Uncategorized Archives - Centre for Enterprise Markets and Ethics

November 4, 2025

Markets and the Environment (Conclusion)

Conclusion In the next decades increasing shares of personal and societal wealth willbe spent mitigating environmental harms. These harms are often blamed on the ramifications of the market system. To some extent this is true but the complaints too often ignore the human betterment deriving from the activity that results in environmental degradation. At its...

November 4, 2025

Markets and the Environment (Chapter 3)

Environmental Economics and Improving Environmental Policy Economics has become less a series of doctrines than … an engine of analysis in which techniques, ranging from the theory of public goods and externalities, ideas about the role of property rights, negotiation, incentives, and mechanism design, are used together with ideas from other disciplines to work out...

November 3, 2025

Markets and the Environment (Chapter 2)

Coase, Ostrom and the Economics of Government Action What this theory [mid-century neoclassical welfare economics] demonstrated, in a nutshell, was that perfect markets work perfectly, imperfect markets work imperfectly, and perfect government can cause imperfect markets to also function perfectly.[1] Steven Medema The theme of Chapter 1 was how features of some goods...

October 31, 2025

Markets and the Environment (Chapter 1)

Economic Theory and Market Failure: A Synopsis To speak about economics as applied to environmental harms, one must know something about economics generally and its conceptual frameworks as applied to policy. While possibly seeming dry and abstruse, these fundamental concepts have direct relevance, including for those more interested in environmental than economic issues. However, this...

October 31, 2025

Markets and the Environment (Introduction)

Introduction At the launch of the Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics, our founding chairman Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach remarked that: [W]hile a market economy is superior to other economic systems which have been tried, it is far from flawless. Financial stability, environmental sustainability and inequality in income and wealth are three critical challenges to...

Private Planning and the Great Estates Cover

August 14, 2025

Private Planning and the Great Estates (Conclusion)

What lessons are to be learnt from the great estates and their role in the development and redevelopment of London? The physical development of a city is not, as is often supposed, merely another aspect of its economic activity. Decisions on the use of land are absolutely fundamental to the way people live on it....

August 14, 2025

Chapter 3: The Rise of Public Planning

Parts 2 and 3 emphasised the historical role of private planning in the development and redevelopment of modern London, and argued that it had some of the benefits often claimed for regulated systems, such as responding dynamically to changing circumstances and solving externality problems. This chapter traces the role of the state in regulating the...

August 14, 2025

Chapter 2: Falling in and building up: adaptation and the leasehold system

London’s expansion was neither uniform nor managed: London was expanding in the 1870s hand over fist, or rather in fits and starts. How was all that growth managed? Of planning in the modern sense of the word there was none to speak of, either physical or economic. London was still strictly laissez-faire; it had no...

August 14, 2025

Private Planning and the Great Estates (Introduction)

We can learn much from urban history. Perhaps more interesting than the record of any particular time period are the dynamics of the system: how cities respond to changes in markets, technology and social forces. In the last 70 years, parts of London have changed greatly. The skyline, once dominated by St Paul’s,...

August 14, 2025

Chapter 1: Basics of Leasehold Development and Planning on the Great Estates

From the seventeenth century onward countless town planners (who would never have called themselves that) were engaged in imposing rationally conceived patterns of growth and development on London. For the most part they were not associated with any political body but were connected with one or another of the ground landlords or building speculators who...

June 13, 2025

Interviews

Conversations with the Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics Perspectives on contemporary issues There are growing concerns that capitalism and democracy are in crisis. Despite the success of free markets in creating global prosperity over two centuries, the recent slowdown in growth in Western economies, the persistence of inflation, increasing economic inequality, financial instability and...