Yesterday evening the Festival of Economics 2014 kicked off with the author John Lanchester in conversation with Izabella Kaminska of the FT. Lanchester, who is promoting his book How to speak money, had some very interesting and important things to say about the language of finance. His key […]
The JRF report What will the housing market look like in 2040?, released yesterday, provided an eye-catching and headline-grabbing answer to the question that acts as its title. Presumably grabbing the headlines was the point. The answer is that under plausible assumptions about future trajectories on tenure, costs and […]
A weekend post at Medium … The apps that made it
#housingday will be marked for the second time on 12th November 2014. It is an opportunity for people in the UK to make the case for housing, and for social housing in particular. Social housing organisations and tenants will be sharing experiences and stories of the difference housing […]
Last week I took part in an enjoyable discussion on nudge policy as part of Thinking Futures, the annual festival of social sciences. Through a slightly mysterious process I ended up speaking in favour of nudge-type policies, while Fiona Spotswood from UWE made the case against relying on […]
There are many roles in life I wouldn’t like to occupy. Quite high on that list is Labour party strategist. What on earth is the next move? Is the party genuinely in a tailspin? Or are current reports of internal strife the confection of a largely right wing […]
On Twitter the other day my attention was drawn to the revised version of Patrick Dunleavy’s thoughts on the matter of academic blogging. For the small number of you who perhaps may not be familiar with Professor Dunleavy he is not only one of the UK’s best known political scientists […]
Yesterday I was back up in that London to attend an event exploring UK housing policy. Many, of not most, of the luminaries of UK housing research made the same journey. The event covered quite a lot of ground, but at the same time the agenda was relatively […]
Last Thursday I toddled up to London to take part in a conference entitled Next Generation Solutions: Housing Transformation, organised by HACT/Northern Housing Consortium. I followed Frances Coppola as part of the final plenary session. My talk on the day was called Social Housing 2.0. But I’m not […]
The final report of the Lyons Housing Review – which may well be the last major party political publication on housing before the election – was published this week. How does it measure up? Has it delivered on the ambition to sort out the chronic problems of the UK’s […]
“a person is not likely to be a good political economist who is nothing else”
(JS Mill, 1806-1873)
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable”
(JK Galbraith, 1908-2006)
“Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult”
(Samuel Johnson, 1709-94)
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