Knowing and Making

Tim Harford's on a couple of rants this weekend: a light-hearted bitch about non-mathematical economists alongside a more serious argument against the "Robin Hood tax" (a much catchier, or perhaps I should say Orwellian, name for the Tobin tax ). I'm with Tim on this one. There's a typically Curtisian video on the front page of the campaign's website (about as blatantly manipulative as the director's better-known work, Love Actually , and with about the same amount of factual content). It attempts to put across the idea that the tax is simultaneously tiny and huge - small enough to have no impact on financial efficiency while being large enough to solve all the world's problems at home and abroad. Tim makes the case against it pretty well - here's a key example: For instance, I might buy car insurance which could – if I knocked somebody down and permanently disabled them – trigger a payment of £1m. My insurance company might want to reinsur...