Review: False Alarm: How climate change panic costs us trillions, hurts the poor and fails to fix the planet.

Bjorn Lomborg (New York, NY: Basic books, 2020) For a long time, there has been no real centre ground politically on climate change: either you are a believer in green activism and its policy platform or a denier, it seems. This is nowhere more demonstrably seen than in the US, where stance on climate change… Continue reading Review: False Alarm: How climate change panic costs us trillions, hurts the poor and fails to fix the planet.

The Economic Future of the Nation: Human Value and Institutional Wealth

Introduction Until the present crisis and the cessation of most social and economic activity the main concern in people’s minds was the economic challenges and opportunities created by Brexit. By contrast with the challenges ahead presented by the economic fallout of the national lockdown, those posed by Brexit now seem insignificant. Predictions vary as to… Continue reading The Economic Future of the Nation: Human Value and Institutional Wealth

The Morality of Markets?

Following the forced resignation of Travis Kalanick as  CEO of Uber last month amidst allegations of rampant sexism, harassment, and misogyny in the workplace, the morality (or lack thereof) of the fat cats that sit atop the economic pyramid that is global capitalism is well and truly back in the spotlight. Perhaps it is a welcome change from… Continue reading The Morality of Markets?

Adam Smith and the Rationality of Self-Interest

  Since Adam Smith the prevailing view in economics has been that the free market operates through a principle of rational self-interest. Much as Darwin later identified the underlying mechanism for the variety and dynamism of nature operating at the individual level, so Smith atomised the creation of wealth to the individual’s self-interest: “It is… Continue reading Adam Smith and the Rationality of Self-Interest

What is the point of the Left? A dispassionate assessment of its virtues and vices

After the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the 1990s there was a brief window in which it was predicted that the forces of democracy and the free market had triumphed and leftist and socialist parties would thereafter only wither away. The view from the present is of a very… Continue reading What is the point of the Left? A dispassionate assessment of its virtues and vices