48 articles, grouped by year
Every day I tell my toddler off for doing something he shouldn't. He has no idea why playing with plug sockets is bad but light switches are ok, or why running off into the middle of the road is bad but running around the garden is fine.
The burger chain Wendy's has been in trouble over plans to introduce surge pricing. This is when prices adjust to meet demand, so you may end up paying more for your burger and fries during busy periods.
The older you are, the more likely you are to vote. Young people simply don't turn up for elections.
What is causing current inflation? There are a number of articles saying that rather than a wage-price spiral, it is being caused by companies increasing their profit margins.
You have probably seen the midwit meme on social media. It often looks something like this...
The NHS is always in crisis. But I think with A&E waiting times pushing 12 hours, this certainly feels like crisis territory to me.
If you want to beat the markets, the old adage of "buy low, sell high" is not a bad place to start. To sum up a decade of Conservative economic thinking, they appear to have gone for "sell low, buy high".
Last week I was amazed to read an article in the Guardian which talked about a pub "cutting energy costs" by switching off their lights and using candles instead. Throughout the article there was absolutely no mention of the fact that this could save the pub…
Right, I am not going to lie. To understand what happened last week is extremely difficult to explain as you need to understand a few things before we even get to fully understand what happened.
When QE (Quantitative Easing) was proposed in 2009, some people were worried that this would result in inflation. After all isn't QE just a fancy way of saying we created money out of thin air?
With the ongoing rail strikes I wanted to talk about the economics of unions. Why do some jobs have unions that you can join and others don't?
When I was young, before I even knew what economics was, I would stare at the pink front page of the Financial Times, wondering why anyone would be interested in the merger of two companies that no one has ever heard of.* But sometimes, there is some…
Everything is political. This phrase annoys me. It is often used as a way for people to steer the direction of an argument towards something they would prefer to talk about: politics.
I really dislike rankings. I feel they are a way to make subjective data seem objective and hide a lot of information that we care about.
Government plans to cut red tape, again. I mean, getting rid of excess bureaucracy seems like a no-brainer as by definition excess bureaucracy is well, excess.
A Nimby is a person who opposes new developments in their local area, an acronym of Not In My Back Yard. The term has certainly taken off in recent years with debates about the amount of housing being built in Western countries.
Finish your dinner, some people are starving in the world. Although this phrase is often used by parents to try and emotionally manipulate their children into eating vegetables, it reflects a deeper societal concern about our attitudes to waste.
You have probably seen the runaway trolley problem. You know the one where a trolley (not a shopping trolley in fact, but a tram) is destined to kill X amount of people.
Jack Monroe has recently highlighted how the rise in inflation can hit the poorest in the economy hardest by looking at the recent rise in food costs. Given that we all consume a different mix of things, inflation will hit us in different ways (depending on…
Will Bitcoin go “to the moon”? I am a bit sceptical myself. I would put it somewhere in the region of a 1-2% chance that it will break 1 million USD but I really have no idea.
Should we pay MPs more? They are already on £80k a year which puts them in the top percentages of pay in the UK.
Do you think we can get infinite growth on a finite planet? Personally, I would not say “yes” to this question.
According to Dominic Cummings' recent revelations, a lot of people in charge of the pandemic failed to grasp the idea of exponential growth. As Mike Bird says, we often ask kids what pocket money they would prefer: a pound every week or a penny that doubles every week.
An edited abstract of our book was published on Sunday and caused statisticians everywhere to lose their minds. One particular tweet has gone viral.
Everyone has been accused of being patronising at some point in their lives. Patronising, by the way, is when you...
In the Autumn of 2005, Noel Edmonds would return to our screens with a new show called Deal or No Deal. Somehow the show managed to drag out the process of picking random numbers, from 1 to 22, and turn it into TV gold.
If you ask most people what the £ is backed by, they will say "gold". There is a belief that somewhere, in the Bank of England, there is this huge vault of gold bars that you could exchange your hard-earned cash for.
What is the definition of arachnophobia, equinophobia & hippophobia? If you said they are all fears relating to spiders, horses and hippopotamuses then you would be wrong.
Science is a process of discovery. If Sir Isaac Newton hadn't discovered gravity, I am fairly certain someone else would.
I was recently asked why I got into my research area. I can trace the exact moment to a 2nd-year political philosophy module at Manchester University by Stephen de Wijze.
The weekend newspaper fans across the kitchen table and the glossy supplement catches your eye. As you are perusing, you come across a recipe and suddenly get the idea stuck in your head that you simply must make this tonight.
A lot of people think free trade is all about tariffs. I think this is why some people thought the deal between the UK and EU would be the “easiest in human history”.
After discussing the idiosyncratic way I buy presents (more of which later) with Tom Chivers, he said: “ An economist's guide to Christmas would make a good book title”. To which I sent him back a vomit emoji (Tom and I are actually writing a book together…
You are at a stag do and in charge of paying the bill and you need to do long division which literally no one knows how to do by hand. So, you attempt to divide £2344 by 24 (lads) into your calculator.
When academic journals first came into fashion, they were primarily a way to disseminate research. Unless you attended a lecture, there was no other way you could keep up to date with new findings in a field without seeing a physical written copy.
Michael Gove’s bookcase has gained attention recently due to some controversial books which appeared on its shelves. Inevitably some people expressed concern that he would own these books as they inferred he may share their views.
Firstly, an important thing I want to make clear. I am more than happy to write references for my students and take great pleasure in seeing them get the job or master’s programme they want.
If a significant proportion of people know these misquotes exist, why do they continue? One would hope over time information about the correct quote would dominate the misquote, and the misquote would disappear from memory.
On Monday the 16 th of March, the government announced that we should “avoid” pubs, restaurants and theatres. For many people, this seemed so blindingly obvious given the threat posed by Covid-19 that they felt the government should have simply banned them even earlier.
The reason why names are important is because they are the first thing people usually come in contact with before understanding ideas. You may hear the name of a concept in passing such as in a conversation or on the radio.
The basics of social distancing are that if you are symptom free, you can meet with people outside but have to be 2m apart. Also passing things to each other with our hands could also potentially spread the virus so this should also be avoided.
The problem with seeing pictures of empty shelves is that it just makes panic buying worse. The media have an important role to play in this but first let's try and understand why panic buying is a problem.
Many economists have argued against undertaking austerity when the UK’s borrowing rates were so low (at the zero lower bound of interest rates). Austerity is all about getting the government deficit down in order to reduce the amount of government borrowing.
This letter was sent to the Guardian in response to Larry Elliott's article. It is less of a criticism of the reformers' 33 points (which I did not think were helpful to their cause), but more a criticism of Larry Elliott's portrayal of economics.
Rethinking Economics is a group campaigning for a pluralist approach to economics. They have put together a book which contains a collection of short essays introducing various schools of thought that you generally won’t hear about in a typical economics class.
Although the study reports positive effects of attending nursery it also found strong positive effects for parents spending time and engaging with their children. The authors conclude that engagement is important – whether this was at home or in a nursery was not so important.
If you watched the recent UK election debates you would have seen that the most pressing issue facing the UK appears to be tackling the UK debt. When we hear the word debt we have all these negative connotations: people going bankrupt, falling into poverty…
George Osborne tweeted recently that zero inflation is " good news ". Prices not rising can only be a good thing surely?
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