My latest post! On England's centuries of maximum wages (yes, you read that right), and how they led to a Lost Century of stagnant growth and a dwindling population, while the rest of Europe forged ahead.

@AaronBastani The prisons are too full (for several reasons) but even allowing for that, both juries and magistrates are ridiculously lenient to dangerous drivers in particular (as @edwest has frequently pointed out). We seem to have the idea that being able to drive is a fundamental right.

A tax that applies to only ten people. What could possibly go wrong?

I was only joking when I said I was being heretical. But apparently I'm so low in the academic pecking order that my opinion counts for nothing. This is what happens when you make a paper open access, I'm afraid: unruly serfs like me might read it! https://t.co/hriEBJsn55

No no, I’m saying the *content* is the wafer-thin, highly subjective framework you’d typically find powerpoint slides presented to credulous consultancy clients. Fine for Oxfam posters, even an airport book - everyone has their slop to sell. But a top science journal? Come on!

I’ve committed the sin of cringe?! Get out the boiling oil!

This happens in a lot of fields and on both left and right. But it's an abuse of the peer review system to essentially launder opinions as research so that it takes on a kind of scientificness. I think most people see it for what it is, and it undermines trust in institutions.

Forgive me for saying something that many will find heretical, but I think this work is really just a few powerpoint slides written in academese for activists, and most certainly didn't deserve to be published in the world's top scientific journal

@antonhowes It's absolutely the elephant in the room. You look at the stats for local gov spending on social care and it's routinely 70%, 80% 90%. People still think council tax pays for bins...

@AlsoKnowne @s8mb @antonhowes From my perspective this is a bonus. Fixing local government is completely essential to the country working at all.

It gets worse! The Tories’ one, remote shot at restoring any credibility was to be a party of economic responsibility amidst a mounting fiscal crisis. … So of course they instead promise more handouts to desperately bribe voters.

Then, finally, we might get an honest conversation about reforming and reining in legal entitlements that have grown completely out of control.

Best proposal I’ve heard: rebrand all councils as “Social Care Boards”, and most of council tax as a “Social Care Tax”, and hive off all other responsibilities that we think of councils performing - waste collection, road repairs, etc - to a completely new kind of local authority

This is such a typical Tory policy from the last few years. A near-worthless handout that only adds complexity to the tax system and makes the problem it seeks to solve slightly worse, all just to show they’re on some demographic’s “side”. At least try to change!

From an English manuscript pretending to be a debate between the heralds of England and France in 1549. "Scarcely wood to dress your meat, but burn turves and sea-coal, which you have out of England"

That pang of annoyance when you stumble across new evidence for an argument already made. From a 1549 tract: such plenty of timber along England's coast that "one may have more timber for 40s [£2] in England than in France for £5." Whereas France is forced to import English coal!

The Climate Change Act’s problem isn’t that it tries to get the UK to decarbonise per se, it’s that it does so via legally-binding “carbon budgets” that subordinate everything every part of government does to decarbonisation. That’s why, eg, you end up with Building Regs that

I need to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bank my mortgage is with.

NEW: Britain is one of the most expensive places in the world to build new infrastructure. Bat tunnels, fish discos, and 80,000 page EIAs are absurd, but are they really to blame? My answer: Yes, but it's more complicated than you think. https://t.co/Sjl1wvJNGd

Interestingly, the funding and management of the Channel Tunnel closely resemble pre-1914 railways, making it a wildly anachronistic fluke in the modern West. 1. It didn't cost the taxpayer a penny. In fact, the Act of Parliament that consented the Tunnel ruled out any public

I try to write just one paragraph for the book on the effects of 1540s inflation on the clergy, and now I know the difference between rectors and vicars, and what a benefice is. And have written five paragraphs on it.