Jonathan Portes, Discover and Read the Best of Twitter Threads by @jdportes

Jonathan Portes

jdportes

The charitable interpretation of this word salad is that the Queen's Speech isn't the place where government actually sets out priorities/tradeoffs or measurable success criteria - that's for the promised

A side note on this - not mostly on Sewell, but on government-commissioned "independent" reports/"Commissions". The process *is* tricky and it is not (and should not!) be a purely "objective"

*Why* did the Home Office ignore the law in order to implement racist policies? As the EHRC report found, because that's what Theresa May and David Cameron wanted. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-55065061 As

Fight?!?! @GoodwinMJ & I discuss social media, academia, & Brexit. I argue that calling out dodgy data, bad stats & the misuse of evidence - "intellectual garbage disposal" - is

Update: Response from @ukhomeoffice PermSec to my complaint:"I agree the phrase you quote should not have been used on an official government channel. I have made clear to the team

This is a good, balanced and well-argued "defense" of austerity by @MrRBourne. Good start: he admits scaremongering about the gilts markets was wrong, both theoretically and empirically and that many

Optimism contingent on phased exit from lockdown reasonably soon . Depth of peak-to-trough output fall is largely baked in. But the *permanent* damage is likely to be a strongly non-linear

Well-argued and thought-provoking as usual by @dsmitheconomics but for once I disagree with the conclusion (1/8 or so)https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-rules-of-a-true-depression-are-being-rewritten-like-everything-else-bq9z965gd I think this is

This is absolutely correct. Equally, it devalues political discourse if we treat normal "spin", misdirection, selective use of facts (as practiced by all politicians) as equivalent to deliberate lies. Journalists