Month: October 2013

Seeking a post-crash economics

Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis. Attributed to Kenneth Boulding From a couple of posts in the Guardian over the last week you could get the sense that the move to recast economics is gathering momentum. Last Thursday the emergence of the Post-Crash Economics […]

Towards a global parliament of mayors?

How should a world characterised by increasingly complex interdependence be governed? If most of the major challenges we face have no respect for the artificial borders marking out nation states, how can we identify and deliver effective solutions? The answer Benjamin Barber offered in his stimulating presentation at the Bristol Festival […]

On doing what academic bloggers do

A paper by Inger Mewburn and Pat Thomson entitled Why do academics blog? An analysis of audiences, purposes and challenges has just appeared online. The paper caught my attention, and not simply because it quotes at length from a post I wrote back at the beginning of the […]

Help to Buy and the death of Keynesianism

When I first studied macroeconomics the Stagflation era of the 1970s and the death of Keynesianism were still being quite hotly debated. They were still contemporary events. Well, they were contemporary events in the way that the election of Tony Blair is a contemporary event for us today […]

Tenants uniting?

For a long time we have thought of the private rented sector as the most disorganised part of the housing market. Most properties were let by small landlords who owned one or two properties. Very few landlords belonged to any form of trade association, although around half let […]

Housing association futures

My post discussing possible housing association futures has just appeared on the HotHouse website. It is a cut down version of Housing associations and the path to 2033, the text to accompany my HotHouse talk, posted here a few days ago.

Recalibrating the savings from the bedroom tax

To be fair to the DWP, ex ante assessment of the impacts of policy change is difficult. Especially when the impacts rely upon behavioural effects that are unknown and unknowable in advance. So when it modelled the savings from the implementation of the so-called bedroom tax it was […]

Browne study

Reshuffle day is for politics nerds as transfer deadline day is for football supporters. You hope for some big name signings and some surprise moves between big clubs, but most of the activity takes place in the lower divisions. What was the most interesting component of today’s activity? […]