The Martin Hutchinson Place
Modern telecommunications shrank the cost differential between rich and poor country product sources, making global supply chains easily feasible. Ever since the middle 1990s, therefore, the rich world has been getting poorer, as living standards across the planet began to converge. In the last decade, however, government actions have hugely increased costs in rich countries, […]
Jeremy Corbyn, the far-left MP for Islington North, appears set to become the next leader of Britain’s Labour party. Various commentators have predicted economic and political doom for Britain, citing his radical ideas as evidence. Yet in reality the British electoral system, the openness of the economy and the lack of support for Corbyn himself […]
Conventional wisdom celebrates cities. It sees the mighty agglomerations of capital and human capital in London, New York, Shanghai and San Francisco/Silicon Valley and celebrates the wealth-producing capabilities of those agglomerations. Yet with today’s low interest rates and high asset prices, the biggest cities also have remarkably high real estate prices, which inflict massive costs […]
George W. Bush and Barack Obama have proved themselves helpless since 2001 to reverse an inexorable relative decline in U.S. power and U.S. living standards. Similarly, prime ministers from Clem Attlee through Jim Callaghan, including Winston Churchill, failed to reverse a similar period of decline in Britain. Neville Chamberlain, good-willed, capable and experienced as he […]
My beloved wife Anna passed away unexpectedly last Wednesday, at the age of 58. In her memory I would like here to recall a joyful occasion, when through my journalistic work she was able to join me at breakfast with King Simeon II of the Bulgarians, her legitimate monarch since birth, elected prime minister of […]
President Obama this week announced in Africa that he would be confident of being re-elected, but was blocked by the 1951 22nd Amendment, which prevented U.S. Presidents seeking a third term. My first reaction was of course a crassly partisan sigh of relief, but then I began thinking about term limits in general, and […]
The Jetsons, a sci-fi fantasy family of the 1960s, lived in impossible luxury in 2062. Not only are we not nearing their living standards, we are going in the opposite direction. This column has wondered why, and a recent Supreme Court case has given us the answer. In one of its few good decisions of […]
A Royal Astronomical Society study published in Science Daily on July 9 and presented at the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, Wales postulates that solar activity will decline by 60% in the 2030s, producing sunspot minima and a temperature decline similar to that of the “Maunder minimum” that began in 1645. During that period, the […]
This six-part review of David Kynaston’s book on the post-war City of London was published by UPI in 2002. It reflects my own thoughts at that time on why the City changed, and what went wrong. I stand by the analysis in Parts I-V today, but inevitably some (but not all) of the predictions in […]
(10th anniversary reprint of a Golden Oldie from July 11, 2005 — I’m away this week.) Discussion following Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement has centered on her potential successor’s views on abortion and wrongful imprisonment, the two areas in which the Angry Left is most hostile to the George W. Bush administration. Yet […]