Archive for category: Other

Cross posted on Substack.

At the close of 2022, Gulnara and I thought it would be fun to pop up some forecasts for 2023. So what were they and how did we do?

The forecasts

It appears we made four forecasts:

1. That the “rebalancing towards consumption” in China would dominate the discussion post-COVID economic adjustment – making it harder to bring inflation down in a low cost manner and keeping tradable inflation high.
2. Automation would be a major theme – with a clear visual number of worker tasks across a number of jobs now being clearly automated.
3. Industry policy would be the go to policy lever pointed at given the two above economic themes.
4. However, there would also be increasing discussion of unemployment benefits – and the importance of the safety net for supporting these transitions.

Right, nice consistent story – two changes in the underlying economy, two policy responses.

How did we do? I’m going to self-evaluate – but super keen for everyone elses thoughts in the comments!

Read more

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone, from Gulnara and myself. To celebrate we’ve put up a video characterising two different ways of thinking about gift giving – specifically the conflict between telling someone what gift you want and the nature of a surprise gift.

People think and feel very differently about this, and fair enough we all have different preferences and have been raised in different gifting cultures (influencing the type of signal a gift is).

However, by thinking about why someone may feel differently about a gift allows us all to understand these different perspectives – as they say, economics is the path to tolerance, acceptance, and ultimately love.

We would love to hear how you think about both giving and receiving presents – what have we missed?

Hey team,

I realised that a lot of the videos going up presuppose knowledge about what GDP is and what the purpose of GDP is – but after hearing another series of people baselessly criticise GDP I realised that assuming this knowledge isn’t really the best place to start.

So I popped a video up at the start of the “Data and Aggregates” playlist that is just about what the point of GDP is.

Read more