Category Archives: Economics

The Strategic Importance of Renewable Energy

Posted on March 12, 2020 by odeboyz

There are three principal reasons why British renewable energy is strategically important. They are, safety of supply, price stability and developing 21st century industries. These are central to the national interest. Safety of Supply The Royal Navy protects British shipping … Continue reading →

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Book Review: David Graeber ~ Bullsh*t Jobs: A Theory (2018)

Posted on March 2, 2020 by odeboyz

Freakonomics (2005) unleashed populism amongst university professors. They realised they could sex up their academic work by judicious selection of the bizarre and get a best seller, fame and fortune. Graeber’s an LSE professor of anthropology has joined in. A … Continue reading →

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Why the Labour Party is middle-class: George Orwell 1936

Posted on February 13, 2020 by odeboyz

I am struck again by the fact that as soon as a working man gets an official post in the Trade Union or goes into Labour politics, he becomes middle-class whether he will or no…. by fighting against the bourgeoisie … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Abhijit V Banerjee and Esther Duflo ~ Good Economics for Hard Times – Better answers to our biggest problems (2019)

Posted on February 10, 2020 by odeboyz

It’s easy to feel intellectually intimidated by a book by two Nobel Prize winners and perhaps that’s the right response sometimes. On this occasion it isn’t.* This is a readable and homely book written in an accessible way. The ‘biggest … Continue reading →

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The generosity of billionaires

Posted on January 30, 2020 by odeboyz

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made headlines earlier this month with his donation of $690,000 to the Australian wildfire relief effort- a sum roughly estimated to equate to less than five minutes* of his earnings. * For someone on £40,000 this … Continue reading →

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Education divides society by wealth

Posted on January 27, 2020 by odeboyz

Economists have found that many elite US universities – including Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton, and Yale – take more students from the top 1% of the income distribution than from the bottom 60%. To achieve a position in the top … Continue reading →

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Gordon Brown’s* Aspiration to End Childhood Poverty, 1997-2010

Posted on January 16, 2020 by odeboyz

Gordon Brown became Chancellor after the Labour landslide of 1997. His aspiration was to end childhood poverty and no one would ever have a better opportunity. The Conservative party was in utter disarray and both he and Tony Blair commanded … Continue reading →

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Workhouses and the Poor from 1834

Posted on January 2, 2020 by odeboyz

…..the able-bodied recipient of poor relief “on the whole shall not be made really or apparently as eligible as the independent labourer of the lowest class.”1 Introduction There’s nothing worse than paying tax and being taken for a ride. The … Continue reading →

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Why the west is stagnant

Posted on December 5, 2019 by odeboyz

Thomas Piketty, the French economist, calculates that more than half of total wealth in Germany* today is inherited — an estimate confirmed by German economists. In the 1960s and 1970s, the share was just a little over 20 per cent. … Continue reading →

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Overconfidence

Posted on November 28, 2019 by odeboyz

Overconfidence, though, can be hugely damaging. Daniel Kahneman has called it the most dangerous of all cognitive biases. The three worst decisions in the UK in the last 20 years – Blair’s war in Iraq, RBS’s takeover of ABM Amro … Continue reading →

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