Adam Brown
@adamlbrown.bsky.social
960 followers 290 following 4.9K posts
Economist, formerly a physicist. Head of UK Economic Policy & Modelling at Cambridge Econometrics. Visiting Researcher at Oxford Brookes Business School. Also interested in cricket, baseball and metal. Displaced Salopian. Vmo
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Pinned
adamlbrown.bsky.social
A major new report published for anyone interested in #innovation, #productivity, #industrialstrategy, #econsky. I'll now do a short thread that pulls out the main findings and recommendations...
britishacademy.bsky.social
The British Academy and @sciencecampaign.bsky.social commissioned Cambridge Econometrics to conduct a systems-based analysis of the strengths and weaknesses within the UK’s innovation system.

Read the full report: www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publications...
resprofnews.bsky.social
The UK needs many industrial strategies.

Smarter growth begins with understanding value chains in innovation, say Daniel Rathbone and Eleanor Hopkins.

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-v...
adamlbrown.bsky.social
I enjoy it for lunch with broken walnuts or pine nuts, balsamic reduction, maybe some salt and chilli flakes. A sprinkling of flash fried chorizo cubes also works well if you're having it for tea
adamlbrown.bsky.social
This graph is basically doing what I predicted in 2022: first you get the jump in commodities, then that feeds through to consumer prices, then that feeds through to wages. Real wages and profit margins fall, then catch up again.
adamlbrown.bsky.social
The ironic thing is that even 15 years ago at LSE, they didn't assign Aghion and Howitt, they assigned Nelson and Winter, because the theory is richer, the methods less tenuous, and the explanations more grounded in reality.
adamlbrown.bsky.social
the reason they "achieved so little" was because they spent their entire 15 years in office trying to govern from policy positions waaaay outside the zone of effective governance.
adamlbrown.bsky.social
This was the Brexit switch that we all talked about at the time - after the debacle of austerity, the Tories had clearly lost the economic argument and with it the PMC vote, but saw an opportunity to pivot to being "the party of Brexit" and fight an election on a culture-war front - and it worked!
adamlbrown.bsky.social
bsky.app/profile/czed...
Sorry but this is wrong. High tea is not and has never been a synonym for supper. Tea is a late afternoon meal, high tea is just a big tea. Supper is a late evening meal. totally different.
adamlbrown.bsky.social
My favourite school trip was to Manchester Science Museum, but it was a Monday so it was closed, so we did Granada studios instead
adamlbrown.bsky.social
wealth creators do not, in fact, create wealth
adamlbrown.bsky.social
Trying to compensate for the obviously fatally simplistic assumption that all innovations are essentially the same and only differ by magnitude by weaving in a cutting edge Poisson distribution (first published 1813)
adamlbrown.bsky.social
The thing is though is that its not even recent mathematics, its Enlightenment era mathematics that the physical sciences realised weren't useful descriptors of complex reality 100 years ago
adamlbrown.bsky.social
There's definitely plenty more Nobels to be won in repackaging some small fraction of the useful insight from a randomly selected heterodox economics field in neoclassical clothing
adamlbrown.bsky.social
I don't think I could be more underwhelmed.
adamlbrown.bsky.social
Its a shame that Richard Nelson died in January because honestly he was long overdue. They could still give it to Brian Arthur and Sidney Winter
adamlbrown.bsky.social
I think there's certainly a lot more this government could do on that, yes. Currently the messaging is a bit inconsistent and I'm not sure the advice they're getting is very up to date
adamlbrown.bsky.social
Indeed! I wouldn't be surprised if that is how they did it. Imagine if we forecast the weather like this. 'Well it's got consistently warmer through months 1-7 this year, so the results of our regression suggest it will continue to get warmer through months 8-12'
adamlbrown.bsky.social
I think they're all interesting! a lot of the story is that if you don't actively regulate to encourage equitable productivity growth, it's more attractive for dominant firms to just try to build moats and rent seek instead.
adamlbrown.bsky.social
The message from the hedgehog chart, which always predicts the same level of future productivity growth despite the underlying growth drivers changing, sometimes significantly, from year to year, is that this is a clownishly amateurish attempt at economic forecasting. We might as well toss a coin
adamlbrown.bsky.social
Which sector do you wanna know about?
adamlbrown.bsky.social
I hope his killers are appropriately punished with TV privileges removed for up to a week or something
adamlbrown.bsky.social
...reduce consumption through a combination of tax rises, higher interest rates, some current spending restrictions. We all understand this. So why, now consumption is falling as planned, are journalists and politicians treating this as a surprise, or a problem to be fixed? Did they miss the memo?
adamlbrown.bsky.social
If we ever want productivity growth ever again, we need to rebuild UK national capital stocks which requires a massive increase in both public and private investment. The only way to do this whilst maintaining macroeconomic stability is to simultaneously reduce consumption. So we take measures to...
adamlbrown.bsky.social
It's not massively worse, it's just more obvious. It is harder than ever to pretend we live in a meritocracy.
adamlbrown.bsky.social
I tried to write a chapter in a recent report about how the UK managed to pair some of the highest quality economic policy research in the world with some of the worst actual economic policy but it was difficult not to get cross
adamlbrown.bsky.social
We don't want harwood here, he's a disingenuous troll. His presence brings nothing but aggravation. He has nothing to teach and is incapable of learning.