[tim worstall] entrepeneur, free marketeer and blogfather

Tim Worstall, for example, would abolish the DTI forthwith and Chris Dillow explains the reasoning thus:

1. If business wants to hire management consultants, it should do so with its own money, not the tax-payers'. I don't see the market failure that requires state intervention here.

2. The state can do a lot to create the conditions for business success. But none of it requires a DTI - low and simple taxes, light regulation, a well-educated workforce and good transport are not in the DTI's remit.

3. Insofar as it's the job of the state to help others - and I think it is to a greater extent than Tim does, I guess - it should help individuals, not companies. The £5bn we spend on the DTI could be better spent elsewhere, contributing to citizens' income.

I come from a different direction on this issue, working as I do for a Ministry of Trade and Overseas Economic Cooperation in a consultative role, as my Minister put it a few hours ago when discussing this article I’m now writing.

Certainly business deals with business internationally but with a benevolent and keen Ministry behind your business, easing your way through all the red tape not necessarily imposed by your own country and doing things like creating free economic zones, as we have, and running publicity for your firm, such as at the coming Trade Fair in London on October 19th, surely your path is smoothed.

And don’t forget that a Ministry sees the whole picture at inter-state level, whereas a business sees things at Chamber of Commerce level.

No doubt I’ll be taken apart on this and it raises the question DK raised earlier in slightly different words – why would I wish to run a profile on someone who does not appear to be remotely connected with my world?

The answer lies partly in my rugby days. For example, we'd visit Durham and as guests, be feted in the dining hall with as much sustenance and wine as we could handle while the lads were elsewhere preparing, before walking it off together up to the field.

Then it would be pure murder mayhem in the mud for 80 minutes, followed by the double line and clapping the other team off the field, followed by more sustenance and bonhomie and taking in the England Scotland match on the big screen, cheery farewells and home we'd go. It's because of this I don't give a rat's a-s- about a man's views, as long as he's interesting and a good sort.

And anyway, Tim Worstall is connected with my world – the blogging world and as one of the elder statesmen and founding fathers, I see him as somewhat of a mentor. Certainly Tim has been more than encouraging to more than one blogger starting out on that long road.

And let’s face it, the man is interesting, dammit.

What is a UK blogger, notwithstanding his stints of Timmy Elsewhere interspersed, doing in Portugal? Why was he in Russia for three years? Why does he deal in precious metals? Why is he so highly sought after by US and UK think-tanks for articles? How did a successful businessman get himself into the writer’s world? What beer does he drink? Why does he get 2400 hits or whatever it is per day at his blog? Too many questions, too fragmented and impossible to know where to start.

We’ll start with the header on his blog. DK informs that the tagline to his blog is the quote that all economics is "all obvious or trivial except..." The answer, apparently, is "comparative advantage" but even this non-trivial concept was explained concisely and clearly as we wandered down to the pub. So already we’re pulled in two different directions. Let’s deal with comparative advantage first, quoting from Wikipedia.

In economics, the theory of comparative advantage explains why it can be beneficial for two parties [countries, regions, individuals, ...] to trade, even though one of them may be able to produce every kind of item more cheaply than the other. What matters is not the absolute cost of production, but rather the ratio between how easily the two countries can produce different goods. The concept is highly important in modern international trade theory.

Comparative advantage may be compared to absolute advantage. When one entity (be it a company or a country) is able to produce more efficiently than another entity it has an absolute advantage: that is, assuming equal inputs, the entity with an absolute advantage will have a greater output.

David Ricardo used an example involving England and Portugal. In Portugal it is possible to produce both wine and cloth with less work than it takes in England. However, the relative costs of producing those two goods are different in the two countries. In England it is very hard to produce wine, and only moderately difficult to produce cloth. In Portugal both are easy to produce.

Therefore, while it is cheaper to produce cloth in Portugal than England, it is cheaper still for Portugal to produce excess wine, and trade that for English cloth. Conversely, England benefits from this trade because its cost for producing cloth has not changed but it can now get wine at closer to the cost of cloth.

"That it is logically true need not be argued before a mathematician; that it is not trivial is attested by the thousands of important and intelligent men who have never been able to grasp the doctrine for themselves or to believe it after it was explained to them." — Paul Samuelson

Now, view Mr. Worstall’s enigmatic triple-dot-curtailed comment through this filter and things become slightly less opaque. Point number one about him – you have to be on the ball, as he can lead you a merry dance.

Coming back to the other point: as we wandered down to the pub - what pub? This is answered by DK himself:

He invited me to stay - under no obligation [other than to sort a few tech problems!] - when I was very down and it was as pleasant and relaxing [and interesting] a week as I have ever spent. I am currently working on a few projects with him and he's efficient too.

This would have to be self-effacement of the most abject kind. When my own blog was down and I e-mailed Tim for urgent help, he immediately gave me an e-mail address and said: This is the man to contact. And who was the guru? DK. Few technical problems indeed!

So, Tim likes a pint it seems and now one can get a further insight into the man by the same question – how do you apportion your day - addressed to two different parties. Tim’s response:

Day? Up, read the papers, blog, walk the dogs, work, lunch, work, bike ride [or siesta, depending], walk the dogs, work, pub.

Good, good. The same question to DK:

Tim Worstall rises early in the morning, which is easy in the mild Portuguese weather, to begin his trawl through the blogs; he writes, both his own blog and his commissioned articles, until about six -- with a short break to walk the dogs - and then drifts down to his favourite pub to drink SuperBock and read [either a vaguely trashy novel or something weightier, depending on which day it is].

Amusing, entertaining and remarkably relaxing to sit with [he is not a man who feels that he has to talk incessantly], our evenings in the pub were spent - when not chatting to the local residents that Tim seems to be so popular with - companionably reading books, drinking, and discussing points of interest.

The pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place but as a seeming workaholic, perhaps it’s best to return to his ventures. The precious metal business, for instance. He describes scandium thus:

… today's gratuitous scandium reference. We have two examples in the day job, The Low Hanging Fruit Company [motto " Scandium, It's Rocks!"]. Adding scandium to aluminium alloys provides a number of benefits and you'll have seen the bike frames and baseball bats made out of this stuff [yes, we have or do supply all of those manufacturers].

If you add it to the alloy that makes wings for aeroplanes, there is one little benefit. As it does not oxidise, you do not need to paint or lacquer the wing surface, thus saving 1 - 2 % of the total weight of the plane. Yes, this is aerospace, so it takes a decade to get a new alloy into the market but that 1 - 2 % fuel saving on every single flight is coming to you from both major manufacturers in the next few years …

There's also another benefit, one that seems to be driven by a groups of British scientists. When you weld steel, the weld is stronger than the surrounding plate : you expect the actual piece of steel to bend or break before the weld. With aluminium, the weld is the weak spot.

However, if you add scandium to both the weld wire and the plate, hey presto, the weld is stronger than the surrounding alloy. This opens up the possibility that in a decade's time we will stop using rivets in aircraft : we'll simply weld them together. That in itself would save a massive 10% of the weight of an aircraft. Think of that as the earthquake.

So we have here a man driven by what he sees as the bleedin’ obvious and DK concurs: Tim is friendly [provided he has had his morning coffee], enthusiastic and convinced of his arguments, or he wouldn't make them.

A man with a mission and my experience of such people, my profile of them if you like, is that these are probably well-travelled, experienced, friendly, able to let their product sell itself if presented correctly and with an eye for the main chance.

DK’s take: Having lived in many places around the world - Portugal [where he currently resides], Russia and the US to name but three - Tim is convinced of man's essential drive: everyone wants to make a buck and they thrive in the conditions - minimal interference and regulation - that facilitate this. On being asked, "Why did you go into dealing rare metals?" his answer is commendably to the point: "I saw a gap in the market."

Says Theodore Gray: Tim Worstall is an interesting character: An Englishman living in Portugal who deals in scandium metal and scandium oxide. He doesn't just deal in them, he does most of the dealing in them (60% or so) that is done worldwide. Oddly, I don't have any pure scandium from him, but rather a couple of rare earths he happened to have on the side. You can contact him through www.timworstall.com: If you're an industrial user or producer of scandium and you need someone to broker your scandium oxide transactions, see Tim.

My role in this article now reduced to linkman, that brings us back to the adage of the product selling itself. Something else becomes appparent – he's not just a salesman but a lyrical salesman. Observe this prose on his beloved scandium:

I was pleased to see that he loaded up a picture of the Smith and Wesson 329 PD revolver.

In order to make this delightful machine, scandium oxide was gently harvested from the sandy shores of the northern Caspian Sea in Kazakhstan. Carefully separated from the output of a uranium processing plant, the material was purified and then left to mature for several years.

Then, following the strict instructions of our buyers, it was flown in majesterial aloofness to Moscow, where it was carefully blended with high purity aluminium from Krasnoyarsk [none better!] in Siberia. Following the blending it was super chilled and then flown on the world's leading metal transport airline, KLM, via Rotterdam, to Pittsburgh.

Where someone else made it into a gun.

Gently harvested from the sandy shores of the northern Caspian Sea? He should be writing. And so:

Tim Worstall's entertaining new anthology of web writers, 2005 – Blogged #, puts the best into a book, says Rafael Behr [Sunday December 4, 2005 The Observer]. On paper it’s a terrible idea: let every have-a-go writer on the planet publish whatever they fancy and give it all away free. No editors, no agents, no fees, no quality control. But a new generation of diarists, satirists, polemicists and poets have made the idea work, precisely because they dispensed with paper. They are bloggers, their medium is the internet and there are around 19 million of them worldwide; 300,000 or so in the UK.

Rafael Behr continues: Worstall is an expat businessman based in Portugal. He is also a prolific blogger, with a libertarian bent, who is on a self-appointed mission to eviscerate every newspaper article that he judges guilty of economic illiteracy. He is not, however, exclusively hostile to old media, nor immune to the charms of ink on paper. He must be at least ambivalent about olde worlde recognition or he would not have published anything so Luddite as a book. But therein lies a contradiction in much political blogging: it rather depends on the very thing it likes ostentatiously to scorn.

Tim's views and again, where to start? With the man himself, of course. When I asked him how he would describe himself politically, his long-winded reply was: Classical Liberal. DK adds: Tim Worstall is that rare thing: a free marketeer who actually puts his beliefs into practice, and I raise a glass to his ambition!

I wondered at this point what he would do if he were actually the PM and whom his cabinet would comprise. His curt rejoinder: Cabinet? Government? No one's ever going to let me anywhere near the reins of power. Chris Dillow at DTI for sure, he'd close it down, just like I would.

So, not much further in ths direction. Nothing for it now but to plunge into his own writing and seek the grail that way. This snippet is as good as any to start with:

We actually want to abolish the taxation of retained profits altogether. This is, after all, what a company uses to reinvest. Tax dividends as income, fine, tax capital gains (although more on that later) but retained profits? Shouldn’t be taxed at all. Actually, there’s interesting evidence that even corporation tax, at least in part, is actually paid by the workers in the form of lower wages.

Indeed a free marketeer as pure as the driven scandium oxide: If we are to hold the world to the standard being demanded here we would never have anything new ever again.

Yes but is the man green to boot?

TCS Daily, 23 February 2006 HYPERLINK http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=022206I http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=022206I Tim Worstall

"Sir Humphrey?"

"Yes Minister?"

"Have you seen this report in The Times today? They say that mineral water is contributing to climate change...here, have a read:

Despite its pure image, bottled water is making a significant contribution to climate change. The industry produces as much greenhouse gas as the electricity consumption of about 20,000 homes in a year, according to research by The Times.

Further, from James K. Glassman’s Technology-Commerce-Society Daily:

The American Prospect's Ezra Klein … says: "I'm of the opinion that how to handle WalMart is among the two or three most important issues facing the country."

He's right you know. Whether we handle WalMart and the attendant issues as intelligent adults, capable of reasoning, or we do so as whining three-year-olds with all the attendant knowledge of incentives, utopian wishes and economic consequences such a three-year-old might possess is, indeed, one of the important questions facing the country.

WalMart, yes, subject of more pieces from my own pen than I can shake a devastated community at. Don’t get me started on WalMart, particularly in Canada. So, Tim writes internationally, publishes books and blogs on a daily basis. The lyrical, the witty and the droll. How about the cutting comment and incisive thrust?

Neal Lawson: Idiot by Tim Worstall August 10, 2006, 3:46 am

Sigh, It is certainly not a Labour response, as markets create winners and losers. That's their function.How is it possible that this idiot is in fact part of the political conversation in the UK?

Not bad at all and did you notice the time on the post? This might very well mean local time but one wonders if he was up half the night on this stuff. But this is to get too far ahead. How did he actually get into blogging in the first place? Journalism.co has one possible explanation:

While McGinty left journalism to build his mini-blog empire, Tim Worstall took the opposite tack.

The British blogger, based in Portugal, started blogging in April, 2004 to get into journalism. He thinks his editorial appeal is straightforward, "Some editors like to have something from a froth-mouthed libertarian."

Worstall believes that "in the future [media] is going to be more biased, that it will throw off any pretension to objectivity and I think it will be all the better for that."

He specialises in opinion, witty commentary and columnist bating. He is the driving force behind 2005: Blogged.

Worstall's output puts many freelances to shame. He is paid to blog for EQSQ. He also writes for Social Affairs Unit, the Globalization Institute, the Adam Smith Institue, TCS Daily and occasionally for The Times, Daily Telegraph and the Philadelphia Inquirer, "I'm now making, month by month, in the $4,000/$5,000 range purely from writing. That's better than if I were actually employed somewhere as a staffer," said Worstall.

He also uses the controversial PayPerPost service. The service pays bloggers to write about subjects using certain keywords, although he keeps this seperate from his main blog.

"I like to try the various things out there being offered to bloggers. So I tried this. I did it and reported on it. In one sense that's actually real journalism, isn't it? Why I continue it is purely for cash: but then that was my motivation in starting to write anyway."

He believes blogging is compatible with a 9 to 5 job, "Blogging takes two or a bit more hours a day. About the time most people spend watching television which is something I don't do. Writing for pay is different, in that it does take much more time, but then that has become my job in a way anyway."

However, it's just a case of blog and sell. "I did bang on a few doors to try and get noticed, but it was the fact that I was blogging at such length that got me hired at all. Being able to point to some output is a lot better than saying 'well, I know no one's hired me yet but I really can do some interesting stuff you know!' In a sense, the blog acted (and still does) as a clippings file, even if in the beginning it was all blog posts rather than clippings."

A blog evangelist he may be, but Worstall is also a realist, "Salary sum earning bloggers will remain very thin on the ground. People who use blogging as an advertising tool, a practice ground, to get freelance work in the regular media, as I have done, will be a much more common form. I don't think brand names or editorial teams are going to go away, but those who write for such might come from a wider pool."

Madcap schemes, altruistic ends, high adventure:

We’re actually going to take money from that nice Mr. Google and then send it on to places where it will help.

The thing is that Google wants, very much, to promote two of their services. Firefox with the Google Toolbar and Adsense itself. And they’ll pay me to do that. Money which can be sent to parts of the world where it will bring rather more cheer than if I simply drank it (not, whatever you might have heard, quite what the Christmas Spirit is usually defined as).
The terms are:

When a user you've referred to AdSense first earns US $100, we'll credit your AdSense account with US X. When a user you’ve referred to Firefox plus Google Toolbar runs Firefox for the first time, you’ll receive up to $Y in your account, depending on the user’s location. (Apologies, I’m not sure, under the Adsense rules, whether I’m allowed to tell you how much each referral earns. You’ll find out as soon as you get an account anyway.) So what will the money be spent on? Two things.

1) Ethiopiad and the Fistula Hospital in Addis Abbaba. Please do click through to find out what it’s all about. For those of you would like a more personal view of the good work done there might I suggest Owen Barder? He knows the hospital from his time in that country.50% of whatever Google pays will go to this charity.

2) We’re going to send Sortapundit to Outer Mongolia. Of huge value to civilisation in general, I’m sure you’ll agree (although less perhaps for the descendents of the Great Khan). However, we’re not going to be paying for his trip. He has entered the Mongol Rally and he can buy his own car and petrol and so on.

No, rather, we’re going to help him raise the sponsorship amount he needs to be able to enter the rally. This money goes to Send A Cow. As I say, he’s got to raise the money to have the fun himself. We’re going to help pay for cows to go to some of the poorest families in Africa. 50% raised will go to this similarly worthy cause. Both admirable causes I hope you will agree?

He’s also widely read and I recall the earlier comment by DK about Tim’s avid early morning readathons. He puts in more links and quotes more people than I’ve had hot dinners:

Mr Kleiman. Quite probably the shortest destruction of the new EU Constitution possible, even if that's not what the comment was aimed at:

The reason that the American Revolution created a republic that has done so well for so long, while the French and Russian revolutions degenerated so quickly into tyranny, was that the American Framers didn't try to create a government capable of doing great good in the hands of brilliant and well-intentioned people.

Instead, they tried to create a government that couldn't do too much to ruin the country in the hands of a bunch of corrupt morons. And they did a pretty good job of it. [Jordan Peterson]

Hates the EU, does Tim. Hence his Europhile perspective comment in his blogheader. But you’d be wrong to think Tim Worstall was anchored to economics or scandium. This piece took me aback:

Dimebag was a guitarist with a band called Pantera (who they are is a subject for another day) and had just gone back on the road (see how this cultish language of the rock and roll lifestyle seems to slip off the tongue so effortlessly!) with a new beat combo known as Damageplan.

Sadly, while performing their music hall turn (what I believe is known as a "gig") in a colonial ville called "Columbus, Ohio" on Dec 9 this year a member of the audience decided to shoot him four times as he performed before said assailant was himself shot by the police.

Sorry – I’m not providing the link for this classic piece. You’ll have to rummage around TW’s blogs for yourself and like the proverbial cellar, you might be quite surprised at what you turn up there. To wind this thing up, I’d like to return to two people who know him well enough. First of all, Chris Dillow:

An assessment of Tim? I really like him, both as a person and as a blogger. I could quibble (and did so in my last post) over several issues - but these are second-order [considerations].

And DK?

As Tim's tentacles of influence spread throughout the world [and they do] and his various spheres of interest, one can only anticipate that he will continue to make his arguments as forcefully, lucidly and with as much good humour as he always has [and did throughout the immensely enjoyable week that I spent with him].

But we’re not quite finished with him yet. DK e-mailed me [and I’ve already been in trouble once today for revealing the contents of e-mails but in this situation I stand by the decision] with the quite reasonable question: Is this just a blogger profiling thing that you are doing for yourself (as it were)?

My reply, if you’re interested, was: If you mean is there an ulterior motive - not that I know of. I just wanted to do it really. Tim's been good to me and I just thought there might be a few readers of the non-UK variety who might like a more rounded picture of him.

We always profile stars but I feel the A and B list bloggers are the stars today - people do read them and they do influence opinion. Therefore they deserve to be profiled. If someone wants to take the piece and use it somehow, well, that's OK because provided the profile was good, it can only be added hits for the guy profiled.

At least, that's my logic.

One last thing and I’m sure Chris Dillow and countless others would agree, that along with Clive Davis, this man is one of the ‘blogfathers’, to utilize a DK term and one of the more extraordinary characters to cross our paths in a long, long while.


# 2005 Blogged: Dispatches from the Blogosphere [Paperback] by Tim Worstall, 224 pages, Publisher: The Friday Project Limited (18 Nov 2005), Language English, ISBN: 0954831837