Should AVs be held to higher standards?

In the three weeks since the first fatal crash involving an AV and a pedestrian, plenty of questions have been raised about the safety of self-driving cars. A question to think about soon will be: ‘how safe should AVs be expected to be before they will be accepted on our roads?’. AVs have massive potential […]

Forget exploitation, motorists choose to pay sky high fuel prices

Politicians have an irresistible urge to meddle. The latest example is the fanfare orchestrated just before Easter by Chris Grayling, the transport secretary. He wrote to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to criticise the price of fuel at motorway service stations. Grayling called for the UK’s three biggest operators – Moto, Welcome Break, and […]

Why can PwC charge such superhuman fees? It’s all in the power of bargaining

The liquidation of Carillion continues to feature prominently in the news. Last week, the story was the fees being charged by PwC, the accountancy firm tasked with salvaging money from the wreckage. It emerged that PwC’s fees, which take priority in terms of being paid over the various creditors and pensioners, amounted to £20.4m for […]

The chancellor should heed Keynes – and keep public spending down

Last week’s Spring Statement by chancellor Philip Hammond has led to predictable calls to “abandon austerity”. With massive hyperbole, Labour accused him of “astounding complacency” in the face of what they claimed to be the worst ever public funding crisis. The facts are rather different. Far from being squeezed, after allowing for inflation, current spending […]

The social media battle against fake news has begun – beware your own emotions

Did Donald Tusk, the former Prime Minister of Poland and now president of the European Council, conspire with Vladimir Putin to murder the President of Poland, Lech Kaczynski? Many Poles believe this preposterous story, I learned last week at a fascinating conference on social influence at the University of Warsaw. In 2010, a Polish Air […]

Altruism and information deficits: What snowstorms teach us about economics

While weather may not seem like a typical economics topic, there are always interesting aspects to behaviour in any context. Quite a number of drivers, for example, appear to have ignored notices of road closure. They drove on regardless, until becoming stuck in the snow. In Greater Manchester, which seems to have been the vortex […]

Surplus is necessary for resilience in an unpredictable world

Our flood management systems are under increasing pressure. In recent years the UK has been hit by several extreme floods which have ruined homes and businesses, and taken lives. Population growth and climate change are expected to make flooding worse: analysis for the 2017 Climate Change Risk Assessment estimated that flood risk will increase by […]

The university pensions strike is a selfish bid to hold future generations to ransom

University lecturers began a strike over their pensions last week. The dispute may even run on and jeopardise the summer exams. The main issue is that the universities’ pension scheme seems to be in substantial deficit. To solve the problem, a move from defined benefits to defined contributions is proposed. With the former, the pension […]

Master the art of brinkmanship to run Brexit rings around Barnier

Michel Barnier invokes a wide range of emotions this side of the Channel. To his credit, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator appears to have a stronger grasp of the insights of game theory than his UK counterparts. Thomas Schelling, the polymath winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, advanced the science of game theory in […]