ChatGPT-5 absolutely nailing this explanation of supply and demand #AGI #thefuture #moneywellspent

It has become received wisdom in Brussels and Washington that there is a new “euro-sclerosis”: that the EU economy is lagging the US This view is wrong A little primer on the measurement of productivity – and why reports of the economic death of Europe are greatly exaggerated🧵

💰How much is too much? The top 10 wealthiest people in the world now own more than the poorest 3 billion combined, and the average billionaire’s carbon footprint is 1 million times that of the average person. Is it time to draw the line on extreme wealth? neweconomics.org/2025/01/expl...

Indeed - the entire point of regulation is to try to provide a fair balance between producer and consumer surplus and eliminate rents all together. Treating rents as inevitable is both a failure of imagination and an abandonment of regulatory duty

Watching the Asia trade and I will never get bored of shery ahns inability to ask questions using normal question intonation and the confusion this causes in interviewees

What if *everyone's wrong* and we still haven't found the answers to the multiple crises (omnicrises?) we face? At the same time Messrs Campbell & Stewart have their critics: the former in Downing Street & policies leading up to the banking crisis; and the latter voting for Osborne's policies.

Not to dunk - at all - but I think there is something about how young journalists a) aren't that well paid and b) of all professions, have the least opportunity to locate somewhere other than London, that means they are extremely sensitive to "middle class and can't afford to live in zone 2" issues

Nice dataviz from the ONS showing median wealth split by category at different points of the distribution: www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...

Opportunity to equalise rates of tax and eliminate cliff edges in marginal rates, missed. Opportunity to reform stamp duty, missed. Opportunity to shift tax burden away from workers, missed. Opportunity to incentivise investment, undermined. Opportunity to drive EV adoption, undermined...

Celebrating Our New City-REDI Associates We are pleased to announce our new City-REDI Associates, who will join a vibrant community of researchers and policy experts working on some of the most pressing challenges facing cities and regions today. Meet our new associates - https://ow.ly/a86l50XuzJa

Tbh id have thought the motivation of old rich men to socialise with a man who specialised in arranging for old rich men to rape children doesn't take a lot of second guessing.

One of the best conferences of the year, looking around and everyone who is anyone in UK regional policy and thinking seems to be here #rsa

Incentivising the middle classes to save less and spend more is incredibly stupid and counterproductive short term fiscal policy AND undermines the entire 'economic rebalancing from consumption to investment' project labour were elected to implement AND their desire to see more money in UK stocks

Robbie Gibb is such a national disgrace that *even if I were a devout partisan right winger* I'd still want to see him immediately summarily sacked, all his honours stripped, and an enquiry opened into his conduct and his role in this debacle and many others.

This is the US but the UK figures are not far off. Unless you honestly believe the top 10% create 50% of all economic value then †by definition† this group is massively undertaxed. Tax them!

This is the US but the UK figures are not far off. Unless you honestly believe the top 10% create 50% of all economic value then †by definition† this group is massively undertaxed. Tax them!

Anyone else find this bizarrely confused and incoherent? Amongst other things confuses supply with demand a number of times, and even conflates 'competitive sectors' with 'high wage sectors', a pretty alarming error

My other contrarian thought about LLMs is that yes they're clearly useful for some stuff but they're perhaps not going to get much more useful than this. They're also already widely used for the things they're useful for, so perhaps their productivity impact has... already happened?

Seems to be as clear a case of false attribution as you're likely to see. Wealth is not the causal factor, green space and vegetation is. Lower income areas don't *have* to lack green space, it's a choice

According to Berlin, "a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing". I've always thought this was BS, but people seem to like it & make the case for the importance of foxes, essentially as generalists who can see the big picture. But in a world with chatgpt, what do we need foxes for?

Can anyone explain why we can't tax share awards to employees/partners as income at the point of award?

Can anyone explain why we can't tax share awards to employees/partners as income at the point of award?

@sachahilhorst.bsky.social thought you might find this interesting

I hadn't seen this before - I don't entirely agree with all the numbers but its a welcome approach to an underacknowledged problem neweconomics.org/2009/12/a-bi...

Excellent - hope this is all over facebook/tiktok etc

I do think we need a moratorium on mainstream commentators describing literally any policy other than managed decline as "populist"

A reminder to economic journalists that the purpose of the entire exercise is to restructure our economy away from consumer services and towards construction and investment; so if the former falls and the latter rises, this is *a good thing*. It is the intended outcome of government economic policy.

bsky.app/profile/czed... Sorry but this is wrong. High tea is not and has never been a synonym for supper. Tea is a late afternoon meal, high tea is just a big tea. Supper is a late evening meal. totally different.

If we ever want productivity growth ever again, we need to rebuild UK national capital stocks which requires a massive increase in both public and private investment. The only way to do this whilst maintaining macroeconomic stability is to simultaneously reduce consumption. So we take measures to...

Amazing quote. Art is fundamentally something humans make for the sake of making something; the only reason to experience someone else's art is to see what another human made. There is - definitionally - no such thing as AI produced art.

Ah yes, the result of 15 years of Tory education policy is a massive upsurge in parents feeling that the system is now so horrendously dysfunctional they have no other option other than to actually quit work and educate their kids at home themselves

Any analysis that treats Trump, Musk and the rise of Corporatist Fascism as some weird historical aberration is fundamentally missing the point. This is the inevitable, unavoidable and entirely predictable endpoint of the sociopathic winner-takes-all economic system we've been building since the 80s

in which, I continue to plead for systems thinking in planning, reprising last night's bluesky rant, so people who read that can be excused. backofmind.substack.com/p/canaries-a...

Down in that London today at @britishacademy.bsky.social

I think the takeaway message here is that reform voters, particularly the working class ones, are far, far more economically left wing than actual reform party position and there's a very obvious strategy for progressive parties to make them aware of this

Interesting to compare the choice of locations, with a map showing current momentum in housing pressures post pandemic.

Interesting to compare the choice of locations, with a map showing current momentum in housing pressures post pandemic.

I've changed my mind on AI somewhat. The main current risk of over-enthusiastic UK AI adoption is not that it doesn't work, its that it *does* work at the enterprise level, but as a means of extracting rents more efficiently, locking us in to a increasingly uneven and extractive economic system.

Am I right in saying that the rate that you pay tax on dividends, rent, savings etc depends entirely on your wages from employment, so you could be earning a million in dividends and rent and still pay the lower rate as long as your wage is under 50k?

scrolling through an old slide pack from 2020 looking for something else, I found some predictions I made about the impact of the pandemic and remote work - I think these hold up quite well

Some of the UK’s most distinguished economists have written to the Chancellor warning that fiscal sustainability will not be achieved “without a significant further increase in public investment” to drive economic growth: www.thetimes.com/article/5acc...

Everyone should read this. Reform have a voting coalition of old school Tories and the large and growing number of anti system voters. Only another anti system party can really hope to take that latter segment off them IMO

Thought experiment. If we just zeroed the bank accounts of every billionaire, what would happen to total global wealth?

We've had 45 years of 'all we need is to deregulate and privatise and everything will be great' and instead everything has got steadily worse. Maybe its time to try something different

Astonishingly, I've discovered, the Tufton Street junktanks that shaped Liz Truss's agenda are still operating at the heart of government. Remind me what we voted for again ... This week's column. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Latest in 'current labour government aren't on the centre right' news

the "tax the billionaires" political refrain is Good Actually in part because it is a call for the people at the top to actually be constrained by rules informed by the public interest, a virtue that fingerwagging correctives about how much revenue such taxes would *really* generate doesn't address

As the government panics about bond market gyrations, its always useful to understand how the UK government actually finances itself: by creating new money, just like a bank. New paper with @AskerVoldsgaard, Neil Wilson, Andrew Berkeley and Richard Tye. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....