@owen.org
Economist. ex No10, Treasury, CGD, PxD. Former visiting Professor @ LSE. Development Drums podcast. Team GB triathlete age-grouper. Olympic volunteer. Feminist, internationalist. Set up the first UK Government website. Helped invent AMCs.
As aid budgets gets slashed & the US withdraws from global institutions, this is an excellent opportunity to finally bring in a non-American leader for WFP (and please stop with the plastic press releases...)
Parliament could amend the Succession to the Crown Act 2013 so that it applies to people then living. (Which it should have done in the first place). That way Princess Anne and her descendants would come before Andrew.
My experience exactly. LLMs do not do data cleaning or organisation reliably. And it is troubling that they do not know they cannot do this.
So far the only use I have found for LLMs is vibe coding. Which is fine if you don't care about the security of your code.
I suspect we are all going to need to read up on Akrotiri and Dhekelia - an example of a military base on an island (Cyprus) for which the military power (UK) has sovereignty.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrotir...
www.cvce.eu/content/publ...
which branch does he want?
I do not think that the answers to these questions should in any way lead us to waver on the principle that the future of Greenland is up to the people of Greenland. But I would like to understand whether and how NATO should strengthen the defence of the Arctic.
I am more interested in these questions than in tedious political speculation by the commentariat about the tone of political communications.
Would like to read analysis of:
a. what would defence of the Arctic, including Greenland, look like? How much would it cost?
b. what exactly are the valuable economic assets in Greenland?
c. which businesses in the UK and EU countries would be adversely affected by an increase in US tarrifs?
An occasional reminder that, in context, Joan Robinson did not use her famous analogy about throwing rocks in your own harbour to suggest that retalation against tarrifs is never rational.
Joan Robinson "Beggar-My-Neighbour Remedies for Unemployment" 1937
ia802806.us.archive.org/16/items/ess... (p170-184)
Rate of change over time, yes. Think of prices vs inflation, GDP vs growth, number of immigrants vs net migration , tax rate vs tax cuts , crime rate vs increases or reductions in recorded crimes.
The political and commentary bubble tends to focus on the first derivative of what the voters care about. Then the bubble seem surprised when they do not get immediate political benefit from getting the first derivative under control.
Well FIFA looks pretty silly now.
Sorry to hear that. This is why I reluctantly took up triathlon. Lots of cardio but lower impact from the biking and running.
Gotta love the Danes
FCDO's internal “best buy” documents identify which interventions deliver the greatest impact—but aren't publicly available.
Euan Ritchie makes the case for publishing them to support partners and improve systems:
https://go.cgdev.org/4q8qsa6
Being development-friendly is not only, or even mainly, about how much aid you give. That is the point of the CDI.
Sweden is the most development-friendly country for the third year running.
I feel for the person who posted the files online before the Chancellor sat down - presumably hoping that they would not be found quickly if there was no link to them. But in retrospect it would have been better not to upload them until the end of the Budget speech.
31 years ago I set up the first UK government website to publish the budget online - the first country to do so.
I took an ASCII version of the documents from the typesetters, and worked overnight to put in HTML tags by hand.
I didn't FTP it to the server until the Chancellor sat down.
Evergreen post
I am delighted to share that Nobel laureates Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee will join our Department of Economics @econ.uzh.ch at the University of Zurich on July 1, 2026, as Lemann Foundation Professors of Economics.
🧵 1/7
Haha. Academia.edu account duly cancelled.
Oh. The stochastic parrot does not boost productivity.
www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/m...
As a former resident of wonk-land, this made me snort
www.economist.com/britain/2025...
I would happily buy a smart speaker that responds to voice commands to play music or the radio, and to control lights and other home automation, but which does not make recordings nor send data to a tech company. Why does this not exist? Is there not a big enough market for it?
I think my family in Denmark might want to quibble with that ....
Chris - let me know if you want me to try to help you to move the archive. - Owen
The evidence in favour of unconditional cash transfers continues to mount.
