One of the things that's been on my mind politically is whether privatisation is good. This is topical at the moment because of the NHS reforms that are going through at the moment, which include a large amount of privatisation. It's also interesting because the term privatisation is intimately tied in with liberalism, and reading up on that has ( Read more... )

Having done a lot of work on the neoliberalism article meant that I got a broader understanding of liberalism, what it is and how it works. Liberalism is important to understand because it's such a mixed church. For example, the people in the United States who claim that government involvement in the economy is illiberal are technically correct, ( Read more... )

Recently, banks do not appear to be having a good time. First there was the NatWest/RBS transaction debacle, then it emerged that Barclay's had been manipulating Libor, an important interest rate, which is used in many other rates, to make itself look better. Interestingly, the tone in the media has changed. It's gone from what could be called ( Read more... )

I updated the neoliberalism article a while ago and more or less left it on its own for a couple of months. I went back to it the day before yesterday because I was updating my CV and wanted to put that I was good at expressing complicated subjects clearly (I've been attending a course for the last two days on getting a job, which had CV writing ( Read more... )

I picked up a book I saw in the library called 25 Things You Need to Know About the Future which I'm about two fifths of the way through. I'm really liking it as it's a general introduction to various futuristic technologies, most of which anyone who's read any sci-fi will have at least some passing acquaintance with, and which are all in the ( Read more... )

The bonuses being paid to various top executives have been in the news a lot. There's a large debate in the media about whether it's right or not that the CEO of both RBS and Network Rail were more or less forced by public opinion to not take their bonuses. I've been trying to think my way through it ( Read more... )

After a good long break, I came back to the neoliberalism article and started rewriting it from the beginning. One of the major changes was that I removed the rigid pre-categorisation and instead opted for a more narrative and historical flow to the article, and this seems to have worked wonders for the clarity and decreased the bias considerably ( Read more... )

I've read a bit more of The Wealth of Nations, and the next two chapters talk a bit more about the division of labour, the kind of circumstances it arises under. Chapter two is where Adam Smith makes the very famous quote about the division of labour arising from self interest. It's really quite a short chapter. The next one he talks about the ( Read more... )

I read the first chapter of the first book of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, which talks about the division of labour in a society ( Read more... )

Two nights ago, my mother noticed an intruder prying into our shed at about three in the morning. She knocked on the window and he went, slowly, across the roofs and out. He didn't take much, just two old car radios, but he did uproot a nice bush of my mother's and trample some flowers. In hindsight, we all thought it would have been better to ( Read more... )