Economy

Readers will be familiar with “the butterfly effect” – mathematician Edward Lorenz’s description of how, within a complex system, a tiny input, like a butterfly flapping its wing, may cause dramatic changes, such as the location, intensity, and path of a storm weeks later.  Economist Steve Keen used similar modelling …

Britain’s metropolitan liberal class is getting exercised about airport delays ahead of the Easter break.  Pent up demand after two years of lockdown and, one suspects, many people having one last holiday in the sun, have run headlong into labour shortages.  And while one can have sympathy with passengers having …

Among humanity’s greatest failings is our inability to process time.  No doubt in our evolutionary past, the need to focus on the here and now – both to avoid danger and to secure the means of staying alive – will have left little time to think about the future.  The …

One thing we learn from our Prime Minister’s pilgrimage to Riyadh to prostate himself at the feet of the beheaders, is that the Atlantic Alliance countries had failed to do even the slightest amount of planning before their episode of sanctions diarrhoea a fortnight ago.  Even an eight-year-old could have …

If you get your news from the BBC, you might be forgiven for thinking that the economic hit from the pandemic lockdowns and restrictions has come to an end.  Indeed, if you merely skim through the headlines in your social media feed, you might believe that the UK is poised …

The UK government faced a barrage of criticism over its National Insurance hike this week.  The tax – which theoretically pays for public services, pensions, and benefits – was in creased last autumn, before the political class became aware of the massive increase in gas and electricity prices coming later …

UK gas prices have fallen back this week – although they are still some 400 percent higher than at the start of 2021.  And the reasons for the fall in price should not breed complacency.  First, the arrival of a south-westerly airflow off the Atlantic has finally begun to spin …

After 20 months of economy-wrecking lockdowns and restrictions, 2019 is fondly remembered as a period of prosperous calm.  Memories though, are deceptive.  And in the days before we learned what gain-of-function meant, things were not as rosy as they now seem.  Although the decade 2009-2019 was officially one of the …

The arrival of the Omicron variant, just weeks before Christmas, has caused a large part of the establishment media and the neoliberal elite to salivate at the prospect of more lockdowns.  This despite early evidence that the variant is mild even though it appears even more transmissible than the Delta …