Tag: Globalisation

Bogus quantification attempts to compress complex problems and analyses into single observations.

Dominance of an industry or activity is not the same as scale. International trade is conducted by individuals and businesses, not governments, and it is them, who negotiate the division of the value added trade creates.

Our capacity to learn from the Great Depression is limited because we do not know how economies would have evolved after 1938 if politics had not supervened.

Commercial and economic success, even in technological industries, depends not on the quality of technology, but on the match between technology and the needs of its customers.

The blunt truth is that free markets are not a particularly efficient system for allocating resources. They are just – like democracy – more efficient than other systems and – unlike democracy – more innovative than other systems.

We make the poor better off not by holding back technical and economic progress, but by accelerating it.

There are historic lessons to be learnt from the recent high definition format war: the importance of the installed base and the unpredictability of consumer markets.

The political consequences of international trade are different from the political consequences of international investment. Yet the willingness of business to transcend political divisions in pursuit of commercial advantage is basically a force for peace.

The capacity of politics to get in the way of economic growth has dominated most of the economic history of most of the world.

The balance between present and future will be determined not by moral philosophy or economic models but by the decisions of ordinary savers, investors and voters.