We’re told that the only solution to Britain’s housing woes is more social housing. Because, as Polly Toynbee tells us:The market will never build enough homes, and certainly not enough “affordable” homes, as scarcity drives up prices. Rather than treating housing as something for the market to rectify, the state should start building more social housing. It already owns land aplenty, and doing this would be a double win: it would both help to solve… Read more »

A useful point to grasp is that physical investment - investment in physical things - isn’t the way that a modern economy adds value. Or not the bulk of the value being added. It is, rather, investment in knowledge and intangibles that does add value.For example, the value of Amazon doesn’t depend upon warehouses and the silicon in servers, although those obviously contribute, but in the software and brand that makes the whole thing work.… Read more »

Free trade had a good run with first GATT and then WTO, and has brought a very large part of humankind unparalleled prosperity, enabling people in poorer countries to sell their labour and its products on the world market. But there has recently been a return to a degree of protectionism, and some observers predict that economic nationalism will come to dominate, meaning that trade will be much less free than it has been, and… Read more »

Lord Sainsbury tells us how we can achieve the much desired levelling up:If, however, the Government is going to grow high value-added businesses outside London, some important changes need to be made. The first change is to give the metro mayors the clear responsibility for spatial planning and transport policies in their cities, bringing their powers in line with those already held by the Mayor of London. This would be a significant change, but granting… Read more »

There is a scene in Yes Minister where Sir Humphrey, goaded by Hacker into giving a straight answer for once, blurts out:“If you’re going to do this damn silly thing, don’t do it this damn silly way.”The Chancellor could have done with that sort of straight talking before today’s Budget speech - it might have stopped the announcement that corporation tax will be increased from 19% to 25%, but only from April 2023.  It fits… Read more »

The boss of Uber claims that the people who work for the company as drivers prefer the flexibility or independence of the manner of working to the possibly benefits of being classified as either workers or employees. He might be right too: The chief executive of Uber has insisted that its drivers want flexibility above the benefits of employment in the wake of a landmark UK court ruling that classified them as workers. Dara Khosrowshahi,… Read more »

Just when we can finally see the end of lockdown and life possibly returning to some sort of normal, we have a flurry of rumours that the Chancellor is about to shoot the recovering economy in the foot with all sorts of tax rises.This would be a disaster, and the people it would hit worst would not be ‘the wealthy’ or ‘big corporations’, but young people looking for their first jobs.Before coronavirus, the government was… Read more »

It doesn’t matter who runs the place, which side or tribe wins any elections, the country is in for austerity over decades to come.That is, if we use the currently fashionable definition of austerity. For that definition is “government spending less this year than last”. That is what has been shouted over this past decade after all. We have various possible definitions of spending of course, real terms, nominal cash, but the most obvious one… Read more »

The centenary of the birth of philosopher John Rawls has prompted the usual claims that his best known philosophical tool, the veil of ignorance, is an argument in favour of redistributive taxation aiming at a much more equal income society.In his thought experiment, Rawls imagined people meeting to design the society they would then live in, but without knowing anything about themselves that might help determine their position in that society (intelligence, skills, gender, age,… Read more »

Some commentators suppose that following the Financial Crisis of 2008 and the current worldwide pandemic that world output will never regain its previous levels, and that people in the future will have a lower standard of living than their predecessors did. Others allege that such increases in wealth as have happened have been concentrated in the hands of the super-rich, leaving poorer people worse off.Neither of these somewhat pessimistic views appear to be justified. Periodic… Read more »