A liberal education is now more useful than job-specific skills
It is twenty years since I first wrote a column for this newspaper. The greater ease of obtaining and checking relevant fac...
Rail privatisation has delivered improvements through accountability and autonomy
Both the leading candidates in Labour’s leadership election have now committed themselves to renationalising Britain’s railways. ...
Look at home to find the efficiency gains from recent technological innovation
I can tap my smartphone and a cab will arrive almost immediately. Another tap will tell me the latest news, value my share portfo...
Effective leaders recognise the limits of their knowledge
When I was much younger and editing an economics journal, I published an article by a distinguished professor – one perhaps more distin...
Solutions to the Greek debt crisis should be found through pragmatism not blame
For most of human history the moral opprobrium association with credit was attached to the lender, not the borrower. Aristotle an...
It sometimes makes sense to fix the market rather than its results
The 2015 election was an almost unmitigated disaster for Ed Miliband and the Labour Party. Yet there was one significant success ...
Knowing When We Don’t Know
The tube map
A few years ago some friends invited me to dinner at their house in Hyde Park gardens. At the time I was living i...
Has the EU pushed integration too far and too fast?
A few years ago, I heard an after dinner speech from a European statesman, a man who has played a major role not only in the poli...
The best answer to the West Lothian question is to ignore it
The ‘West Lothian question’ was named for Tam Dalyell, the former member of parliament for that constituency. His 42 years servic...
HS2 is yet another politically-driven project in search of a rationale
In the 1980s privatisation was the big new idea in economic policy. I posed a question over a drink one evening to a friend who worked ...