The Martin Hutchinson Place
In the recent Congressional Budget Office projections of the budget deficit to 2033 (which as you would expect, make gloomy reading) there is one morsel of good news: revenues in 2024 (and extrapolated to 2033) are higher than previously expected because immigration brought more people into the workforce. That caused me to wonder: to what […]
In 1830, Britain was completely economically dominant, the only significant industrial power. Since that time, it has steadily lost its industrial dominance and that relative decline, while to an extent inevitable, was hurried along by a grossly malign approach to policy which persists today. Unless it is reversed, further accelerating decline is ahead.
Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was at first sight a splendid 21st century replica of the 18th century Country Banks that fueled the Industrial Revolution – it was local to Silicon Valley, supremely attuned to the major industry in its locality, and easy for that industry to deal with. So why did it fail? The answer […]
The Financial Times this week had a lengthy piece “When the tech boom met reality” detailing how truly galactic levels of venture capital funding have produced little innovation and are now leading to truly galactic levels of losses. It is now clear that the “all point in one direction and throw money at it” approach […]
President Vladimir Putin’s catastrophic blunder in invading Ukraine has upset the applecart of the post-1991 international order. The outcome of that conflict is currently unknown – there are a wide range of possibilities. However, most of the better outcomes will result in an end to the globalization dream – in reality, nightmare – and a […]
This column has not written enough about the economic damage done by excessive regulation, partly because most of that damage takes the form of new businesses snuffed out. Something that has been eliminated from existence is by definition difficult to write about. However, in my Industrial Revolution researches I have found an example of regulation […]
The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced last week that U.S. non-farm business sector productivity unexpectedly fell 5.0% in the third quarter of 2021 and was 0.5% lower than its level in the third quarter of 2020. This returns the U.S. economy to a pattern of ultra-low productivity growth that first became evident in the Obama […]
Although it represented my youth, I am by no means nostalgic for 1973-74. In Britain, it gave us a banking crash, the 3-day week, the lead-up to 25% inflation and the most left-wing Labour government Britain ever had. In the United States, it gave us the nullification of 1972’s landslide election victory, a resurgence in […]
In a thousand years’ time, when the economic history of our era is examined by forensic historians, Senator Lamar Alexander (R.-TN) will receive special notice as the tiny catalyst for economic collapse. His rejection of Judy Shelton for the Fed Board of Governors, on the grounds that she is too close to an administration that […]
The fancy-college-educated left take great satisfaction in proclaiming that robots will soon threaten blue-collar jobs, while skills requiring higher education will be immune from competition driven by artificial intelligence (AI). This is surely incorrect. Robots/AI can in principle reproduce any predictable process, whether mechanical or intellectual. They cannot reproduce unexpected movement, leaps of imagination or […]