Last week we pointed out that to solve the Birmingham binmen strike it is necessary to pay teaching assistants more.

One of those little proofs that if you put the word “political” in front of another - as with “social” in front, or “studies” after - then you have wholly destroyed the meaning of the word being so modified.

Apparently being able to leave Luton is a bad idea. So says Caroline Lucas: Almost 90% of flights from Luton are taken for leisure - in other words British tourists taking their money out of the country to spend abroad. Expanding Luton is not good for UK growth…

There’s an old City adage that specific mistakes only come along once in a generation. Folk see the mistake, learn from it, then don’t repeat it.

We do think this is a sign of something having gone wrong. But then there are few who do think society is wholly and justly on exactly the right path at present.

So the mathematician asks the economist whether there’s actually anything at all in all of the social sciences that is not obvious nor trivial.

As Paul Krugman pointed out productivity isn’t everything. But in the long run it’s almost everything.

Sure and it’s lovely if someone walks in with a freebie cheque for you. But cheques very rarely stay freebie - there will be an insistence upon imposing some costs in return, obviously enough:

Gary Stevenson, the tax the rich populist du jour, continually tells us that taxing the rich is easy. Because while the individual might move they’ve still got assets.

Given our greybeard status one of the things we’ve learnt is that bad policy, bad economics, keeps returning like the acid reflux after a bad curry.

No, no, there must be some mistake here. We all know that people called upon to proffer up their mere fair share to the common weal don’t change their behaviour in order to dodge that righteous gifting.

Every government tries to hack back at the Civil Service. Given that every government does try to hack back the Civil Service then, according to the media aimed at the Civil Service, this proves that hacking at the Civil Service doesn’t work: