Iron Economist @IronEconomist Twitter profile

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

3 years

Another example of my motto: ‘A hot labour market is better for your policy priorities than any of your policies’.

Adam Ozimek

@ModeledBehavior

3 years

Bold and important paper from @JWMason1 and @rortybomb , a must-read even if you don't agree with all of it.

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Last Seen Profiles

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

3 months

What’s absolutely astonishing about the UK’s housing crisis, and what has absolutely killed the Tories among under forties, is that even the most elite end of professionals are effectively priced out of family homes.

James 🚄

@TypeForVictory

3 months

You'd need to be earning about £120k to afford this 700sqft, two bed terrace in Cambridge. That's "highly paid professional" money for an ordinary home. That doesn't mean there are "loads of exec homes", it means there aren't enough homes, period.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

Not only does the UK have a housing shortage but planning system is so bad we additionally have created a water shortage in one of the wettest developed nations.

YIMBY Alliance

@yimbyalliance

7 months

Beginning to wonder if the UK has basically forgotten how to build anything at all

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

This is terrible. The proposal was to replace this on the left with that on the right, a clear improvement that would additionally create more homes and reduce housing pressure.

Chris Philp MP

@CPhilpOfficial

7 months

I am pleased that a plan to demolish a family home on Riddlesdown Road, Purley and replace it with a large block of flats has been refused. New homes are needed but the right place for new flats is Croydon town centre, central London and brownfield sites.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

1 year

Cities are not museums and civilised countries understand that.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

4 months

Duncan Stott 🏗️🔰🇺🇦

@DuncanStott

4 months

Data centre refused planning permission in Iver, Buckinghamshire Data centre refused planning permission in Abbots Langley, Hertfordshire Now NIMBYs want to block a data centre in Havering

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

1 year

It will never stop being funny that in one of the places @that actually did this-Vancouver- the tribal elders immediately cashed in from their immunity from planning regulation to single-handedly solve the cities housing shortage and cash in tens of billions of dollars.

Ben & Jerry's

@benandjerrys

1 year

This 4th of July, it's high time we recognize that the US exists on stolen Indigenous land and commit to returning it. Learn more and take action now:

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

Once again I must remind you. Marxist analysis is the astrology of the upper middle classes.

Nick Bano

@NickBano

7 months

AGAINST LANDLORDS is out today. I only set out to apply some Marxist thought to today’s housing horrors, but it has (already) proved to be such a wind-up that the Institute for Economic Affairs has labelled me an ‘edgy Maoist rebel’. I hope you find it useful and/or enjoyable.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

21 days

There is no more perfect encapsulation of the failure of our planning regime than that we are going to import water from Norway to *England*. We are deeply into the ‘stop hitting yourself’ part of the failure phase diagram.

Alex Robinson

@Robinson_IP

22 days

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

2 years

Ok, let me introduce you to Seething Wells. Opposite hampton court palace in Surbiton, its under the RBK (kingston) planning authority, Kingston is one of the richest boroughs in London.

David Henig 🇺🇦

@DavidHenigUK

2 years

Easy to criticise the UK planning system. But unconvincing unless you can also point to the developments that have not happened because of it as opposed to for example, cost, badly handled process, local anger, lack of strategy etc. And I wonder how many critics have experience?

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

3 months

Another successful 4 year campaign to prevent an existing warehouse being used as a warehouse. Please help me my economy is dying.

Jeremy Corbyn

@jeremycorbyn

3 months

A fantastic victory for our community. Well done to everyone who worked so hard to keep a vehicle depot away from our local primary school. More proof that grassroots campaigning works!

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

This meme is so much of British policy

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

5 months

By my count it was 4 hours from parody to policy

Tim Chapman

@IslingtonChap

5 months

Here is my message to CCHQ: if you really want to play on my contempt for young people, bring in a Quadruple lock.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

3 months

The NIMBY tears are already starting and I for one am here for it.

Nigel Huddleston MP

@HuddlestonNigel

3 months

Today, Rachel Reeves announced Labour’s changes to planning and housing - and name-checked a proposed site at Worcestershire Parkway within my Droitwich and Evesham constituency. During the election campaign I expressed grave concerns about Labour's instincts to make top-down

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

1 year

We have managed to reach a place where a graduate on 30k is paying vastly more net tax than a pensioner on the same because not only is the pensioner not paying national insurance or graduate tax they are also having most of their tax refunded via the state pension.

🧔🏽

@ne_al_

1 year

british young professionals are absolutely entering a 'tax is theft' era and it's makes me sad

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

Ok, I have had enough wine to engage with this insane piece. It’s time to get started.

The Guardian

@guardian

7 months

The end of landlords: the surprisingly simple solution to the UK housing crisis

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

9 months

Almost no one fully appreciates the extent to which high rents are purely a policy choice and we could just choose to have much lower rents (and much nicer houses) by choosing to allow more construction.

Hunter📈🌈📊

@StatisticUrban

9 months

Wow.... you're telling me that builidng housing.... keeps housing prices lower? Who could have seen this coming. This is such a twist.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

6 months

The school cut off is September 1st. So a kid with a September birthday is oldest in the year. There are 2 effects: being developmentally ahead helps you get into the best universities, vs the effective mild acceleration of being young in your year which is good for bright kids.

adad8m🦞

@adad8m

6 months

OK, this actually seems to be true that UK Nobel prize winners are more likely to be born in September: the question then is why? #Statistics

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

3 months

It’s genuinely a huge problem in our country that I, a massively engaged politics nerd, don’t actually know for sure if it was the council, the Met or the Mayor who seems to have decided that there should be no large public screenings of the euros in Westminster.

Westminster Police | Central West BCU

@MPSWestminster

3 months

An anti-social behaviour dispersal order is in place in #Westminster [see map] until 2am on 15 Jul. Crowds of people gathering and drinking in central London streets could be in breach of this order. We encourage those to enjoy themselves safely at local licenced premises.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

4 months

This is pretty funny because he is describing the country that the Tory’s made: we are a high immigration low growth bureaucratic nation already

Roland Smith

@rolandmcs

4 months

Morning

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

5 years

It’s amazing how few people have really internalised what is coming in the next month. Especially in the US. Not the human damage or the economic damage that is coming.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

1 year

So was having a discussion about why Uk universities appear insanely expensive. Turns out the answer is pensions. As of 2019 fully 1/4 of the cost of the university system is paying pensions. Truly we are retirement home Uk.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

17 days

The UK misses out on technology boom after technology boom because our planning system just doesn’t allow this kind of boom. By the time you have shown ‘proven need’ and evaluated 7 other cities to satisfy the NIMBYs all your customers already use data centers in other countries.

Joey Politano 🏳️‍🌈

@JosephPolitano

17 days

US data center construction reached another record high this month, surpassing a rate of $28.5B/year amidst the AI boom. That's 57% higher than last year and 114% higher than two years ago.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

11 days

That’s because almost all the correlational claims turned out to be false when a decent causal study turned up. Let’s just go through a few cases where large literatures of correlational studies failed causal tests:

Melissa S. Kearney

@kearney_melissa

12 days

Somewhere along the way “correlation is not causation” morphed into “until the causal link is proven beyond a reasonable doubt, ideally with a large scale RCT with global external validity, than the correlation likely reflects the impact of some unobserved factor I can’t name.”

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

4 months

Yes we have a housing crisis, my plan is to build less than the levels we have been building. Somehow this will solve things. - The Greens.

Politics UK

@PolitlcsUK

4 months

🚨 NEW: Carla Denyer says "my god" do we have a housing crisis She adds the Green plan is to create 150k council & new build homes #ITVdebate

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

2 years

It’s been thirty years since the water companies said the south east needed a new reservoir to avoid water stress but we still haven’t built one, so now we will just ban showers rather than overrule 200 rural NIMBYs in Abingdon.

Daily Mail Online

@MailOnline

2 years

Power showers could be banned under Government plans to save water

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

4 months

The greens don’t just oppose nuclear they oppose solar! They market as environmentalists but actually they are nostalgic conservationists. Ie they don’t want tech led solutions they want nothing to change and believe there was some idyllic state of local cultivation of food.

ellis

@elsilt

4 months

i do not understand how the greens suddenly have gained the allure of a serious party when they oppose nuclear power so heavily it’s literally antithetical to their environmental goals

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

3 months

I can taste the nimby tears and they are delicious.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

4 months

Nothing to see here just the UK choosing to be poor again.

Theo Bertram

@theobertram

4 months

A council has refused planning permission for a datacentre because it would damage the green belt in both 'spatial and visual terms'. The location is a former landfill site.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

3 months

What are we all doing here honestly. This kind of street crime is extremely corrosive to society and needs a firm punishment. 2-3 years in jail.

Æthelswin

@AEthelswin

3 months

Remember the big Met operation last year where plain clothes police officers put themselves in danger and allowed themselves to be targeted by watch thieves prowling in Londons West End. This is how the courts sentenced those thieves.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

1 year

on 30k a grad worker pays: 3484 income tax 2091 NI £900 student loans for a take home pay of £23600 roughly. On a private pension at 30k you pay 3464 income tax, 0 NI, 0 loan payment and additionally receive ~£8100 in state pension payments. For £34657 take home.

Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

1 year

We have managed to reach a place where a graduate on 30k is paying vastly more net tax than a pensioner on the same because not only is the pensioner not paying national insurance or graduate tax they are also having most of their tax refunded via the state pension.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

3 months

Guys, guys……did we win?

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

6 months

The absolute insanity of this is that no one has any way to pressure the environmental agency to build a new reservoir. It should be their statutory obligation to provide water for whatever needs to be development gets made, rather than making them a veto player.

Yuan Yi Zhu

@yuanyi_z

6 months

☠️

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

Electricity prices are one of the biggest causes of industrialisation and deindustrialisation so if this maintains France will see a big industrialisation at Germany’s expense.

Julien Jomaux

@JomauxJulien

7 months

Impressive price difference between Germany and France tomorrow

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

8 days

What if, and I am spitballing here, we built some homes so there were some vacant homes for these people.

BBC News (UK)

@BBCNews

8 days

Call for young to have legal right to live where they grew up

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

5 years

Saw a new paper on the lead-crime hypothesis, and it is pretty much the perfect randomised intervention. Notes to follow.

Life after Lead: Effects of Early Interventions for Children Exposed to Lead

(July 2018) - Lead pollution is consistently linked to cognitive and behavioral impairments, yet little is known about the benefits of public health interventions for children exposed to lead. This...

www.aeaweb.org

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

2 months

The British publics tolerance for the ‘just ban it’ style of politics is pretty incredible tbh.

Gareth O'Connor

@garethoconnor

2 months

Sunday Times lead says Govt wants to ban social media access for children under 16

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

4 months

This is essentially why public consultations are bad.

Sally Rugg

@sallyrugg

5 months

You’ve simply got to respect this

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

4 months

This genuinely an astonishing snippet.

Joy Morrissey MP

@joymorrissey

5 months

Marlow Film Studios rejected by Bucks Council

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

9 months

I think people are kidding themselves about how much work people do in the office tbh. The office is basically a social space.

Kitten 💖🐈

@kitten_beloved

9 months

People working remote do less work "I need flexibility for childcare" yeah so you can work less "I make up the hours later" no you don't

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

23 days

What exactly does he think economic growth is? It is precisely the increase in goods and services consumed. Ie it is exactly ‘more money in people’s pockets’.

Aditya Chakrabortty

@chakrabortty

23 days

Britain wants spending and a better NHS, not this obsession with growth. That’s why there’s big trouble ahead My column

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

So in the last round of yimby discourse I discovered that there are a lot of people who think landlords is the reason for high rents. Well I’m pleased to discover I have a found a EU city that banned landlords! So, how do we think it went?

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

Absolutely incredible. Even in London £100k is like the 8th percentile of the income distribution, and a household with two 100k earners is easily top 2% nationally on household income.

Dan

@DanW400

7 months

@SimpGanassi @gsoh31 Not true. Two people earning £100k each could do it. £100k is standard in London for people in their early 30s.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

@MWStory @Samfr @s8mb Uk policy: please invest in my country. Corp: ok how about a data center? Uk: No Corp: how about some lab space? Uk: No Corp: maybe a nice reservoir? Uk: No Corp: ok what exactly do you want? Uk: No build. Only Invest.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

26 days

I belong to the camp that thinks growth is quite easy. It’s just unpopular. We can have growth it’s just that growth means dynamism in a polity that prefers stasis.

Rob Ford

@robfordmancs

26 days

Either that or do the magic growth dance and all the problems fall away. Because everyone knows the formula for growth is easy - and remarkably it always lines up perfectly with the ideological preferences of people with strong ideological preferences

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

5 months

It is good when houses are cheap. This is the future I want for the UK. NZ just decided one day to solve its housing crisis with planning reform and it only took about five years. Just reform planning and get a building boom.

Hayden Donnell

@HaydenDonnell

5 months

Auckland’s housing market has been struck by a disastrous plague of affordability, to the point that some buyers might even be *pauses to retch violently* getting bargains

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

8 months

In britian you can go to any local planning meeting and discover in pretty much every town they are hostile to the idea of more people moving in.

Joshua Reed Eakle 🗽

@JoshEakle

8 months

"If you're against immigrants from another country, why aren't you against immigrants from another town?" – Deirdre McCloskey

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

19 days

UK gdp weaker than expected. UK house price growth stronger than expected. Nature is healing.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

This is basically a luxury apartment, but it was absolutely normal in the seventies for people in their twenties to have their own place in the 70s. People are memory holing it. At 25 half of uk people born in 1950 were home owners fgs.

Jerusalem

@JerusalemDemsas

7 months

It’s not a tax on single people that it costs more to live alone!! Stop framing expensive, luxury lifestyles as normal! At no point have 20-somethings expect to afford a place on their own in a major city.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

4 months

‘How will we raise investment?’ I wonder, as I stamp REJECT on a billion £ of private sector investment. A real head scratcher. Let’s have a conference and brain storm, but not this week, quite busy you see: I have to stamp REJECT on another 500 planning applications this week.

Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

4 months

@Sime0nStylites A second example from today Oxford turned down a new science park.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

1 year

A lot of people missed it but desalination was a big technological success story of the 2010s. An Israeli firm managed to make it dramatically cheaper and Israel is now a large exporter of water.

Arpit Gupta

@arpitrage

1 year

Desalination capacity seems to be improving quickly! Water seems to be one of those issues where there is a great economist solution no one likes (price water), and a technological abundance solution (desalination) that’s maybe more feasible

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

2 years

Honestly without the war in Ukraine ‘Team Transitory’ would have absolutely smashed this.

Conor Sen

@conorsen

2 years

1-year breakevens cratering with the last obviously hot headline CPI print about to roll out of the window:

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

1 year

<checks vacancy and recruitment numbers> Actually I think the government might need to recognise the economic context that public services operate in.

Sky News

@SkyNews

1 year

BREAKING: Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has hinted he will ignore recommendations for public sector pay rises, saying workers "need to recognise the economic context we are in"

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

Just absolutely love American yimby discourse that’s like ‘look at this totally unaffordable place that’s 6x earnings’, meanwhile the literal cheapest city in England is about 5x.

Jeremy 'adjusted for inflation' Horpedahl 📈

@jmhorp

7 months

@judgeglock Nashville doesn't look like much of a model to follow anymore. Housing prices were almost 6 times income in 2022 -- as high as Austin -- and probably worse now

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

4 months

YIMBY Alliance

@yimbyalliance

4 months

NEW: Keir Starmer ‘will unveil plans to build 1.5 million houses over five years by forcing councils to approve new homes, including on the green belt, warning that those who refuse will have development imposed upon them as part of a “zero tolerance” approach to nimbyism.’

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

5 years

Here is the key chart: You can see both that measured lead levels (BLL) does show a smooth relationship with a variety of anti social behaviours, and also that the intervention to lower lead levels massively lowers those behaviours relative to the control group.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

2 months

Honestly they should have priced them at £1000 a ticket and reduced the price by £15/day until they were sold out. Would be a nice orderly market no massive queues. Demented to have a system with both queueing and dynamic pricing. Worst of both worlds.

Daniel Thomas

@DanielThomasLDN

2 months

CMA calls for consumer protections as Oasis ticket price dispute widens via @ft

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

2 years

Rates can’t actually get anywhere near what is implied in the curves in the UK. Genuinely would be Armageddon in the housing market. Lots of UK 2Y fixes who would be rolling onto +100% monthly payments. That’s a big enough hit to consumer spending to cause a recession.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

2 months

I think this is a good observation. It’s born out of a desire to be fair, but organisations don’t actually have time to give equal scrutiny to everyone so if you try the scrutiny becomes so cursory that the only way to get caught is to be scrupulously honest.

Jonathon Kitson

@KitsonJ1

2 months

Britain is remarkably good at making the lives of normal people as difficult as possible to deal with maladjusted people or rule breakers, which it then exempts from those rules anyway.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

2 months

Starmer should just impose NI on pensioners. Can reasonably argue pensioners aren’t ’working people’, it’s obviously unfair that wealthy pensioners face lower tax rates than working people and it would raise loads of money.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

17 days

Let me translate: ‘yimby hunch’ means decades of careful empirical work by urban economists showing a 1% increase in stock reduced prices by 1-2% relative to the counterfactual of no building. Secondly, ‘population growth’ is not a proxy for ‘housing demand’.

Just Space

@justspace7

18 days

“If the YIMBY hunch that house values fall when the supply of new homes outstrips population growth were true, overall prices should’ve come down since 1970. Britain has experienced the exact opposite; five decades of astronomical property-price inflation”

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

1 year

What’s incredible here is that this guy won the lottery and is still complaining. House price growth has been what 10% per year in Wimbledon. The guy is gonna have made at least £1m and probably £2m while getting to live far below market rents for 2 decades.

James

@matkinsj

1 year

Who the hell hasn’t been repaying the capital on their mortgage for 20 years?

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

18 days

The housing theory of everything strikes again.

Sky News

@SkyNews

18 days

Prisoners on early release 'reoffending to escape homelessness' Read more🔗

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

3 months

The funny thing about rent control advocates is that their argument that it’s different this time always boils down to a version of ‘rent control can’t hurt supply because we already made supply illegal’ and it’s like yes, you have identified the problem there.

Matthew Yglesias

@mattyglesias

3 months

The tired, old, neoliberal conventional wisdom is that rent control is a bad idea but if you delve into the most up-to-date research on the subject you'll see that ... yeah, it's still a bad idea.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

2 years

It’s stuff like this that has truly radicalised me to the point where I think just repealing the entire own planning act from the 50s with all its various amendments in it’s entirety would genuinely be better than the status quo. Local residents clearly just abuse the system.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

3 months

Jason Groves

@JasonGroves1

3 months

Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay confirms he’s opposing new electricity pylons needed to link green energy to the grid in his East Anglian constituency. Says the route is not popular locally and he’s a ‘constituency MP’ first

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

The UK is trying to return to Victorian conditions of child poverty through the novel means of just building so few homes that eventually everyone will live in cramped conditions in 1000 year old buildings.

Ian Dunt

@IanDunt

7 months

Jesus Christ this is horrific

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

6 months

It’s good for high supply to drive down prices and rents.

Piker Capital

@PikerCapital

6 months

There is a biblical amount of housing supply hitting the market in Florida. Trend is normalizing, but if this growth continues…. not ideal. Active listings have returned to 2020 levels. (+57% YoY)

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

6 months

The thing about this chart is that if solar wins, and it really looks like it will, there will be genuinely quite big cost differentials in electricity based on region, and the dark red places on this map will have huge advantages in manufacturing cost base.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

5 years

I regret to inform you that this is still the warm up act. The world is going to be a very very different place six weeks from now.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

2 months

Every council that has declared a climate emergency just turns out to be the most nimby people imaginable.

KentOnline

@Kent_Online

2 months

A solar farm the size of 86 football pitches on high-grade farmland has been rejected as developers are told “it should be on roofs and car parks” instead

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

4 months

Yeah this is something I don’t understand tbh. This government is in many ways economically to the left of Tony Blair. They have hiked taxes on the highest earners and given tax breaks to most of the rest. It’s been center leftism for pensioners really.

Stakeholder Consultant

@echetus

4 months

Britain: Everything from smoking to sugar sin-taxed. 11% of GDP spent on the NHS. It is illegal to build an extension without permission from a local politicians. Tax at all time highs. Financial Times: If they were any more economically right wing, they would fall of our graph

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

1 month

So the exception to this is property taxes. Which are a form of wealth tax that does actually work well. If the Uk wants a wealth tax 1%/year on the market value of all housing would be the way to go.

Dan Neidle

@DanNeidle

1 month

There’s never been a country with a “normal” tax system that’s had a successful wealth tax. Not one.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

4 months

I have just, this moment, learned that Rishi has the UK’s largest military base in his own constituency. He could genuinely lose his seat because of this. Absolutely astonishing stuff. I’m not gonna make it to election day if this keeps up.

Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

4 months

There is an old joke about recruiting that amounts to ‘remember that recruiting works and you do get what you hire for so be very careful that your pipeline isn’t optimising for liars’. And it makes me think, what exactly were they optimising for when they made Rishi an MP?

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

Railway electrification is one of the most glaring state failures of the last fifty years. Electric trains are just better in every way so any long term plan should be for 100% electrification and yet we have barely progressed. Only 38% of Uk lines are electrified.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

£300 a month is £3600 a year. To a pensioner who rents that’s the same as a 30% increase in the state pension. Thats a lot actually! Also these numbers are wrong. London has 3.7m dwellings. Increasing it by 1.3m dwellings should give 35–70% rent declines.

Tom Gann

@Tom_Gann

7 months

Wow if 1.3 million homes are immediately (!) built, rent on a London flat in a not very prestigious area might decline from £1800 a month to £1500 if we're very lucky? Problem solved.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

5 years

This is the holy grail for causality. It conclusively proves that the lead crime effect is causal and not just a proxy for other factors. It also shows its large size. Interventions to lower lead halve the rates of anti social behaviour.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

2 years

This is once again where I point out that the Uk has more social housing than most of our peers and also spends the most on housing benefits of any of our peers. We just need more houses.

Madeleine Davies

@MadsDavies

2 years

More than two million children in England are living in overcrowded accommodation with little or no personal space. A chronic shortage of social housing

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

5 months

We don’t need ‘new towns’ we need ‘A New City’. We need to build a city the size of Birmingham with a huge emphasis on a modern integrated transport network and walkable urbanism. We need a glittering skyline of skyscrapers to reset the conversation on what is desiresble.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

The UK has extremely high housing and child care costs so even people on high earnings feel squeezed especially while they have kids under 10. This is true even though they will objectively have vast surplus earnings once their kids leave home. This is a big failure of policy.

Sam Freedman

@Samfr

7 months

Hunt's £100k thing is cloth-eared but thresholds at £100k (both childcare + personal allowance phase out) are bad tax policy that disincentivise work. You could smooth it out without cutting the overall take by increasing taxes elsewhere on wealth/high earnings.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

1 year

Genuinely absolutely incredible the extent to which high rents and homeless ness is something we could just fix by reforming planning. The places that drove through reform just immediately change trend. There are few policy areas like this.

Jeremiah Johnson 🌐

@JeremiahDJohns

1 year

You guys are never gonna guess which city did a big package of YIMBY reforms in 2020.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

1 year

Every time an MP proposed ‘young people should do this’ I counter propose ‘pensioners should do this’. Everyone could spend their last working year working at the council. If that sounds absurd by does it sound any less absurd for young people to do it?

Sam Dumitriu

@Sam_Dumitriu

1 year

There’s something wrong when an MP seriously proposes forcing every young person to spend a year working for the council.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

25 days

I think a lot of people don’t realise just how insanely deep anti bribery legislation has penetrated. *Teachers* have to declare hospitality and do anti bribery training now. Absolutely absurd situation.

Luke Tryl

@LukeTryl

25 days

@rcolvile Yeah this from a teacher in our focus groups last week jumped out at me on just that point.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

3 months

But even if you are doing very well in law or finance and earning £250k a year, you are almost totally priced out of family homes in Wimbledon. These are top 0.1% incomes at 30, people who have categorically Made It. And yet, they can’t buy their teachers old house.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

@DavidRBradford If we build more we could all have larger flats. We can actually just have more floor space on the same land by the magic of technology.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

4 months

Why don’t councils build more social housing? It’s a mystery.

Sam Dumitriu

@Sam_Dumitriu

4 months

This isn't even that uncommon.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

4 months

We need to start jailing people for this. This is fraud that resulted in the mis allocation of huge sums of public money globally. The authors need to be jailed.

Ben Landau-Taylor

@benlandautaylor

4 months

There are about 50 million people with Alzheimer's disease. This fraud resulted in 16 years of misdirected research before it was discovered. Depending on how much that delays finding treatments, this fraud might cause more suffering than any ongoing war.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

4 months

It really really grinds my gears that this is basically an accurate summary of the majority of discourse. The UK has the deepest capital markets in Europe. We don’t need the government to get black rocks financial capital. We need to let spades go into the ground.

Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

4 months

‘How will we raise investment?’ I wonder, as I stamp REJECT on a billion £ of private sector investment. A real head scratcher. Let’s have a conference and brain storm, but not this week, quite busy you see: I have to stamp REJECT on another 500 planning applications this week.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

28 days

The only industrial strategy we should have is making this red line go down and to the right. Having the cheapest industrial electricity in Europe is an eminently achievable tangible goal that would generate investment, but we would have to smash several powerful lobby groups.

Neil O'Brien

@NeilDotObrien

28 days

I agree with @Richard4Watford . It's good that government is *talking* industrial strategy, but meanwhile Ed Milliband is taking our energy costs to the moon; there's no plan on R&D - except binning strategic AI investments; and HMT are letting numerous key firms collapse.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

1 month

This is an absolutely insane idea. Just assuming highly selective schools should be treated as if their pupils are randomly selected is just insane. Imagine doing the same to grammar schools.

YouGov

@YouGov

1 month

Two professors have said that top universities should cap the number of students they admit from private schools at 10% Britons tend to back the idea, by 40% to 26%

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

5 months

Great article by @jburnmurdoch in the FT today. People really don’t get the scale of the Uk problem. If we want to have outcomes like the good places we really do need to expand the total stock by 25-35%.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

1 year

British people generally have wildly wrong ideas about what the distribution of Uk income actually looks like. People on 100k regularly talk of ‘the rich’ without blinking. You can see the whole distribution here:

Percentile points from 1 to 99 for total income before and after tax

This table shows the percentile points of the income distribution, estimated from the Survey of Personal Incomes each year.

www.gov.uk

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

When the YIMBYs have won over the Financial Times comment section you know it’s an unstoppable political coalition.

John Burn-Murdoch

@jburnmurdoch

7 months

FT commenters absolutely on fire today 🔥🔥

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

We have built enough homes when two teachers can afford this perfectly ordinary suburban house. By my reckoning that’s about 7m homes needed - but maybe roles going to take more! Let’s just build 5m in the next parliament and see where we are.

Cal

@SimpGanassi

7 months

This ordinary suburban London 3 bed house in Zone 4 metroland was built in the 1930s for ordinary middle class families. Today it costs almost a million pounds and you’d need to be in the top 0.5% of earners to be able to buy it on a mortgage

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

6 months

We should not need large subsidies to make housing affordable for normal renters.

Ian Mulheirn

@ianmulheirn

6 months

As I explored with @JamesBrowneTBI and @ChristosTsoukal last year for @jrf_uk , reduction in rent subsidies - not deterioration of market prices - has hammered rented housing affordability over the past 40 years.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

When you don’t have enough homes you will ration them somehow. You might not enjoy rationing them by price, but rationing them with 5 year waiting lists is worse.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

21 days

CPRE needs to die. They just oppose everything, barely make any attempt at accuracy or balanced evaluation. Just a terrible nimby organisation.

Harry Rushworth

@Hrushworth

22 days

Just so we’re clear: It is currently a golf club. Part is becoming a tennis club, the rest is becoming a new public park. There is no park being lost forever.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

6 months

Did the guardian finally write a decent article on Vienna’s housing policies? Mentions some of the important bits - not only does it build a huge amount but it has far less ability of locals to block things.

Darrell Owens

@IDoTheThinking

6 months

Vienna: - Smaller, denser housing - Funds housing through universal income taxes - Uses public lands for market & public housing; collects land rent to fund more - Gives loans to finance inclusionary zoning - Top-Down land-use Sounds scary in California

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

2 months

This is almost completely a myth. People for some reason seem to believe people just live at home all the time. Here is the crossways council estate at night. And at George’s wharf to compare.

𝔰𝔞𝔯𝔦𝔰𝔥𝔞 🕊️🩶

@carbdiem

2 months

@Layo_FH I knew someone who lived in St George's Wharf right by Vauxhall station. In winter it was very clear how many people lived there by how many lights were on in the building, it is virtually empty

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

Oh dear, turns out when you remove the landlords rental supply goes down and rents go up. Who could have imagined?!? It’s almost like providing an in demand service is a Good Thing.

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Iron Economist

@IronEconomist

7 months

This chart is just so wild. Always in my mentions people are like ‘the uk doesn’t even have the capacity to build more homes’ and out there the US has found enough of a heavily specialised workforce to build incredibly complex factories 62% faster than they did a year ago.

Erik Brynjolfsson

@erikbryn

7 months

America is rapidly building manufacturing capacity. What are the main reasons for that?

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