Painting Fakes

A few years ago my daughter and I developed an addiction to the American crime drama Bones.  The story centres around a group of forensic scientists, the most brilliant of whom is forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.  This team of impossibly good looking and brilliant people work in a shiny laboratory at the Smithsonian Institution and solve grisly murders rapidly on the basis of the tiniest scraps of evidence.  In one episode they solve a murder in which the only evidence is a single finger-bone of the victim. If we switched the TV on a bit early, we would get to see the end of the previous show, which for a long time was one of those police docu-dramas where the cameras follow a group of real police officers as they go about their daily business.  The contrast could not have been more stark.  Real police work turns out to be amazingly pedestrian.  The officers pull someone over for a faulty tail-light and find drugs in the glove-box.  A serious offender is caught because som

So, over the next couple of months we are going to be talking a lot about same sex marriage thanks to the governments decision to hold a 'national survey' on this question in place of the promised plebiscite.  Debate is hotting up already.  The level of vitriol from some conservative Christians has risen appreciably, and it is not only directed at proponents of same sex marriage.  I have seen savage things said to and about quite conservative Christians who have gently suggested that their fellow Christians could consider voting yes , or even just abstaining  without compromising their own view of marriage.  The fear and anger in the air is palpable. I don't want to rehash those arguments.  You can follow the links or find them, and many like them, on the internet if you are masochistic enough to want to read them.  Personally I will be voting yes, but you need not let that influence your decision.  Follow your own conscience wherever it leads you. The thing is, I thi

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  We all know that.  The question is, how do they do it? A couple of years ago I reviewed French economist Thomas Piketty's opus,  Capital in the 21st Century .   Piketty shows, using an impressive dataset and some simple equations, that the normal state of capitalist economies is that capital generates larger returns than labour, meaning that over time more and more of the resources in a society go to those who have capital. In Western societies this process was reversed in the immediate post-war decades by a combination of factors.  Rapid economic growth was driven by the recovery from two world wars and the Great Depression.  This led to wages growth and inflation, which redistributed income away from capital and towards labour.  To add to this, governments funded the reconstruction through high rates of inheritance tax, limiting the ability of capital to accumulate across generations. Since the end of the resulting boom in the 1