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....

Degrowth is simply the study of whether there are better means of measuring and generating human economic benefit other than through maximising GDP. This is one of the most important academic questions of our time. The fact that the chair of escr appears to not understand the idea is embarrassing

In the car today so flicking between radio 2 and 4 and OH MY GOD the BBC news headline writers hate the government

Sam of course an expert in policy exchange disingenuity, having worked there for 3 years

Where could we raise tax from? Well here are some stats: the top 10% of households earn 3.2x the median wage, 5x the median self-employment income, and 21x times the median investment income. They pay 4.2x the amount of tax (mostly on wages) but still end up with 2.9x the median disposable income

If only we had listened to rage against the machine

Worth noting that major drivers here are transport and hospitality spending, both areas of domestic expenditure that are driven by high earners (top 10% of earners consume 20% of transport and hospitality, top 20% consume 36%). www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...

New Cambridge Econometrics report out now on defining and measuring the UK Digital Economy. It might sound a bit dry but its important stuff, and some of the insights make for really interesting reading. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

New Cambridge Econometrics report out now on defining and measuring the UK Digital Economy. It might sound a bit dry but its important stuff, and some of the insights make for really interesting reading. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

I see more aggressive lobbying against wealth taxes from the millionaire tax avoidance adviser lobby today. Read these with a bucket full of salt.

Lots of comments on the ideal English "regions" - which rightly ignore the clumsy and ahistorical ITL1 regions we currently suffer with. The key here is to try to create (and name!) regions with coherent historic identities, with the functional economic geographies *that you aspire to*

Look at that, once upon a time I coached this lad

Deadline for this is Friday this week

This is a good explanation of what's happened, but rather than describing this a success, I'd describe falling into a role as a low cost centre as a serious economic regression that locks us into indefinite stagnation. Low cost service centre is basically one step up from being a commodity exporter.

Very good, apart from the "raise agglomeration by building motorways" bit, which is just... yeesh

The only way to get a new vehicle log book is to send a £25 cheque to the DVLA. (There is no online payment option and they specifically specify no cash). I haven't written a cheque in over a decade and no longer have a cheque book. What century is this?

The research explores the linkages between R&D to productivity down what we call "knowledge chains" or "innovation pathways" for 10 case study technologies. We start by developing a theoretical framework. The final systems map looked like this (read the exec summary for details)

A reminder on this - if you know someone who might be interested - let them know. There's ~two weeks left

Finally, different types of knowledge chains and value chains require different strategies in order to ensure the UK captures full value from its innovation efforts. We developed a neat visual guide here:

The full report can be found here: www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publications...

A major new report published for anyone interested in #innovation, #productivity, #industrialstrategy, #econsky. I'll now do a short thread that pulls out the main findings and recommendations...

A major new report published for anyone interested in #innovation, #productivity, #industrialstrategy, #econsky. I'll now do a short thread that pulls out the main findings and recommendations...

The British Academy and @sciencecampaign.bsky.social commissioned Cambridge Econometrics to conduct a systems-based analysis of the strengths and weaknesses within the UK’s innovation system. Read the full report: www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publications...

The UK needs many industrial strategies. Smarter growth begins with understanding value chains in innovation, say Daniel Rathbone and Eleanor Hopkins. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-v...

Three of our teams at CE - including mine! - are hiring: If you care about UK economic issues, about rigorous, evidence-led analysis, and have a good understanding of economics and high-level technical skills, apply here: app.occupop.com/shared/job/e...

Tim nice but dim here getting basic economics repeatedly explained to him in both the quotes and replies

This is a really disingenuous framing. 'should we stop the UK's best talent moving to London?' should really read 'should we stop giving the UK's best talent no choice but to move to London?'

Three of our teams at CE - including mine! - are hiring: If you care about UK economic issues, about rigorous, evidence-led analysis, and have a good understanding of economics and high-level technical skills, apply here: app.occupop.com/shared/job/e...

New ft 'how to spend it' festival accessory idea just dropped

I mostly agree with the conclusions here, which is that its the location of the most productive firms that then dictate wider productivity metrics (via Baumol effects). So its "firm" effects rather than "place" effects IMV. But them this begs two questions:

More importantly, when faced with slightly more complicated logic puzzles (not in the benchmark tests), they are completely unable to solve them There is no indication that LLM's will ever be able to generate anything that is not explicitly in their training data 2/2 pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/08/a...

Its quite telling that this article is all about hyping up AI, but the only concrete example they give (at Ocado) seems to be about using more robotics www.ft.com/content/5009...

I'm at a conference where a CEO just claimed llms would make office workers '300% more productive in a few years' @davidgerard.co.uk

So frustrating all the people in the article are so close to realizing that agglomeration benefits have diminishing returns and can go negative, but then conclude...

Another copilot banger. I asked it to convert a powerpoint into a word document - a simple task right? Apparently not

Deep research this is not. Its basically just a bunch of boldly unjustified assertions based on some entirely spurious associations and a load of handwaving about creative destruction. The few references there are don't really back up the claims they're supposed to support.

Why are solar panels and batteries from China so cheap? It's more to do with automation and state-of-the art manufacturing processes than cheap labour. www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-chea...

An interesting example of the atomistic fallacy, where statements about individual-level effects are used to draw erroneous conclusions about the the population as a whole. The fact that individuals have already optimised to the existing system does not imply that a superior system does not exist