There’s a solution to dire public services: make our public sector more productive
Pre-election blows are being traded with increasing ferocity by both the main parties. Do the costs of Labour’s energy policies bear scrutiny? And can the Conservatives really afford to cut taxes? All of these questions relate back to the state of the public finances. Taxes are already at a post-war high relative to the size […]
Marriage: Romantics bemoan its demise but so should economists
The dramatic erosion of marriage in the UK is one of the key social changes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Last week, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published data showing that for the first time the proportion of the population aged over 16 who were married had fallen to below 50 per cent. […]
May Cameron’s Wellbeing Unit rest in peace, money can buy happiness after all
Last month, the government announced that the What Works Centre for Wellbeing, set up with great fanfare by David Cameron in 2014 with the mission to boost national happiness, is to be shut down. Ever since the concept was first launched after the Second World War, the main focus of the policy of governments of […]
Sunak should be modelling his fiscal rules on Clem Attlee’s, not Margaret Thatcher’s
Normally, reading economic statistics is, for almost everybody, a sure-fire way of curing insomnia. Not anymore. The Office for National Statistics came out with yet another attention-grabber last week. Government debt in the UK, the august body pronounced, is now bigger than GDP for the first time in over 60 years. The statisticians did qualify […]
Yes, money can buy happiness and our well-being doesn’t plateau as we get richer
Does money buy happiness? The question is a perennial one. From ancient times we have the cautionary tale of King Midas, who, according to Aristotle, starved to death as a result of his “vain prayer” to turn everything he touched into gold. The quality of life is influenced by many factors other than money, as we […]
A miniscule bit of growth last November is unlikely to save us from a recession this year
In November last year, the economy grew by 0.1 per cent, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) last week. The news, in the midst of many a miserable headline, was greeted with great excitement. Most City economists had predicted a fall by around 0.2 per cent. Cue animated performances on the TV news […]
The Great Frost of Covid-19 will pass – and Britain’s economy will heat up
The Great Frost of 1709 has been in the news this week, quite possibly for the first time since 1709 itself. According to Bank of England estimates, this was the last time that GDP fell by more in a single year than it did in the Covid year we have just had. The Office for […]
Our tech advances are difficult for productivity stats to compute
One of the most depressing aspects of the decade of the 2010s, well before Covid-19 struck, was the apparently very slow growth in productivity. This is not a mere ivory tower issue. It is only through increasing productivity that rises in living standards can be sustained. Productivity is the key measure of the efficiency of […]
The ‘graduate premium’ is little more than a myth — invest in further education instead
Universities and their students are seldom out of the news. Ever since Tony Blair pledged to send 50 per cent of 18–21 year olds to university, they have been a persistent topic in political economy. University towns now notoriously favour Labour at the ballot box, often an island of red in a surrounding sea of […]
Want to level up the UK? Look at disparity within the regions, not just between them
It is a truth which has rapidly become universally acknowledged (to borrow Jane Austen’s famous phrase) that the government must deliver for its new supporters in the regions. This is a massive challenge. The gap in income per head, for example, between London and other areas of the country is obviously large. But the firm […]