In the 1990s, Angus Deaton noted that the CPI we use to deflate tend to be based on weights for people in the top quartile of the population income-wise. When you shift to weights that represent poor people's expenditure patterns, you find different rates of inflation. For the end of the 1860s to the 1910s, this was not trivial. The poor had more deflation (yes) than the "usual CPI" (and far more than the rich). Thus, just for these reasons, we understate their gains. Below I show the hourly wages of production workers deflated by either the CPI or a poor-people price index. You miss a great deal of gains. Over that period, it means that the real gains at 2.5% per annum compared to 2.11% per annum. A 0.4 pp difference which is huge. So the faster-growing series cuts the time needed for wages to double by roughly 5 years (28 years instead of 33 years)

Guy who thinks building more houses will depress prices but that adding more lanes to the highway won’t relieve congestion.

UK General Election nowcast under a hypothetical additional member system 323 constituency seats balanced out by d'Hondt PR at the regional/country level (compensatory) 🟥 LAB: 162 ➡️ RFM: 152 🟦 CON: 130 🟩 GRN: 72 🟧 LDM: 72

I think this suggests Reform doing poorly, probably 3rd place

GM by-election, total votes cast in... Bolton: 49.2k (-43% (% not %pts) on May) Bury: 40.6k (-32%) Manchester: 40.6k (-32%) Oldham: 37.1k (-50%!) Rochdale: 38.9k (-35% Salford: 46.2k (-16%) Stockport: 71.5k (-28%) Tameside: 44.3k (-37%) Trafford: 62.3k (-28%) Wigan: 56.3k (-41%)

Random towns where nobody in their right mind would propose building a data center are debating and passing bans. midcoastvillager.com/news/wa…

An economist and a futurist walk into a bar. The economist takes a sip of his drink. "Ugh, if only people understood basic economics. High-skilled immigration alone would do wonders for US growth." Futurist: "Oh yeah? Say 100 million immigrants moved to the US, each matching the best human experts in every economically relevant field. Big deal?" Economist: "Massive. Transformative." Futurist: "What if they also worked longer hours and faster than any American?" Economist: "Even better." Futurist: "What if they were extremely frugal — consuming only the bare minimum needed to keep working?" Economist: "A near-100% savings rate? Better still!" Futurist: "What if they were very clumsy and physically weak, so they could only do some kinds of work?" Economist: "They could still do all cognitive labor — that's over half all wages! Somewhat less good, sure. Still transformative." Futurist: "What if their skin was grey, almost metallic, from some kind of accident?" Economist: "Who cares?!" Futurist: "What if they were AIs?" Economist: "3% growth per year, tops. There'd be bottlenecks. Honestly, the people predicting explosive growth from AI should learn some economics."

Read this brilliant piece on 23 June and Britain's near-miss grid crisis 🧵 dispatches.kilowatts.io/p/a-… Summary: → Gas & nuclear outages (partly because of hot weather) → Solar great, then gone → Wind forecasts way off → Demand forecasts too national → Interconnectors saved us — barely Gas and nuclear had huge outages that day — some sudden. Solar was brilliant, then died with the sun, exactly as it always will. We need way more batteries, especially in homes, to fill that gap. Wind forecasts were miles out — not because wind is unpredictable, but because the central models used to plan the system are. Demand forecasts were even worse: a single national number can't capture where power is actually needed. London fell 472MW that evening while the model expected it to rise 1,138MW. That's not a rounding error, that's a system flying blind on geography. Interconnectors saved us that night — but only after frantic phone calls, not because the market was built to use them well. With zonal pricing they'd work with the grid instead of against it every single evening. The real lesson of 23 June: a grid built on one national price for everywhere is guessing at a national scale about problems that are actually local. The crisis wasn't "not enough power" — it was too little power in exactly the wrong place, behind wires that were already full, while other regions had headroom to spare. A single price can't tell a battery in Kent to discharge and a battery in Scotland to wait — it just tells everyone the same story at the same time. Zonal pricing fixes that: it makes location visible in the price itself, so flexibility shows up where the grid actually needs it. Pair that with batteries everywhere — homes, street corners, substations — and a genuinely digital grid that dispatches by the second rather than buying its safety margin in one panicked burst at 2pm, and near-misses like this stop being near misses at all. We have the technology. We just need the market design to use it.