How and where we live inherently affects others. People also have deep financial stakes in land and property. Moving is costly. These three facts together mean that the rules determining what sorts of homes we can build, where they can be built, and who can live in them are inherently contentious. Improving upon our current […]
Neoliberals are often accused of being emotionless, calculating machines. We are thought of as the dystopian caricature of economists, knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing. Whether or not this preconception is true, policies require an assessment of their costs and benefits. Broad political questions, such as the optimal way to structure […]
You have to admire Sajid Javid’s approach to the housing part of his brief as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. He has thrown out dart after dart to see what will stick, previewing, leaking, and suggesting policies that later fall by the wayside as they prove unpopular. He clearly understands the problem […]
The 2007-8 financial crisis had lots of causes. But one crucial problem was that banks’ errors were correlated: nearly all of them made the same bets, and they bet big. So you’d think that regulatory policy, now in the hands of the Bank of England, would steer clear of anything that made that problem worse, by encouraging […]
It might look like the young have a lot of problems facing them. They are coming of age in a world where nuclear war no longer looks like a marginal possibility. A world where robots and artificial intelligence that might rapidly — and permanently — erase their comparative advantages as humans, and with them their […]
When you conduct an economic study you measure a range of variables, but most of the time you can’t capture everything. You analyse the date you have collected, and find relationships, but if you aren’t careful there might be a variable you’ve omitted, which means that your correlations will be biased. Some examples are obvious. […]
Everybody hates neoliberalism. The term has become a term of abuse, mostly by those who consider themselves anti-neoliberals. Critics also allege that the world is currently run under neoliberalism. In George Monbiot’s words, it is “the ideology at the root of all our problems“. But the world is in a pretty good state, and since the introduction […]
Tax Freedom Day is upon us again. In 2016 the average person stops paying tax, and starts paying themselves on June 3rd. Every penny they earned from 1st January to 2nd June, inclusive, went to the taxman. Well, not quite. Firstly, and quite obviously, people pay tax throughout the year, not in one big block […]
Now the government has U-turned on plans to abolish tax credits, it should look at housing benefit for welfare savings—most housing benefit is a transfer to landlords and the remainder is an inefficient and distortionary intervention. It should abolish the £26bn system and use the money to fund tax cuts for low earners and a […]
Tax Freedom Day is upon us again. In 2015 the average person stops paying tax, and starts paying themselves, on 31st May. Every penny they earned from 1st January to 30th May, inclusive, went to the taxman. Well, not quite. Firstly, and quite obviously, people pay tax throughout the year, not in one big block […]
