Went to a good discussion today on the digital economy, competition policy, etc. I do think this metaphor holds up quite well.
What we've done is discover a digital dimension, with different laws to our own... (1/n)
medium.com/predict/the-in… We've then allowed private companies to colonise this alien dimension. Which they've done with enthusiasm - to take advantage of the liberating alien laws (network effects, zero marginal cost, non-rivalry, etc.) (2/n)

A Sunday game for digital geeks:
What institutions are we missing when it comes to public digital infrastructure?
I’m thinking long-term - ones we should build in the next 10 years. My starter list to critique/build on: 🧵 1. UK Digital Infrastructure Bank. Like UKIB but for digital infrastructure of public value. Underwrites financing, takes equity. Focuses on digital infrastructure of civic value with a commercial model but that is risky/sticky/long-term. Could be aligned to govt missions. (1/n)

Eugh, systems collapse in the NHS. What a perfect illustration of why deep cuts drive waste, not efficiency. (1/n) On my current referral to orthopaedics they sent me for a duplicate x-ray because they couldn't access the image from my last x-ray a few weeks ago. (2/n)

It's really sobering to get closer to net zero policy. It's so clear we're not being *remotely* radical enough. e.g. 30,000 annual heat pump installations when the govt wants 600,000. We're nowhere near. The problem isn't just the policies, it's the methods we're using. 🧵 We need to snap out of old models of policy-making. They're just too linear, siloed, and slow. We need to assemble cross-government teams - all the critical disciplines in a room. And not just govt but reps from key business sectors/civil society. (2/n)

Yep. It's especially striking when you contrast political stasis/1990s vibe with the blistering pace of technological change. I hate to admit it but the 90s were so. long. ago.

https://twitter.com/Samfr/status/1657325564867362817

Another thing I find intriguing is that the system is dying from the centre out, or from the top down. There's a lot of energy at the edges of the system - bold new ideas, new models of service delivery, etc - but there's dead wood/stasis in the middle.

It's fascinating how many of the big net zero policy challenges are really challenges of service design. 🧵 Electric vehicles - a fantastic technology with a terrible user experience. A mess of apps, no common payment platform, multiple plug sockets, no good open map of charging points, etc.

This morning we're publishing the final essay in a project I've been leading with @jrf_uk.
The essay is called Unequality and it explores how inequality is changing with the shift to an intangible age. Here's the link:
medium.com/@jamestplunket… (1/n) We've also published this thought-provoking response from @stianwestlake, leading thinker on the intangible economy: stianstian.medium.com/inequality-and… (2/n)

I've written a lot about behavioural manipulation and why it's a critical issue for markets. Today @citizensadvice has a new report that throws open the lid on the dodgy tactics firms are using, why they matter, and what we can do about it. 🧵 The whole thing makes for troubling reading. Gamified gambling to pull people into addiction. Subscription traps that are easy to joing and a nightmare to leave. Buy now pay later defaults that leave people borrowing without even realising. (1/n)

It's so interesting that Elon is basically answering the exam question: 'Show why the current regulatory settlement for social media platforms is not sustainable.' (1/n) And not just answering it, but really nailing it with first class precision. Before all this, big tech lobbyists could *just about* cling to the argument that the system might settle at an OK equilibrium. (2/n)

Ok, I'm off. A bit of an experiment obviously and I'll pop back occassionally, but since I spend my time writing about how how we build a better internet, I guess I should be part of it.
Here are some of the 'Switching to Mastodon' tips I've found most helpful...🧵 Don't just cross-post. The atmosphere over there is entirely different, so dumping Tweets into Mastodon is like shouting into a cafe from a neighbouring pub. Better just to drop it all here for a bit. Think of it as a holiday to explore somewhere you might want to live. (1/n)

So I'm increasingly persuaded by the argument that the tech bro mentality, and the lack of diversity at the frontier, is a problem of real economic significance. 🧵 The thought was prompted by a post from @ExponentialView - Has autonomous driving been a massive distraction? - looking at how self-driving cars still don't really work despite massive investment. (1/n)

I increasingly think this is a top tier problem for consumers and regulators. Markets that aren't so broken that it ever reaches a crisis, but where there are pervasive misleading behaviours. (1/n)

https://twitter.com/jamestplunkett/status/1578128428032737281

When you buy a low cost flight these days it's a gauntlet of attempts to mislead you. The headline price is close to a fiction. And you have to duck endless defaults/nudges for insurance, etc. Getting to the end with what you intend is like playing a computer game. (2/n)

It’s quite hard to find words for the idea of cutting family incomes in a cost of living crisis, which is what not uprating benefits means. Grave implications. 🧵 1/ The social/human harm of further cuts to income at this point is sobering. As others have said of economic policy: this is not a game. The same applies to playing with family incomes.

Oof, the doom-scroll is especially doomy today. Three thoughts on staying positive. 🧵 1/ First - a rule I try to follow (not always successfully) is to respond to negatives with positives. Do patient work on big social problems and how we get through them. I do this because I buy Keynes' observation about the insistent power of good ideas. Their time will come.

Can't help but feel a need for some intellectual history today. The 1980s political/economic paradigm wasn't just decided by politicians - political leaders were riding an intellectual wave that had been swelling for decades. (1/n) The early 2020s intellectual backdrop is *entirely* different. TL;DR - the orthodox wave crested a while back and the wave that's been swelling (and that will at some point power a new political paradigm) is heterodox approaches - behavioural econ, complexity theory, etc (2/n)

There'll be lots of talk about benefits/incentives today and it's worth remembering this quote from Churchill. One big lesson from the history of welfare is that you can't run a system on fear - people need hope. (1/n) When people are worried about how they'll feed their kids, or pay the rent, or stay warm, they don't tend to make the positive economic choices that any dynamic economy needs - taking time off to train, moving home, starting a business. (2/n)

Eugh. Really starting to feel it in the pit of my stomach whenever we talk about the cost of living crisis. I've been wondering for a while how dicey things will get and I increasingly think the answer is *very*. (1/n) This week alone at Citizens Advice we've seen: 1. A sharp uptick in the urgency of problems we’re helping people with, 2. An increase in the complexity of each case - needing deeper work and more interactions...

Thinking about the Queen's speech. One thing I remember being struck by when I started work in No 10 back in the late 2000s is just how much the bottleneck of parliamentary time slows down policymaking. (1/n) You have space for 20-25 bills a year and that simple capacity constraint is one of the main things that determines policymaking. (2/n)

One thought this prompted. Drucker talks about how modern models of work - basically managerialism - first emerged in business. This meant business became the prototyping environment and other sectors (e.g. the state) then tried to transpose the lessons into their domains. (1/n)

https://twitter.com/jamestplunkett/status/1523548389270761472

We see this in the way the public sector went looking for analogues to the various functional components of business managerialism, e.g. profit. As Drucker puts it: “Non economic institutions need a yard stick that does for them what profitability does for the business.” (2/n)

It’s really hard to think of a more perfect demonstration of sticky human behaviour than this whole 5-day-commute → WFH thing 🧵 1/ First it took a global pandemic to stop us pointlessly commuting 5-days-a-week, grumbling every day and yet doing it anyway:

https://twitter.com/jamestplunkett/status/1437673478497374209?s=20&t=885OMet_7TAYVI90prUZVQ

Enjoying this. It’s good at unpacking how the left has adopted a narrower conception of equality over time. One consequence that I hadn’t really clocked before is that it means the left has given up a whole bunch of quite powerful arguments against inequality. (1/n) For example, progressives used to talk much more about ‘equality of standing’ or egalitarian social relations - you should be able to look someone from a different profession or class in the eye and feel equal, not below them. (2/n)