A new beginning

I’m sure you’ve all noticed that, with the exception of Patrick’s great post on productivity yesterday, it’s been a bit quiet around here lately. Matt’s busy working two jobs in addition to writing a PhD, agnitio has decided that a house and family are more important than blogging, and I have descended into the laziness of failing to test my ideas in public. One of those things is a really bad reason not to blog, so my Christmas present to myself is to get back in the saddle and spend at least one day a week being told off by Eric! But I want to write about some different things than I did previously.

My posts are going to be very UK-centric because that’s where I live and work these days. As Matt never fails to point out, each country has it’s own different problems and we can’t generalise between them, so I’m not going to try. However, I hope that discussing two countries that are very culturally similar but economically different will only make this a better blog.

In the spirit of specificity I am going to try focussing much more on specific data, rather than just generics, and use charts more often. I’ve been inspired by Flip Chart Rick’s fantastic blog, which uses existing data and analysis to create useful and insightful narratives.

Finally, I am going to try talking a bit about the tools I use every day as an applied economist. With the advent of ‘data science’ and ‘data journalism’, telling stories about the economy with evidence has never been more popular and the tools to do it are developing fast. Economists have taken to blogging like ducks to water and there is no reason we shouldn’t be leading the adoption of great new sharing and collaboration tools like Plotly, Jupyter/IPython , Quandl, and others, too.

My new blogging life begins tomorrow.