This week I have heard people claim that locking down earlier would not have made much difference. This is wrong. Even locking down a few days earlier would have made an enormous difference, and I can prove it! In early March, as I wrote on March 12th, we knew that cases were growing at over… Read more
Posts by:
Charles Adams
Quantitative easing: good or bad?
To repurpose a quote attributed to the physicist Richard Feynman, “If you think you understand money, then you do not understand money.” Feynman was talking about “quantum mechanics”, not “money”. Most people would probably think that they have very little in common. The similarities may be subtle but there is one fact that in both… Read more
Essential workers – remember them!
Most sensible people have always realised that health is essential, and that nurses and all health support workers are essential workers. And now in this time of crisis, we can see exactly how essential these essential workers really are. Not just nurses and the health sector, but also farmers and other agricultural workers, lorry drivers,… Read more
Covid-19: A test of leadership
It is difficult to write about Covid-19 because, above all, this is a human tragedy – behind every statistic are a manifold of individual human stories. Still the statistics are very important, because they may help us to learn how to save lives in the future. At the level of government, Covid-19 is a test… Read more
One graph – the most important graph in the history of Humanity!
I realise that I am a bit odd. The fact is that I love graphs. Graphs make me happy, and sometimes sad. A good graph speaks to me like a Da Vinci painting or a Tolstoy novel. A good graph tells a story and there is no need for words. But I realise that graphs… Read more
The household fallacy
It’s election time and the household fallacy is back in vogue. On Radio 4s “Any Questions” this week a lady asked (more eloquently then my version, go to 14.45 minutes in), how are we supposed to teach our children about counting their pennies when politicians are promising to spend on this, that, and t’other? The… Read more
Rock paper scissors
I never really liked the game rock-paper-scissors, because it seemed, well, ‘kind of random’. But there is another story that is rather interesting. This simple game provides us with an abstract framework to walk through complex questions such as whether the supreme court ruling on the prorogation of the UK parliament was appropriate or not…. Read more
‘Public’ schools
Foreigners are puzzled why citizens in the UK have to pay to attend a ‘public’ school. I tell them, it is the same reason why you need to use a knife and fork to eat a banana! Melissa Benn has written in the Guardian today that our ‘public’ school system is “morally rotten”. I might… Read more
A household is not like a state
As a society we need to be far more concerned about climate and inequality than money, however as it is almost a year since I last wrote about sectoral balances, there are another 4 quarters of data to look at, and I want to make the point again, money is not a contraint on what… Read more
‘I am’ Greta Thunberg
Christopher Caldwell has an Opinion piece in the New York Times called The Problem With Greta Thunberg’s Climate Activism. The problem with Christopher Caldwell’s opinion – “Kids her age have not seen much of life. Her worldview might be unrealistic, her priorities out of balance.” – is that the more knowledgeable parts of the human race… Read more