I also share your gripe whenever I hear the "China has built X km of railways in the time the UK/US/somewhere else has built X/1000"

you and the solow model :)

In the same way that independent judiciaries also constrain democracies? I’m more convinced by the ex-post argument that fiscal policy is no better, than the ex ante argument that the OBR is fundamentally undemocratic

But there are *other* problems that the government needs to consider. The first is that having a complete capital gains exemption on primary property and no such exemption on other investment assets encourages people to wildly over-invest in property relative to bonds, equities, other real assets.

So flip side is that 1%pt is a short term price shock that should drop out of data soon enough (he says optimistically)?

I find these sneering “aren’t the public dumb” takes (referring to original post) mystifying. This is exactly what you’d expect if a large chunk of the public favour a defence spending increase funded by a progressive tax rise. Not obviously dumb/inconsistent/mad unless i am missing something.

Interesting article. Re the matching chart: I imagine this is sensitive to % of migrants in workforce since migrants tend to be poorly matched, intially at least before improving their match e.g. see Bell and Johnson - www.gov.uk/government/p...)