Letter wars, and how policy is made

This one is UK focused, although similar points may apply elsewhere First there was the letter in the Guardian written by economists provid...

Going backwards on fiscal rules

I was preoccupied when it first came out, but I wanted to note the excellent discussion by Jonathan Portes of the government’s new fiscal ru...

The F story about the Great Inflation

Here F could stand for folk. The story that is often told by economists to their students goes as follows. After Phillips discovered his cur...

Austerity as a Knowledge Transmission Mechanism failure

In this post I talked about the Knowledge Transmission Mechanism: the process by which academic ideas do or do not get translated into econ...

Policy, risks and public discourse

Another post where I use the UK as an example to illustrate a more general point Along with their normal forecast, the National Institute ha...