Barnett formula erodes the concept of ‘English votes for English laws’
Every state with devolved institutions of government redistributes revenues among subsidiary jurisdictions. These allocations promote e...
Why worry about deflation? II
Over a million people in Europe have signed petitions against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. In Britain, a YouGov ...
Why worry about deflation?
The overall price level in Britain and the United States was much the same in 1913 as a century earlier. The longest semi-official pric...
Economists: there is no such thing as the ‘economic approach’
Forty years ago, Chicago economist Gary Becker wrote an essay describing “the economic approach to human behaviour”. In his v...
In finance and politics it pays more to be right than to be active
I have been in my house in France since the New Year. The response to the massacre in Paris last week was deeply moving: th...
Rise in US and UK inequality principally due to financialisation and executive pay
In 1920, ‘the 1%’ – the top percentile of the income distribution – accounted for between 15% and 20% of total gross income in develope...
Scottish independence vote will continue to shape British politics
The latest opinion polls in Scotland show Nationalists leading Labour by around 20 points, with other parties trailing way behind. ...
Rationality will be at work this Christmas
And so it is Christmas. And, as every year, people will spend time with relatives they do not much like, give presents which the ...
To assess value it’s wise to escape the market crowd
‘The wisdom of crowds’ has become a modern cliché. And a strange one – the crowds which attended the Nuremberg Rallies, or cheere...
Home ownership has distributed wealth but raised generational inequality
Two weeks ago, I described two ways of looking at the capital of a modern economy. We can measure the value of physical assets, o...