Conservatives are supposed to be comfortable with the idea of inequality. After all, we’re not all equally talented and if we don’t allow people to make the most of their talents, then the economy as a whole will suffer. In other words, enforcing equality makes us all poorer. But might there be circumstances in which […]
You might think that you’re familiar with the idea of electronic money. After all, for most of us, most of our money flows in and out of our banks accounts as bits of data somewhere in cyberspace. But what if we didn’t have bank accounts, credit cards or any of the associated financial services? Obviously, […]
Every day seems to bring a new economic horror story from Europe. But not this day, not on the Deep End anyway. Just for once, we’re going to focus on the upside – in particular, the good news story that is Poland. This comes courtesy of a wide-ranging and ever-so-slightly envious piece on Spiegel Online: […]
If you thought that the Eurozone crisis was all about sovereign debt – the money that governments borrow to finance their overspending – then you’re wrong. Obviously, sovereign debt is involved, but only as one part of a much bigger picture. Writing for Huffington Post, Simon Johnson and Peter Boone open our eyes: "When Greece quits the […]
We’ll begin today with a story, which though unverifiable and quite possibly apocryphal nevertheless makes an important point. Many years ago, a number of senior Conservatives met to discuss the Party’s ‘narrative’ – the essential message running through everything it said. The market research people reviewed their latest findings, recommending that the narrative should focus on fairness – […]
On Friday, the Deep End featured Damian Thompson’s brilliant piece for the Spectator on addiction. Focusing on pornography, he shows how technology is widening the exposure of our society to addictive activities. The conventional wisdom is that addiction is a demand-led process, i.e. that addiction drives supply. But Thompson argues that history shows the opposite, i.e. […]
It’s been a good year for Damian Thompson. For a start, he’s established the Telegraph Blogs as the best of the newspaper blogging operations; and now he’s published The Fix – an eye-opening, iconoclastic analysis of addiction in the 21st century. Here's an edited version of his article for the Spectator, in which he explains how […]
Question: What are the first three letters of the Greek alphabet? Answer: I, O, U. Actually, there’s a point to this bad joke, which is that promissory notes – issued by the Greek government – could enable a compromise between a potentially calamitous Greek exit from the Eurozone and the unsustainable status quo. This intriguing […]
We live in a time of financial crisis. Understandably, the focus is on how to get out of it, but we also need to ask how we got into it. A pretty good answer is too much debt. In fact, unsustainable borrowing provides a universal explanation for just about every aspect of our economic troubles […]
A great think piece from Daniel Knowles, the enfant sensible of the Daily Telegraph. His basic argument is that thanks to the internet “all sorts of things we used to pay large sums of money for are now nearly or completely free.” New and exciting online businesses may be replacing old offline businesses, but the […]
Is ‘Spexit’ a word yet? We've already got ‘Grexit’ – a reference to the widely expected Greek exit from the Eurozone. But the appearance of Spexit in the headlines would herald an altogether bigger crisis – an impending Spanish exit from the Eurozone. Writing for EconoMonitor, Michael Pettis argues that Spain will soon have no choice but […]
Warning! If you believe that foreign aid is all about ‘taking money from poor people in rich countries to give to rich people in poor countries’, then this post is not for you. If, on the other hand, you’re convinced that the only thing wrong with foreign aid is that there’s not enough of it, […]
A defence of grammar schools from, say, Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail would surprise no one, but when it comes from Mary Ann Sieghart in the Independent feathers are ruffled. Referencing the ongoing debate about social mobility, Sieghart reminds us that education really can make a difference: “…pupils who had free school meals and […]
The left accuses the Coalition of cutting ‘too far, too fast’. However, the Government's critics on the right say that there haven't actually been any cuts. The latter case was made last week in a report from Tullet Prebon – which notes that Government spending has not fallen and that public debt is still rising. So is this […]
When British Conservatives look across the Atlantic for inspiration, which country do they have in mind? These days, it’s more likely to be Stephen Harper’s Canada than the USA. The Republican Party does have some followers on this side of the pond, but for the most part they’ve greeted the GOP’s choice of Presidential candidate […]