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 belief, the Swedes did introduce a few legally enforceable restrictions on behaviour. For example, public gatherings of more than 50 people were forbidden in March. Private ones were exempt from the ban. But, overall, compared […]
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 of incompetence and mismanagement emerging. Public Health England (PHE) is at least going to be put out of its misery by health secretary Matt Hancock, and replaced with a new agency specifically focused on pandemics. […]
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 the city authorities on 6,936 randomly selected people found that some 40 per cent had coronavirus antibodies. Just 6,000 deaths have been reported so far in a city of 20 million. A similar exercise in […]
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 over the past 30 years. Not all economists have been persuaded of its merits by any means, but nevertheless, its influence has extended far beyond academia, into finance ministries and central banks around the world. […]
Why you should read the small print on alarmist Covid-19 death projections
Another day, another lurid, headline-grabbing number of deaths to expect from Covid-19. This time, it was a study from the Academy of Medical Sciences. A second wave, we were warned, could kill 120,000 this winter in hospitals alone. To be fair, this study was a projection rather than a forecast. A forecast is what is […]
Office clusters are as crucial to productivity as they ever were
The Prime Minister is now demanding that offices reopen to revive economic activity in the centres of towns and cities. But there is not much sign of a return to work. The preferences of the workforce are an important factor in the very slow pace of return. Fears expressed about the safety of public transport […]
The costs of lockdown could far outweigh the benefits
Radical leaders such as Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand and Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland have gained plaudits through their relentless focus on eliminating Covid-19. But this comes at an obvious economic cost. Tourism is some 15 per cent of New Zealand’s GDP, and major destinations such as Queenstown in the Southern Alps have been devastated. […]
Innovation is the only way to recover from the Covid crisis
One silver lining of the Covid-19 crisis has been a surge in innovation. Enterprising firms have invented both new products and different ways of delivering existing ones. Innovation is the life blood of any prosperous economy. Innovation is much more than a scientific invention. It turns inventions into things of practical and affordable use to […]
The government should have been working on multiple tracing apps all along
The NHS contract tracing app has been scrapped in favour of a system developed by Google and Apple. Although health secretary Matt Hancock has been heavily criticised for this failure, the UK is by no means alone. For example, Denmark, Germany and Italy each tried to build their own app, based on the same type […]
History shows us that slavery is an economic catastrophe as well as a moral one
Slavery has certainly been in the headlines in the past couple of weeks. Given this sudden interest in this area of history, it is worth considering the economic lessons it can teach us, as well as the moral ones. Slavery was abolished in England itself in the twelfth century. Then in 1772, Lord Mansfield gave […]
