Many of the problems in the British public sector directly relate to the attempt to create a world fit for the central planner in which all tasks can be set down in a system of rules. The philosophy of 'empirical consequentialism' underpins this entire venture. This is the view that the...

In the 1990s and 2000s, unemployment was seen, both by academic labour market economists and policymakers, as a short-run disequilibrium phenomenon. Policy was aimed at increasing the 'flexibility' of the labour market, at removing obstacles to the workings of the market, which would ostensibly...

By scientific standards, the accuracy of short-term economic forecasts has been poor, and shows no sign of improving over time. We form a delay matrix of time-series data on the overall rate of growth of the economy, with lags spanning the period over which any regularity of behaviour is...

We provide empirical evidence that in a social network which evolves over time, it is possible to extract deep information about the system from limited observations. In this paper, we consider a simple piece of readily available evidence on access to financial services by individuals in the UK....