What should politicians do? Make us happier of course. UK politicians are not doing great at this – we are only 18th in the happiness league table of OECD countries.* Maybe politicians have got their priorities wrong? As I show below, as happiness and equality are related, maybe they should be doing more about inequality… Read more
Posts by:
Charles Adams
An education is not a commodity
These are dark days for the UK higher education sector. First the good news. The UK university sector is still world leading – 16 universities in the top 100, second only to the US with 25, third is Australia. Although speaking English seems to help, these league tables do seem to suggest that UK universities… Read more
Taking back control of Brexit
With the Brexit negotiations going so badly, is it time for the UK negotiators to start playing their strongest cards? First, recognise that the UK does not have a strong hand with regard to trade. The asymmetry arises because EU is the larger market than the UK, and the EU market is subdivided into blocks…. Read more
Houses, wealth and income
One of my favourite books on economics is Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the twenty first century, partly because it is brilliant (although long) and partly because it is packed full of enormous quantities of data. One of key points of Piketty is that the ratio of wealth to income is very important. You can think… Read more
The scarcity myth
According to page 4 of the Principles of Economics by Mankiw – economics is the study of how society manages its scarce resources. or this recent post by Tim Worstall, Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute: there are unlimited human desires but only scarce resources with which to sate them. This is easy to understand… Read more
Is world-leading NHS healthcare an affordable proposition?
Authors: David Laws, Consultant Anaesthetist, City Hospitals Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust, Sunderland, Tyne & Wear, SR4 7TP Professor Charles S. Adams, Department of Physics, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3LE Introduction: The unquestioned assertion that a highly developed currency-issuing nation cannot afford high quality healthcare [1] is based upon a set of inter-related and almost universally-held… Read more
Some data on the UK housing problem.
We hear a lot about the housing crisis and following on from a discussion on Richard Murphy’s blog I thought I would have a look at the data. Ideally all discussion should begin with data—in data there is truth—but we should remember that data-ists have enormous freedom as to what data to choose and how… Read more
Hell, fear, and hyperinflation
Money is our means to undertake economic activity. It incumbent on the agents of government to ensure that money flows to all parts, such that the economy can flourish. Money is not the constraint on what we can achieve—we are—and a growing economy requires a growing amount of money. So why are politicians telling us that… Read more
Science and technology are the greatest agents of collective human progress.
Surely, only a politician could think that: “A free-market economy, operating under the right rules and regulations, is the greatest agent of collective human progress ever created.” Or maybe a politician and an economist. For everyone else, a much stronger case can be made for mathematics and written language, or science and medicine, or the ability… Read more
Poisonous tendencies
Cross-posted on Brave New Europe. Anyone that has tried to balance a seesaw – not touching the ground – knows about equilibrium. We know how to adjust our position to correct any movement away from perfect balance. The seesaw fluctuates and we cannot relax, but if we react correctly it never moves far from the… Read more