The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
I do all my exploratory data work in Jupyter Notebook. It’s an amazing mix of nicely-formatted text, syntax-highlighted code and clear outputs. I love it: But it’s not the complete package. I often want to peek at the results of a calculation I’ve done, just to verify to myself that I know what I’m doing. … Continue reading “Finally, a Python workflow that actually works”
GDP is easy to describe. It’s one of the reasons it is so popular as a measure of what a country “does” economically. You just add up everything that’s produced in a given year, and subtract all the stuff that went into making it. What’s left is the genuinely “new” stuff the economy produced that … Continue reading “GDP may partly be “based on randomly generated numbers””
The release of the BBC’s list of top-paid talent has quite unexpectedly focused on the difference between men’s pay and women’s pay. But it’s hard to look at a list and see whether women are doing worse than men, or whether there are fewer women on the list. Clearly either of these is a bad … Continue reading “BBC gender pay gap”
There’s an air of arms race about flatsharing adverts of the kind hosted by sites like SpareRoom. All individuals want the same thing: to find other individuals, either to move into the spare room in their shared house, or who have a spare room to move into. And all agents and landlords want the same … Continue reading “SpareRoom is over. What’s next for Britain’s flatsharers?”
Bored out of my brains marking a large pile (84) of exams, I decided to spice things up a little bit by timing how long it took me to mark each question. I happen to favour the style of marking where you mark every question 1, followed by every question 2 etc. It seemed clear … Continue reading “Are bad exams harder to mark than good ones?”
The Reteaching Economics network is a group of early-career economics teachers interested in moving the teaching of economics on from nonsense like this: to something a little bit more resembling the actual world which students expected to be finding out about when they signed up for an Economics undergraduate[1]. They are inspired by the incredible Rethinking … Continue reading “Does your econ department care about new ideas?”
Oxfam published a press release yesterday containing an open letter to world leaders calling for them to “make significant moves towards ending the era of tax havens” which are “distorting the working of the global economy”. This seems to me like a pretty important intervention, and it’s a rare opportunity for economists to use their variably-justified … Continue reading “Does your department care about tax havens?”
The reason why teaching undergrads is the best job I’ve ever done is because interacting with intelligent, energetic people is not the once-in-a-while happy coincidence it is in most jobs, but it’s the central purpose of what you’re supposed to be doing. Sure, there are the hours of marking, the jocks, the whingers (colleagues that … Continue reading “Economists should start doing themselves out of a job”
I’ve often asked myself, in self doubting moments and imposter-syndrome-rich night sweat events, what the difference is really between a person who says they are an economist and, well, just a person. Can I really lay any claim to be something other than the averagely well-informed news media-consuming citizen? Certainly a lot of what I covered in my MSc … Continue reading “How to make an economist”