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16 August 2017
The Guardian has recently published data on the gender pay gap in different parts of the Civil Service. Despite the gap having fallen since this exercise was last done, there has been predicable outrage. Labour says it is ‘appalling’ and ‘morally wrong’ for a pay gap to exist at all in the public sector. The ...
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Len Shackleton
16 August 2017
2 August 2017
I saw a first sneak preview of Corbynmania about two years ago. It had nothing to do with Jeremy Corbyn, whose existence I was blissfully ignorant of at the time. I took part in a panel discussion on the UK housing market, organised by a London university, for an audience of students and young academics. ...
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Kristian Niemietz
2 August 2017
31 May 2017
Two weeks ago, Tim Gurner, an Australian property developer, caused a wave of social media outrage. Gurner had suggested that the reason why so many young people cannot afford to buy a home is that they spend too much money on fancy stuff – he specifically mentioned ‘smashed avocado’ and ‘four coffees’ – rather than ...
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Kristian Niemietz
31 May 2017
28 April 2017
Continued from Part 1. Let me suggest that what Marx was objecting to – revolting against – was human nature and the existence of scarcity. Man can never escape from or get outside of being an individual “ego.” We exist as individual human beings; we think, remember, imagine, choose, and act as distinct and ...
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Richard M. Ebeling
28 April 2017
6 April 2017
Gross Domestic Product pops up everywhere in the news. In the summer of 2016, for example, the news that Ireland’s GDP had increased by 26.3 per cent in 2015 had people scratching their heads. Last September’s issue of The Economist raised the perennial question of whether GDP figures released by the Chinese government are reliable. ...
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Pierre Lemieux
6 April 2017
16 March 2017
First published in the Netherlands in 2014 and now republished in English with a retina-burning, bright orange jacket, Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists has become an international bestseller thanks to three big ideas: open borders, a basic income and a shorter working week. At least two of these proposals have been of longstanding interest to ...
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Christopher Snowdon
16 March 2017
10 March 2017
Government and Institutions
My track record on Brexit-related predictions has so far been abysmal. I got it wrong at every turn. For a start, I was sure that voter turnout would be low. I thought that after an initial campaign hype, most people would conclude that leaving the EU would be neither the end of the world, nor ...
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Kristian Niemietz
10 March 2017
6 March 2017
As Chancellor Philip Hammond and US President Donald Trump begin work on their respective budgets, speculation is rife about changes to spending plans and taxes. Will there be significant infrastructure investment? How fast will government spending be cut, if at all? Underpinning all these decisions lies a modelling assumption with arguably much more significance than ...
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Ryan Bourne
6 March 2017
10 February 2017
By and large, free-marketeers understand where their opponents are coming from. We understand what explicit or implicit assumptions they make about the world, and why a lot of their conclusions make sense under those assumptions. Most of us could pass an ‘ideological Turing test’, such as attending a Momentum gathering and pretending to be a ...
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Kristian Niemietz
10 February 2017
3 February 2017
This week, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) revealed that university applications have fallen by 5% for the first time since fees were raised to £9000 per year in 2012. In our most recent ieaTV interview, IEA author Peter Ainsworth finds this fall to be notable, arguing that it’s not hard to see why ...
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Madeline Grant
3 February 2017
