Concentrating economic activity in London

I've posted my first blog post at ESRC The Economics of Constitutional Change blog. It's entitled The decision to concentrate economic activity in London. Comments should be left here though as we're not accepting comments on the ESRC site.

End April Links

# Another good defence of the economics that I understand from Noah Smith: What is an economic equilibrium?

# "Paying more in" than you take out, unless you're unfortunate, is fundamental not only to insurance but also to communitarian and cooperative society. As Chris Dillow says, some people need reminded of this, including the Labour party it seems.

# I probably need to link to something Thatcher related. Chris Dillow describes Thatcherite roots of the crisis

# The stupid cruelty of the creditor

# Edinburgh doing well: Scotland's tech start-up capital?

# Another outstanding post from Interfluidity, The mother of invention. A quote: "

Abundance, ultimately, is a choice variable for the political class. “We” are presented with a devious choice, a Faustian seduction. We can choose abundance, for ourselves, by maintaining a distribution under which a relatively small fraction of humanity claims a sufficiently large share of world purchasing power that the economy’s capacity to produce will remain safely in excess of that group’s needs. Or we can choose scarcity, by distributing purchasing power widely enough to put our productive capacity under pressure, leaving all of us, even the affluent, at risk of actual shortage.

If we choose the abundance, we can expect Tyler Cowen’s “Great Stagnation” to continue. Technology will stagnate, because purchasing-power weighted necessity is the mother of invention, but people with needs have little purchasing power while people with purchasing power have trivial needs. If we choose scarcity, we take a risk. We may fail, and end up impoverished relative to where we (some of us) might have been, had we chosen the more conservative path. But purchasing-power-weighted necessity is the mother of invention, and in the past, mass affluence has inspired extraordinary innovation in pursuit of the mass dollar. If you believe in the power of capitalism and technology, then you should favor choosing scarcity, both for your own benefit (robots, yay!) and to expand the “we” by whom some level of abundance might plausibly be claimed."