An overdue post this time, and I’ve decided to do the book review on Europe in this edition rather than a separate one. Some may say I didn’t have enough links that I found interesting enough to talk about, but I have nothing to add here.
A bit of a hodgepodge of links this week, with the first on Starmer’s last act, and an interesting read on football influencer Fabrizio Romano. Lastly, my thoughts on “Can Europe Survive?”, by David Marsh.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-apples-and-oranges-tribunal.html
- A short but scathing post by Alex Tabarrok from Marginal Revolution on the ridiculous Equality Act’s “equal value” provisions, which essentially mandate that a judge decides the value of labour.
- This is the best explanation about why free markets are necessary:
- Free markets are the only institution that aggregates that knowledge, articulates it in prices and gives people a reason to listen and respond. A price is a signal wrapped up in an incentive.
- Turning back to the UK:
- How is it going? The Tesco litigation began in 2018; the tribunal’s fact-finding hearing ran 36 days, its judgments run to more than 900 pages resting on some 19,000 pages of training manuals, and the independent experts have yet to begin the report that will actually say whether a shelf-stacker’s job equals a warehouse worker’s. Eight years, and the calculation has not started.
- The government now proposes to add race and disability comparisons and an enforcement unit to publish official guidance on which reasons for a wage difference are permissible. A bureau of allowable scarcities.
- This has been mostly slept on in the UK, at least in most of the mainstream press I’ve seen. I’m speculating, but perhaps because it says “equality pay provisions”, people believe this is rectifying differences in pay between men and women for the same job.
- In reality, what is actually happening is a tribunal is deciding what a job is “worth” and deciding it is equal to another one on court-decided criteria. Hence, a warehouse worker and an employee at the till are treated as the same. Up is down, left is right, and so on.
- This is set to get even worse under the Labour government, who are extending the criteria to race and disabilities. The chance of further massive legal liabilities for companies and other entities is increasing, when the economy is already fragile.
- Alternatively, we could stop trying to mandate what is fair through the legal system, and return to economics. Your focus as the “Labour” party presumably is as high a salary for the lower and middle income groups as possible. Return to the basics of supply and demand – make it easier for demand to rise by undoing NIC rises and the Employee Rights Act, and reduce supply by reducing immigration in low-wage sectors. Let the market tell you what jobs are worth when individuals are scarce.
https://goldengoal.world/2026/06/10/from-agueroooooo-to-here-we-go/
- Elle Hardy goes into detail about the rise of football influencer and transfer guru Fabrizio Romano, before examining the corruption around the wider game.
- By helping to transform the transfer market into a minute-by-minute drama, he’s ensured that for a certain subsection of fans, the decisive moment in their footballing lives isn’t necessarily when a goal is scored on the pitch. For many, that moment of ecstasy is now delivered with a flurry of thumbs, condensed to his three-word catchphrase when a deal crosses the line: here we go.
- Perhaps some context for those without any ball knowledge here: transfers are addictive to fans. It allows us to dream of world-class players coming to our clubs who can lead us to glory, and for the most part, you don’t have to be bound by realism (until the accounts are revealed).
- Romano is not someone I follow, but it’s impossible to escape his influence, which is incredible given he’s just an individual.
- In the second half, Hardy turns her attention to how football has increasingly been dominated by money, increasingly so under Gianni Infantino, and how Romano fits into this.
- Consider the trajectory of football’s most famous sounds. For a previous generation, not so long ago, the apex was Martin Tyler’s howl as Sergio Agüero’s goal crossed the line in the dying seconds of the 2011–12 Premier League season, seeing Manchester City overhaul bitter rivals Manchester United to win their first league title in forty-four years: “Agueroooooo!” For millions of fans today, the equivalent is “here we go,” posted by Romano upon confirmation of the closing of a transfer deal. Football’s narrative power, for so long directing the dreams of billions, has moved from events on the pitch to the surrounding financial machinery. This is not entirely Romano’s doing, but he has been its most effective chronicler, and its most powerful accelerant.
- I think there is no doubt that football is increasingly dominated by money, and that there are new generations of fans primarily interested in the “financial banter” – who did you sign, who did you sell, who came out on top, etc etc. But I also note I have never seen as good content on clubs, including tactics, history, deep dives into tactics and player analysis. Though much less flashy than Romano, the true core of fandom remains.
Can Europe Survive?
- I’ve been meaning to read this for some time but only just got around to it fairly recently. Given its nature – history, geopolitics, economics, and international relations, I felt confident I’d be interested in it. I’m glad to report that it was a good read and should be added to the reading list of anyone interested in understanding how Europe got here.
- Something to immediately flag right now is that given the book scope, there are inevitable shortcomings – it covers a huge amount, and each chapter, from the Europe-US relationship to France-Germany, to the history of the Euro, and so on, could have been books in themselves. But what really elevates it is the number of individuals interviewed for it, across both sides of the Atlantic.
- Given the subject, there’s a huge number of areas to cover. In no particular order:
- The Euro is a huge part of Europe’s history and therefore the books. The obvious problem is that if you form a monetary union, you need a fiscal union as well; otherwise you risk being vulnerable to crisis. As the book explores, from the beginning the Euro was a political instrument – a way to embed the newly unified Germans into the European project, while making Europe a rival to the dollar, and increasing influence. The amount of energy European leaders have had to spend managing this since 2008 has been extreme and has almost certainly distracted them from other equally pressing challenges.
- It’s hard to say what will happen here. Ultimately, I can’t really see the Euro being allowed to fail, given the amount of prestige and investment in keeping it going. But until it is properly economically rectified, it will continue to hang as a millstone around European countries’ necks.
- The Europeans (and the Americans) got the post-Cold War order badly wrong. It’s striking just how much attention and time was dedicated to Putin in this book, with Germany in particular looking very poor here. Chancellors such as Schröder and later Merkel appeared to ignore Russian history or believe that economics was enough on its own to prevent war. What I appreciated in Marsh’s story was the immediate post-Cold War history, and the interviews around the NATO expansion into the Baltic states. Arguably, Russia had a point about being misled about this (but then, try not to constantly invade your immediate neighbours and then be surprised that they never want this to happen again). Where Europe went wrong was forgetting that defence is an insurance payment. Even in good times it needs to be paid, and unfortunately we just refused to. Now we are in catch-up mode, in a much more difficult global environment.
- China is also crucial here, and I found it striking how even now it seems that Europe is unable to reckon with such a geopolitical rival. China’s economic model will strangle European industry, indeed, it is already doing that. But we consistently see attempts by European leaders to praise the Sino-European relationship and to try to position Europe as a third player between America and China. That is deluded. Until Europe reactivates its economy, which is mostly down to domestic reforms, Europe will continue to be dependent on the USA and vulnerable to China.
- Marsh naturally does think Europe can survive, but needs significant reforms to do so, such as those outlined in the Draghi report. In a way, this is pretty old news. Europe has not been renowned for its dynamic job markets, technology sector, and economic growth for some time. The question is, why would it change now? I’m increasingly pessimistic about this. Stagnation is harder to get out of than outright collapse, as problems can be hidden or slowly emerge, as we see in the UK right now. The short-term domestic pressures across Europe tend to act against radical reform; why suffer economic pain and poor polling for an uncertain return?
