Month: March 2014

The Q#1 quintet, and more

Here are the five posts on this blog that recorded the most hits between January and March 2014: Uncertain terrain: Issues and challenges facing housing associations (11th May 2013) Why is Owen Jones so annoying? (4th July 2013) My top ten blogs 2013 (29th Dec 2013) A voyage of […]

The Conservatives as keepers of the liberal flame

Over at the New Statesman on Friday Ryan Shorthouse argued that liberals should look to the Conservatives to find the party delivering on a liberal agenda. In the post he reprises some themes that he set out in his contribution to the Liberal Reform fringe meeting at Liberal Democrat […]

The economics we need, not the one we’ve got

A little late in the day I’ve just finished Adair Turner’s Economics after the crisis: objectives and means, published in 2012. It is based on Turner’s 2010 Lionel Robbins lectures. Economics after the crisis is a thoughtful book which makes a number of relatively simple but profound points. The […]

On the impact of economic ideas

Yesterday Noah Smith discussed whether economists’ ideas and arguments have much of an influence on policy and practice. He used an edited version of a famous quote from Keynes as his jumping off point. He then considered whether we can credibly claim that any living economist has significant […]

Housing policy as if people mattered

We’re doing the housing policy debate all wrong. That, at least, is the argument Danny Dorling advances in his recent book All that is solid: The great housing disaster. At the heart of the book is the claim that the focus on increasing the supply of new homes […]

Beyond the council tax

The council tax is unlovely and unloved. It was rushed into being as a replacement for the hated poll tax. Its structure has always been an uncomfortable compromise, somewhere between a charge for services and a genuinely progressive property tax. The property values upon which it is based […]

Doing something about housing

What to do about the housing crisis? It’s a question that, should you have been so inclined, you could have focused on throughout much of yesterday’s proceedings at Liberal Democrat Spring Conference. A motion on the reform of planning policy was passed, unamended, during the morning’s official business. […]

Fighting talk

These days it seems we’re more likely to hear politicians talk about a “cost-of-living crisis” or, possibly, allude to problems of housing affordability than we are to find them discussing “poverty”. Indeed, we’re back in an era where the whole concept of poverty, and whether there are any […]