It’s rare that a politician comes to power without being bound by some kind of manifesto. And yet, that’s exactly the position that the UK’s latest PM, Andy Burnham, finds himself in. Some may say that puts him in a bad position and that he lacks a mandate for change. For what it’s worth, I think that’s definitely true. But it also leaves him with a blank page from which to design policy. It’s been more than a decade since
John Maynard Keynes’ acerbic remark that “…in the long run, we’re all dead” resonates because it is true, [1] and because it rightly draws attention to the here and now rather than some uncertain and distant possible future. But it has encouraged some commentators to dismiss long-term considerations as altogether irrelevant. I’m ready to bet Keynes never intended that. Political cycles in democracies practically insist on ignoring the long-term: if a policy is net costly in the short term it will
Saudi Arabia is an oil economy that wants to maximise the value of its oil wealth while diversifying away from oil; seeking employment opportunities for a cohort of young Saudi nationals when most jobs have usually gone to immigrant labour; governed by a highly traditional, patriarchal political elite that wants to modernise without changing its fundamental character. These objectives sound unachievable because they are so confusing. But the early signs are positive, remarkably enough. Saudi seems to be finding a
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,
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
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
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
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,
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
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