Let’s play. Those words, delivered to a small group of like-minded people you trust, are the surest way I know of finding a creative solution to some problem. But the mood that makes play possible is fragile: one difficult person, one sharp comment, and it vanishes like a soap bubble and you will struggle to recover it. So when we set out to invite a room of 100 people to play, it was with some trepidation. These were highly successful,
A few months have passed since we were last obsessing about tariffs, during which time there have been a couple of other items dominating the news. Those items (the conflict in Iran, the new British PM) are a bit stale, so it seems it’s time to have another go with tariffs. Perhaps this season will be more interesting? We’ll see, but the early signs are not encouraging. Canada, the country probably most vulnerable to US tariffs, looks like it’s going
In November 1967, Harold Wilson gave his famous ‘Pound in your pocket’ speech. As Prime Minister of the UK he had just cut sterling’s fixed exchange rate against the dollar by 14%, and now attempted to persuade the British public that this did not affect them. He claimed: “It does not mean that the pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or in your bank, has been devalued.” He soon rowed back from this obviously fatuous remark: that
On yet another scorching London morning Jane wakes up to the tinkling tunes of Berlioz on her DAB radio, designed in the UK, made in China. Unwilling to face the day quite yet, she burrows down into blue and white-striped sheets, purchased at IKEA, made in China. The temptation of an ice cold cup of green tea, grown and packaged in China, coaxes her out of bed and she pads out to the kitchen in bright pink UGG slippers and
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