Thank Fathom it's Friday Archives

Korea in the melting pot

Erik Britton17 July 2026|

The best scene in the award-winning South Korean film Parasite sees rainwater washing the expensive houses high on the hill before sluicing down through ever-lower levels of the city, collecting detritus all the way. Finally it reaches a filthy, toxic sump in the basement where the family at the centre of the action live. If that image feels familiar, that’s because it is. It featured in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, in Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables,

GDP: one size does not fit all

Elisabeth Werenskiold10 July 2026|Tags: Economic growth, GDP|

When I was at university we dealt very little with Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. Our courses focused instead on its theoretical counterpart, Y (economic shorthand for output or income). Y is a solid foundational bedrock; GDP is not. Rather, it’s a number that changes based on how you measure it; which is regularly revised (to my annoyance when I was forecasting Swedish GDP for the Norges Bank); and which is often used by commentators to capture far more than

A year in lunches

Evie Cottington3 July 2026|Tags: Placement student|

From walking into the office on my first day to entering the final weeks of my year-long placement here, there has been one constant in the Fathom office: and that is Andrew Harris asking if you want to grab lunch. What seems at first like a trivial question quickly becomes more complicated when you are a student living in London with a limited budget. As any good economists would, my fellow placement students and I realised that the answer to

Why we buy expensive concert tickets

Kavya Kumeria26 June 2026|Tags: Creative Industries, Creativity|

If you’ve attempted to buy a ticket to see your favourite artist live in the last few years, you’ll know that you’ll have to navigate the infamous ‘Ticketmaster war’. This highly competitive online scramble to beat the bots and the other fans to the ticket you want usually ends with you forking out considerably more than you originally meant, even for the worst seat in the stadium. To add insult to injury, someone on Twitter will somehow manage to score

The value of creativity

Emma Porter19 June 2026|Tags: Creative Industries, Creativity|

Many of my friends and family were surprised when I told them a year ago that I'd be working in an economics consultancy. “I thought you wanted to do something creative?” was the usual response. Fair point - and honestly, the same question crossed my mind. How would I find my place in a company producing such complex, analytical and rigorous work, when my strengths leaned more towards the arts and creative ways of thinking? But now, eleven months later,

What’s happening in Japan? Kaizen it ain’t.

Erik Britton12 June 2026|Tags: Inflation, Japan|

The Japanese term ‘Kaizen’ has been co-opted by Western management consultants and lifestyle gurus, and is taken to mean a culture of continual improvement: tiny, incremental changes, day after day that, after a long period, mean success. I vividly remember being shown around a Japanese-owned factory in the UK, where the management had recently presented one of their employees with a reward for having found a way to shave 1.7 seconds off the time it took him to complete one

The role of AI in techno-economic competition

Andrew Harris5 June 2026|Tags: AI, Innovation, China|

Today’s blog is something a little different – I’m sharing the video version of our latest special edition podcast episode on AI and US-China techno-economic competition. Last month I caught up with David Lin from the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) at the 2026 SCSP AI+ Expo in Washington DC. We’ve known each other for about four years now, since Fathom wrote a report for the SCSP about the future of AI and techno-economic competition between the US and China

Is this thing broken? The Loonie is not moving

Erik Britton29 May 2026|Tags: Oil prices, Canada|

Until President Trump took office for the second time, one of the most-reliable relationships in foreign-exchange markets was between the value of the Canadian dollar and the price of oil. When oil prices rose, so did the Loonie, making Canadians richer as a result. Since oil is priced in US dollars, a stronger Loonie meant Canadians did not get so much Canadian currency in exchange for their oil as they otherwise would have; but they got more of everything else.

Innovation with Chinese characteristics

Erik Britton22 May 2026|Tags: Innovation, China|

In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, frustrated with the inability of the airmen under his charge to execute a perfect 90-degree turn on parade, Lieutenant Scheisskopf gives serious consideration to having nickel-alloy swivels surgically inserted into their thighs. Likewise, all governments probably sometimes wish the individuals and private firms in their jurisdiction would line up perfectly in the service of the needs of the state, forgetting that, in open societies, the state exists primarily to serve them, not the other way around.

Get over it already: Brexit, a ten-year audit

Erik Britton15 May 2026|Tags: BREXIT, UK politics, Politics|

A late family friend named Martin, whom I once asked what he thought of a mutual acquaintance said: “I don’t know; I haven’t formed an opinion yet.” How long had he known this person? Twenty years. Well, almost ten years after the UK voted to leave the EU, I find I still haven’t really formed a strong opinion about the impact that Brexit has had. It’s not that I haven’t thought about it. It’s that a couple of other things