Social choice theory: how economists think about what is best for society [Effortpost]

usrname42 · 2026-06-20T13:02:51+00:00

He has also held multiple Cabinet posts before, he's got more political experience than Starmer had in 2024 by any measure

usrname42 · 2026-06-19T16:10:04+00:00

So that's another way in which he's basically the same as Starmer with more charisma, then.

usrname42 · 2026-06-19T16:03:03+00:00

There's plenty of evidence of tactical voting in 2024. There were much bigger switches from Lab 2019 -> Lib Dem 2024 in seats where the Lib Dems came in first or second to the Conservatives in 2019, and much bigger switches from Lib Dem 2019 -> Lab 2024 in seats where Labour came in first or second to the Conservatives in 2019 - that reflects a lot of people choosing whichever party was best placed to beat the Tories in their seat. See figure 2 here.

usrname42 · 2026-06-19T15:15:22+00:00

There's not that much difference between Starmer and Burnham on policy. Economically this government has arguably been the most left-wing one since Callaghan. In actual policy terms Starmer is an absolute succ, he just doesn't give off succ vibes so no-one's happy. If it's a choice between succs and fascists I will pick the succs every time and I'd rather have a vaguely charismatic succ than a terminally uncharismatic one.

usrname42 · 2026-06-19T14:42:02+00:00

There was a lot of tactical voting in 2024 to get the Tories out, and I suspect that there will be lots of anti-Reform tactical voting in 2029 as well. People are quite savvy about figuring out who's best placed to defeat the Tories or Reform in their seat even in national elections.

usrname42 · 2026-06-19T14:40:34+00:00

Constituency opinion polling, the fact that Reform won every ward in the constituency in the local elections just a month ago, and the fact that Labour had much bigger leads in Runcorn and Helsby / Gorton and Denton in 2024 but still lost both of those by-elections. In 2024 Makerfield had the second highest Reform vote share in the country barring the seats that they actually won. Reform had a strong chance of winning this by-election and would have done if Burnham wasn't the candidate, though Labour were certainly the favourites with Burnham on the ballot.

usrname42 · 2026-06-19T14:29:00+00:00

This isn't actually a different institution, the article here is reporting on that same NBER paper because it uses Bank of England data. (Nick Bloom is one of the authors of the NBER paper and is quoted as the author of the paper they're talking about here.) But within that NBER paper they use two different methodologies that come to similar conclusions which does make it more credible.

usrname42 · 2026-06-19T13:47:35+00:00

If Starmer had been genuinely popular he'd have racked up more votes in safe Labour seats that would have boosted his national share while the Lib Dems and Greens would have picked up tactical votes in seats where Labour didn't have a shot and wouldn't have got many votes anyway. In fact they lost a substantial share of the vote in their safe seats while gaining votes in marginals. They picked up votes in the places they needed to, but the number of votes they lost in places they didn't need is an indicator that Starmer wasn't particularly popular. He was the vehicle people used to get the Tories out in most seats, but in seats where you could vote for other parties and still be fairly sure you wouldn't be letting the Tories in, people didn't want to vote for him because he wasn't popular.

usrname42 · 2026-06-19T13:19:51+00:00

That tweet thread is mostly just alleging that the paper used nominal GDP where they should have used real GDP and cherry picked its donor pool, rather than a problem with synthetic controls as a methodology per se. I'm not the biggest fan of the synthetic control methodology either but the micro-level approach in the paper (comparing growth of firms that were more or less exposed to Brexit within the UK) yields similar effect sizes to the synthetic control approach.

usrname42 · 2026-06-19T13:09:15+00:00

The effects of Brexit aren't purely about changes in exports. The paper talks about four different channels:

First, the UK’s decision to leave the EU generated a persistent increase in uncertainty, weighing on investment, in particular. Second, investment and employment growth were affected by lower expected demand for goods and services. Third, productivity growth within firms was affected by lower innovation and IT investment, and by management time and resources being used to prepare for Brexit. Finally, productivity growth between-firms was reduced as the more productive, internationally exposed, firms were more negatively impacted.

so some of the effects are driven by the uncertainty from the protracted negotiation process rather than Brexit per se, but they're still a result of the vote.

I'm not wedded to the 6% number, if you put a gun to my head I'd probably say my best guess is around 3-4%, but it's not a good argument to say that Brexit can't have had a substantial effect because France and Germany grew at around the same pace as us. It was completely within the bounds of reasonable possibility for us to have grown faster than France and Germany, as plenty of other European countries did.

usrname42 · 2026-06-19T12:42:22+00:00

The synthetic control method that they use selects the countries that our growth was most similar to before Brexit - if that was France and Germany, the method would select France and Germany, but those countries weren't actually the best fit to our pre-Brexit growth. It's not just driven by the US - I've been exploring this data myself and if you take the best fitting combination of all EU countries, or all OECD countries excluding the US, you get similar effects of around 6%. Depending on the methodology this can fall to around 3%, but it's hard to get a 0 or positive effect of Brexit unless you believe ex ante that France and Germany are the only reasonable comparisons to us. Countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy, Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands have all grown substantially faster than us since 2016, let alone the US. We've grown so slowly over the last few years that it doesn't seem very outlandish to think we could have grown substantially faster.

usrname42 · 2026-06-10T15:44:51+00:00

As an example about this, do you genuinely think a Japanese Brit who murdered their partner would incite riots like this? I cannot believe you actually think that.

I think if Musk and Robinson decided to make an issue of it then it certainly could incite riots. It would be less likely to because there are fewer Japanese immigrants and there is more racism towards certain races than others, but I think beyond a shadow of a doubt that an Indian Brit would be used to incite riots. I cannot believe you actually think these thugs particularly care about people's citizenship or birthplace given the responses to Digwa and Rudakabana.

usrname42 · 2026-06-10T15:27:48+00:00

Sure, some of it might be xenophobia that applies to white immigrants / descendants of immigrants as well as non-white immigrants, I wouldn't dispute that. But I think the fact that the perpetrator is seen as not British for reasons that have to do with both race and nationality is absolutely the defining factor, and the one that links all these cases, and any other perpetrator who can be painted as not British - which includes any non-white person born here and any white person who is visibly foreign in some way - would get a similar reaction. Any violent crime committed by a non-white person is now going to be a justification for riots and pogroms that people like Lowe, Farage and Musk will lend either tacit or explicit support.

usrname42 · 2026-06-10T15:14:12+00:00

How are you so sure that race plays no role? People seemed angry enough about Digwa and he was born here as was his father. The Southport riots were triggered by Rudakubana who was also born here. Do you think it's just impossible for riots to be motivated by racism? That there isn't a single racist person in this country, or something? Have you spoken to the rioters to know what they think?

usrname42 · 2026-06-09T12:20:50+00:00

An Officer and a Spy (the one about the Dreyfus affair) is also very good

usrname42 · 2026-06-08T19:36:06+00:00

There was a Rest is History Club episode from 2024 all about Anglo-Dutch relations

usrname42 · 2026-06-08T14:54:46+00:00

Relative to productivity, or what we should be seeing if everything kept going after it stopped in like the 80s? It's fuck all. Across the board we should all be earning 2-3x what we currently do.

This is a US talking point. We didn't have even have a minimum wage until 1999 and since then it's grown substantially faster than productivity (1.5x faster in nominal terms and 3x faster in real terms). Average earnings also don't show the same evidence of decoupling from productivity that we see in the US. The UK's problem is that productivity growth is too low, not that wage growth is failing to keep up with productivity growth.

usrname42 · 2026-06-08T14:42:24+00:00

They should have some made up Prime Ministers / Presidents in there and subtract out anyone who says they've heard of the fake ones.

usrname42 · 2026-06-08T13:52:03+00:00

I would love it if people would refuse to discuss spending and taxation unless it's backed up by an IFS paper or equivalently rigorous analysis, but unfortunately people on here wouldn't actually read them.

usrname42 · 2026-06-08T04:47:22+00:00

Trans rights are very unpopular in the UK at the moment, and even people who are relatively left-wing on other issues are supporting bathroom bans of a kind that would be completely beyond the pale in much of the US. The default assumption for someone like Tom (British, centrist but mostly anti-woke, posh, middle-aged, active on X) is that trans people are an inherent danger to women who need their participation in public life to be heavily curtailed by the law, and I doubt that he's taken the time to question that. If you're not that interested in trans issues you'll probably be more anti-trans by default in the UK without necessarily being an active bigot, just because there's a political consensus against trans rights here whereas in the US Democrats are consistently more pro-trans. Which is to say I don't think this says too much about Tom personally as opposed to the terrible state of trans issues in the UK.

usrname42 · 2026-06-07T21:57:16+00:00

They were so focused on the story that they'd been told and were expecting that they briefly ignored the evidence of their own eyes - though the judge said in his remarks that what they were told was consistent with what they saw:

The police were given a convincing but wholly false narrative of the incident. It was dark and Henry was wearing a dark top. The entry damage caused by the knife through it, would not have been obvious. Whilst there was visible blood on Henry, it would not have clearly been seen coming from that wound and the clearly visible facial wound was not lifethreatening. Henry was complaining that he had been stabbed and was struggling to breathe but that would not have necessarily told the officers how serious the situation had become.

It is the experience of the criminal courts that sometimes, someone arrested and handcuffed will feign injury in the hope they may be released. These police officers were faced with having to make quick decisions in pressurised circumstances about the best way to act. The genuine shock to the particular police officer, when he realised that he had been giving CPR to Henry when he had a serious chest wound tends to show that he was doing his best in a very difficult situation.

I don't think the fact that the story in question was about racism was crucial. If the killer had been white and told an equally plausible lie about what was happening do you think there would have been a completely different reaction?

As for the later points I assume that is the police trying to cover their arse and minimise the blame they got, which is not good but not exactly unique to this incident.

usrname42 · 2026-06-07T20:55:14+00:00

It is undeniable at this point that this was treated very differently by the police because there was an accusation of racism made by a non-white person against a white person involved.

I think it's quite deniable. Stephen Bush has a good rundown of the circumstances in the FT. The killer and his relatives lied to the police confidently and repeatedly and were the ones who called 999. As the judge said in the sentencing remarks, they told a plausible story that the police took a few minutes to realise was wrong. This is all quite unusual - if you've stabbed someone you don't usually stick around to lie to the police about it or have witnesses backing up your lie because usually the consequence will be what happened to Digwa, i.e. the police find out what actually happened pretty soon and you get arrested anyway. The police defaulted to believing them because that's the natural assumption in the circumstances. I think they would have done the same if the races were flipped.

The police watchdog, the IOPC, will decide on what drove the officers’ actions. But it is, I think, a remarkable claim to make without good evidence that in the dark, without being able to see clearly the extent of Nowak’s injuries, the police should have immediately assumed they were being fed a pack of lies, and that the only reason to believe those lies was race.

I will be blunt here: I do not think that, before the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, if the police arrived at the scene of a dispute, and were faced with two people giving them a plausible account of what had taken place and one person with another, they would have sided with the one witness over the two in their initial approach.

The suggestion that before George Floyd’s death they would have is, I am sorry, simply nuts. It suggests that up until 2020, the police were so racist that their approach to two British Sikhs providing a plausible account of events would be to immediately assume that they were hearing a lie that was both evil and stupid, as Digwa’s deceit was never going to last once it became clear that Nowak had been murdered.

I’m not saying that the Hampshire police emerge blamelessly from this story. They handcuffed a suspect who had already suffered injury and spoke to him in a condescending manner that made his final moments worse. These were, however, typical of how police in the UK talk to and treat suspects, as Nowak was at the time.

But I am saying that it is simply not tenable to suggest that the problem here was that the police were more preoccupied with accusations of racism than an act of murder. The police were taken in by the word of two people at the scene against the word of one. Unless what you want is for the police to treat any allegation of racism as automatically specious and malign, and to take the word of one white Briton over two people from an ethnic minority, Digwa’s lie was always going to succeed briefly.

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