I fancied picking up the violin again, after we dug one out of my in laws. I only made it to grade 3 before giving up. But in lockdown one, I was entranced with 'Ashokan Farewell' which Ken Burns plays to death during his doc on the civil war.
So I am trying to play it. Here is a version of it on the interweb [not me obvs]:
Interesting thing is that though it sounds to the uneducated ear to be located in the period, it was composed in 1982.
The other striking thing is the hundreds of you tube commenters on various versions of it with haunting remarks about their dead loved ones, about whom this reminds them as it became their song. OK done.
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The covid triangle article in the FT is really something. It would be really interesting to try to build inequality into a macro-epi model somehow, to grapple with the aggregate wealth and health consequences of inequality during a pandemic.
Obvs this is what makes a post pandemic budget that attempts no recompense for what happened, nor any recipe, nor even a conversation about what to do about mitigating some future pandemic, frankly obscene.
It's also not rational from the point of view of those at the top of the pile, even if you assumed they had no sense of altruism or social justice.
One thing that occurs to me is that the Govt lay down and took the OBR analysis of the effect of Brexit on potential output [and therefore on the tax base]. Or did I miss something. Somewhat surprised by this.
Does this mean: secretly they accept that Brexit will make us poorer? But it's ok to concede this to elite commentators as no-one else will notice or care?
Or: they dispute it, but find it convenient, because it gives them cover to shrink the size of the government relative to the economy? [If you play along with what you think is a falsely low tax base, you can pretend you are keeping state share constant, when you are cutting it]
1% pay rise for the NHS. One of the neat ideas talked about to discuss the economics of public policy in the pandemic is 'retrospective insurance'...
You imagine the kind of policy you might take out on people's behalf before a pandemic, to insure them against the risk that one comes along, so that if one does come a long, they are made good.
If we said to NHS workers 'there is a certain risk that you will have to work like crazy through a pandemic, exposing you and your family to a virus with a certain mortality rate, what do you want from us so that you are ok to carry on working here?'
Missing from the Budget is any discussion or action at all on addressing the economy's problems post covid. What health budget will be need to put us in a better place to deal with another one, or will we not bother trying to prepare [the implication of where we are]?
The pandemic has been incredibly regressive in terms of - impact on children's education; mortality; who can homework and who cannot; square footage that one is locked down into. Any thoughts on addressing that, or do we just proceed as though it didn't happen and won't?
What will be the hangover on expenditure patterns, demand for space, where people want to live and work? What role, if any, is there for government in facilitating dealing with this legacy/transition?
Will be interesting to see what the new @bankofengland remit, described today, is interpreted to mean.
Skewing corporate bond purchases [which don't amount to very much] towards greener firms? If so, how much of a skew would qualify as meeting the target?
Such a skew would presumably increase the credit risk for a given portfolio, in the short term. BoE indemified against that, but how much extra credit risk is acceptable per unit of greening?