s most important business in the future. Whether Zuckerberg or someone else succeeds in creating a convincing Metaverse, it seems to me a wholly negative development for […]
The Biden administration and its allies in Congress are now considering a “billionaires’ tax” on the unrealized capital gains of billionaires’ stock holdings. Nothing is so well designed to collapse the whole house of asset-bubble cards, as the billionaires re-direct their investment towards areas that are not caught by this impost. It therefore seems worthwhile […]
“The gates of Hell are open night and day Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to return, and view the cheerful skies In this the task and mighty labor lies.” Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, translated by John Dryden, published in 1697 when poetry was poetry, is a useful window on China’s […]
Economists David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens won the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel” last week for their work on “real-world” experiments that drove a truck through market-driven economic theory. This was not surprising. Conventional wisdom among the “woke” intelligentsia is today a far more important driver of […]
This column recognizes that new products and services can have technical hiccups. Stephenson’s Rocket ran over a Cabinet Minister at its inaugural ceremony, killing him. The Hindenburg’s new transatlantic airship service burst into flames in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The first jet airliner, the Comet 1, kept blowing out its windows at high altitude. But the […]