I have been wondering for some time whether there might be clues in the future trajectory of the Chinese economy & stock-markets in the behaviour of other large economies that have emerged since World War II. As neighbours, Japan seemed like the obvious starting point. I started off by looking at both countries’ GDP Deflators… Continue reading China Slowdown: Are There Lessons From Japan?
Author: rusnewton98
Is It Always Good to Share?
The Sharing Economy has attracted tremendous interest over the past few years: firms like Uber, AirBnB, TaskRabbit and Zilok offer people the ability to monetize assets that they’re not using all the time, or to find customers more easily than was the case pre-internet. As a homeowner, I’ve become an enthusiastic user of AirBnB: the… Continue reading Is It Always Good to Share?
Does London Need Another Runway?
As the debate continues to rage, with Heathrow & Gatwick both claiming to be the best option for an additional runway, I thought it might be interesting to review the current situation and ask whether an extra runway is needed at all. London has six international airports within an hour’s drive or train-ride of the centre:… Continue reading Does London Need Another Runway?
Data Security
This week I had emails from two services I use notifying me that they each had suffered some sort of security intrusion, and suggesting I change my password etc etc. One was Slack — for a technology company currently raising assets at a reported $2.8bn valuation, discovering that hackers have been poking around in the… Continue reading Data Security
Wage Inequality: How Not to Fix It
There was a great little piece on Business Insider this morning about Patricia Arquette’s acceptance speech at the Oscars. It got me thinking. Let me start by saying that I am a firm believer in equality in all areas: male/female, black/white, whatever. Whilst there are undoubtedly differences in individuals’ capabilities that’s what makes the world… Continue reading Wage Inequality: How Not to Fix It
National Health Service: Not National At All!
Back in the mid-1980s when (as a freshly-minted science graduate) I joined Shell International Trading Company as a programmer, PCs were only just starting to appear on people’s desks: most of the ‘real’ work was done by big old mainframes located in Shell’s data centre at Wythenshawe, just outside Manchester. Oil traders, just like those… Continue reading National Health Service: Not National At All!
Putting the Gini Back in the Bottle
An article by The Economist on Twitter caught my eye a couple of days ago. It shows that the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans control around 22% of the nation’s wealth — almost exactly the same proportion as the bottom 90% of citizens. This hasn’t happened since the late 1930s and the article seems to be… Continue reading Putting the Gini Back in the Bottle
Mobile Telephony
I had an interesting and salutary experience recently when travelling in Germany. I was using my Blackberry to read my emails, careful (I thought) to be connecting to WiFi in the airport, hotel and so forth. When I got back to Jersey, I received a text message from my provider, Sure, alerting me that I had… Continue reading Mobile Telephony
Should You Pay The Ransom?
The recent surge in popularity of “ransom-ware”, along with Islamic State’s penchant for hostage-taking got me thinking about kidnapping & ransom. In last weekend’s FT, Tim Harford reviewed the work of Reinhard Selten on the ‘Chain Store Paradox’ and it struck me that there was a strong parallel between the rational response of a monopoly… Continue reading Should You Pay The Ransom?
Dying on Payday
This is from the egalitarian Sweden: “In this paper, we study the short-run effect of salary receipt on mortality among Swedish public sector employees. By exploiting variation in pay-days across work-places, we completely control for mortality patterns related to, for example, public holidays and other special days or events coinciding with paydays and for general… Continue reading Dying on Payday