So, did ya ever want to know social network analysis metrics on the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport’s special advisers during the spring of 2011, as Rupert Murdoch’s interests in the UK feverishly lobbied Jeremy Hunt and his staff and we raced towards the epochal eruption of Hackgate? ‘Course you did. In June, 2011,…
Read More Hunt, through a non-sexist prismVia Simon Wren-Lewis‘s blog. You see the flattish bit from 2002 to 2008? When people like Hopi Sen talk about “spending out of control”, that’s the bit they mean. This is some weird use of the word “control”, huh? In fact, the only period on the chart where the budget wasn’t either busting or booming…
Read More Look after unemployment and…Econospeak has been having a debate about whether aggregate supply/aggregate demand models are actually any use in economics, which is important because pretty much everyone who does a macroeconomics class gets taught them, like me. One of the things I remember being dissatisfied with was how to reconcile the long-run aggregate supply curve with the…
Read More Green FriedmanUnlearning Economics touches on Daniel Kahneman’s System One/System Two distinction. I think it’s worth repeating something that struck me about Thinking, Fast and Slow here. Kahneman specifically refuses to make a value judgment between the two, and repeatedly stresses that people trust to intuition for the very good reason that intuition is very often right.…
Read More quick KahnemanJonathan Portes reviews David Goodhart. A sample: ‘Bradford has just opened two more schools for children with Special Educational Needs,’ he writes. ‘On some measures nearly half of all children in the area qualify for special help.’ No source. However, the Department for Education publishes the statistics, and it turns out that in Bradford, the…
Read More Goodhart: majority of Bradfordians are twisted mutantsThis post on Abou Djaffar‘s fine blog expresses something that the Woolwich murder made me feel. It was a perfect demonstration of the dreadful way availability entrepreneurs come out of the woodwork, the spirit of Why the Bombings Mean You Should Support My Politics, a text that looking back accurately predicted the tone of our…
Read More Demonise the availability entrepreneurs, an occasional series