Wednesday, 13 August 2025

AI and productivity

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Martin Baily, Erik Brynjolfsson and Anton Korinek offer a calculation that is more subtle than you might think.  They say  "The first ...
Sunday, 10 August 2025

Who is working class?

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 The UK government has announced civil service internships will only be available to those who are working class.  What does this really mea...
Tuesday, 29 July 2025

Which industries do the most R&D? Some suprising US data...

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 I was always of the view that R&D was concentrated in a few manufacturing industries: chemicals (including pharma), computer manufactur...
Friday, 25 July 2025

Computing in the Cloud

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 I hadn;t seen this study untile now.   Cloud services market study, Final repor t. from Ofcom.  Some things I took away. "‘Cloud compu...
Wednesday, 25 June 2025

QE, QT and interest on reserves

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 The Bank of England governor has written a very good lette r after a reform MP suggested not paying interest on reserves. My thoughts. 1. P...
Monday, 16 June 2025

Foreign Trade, tariffs, Dollar dominance and some helpful national income identities

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 The brilliant Maurice Obstfeld has a very good explainer on  The U.S. Trade Deficit: Myths and Realities, Brookings Conference, March 2025...
Tuesday, 3 June 2025

Even more chain drift

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 I hadn't realised until now that the Johnson review has a nice box on Chain drift. Here's the idea.  1. Suppose the item 1 is deter...
Sunday, 1 June 2025

Some maths of public spending and labour costs

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 From th e IFS  and my interpretation:  " Staff costs account for almost half of departmental day-to-day spending.." "At this...

Slow productivity growth: lessons from the past

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 I am late to this, but this article by the brilliant economic historian Joel Mokyr is fantastic. "(2018), ‘The Past and Future of Inno...
Wednesday, 30 April 2025

US and UK TFP since the pandemic

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 The BLS has just published an update on US labour and TFP growth .  Heres a graph of  private non-farm business. Red is TFP growth, dark bl...