The Martin Hutchinson Place
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 […]
Three years into his administration, President Donald Trump is subject to a level of obloquy surprising given the U.S. economy’s benign performance. Not only his political opponents, but even some nominal “conservatives” want to impeach him. The reason is clear: rigid thinkers committed to the “icons” of past consensus policy loathe President Trump with unparalleled […]
The Trump administration last week announced a substantial tightening of the “public charge” rules by which immigrants drawing welfare would be ineligible for permanent resident “green card” status. As Milton Friedman said: “It is just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state,” so this is good policy. However, it made me wonder: […]
There are many reasons why the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain in 1775-1850, but among the most important is the quality of economic thought among British policymakers of that period. Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo gave them an excellent grounding in free market economics, and few statesmen of that period opposed their doctrines. […]
Charles Mackay’s 1841 masterpiece asserted that the “madness of crowds” created “extraordinary popular delusions” that led to investment bubbles and crashes. Recent events suggest that when those crowds congregate in cities, rationality flies out of the window, and delusions infect the entire urban body politic. Rationalists, dwelling in leafy suburbs or deep in rural hideaways, […]
While we are in a brief period of decent global growth, the underlying productivity trends in rich countries are disquieting. What’s more, it now seems likely that, except in the United States, we will not escape the zero-interest rate lunacy before the next downturn. Even more disquieting is a re-acceleration of global population growth, so […]
Britain’s Labour Party has now committed to re-nationalizing many of the utilities that were privatized to such fanfare under Lady Thatcher in the 1980s. Reluctantly, we should admit that in certain respects, the Labour Party has a point; monopolies owned by private equity groups, as have appeared in the water industry, offer no accountability to […]
Establishment journals such as the Economist and the Financial Times, and the participants in this week’s Davos rock festival have recently been decrying defeats for “liberalism” in the votes for Brexit and Donald Trump. Naturally, we are expected to sympathize: after all, what right-thinking person could object to liberalism? There is just one problem: the […]
After the Federal Open Market Committee raised the Federal Funds rate by 0.25% last week it became clear that Janet Yellen and her predecessor Ben Bernanke have laid a trap for President-elect Donald Trump. Each time the FOMC raises rates, increasing the rates the Fed pays on $2.1 trillion of bank deposits with it, it […]
The news last week that our closest star, Proxima Centauri, has a planet Proxima B orbiting it that could possibly support life is immensely encouraging. As I have written frequently, our current economic and political arrangements are so bad that eventual collapse seems inevitable. However, like the Pilgrim Fathers, we may have the opportunity to […]