My Blog

Economics has a lesson for Remainers and lockdown-lovers who refuse to let facts change their minds
Christmas is a time to be charitable. So let’s spare a thought for those who fought against the referendum result.

Hurrah for a vaccine — but was lockdown actually worth it?
The development of the vaccines has changed many things. It has even influenced the opinion of the Prince of Lockdown

Economics lessons from history: Don’t expect a post-Covid boom
Just over 200 years ago, the finances of the British government looked even more parlous than they do today. Since

Want people to get the Covid vaccine? Pay them
The vaccines seem to be coming thick and fast. The task now is to ensure that enough people get them

It is science, not lockdowns, that will save the world
The various new vaccines announced over the past two weeks give real hope of a return to normal life. Of

The public are not to blame for the second lockdown
Justice secretary Robert Buckland last week blamed the public for England’s new lockdown. In particular, the fault was with people

Lockdown 2.0: A creative destruction revolution, or the death knell of innovation?
So Boris Johnson has failed to follow his own government’s guidelines on cost-benefit appraisal. Study after study by economists show

Forget the polls endorsing lockdowns and look at how people actually behave
Economics is at long last storming the bastions of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). This citadel of epidemiologists

The government must take back control of the Covid narrative
The word “narrative” is usually seen as being a posh way of saying “story”. But the idea of narratives is

Heavy-handed Westminster diktats have eroded trust — now only localised Covid policy can restore it
Last month, the official group of scientific advisers — SAGE — warned the government that only a quarter of those

Following the science? This government lacks a basic grasp of the scientific method
Verification and validation. It is hard to imagine a more nerdy phrase. But it is, in essence, how science makes

And this week’s winner for the Stupid Scientist award is…
Scepticism about the advice given by government scientists about Covid-19 is rising sharply. In areas like Bolton infections are high.

Incentives are a better way to tackle Covid-19 than blanket lockdowns
A great deal of government policy during the Covid crisis has involved regulation. Given a choice, economists usually prefer to

Coronavirus fatality rates are way down – why has the government not taken this on board?
King Canute has had a bad press. The monarch sat on the beach on his throne with the deliberate intention

On coronavirus, governments have been the most irrational of us all
Decisions, whether by individuals, companies or governments, are often made with imperfect and incomplete information. This is so obvious as

The national productivity recovery depends on getting people back to the office
Office workers continue to display reluctance to return to their workplaces, despite encouragement from the government for them to head

Sweden shows us whether lockdown was worth the economic cost
Did Sweden get it right in its response to Covid? There is increasing interest in this question. Contrary to widespread

Busting the myth of the selfless bureaucrat
There seems to be a fundamental problem with quangos. Hardly a day seems to go by without some new story

The costs of lockdown can no longer be justified
In an otherwise depressing week, two pieces of very good news emerged from India. In Mumbai, blood tests conducted by

Great expectations: The Darwinian wars of economic and epidemiological forecasting
A key concept in modern economics is, to use the jargon term, rational expectations. The idea has dominated orthodox macroeconomics