The Coasian Hell series were some of the most popular posts ever on this blog, and I’m quite proud of them, so how about a follow-up? One Coasian objection to the concept might be that the actors in the system can trade their way around to an efficient outcome through side-bargaining between them. This is…
Read More Coasian Hell: Back Into HellSo how much money has the government spent on the contact-tracing programme? Silly question. Everyone knows the number is £12bn. Or maybe £22bn. I am generally sceptical of the National Audit Office; it’s managed to mission-creep into being a general purpose policy evaluation group, but its terms of reference haven’t kept up, so it has…
Read More how much do you think we spent on contact tracing?During the first lockdown I got around to watching the General Magic documentary. Having worked in the mobile industry for practically all my career so far, I am not surprisingly fascinated by the history of the technology and the repeated roads not taken. General Magic was a spinoff from Apple in the 1990s that tried…
Read More Three links on failure in Silicon ValleyThis raises the question of why it’s always “grade inflation” we hear about and never “grade growth” or “educational productivity improvement”. A while ago I responded to this Chris Cook piece about The One Where They Decided To Downgrade Everyone To Match Their Class Except For Subjects Only Rich Kids Do – remember that? it’s…
Read More looking back on an omnishamblesThis long read looking back at the 1978 smallpox outbreak in Birmingham is a remarkable document of mundane competence. Although the origin of the outbreak was a laboratory cock-up, the local authority swung into action, mobilizing local, national, and international resources, tracing contacts, isolating patients, and ring-vaccinating the bug out of existence. This is Dr.…
Read More Public incompetence is a moral issueA deep dive in what the Tigray vs Ethopian central government fight is about. People in the DRC President’s entourage keep dying unexpectedly. Some of them caught COVID-19 but at least one was definitely assassinated and another had both a heart attack and multiple blows to the head. What’s happening? A group of Kenyans wanted…
Read More Four links from a consistently strong blogIn the acracy post I briefly touched on the apparently influential idea that there’s an economic calculus you can apply to COVID-19 – an inverse relationship between R and GDP growth. I didn’t really want to go into it much because I was writing about acracy rather than economics, so let’s get back to it.…
Read More The Hancock curveWhen I was despairing about the very possibility of accountability and coming up with this post, I was thinking of things like this piece from Josephine Cumbo in this weekend’s Financial Times: Data obtained through a Freedom of Information request showed that since 2018 the Financial Conduct Authority has opened formal investigations into 29 firms…
Read More RottenAnother drive-by media studies thing. Efforts to regulate the media tend to focus on ownership (telco regulation people would say structural remedies) – should you be allowed to own a newspaper and a TV station? What about two TV stations? Can you vertically-integrate content production and distribution? Alternatively, they sometimes try functional things, like requiring…
Read More Andrew Neil should be broken up by the competition commissionAround the end of August I was despairing of political accountability on the grounds that the effectiveness of what is generally called spin, the practice of tactical political publicity, seemed to have improved significantly since about 2005. What really worried me about it is that if it’s a technology, it can be improved, and as…
Read More Cataloguing spin