See my recent piece in The Guardian’s on-line magazine ‘Public’, and you might also be interested in my comments in The Guardian’s society section.

Just in case you have missed this: The Real-World Economics Review Blog is holding polls to determine the awarding of two prizes: The Ignoble Prize for Economics , to be awarded to the three economists who contributed most to enabling the Global Financial Collapse (GFC), and The Noble Prize for Economics , to be awarded […]

We took my 5 year-old son to see a ‘Horrid Henry’ show after Christmas. At one point in the production Horrid Henry is trying to convince his little brother Peter Perfect that he’s been to the future. “What’s the future like?” asks Peter. As Henry appears stumped for an answer, my son shouts out “scary” […]

The central message of yesterday’s PBR was that we need to put the national finances in order, but not quite yet – in fact not for quite a long time. That does not mean there will not be severe cuts in public spending – there will be. It’s just that they will be severe rather […]

According to the supercomputer Deep Thought the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything was 42 (in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy). It turns out however that this number may be subject to localised quantum relativity effects – specifically on an insignificant island off the north-west coast of Europe, a […]

No, not the Beetles hit, but the flavour of many of the meetings I’ve been attending in recent weeks and will be in the next few weeks. First was a Guardian ‘roundtable’; this was followed by evidence I was asked to give to the Northern Ireland Assembly Finance Committee; another roundtable, this time organised by […]

I thought I’d share this interesting message from David Halpern, Research Director, Institute for Government London: NEW BOOK: HIDDEN WEALTH OF NATIONS DAVID WRITES: As you may know, since leaving No10 and Cabinet Office, I’ve spent some time revisiting the last 25 years of data on value change, the social and economic challenges (and opportunities) […]

In the never-ending, and now more important than ever, effort to do more-with-less, a new initiative has come out of Whitehall: OneTotalLocalPlace. There have been quite a number of initiatives that have been focussed on getting the best value for money our of local spending. These have included: – Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) – these […]

I detest even having to blog about this – the Sun’s manipulation of a grieving mother of a dead British soldier today is disgusting. But, let’s be very clear. Gordon Brown lost the sight in one eye when he was a kid, playing Rugby. The sight in his other eye is adequate, but not brilliant.