Utopia, you are standing in it!

“What a fool I was. I was only a puppet, and so was Ulster, and so was Ireland, in the political game that was to get the Conservative Party into power.”

Edward Carson, leader of the Ulster Unionists during the Home Rule crisis, 1921

Amongst Theresa May’s list of growing concerns is a potential landmark legal challenge to her deal with the Democratic Unionist Party (“DUP”). A Green party politician who stood for the general election in West Tyrone, Ciaran McClean, alleges that Theresa May’s deal is unlawful as it breaches the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. Mr McClean’s solicitor, David Greene, also acted for Deir Dos Santos in Miller and Dos Santos v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union [2017] UKSC 5 (“Miller”).

The letter sent on behalf of Mr McClean states that any agreement between the DUP and the Conservative party would compromise the…

On the face of it, it sounds ridiculous: Of all the reasons young men may face challenges in today’s economy, the allure of playing video games is one of them.

However, the Washington Post reports: “Why amazing video games could be causing a big problem for America.”

The piece reports on new research that “may help explain one of the most alarming aspects of the nation’s economic recovery: Even as the unemployment rate has fallen to low levels, an unusually large percentage of able-bodied men, particularly the young and less-educated, are either not working or not working full-time.”

The Post writes: “The researchers are not merely saying that young men, out of work, are turning to video games. They’re saying that increasingly sophisticated video games are luring young men away from the workforce. To determine this, the researchers analyzed changes in how people were allocating their time to leisure, and ran…

On 20th anniversary of Hong Kong, Neil Monnery has a nice piece on role of John Copwerwaithe in shaping the island economy:

People who don’t pay a lot of attention to political news, and there are lots of them, often wonder about the real difference between parties. There are many who at least claim that they vote for the man, not the party. I ran across a good example in Politico Magazine. I had no idea that Politico had a magazine. Short piece by the editor, one Stephen Heuser, to introduce their “Cities Issue” — “One Nation, Divided by Density”

Pick a city in America, any city. Chances are it’s younger, more diverse and moreeducated than the countryside around it—and way, way more liberal. The resurgence of the city has been one of the most striking reversals in modern America, as the bleak streets of the 1970s have turned into magnets for a new kind of young, hyperconnected professional, and even wealthy retirees flocking back from their suburbs. It has also…

Late last week I was scrolling through a story about the IMF’s latest comments on the US economic outlook, short-term and more medium-term.   As the story reminded readers

The Trump administration says its economic platform — including cutting corporate and ­income taxes, boosting infrastructure spending and reducing regulations — will push growth up to a sustained rate of 3-4 per cent a year and cut unhealthy government debt levels.

At present, the Federal Reserve’s FOMC members collectively think potential GDP growth rates in the US are a touch under 2 per cent per annum.

The IMF has just finished its Article IV “mission” to the US (the US Treasury and the Fed being each a few blocks’ walk from the IMF), and released the team’s Concluding Remarks.   The Fund is, understandably, (more than) a bit sceptical about prospects for such an acceleration in the rate of growth of…

Keynesian economics is fundamentally misguided because it focuses on how to encourage more spending when the real goal should be to figure out policies that result in more income.

This is one of the reasons I wish people focused more on “gross domestic income,” which is a measure of how we earn our national income (i.e., wages, small business income, corporate profits, etc) rather than on “gross domestic product,” which is a measure of how our national income gets allocated (consumption, investment, government, etc).

Simply stated, Keynesians put the cart before the horse. Consumption doesn’t drive growth, it’s a consequence of growth.

But let’s set all that aside because we have new evidence that Keynesian stimulus schemes aren’t even very good at artificially goosing consumption.

Three economists (from MIT and Tex A&M) have crunched the numbers and discovered that Obama’s Cash-for-Clunkers scheme back in 2009 was a failure even by…