Jo Michell

@jomichell

Professor of economics at UWE Bristol. Chair of Post-Keynesian Economics Society. Progressive Economy Forum council member. Interested in macro, finance, banking, climate change, inequality, demographics.

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Bluesky

Ist das dein Profil?Übernimm es — dann gehört dir jomichell.dirty.social.Profil übernehmen

Jo Michell@jomichell· 27d

This “she’s on the right so markets like her” stuff is just so stupid on so many levels.

But one person briefed on the plan said:
"Shabana is nailed down as chancellor.
That's definitely happening." Markets responded positively to the prospect of a chancellor coming from the right of the Labour Party.

Jo Michell@jomichell· 27d

Yep, that’s pretty close to what I wrote yesterday.

Jo Michell@jomichell· 28d

This is not objective reporting.

Supporters of Mahmood, who is seen as a tough and effective home secretary, say the former barrister would be prepared to take on Treasury orthodoxies, although she has not held any economic roles as a minister,

Jo Michell@jomichell· 28d

I’m sorry, but what is ‘radical’ about the policies pursued by Miliband?

Miliband's promotion of radical net zero policies has earned him enemies among some trade unions, with Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite, saying his appointment to the Treasury would be a "noose around job creation"
in Britain.

Jo Michell@jomichell· 29d

Look at that sky! Glorious!

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 12

Before I ironed it, this was a keycard to a room.

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 11

We’ve finally found out who is responsible for the The Black Hole

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 10

Enjoying this polite skewering of the FT's Burnham bond apocalypse obsession.

With Andy Burnham now about to enter Downing Street, the question is whether there is a third option. In an interview with the New Statesman last September, Burnham made a throwaway remark he has not been allowed to forget: ‘We’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets.’ Fund managers lined up to express their dismay, sounding dire warnings about what lay ahead if Burnham were allowed into power. Since then, the press – led by the usually more circumspect Financial Times – has been like a dog with a bone, chasing down bond market analysts for apocalyptic visions of Burnhamism, treating vox pops conducted within the Square Mile as the expression of pure economic reason.

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 10

The youngling’s selection of native wildflowers is looking great (if thirsty). Deffo recommend having some of these in your garden if you have space.

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 10

Thanks. I think it would be useful to have a clear author attribution on the main website/report. As it stands, the built in robot gives a different answer to the university website, and the report itself says nothing that I can’t find.

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 9

Sorry, what?

Analysis in this report leads with quantitative analysis using fiscal and economic metrics. This choice reflects an observation that fiscal constraints present the first barrier to action, and recognition that fiscal discipline is a valuable reflection of underlying biophysical constraints.
This limits the report to focussing on substantiating the effects on social and physical resilience using economic values. Analysis of the strengthened social cohesion and elevated efficacy of collective decision-taking would require post-factum qualitative analysis beyond the scope of this report, and so are speculative outcomes of the programme.

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 9

Mm.

The Appendices are substantially outputs at the conclusion of research activities
with AI support. The Claude Opus (4.6-4.8) AI models have been used to research
background data and develop models to support budgets and distributional impacts of individual policies using directions, instructions, and prompts from the author. All AI inputs, models, and outputs have been reviewed by the author.
The propserity2030.uk website is built in collaboration with Claude and uses the
Astro framework.
The website includes an Ask page that allows natural language query of only the report's contents, results generated using the Anthropic API, Sonnet model.

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 9

Wtf is this?

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 7

today I learned that Alan Greenspan played saxophone with Stan Getz. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Gr...

Greenspan attended George Washington High School from 1940 until he graduated in June 1943; one of his classmates was John Kemeny.[16] He played clarinet and saxophone along with Stan Getz. He further studied clarinet at the Juilliard School from 1943 to 1944.[17] Among his bandmates in the Woody Herman band[18] was Leonard Garment, Richard Nixon's special counsel.[19] He reported to a draft board for potential military service in World War II and was rejected as medically unfit in 1944 due to a spot on his lung.[20]

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 7

As far as I can tell, this refers to a fiscal consolidation of ~4% of GDP under the 'baseline scenario' in which government spending is ~9pp of GDP higher by 2075.

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 7

I think that a bit more context is needed here. £100bn consolidation compared to what baseline? Under what scenario? As presented, this is a largely information-free statement.

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-is-a-gift-article/.
https://www.ft.com/content/05ab5df6-877b-4e5a-a01d-de9f19b52b37?syn-25a6b1a6=1

Andy Burnham needs to tackle the UK’s “unsustainable” public finances quickly to minimise the risks to the economy, the UK’s fiscal watchdog has warned.

Even if the UK takes urgent action, the Office for Budget Responsibility said spending cuts or tax rises equivalent to more than £100bn a year would be required to stabilise debt at 95 per cent from 2030-31 onwards.

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 7

I see that the OBR has published its fiscal risks report. I kinda feel that something might happen that forces a change of course at some point before we get to debt at 1000% of GDP? And this implies that it's not a very meaningful scenario?

The OBR's famous exponential growth in debt/GDP graphs.

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 7

Not sure who needs to know this, but John Hicks wrote a book about Austrian capital theory.

PREFACE
THIs is the third book I have written about Capital. Value and Capital (1939); Capital and Growth (I965); Capital and Time
(1973). They were not planned as a trilogy. I had no idea, when I finished the first, that I would write the second; when I finished the second, that I would write the third. Nor do the later volumes supersede the earlier, save in a few quite limited respects. Capital (I am not the first to discover) is a very large subject, with many aspects; wherever one starts, it is hard to bring more than a few of them into view. It is just as if one were making pictures of a build-ing; though it is the same building, it looks quite different from different angles. As I now realize, I have been walking round my subject, taking different views of it. Though that which is presented here is just another view, it turns out to be quite useful in fitting the others together.

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 5

Rules-based international order.

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 5

Very useful! Slight quibble: I think you overstate the position of the wealth tax commission somewhat. They didn’t support and annual wealth tax as a revenue raising strategy — which is the relevant case for your discussion — but they didn’t strictly recommend against it.

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 4

Lots out there today.

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 4

How have I missed this until now? An accessible guide to the natural rate of interest! www.amazon.co.uk/Price-Money-...

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 4

This is not a fair summary of the case for and against Palantir.

The Labour movement's hostility is more brazen. Evidence suggests that software developed in partnership with Palantir, for instance, was able to reduce sepsis deaths at a Florida hospital by 68 per cent, saving 900 lives in four years. Yet Labour has tried repeatedly to block it - there is a sense that the movement would rather people die than allow Peter Thiel near the NHS.

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 4

Article is full of implicit assumptions without strong theoretical or empirical backing. E.g. tech change which drives growth is synonymous with ‘AI’. The work of the Nobel winners does not support the conclusion that Burnham is not serious about growth because he didn’t mention AI.

Nor does Burnham have a convincing view of the causes of growth. If there is one thing we know, it is the critical importance of technological progress, driven by the discovery of ever more creative and ingenious new ideas. That is the lesson of the work by Peter Howitt, Joel Mokyr and Philippe Aghion that won the most recent Nobel Prize in Economics. But it is not how Burnham thinks about growth - his Manchester speech did not even mention Al.

Research led to more research
The model that Aghion and Howitt constructed in 1992 has led to new research, including the study of levels of market concentration, which involves the number of companies that compete with each other. The researchers' theory shows that concentrations that are both too high and too low are bad for the innovation process. Despite promising advances in technology, growth has fallen in recent decades. One explanation for this, based on Aghion and Howitt's model, is that some companies have become too dominant. More forceful policies that aim to counteract too much market dominance may be necessary.
Another important lesson is that innovation creates winners and losers. This not only applies to companies, but also to their employees. High growth requires a lot of creative destruction, which means that more jobs disappear and there is potentially high unemployment. Therefore, it is important to support people who are affected while making it easy for them to move to more productive workplaces. Protecting workers but not jobs, for example through a system that is sometimes called flexicurity, may be the right solution.

revoluonary enect on the word and on peopies quanty or ure.
Useful knowledge
So - what creates this sustained economic growth? This year's laureates used different methods to answer this question. Through his research in economic history, Joel Mokyr has demonstrated that a continual flow of useful knowledge is necessary. This useful knowledge has two parts: the first is what Mokyr refers to as propositional knowledge, a systematic description of regularities in the natural world that demonstrate why something works; the second is prescriptive knowledge, such as practical instructions, drawings or recipes that describe what is necessary for something to work.
Mokyr shows that prior to the Industrial Revolution, technological innovation was primarily based on prescriptive knowledge. People knew that something worked, but not why. Propositional knowledge, such as in mathematics and natural philosophy, was developed without reference to prescriptive knowledge, which made it difficult, even impossible, to build upon existing knowledge. Attempted innovations were often haphazard or had approaches that someone with adequate propositional knowledge would have understood were futile - such as building a perpetual motion machine or using alchemy to make gold.

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 1

Glastonbury for old people.

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 1

I was disappointed to see the FT reporting warnings of "a new black hole in the public finances" (September 9). A black hole is an astronomical body so dense that its gravity prevents anything from escaping. It is not the difference between a relatively arbitrary target and an uncertain forecast. As the BBC has acknowledged, journalists have a responsibility to take particular care when reporting on the public finances. Misleading and emotive metaphors should not be used
-at least without caveat or quotation marks
- in a serious newspaper such as the FT.
Jo Michell
Professor of Economics, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 1

Even aside from the blindingly obvious idiocy of this “filling the black hole” gibberish, the economist in me is also infuriated by the stock flow inconsistency. A hole is a *stock* measure. A shortfall on expected tax revenues relative to planned expenditure — a funding gap — is a *flow* measure.

Alex Wickham ®
@alexwickham • 1h
X
Defence barely mentioned by Burnham on Tuesday but it could define his premiership whether he likes it or not. He has to immediately find £5b to fill the black hole.
Then tens of billions more to meet future UK commitments. That's the reality of governing over the next 5/10 yrs...

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 1

Guardian: better, but it’s a funding gap rather than a hole.

Jo Michell@jomichell· Jul 1

The Times and the Telegraph: equally idiotic.