Category Economy General
COVID-19 | A MORAL MAZE
Pressure is mounting to enforce the lockdown-equivalent of super-gluing every citizen in the land to their living room sofa to prevent us all from dying of COVID-19. One has to question the morality of blanket, state-enforced lockdowns. Holding the Contrary View One of the drawbacks of being a lockdown sceptic – I’m one of them […]
COVID-19 | A VERY BRITISH TYRANNY
The principal reason I write about anything at all is to help shape my understanding of topics of interest to me. If in so doing your own understanding of the topic in question is also shaped in some way – possibly not in the same direction as mine – then that’s a good thing. The […]
CORONAVIRUS | THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM
This is the second post in a mini-series of three. In the first post I wanted to scope out what I thought could be the Covid-19 worst-case scenario. In this post I want to build on that theme to understand if the worst-case scenario is more or less likely to unfold. I’ve written this in […]
CORONAVIRUS | THE GOVERNMENT’S STRATEGY
This is another interim post squeezed in between Parts 1 and 2 of the series I’m publishing relating to the potential Covid-19 worst-case scenario. Part 2 will be published presently. Meantime, I realised as I was drafting the forthcoming post that the government’s strategy for tackling the Covid-19 pandemic was unclear. So, I decided to […]
CORONAVIRUS | OPEN LETTER TO GENERAL SIR NICK CARTER
This is an open letter to General Sir Nicholas Carter, Chief of the Defence Staff and a fellow alumni of mine. I have sent this letter in hard copy to General Carter at his office in the Ministry of Defence London, and copied it to the Prime Minister and also to my Member of Parliament. […]
CORONAVIRUS | WEIGHING THE RISKS
This is an interim post in the mini-series of three that I’m publishing on coronavirus contingency planning. I felt compelled to publish this in-between post after an exchange on Facebook between a doctor-friend and me. In this post I’m questioning whether exhorting one’s family, friends and acquaintances to ‘stay safe’ is in fact inimical to […]
CORONAVIRUS CONTINGENCY PLANNING | WORST-CASE SCENARIO
This is another mini-series of three posts looking at contingency planning for the Covid-19 pandemic should the health, socio-economic and geopolitical situations deteriorate. This first post describes what could be a Covid-19 worst-case scenario. The second post will look at the positive side of the pandemic and how our quality of life could conceivably be […]
CORONAVIRUS | MICROECONOMICS
The Crisis Hasn’t Started It’s always been such that one of the wild cards which could shake our complex, fragile, globalised civilisation would be a pandemic disease. Indeed, the threat of a pandemic like the one we’re experiencing now has always been a case of ‘when’ not ‘if’. Here’s Bill Gates making just such a […]
CORONAVIRUS | WHERE’S THIS HEADING (PART 3)?
A Long Read This post is the final one in a series of what’s turned out to be four parts (1, 2A, 2B and 3) contemplating the economic, political and social implications of the Covid-19 pandemic. The perspective I’m sharing here is held by people whom I refer to as ‘alt-economists’; I suppose I’m one […]
CORONAVIRUS | WHERE’S THIS HEADING (PART 2B)?
This is Part 2B of what will now be a four-part series of posts; things are changing rapidly. We’re interested in the extraordinary impact of governments’ reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic. Some of us consider that, as grim as Covid-19 could be (and for now that remains arguable without meaningful data and in the context […]
Moraymint Chatter 