Ben's blog and articles

On my morning commute last week I decided to dip into a bit of 18th-century philosophy: Hume’s fork, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Then I veered off into some physics: Newton’s law of universal gravitation, Einstein’s theory of general relativity. But what’s even more remarkable than my geekiness is the fact that I did all this on my smartphone. The articles were on Wikipedia. And I started out not with a planned reading list but with Google. In those ancient days before sm

The bonanza, in the end, failed to materialise. There had been a fair amount of talk before the Spring Statement that Philip Hammond would be in a position to unveil a new dawn for our beleaguered public finances. City analysts had been chattering like South London parakeets about a potential £10bn permanent improvement in the public finances. And the excitement had jumped the species barrier from the Square Mile to Westminster. The ardent Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg had squawk

“The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past,” wrote William Faulkner. That certainly applies to the economy. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said last week that it had been examining its estimate for telecoms output-price inflation between 2010 and 2015. Research suggests statisticians may have been considerably overestimating this in light of large increases in bandwidth volumes available to business customers over that period. This tentative and pretty technical bit o