Bookmarks (17)

US legislators are eager to ban TikTok. They are missing a bigger question: should they also ban Instagram, Facebook and the network formerly known as Twitter? The obvious answer is “no”, because although everyone grumbles about social media, we still use these networks, which strongly suggests that deep down we still value them. But what […]

Nicolae Ceaușescu was not beloved. His regime was vicious and he treated Romania as his personal wallet: while Ceaușescu emptied the coffers to construct a vast, ornate palace, his people starved. He imposed disastrous population control policies on his country too, which saw hundreds of thousands of unwanted children left to rot in squalid orphanages. Ceaușescu’s rule […]

The “Wendy’s Dave’s Triple” is a fast-food offering that stacks two possessives and three hamburgers. I am not sure how easy it is to swallow in either regard, but what has really been sticking in people’s throats is the prospect of surge pricing at the Wendy’s fast-food chain.  A few weeks ago, the new CEO […]

Here’s a discovery to bring you up short: unemployment is good for you. Really? Well, no, not really. But a new research paper has found a correlation that points in that direction: more unemployment, fewer deaths. Underneath lies something real, shocking and yet somehow inspiring. First, let’s unpack the research, conducted by economists Amy Finkelstein, […]

Back in October, the headteacher at my son’s school began each assembly by displaying the Premier League table, with Tottenham Hotspur at the top. (My son, a fan of Tottenham’s local rivals Arsenal, was outraged.) Those familiar with English football will know that Tottenham were top of the league for much of October, but only […]

My colleague John Burn-Murdoch recently presented striking evidence of a new trend: young men and young women are becoming politically segregated. Young men now sit substantially to the right of young women on the political spectrum. This is an international phenomenon and it’s new. Should we be surprised? Society seems to be polarising along every […]

Do you think the leading large language model, GPT-4, could suggest a solution to Wordle after having four previous guesses described to it? Could it compose a biography-in-verse of Alan Turing, while also replacing “Turing” with “Church”? (Turing’s PhD supervisor was Alonzo Church, and the Church-Turing thesis is well known. That might befuddle the computer, […]

When the spreadsheet launched in 1979, it was a bewildering piece of software. People had no idea what they were looking at. A computer screen, filled with a grid of numbers? As Keith Houston explains in his new history of the pocket calculator, Empire of the Sum, they hadn’t realised that the rows and columns […]

On June 1 2009, Air France Flight 447 vanished on a routine transatlantic flight. The circumstances were mysterious until the black box flight recorder was recovered nearly two years later, and the awful truth became apparent: three highly trained pilots had crashed a fully functional aircraft into the ocean, killing all 288 people on board, […]

When he first heard the music, Brian Eno grabbed a copy of the single and ran to find David Bowie. “I’ve found the sound of the future,” he breathlessly announced. It was 1977, and the sound of the future was “I Feel Love”. Donna Summer’s ethereal vocals were backed by producer Giorgio Moroder’s pulsing, looping […]

Against my better judgment, I was recently prevailed upon to play a game of Monopoly with the family. It soon developed in a fashion that has become familiar: everyone tried to rip everyone else’s face off, except me. I proposed a mutually beneficial deal to each player, offering extra concessions myself to make sure those […]

If Christmas is (alas) a time for a materialist blowout, January is often a time for rueful reflection. Should we really have bought all that soon-to-be-landfill for each other? The answer, as I have written a dozen times, is . . . probably not. Thankfully, people have stopped sending me emails declaring that economists don’t understand Christmas. Now they […]

The New Year ritual of vowing to quit smoking, drinking or dessert is not for me. I’ve long preferred the idea that resolutions should be adding something positive rather than squeezing out bad habits. In a typical year, I might resolve to exercise more, to see more live music or to spend more time with […]

Last year, inspired by Randall Munroe’s delightful books What If? and What If? 2, I invited the good folk of Twitter to ask me absurd hypothetical questions about the economy, to which I would attempt some serious answers. This year, we’re going to do it all again. Alex asks: How big would an asteroid made […]

Should we worry that Rachel Reeves, who is likely to become the UK’s first female chancellor of the exchequer, will be a “cut-and-paste chancellor”? When my colleague Soumaya Keynes reviewed Reeves’s book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, she stumbled upon a sentence that copied an uncredited source almost verbatim. It wasn’t hard to find […]

A couple of years ago, taking questions on stage in front of a live audience, I was asked to do my duty as an economist and make an economic forecast. But the questioner had a demanding benchmark for what made a good prediction, informing me that the previous keynote speaker at this conference had been […]

Why does nobody have spontaneous fun any more? You can blame the economists for this one, if you like. Specifically, blame the Soviet economist Yuri Larin, who in May 1929 proposed the idea of nepreryvka, the “continuous work week”. At the time, most people in the Soviet Union lived according to the rhythm of a […]