Look to Twitter for why Britain’s economy proved Project Fear wrong
The economic data on post-Brexit Britain is beginning to emerge. We discovered last month that employment in May to July grew by 174,000 compared to the previous three months. Last week, the Office for National Statistics published its estimate for the output of the service sector of the economy in July. This shows a 0.4 […]
The blob is wrong: competition and independence raise school standards
The A-Level results released last week confirm the dominance of schools in London and the South East. Provisional league tables have only appeared so far for state schools, but these two regions have two-thirds of the top 100. South Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear, and Wales did not have a single school between them in the […]
Why Britain and the US are streets ahead of Europe in innovation
The proposed takeover of the hugely successful ARM Holdings by the Japanese giant SoftBank is in the news. Cambridge-based ARM is well placed to exploit the white hot concept of the internet of things, highlighting the UK’s recent advances in this field. The UK has also performed well in biotechnology. But the industry came under […]
How Stalin’s right-hand man could help the UK in EU exit negotiations
The topic of behavioural economics is very fashionable. But many economists remain rather sniffy about it, arguing that it often does not really add to what the discipline already knows. But one of its most distinctive and strongest results from a policy perspective is its emphasis on what is called the “architecture of choice”. Economists […]
There’s a smart case for diversity – but it’s not the one you think.
Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, hit the headlines last week with his confession that even he could not understand much of the material which pension providers give to customers. Less noticed, however, was a speech he gave the previous week at a dinner organised in aid of Children in Need on […]
There’s little logic to 2016’s shareholder revolts against executive pay
The crisis at BHS has focused as much on the ethics of Phillip Green’s behaviour as it has on the plight of the company itself. Sir John Collins, who put his name forward for a knighthood, has said Green should be stripped of it if his handling of the beleaguered company is found to have […]
Scotland’s fiscal fantasy and the impact of an OUT vote
A short visit to the Highlands last week was refreshing. The scenery is just as spectacular as ever, and the people just as welcoming. But elsewhere, the tectonic plates are shifting. Last week, a televised debate took place amongst the political leaders contesting the elections to the Scottish Parliament in May. It resembled a bidding […]
The IMF is in trouble – and not just due to its poor forecasts
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has played a prominent role in world financial affairs in the post-Second World War period. In the 1950s and 1960s, its main purpose was to support the system of fixed exchange rates. Since then its activities have evolved to embrace developing economies and both banking and sovereign debt crises. The […]
What game theory tells us about David Cameron’s EU deal
Game theory is the study of how rules and tactics affect outcomes, and it is pervasive in academic economics. The opening sentence of one of the economics courses at Cambridge pontificates: “Optimal decisions of economic agents depend on expectations of other agents’ actions”. Translated into English, this means that, for someone in a negotiating situation […]
Why Julian Assange shows that only intelligent machines can be truly rational
Is Julian Assange rational? There are no prizes for guessing the responses of most City A.M. readers to this question. He faces questioning over allegations (which he denies) in Sweden, and he claims that America will try to extradite him and put him in prison for a very long time. Assange has chosen instead to […]
