Sam Dumitriu, Adam Smith Institute

Sam Dumitriu

Adam Smith Institute

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Past:
  • Adam Smith Institute

Past articles by Sam:

Don't have a cow, man: The prospects for lab grown meat —

Researcher Jamie Hollywood and Adam Smith Institute President Dr Madsen Pirie discuss the potential for lab grown meat to save lives and the environment. Executive Summary: Demand for meat has grown along with incomes. During the 1960s meat consumption in East Asia stood at jus → Read More

No, school choice doesn't cause gang violence —

On Tuesday, my colleague Daniel Pryor appeared as a witness on BBC Radio 4’s The Moral Maze to discuss the causes of gang violence. He made a persuasive case that ending the prohibition of recreational drugs such as cannabis would reduce gang violence just as the end of the prohibition of alcoh → Read More

Students should celebrate lecturer strikes —

Starting on Thursday, academics and lecturers at 61 universities represented by the University and College Union will strike for 14 days. According to the Sunday Times, affected universities are planning to dumb down final exams to ensure that the walkouts do not affect final grades. Essentially, it → Read More

The NGDP Targeting Reader —

You might have seen our new paper Monetary Policy After The Crash: Lessons learned? call for the Bank of England’s 2% CPI Inflation mandate to be scrapped and replaced with a Nominal GDP target. The report’s author Prof Anthony J. Evans persuasively sets out the problems with the Bank of England’s c → Read More

Policy Priorities in 2018: Boosting Productivity —

Across the Western World, there is a growing sentiment that capitalism isn’t working. Productivity growth has stalled and inflation has outpaced wages. This has led to voters backing protectionists (Trump) and socialists (Sanders and Corbyn). In response, conservatives are becoming more intervention → Read More

Oxfam don't have the monopoly on truth —

Oxfam’s annual wealth inequality press release features a startling statistic. And no, it isn’t that the 85 richest people in the world could fit on a single double-decker bus. They claim that 2/3 of the world’s 2,043 billionaires got their wealth through cronyism, inheritance, and monopoly. I won → Read More

Rent control increases rents —

It is a curious truth that when economists agree (a rare occurrence), politicians usually disagree. Free trade is the obvious one (as Paul Krugman says, “If there were an Economist's Creed, it would surely contain the affirmations 'I understand the Principle of Comparative Advantage' and 'I advocat → Read More

Stop worrying about buybacks —

Are financial markets fundamentally broken? If you read Charlotte Pickles’ article on share buybacks, then you would be inclined to think so. She argues that firms are forgoing real investment and engaging in ‘financial engineering’ to artificially meet earnings targets at the expense of long-term s → Read More

Great minds think alike —

In today's City AM, I argue that it is right for train fares to rise by 3.4%. Part of my argument is that it is wrong to subsidise rail users who are, on average, better off than other commuters. But I make a further argument. In fact, cutting rail fares may not even help most commuters. "If fa → Read More

Productivity is everything, here's how we boost it —

The Chancellor decided not to exercise his traditional right to present the budget alongside a stiff drink. That’s a surprise, because today’s OBR GDP Growth projections would have any reasonable person reaching for the bottle. The stubborn refusal of productivity growth to return to its pre-crisis → Read More

Is land banking to blame for the housing crisis? —

One of the most frustrating aspects of the housing debate is that even among the people who accept that the fundamental problem is insufficient supply, there are a sub-category who choose not to blame restrictive planning laws but instead lay blame at so-called land bankers. They point out that the → Read More

At last some sense on climate change —

A few years back perennial BS vendor Naomi Klein wrote a book called This Changes Everything. She argued, in typically economically illiterate fashion, that the threat of climate change requires us to reject mainstream economics and instead embrace the sort of socialist, planned economy that → Read More

Is Net Neutrality good for permission-less innovation? —

Net Neutrality is the idea that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should treat all content (from Netflix and YouTube to this very blog) equally. Advocates of Net Neutrality typically back regulations that ban ISPs from charging companies like Netflix extra for access to fast lanes. There’s → Read More

The ASI at Tory Conference: cannabis, vaping, clubbing and winning over Millennials —

Let's face it, Conservative Party Conference can get a bit stuffy. But that's definitely not the case when it comes to the ASI's conference fringe line-up. We're discussing issues that really matter on topics that are often neglected, but vitally important if you care about a free society. → Read More

For efficiency’s sake, let’s tax the young less. —

In The Millennial Manifesto, the ASI’s President Dr Madsen Pirie advocated a series of policies that the Conservatives could implement to win over young people attracted by Corbyn’s radical socialist manifesto. Like many ASI reports it advocated tax cuts, but controversially Madsen argued that → Read More

Energy suppliers engage in price discrimination – that’s a good thing —

Most consumers are equal parts confused and outraged at energy prices. It’s not simply that they’re too high (although they could be lower), it’s that two customers who get identical products can pay vastly different prices. ‘Loyal’ (low-engagement) customers on standard variable tariffs (SVT) → Read More

Tech giants are undercutting business

In today’s Times, consumer affairs reporter Andrew Ellson argues that “ Feckless ministers have let tech giants undercut business”, but his objections are rather wrong-headed. First, he’s concerned that Amazon will outcompete car dealers and the treasury will get less tax as a result. He wri → Read More

A better way —

If you tax investment, you tend to get less of it. And because workers rely on invested capital to produce the goods and services we consume everyday, falls in investment inevitably lead to falls in wages. In fact, economic theory tells us that because investment is so responsive to changes in → Read More

A life-saving deregulation from the Trump admin —

Last week, the US Department for Health and Human Services (HHS) scrapped one of the Obama administration's most harmful regulations. The Wall Street Journal Reports: "...last week the Department of Health and Human Services withdrew a proposed Obama-era regulation that would have proh → Read More

Wal-Mart: A progressive success story... —

I stumbled upon a fantastic paper the other day from Jason Furman, who served as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Barack Obama ( H/T Matt Ygleisas at Vox). In 'Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story' Furman defended Wal-Mart against its left-wing critics arguing that supermarke → Read More