What is inflation? The answer seems obvious: when things get more expensive, that’s inflation, and it’s bad. But an alternative view is Milton Friedman’s. In a talk in 1963, the hugely influential economist defined inflation as “a steady and sustained rise in prices”...
In between summer holidays and the arrival of a new prime minister, few people will have noticed that, by dithering for a decade, the government has quietly wasted nearly £200mn. Even fewer will have been surprised. But we should be paying attention, not just in the...
I first began to conceive of this column three and a half hours before typing these words, as I stood with my wife and children in an impossibly long queue for the Eurostar, snaking across Gare du Nord in 35C heat. The problem was not the delay, but the discomfort,...
We all pass certain milestones in our lives that cause us to stop and reflect. The death of a parent; a child finishing school; one’s former tutorial partner becoming the prime minister. Your humble Undercover Economist is having to deal with all three in the space of...
Few parts of the British economy are as meticulously observed by this columnist as Legoland, a theme park within sight of Windsor Castle. Each July, my son and I have sampled the delights of the Dragon rollercoaster and the Viking River Splash, endured the rigours of...
“We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision,” wrote Samuel Alito in explaining the reasoning of the US Supreme Court as it reversed the constitutional right to an abortion. Perhaps not, but some facts are clear...
At the risk of sounding like a newlywed presenting my spouse with a list of pointers for improvement, these once-miraculous Covid vaccines could do better. It wasn’t long ago that I celebrated the anniversary of being fully vaccinated, but that first flush of immunity...
I’ve been thinking recently about three debates. In the first, which took place in January 2016, two Harvard students, Fanele Mashwama and Bo Seo, proposed that “the world’s poor would be justified in pursuing complete Marxist revolution”. In the second, in October of...
In the mid-1990s, the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission, an insurer of state employees, released healthcare data that described millions of interactions between patients and the healthcare system to researchers. Such records could easily reveal highly sensitive...