Alan Duncan: the British Art Laffer

In a bizarre Art Laffer-like incident today, Alan Duncan reminded us of the good old days when all Tories were mad.

In the midst of a number of other infelicities, widely reported in left and right wing newspapers nationwide, Duncan said of the House of Commons:
Basically, it's being nationalised.
Now I am spoiled by my choice of targets. I have:
  • American economists who think that the government doesn't run Medicare
  • American financial journalists who argue that Stephen Hawking would have been left to die by the NHS if he'd been British (which he, er, is)
  • A British MP who thinks - and is willing to admit - that the House of Commons used to be a private company
Republicans must be terrified that, if Obama gets his way, they are going to end up with a publicly owned government. Thank goodness free enterprise still reigns in that branch of the economy.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is the difference between cognitive economics and behavioural finance?

This question was posed in an interesting LinkedIn discussion group (Behavioural Finance: Theory and Practice) by Kerry Pechter. I dashed off a quick answer which ended up being 500 words long. So I thought it might be useful to post on here. Can anyone tell me the difference between cognitive economics and behavioral finance? Cognitive economics is not yet a widely used phrase, though Marco Novarese and I have been using it as a name for a more microfounded version of what's typically called behavioural economics. So I'll answer the question based on how I use the term. The first difference is between "economics" and "finance". Economics is a broader field, including the trading of any kind of goods or services, whereas finance specifically focuses on investment and the value of financial instruments. Indeed I consider economics very broadly to be the study of how resources are allocated (by individuals, and across society). The more fundamental...
Read more

Is bad news for the Treasury good for the private sector?

An intriguing post from Robert Peston raising the spectre of the Treasury failing to sell all the bonds it wanted to sell yesterday. Is this, as he implies, plain bad news for the government because their funding is getting more expensive? Or is it good news for private lenders - implying that investors are fed up with their "flight to quality" and are now considering private sector investments instead? The answer is dependent on two further questions: is investors' money switching to foreign investments, UK private lending or UK equities? are investors actually running out of money to invest - the infamous savings trap, where people in aggregate try to increase their savings but fail to do so, because the attempt to save reduces total income in the economy and available savings are reduced too? Hopefully we can find out. How could we figure it out? by looking at total UK savings this month - this is not an exact science but we should hopefully be able to see if the tren...
Read more

Book review: Alchemy, by Rory Sutherland

Rory Sutherland's new book Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don't Make Sense  continues his 10-year campaign against the traditional, logical pursuit of business advantage, through a scientific lens that includes several cognitive economics themes. As ever, a curated series of amusing anecdotes about people or companies who took an unusual angle on marketing or product invention, fuel a philosophical wander. That philosophy could be summarised as: if it makes sense, someone's already tried it. So try something that doesn't . The ideas that underpin the book are broadly based on behavioural economics and cognitive science, with bits of evolutionary theory, statistics and old-fashioned advertising intuition thrown in. At first it doesn't look like a behavioural science book as such: the theoretical backbone takes a while to show. Rory's style is discursive: an after-dinner-talk of anecdotes, dismantling of conventional wisdom, ever-so-slightly outr...
Read more