Written 15 June 2022 Dominic Frisby wrote a really good and thought provoking piece here on water as real estate, the housing crisis and tax. Like him I am a bit of a Georgist in these matters and I thought he outlined a really positive vision for how we can use our available resources to make our towns and cities nicer as well as build housing. Alright, the houses are floating, but they’re still houses in my book! It’s well worth a read. I worked for about five years for Sutton Harbour Holdings in Plymouth, which owns Sutton Harbour (including...
Written 05 June 2022 It’s become increasingly clear to me over the years that abundant, reliable and cheap energy is the cornerstone of progress we have enjoyed in the developed world for many years now. It also lies at the heart of environmental questions that are set to be at the centre of our political life for the rest of my life and so I’ve been looking to read more on Energy this year. I started with The Prize by Daniel Yergin which deals with the history of the oil industry (reviewed here), then Helen Thompson’s Disorder (which touches on...
Written 30 May 2022 The Plymouth Herald reports today that the future of Plymouth Airport is once again “under discussion”. This is a long running saga down in these parts and is a subject I have some familiarity with having worked for Sutton Harbour Group (SHG, the current airport owner) between 2013 and 2018. I’m not interested in the question of whether or not the site has a viable future as an airport, but as an interesting illustration of all the things that are wrong with the way we approach infrastructure, housing and (my main interest) taxation in this country....
Written 27 December 2021 This is the fiftieth and probably the last book for me of 2021, and was unusual for a couple of reasons. First, it is one the very few books I have read recently that I have read as a physical book. I got a kindle a few years ago and while I know that many people just prefer physical books I prefer reading on a kindle nowadays and cleared most books out of the house about three years ago. Secondly, I bought the book directly from thelocalists.org via their twitter account @localmattersENG. The book is short,...
Written 12 December I heard about this book rather in passing while listening to an an episode of Demitry Kafinas’s Hidden Forces podcast. It is a big read and took some time to get through. It covers the history of the oil industry from the second half of the nineteenth century. What a story it is, huge in scale, immense in its impact on humanity and central to any serious reading of economics and politics. Of course everyone professes to know how important oil is, but this book really does convey that its importance is far more foundational than we...
Written 15 September I finished this a couple of weeks ago and as I found it pretty thought provoking thought I’d set down a few thoughts. The title is somewhat misleading: the book is by no means an anti-Aid screed but does describe well how Aid sometimes comes up short. It also sets out a realistic vision for what a more effective system of International Aid would look like. Giles Bolton is obviously a bright and highly motivated chap and wrote this in the mid-noughties following stints with DfID in Rwanda and Iraq. He comes across very much as an...
I thought I’d chance my arm at setting out some semi-serious thoughts on what “leaning left on economics and right on culture” might actually mean in practice for a UK government in 2021. We are told this is the electoral sweet spot, but I don’t think the current Government’s heart is in it at all and it certainly doesn’t have the talent to achieve much. As for the opposition, well… I started out with a thread then decided it properly belonged in a (quickly put together) blog post. The train of thought was prompted by this tweet: The last reforming...
Written 14 July 2021 I didn’t follow yesterday’s debate in Parliament closely in which the Government won the vote to move away from the 0.7% of GDP target. I doubt I missed much. I’m writing something down on this because I have spent a few years up close and personal with International Aid (in Egypt in the mid-1990s) and never really quite got to the bottom of what I think of it all. I’ll see if writing my thoughts down gets me any closer to a conclusion or a more settled position. I suspect it will help but I doubt...
Written 24 June 2021 The story this week in the BBC on the EU resettlement scheme seems to me to have pretty wide ranging implications. Maybe it’s just me though: I find stories in the statistics/economics/public policy/Brexit space pretty interesting, but I accept that this puts me in a small minority! Anyway, the story concerns the numbers of EU nationals applying for settled status in the UK as the deadline approaches and the BBC coverage is here. It appears that as at 31 May 2021 some 5.6 million applications had been made under the scheme. The UK government is currently advertising...
I’ve finally got round to reading Progress and Poverty by Henry George, a book I’d never heard of until a few years ago. In fact, when I say read I mean that I downloaded it on my Kindle and read some of it but I’ve got through most of it using a free audiobook/podcast which I found good. I generally read in the evenings and it is not the easiest book to read, it needs concentration, there is a lot in it and it is very much a book of its time in terms of style. Background Before setting down...
