Jobs, and a job

applestore
Personal, TechnologyOctober 18, 2011
A little while ago I used this blog to talk about what was actually going on in my life, and it seemed to go quite well. And then I came back from Vancouver, and had nothing to write about, so it all kind of fell apart. Well, now I'm back there, two years later, I'm returning to that tradition. Starting with this. Read more →
 

Is the future of economics experimental?

Is the future of economics experimental?
EconomicsMarch 31, 2011
The economist is often likened to the astronomer: one who is powerless to influence the forces they study and resigned to formulate their ideas based on observation alone. An ideal approach for economists would be to hold everything in a market constant, change just one variable of interest and then observe the result. Doing so is the only true proof of causality, but economists are generally considered powerless to do this. The closest they can come is when a ‘natural experiment’ is formed by chance, but these are never precise enough to truly isolate the effect of one change. Read more →
 

Preference reversal: a primer

Preference reversal experiment
EconomicsFebruary 27, 2011
If you have recently spent fifteen minutes staring at a baffling array of pie charts and percentages on my behalf, thank you. I wrote this post because I thought a small number of you may want to know what it was all about. Read more →
 

Review: Manic Street Preachers ‘Postcards From A Young Man’

Manic Street Preachers 'Postcards From A Young Man'
MusicSeptember 20, 2010
It's pretty bold of a band to announce a new album with "we're going for big radio hits on this one". It's also hard to think of one that could escape a backlash against this type of honesty, but in this case the band in question is the Manic Street Preachers and their career is basically built around the combination of honestly and shoot-your-mouth-off boldness. It's a credit to the band that they escape — and indeed, transcend — any accusation of 'selling out', but it's also unsurprising given a look at their 18 year back-catalogue, which is partly based around the type of grainy, acetic and often aggressive tunes that were never designed for radio. The band acknowledged this head-on with 2009's Journal For Plague Lovers — the second best epitome of this after The Holy Bible — from which they didn't even release any singles. Read more →
 

Some thoughts on the eve of the election

The three horsemen of 'change'
PoliticsMay 5, 2010
As anyone who follows me will be acutely aware, I've been tweeting a lot about tomorrow's general election in the UK. But I'm not the only one: this election has certainly got people talking and broken a lot of ground in so many ways. I'm hardly qualified to make comparisons to the past, having only experienced a few elections in my years, but it seems there hasn't been this level of excitement or engagement with the political process for a very long time. All this considered, I thought it'd be a shame not to jot down some thoughts for prosperity right before what could be a rather historic day. Read more →
 

Making the most of opportunities abroad

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
TravelApril 30, 2010
For the first semester of my second year I was lucky enough to be accepted into the Universitas 21 scheme to study at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Looking back, I can't imagine a better place to study than Vancouver: it is compact yet has everything you'd expect from a major North American city, and the UBC campus is only a short bus ride from downtown. The campus is a sight to behold; set in parkland on a peninsula jutting into the Pacific, just walking between classes gives you mountain and sea views, and at around three times the size of University Park, it's also a town unto itself, with restaurants, bars, shops, museums and gardens....not to mention beaches! Vancouver’s location provided an endless list of things to do on weekends; I don’t think any exchange student left without spending an afternoon in the city’s beautiful Stanley Park, watching a Canucks ice hockey game or visiting Whistler, the world famous ski-resort just an hour’s drive north. The challenge was to remember I wasn’t there for a four-month holiday! Read more →
 

Too soon?

For a lazy political cartoon this sums up the article pretty nicely!
Economics, PoliticsMarch 7, 2010
Open letters seem to be the standard method of communication nowadays — well, if you happen to be an economist anyway. Earlier this month, 20 of them wrote to the Sunday Times recommending that policies to reduce the UK’s burgeoning budget deficit be brought forward. Almost immediately, another open letter was sent to the Financial Times in response, this time signed by no fewer than 60, asserting this was entirely the wrong approach. This is a good example of the old “if you put two economists in a room, you get three opinions” adage, although this time we have 80 economists involved, and the stakes are somewhat higher... Read more →
 

iMust have one?

SteveJobsiPad
TechnologyFebruary 4, 2010
The newest creation of zeitgeist-botherers Apple is the iPad, the company’s new tablet computer, announced last month in San Francisco. Apple were typically secretive about the device prior to its launch, perhaps in an attempt to cultivate the hype. If so, it certainly worked. Read more →