Economics & Marginalia

Economics and Marginalia is an attempt to keep ahead of the avalanche of content published every week – the writing on economics, politics, development and pop culture that keeps my brain occupied. In it, I pick between 5 and 10 of my favourite pieces of -mainly- popular economics and political commentary every week and briefly summarise what I liked about it, or what it taught me, in an accessible way.

The guiding spirit behind this blog is that the world is complicated but comprehensible, and I look to showcase writing that doesn’t dumb down the complexity, but puts a premium on clarity.

More from the Series

Blog Post

Economics & Marginalia: January 22, 2021

January 22, 2021
On to more important – and depressing – issues. A new VoxEU piece looks at the impact of Covid-19 on childcare services, and by extension on female employment and finds predictably grim effects. It’s not surprising: if discrimination at some point in the chain leads to women earning less or selectin...
Blog Post

Economics & Marginalia: January 15, 2021

January 15, 2021
It’s been a grim couple of days.In the search for silver linings to this car crash of a pandemic (and pandemic response), till this week I had found only one: additional time spent with my son. 
Blog Post

Economics & Marginalia: January 8, 2020

January 08, 2021
Shall we start with something uplifting? I think we need to. I really, really liked Duncan Green’s comments to recently graduated MSc students at the LSE. He discusses the mountains behind the mountain they have just scaled and suggests four excellent rules for making the world a better place.
Blog Post

Economics & Marginalia: December 18, 2020

December 18, 2020
Humanity took an L this year. We got dunked on by a virus, by wildfires and by ourselves. The last part was the really hard bit – we constantly made things worse for ourselves with impatience, intolerance, stupidity and garden-variety selfishness. Still, not everyone sucks, and there ...