Book Review – Mass Flourishing by Edmund Phelps
This book is really two books. The first - which I found original and fascinating - is on the negative consequences of the widespread u...
The danger of political groupthink in our universities
The American social psychologist Jon Haidt recently reported a study by William von Hippel and David Buss of the political leanings of ...
What Uber and another John Kay teach us about innovation and competition
‘Imagine’, said the cabbie, ‘that Uber had already been operating for twenty years. And I came along with my black cab. My ...
Pharma responsibilities are to a wider community than its own shareholders
A man died in Rennes, France last week after a clinical drug trial went disastrously wrong. Shortly before Christmas, Martin Shkreli, w...
The business of attacking companies is hard to admire but publicly useful
The fund cum research group Gotham City Research had two share picks in 2014. The founder of Spanish wifi provider Gowex, Jenaro...
Teams of foxes make the best forecasts, but expert hedgehogs can help
One of the banes of this economist’s life, and never more so than at the turn of the year, is the belief that economists is clairvoyanc...
Famous quotes may be apocryphal yet illuminating
‘Who said it?’ - identify famous quotations - is a standard part of every Christmas Quiz. But who didn't say it? For example, Hum...
Income and corporation tax structures must be reformed to combat avoidance
Ian Read, the Scottish born chairman and CEO of Pfizer, must often have left his public relations advisers wringing their hands. But la...
The mechanics of crises
Financial crises have their origins in human behaviour. They are not natural disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes whi...
Look behind the fiscal tree but don’t expect to find any money
Russell Long, the southern Democrat who was long-serving chair of the Senate Finance Committee, composed the ditty ‘don’t tax you...