Life under Network Rail offers a glimpse of the future if Corbyn were left in charge

The shambles that is Network Rail continues to blight our lives. City A.M. readers may have experienced the cancellation of many services into Waterloo on Monday, due to engineering works overrunning. Even the best-laid plans can go astray. But this week was not just a one-off event. It seems to be a permanent feature of […]
Altruism and information deficits: What snowstorms teach us about economics

While weather may not seem like a typical economics topic, there are always interesting aspects to behaviour in any context. Quite a number of drivers, for example, appear to have ignored notices of road closure. They drove on regardless, until becoming stuck in the snow. In Greater Manchester, which seems to have been the vortex […]
Mind the gap: Economics is catching up to the fact that we’re not always rational

Do Tube strikes make Londoners better off? At first sight, the question is simply absurd. The answer is surely “no”. But a paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics comes to the opposite conclusion. Cambridge economist Shaun Larcom and his colleagues analysed the two-day strike of February 2014. They obtained detailed travel information on nearly […]
Neo-Luddites won’t like it, but the UK must keep on (driverless) truckin’

The announcement that experiments will take place with driverless lorries on UK motorways ought to be a cause for celebration. Once again, human ingenuity is pushing out the frontiers of technology. But the general reaction in the media has been one of anxiety and concern. Wholly contradictory arguments have been advanced against them. Driverless cars […]