Fergal Hanks

Locations of new homes built in Switzerland in 2018

Country-wide effects of new housing supply: Evidence from moving chains, by Lukas Hauck and Frederic Kluser

Another new paper on housebuilding and vacancy chains, this time with data on every Swiss resident & housing unit! An interesting context given Switzerland's high immigration, very large rented sector and strong tenancy rent controls... frederickluser.github.io/files/Moving...

The US market is half the global market, it makes a massive difference www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK611...

Comparing U.S. and International Market Size and Average Pricing for Prescription Drugs, 2017-2022 This issue brief examines trends related to market size measured via sales revenues and volume of prescription drug use between the U.S. and other countries between 2017 and 2023. Specifically, we com...

The US makes up half of spending on drugs www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK611... . Given the big costs are fixed drug development costs the difference is between profits and losses.

Primaries work somewhat but they do fail with candidates who activate core supporters and no one else. Corbyn in the UK is a good example and there are plenty of examples of republicans senate nominees who were obviously poor choices.

If Jerome Powell has million fans, then I'm one of them.
If Jerome Powell has one fan, then I'm THAT ONE.
If Jerome Powell has no fans, that means I'm dead.
If the world is against Jerome Powell I’m against the entire world

This does very much show how the Cambridge Green Belt has failed. It was designed to stop Cambridge becoming a major urban centre, it happened anyway and all that meant is that its major extensions have to be built about 10 miles away from the city.

In a NEW JI WP Fergal Hanks @fhanksalot.bsky.social studies the temporary employment effects of shifts in labour demand across industries and the role of industry specific skills.
#econtwitter #econsky
Read the paper: www.janeway.econ.cam.ac.uk/publication/...

One of the biggest drivers of high housing costs is that a small, highly motivated group of incumbent homeowners block new housing in their neighborhoods and almost no one is organized to push back.

Young people bear the brunt of that imbalance.

Be a housing fan.

This is the UK where this is the average pavement width.

You can tell because the robot has the logo of a UK cooperative supermarket chain.

NEW JI WP: F. Bilbiie, F. Hanks & S. Lavender (Cambridge) study how consumption-hours complementarity makes HANK models deliver plausible fiscal multipliers while resolving two puzzles; it also proposes two functional forms for utility that feature arbitrary complementarity
bit.ly/47qTXxx

Unemployment Consequences of Labour Re-allocation over Industries – Fergal Hanks YouTube video by Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge

New JI Video: Does shifting labour demand across industries cause aggregate unemployment? Fergal Hanks
@econcam.bsky.social discusses how industry-specific skills + imperfect substitutability can raise unemployment by up to 0.5pp
#econtwitter
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp_G...

Are you looking at the UK and thinking it would be a fun time?

This chart is already inflation adjusted. Also they adjust to 1982-1984 prices so it is $400 at 1982-1984 prices. If you were to use 2025 prices this would be around 3.2 times higher i.e $1280/week, $5120 per month.

Also the medical bills being a big cause of bankruptcy comes in part from Elizabeth Warren's work which was pretty sloppy. More careful work finds that while it causes some bankruptcies it is much less than Warren suggested. economics.mit.edu/sites/defaul...

I was talking about the people avoiding the panhandler not the homeless person themselves. Again most people aren't homeless at a given time so helping the homeless doesn't make most people materially wealthier.

table of proportion experiencing housing difficulty across europe. Association between western European and high rates despite generally larger welfare programs.

Highest housing difficulties due to their lack of a welfare state in

checks notes

France/Sweden/Finland/Denmark

My guess is the cost is probably much higher in utility rather than directly money terms.

On a side note homelessness is one of the worst examples as it is going to be driven far more by house prices than size of welfare payments. All more payments do is help you outbid someone else.

Again we are talking about safety net programs. They act like insurance, if something bad happens they step in. But today if you are not in those bad states your still have to pay the premiums i.e. taxes. If you want Scandinavian welfare the median person is going to pay more tax on net.

But that message is wrong (at least at a moment in time). Those who aren't disabled/unemployed/old at the current point in time will have to pay more for the safety net for those other people to be strengthened.

Get in loser we’re urbanizing California

The UK still fought colonial wars post WWII. The one that comes to mind is en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau_Mau... but both France and the UK were involved in the Suez crisis.

Also this is a bit more pedantic but the 2nd Boer was was fought in the 20th century.

The obvious one is Switzerland. Otherwise what you said is mostly observing that the UK didn't suffer fighting on its own soil in WWI and WWII which is basically just due to geography rather than good governance.

The UK is not currently in its worst position post world war II. In the 1970s the UK had to be bailed out by the IMF and there was the winter of discontent.

Can Cambridge be a model for kick-starting the British economy? An ambitious plan aims to double the size of the city and make it a hub for growth and innovation. But will its infrastructure cope?

Great article in the FT today— shows exactly why @camyimby.bsky.social
exists.
Cambridge has world-class ideas. But can we make space for the people who build them?

We desperately need infrastructure, housing, and labs in Cambridge to power growth and innovation in the UK

on.ft.com/4hJOOT9

There is strong evidence that voting for obamacare cost members of the house their seats. They passed what they could and Americans punished them for going too far.

William Easterly tweeting that Jeffery Sachs got it more right on the effectiveness of bed net distribution on malaria with a graph of malaria deaths in africa falling from 800,000 to 400,000 from 2000 to 2015.

On bednets in particular there has been a lot of study since the arguement and Easterly has now changed his mind on that specific topic (x.com/bill_easterl...). My guess is he would still argue that it doesn't help with growth but it can help improve some material conditions.

This is a bit off topic but do you have any thoughts on the impact of Canada imposing export tariffs on Alaska. Does Alaska import mostly from third countries or the main land US via land routes through Canada? Substitution to shipping would be hard to the Jones Act.

The cheap food thing drives me up the wall. I was on holiday in Japan and there was a job advert in a restaurant and the hourly wage was $4 (this was when the yen was particularly weak). Food is labour intensive, thus cheap food requires cheap labour. Why does anyone left-wing want this?

The alternatives: vigilantism and self defense workshops.

1) They mention prison abolition and the title clearly applies to both. There are people for whom abolition means abolition.

2) Their other writing makes it clear they don't mean to replace the police with another "community defence force".