James Bartholomew is the author of The Welfare of Nations.
From our UK edition
They learned from us – now we need to learn from them The last time I visited Singapore, I stayed at the charmingly run-down, distinctly colonial Raffles Hotel. I drank a Singapore Sling in the Long Bar, contemplated a well-fed cockroach in my room and fancied myself to be following in the footsteps of Somerset
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What makes you happy? If you did not think anybody cared, you could not be more wrong. Your happiness has become a major issue. It is being investigated by professors with regression analyses. It is being fussed over by politicians who want to show their human side. The British government has decided to measure your
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Sweden is iconic, like Marilyn Monroe or Karl Marx. It is supposed to stand for something special: a kind of paradise where socialism and a big welfare state go together with being a successful, rich country. The left use it as a triumphant example: ‘See! It works in Sweden! High levels of equality, a big
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Yoshiko found she was pregnant and talked to her live-in lover about what they should do. His attitude was not exactly out of the PC book of ‘The Right Things To Say When Your Girlfriend Says She Is Pregnant’. He said he was prepared to marry her as long as she accepted that she would
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In Britain we are now glumly entering the age of austerity and everyone expects unemployment to go on rising. This has been the case in the past: even when the economy starts to grow, there is a painfully long lag before unemployment starts to fall. But not in Switzerland is different. There, unemployment is already
From our UK edition
James Bartholomew on why bravery, kindness, modesty, generosity and restraint are fast disappearing from Britain — but not from George Bush’s America Those who depend on the BBC for news are still puzzling over why America voted for that bad George Bush. One reason that got little or no airtime was that they liked his