After working in the Productivity & Structural Reform team at HM Treasury some years ago as a very junior economist, the fascinating subject of productivity has always remained dear to my heart. Back then under the Labour government, a key mission of the team was to close the UK’s yawning 45%[1] productivity gap with the US economy, and the smaller deficits with some of our European peers. After a period when UK productivity grew at a healthy pace of over

After recently becoming a first-time dad, I have started dedicating more thought to ways that I can optimise my time and improve my multi-tasking skills: hold Baby and watch football; go for a walk and get Baby to sleep; clean the flat while resting in between exercise sets, and so on. It being my turn to write this week’s TFIF blog, I have decided to multi-task once more by writing about a baby-related topic I’ve come across in my new

How might an individual react if, at the end of some arbitrary accounting period, they find themselves with more cash in the bank than they had hoped for? A happy position to be in, right? When trying to answer these sorts of questions, economists tend to wheel out the tried and tested ‘lifecycle consumption model’ (or LCM). This says that an individual will use their expected lifetime resources to consume goods and services, period by period, in a way that

Ever thought about going veggie, or giving Veganuary a shot? Or simply tried to cut out meat and dairy from your diet? Well, you might be interested (or appalled, if you answered no to all of these!) to know that the UK Climate Change Committee is banking on Brits eating 35% less meat and dairy by 2050 in order to help the country reach its net zero carbon emissions target. Is it realistic to expect the nation that brought us

Brace yourselves: econometrics follows. Look at this time series. What happens next? Many macroeconomic time series look a bit like this. They are trended, but wobble around in interesting ways compared to that trend, and for long periods of time. You can see that by eye — and it’s even clearer if you put the series on a log scale, thus:   How would you go about forecasting this time series? Well, you might start by estimating the trend in

Do we need to change the way men think? It’s a question that has echoed widely since the devastating news of missing Clapham woman Sarah Everard, whose remains have been found in a wood in Kent. Her fate has triggered a #MeToo response on social media, with many women breaking silence to describe for the first time their own experiences of abuse and feelings of unsafety. Men have spoken up too, including this comment from Jay Rayner: “If I find

As a boardgame enthusiast, a global pandemic is the worst case scenario. Sitting inside for hours around a board with friends all touching the same cards, tokens and dice is surely one of the easiest ways to transmit a virus — something that the UK government belatedly highlighted back in November last year. I discounted their suggestion of running a quiz instead as sooooooo April 2020, which left me and other board game fans with a handful of options. I

You may recall my beaming mood in my last blog post, courtesy of schools remaining open during lockdown? It didn’t last. Home-schooling was back in less than a week, and I was again guzzling down the latest vintage of Chateau Sour Grapes by the bucket-load. However, with schools due to reopen in about 220 hours - not that I’m counting - I will not bore you with a therapeutic rant. Instead, I am going to pass on my tip to

Cricket is back on Channel 4. Here’s why I’m not sure that’s a good thing. My suspicion, and I’ll stress I know nothing about broadcasting rights, is that the only reason for its return is that Channel 4's competitors were reluctant to open their chequebooks. Even the most ardent of fans knows that Test match cricket has a PR problem. In a world where email has superseded the letter and Instagram has replaced the postcard, it’s not hard to see

One of the many fallacies within our cognition is normalcy bias: refusing to plan for or react to a disaster that has never happened before. Sound familiar? There are some facets of the pandemic that could have been mitigated with prior planning and resistance to the forces of normalcy bias. But, with the benefit of hindsight, these have already been analysed to death. To me, the more worthwhile lessons from the pandemic come from the things that we forgot in