When the US was obsessing about the then-still-not-exactly President Trump and his tweets about Congressman John Lewis, I tuned it out, and tuned in instead to the politics of the Mother Country. The Bank of England's Governor Mark Carney on Jan. 15 said that the country's consumer spending has held up well since the Brexit referendum, a fact that seems to have surprised him. Consumers are "entirely looking through Brexit-related uncertainties." Stiff upper lips and all that? More important, Prime Minister May gave an important address about the direction her government will take in executing the UK's exit from the EU. There have been talk of a so-called "soft Brexit," which would presumably entail retaining many of the benefits of membership in the EU while throwing off the liabilities. The leaders of other European nations had made clear their displeasure at that idea, and there developed a consensus that it wasn't going to happen. May ackn...
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In June of this year, Paul Krugman wrote a sort of humblebrag column admitting to certain errors that have accumulated in his columns. The tone was, "yes I've gotten things wrong, but none of these examples reflects any very deep mistakes in my assumptions, and since I'm owning up to my errors, all is good." The most intriguing of the admissions, to me, involved the economy of the United Kingdom. Krugman has been using "austerity" as a whipping boy for years now. Every impulse toward hardening the money supply or cutting public expenditures, in any country toward which he turns his gaze, is "austerity" or the cult of the "austerians" and a bad thing. One sometimes gets the impression that Krugman coined "austerians" to pun on "Austrians," and to try to use the failures (as he sees them) of austerity policies as arguments against Austrian economics. A silly pun, if that is what is intended. Anyway: the U....
In our Mother Country, Nigel Farage has been debating Nick Clegg of late. The most recent, the one that has me paying attention now, was the one on Wednesday, April 2, 2014. For my fellow Americans, who only rarely tune into matters on the other sides of oceans -- it is worth your while paying attention to this. Talking myself through it now ... Farange (that's his picture above) is the leader of the UKIP, or the Independence Party, which wants to quit the EU altogether and reduce immigration. Clegg is head of the Liberal Democratic party, which is in coalition with the (larger) Conservative Party in the present government. Clegg also has the title Deputy Prime Minister. The aforesaid CP hasn't been taking part in these exchanges. Neither has the other Major Party, Labour. Its a little bit as if, in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt had debated Eugene Debs, leaving both the incumbent president (Taft) and the major party challenger (Wilson) out of the e...
Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created Dilbert, likes to say that there are only nine news stories, constantly re-written. Every year at this time I check recent stories with his list in mind to see if he is right. I'll start with his wording unmodified by examples. 1. EXTREME WEATHER BATTERS SOMEPLACE 2. IDIOTS KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE 3. POLITICIAN DOES SOMETHING ILLEGAL 4. PRIMATE ATTEMPTS INAPPROPRIATE SEX 5. EXPERTS WARN OF FINANCIAL CALAMITY 6. BIG COMPANY BUYS ANOTHER BIG COMPANY 7. FAMOUS PERSON DOES SOMETHING INTERESTING 8. A SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY MIGHT BE USEFUL IN TEN YEARS 9. GOVERNMENT FAILS TO ACHIEVE A GOAL I did the research for what follows a couple of weeks ago, in mid-January. I'm too lazy to do the updating -- feel free to play along yourself if you like. But the point stands, these stories are the same ones that are in all the papers all the time. I'll try for some geographical diversity as we go along. 1. Extreme weather? ...