gavinjackson.bsky.social
Writing about economics at the Economist
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Turning text into markdown, extracting a table from some writing, speeding up coding and getting to grips with the “mean” opinion on an area have all been helpful for me. It’s basically a Microsoft office plugin.
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Yeah they’re not everything machines and they’re not god but they do make a bunch of software tasks a bit better.
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I think we don’t know enough to say that we even raise the probability. And even more difficult for political engagement is that we don’t know whether our ends are the right ones, even if the means work.
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Essentially this.
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The only argument I think works is that political engagement is a pro-social behaviour that you should adopt even though it is likely to lead to personal costs and unlikely to lead to any positive public consequences.
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*unconvinced
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Yum yums and yummy mums
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“Call it Pastry Britain”
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Well most governments have adopted a strategy of subsidising purchases of Norwegian fossil gas but even so if you add up 1) and 2) then you have a bit of a strategic argument.
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Newcastle dal, maybe?
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Newcastle hummus sounds like a euphemism for something disgusting unfortunately. Tyneside hummus? Gateshead hummus?
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Also if you don’t like Reform because of their stance on Trump, migration and Brexit then the LDs are one of the only parties that provides you with an alternative.
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You also get a slice of cake tbf
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Three ways to take this:
1) Europe lacks fossil fuels so reduces import dependence
2) climate change is a threat to public safety
3) strategic in terms of industrial strategy and Europe has decided it wants to shape its economy to be green
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Have to say I’m shocked that exams weren’t in-person anymore. Even before AI it sounds ripe for cheating.
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While it doesn’t make sense from an economic perspective, I think there is a strong instinct that green policy is something you do when fossil fuel costs are low (because people can afford it) rather than high.
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Yes, and I think that the state may feel like a greater presence in the economy of China (33% of GDP) than Germany (50% of GDP).
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And then there's things like the BBC. Funded by a tax and a public sector body, but is it part of the state? Are universities? "Shrinking the state" normally associated with privatisation but government spending on a private company would count as "the state" in this metric.
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I don't think that's true. Healthcare is a luxury good (demand increases proportionately more as a % of GDP as GDP grows) and is provided by the state. As GDP grows we should expect increasing demand for better healthcare, partly through improved life expectancy.
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Much harder to export to the EU
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Is diesel trucks?
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Not as far as Crystal Palace!
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Personally I think that it should only be done shamefully and furtively in dark rooms rather than discussed in the pages of serious newspapers but enough about video games.
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Feel as if this just tells us that monthly changes in GDP aren't that helpful.
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I did wonder, given the week's discourse, if we should have serious games writing because young men are spending a lot of time on video games and they're an influence on how adult men think then we should probably have porn writing too.
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Nah, I don't agree with that.
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The OBR enhances the power of the chancellor by giving them more tools to push their preferences onto other departments, rather than undermining elected politicians. Truss and Kwarteng were simply bad at this game.
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So best way to understand it is a big expansion in social housing?
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Yeah “wage growth” and “full employment”
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Then enjoy paying high interest rates instead.
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This could be us, but you playin’
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Put taxes up then.
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Surely levelling up was just a reversal of the “levelling down objection” to egalitarianism, which anyone having studied PPE at Oxford since 1997 would be familiar with?
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And none have had much success
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Guess I’m sceptical that Sunak got the idea for Freeports from Sim City rather than working backwards from the idea of post-Brexit deregulation.
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And Poland