iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Time for an AI beer. Wish me luck!

Anti-Establishment ‘Hazy Daisy’ New England IPA

Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The official evaluation agrees that Help To Buy * made unaffordable places even more unaffordable * worked best in places where it was needed least … and yet concludes that it was ‘very high value for money’ 🤔 www.gov.uk/government/p...

The Help to Buy scheme represents very high value for money. The Help to Buy scheme is estimated to have generated a net present social value of £25.1 billion in 2024/25 prices over the lifetime of the scheme (April 2013 to March 2023), including projected income from equity loan redemptions up to 2039/40. This value is driven by the social benefit of the impact of Help to Buy in supporting an increase in housing supply.

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Re Your First Home - a reminder that H2B * Raised house prices overall * Helped developer profits * In London, raised prices, not supply * In more affordable areas, supply up but no price effect Govt will have to think hard about benefits vs lessons learned, as Angela Rayner put it today.

On the economic impacts of mortgage credit expansion policies: Evidence from help to buy / Felipe Carozzi, Christian A.L. Hilber, Xiaolun Yu / Journal of Urban Economics, 2024

Abstract
We take advantage of two spatial discontinuities in Britain's Help to Buy (HtB) scheme to explore the effectiveness and distributional implications of mortgage credit expansion policies. Employing a Difference-in-Discontinuities design, we find that HtB significantly increased house prices and had no detectable effect on construction volumes in severely supply constrained and unaffordable Greater London. Conversely, HtB did increase construction numbers without a noticeable effect on prices near the English/Welsh border, an affordable area with comparably lax supply conditions. While HtB did not help would-be-buyers in already unaffordable areas, it boosted the financial performance of developers participating in the scheme.

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Happy 10th birthday to this masterpiece

Hannah Proctor’s A Certain Mantype, 2016

They were born in the early 80s. They went to an elite university but not to Oxbridge. They have some potted plants and like to cook from recipe books - probably they have the first Ottolenghi book but they know that's a bit passe now. They don't go out much anymore but they still check Resident Advisor from time to time because they like to think they could go out if they felt like it.

Sometimes they go to Café Oto. They were probably into Burial at some point.
They also have a favourite Mahler symphony. They've probably been to Berghain and even considered moving to Berlin in the mid-2000s. They used to stay out till dawn dancing in warehouses in Hackney Wick. Now they have a stable routine. They watch Adam Curtis documentaries to keep up with the sneery conversations on Facebook and of course Chris Morris and Patrick Keiller were always their heroes. They could make a joke about the Werner Herzog penguin documentary. They are left-wing but they would never use embarrassing words like 'solidarity' or 'comrade. They rarely, if ever, go to protests. They have a job that requires them to wear clothes that are relatively smart - a round-necked woollen jumper over a shirt, for example. They have a pure wool scarf and good leather shoes. They do not read Marx but they know enough about him to make fun of people who are obsessed with the value form. Their group of friends from university who they see less and less don't know anything about the value form though. They might own a copy of A Thousand Plateaus but it's years since they bothered reading that kind of thing. They like Jonathan Meades and Stewart Lee.
They hate Clapham even though one of their friends moved down there recently. They read the Guardian online but of course they know it's shit.
Sometimes they read articles on Jacobin. They have a long-term girlfriend but feel weird about getting married even though they've already bought some second-hand teak furniture tog…

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

*Casually* in fact while I was writing this I ran up a lil AI detector myself

We can even make our own detector

The key ingredient to Pangram’s AI classification algorithm is access to (1) many human written texts and (2) mirroring this text using an LLM engine. I happen to have a large corpus of economics texts and an open-source LLM. Consequentially, I trained my own economics Pangram model. In a future column, I’ll walk through this model. For now, here’s the model if you’re interested in playing around with it.

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Here’s the UK Head of Consulting at EY

UK Head of Consulting at EY says that “AI will increasingly help with routine consulting work <while human consultants will> have to be good at what we’re really good at, which is to be human . . . We have to be face to face once the agents are remote.”

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

This is a v interesting idea in fact. Tho unless they get the connections built too, it’s 1m people plonked in the Cambridgeshire countryside who’d have to drive everywhere

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

Delicious Judeo-Christian heritage

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

Want to know what switching from development control to rules-based planning might look like in the UK? @mauricelange.bsky.social has numbers 👇 HT @stephenkb.bsky.social

LB Croydon switched to rules-based planning in 2019. Croydon then delivered more houses on new-build sites of 6-10 units than any other London borough since 2004.

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Have been waiting for someone to write this paper #EconSky 📉📈 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The direction of innovation and work from home, Chungeun Yoon, new out in Research Policy

Highlights

• Work-from-home shifted innovation toward non–face-to-face technologies.
• Firms adopting work-from-home increased patents for non–face-to-face technologies.
• Smaller, younger firms in the ICT-related industry drove these results.

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

Last month’s tube strike did not, in fact, bring London to a grinding halt on.ft.com/4nSaQXK

FT graph showing a drop in Oyster check-ins, and a rise in Overground, Crossrail and Lime bike use during last month’s tube strike

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

Social housing stocks across the OECD. The UK is doing much better than I expected!

Graph of OECD data showing number of social rental dwellings as a % of total stock (2022 or latest year available, by selected countries). OECD average 7%, UK 16%.

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

Someone is going around central London changing Rs into Ps

A door where “FIRE EXIT” has been changed to “FIPE EXIT”

A street sign reading “Stratford Villas” that has been changed to “Stpatford Villas”

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

UK cities with higher industrial concentration in 1881 had more unskilled workers in 1971, and much lower average wages in 2020.

Table showing an IV regression of 1971 unskilled worker share (col 1) and 2020 log wages (col 2) on 1881 Herfindahl Index and employment. Units are urban settlements identified using a clustering procedure. IVs are predicted industrial concentration and land ownership fragmentation.

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

One-industry towns are bad for you

Graphs showing UK cities industrial concentration in 1881 versus share of unskilled workers in 1971 (panel a) and low wages in 2020 (panel b)

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 20/06/2025

Includes these two Conservative election posters from 1983 👇

A 1983 Conservative party election poster featuring a British Asian man in a suit. The tagline is: “Labour says he’s black. Tories say he’s British.“

A 1983 Conservative party election poster featuring a Black British man in a suit. The tagline is: “Labour says he’s black. Tories say he’s British.“

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Sobering stuff for those hoping to gain from US brain drain www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Proposed NIH + NSF cancelled grants / budget cuts add up to $31.5bn. The EU Choose Europe fund is worth $571m.

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

Next level geopolitical menswear game from Macron here

Macron in Greenland wearing co-ordinated navy blue polo neck fleece, navy blue suit jacket and black hooded coat

JD Vance in Greenland wearing oversize shiny green parka

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

… in London you’d have to get over 30 BIDs to run a vote, and hope they all pass. See pic. Maybe not getting that done is a failure of political leadership, but it’s also a much harder problem.

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

you may not like it but this is what 2 high agency males look like

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

Big push R&D also shifts long run economic geography, so this is also a spatial policy tool. Here’s a great example from the Gross and Sampat paper. Left is geography of WW2 R&D, right is the impact on cluster performance over 30 years.

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

Quick experiment inspired by @adamtooze.bsky.social’s latest Chartbook. Compare and contrast! L: Mistral R: DeepSeek R1

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

London: Thursday is the new Friday, Sunday the new Saturday Other cities: Saturday the new Friday, no drinks on a school night

Two time-series graphs comparing daily spend in pubs in London vs other big cities, 2019 vs 2024. Thursdays are now the most popular day for an after-work drink in London, but after-work socialising appears to be less popular post-pandemic in other large city centres outside of London.

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

Discussing the war plans in the group chat

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

Quite the pivot for Peter Andre

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

This is a lovely ur-name story from @stephenkb.bsky.social. The Ellis Island Special, but for West London

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

It’s … complicated? Some of these things are much more concerning than others. ‘In some form’ is doing a lot of work here.

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

Am I reading this right - IZA is *closing down* at the end of this year? At least in its current form? This was sent out to Fellows today. #EconSky 📉📈

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

Indeed! Here is R1’s answer. (The underlying ‘reasoning’ looks quite a bit like Matt’s article.)

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

Fully agree with this. We find that every two BBC jobs created another job in Salford’s creative economy, just in the first five years. A pretty good outcome! But the projections were much higher than this, and so that’s going to disappoint some people.

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

🚨 📣 CFP GCEG 2025 - Geographies of Skilled Migration, Innovation and Economic Performance. Send us your abstracts by **5 January 2025**. More details below. #GCEG2025 Organisers: @tkemeny.bsky.social, Francesco Lissoni, Ernest Miguelez, @andrea-morrison.bsky.social, Anna Rosso and yrs truly.

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

🚨 PSA - Call for papers at the 2025 Global Conference on Economic Geography! Please send us your abstracts on Geographies of Skilled Migration, Innovation and Economic Performance. Deadline for pre-selection is **5 January 2025**. More below. #GCEG2025

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

I hope to collect the full set one day

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Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Congestion charging is good! 👇 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Title of a new peer-reviewed paper; The city-wide effects of tolling downtown drivers: Evidence from London’s congestion charge, Ian Herzog, November 2024, Journal of Urban Economics

Abstract: This paper studies effects of London’s Congestion Charge on regional traffic, commuting, and economic activity’s spatial distribution. London began tolling drivers into its central business district in 2003 and I find that the policy reduced traffic on untolled roads leading downtown. I build this effect into a quantitative model with heterogeneous skills, endogenous mode choice, and traffic externalities to examine effects on commuters. Simulations suggest that London’s Congestion Charge incentivizes driving to untolled workplaces and gives the region’s commuters positive net benefits. I also find that benefits are progressive because the policy reduces traffic where low-skill commuters live and work.

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