Usually I hate “educational” versions of rap songs (where are the wide screen TVs and girls shakin’ they thang?). That said, this does have something going for it….

According to this article (don’t read it, it’s stupid) George Soros has launched “a $50 million effort to purge economics of its free-market zeal.” What free market zeal? I’ve never noticed any free market zeal: most economics taught to undergraduates seems decidedly statist in its leanings, so much so that I suggest to my [...]

From a Guardian comments thread:
“Anyone with half a brain knows the planets resources are finite and in simple terms running out.”
Whereas anyone with a whole brain knows that this is simply not true and that more efficient technologies, new materials and new recycling techniques will mean that these worries about “running out” of resources will [...]

…shrinks a further 0.4%
Alistair Darling
We need to keep in place the support the government has been giving to people and to businesses.
Vince Cable:

Because the government owns half the banking system it should be more active in my view in making sure that lending goes out.
Anyone willing to bet now that political issues will never be [...]

Tim Worstall has a post on Dickensian poverty. Apparently a teacher’s union leader has commented that:
a “small, significant and growing minority” of children were being raised in families with low expectations and a level of poverty “mirroring the times of Dickens”.
…………………
“Children who cannot dress themselves, children who only know how to eat with a spoon [...]

Gender pay gap in City ’shocking’
Not really. This really isn’t shocking. How many times does this need to be said?
One of the main reasons for the vast difference in bonuses is that relatively few women reach the top ranks of financial firms where the biggest rewards are paid.
Any reason this could be so? Hmmmm……. [...]

Terence Kealey wrote this article for the New Scientist magazine. In it his makes some pretty big errors and perpetuates some myths that should not be perpetuated. Here is the letter I sent him with my criticisms:
Dear Prof. Kealey,
I read your article on economics in the New Scientist with interest, and greatly enjoyed [...]

Golf is coming in for some stick in Venezuela:
“Let’s leave this clear,” Mr. Chávez said during a live broadcast of his Sunday television program. “Golf is a bourgeois sport,” he said, repeating the word “bourgeois” as if he were swallowing castor oil. Then he went on, mocking the use of golf carts as a practice [...]

Why am I bothering to follow this debate, aside from the fact that I might spend some of my life living in the U.S.? Well, if the USA cannot hold the line against massive government control of the most important growth industry in the developed world, I suspect that no democracy can.
Camille Paglia (hardly [...]

“Someone who works in the arts is every bit as gainfully employed as someone who works in an auto plant or a steel mill,” Mr. Landesman said. “We’re going to make the point till people are tired of hearing it.”
A ludicrous suggestion: after all, aren’t many artists massively subsidized because no one wants to buy [...]