Alexandre Afonso

Alexandre Afonso

Leiden University

Category: Uncategorized

  • The situation in Ukraine, in a nutshell.

    Read.

  • Journalism also Works like a Drug Gang

    I came across an old but interesting column by Roy Greenslade about “how journalism became a middle class profession“, describing how journalism progressively closed its doors to people from low-income backgrounds in Britain. I found it especially interesting because the logic described there is extremely similar to the “insider-outsider” logic I talked about for the Read.

  • Why School Choice is Bad for Social Mobility

    I am quite a good example of  social mobility. My parents only completed obligatory school – that was four years in rural Portugal in the 1950s – and started working at 12. They moved to France and then Switzerland in the 1970s, and worked their whole lives in unskilled jobs. In spite of that, I Read.

  • How Britain claims to fight wage dumping at home but does the opposite in Brussels

    Immigration is all the news. There isn’t a day when the government doesn’t come up with some new measure or declaration to fight or reduce immigration flows because they allegedly depress wages. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, said many times that she wants curbs in the free movement of workers in the EU to protect Read.

  • What does the Swiss immigration vote mean for Britain and the European Union?

    On February 9, Swiss voters accepted by a very slight margin a popular initiative spearheaded by the Eurosceptic Swiss People’s Party proposing to introduce immigration quotas for all categories of migrants entering Switzerland. The referendum has made the headlines of the international press, and its unexpected result – all other major parties, trade unions and business associations Read.

  • Why footballers (may) deserve ridiculous salaries and bankers don’t

    In spite of £8.2bn pounds in losses, the Royal Bank of Scotland is going to pay £588m in bonusses to its staff. The CEO of the – taxpayer-owned since 2008 – bank said that the issue of bank bonuses was a sensitive one, but that “I need to pay these people fairly in the marketplace Read.

  • La cuisine statistique de l’UDC

    On vote dimanche sur l’initiative “contre l’immigration de masse”. L’UDC a produit des projections de croissance de la population dans ses encarts publicitaires qui ont déjà été critiquées par Martin Grandjean (ci-dessus). l’UDC base ses projections sur la croissance de la population si l’immigration restait à des niveau similaires à ceux de ces dernières années, Read.

  • Dealing with email bankruptcy

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    On January 1st, New York Times journalist Nick Bilton, acknowledging that he would never be able to answer all of them, deleted a backlog of 46,315 unanswered emails and, officially declared email bankruptcy. A number of high-profile individuals have declared email bankruptcy over the last decade, the first being Lawrence Lessig in 2004. Just like Read.

  • How securing borders increases the number of immigrants

    In Nick Robinson’s BBC documentary “The Truth About Immigration” aired today, there was an interesting mention of the government’s objective being to reduce *net* migration to “the tens” of thousands. Net migration is obtained by computing two very large figures: the number of people who arrive in the country minus the number of people who Read.

  • An Official Message from the British Government to all Romanians and Bulgarians

    Related posts: The Next Home Office’s PR stunt     Read.