The Martin Hutchinson Place
Since 1980, the global economy has become increasingly financialized – by all measures, the ratio of debt to GDP has steadily increased. If something cannot go on forever, it will reverse, and there are two ways in which this might do so. One way is the global kumbaya of a debt jubilee, which would collapse […]
The Industrial Revolution is traditionally held to have begun in the middle 1780s with James Watt’s invention of the rotary steam engine with condenser attached. (The condenser alone did not allow Watt’s engine to power machinery, since it still used the jerky Newcomen “beam” motion.) Yet there was another innovation, almost 20 years earlier, which […]
In 1970, Venezuela was a little richer than Chile — $1,014 nominal dollars per capita versus $933! on World Bank figures. Both were corrupt social democrat countries with poor management and bloated government. Fifty years later in 2020, Venezuela, which continued and worsened its socialism, had a GDP per capita of only $1,691 nominal dollars […]
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 […]
Judging by its first 21 years and the prospects therefrom, there is a good sporting chance that the 21st century will be a grim one for most people. Since at least mediaeval times, each century has been an improvement on the previous one, for ordinary people living through it. Incomes have risen, technology has made […]
This column is increasingly convinced that economic policy peaked in quality some 200 years ago, to give us the Industrial Revolution. Contrary to Whig historians’ fantasy, the government that produced that policy was elected on a relatively broad franchise, of property-holders possessing a “40-shilling freehold” – a fairly low requirement. While returning to such a […]
As the celebratory editorials note, it is now 20 years since Goldman Sachs’ Jim O’Neill propounded the concept of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and proclaimed that the four emerging market economies would outgrow massively the major Western states and become a dominant factor in the world economy. The idea was naively optimistic, […]
The sale to a Chinese company in 2016 of one of the world’s largest cobalt sources, controlled by a U.S. company Freeport McMoran (NYSE:FCX), is emblematic of U.S. national weakness, “wokeness” and decline. However, one underlying cause of that sale was the blizzard of stock buybacks and unsound acquisitions made by FCX in the years […]
Looking back on past critical elections, those readers generally agreeing with this column will have a number of “turning point” elections in which they could wish the more “conservative” candidate had won, although our definitions of “conservative” may differ. In one case, however, one could wish that the more liberal (in the American sense) candidate […]
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 […]