Another micro-blog, this time on PFI, and a not very hot take on Carillion and Capita. I was going to avoid talking about the collapse of Carillion. I get a bit frustrated talking about PFI because lots of people strongly dislike it without knowing much about it, which makes for a less than fun debate. … Read more
I was a Miner, I was a Banker/I was a Quantitative Analyst/Between the Wars/I played at Glastonbury/In time of austerity A bit of a follow up from last weeks look at the ways property wealth, property tax and pension wealth interact and how monetary policy can change how wealth is re-distributed. While I was writing … Read more
Last month I wrote about attitudes to inequality specifically why I think that recent headlines about Rampant Inequality are way off the mark. The belief that we live in an era of great inequality is so prevalent that a lot of people reacted with disbelief when I wrote that wealth inequality in the UK was … Read more
The two headlines above, one from the Washington Post, and one from the Guardian are typical of recent press stories about the rise in inequality . Inequality is apparently the defining characteristic of our current age. The Guardian has an excellent series of articles chronicling how inequality shapes the modern world, while Oxfam have published … Read more
I write my blog in WordPress, and I can check out how many reads I get for every blog. Sometimes you get surprising insights – there is someone in Canada who binge reads my blog every few months for eample. Breezy businessy blogs written from a vaguely leftish perspective are popular, some subjects less … Read more
As a follow up to yesterday’s blog I wanted to say a tiny bit more about Laffer curves and whether or not they work in the real world. I feel that I dismissed a huge idea in modern economics without giving it time of day, but I didn’t want the whole blog to be … Read more
In case anyone had missed it we live in a 24/7 media culture. Politicians rise and fall based on their ability to shape or react to a continuous churn of news. This has created a bias for action not ideas. Tough new measures rather than well thought out policies. Clampdowns on pretty much everything. An … Read more
This is short update in advance of next weeks full blog. I am trying to stick to one longer piece a month, with some shorter blogs in between Last year I wrote about the way that Unemployment Statistics are collected: https://jon-chadwick.com/2017/03/18/unemployments-rising-in-the-chigley-end-of-town/ In particular I highlighted problems with the way the Labour Force Survey captures data … Read more
Welcome to my first blog of 2018. I plan to write one blog a month, but look at each issue in a bit more depth. Over the last year I found that I wanted to go into some subjects in more detail than a fortnightly blog allowed. I had started writing a blog for January … Read more