2012 on the cheap
August 14th, 2008 at 17:00

What about that Olympic opening ceremony, eh? I know that last week I was slagging off China’s human rights record, but say what you will about authoritarian dictatorships, but they sure know how to organise people down to perfection.

I was in awe for as long as one reasonably can be during the four and a quarter how spectacular. After the ceremony had finished, and I’d calmed down after seeing a man fly around the stadium with the Olympic torch (what if he’d accidentally burnt the ropes holding him up?), I did begin to wonder, much like everyone else did, “How are London going to top this?”.

A lot of the ceremony was set aside for teaching us Chinese history through the medium of dance. Unsurprisingly, this missed out a few of the less glorious historical events, like the “Great Leap Forward” - perhaps because choreographing a dance about the deaths of 14-43m people is a bit tricky. This is understandable… but what if London 2012 tries to tell the history of Britain? Won’t most of the dances involve the British beating up the ancestors of the other Olympic participants? It’s not going to make us particularly likeable.

I think the biggest problem facing London 2012 though is how it’s going to be paid for. I’m assuming that unlike Beijing, the people planning the London games are restricted by pesky things known as “budgets”, and they need to make the money they do have go a long way to match up with Beijing’s show – and the games are already said to be way over-budget as it is. However, I think I’ve spotted a solution.

Earlier this week it turned out that a spectacular fireworks display during the Beijing ceremony had been faked and computer generated imagery was used, on the not-too-unreasonable excuse that flying over fireworks in a helicopter to film them might be a bit dangerous. No one noticed at the time – everyone was too busy being impressed.  To take this to its logical conclusion… why doesn’t London just fake the whole Olympics with computers?

Computer technology is comparatively cheap these days – why bother with the faff of setting up all of those 300 events when former Blue Peter producers will verify that we’re the best in the world at TV fakery?

Computer games companies have been trying for years to perfect the sports simulation, so they must be pretty good at it by now… why not just set up the athletes with a Nintendo Wii and run the competition on that? That athletes still get to compete, and viewing becomes more fun as the participants have little cartoon faces. If we get a bit desperate for medals, we could just slyly enter the cheat codes when the other teams aren’t looking.

And best of all, playing out the 2012 Olympics on computers will be more inclusive – they’ll no longer discriminate against the hideously unfit because as long as you’re able to swing a video games controller, you’re basically in the competition… and isn’t everyone playing together part of the Olympic spirit?

Maybe I’m just advocating this idea because it’d be the closest I’ll ever get to being an Olympian?

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An uninformed treatise on Georgia, the international system and international relations generally, that will probably come back to haunt me when I’m older and wiser.
August 12th, 2008 at 01:56

I’ve studied international relations for three years now and have taken an active interest in world affairs for much longer, yet despite having an honours degree in the subject I still, frustratingly, am not really any closer to having any answers about how to sort the various international messes out. This isn’t a slight against my old university - it was excellent, and I can now explain the problems much better than I once could - but the world’s problems are so bloody complex that international relations cannot be mathematically modelled and experiments cannot be carried out to find solution - the carefully nuanced diplomacy that acts as the razor-thin wedge between a pragmatic peace and everything kicking off is more like an ultra-pretentious dance. Outside observers will be baffled and apathetic, asking “what’s the point?” and write-off the politicians, yet for the performers, every spin, kick or slow-motion movement is totally vital to the greater meaning of the performance.

Basically this is just a long winded excuse for being rubbish at international relations. But it’s not like the people who do it professionally are any better.

Take the Georgia “crisis”, for example - which is actually a war, even if the media doesn’t want to call it that yet. Tanks? Check. Incursions on to foreign soil? Check. Opposing armies shooting at each other? Check. I haven’t a clue how to fix it - but I can tell you the problems it has caused.

If anything, this (yet again) exposes the inadequacies with the international system. Back in the 17th century, the chaps around the table at Westphalia probably thought they were being pretty smart coming up with the concept of a sovereign nation-states as discrete territorial units - unfortunately this has become The Done Thing, which means that, in theory at least, all of the minorities or regions after some independence are essentially fucked by international law to the point where you get absurdities like Taiwan not being a real country and having to fudge its way into international things (”Chinese Taipei”) or entire regions of the world in a weird status-quo because the other countries can’t really be seen to be supporting them for fear of pissing off their “rightful owners”. If only Northern Cyprus, or Somaliland, or South Ossetia were as lucky internationally as Kosovo.

This especially doesn’t seem fair for South Ossetia, who seem pretty keen on being a part of Russia, or presumably united with North Ossetia in one way or another. The west have been pretty quick to condemn Russia for their ridiculously disproportionate response and moan on about Georgia’s sovereignty and that… they didn’t seem quite so concerned about Serbia’s sovereignty when they were busy recognising Kosovo. Don’t get me wrong - Russia are massive hypocrites too when they talk about South Ossetia’s rights to self-determination, as I’m sure the people of nearby Grozny would want to point out.

And that’s the overall problem with the international system - it’s horrendously unfair. As any realist will tell you, there’s no real international laws, it’s just the big guys calling the shots. They might play fair if you’re lucky, but chances are they’ll only do it when it’s convinient for them (cf: America ignoring the UN over Iraq, then getting pissy with Zimbabwe and threatening to get a UN RESOLUTION over it - no wonder Mugabe presumably laughed it off and went back to organising gangs to kill opposition supporters).

This setup works when you’ve got a unipolar setup - like the 90s with America basically in charge of the world. It’s by no-means fair, but then international relations never is, but it’s stable because no one has the power to stand up to them. They might fuck a few people over but they’ll generally keep the peace. A bi-polar system like we had in the Cold War is pretty good too as they kept each other in check with the whole Mutually Assured Destruction thing. What’s scary is that it looks as though we’re entering another period of a multi-polar balance of power with the great powers being America, China and Russia (or Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia, if you will). This isn’t particularly stable, as 1914 and 1939 grainily illustrated. With more than two powers the balance of power may end up somewhat asymmetrical (Oceania and Eastasia have always been at war with Eurasia), and if backed into a corner in a war sparked off by a small international event - say, the assassination of an Arch-Duke or a power wading into conflict over a breakaway region in the Caucasus region - it can’t be long until someone starts chucking the bigger guns around?

Whilst I paint a pretty nightmarish picture of the imminent apocalypse due to the international community’s inability to adapt to modernity, I would like to think that if any of my former lecturers, or indeed anyone who knows what they’re talking about, are reading they’ll think that what I’m suggesting is laughably implausible because I haven’t factored in the one thing that can save us. And it ain’t a pretty solution. Money could hold the answer to this. More capitalism could be the thing that pacifies the international system. Sure, some sort of revolutionary socialist utopia could probably solve a lot of problems, but let’s be realistic - what’s more likely to happen? Unlike a science experiment, we can’t run a test, and we’re active participants in a constantly changing international environment - in the absence of the interactions of some sort of personal God who happens to be big on Marx, we can’t reform the system from the top-down, so capitalism is the, er, best option.

Though capitalism does make wage-slaves of millions of people in the developing world, keeping them oppressed and unable to participate in the political process, thus maintaining the status quo and allowing for us in the west to become slaves ourselves to consumerism and thus distracted from politicial participation ourselves, it does have one thing going for it. It maintains a degree of stability in the international system.

The term “complex independence” was coined (by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye if you’re looking for someone to blame) to describe circumstances in which states maintaining an economic interest in each other creates a mutual desire to cooperate rather than blow each other up. To take a ludicrously extrapollated example, America would never attack Britain, even if Gordon Brown punched Laura Bush in the mouth and kicked Barney, the Presidential dog, around the face, because America has far too much money tied up in Britain, so it’d essentially be attacking it’s own interests.

Back in the real world for a moment, this makes the apparent response to what’s going on in Georgia all the more bizarre. Obviously no one in the west is talking about military action, as that could be the kiss of death for the existence of biological life on this planet, but someone has suggested (yeah, I do my research thoroughly), that delaying Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organisation could be a good idea.

Though the WTO isn’t be any stretch of the imagination a force for good in the world, what with the raping of the third world, and the hilariously inbalanced voting system of voting power being weighted based on the size of the memberstate’s economy, surely getting Russia in on the machine that powers the wheels of global capitalism can only help pacify it?

One of the (alleged) reasons for Russia’s continued military action in Georgia is the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline that apparently pumps 1m barrels a day - about 1/90 of world output - which was specifically designed to not go into Russian territory, meaning the Russian’s don’t get a cut. Similarly, a lot of this “resurgent Russia” talk is centred around Russia’s new importance for supplying Europe and others with energy? If energy wars are going to be the geopolitical flashpoints of the future then surely you want these guys on the inside and negotiating, not left alone outside getting pissed off about it?

(Another option would be to do the decent thing and go green and work on renewable energy, but obviously some sabre-rattling and tough words are much easier.)

It’s utterly bizarre really that “sanctions” in both the metaphorical sense of delayed entry to the WTO and literal sense like pre-2003 Iraq (etc) are touted as a viable tool in international relations as they never work. Putting them on Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Cuba… basically the ‘axis of evil’ to name only a few, has only isolated them more - if we’d worked to bring them into the international economic system where they could have been economically active like how, say, Taiwan and Indonesia were transformed in the mid-20th century, or how China is being transformed right now. I really can’t see how working to piss off Russia even more is going to help at all.

A pleasant side-effect of all of the globalisation that I’m rather inexplicably advocating is that it erodes the power of the nationstates - the ones with the weapons - and in one sense makes the economic system fairer as countries compete more fairly - look at Lenovo and Tata from China and India respectively as successful multinationals that are helping gradually shift the power away from America. If Russia were in on the west’s evil system of exploiting the poor in pursuit of nice consumer goods, they might be less inclined to attack the west’s interests.

And yes, the cruel irony of this change in the international system (which to a large extent has already happened) is that we do end up with some sort of horrendous, unaccountable, amoral, profit driven, worker-exploiting corporatocracy, which itself would be a problem at least as massive as one where the nationstates are in charge.

Didn’t I tell you I wasn’t very good at solutions, but was pretty good at describing the problems?

(End note: No, I’ve no idea what my political opinions/leanings are anymore either. I thought I was some sort of liberal idealist, but what I’ve just written may beg to differ. And would you like to see more incoherent treatise on international relations? Or should I stick to going for the lols? Let me know in the comments, like?)

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Humanity’s value.
June 24th, 2008 at 19:20

One of the key ideas in our society is that “everyone is born equal” and that everyone has equal value- if this is true, then it begs the question: what is the value of a human being? According to eBay, it is 2.2 Million Australian dollars, or just over a million pounds sterling.

We know this because a man called Ian Usher, originally from Yorkshire, now living in Sydney, sold his life on eBay - his house, his car, even his job and his friends - for AUS$2.2m. If the ever reliable Wikipedia is anything to go by, with a world population of 6,704,845,726 people, it means as a species we’re worth over £7150 TRILLION.

Considering that the world’s total GDP, the sum of every country’s economic worth is a paltry $65.95 trillion (2006 est)- or about £33.5 trillion, this makes one thing clear to me: the economic case for re-legalising slavery is unarguable.

Think about it - we can beat the credit crunch, pay off all of that third world debt that the news agendas have forgotten about, and still have enough money left for everyone to have a swimming pool in the back gardens of their mansions - simply by remortgaging the human race. Here we are worrying about how we’re going to pay for things, and yet all this time we’ve been literally sitting on a veritable goldmine of cash.

The cash windfall would be like a lottery win for humanity. With money like this, America could easily afford to stay in Iraq for the next 53,000 years (at a cost of $720m – or £365m - a day) – the only danger would be running out of soldiers to send there.

And don’t get me wrong, this wouldn’t be like the rubbish old version of slavery, this would be a whole new, better kind, as we’d all be in charge. You wouldn’t even have to sell off your entire life - what’s to stop us all becoming like the asset strippers, like James Goldsmith, who bought up loads of companies in the 80s, and sold off the inefficient and redundant parts?

Don’t need that womb as you don’t want any kids, ladies? Sell it off! Don’t need to know all that stuff about Shakespeare and photosynthesis that you accrued from school, hairdressers? Sell it off! Need to teach your enemies a lesson, but you’re a bit of a wimp? Literally hire some muscle!

I don’t even think this idea is that terribly revolutionary - after all, we already sell our labour every time we go to work, and in most cases, there is a direct link between amount of work done and the amount of remuneration. There have even already been cases of companies paying people to get a tattoo with their logo on and stuff - monetizing our entire lives is merely a logical extension of this.

I guess the only problem with this is the, er, horrifyingly, fact that I seem to be happily advocating a form of slavery. Would anyone like to buy my sense of shame? It’s going cheap, and I haven’t used it much, so its in near mint condition.

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Democracy doesn’t work: Economics special!
May 23rd, 2008 at 20:05

In what must be about part fifty of my “why democracy doesn’t work series”, I’m doing the unthinkable: I’m going to sort of agree with the government line. I realise this is unfashionable and makes me a bad journalist (unless I’m Michael White), but they sort of have a point this time.

When trying to explain how they got obliterated in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, the government have been moaning about how everyone was voting Tory because they economy has gone to shit (that’s economic jargon) - and the interviews with the general public on the telly seem to back this up, with the “man on the street” bemoaning the spectacular price of petrol.

But… why punish the government for this? What are they supposed to do about the macro-economic circumstances? We live in a globalised world, where transnational capital flows can’t be stopped by one nation - economic policy these days is merely reactive. If the PM wanted to get the price of oil to go down, he’d have to figuratively do what King Canute did… and would have about as much success in the process.

Unfortunately, this is where democracy fails: the general public are too stupid to understand this. In fact, there was even a candidate in the by-election from the “Cut Tax on Diesel and Petrol” party, who I assume spends more time cutting up people in his white van than studying basic economic theory, such as the laws of supply and demand.

Reducing the tax would merely increase demand, which considering that unless Gordon discovers he forgot about a massive deposit of crude oil in his constituency, would then push up prices, and instead of the cash going to the government to pay for stuff, it’d go to needy oil barons and corrupt dictatorships. And as much as I dislike the government, I’d prefer them to get the money rather than the Saudis.

All the government can do to is fiddle with the tax and the interest rates - and even with these tools they don’t exactly have a free-hand at deciding what the economy does. Tax too much and all of the economic activity dries up, tax too little and there’s no money for hospitals and illegal wars - put the rates up and no one will spend any money, put the rates down and everyone will borrow money and get into stacks of debt. The unfortunate fact is that our entire economy, and by extension, our decadent way of life is entirely down to the whims of the market.

Don’t get me wrong, I find this a bit depressing too, but its true (and something else we can partially blame Thatcher for, excellently). So, like, lay off the government, everyone! Its not their fault they have so little power and influence in reality - they probably already have a complex about feeling powerless, and we’re not helping.

The problem isn’t the government, but the government and its lack of power. And that’s why democracy doesn’t work.

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i Ken has gambling addiction?
May 1st, 2008 at 16:23

Today was quite an exciting day - I handed in my dissertation, possibly the last piece of academic work I’ll ever do, aside from the three exams I’ve got coming up soon. Whilst it was a huge relief to take the gigantic weight off of my shoulders (I kept it there to remind me to finish my dissertation), I was hit with the realisation that I don’t have anything else lined up to do after my last exam on May 22nd - no job, no masters course, nothing, for the rest of my life.

So I thought, if I’m going to be an unemployed waster for the rest of my life, I may as well start early - so I went to a betting shop to do some gambling.

I’ve never been to a betting shop before, because I’ve always assumed they look a bit seedy - why else do they cover up the windows… what do they have to hide? Organised crime? The dregs of society depressingly pissing away their meagre wealth by watching skinny dogs run along a track?

Turns out that it was the latter. Although the former could have been going on for all I knew.

I walked through the door, and it was as depressing as I’d imagined - there were three men in there, who looked like they had no where to be, one of them playing the fruit machine and the other two watching the Greyhound racing - I initially thought that it was horse racing, before realising that’d be too classy - and there was a grumpy woman behind the counter.

I thought “Yeah, this is a scene I want to be a part of”.

So I told the woman I wanted to place a bet. What was I betting on? The London election, of course. After carefully studying the odds, and realising that the odds on Boris were backwards because they were so certain that he was going to win, I decided to risk a bet on Ken.

It isn’t looking good for Ken at the moment - the latest YouGov poll has Boris 6% ahead (after second preference) whereas every other polling company apparently has it as “too close to call” - I’m hoping that the actual results will massively swing in Ken’s favour, because hopefully when the London voters are in the polling booth, with their pencil hovering above the ballot sheet, they’ll take a step back and think “what the fuck am I doing?”, and vote for the less evil candidate.

Also: YouGov was founded by Stephen Shakespeare, a major Tory donor, and they apparently rely heavily on internet polling, which is probably pretty unrepresentative and unreliable… so I’m hoping they’re hideously bias and wrong. Hopefully it’ll be like the 1992 General Election when everyone apparently thought Neil Kinnock had it in the bag.

So fingers crossed, Ken will fluke it and win - if he does, I apparently stand to win £17.50 (having bet a fiver). If he doesn’t, Boris’s reign will start as the Tories mean to go on - by taking money off of poor people like me. And I don’t even live in London. It’ll be an extra kick in the face to accompany the first one I’ll get by the Tories being in power somewhere.

So if you’re a Londoner reading, Vote for Ken! Not just for my sake, but for the good of London!

If this goes well, I could really get into this gambling lark.

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Monetary Fallacy
February 18th, 2008 at 23:02

Economics is a hard subject, and I imagine that working in the world of finance is difficult business. You need lots of highly specialised skills if you want to work in the city – like the ability to use two phones at once, and being able to wear braces without looking like you’ve just stepped out of the nineteenth century.

In these turbulent economic times, we have to put our faith in these people, so we have to assume they know what they’re doing. Most economic concepts are simply too abstract for us to grasp – understanding what bonds, futures and dead cat bounces are is almost as complex as understanding quantum physics, or what would possess someone to actually buy Kerry Katona’s autobiography.

So the question arises, how can we sort out these problems? The national debt is apparently £1.3 trillion – which is pretty big. The Chancellor taking out another high-APR credit card and paying off the national debt with that probably isn’t going to sort this out, it will merely delay it – and its not like we can call in the loans that we’ve given the developing world over the years – the “Make Poverty History” campaign showed how mean that is… and besides, even if we sent the toughest, burliest looking men to the developing world to act as loan sharks it would be futile. Sure, they might come back with their video recorders, but we couldn’t sell them on to, say, America, because they have different sockets in the back of their TVs to us.

So dealing with the forthcoming economic problems looks tricky, and has economists and the general public alike scratching their heads, furrowing their brows and chewing pen lids to pieces. Does anyone know what to do?

Ignorance has never stopped me from commenting on a topic before, so I’ve come up with a solution that thinks outside the box a little bit: tax the poor more.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating a Thatcherite policy that relies on giving rich people loads of money and hoping it’ll filter down to the poor people, as that obviously doesn’t work – what I’m suggesting is a little ruse that we can use to exploit the goodwill of the rest of the world. So make sure you don’t tell anyone foreign about my brilliant plan or this might not work.

If we tax the poor 100% of their income they will be left with nothing – and our poor people will be living on significantly less than a dollar a day (in fact, exactly one dollar less than a dollar a day), and thus qualify as living in absolute poverty. All we have to do then is give Bono and Bob Geldof a ring, and before we know it, they’ll be benefit concerts around the world to raise money for us.

“Just £14 a month is enough to give a family of four a subscription to Sky Sports”, concerned celebrities will say on adverts shown around the world, “and just £6 will pay for three hours in a multi-storey car park”. Then all we have to do is wrack up the desperation by explaining that some of the most rural British people have to drive up to maybe ten miles a week to reach a supermarket to get food and bottled water and the money will come flooding in.

Sure, some may claim that we’re essentially “sponging off benefits”, but we should be able to take that, as it’s not like our right wing press have never accused foreigners of doing that before.

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Big Brother is watching you
September 10th, 2007 at 12:03

This is slightly creepy. After logging on to the council website to pay my parking fine, I put the details on the ticket in, and I was given the option to “view evidence”. It turns out that the traffic warden has been taking photos of my car. I didn’t realise they could do that. Whilst this is arguably a massive invasion of privacy and yet another sign that a surveillance culture is turning modern society into an Orwellian nightmare, it also has an upside: I get to post action photos of the actual thrilling event.

The amazing thing, I think, is that the photographer was the bastard traffic warden himself. With photography skills like these, I wonder if he’s got a Flickr account and is one of the many semi-pro photographers on there who post endless artsy black and white pictures of their pets?

I think the lesson here is to pay and display when you park, kids.

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Fairground Idea
August 11th, 2007 at 23:14

I’ve had an incredible idea for a new travelling funfair. The business plan is impeccable, because business is at the very heart of my idea.

Basically, each attraction would be priced individually, and the prices would vary according to market conditions. If not many people are using it the price will go down, and if its popular the price will go up: supply and demand, basically.

What would I call my fair? The Laissez-Fair, of course.

For example, rather than the queue for the dodgems being massive and no one wanting a go on the rigged coconut shy, the dodgems would be priced highly and the coconut shy would be dirt cheap… but would still turn a profit because the coconuts would be glued down.

There would be no queues because the visitors would be manipulated by changing prices, ensuring an equal spread of people throughout the fair.

Thinking this through, I could theme the entire fair around macro-economics. Those bungie capsule things could have the two towers at painted up like graph axis and it could be a homage to elasticity of demand? The ferris wheel? The economic cycle. Roller coaster? From the side it’d look like a graph of boom and bust. I’m still trying to think of a way to link the log-flume to trickle down economics.

There could be a terrifying new ride like those machines that hoist you up and then let you fall to the ground at speed. It could be called “Black Wednesday”.

I can’t see how this can possibly fail, as it would be self regulating. Crowds would be consistent throughout the week rather than it being packed on Friday and Saturday nights, as people would deliberately time their visits for when it is cheaper, so they’d never be any off-peak periods when its too expensive to keep the place open. Competitors wouldn’t have a chance, because if they tried to muscle in on the economics-themed-fairground market, they’d be pushed out using my rapid reaction market forces, as my prices would fall when demand is diluted by rivals. And in terms of social benefits, it will school people in basic economics - which is a valuable public service.

Look out for me on Dragons Den.

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Johnny Quest thinks I’m a sell out.
April 26th, 2007 at 20:43

Yesterday I received an interesting e-mail from someone wanting to “sponsor” (as he put it) some posts on my blog. “Hmm…” I thought, as I realised that I’d been presented with my first opportunity to properly sell out on all of my opinions, lose all credibility in the eyes of my peers, but maybe make some money, which would be help cushion the victimisation and social exclusion that I’d then be on the receiving end of.

I was a bit sceptical - he was asking for a “positively or neutrally framed review” of whatever products and services he told me to write about. Here’s part of my reply:

“If I were to do this, I’d want to decide whether to participate on a company-by-company basis, and I’d clearly flag up to my readers that I am being paid by the company to write the article. My credibility means a lot to me, and I think my readers are savvy enough to know when there’s a hidden motive behind something. I imagine that it would be within your interest to let me point out to readers what is going on - Google for ‘alliwantforchristmasisapsp‘ if you’re unsure as to why!

“If I were to review a product, then I would actually want to review it, and not just regurgitate a press release. Similarly, whilst you ask for a ‘good or neutrally framed’ review, I would still approach it objectively - obviously I would not be unjustifiably cynical or negative, though.”

I’m not willing to be used as some sort of corporate shill. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll happily sell out if the price is right, but just because I’m a blogger doesn’t mean that I’ve got no concept of journalistic ethics. I get the impression that the marketing men think blogs and viral marketing are key to reaching difficult demographics that TV advertising doesn’t reach (ie: young people), and think that because its the internet, then they can subvert normal accepted standards of advertising practice.

It got a little more bizarre when I recieved another e-mail giving me some more specifics. Rather than explain it, here’s how they described what they want me to do:

“We are not asking that you review any products or services, but rather just have a look and comment and add a link within the first 200 word of the post or a couple of links inline text links; one to the home page or article and one to a specific product page. You are also welcome to link to any other resource that you like in the post, whether this is general market research, a comparison with a competitor - whatever you like - while not essential, is ok with us. However, we do ask is that not defamatory comments are made.”

“We certainly do not want bogus reviews or anything that would require a disclaimer on the post - just make a comment if you feel it is worth doing so and do so with your own flair and style.” They basically wanted me to astroturf for them. They don’t seem to understand that I’d want to put a disclaimer on anything that I’ve been paid to write on a specific topic about*.

What makes this particularly odd is the companies who they wanted me to promote. I’m not sure what companies you’d associate with me, but all of the companies listed later in this second e-mail were offering financial services of sorts.

Why on earth would you take financial advice from me? I think you’d get more success taking advice on nation-building from the Bush administration, or advice on how to tackle fires from Alan Ball. (Too soon?)

And wouldn’t you readers think that it’s a bit odd that rather than posting stupid videos, or, er, complained about selling out, I started doing comparisons of the mortgages that different banks offer? “Wow, I’ve just found this really great mortgage! It’s a variable rate tracker so you know it can save you, yes, you, a lot of money!”

So I’ve e-mailed back and said that I’m not interested. Was this the right thing to do? What would you have done in my position? Why not post a comment and tell me?

Also! Are you a big company? As I made clear a few paragraphs ago, I don’t mind writing stuff for money, as long as it is done fairly, and flagged up. For example, I could review your companies products. Of course, I’d be objective, but if your company’s stuff is any good, then this shouldn’t bother you. Why not send me free stuff and/or money? Contact me on james (at) jamesomalley.co.uk if you’re interested.

(* ie: You can pay me to write stuff if I can write what I like, and I won’t get on my high horse about receiving payment, as if I’m given the freedom to write what I like then I’m not being censored or whatever. You know what I mean.)

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Top 3: Economists
April 10th, 2007 at 23:58

I’m trying to start a running joke, and I’m only having limited success. Whenever someone mentions a well known person to me, I’ll rank them in a list of my favourite members of their occupation. For example, when discussing the new £20 note, I’ll tell people that Adam Smith is my third favourite economist, implying that I have really specific ranked lists of favourites for a number of things.

Here’s the thing: I would genuinely like to have ranked lists of my favourite things. In fact, lists of favourites are my second most desired metaphysical possession (after charisma and before modesty).

So to try and make it a reality, here’s a list of my three favourite economists:

JAMES O’MALLEY’S TOP THREE ECONOMISTS

3) Adam Smith

How can you not like a man who has has a sort of reverse invisibility cloak and can instead see invisible things. He spotted some invisible hands meddling with the market, and then wrote about them so that we mere mortals can too detect market forces. He’s basically like Isaac Newton if he were hit on the head by some bullion instead of an apple and didn’t turn into a religious nutter later in his life.

He wins bonus points for being a bit of an all-rounder and appealing to all sides of the political spectrum: He theorised division of labour, and thus mass production ages before Henry Ford, setting us comfortable westerners up for an easy life. Excellent. He was, however, in favour of progressive taxation and (figuratively) taxing the shit out of the rich, which is also excellent. Adam Smith is a top bloke. I’d invite him to my birthday party.

2) John Maynard Keynes

Keynes is so good, there’s a school of economic thought named after him: Keynesian Economics. He was a big fan of state intervention in the economy to keep things afloat, and his ideas kept the world going after World War II. Unfortunately, things fucked up for his ideas when there was an oil crisis in the 70s and Nixon de-linked the Dollar from the gold standard, which caused the entire world system to unravel… but lets not mention that. Keynes was dead by then anyway, so it’s not like he ever knew anyway.

1) John Kenneth Galbraith

I don’t actually know that much about ‘JKG’, but what I do know is that he’s the most quotable man on earth, and after all, the quotability of a person is a much better judge of them than their body of work and character. Here’s some things he’s said according to the ever-reliable Wikipedia:

• “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
• “It is a well known and very important fact that America’s founding fathers did not like taxation without representation. It is a lesser known and equally important fact that they did not much like taxation with representation.”
• “Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
• (On being asked what it is like having reached the age of 90) “Better than the alternative.”
• “Under Capitalism, man exploits man, under Communism, exactly the opposite” (Wikipedia reckons this is falsely attributed to him, but I disagree as BBC News says otherwise.)

Next time: My Top 3 Civil Engineers. (Look forward to it).

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