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Old Madsen’s Almanack
Some of 2027 is already on the calendar. The rest can be read from trends that are unlikely to reverse. Here are the predictions you might bet on, roughly in order of confidence. The French presidential election in April and May is the big one. Macron cannot stand. The National Rally, led by Bardel
Green capitalism isn’t even a thing
Apparently it’s capitalism that destroys the natural world. Well, according to a new book it is. Yet the example given is nothing, at all, to do with capitalism. Nor socialism, communism, communalism nor any other possible method of organising who owns what in an economy . The task of achieving a
Trump, the modern mercantilist
The case that Trump is a latterday mercantilist is surprisingly strong. Mercantilism was never a tidy theory. It was a set of habits that involves treating trade as a contest, counting the surplus as the score, and letting the state steer commerce toward national power. On each count, Trump's record fits.
Government by lazy, ignorant, drunks works then
This works for us: The biggest empire the world has ever seen was run by a small elite who partied all night, drank liters of port, and stayed in bed until the afternoon. Tho’ we’d prefer the English of litres of port but there we are. More than that, none of these people had ever had any technical training in anything and were rigidly educated in the classics and not much else. Perhaps some amount of the more recent poetry might be acknowledged but no more than that some. This is where we think the error creeps into this analysis:
Once again, business rates are a tax upon landlords
We gawp with amazement at the argument here: John Lewis has warned the Chancellor that a tax raid on retailers in the Budget would trigger a wave of catastrophic closures on the high street. Jason Tarry, the chairman of John Lewis and Waitrose, said a tax raid on department stores and supermarkets by John Healey would “only harm our high streets” and threaten to prompt closures.
A lovely example of the costs of bureaucracy
Of course this isn’t what Phineas thinks he is telling us but it is true all the same: The new strategy could be especially useful in helping support more ambitious housebuilding on tricky small sites. In London a “small site” is defined as a piece of land that is under 2,500 sq metres, about the size of nine tennis courts. These plots are too modest for major developers to take an interest in, so often just sit empty. However, the potential to better use vacant small sites is enormous.
Two futures for Britain
Let's look at two Britains. In number 1 we allow fracking, approve data centres, modular nuclear reactors, reservoirs, and North Sea gas. In 2 we pursue net zero, don't allow fracking, or approve data centres, modular nuclear reactors, reservoirs, or North Sea gas. By 2050 how might the two differ?
A lovely example of why politics is bad at economics
Let us imagine, just for a moment, that this climate change thing is really big and important. So much so that we’re going to subsidise people moving from internal combustion engines over to electric vehicles. No, no, don’t worry about whether all that is true or not, necessary or a good idea. That’s just the set up. We’ve got to shift that transport sector and we’re going to do it via subsidy.
Taking us by surprise
Very few people foresaw the use Viagra would be put to. Few saw semaglutide coming. Very few anticipated large language models and AI coming along so fast. Yet all of these have had a massive effect on society. And there are other man-made developments that might soon surprise us by their widespread effect.
A lovely example of petitio principii
Apparently those who think that technological change will solve climate change don’t think it necessary to do non-technological change-type things to solve climate change. Which seems pretty logical to us. But apparently this is bad : “Strikingly, we see the same tendency at the individual level,
Unintended consequences: the anti-growth ‘Mansion Tax’
The government has a wretched track record when it comes to measures stimulating the economy, (although its predecessor was little better). Another measure that risks damaging growth, is waiting in the wings; the inelegantly titled High Value Council Tax Surcharge (HVCTS) announced by the old Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, in 2025, and due to come into effect from April 2028.
Britain's Productivity Problem Is a Choice
Britain has a productivity problem, and it is one of our own making. Before the financial crash of 2008, output per hour grew by roughly 2 per cent a year. Since then it has crawled along at about half that rate, sometimes less. The gap with America, France and Germany has widened year after year.
We don’t believe the productivity numbers about AI
Hal Varian pointed out that GDP doesn’t deal well with free: So much for that AI-driven productivity boom, says Apollo’s Torsten Slok. Or as he puts it “the AI boom is clearly visible in investment data and in equity valuations, but it is not yet visible in the productivity statistics, which means the productivity payoff from AI remains a forecast rather than an observation.”
Class Dismissed: Why Britain Should Stop Keeping Score
Arthur Scargill once boasted that he had never betrayed his class. It was meant as a badge of honour. It should have been read as a warning. We understand loyalty to family. We understand loyalty to village, county and country. These are places and people we belong to and most would not wish to leave.
This isn’t what net zero means, Mr Monbiot
We’re told that we all have to stop flying and that’s that. It’s just horrible consumption, d’ye see ? If Heathrow expansion goes ahead, passenger numbers in the UK are forecast to rise from 299 million in 2025 to 491 million in 2050. As other sectors decarbonise, the proportion of climate breakd
Fewer Babies, Fresh Answers
The birth rate is falling across the developed world. In England and Wales it now sits around 1.4 children per woman, well below the 2.1 needed to keep a population stable. Japan, Italy and South Korea are further down the same road. The usual response is gloom. Fewer workers, more pensioners, and a future of rising taxes and failing services.
No wonder Willy Hutton gets so confused
This, well: I regard the economist John Maynard Keynes as offering the most original, insightful and best understanding of contemporary capitalism yet devised. He is my intellectual lodestar, whose thinking has informed all my writing. We do tend to think there’s rather more to economic commentary than just that one person. But intellectual fads and all that, personal opinion. But it would aid if one understood one’s own intellectual lodestar:
Zack and the Green Party shoot for the impossible
It’s nice that someone has an ambition and to an extent the bigger the better. We do though think that aiming for the already known to be impossible is just that too, too, ambitious. Which brings us to Zack and the Green Party’s new idea on rent : And in the long term, we’ll put in place a nati
55% if over the peak of the Laffer Curve for income tax
Taking money away from someone is taking money away from someone. Therefore the taper - the amount by which Universal Credit is reduced - is the same as income tax plus NI on wages. Thus : For every £1 I earned, my Universal Credit was reduced by 55p. …. One week I sat across a Formica table fro
Cheap future energy
In my 2016 book ‘Britain and the world in 2050,’ I suggested that energy would be extremely cheap by 2050, with widespread effects. Although energy costs have been rising recently, there is a strong case that my prediction for 2050 will come about. The key is to separate two things that the recent
The Household Analogy works just fine for Goverment
From Larry Elliott: Top of the list is the idea that the UK government is no different from a household. That means it should match its spending to its income as closely as possible, borrowing prudently and within tightly defined limits. Otherwise it will “max out the nation’s credit card” and risk spiralling into unsustainable debt. This analogy has the benefit of sounding like a statement of the obvious to many voters, but is actually entirely false.
Pay universities for results
Britain's universities are in trouble, and not the genteel, sherry-in-the-senior-common-room kind. More than a third of institutions reported a deficit for 2024-25, and that is forecast to rise to four in ten for 2025-26. Some are running short of cash. Courses are being cut, departments closed and staff laid off. The sector that lectures the nation on sustainability cannot sustain itself.
The costs of the regulatory state
One of those ideas about why it was Britain that had that first industrial revolution is that it was, at that time, one of the few places where you could just go do stuff. We’re sure there’s more to it than that but we’d also insist that being able to just go do stuff is an important part of being able to develop new things. As it is now:
Putting a million neets into work
Britain has a million young people doing nothing. Not studying, not training, not working. The ONS counted 981,000 NEETs in April to June 2026, and 393,000 of them were unemployed and looking for work. The number has been climbing for four years. Only one EU country, Romania, now has a higher NEET rate than ours.
This is a dismal justification for a National Care Service
We are unimpressed: It’s an important discussion. But what if government didn’t just look at how to care for people in their later years and instead spent real political capital on policies to help people live longer independently, and in good health? The data isn’t pretty on this. While the trend over the past half-century in almost all countries has been for people to live longer, healthy life expectancy has been consistently falling.
Help people, not property
Britain’s social housing makes a basic mistake. It subsidizes the house instead of the household. The help is bricked into a building, and it stays with whoever happens to live there, whatever their circumstances become. Consider how it works. A council or housing association lets a home
Remembering Douglas Mason
Tomorrow (30 September) would have been the 85th birthday of Douglas Mason, the prolific Adam Smith Institute author, who famously proposed to replace council ‘rates’ (a local property tax) with a per-capita charge for local services — a system that was immediately dubbed the ‘poll tax’. Everyone a
This all seems a little swift to be honest
That there needs to be some period beyond which a local council can insist upon a property being repaired at least, if not reused, seems sensible enough to us. One of us, a couple of decades back, marvelled at decaying houses in the expensive streets outside Lisbon. The rotting teeth in the rows were the result of the supporters of - and gainers from - the Estado Novo deciding another country would be a good idea after the 1974 revolution. They might well have been right too.
Lives saved by switching to vapes
The modellers have already had a go at it. The tool of choice is David Levy's Smoking and Vaping Model (SAVM), a cohort-based simulation now adapted to several countries. It works by comparing two futures: a ‘no-vaping’ baseline built from population, mortality and smoking-prevalence trends, against a scenario where nicotine vaping products displace cigarettes. The gap between the two gives the deaths and life-years averted.
As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly
No. Really, just no. A new help-to-buy scheme aimed at giving first-time buyers who cannot rely on the “bank of mum and dad” is to be introduced in a big policy announcement by Andy Burnham. The programme, called “Your first home”, is intended to help buyers in England who have a regular income but have been unable to save for a large deposit or don’t have financial support from their family.
Why not find out first, spend second?
This is the wrong way around we fear: The UK government has pledged £210m to regenerate high streets by taking boarded-up shops, pubs and clubs and turning them into shared workspaces, cafes and community hubs. Andy Burnham said the funds would “help put power back into the hands of locals who know their area best” as part of his effort to “restore pride and bring hope back”. Spending to paint a few bollards, hang a few baskets, isn’t the right way to do this. We know that we desire less High Street than we used to.
Allow us to just interpret Willy Hutton and Andy Haldane for you here
On the subject of what to do with the utilities we get: Having done so, what alternative governance structures strike a better balance than the extremes of nationalisation or privatisation? Aligning the incentives of utilities with those of the public could be done most easily and effectively by turning them into public-benefit companies with a primary, constitutional objective of delivering high-quality services, with profitability subordinate to that broader aim.
Time is the simplest thing
Physics learned long ago that nothing happens in an instant. Einstein gave the universe a fourth dimension, and nobody in that field has managed without it since. The three spatial dimensions tell us what it is, the fourth dimension tells us when it I there. Economics could use the same lesson. Too
Why would we want to create yet another black market?
This sounds odd to us: Unemployed people will be blocked from spending their benefits on alcohol, cigarettes and gambling under plans set out by Kemi Badenoch. Warning that welfare had become a “lifestyle choice for those who can’t be bothered”, the Conservative leader said the proposed reforms would be tough on those who “exploit” the system. Under Tory plans, the long-term unemployed would have their benefits cut by a third.
The numbers don’t add up
Economists love equations the way conjurors love top hats. Both create the impression that something rigorous and reliable is happening inside, when often what’s inside is guesswork dressed up in tidy notation. The physical sciences earn their mathematics honestly. An electron does not de
That devolution idea didn’t last long then
Sigh: England’s mayors should face much greater official scrutiny to avoid Andy Burnham’s devolution agenda being “derailed by one bad decision”, a thinktank has said. How can we allow people to just do their own thing when they might do the wrong thing? Therefore, whatever lipstick we put on the pig do not allow people to do their own thing. It’s the shriek of the authoritarian, isn’t it? So, anyway, that idea of local freedom and devolution didn’t last long enough to even be implemented. Tim Worstall
Contrasting philosophies
Socialism starts with a picture. Somewhere in the mind of the socialist there sits a finished society that is harmonious, planned, and fair by design. The task, as they see it, is to build toward that picture and hold reality to its measurements. Everything that resists the plan is treated as a defect to be corrected, not as evidence that the plan might be wrong.
Well, now we’ve agreed we’ve got to cut spending…
….We get to the joyous part of which spending to cut. We’d not put Gaby Hinsliff out on the leading, bleeding and cutting, edge of economic debate. Not to be rude about her views or anything, but rather more in the mainstream of what Guardianistas are believing. Which is what makes this so interesting: Everyone knows hard choices loom, but everyone is frightened to make them.
Overseas representatives
France gives overseas territories seats in its Parliament. Its method is straightforward. Overseas departments, such as Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Réunion, Mayotte, aren't colonies with a consultative voice. They're departments like any other, and they send deputies to the National Assembly and senators to the Senate on the same basis as Normandy or Provence.
Nationalisation gives us less, more expensively
Two stories from the press: Labour has been warned its “skills revolution” to tackle youth unemployment risks failure, after its flagship apprenticeship scheme enrolled only 160 young people in its first eight months. The shortfall, highlighted in a report by the Fabian Society, leaves the government well off track of achieving its ambition of 30,000 “foundation apprenticeship” starts by the end of this parliament. As a rough pencil sketch apprenticeships were recently nationalised.
Much-needed inventions
Eight years ago I posted a series on inventions that I’d like to see come about. I just asked AI, eight years later, to report on how many have since been invented or made progress toward. Below are my original 15, and bellow them is the AI report on the progress, if any, on each of them.
Passing the Billionaire Tax proves that the Billionaire Tax should not be passed
From the approving letter signed by Diamond, Krugman et al: Proposition 40 offers the first opportunity for the people to start reining in the power of billionaires. It isn’t just critical for Californians. If the state that houses some of the country’s most powerful billionaires votes to tax their wealth, it will kickstart a movement to tax ultra-high-net-worth individuals in other states — and eventually at the federal level and in other countries.
Some statements just make us gurgle like a drain
From The Guardian: Europe’s dilemma over AI was rendered in stark terms this week. The head of the continent’s central bank, Christine Lagarde, said Europeans have two options: shun the technology and lose out on growth; or embrace it and become dependent on tools developed by the US and China. The great debate over AI safety that has erupted in recent days threatens to make the choice moot. If the worst scenarios come to bear – and experts have differing views on this – then the technology will impact the continent regardless.
We appear to be getting the trades unions on board
From Sharon Graham at Unite: If the tax threshold of around £12,500 hadn't been frozen for the past few years it would have moved up to over £16,000. People at the lower end are paying eye-watering amounts of tax and it needs to change. We have long insisted that the personal allowance is far too low. Indeed, between us and the CPS we managed to get it raised to that £12,500 back a decade or two. On very simple grounds, it’s an abomination that we charge income tax (and NI, but for another day) to the incomes of those we define as poor.
Britain's Childcare Problem Is Regulation, Not Money
British parents hand over more than a third of a dual income household’s net earnings on childcare. That’s the highest burden in the OECD. The reflex is to call for more public money. But the international evidence points the other way. The problem isn’t spending. It’s regulation. At the heart of B
We’re deeply unconvinced by this mithering over AI e-waste
Given that we have direct and personal experience of the process of dealing with e-waste - well, one of us does - we are, we’re afraid, deeply unconvinced here : The ongoing campaign to build thousands of massive datacenters for AI will create a “tsunami” of discarded electronics, putting the worl
Fable of the bees
Mandeville deliberately challenged the prevailing moral and religious orthodoxy of his day. He set forward the notion that it was self-interest, greed and vanity, thought of as wicked, that actually drove human achievements such as industry commerce and prosperity. When the bees were driven by thes
A logical point about the slavery reparations movement
As is usual when someone details the vileness of slavery we get the claim that, well, it financed the current richness of the world : That complicity helped shape modern Britain, Lester said. Plantation profits helped fuel the Industrial Revolution, railways, public health, welfare, universities,
March of the killjoys
First they came for tobacco, then it was alcohol, then sugar. After sugar came fats and ultra-processed foods. Then they went for calories, stigmatizing high calorie foods. Then it was processed meats such as bacon. They don’t want sweets, biscuits and other treats advertised before 9.00 pm on television, or not at all on Transport for London. These are all laws or recommendations based on Health Department advisories
Lentils! — Adam Smith Institute
Andy Burnham’s idea of putting more lentils and chickpeas in school meals has risks that should be carefully evaluated. The National Institute of Health estimates that around one in 200 people have allergies to pulse vegetables, which include not only lentils and chickpeas but also peas and beans.
We don’t believe claims of social value
Apparently Help to Buy was a grand success: George Osborne’s scheme to reduce costs for first-time buyers represented “very high value for money”, according to a government review, bolstering the case of senior government figures who have been arguing to resurrect the idea. An official audit of the Help-to-Buy programme has calculated it provided £25bn of social value to the UK in the last financial year, despite criticisms it was overly expensive and only served to inflate house prices.