path-dependent.bsky.social
Public policy stuff at Teesside University
https://research.tees.ac.uk/en/persons/nicholas-gray
984 posts
2,842 followers
1,299 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
comment in response to
post
Ok ok. I'm sure someone looks at these things occasionally.
Did you actually need it though, or were you making a point (...your own evidence on your dashboard shows you...")?
comment in response to
post
I didn’t say less data – I was thinking about trying to offer clean, definitive solutions from messy evidence. Sometimes you have to accept it’s messy and navigate it, which might be what you’re saying. Maybe the policy entrepreneur (slight) snark that people seem to like wasn’t quite right.
comment in response to
post
"It's complicated and we need more data" is sort of the opposite of what I was trying to say.
comment in response to
post
It's not so much always more data as accepting that the best available evidence can be mixed, complicated and sometimes contradictory.
I used the example of employment programmes where there's loads of evidence but... it's still complicated.
comment in response to
post
Of course, but I think sometimes we look for *the* answers when we need to accept and navigate contradictions and uncertainty in the evidence.
comment in response to
post
Haven't seen you on social media for ages (although I'm probably on less). Good to see you're around... I know you have to be careful what you say these days.
comment in response to
post
A simpler version of this is the dashboard or area profile, a hardy perennial in local government. Lets get all the information together in a handy toolkit for nobody to look at.
comment in response to
post
So, wouldn’t it be great if we could cut through all that and come up with a toolkit or model approach that would give policymakers a clear idea of what works, for who, and in what circumstances?
It sounds great but isn’t it just that this is an inherently complex problem?
comment in response to
post
Like something I've just been looking at.
We know that over the years there have been myriad policy interventions around worklessness and health, and they’re the subject of loads of evaluations and research that are (importantly) sometimes, possibly often, contradictory.
comment in response to
post
Which in turn reminded my of @gilesyb.bsky.social lessons from being a SPAD and the one stop shop fallacy.
Someone might have already said this and I can’t think of a snappy name... but I'm thinking of something like the evidence-based toolkit fallacy.
comment in response to
post
Wearing an unusual hat was always particularly unacceptable.
comment in response to
post
If you've ever been whatever was "alt" in a particular era (hippie, punk goth, whatever) in a provincial town or suburban neighborhood then you might remember the phenomena of strangers yelling some aspect of your appearance at you like it's the punchline to a joke.
Pink hair! Ripped jeans! Hat!
comment in response to
post
No cause for alarm. A victory for north against the southern fancy dans of Yorkshire.
comment in response to
post
My trigger happy pre-gloating ensured a decent show for the last wicket.
comment in response to
post
It seemed big and clever at the time.
comment in response to
post
Anyway, good thing it's father's day because these should have come with a health warning.
comment in response to
post
Don’t be calling the toon small, you’ll get green ink letters.
comment in response to
post
Yes, we’re not first people to say it since yesterday, but we could give London residents and businesses (through their elected representatives) the option of funding stuff themselves with a bit of additional taxation. We won’t though.
comment in response to
post
It appears that capital is finite, and government is prepared to make the trade-off of possibly slower overall growth to make a start on trying to reduce regional productivity gap. Risky but someone had to try?
comment in response to
post
Anyway, some disappointment at London not getting its big ticket asks in the SR and it’s fair to say there can’t be many lower risk public investments than London Underground.
comment in response to
post
For people of the right age, I don’t think it’ll ever be unsurprising that the streets south of Euston Road and around Caledonian Road are quite swanky and cool when it's difficult to exaggerate quite how insalubrious they used to be.
comment in response to
post
Had half an hour before the train and had never really taken time to look at the new stuff on my own before.
Wandering around in the sunshine, with people everywhere, I couldn’t help thinking about the “London has fallen” guys tweeting from their bedrooms 250 miles away
comment in response to
post
The back story is that, more than two decades after moving north, this person still loves laughing it up at mawkish Geordieisms (“Coming home Newcastle” is a particular favourite) so the combination of Sting and levelling up is like a Christmas present.
comment in response to
post
I'm not accountable for his actions.
comment in response to
post
Reminds me how much better wearing your home town football shirt is when you don't live there.
Wander around Barking in your West Ham shirt. Whatever. Wander around Newcastle in your West Ham shirt and you're *the* geezer.
comment in response to
post
Can't get out of the tired "that London" habit.
I used to call it that London when I lived here, which was very marginally funnier. Sometimes "this London".
comment in response to
post
Oh. Are we talking about those newfangled video games?
comment in response to
post
I can see Dom playing Call of Cthulhu… I guess he ran out of SAN points some time ago.
comment in response to
post
Clearly though, councils haven’t had the money to maintain leisure facilities or the basic public realm.
comment in response to
post
The NDC style stuff that Onward championed (if the plan for neighbourhoods still exists) isn’t the worst idea ever – neither was the older loose idea that councils did “regeneration” while bigger-ticket economic development was done at the strategic level.
comment in response to
post
We've said this I don't know how many times but it needs revenue funding
...and that doesn't mean tacking something like 'community and place' onto the remit of local growth plans, spreading limited resources even thinner (as with the Shared Prosperity Fund).
comment in response to
post
I'm looking forward to this story generating more 'Wilson closed more pits than thatcher' discourse over on X.
comment in response to
post
It doesn't feel appropriate to 'like' this post.
comment in response to
post
Anecdotally (and looking in the mirror) this encourages people from regional cities to go back to them when they get older and the choice is 'harder to find a good job' vs 'living on a roundabout off the m25'
comment in response to
post
In his sixties at the youngest.
comment in response to
post
All those experienced Welsh pitmen just raring to go
comment in response to
post
Greater London has only had devolution for a quarter of a century or so... perhaps we're all being impatient.