Tim Worstall

Raw materials and basic services need to be valued more, manufacturing skill needs to be valued more and, oddly, “things” need to be valued more.

You don’t get to determine what value is nor what is valued nor how.

We’ve got this market thing you see? Which, at root, is simply all of us, all 7 billion of us, placing upon what other people produce the value that we think it has. Each of us individually exercises our judgement, measures the additional utility that a good or service brings us and the market aggregates those into a system of prices: the values.

And that’s it I’m afraid. There is no great secret.

Usual nonsense from someone inside the cartel about relaxing the entrance rules to the cartel:

The news today that the education secretary is to remove the requirement for academies to employ qualified teachers sent a shudder down my spine. For a teacher like me, who has taught for more than 20 years in various comprehensives and has spent a great deal of time, quite a bit of it my own time, being “trained”, I know that pupils get a raw deal if they are taught by an untrained teacher.

Firstly, a properly trained teacher is fully conversant with the various theories about how children learn; he or she understands that you can’t just stand at the front and bark orders, that you need to engage children in “active” learning where they are doing things that assist with their learning. A well-trained teacher knows how to assess their pupils lesson by lesson, and use their assessments to shape further lessons, building upon a child’s strengths and tackling their weaknesses.

I know I wouldn’t be nearly as effective as a teacher had I not been trained.

No one at all is suggesting that teachers should not be trained.

The argument is over whether a teacher needs to have a post-graduate course (even a degree at all) in trendy arguments about “how children learn” or they need 6 weeks of standing in front of a class and being told what they’re doing wrong.

I can quite easily find you a current teacher who would say that the 6 weeks or so of classroom practice helped a great deal more than the year of academia (Hallo Shuggy!).

It probably would be a good idea if someone teaching Further Maths A Level had a Maths Degree….or something close to that level of education in the subject. The idea that someone needs a post-graduate degree in order to oversee the finger painting in Year One is rather harder to support.

From what I understand from the papers we have both a Queen and a method of health care in this country.

Who knew?

The ASI addresses the Olympics.

The outcome of this approach to the Olympics is that my religious zeal for London 2012 is roughly the same as everyone else’s religious zeal for other, lesser-known athletic competitions; namely, it is non-existent. This is a far more reasonable and mature approach than that which has been adopted by the British government. Our “heroes,” lest we forget, engage in individual competition all the time, none of which the media seems to call heroic — for example, on a biennial basis in the European Athletic Championships (2006, Gothenburg; 2010, Barcelona; and 2012, most recently, in Helsinki). But (1) nobody apart from track and field buffs talk about the hero-rockstar-legends who changed the course of history in Gothenburg and (2) no multi-billion-pound infrastructure investments were made in Helsinki anytime recently.

This is because (1) none of us were paying any attention when they were running in circles in Gothenburg and (2) it was a track and field meet, for Christ’s sake, not first contact with an alien civilization. It is perfectly possible to hold a track and field meet without spending a dime: you just set a time and a date for everyone to turn up, say “go,” and time how long it takes them to go from A to B. Winner gets a ribbon. Piece of cake.

D’ye think Paris might still be interested?

And if there is no income a deemed rate of return on asset value should be applied instead and that should then be taxed instead.

Sirisly?

If you’ve not made any money it should be assumed that you have and you get taxed anyway?

What?

but British Gas dare not say anything about a 27% rise in profits, refusing to face the Today programme to explain why.

I hadn’t known that the Today program was now part of the economic governance of the country. A Star Chamber before which a business must explain itself.

The French have admitted they are “rude, stroppy, and slothful”

Or, in sympathy with this blog’s one French reader, Parisians admit they are Parisian.

A coalition of terrorist groups including the Real IRA, the Republican Action Against Drugs and a loose coalition of independent armed factions were said to be merging to form a “unified structure, under a single leadership”.

The union threatens to undermine progress made between Ireland and Britain in recent years, which culminated in a historic handshake between former IRA commander Martin McGuinness and the Queen last month.

The new paramilitary group includes hundreds of armed dissidents prepared to be “subservient to the constitution of the Irish Republican Army”, sources told the Guardian.

This is the simple history of Irish Republicanism….sorry, of the armed wing of it.

Been going on for a century or so at least. Group forms, fights, gets some stage closer to the United Ireland thing. The achievement of Eire, or joint rule at Stormont, satisfies enough that some retire (or, as some more cynical might argue, age and the delights of not hiding in ditches persuade some to). This leaves the hard core/the next generation of youngsters who find it exciting to reform some years later.

IRA, Official IRA, Republican IRA, now 32 County peeps etc.

*Shrug*.

No no, I won’t take no for an answer here.

The likelihood of intense political and regulatory scrutiny on the new chairman and chief executive of Barclays means both must be untainted by its reputational collapse and are likely to be recruited externally, possibly from Canada or Australia.

The bank has told investors it is looking to have either one external and one internal appointment, or two external appointments, a top 10 shareholder in the bank said.

I think the obvious candidate is clear, don’t you?

Richard J Murphy. After all, he knows exactly what is wrong with banking, exactly what needs to be done in the future. So clearly well qualified to do the job.

He would bring that necessary element of morality to the City. He would, of course, be willing to only pay himself 20 times the lowest salary in the organisation. £200k maximum perhaps, therefore offering the shareholders a substantial saving.

In fact I can only think of one reason why he is not already doing the job. It’s most, most unlikely that the FSA would approve him as being fit to run a bank.

The new president of the World Bank is determined to eradicate global poverty through goals, targets and measuring success in the same way that he masterminded an Aids drugs campaign for poor people nearly a decade ago.

Jim Yong Kim, in an exclusive interview with the Guardian, said he was passionately committed to ending absolute poverty, which threatens survival and makes progress impossible for the 1.3 billion people living on less than $1.25 a day.

“I want to eradicate poverty,” he said. “I think that there’s a tremendous passion for that inside the World Bank.”

Kim, who took over at the World Bank three weeks ago and is not only the first doctor and scientist (he is also an anthropologist) to be president but the first with development experience, will set “a clear, simple goal” in the eradication of absolute poverty. Getting there, however, needs progress on multiple, but integrated, fronts.

It would help if he knew a little economics perhaps.

For example, this Washington Consensus/neoliberalism/globalisation shtick has at the very least coincided with the greatest reduction in absolute poverty in the history of our species.

Meaning that, to a first approximation at least, it would seem sensible to continue with the Washington Consensus/neoliberalism/globalisation shtick.

As far as we can tell it’s even managed to do something in sub Saharan Africa, the place where all other development ideas give up the ghost.

Why stop doing what apparently works?

The genial and clubbable Davidson, steeped in politics since his childhood, when Stanley Baldwin would drop in for breakfast, embodied the hereditaries’ belief that there were times when they knew best. Asked in 1991 for his reaction to their Lordships’ defeat of the War Crimes Bill, Davidson said: “I’ve always felt that the House of Lords represents the feelings of the country on certain subjects better than the Commons.”

Given that they own most of it they should be in touch with it.

In what could be a plot development from one of the espionage novels that he writes under the name Nigel West, Rupert Allason has become engaged to a beautiful violinist young enough to be his daughter.

Apparently middle aged Downside boys can swap out for the hot younger bird.

The judge said the child’s supposed father, a married elected politician, had “achieved a level of notoriety as a result of extramarital adulterous liaisons”, noting that it was alleged to be the second time he had made a lover pregnant during an affair.

Has been known to publicly talk about “whiff whaff”, no?

Kristen Stewart has issued a public apology to Robert Pattinson, her boyfriend and Twilight co-star, after reports she had a fling with a married director.

We’ve always known this is how actresses do audition after all, it’s just everyone was more discreet in times past.

A strike by 25,000 British border staff aimed at ‘inflicting maximum pain’ on the eve of the Olympics has been called off this morning.

The Home Office has averted 24 hours of industrial action by members of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) at airports tomorrow after agreeing a last minute deal.

PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka says 800 new jobs will be created in the UK Border Agency and 300 in passport offices.

I’d wait a couple of months. Train up a few more people. Then renege on the deal.

Serwotka has quite clearly indulged in a little blackmail here and there’s no shame in cheating a blackmailer out of the demanded reward.

This probably isn’t online.

Ivanov, V.V., 1997. Ecological Geochemistry of Elements. v. 5. Rare
d-elements. Ekologiya, Moskva. 576 pp. (in Russian).

But would anyone with academic access like to try and find out?

To explain: this paper is the source of a tale that one of the Madagascan columbites has been reported as (occasionally!) containing up to 6% by weight Sc.

The question is, which one?

Thanks to those who tracked this down: especially PaulB. There does seem to be a copy of the book there. But it’s got some wildly strange registration system. So, I’ll have to find some other way…..but thanks again for looking.

After a bitter conflict between King and Parliament, the power of royalty in the person of Charles II was restored. In defeat, Magna Carta was not forgotten. One of the leaders of Parliament, Henry Vane, was beheaded. On the scaffold, he tried to read a speech denouncing the sentence as a violation of Magna Carta, but was drowned out by trumpets to ensure that such scandalous words would not be heard by the cheering crowds. His major crime had been to draft a petition calling the people “the original of all just power” in civil society – not the King, not even God.

Well, no. The major crime was treason, being that of helping to execute Poppa, Charles I. It’s the sort of thing that happens to people who, in the long term, lose a civil war.

The significance of the companion charter, the Charter of the Forest, is no less profound and perhaps even more pertinent today – as explored in depth by Peter Linebaugh in his richly documented and stimulating history of Magna Carta and its later trajectory. The Charter of the Forest demanded protection of the commons from external power. The commons were the source of sustenance for the general population: their fuel, their food, their construction materials, whatever was essential for life. The forest was no primitive wilderness. It had been carefully developed over generations, maintained in common, its riches available to all, and preserved for future generations – practices found today primarily in traditional societies that are under threat throughout the world.

The Charter of the Forest imposed limits to privatisation.

Snigger, The Charter of the Forest imposed limits to nationalisation. It was “The King’s Forest” see? His private (ie, the State’s) hunting grounds. The Charter of the Forest detailed what the common people could do even on the State’s land.

And this is only a tiny sample of struggles underway over much of the world, some involving extreme violence, as in the Eastern Congo, where millions have been killed in recent years to ensure an ample supply of minerals for cell phones and other uses, and of course ample profits.

What? The Congolese civil war was caused by the lure of the profits from tantalite?

Err, no, I think not. Exacerbated, sure, possibly part financed agreed. But caused by? No, really, no.

The rise of capitalist practice and morality brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are treated, and also of how they are conceived. The prevailing view today is captured by Garrett Hardin’s influential argument that “freedom in a commons brings ruin to us all,” the famous “tragedy of the commons”: what is not owned will be destroyed by individual avarice.

Proper Chomskbollocks that. Hardin absolutely did not say that the commons must be privatised. All he did say was that if (IF!) demand was higher than the capacity of the commons to supply then access must be managed. He was very clear that it could be governmental (“socialist” in his own words) control of access or private. Which worked better (not which was more moral, but which worked better) depended upon the resource itself.

The grim forecasts of the tragedy of the commons are not without challenge. The late Elinor Olstrom won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 for her work showing the superiority of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins.

More entire Chomskbollocks. Her work was about when does such voluntary cooperation among users lead to adequate (superior if you wish) management of a commons and more importantly, when does it not. A rough rule of thumb is that when the number of users rises above the low single digit thousands then we’re back in Hardin territory. Government or private property.

That was 150 years ago – in England earlier. Huge efforts have been devoted since to inculcating the New Spirit of the Age. Major industries are devoted to the task: public relations, advertising, marketing generally, all of which add up to a very large component of the Gross Domestic Product.

3% is a very large component of GDP now, is it?

Both recognised that the public must be “put in its place,” marginalised and controlled – for their own interests of course. They were too “stupid and ignorant” to be allowed to run their own affairs. That task was to be left to the “intelligent minority,” who must be protected from “the trampling and the roar of [the] bewildered herd,” the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” – the “rascal multitude” as they were termed by their 17th century predecessors. The role of the general population was to be “spectators,” not “participants in action,” in a properly functioning democratic society.

Yes, I know he’s quoting the ad men there but it does sound very much like the revolutionary vanguard of socialism, doesn’t it? Or even the Guardian comments page. You peons should do as we enlightened say.

Could someone tell me why this grammarian is so respected as a political theorist?

Bit of a strange one really.

Although the world was hoping for a good US harvest to replenish dangerously low grain stocks, this is no longer on the cards. World carryover stocks of grain will fall further at the end of this crop year, making the food situation even more precarious. Food prices, already elevated, will follow the price of corn upward, quite possibly to record highs.

Not only is the current food situation deteriorating, but so is the global food system itself. We saw early signs of the unraveling in 2008 following an abrupt doubling of world grain prices. As world food prices climbed, exporting countries began restricting grain exports to keep their domestic food prices down. In response, governments of importing countries panicked. Some of them turned to buying or leasing land in other countries on which to produce food for themselves.

Welcome to the new geopolitics of food scarcity. As food supplies tighten, we are moving into a new food era, one in which it is every country for itself.

He’s normally very vocal about localism. But as you can see, he’s blaming food nationalism for part of the current problems. The answer therefore must be globalisation, not that nationalism.

Sure, I agree, it’s just odd to see Lester Brown advocating it.

Men’s relationships with their female friends may be fuelled by an undercurrent of sexual attraction regardless of whether they are single but the feeling is not mutual, a new study suggests.

The average man considers the sexual attractiveness of the female bus driver when paying his fare let alone the bird he has coffee with twice a week.

There is no law against paying someone in cash

It’s known as “legal tender” for a reason.

Dear God, you pay at the supermarket in cash, at the market stall, at the chippie, at the pub. You doing the paying are just fine. It’s up to the recipient to make sure they pay the appropriate tax on the money they receive.