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Reposted by Aveek Bhattacharya

Robert Saunders @robertsaunders.bsky.social · 8h

On 26 October, we'll be marking 50 years since the IMF crisis by exploring the politics of economic shocks. What is it like to govern in an economic crisis? What happens when "the markets" turn on governments? And what does this mean for democracy? All welcome! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/politics-a...

eventbrite.co.uk

Politics and Economic Shocks, from the IMF Crisis to the Mini-Budget

Join the Mile End Institute for a discussion exploring how financial crises and market pressures have shaped British politics since 1976.

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Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 8h

Public attitudes to electoral reform can be fluid + cross-pressured. See this BSA trend on Keep vs Change over 3 decades Change the system was 60-36 (+24) in 2024: ahead 2021-24 Keep the system we have peaked 66-27 (+39) 2011, the year a referendum held on the Alternative Vote (which lost 68-32)

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Professor Peter Matthews @urbaneprofessor.bsky.social · 10h

This was already happening in other areas too: the changes to employment support in England are a lot like that happens in Scotland; and the Timms review of PIP looks like it will create something that looks like Adult Disability Payment

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Gavin Jackson @gavinjackson.bsky.social · 12h

Or maybe the only growth theory you need is “it’s basically exogenous and nothing that happens in SW1 matters”

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 12h

This is bad reasoning imo because it overestimates the government's power over the economy (especially in the short run!). It's like saying the football team that won must have had better tactics - maybe, but often not.

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John Muller @johnspacemuller.com · 22h

How can we get Nathan Fielder into a rental home with Man City execs for the next 34 days

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

From this survey, median position in Scotland seems to be that migration is good but we've had too much. My read of polls from the rest of the UK suggests more ambivalence, but the median person is "neither good nor bad".

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I think this impress is probably mistaken. I was speaking to someone who worked in Blair's Number 10 strategy unit and told me they had no access to academic research (I'm guessing before Google scholar) and apparently nobody had noticed.

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Another example of Reform miserbalism for @duncanrobinson.bsky.social - they're behind among dog people and cat people, but are the favourites of those who don't like pets. (NB squinting at some pretty small margins here)

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

This great, so much in this. Need to resist the urge to think too much about Morrissey's grim politics, but there's an irony that he once represented and embodied a poetic, romantic, culturally promiscuous working class that defied stereotypes and now is easy to reduce to an avatar for the hooligans

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Jose Mourinho celebrating his Premier League title with Man Utd

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

More parochially, do we under-appreciate Armando Iannucci as one of the great living Scots? Not just personally behind Veep and The Thick of It, but his disciples did Succession, Slow Horses, Peep Show (and Jesse Armstrong even wrote for Black Mirror) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

There's someone in the comments saying this list is too American, and 4 of the top 20 are British + Veep/Succession have British creators and about half the actors on the Wire and Game of Thrones were British, so that's actually a pretty good hit rate I think?

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Joel @storywonker.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

"This director did the Barbie movie" is a signal the film's going to be grown-up and seriously-made. What times we live in

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Alcohol has externalities? Huge if true (Not that the Conservatives have shown much sign of caring about those externalities when caused by drinkers not on benefits)

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Well this is disappointing. Just wrote yesterday, contra @will-davies.bsky.social about the potential I see in AI aveekbhattacharya.substack.com/p/readwatche...

aveekbhattacharya.substack.com

Read/Watched/Listened/Ate: Deliberation and Trade-Offs

38: September 2026

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Seems like a normal way for budgets to work? You have a maximum amount you can spend, and you aim to spend a little bit less as a contingency? Not the only way of course, but how you'd act if you really don't want to overspend.

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The mandate fairy causes brain rot. What do you think is more likely, that voters have taken close note of your manifesto and are ticking each commitment off, or that they want politicians to compromise and work things out together?

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I'm writing about this and it is a genuine question I have - how come appointments to the Monetary Policy Committee and OBR (indeed the Migration Advisory Committee or Climate Change Committee) are not more politicised. Strong British norms, or just contingency and luck?

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

"its fiscal rules" - whose fiscal rules? The government's. So then surely it's the government that is setting the bounds of permissible fiscal policy. The government can just change the fiscal rules if it wants, lord knows it has done that enough times.

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Tom Richmond @tom-richmond.com · 22/09/2026

England's performance in the latest round of PISA tests was brilliant....... wasn't it? I mean, we rose up the rankings in maths, reading and science, so everything is going well....... isn't it? My new post on LinkedIn: lnkd.in/p/e9hJCK5n

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Unsurprisingly the thing described is nothing like DOGE (because @dan-goss.bsky.social isn't an idiot, just maybe rhetorically carried away). It would engage the public and work closely with experts. The similarity is orthodoxy breaking, but I'm not sure that's even what Dan wants?

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

OK but what if I have a British passport, am resident in England, but grew up in Scotland so being called English brings me out in hives?

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Nancy Hey @worklifeyou.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

UK Measures of National Wellbeing - both including and beyond GDP - 1/4ly release by the National Statistics office www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula... Overall top line - life satisfaction has improved since the coronavirus pandemic, but not fully returned to its pre-coronavirus pandemic levels.

ons.gov.uk

Beyond GDP insights, UK headline measures of National Well-being - Office for National Statistics

Exploring quality of life and progress beyond GDP in the UK, drawing on the 59 national well-being measures published annually and the seven headline measures published quarterly.

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James Austin @jamesdaustin.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Hmmmm. Net zero is still *far* more popular than unpopular and the drop in support is largely driven by polarisation.

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Weird how everyone has memory holes that conference speech where Starmer said "racism is bad and I'm against it" and it was the high point of his premiership.

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Nyoni has been great but I hope everybody has learned some lessons about patience from Bajcetic

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Would be interesting to test this, but my guess is that people systematically overestimate how likely players are to score on the eye test. That said, we should recognise there's a lot of random error in these models which is why analysts complain about reading too much into single game xG...

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I actually think this is quite wrong. My read is that very few policy arguments break down on deontological/consequentialist lines. The one big exception I think is criminal justice: is it about desert or crime prevention, but that's pretty unusual I think.

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I wouldn't be so sure “I don’t particularly enjoy going to watch Nice because there are some good players, but the level of football is not high enough for me to get excited,” Ratcliffe told The Times in March about the CLUB HE OWNS

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The correlation between people who worry about AI deaths and worry about malaria deaths is so much higher than anybody seems to appreciate

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Nick Garland @npjgarland.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Really excited to be relaunching Progressive Review, @ippr.org's journal of politics, ideas and public policy, with a new editorial team + advisory board:

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Ironic thing to say, given the heavy overlap between the philosophers associated with longtermism and moral uncertainty

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Seems like a bad test for environmental advocates to set - focus on a largely symbolic policy rather than clean power generation, grid decarbonisation, electric vehicle or heat pump adoption, something on diet change or farming emissions etc etc

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

One big impact of this, I think, is that the UK goes from being a huge outlier in terms of the scale of the post-2008 productivity slow down to being broadly in line with international peers.

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

This is really, really, really important stuff. ‘We now think more of the slowdown can be explained by continued falls in average hours worked, leaving less to be explained by falls in output per hour’.

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Fits with @duncanrobinson.bsky.social's piece last week: Reform seems to disproportionately attract miserbalist, anti-everything voters www.economist.com/britain/2026...

economist.com

The misanthrope party

Reform UK’s miserabilist streak is Nigel Farage’s asset, and his problem

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

We spend so much time complaining about the problems we see and too little time being grateful for the problems we averted. Well done banks and their regulators for avoiding a big spike in mortgage arrears, let alone repossessions.

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

If this is our manifesto, I'm happy to sign up

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Wtaf is this? This isn't how think tanks work? I mean, I've definitely been ignored by journalists, but not on purpose: in general, ideas will benefit from scrutiny, not hidden away. (Actually think there is a problem that the government struggles to float ideas without being tied to them)

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

A hill I will probably die on is that there is nothing technical or weird about the concept of a counterfactual, and society would be better if the idea were more widely used and understood.

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

As the dust begins to settle, looking forward to these sorts of analyses of what we've learned from the assisted dying process. I'm not sure the public were more or less engaged because it was a Private Members Bill though? Is the claim any ethically significant policy should have a citizens jury?

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I have two aspirated "bh"s in my name that I have zero hope of anybody non-Indian pronouncing.

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

In fact, it's even worse. There were specific reasons why borrowing was a good idea in the early 2010s. But somewhere along the way it bizarrely became the left wing position not to take rich people's money through tax but to sell them bonds and pay them back with interest.

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

If you're so bad at context clues you can't decode [Something something] Holborn & St Pancras [Something something] Zack Polanski [Something something] U-turn Labour nahin You probably shouldn't be making laws for the country

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I actually think it's fine to draw illustrative or conceptual charts - like, I don't know, a Kuznets curve. But you do eventually have to test it against data/show your working

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

The hiring and then briefing against Chris Wormald, akin to going to Steaks Inc, ordering the T-Bone and going 'wait, there's beef in this?' and then being bizarrely, aggressively rude to the waiting staff to the point you end up up with a £860k fine. (Paid for by all of us)

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Aveek Bhattacharya @aveek18.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

"As we’ve lost our confidence, we started trying to make lots of different arguments for development that go beyond what I believe to be the core one, which is, if you have the capability to save people’s lives and to change people’s lives, you should deploy that capability ambitiously"

theguardian.com

‘Sweat the asset’: new development minister plots path to make UK aid count

Kirsty McNeill reaffirms Labour’s 0.7% of GDP pledge and promises value for money to allay voter concerns

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