Aveek Bhattacharya
@aveek18
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Research Director @SMFthinktank. 'pitched direct Treasury cash payments to help with energy bills way before it was cool' (Politico). Views are my own.
York
Joined March 2012
By my very subjective tally, 16 of Divock Origi's 39 Liverpool goals are in some way memorable/remarkable, and 5 are genuinely iconic. What a career.
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Please don't call a proposed tax on South Asian migrants a "curry tax".
Nigel Farage defends plan to slap CURRY TAX on British takeaways.
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The iconic:. 1. A 96th minute equaliser to salvage a 2-2 draw against West Brom in December 2015, leading to these much-mocked scenes, which nonetheless represent a key moment in the Jurgen Klopp story
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Nice profile of Martin Ravallion, who died last week, and his contribution to measuring global poverty.
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5. The guy scored the winner in a Champions' League final
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2. Origi's more famous 96th minute goal, to beat Everton in December 2018, and send Klopp haring onto the pitch.
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@StefanFSchubert @georgeeaton @shreyagnanda It's a loan that to all intents and purposes functions as a tax, I think it's perfectly fine.
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3 &4. Two goals vs Barcelona in 2019. Most famously converting Alexander-Arnold's quick corner, but also scoring the first to get one of Anfield's most extraordinary nights started.
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The not-quite iconic, but still remarkable. 6. Today (will be iconic if Liverpool win the league, I think). 7. Another late winner to stay in a title race, vsNewcastle in 2019 - again would have been iconic if Liverpool had won the league. He'd have better luck later that week
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9. A last minute overhead kick in a 5-5. And not even in the top 8 maddest Origi goals. Arsenal, October 2019.
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8. Playing his part in another great Anfield European night - scoring the first in Liverpool's dramatic 4-3 win over Dortmund in 2016.
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10. Preston 2021. Not the biggest occasion, but a scorpion kick for goodness' sake.
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11 &12. A couple of smashing goals in a 5-2 derby thrashing, December 2019.
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A fact that has receives surprisingly little attention: there has been a secular increase in most measures of happiness and life satisfaction in the UK since the early 2000s, and we don't really know why
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🚨 PERSONAL NEWS 🚨 . Excited to start work today in a new job as Chief Economist for @SMFthinktank!. I know. A job. In this economy. Feeling pretty fortunate.
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Here's my best effort to find a way to overcome the "profound and bizarre psychological block" against cash transfers: cash benchmarking.
We have the most profound and bizarre psychological block against providing assistance to people in need in cash. We insist against all evidence that they will mostly waste it. In fact cash is the single most practical, efficient and effective intervention for improving lives.
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I can accept personal statements are bad and should go, but the idea of doing a video message seems so much worse to me personally. Not sure if it's a generational thing or the fact I'm more of a text than a video person.
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Right then! It's my first day as Interim Director @SMFthinktank. I'm painfully aware of how new I am at all of this, so please do get in touch if you have thoughts on how we're doing at SMF, how to run a think tank or want to give us money (worth a try. ).
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14-16. Somewhat forgotten in all the subsequent drama, but Origi's first ever goals were in a hat-trick in a 6-1 away win over Southamption in a league cup quarter-final, 2015.
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This piece is really good. Having worked mostly from home for 5 years, I'm very conscious of the way I got next to no "hard work" done on my days in the office because I was catching up on "soft work"
I wrote about a huge new study on remote work—60,000 employees at Microsoft—and what it tells us about the future of knowledge work, productivity, and a trillion-dollar question: What are offices good for, exactly?.
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This chart is incredible, and encouragement that the UK can get some things right.
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% of people with low life satisfaction by age. Not clear young people are the issue. Are we sure middle aged folk wouldn't benefit from some national service?.
👥 We have a major crisis among Britain’s young generation: they’re unhappy, unskilled and unmoored. It’s time to look at what a new Great British National Service would look like to reengage them with society. Latest column for @theipaper
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Guys, we found him. The rational voter.
I voted in an election yesterday where my preferred candidate won by a single vote!.
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This is a cool chart - what time do people in different European countries eat, and how long do they spend eating?
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13. Rather overshadowed by a mad game where Liverpool conspired to lose from 3-1 up with 15 minutes to play, but how many goals have you seen scored from outside the box on the right hand side? Bournemouth, 2016.
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Sigh. EA has always been pluralistic, and it's more important than ever that it is so. In the old days it wasn't just 'buy bednets', it was 'be a banker' and 'worry about wild animal suffering'. .
I was a fan of Effective Altruism (almost taught a course on it at Harvard) together w other rational efforts (evidence-based medicine, data-driven policing, randomista econ). But it became cultish. Happy to donate to save the most lives in Africa, but not to pay techies to fret.
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Some (provisional) thoughts on this - that I'm still thinking through:. 1. The core argument - that the UK is not at the economic frontier, and should shift its thinking to recognise that is right and important.
New post by me:. The UK is much poorer than it ought to be – the US is nearly 40% more productive than we are. To get richer, we need to start thinking like a developing country and focus on getting the basics, like housing and energy, right.
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Going to start posting some short book reviews on here. Hopefully there might be some useful recommendations in there, and if you've read any of these books and want to discuss, please comment!.
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The idea that parents with kids in private school will reduce working hours by *40%* if we put VAT on school fees doesn't pass the smell test for me. But suppose it's true, what does that imply? . Seems weird to me to think of private school fees as a labour market policy.
🚨New ASI research has found that Labour's tax on private schools could cost the taxpayer upwards of £2.5 billion🚨. The new policy may lead to a massive exodus of high skilled parents from the workforce and withhold educational opportunities from poorer students. Here is a short
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I've spent too much time on GiveWell, because this quote is making me twitch.
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5 years of pitching, and I finally caught my white whale, a Guardian byline. Appropriately enough, describing the PhD research I spent much of that time doing.
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+1. "Most people care so little about saving lives in developing countries that effective altruists can save 200,000 of them and people will just not notice".
This @slatestarcodex defence of effective altruism sums up how I feel. Sure, you can point to things it's got wrong, but the good it does is vast, and no one notices in an honest world, this would shut its critics up, I think.
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Missed it in all the excitement, but devastated that Firmino extraordinary run of 100+ fouls without a yellow card has been ended (his previous yellow was for removing his shirt).
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A bit baffled by this. What % of people do they think *should* receive more from the state than they put in? . 0? so the state does no redistribution *at all*?. Lower, say 20%? Wouldn't that mean we're all subsidising an "underclass"?. What's meant to be the right answer?.
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Sometimes working in a think tank, you get media coverage for research that is a bit. quick and dirty (but still often important and informative!) . This week, though, we press released some stuff from my PhD, which has been literally six years in the making. Summary below. .
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TIL something weird: none of the women's sprint world records (100m, 200m, 400m) have been broken since 1988. Now I suspect that's got something to do with doping, but then why is the story completely different for men?.
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I remember when the problem with EA was that it was too demanding, not too easy.
Growing more and more convinced that EA is so attractive to young talent because it promises them impact without the schlep, without the psychological hardship required to figure out how *you in particular* can affect the world.
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Weirdly reminiscent of 2016/17: two spells of title chasing form with a spell of relegation level form sandwiched in between.
23 points from last 27 #lfc.
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@dylanmatt @NathanpmYoung But a couple of salient differences:. 1) the socioeconomic position of Indians. Suspect it would feel bigger to have a Black/Muslim PM, as they are more marginalised. 2) Sunak hasn't won an election. Part of what was powedful about Obama was voters endorsing him.
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@StefanFSchubert @JmsOlvr It's a factor, but nowhere near enough to explain the scale of the trend. Non-drinking rising in the white population too (though some evidence white students in schools with more minorities are less likely to drink, so they may be indirectly influenced by immigration).
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As I've said before this might be one of the most significant and underappreciated trends in modern society.
Time that fathers and mothers spend with their children, select countries (1965-2010). #parenting #dataviz. Source:
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I think the error here is to assume that the only knowledge that matters is deep expertise built over years of experience. There's lots of contexts where getting someone to read up on a topic or speak to people for 50 hours and synthesise their views is useful.
I don't understand how 23-year-olds go into consulting & have a single thing to say. I'm sure lots of them are very smart & useful, but how? . (really though if someone knows, please tell me before I lose the whole weekend to this).
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@maybeavalon Says so much about London that it's solution involves leaving the robots to calculate the tab just to make sure you need absolutely never speak to a human.
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This is a fascinating chart. Hadn't appreciated just how widespread scepticism of the tabloids is.
Very good data-driven piece by @jburnmurdoch on why US-style National Conservatism should struggle in the UK. I wish I could be as optimistic has you John!
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Is this meaningfully different to eg one generation getting free University tuition and another paying fees? Or maybe a better analogy is different pension entitlements by age.
@jamesrbuk I think for me, it’s the premise: that you could have two different classes if “adults” with different rights. I think that’s a really disturbing concept in law. And I think the popularity of the thought of a “smoke-free generation” has masked the weirdness of the premise.
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I was sceptical of the notion of "knowing the club", but now I get it. Arteta well in tune with Arsenal traditions
Mikel Arteta has made his latest signing to enhance the feelgood vibe at Arsenal — a chocolate Labrador. The dog, who is affectionately called “Win”, spends most days at the club’s training ground
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I spent five years of my life advocating for minimum unit pricing (MUP), so it would be a big deal for me if it "failed". I don't think it has, but more importantly I want to try and explain why and try to model the sort of transparent reasoning we should do more of.
Minimum alcohol pricing in Scotland has failed exactly as Chris predicted it would before it was brought in. It raises prices for normal people who drink cheap alcohol, and drives alcoholics to damaging measures without reducing their consumption.
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What is the most miraculous transformation of a relatively unpromising raw ingredient into a delicious foodstuff comprised mainly of that ingredient? Chickpeas to humous/falafel has to be up there.
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A bit from me on 'nanny state' discourse: public attitudes have been in favour of action on smoking/drinking/obesity since before the pandemic, politicians might just be catching up.
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If I didn't know better, I would have said this, by @KelseyTuoc, is banal and non-contentious. But given the state of the discussion on birth rates and natalism, it needs saying, over and over.
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Absolutely wild how fuel duty and childcare cost about the same.
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1/ Really excited to finally launch a project I've been working with .@Fay_Niker. on for .@JusticeEverywh1. over the past few months!. Beyond the Ivory Tower: a series of interviews with political theorists that have ventured into the scary world of real politics.
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Set myself a cooking challenge for 2021: make a (vegetarian) dish for every region of Italy.
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There's a real economy out there. Be nice if we talked about it sometimes.
Everything is accounting.
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There's no evidence that pub sector as a whole is in decline, just consolidated. Bigger pubs have won at the expense of smaller ones. Pubs have shifted to food over drink.
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I'm old enough to remember when EA was too individualistic and wasn't political enough for its critics. I'll respond more fully when I get a moment, but I think David and Morgan are worth engaging with. They're critical but not unsympathetic, so might help keep Labour EAs honest.
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@Richard_Carr It seems pretty clear to me that students should not have lecturers' personal numbers. I think some people just don't get the nuances of different communication platforms.
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@TrinleyWalker Better revenue sharing and wage caps would be the ideal (although wage caps would also benefit owners at the expense of players!). But seem unworkable. More modest but more practical is stricter limits on squad size, as @Marcotti has argued for:
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Asking an academic for the policy implications of their research:.
Mark: Well, look, the first thing is to acknowledge that the ancient Egyptian era is so completely different from our own, then any cultural, political, or business parallels that we draw between the two eras are by their very nature almost bound to be wrong.
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Don't think I've had a report make as much impact before it's even come out, but released today: the case for raising remote gaming duty, with @jranoyes @gideonsalutin.
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Still a bit of a mystery to me how little attention people pay to Welsh public policy, especially given that it's actual existing Labour government is an obvious place for a potential Westminster Labour government to look for ideas. .
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At 7pm on an average day, half the country is watching TV.
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The flashier puns will get the attention, but this headline is one of my favourites from @stephenkb:
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UK vs Japan, philosophers cited in parliament.
Here’s one for lovers of esoteric facts - the top five philosophers cited in Japan’s parliament. Marx leads the pack, with 970 citations. Then Kant, Rousseau, Aristotle and Hegel tied in fourth place. A good spread of accumulated wisdom. Nikkei table.
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On the off chance you want to read 100,000 words on school choice in Scotland and England, my PhD is in the LSE repository now:
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This is exciting to get through the door - a real, proper book that I made happen! (With a lot of help from @Fay_Niker and the people who wrote it of course)
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The idea that progressive activism is a clear route to career advancement for sportspeople is also nonsense. Colin Kaepernick hasn't played in the NFL for four years! These players have been trained from day 1 to give as little away as possible on football, let alone politics.
This is a terrible piece that has a serious case of US-brain. "Rich man is moved by plight of people he perceives to be like him, hires successful publicist for campaign" is a story that also links Rashford to say, 50% of Conservative members of the House of Lords.
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This seems weird to me. Firstly, I don't see why mortgage/rent ratio is the best indicator of need for new housing - how is it OK if mortgages and rents are both really high?
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oops
Anyway here’s what’s really going on
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But I don't know how you appreciate the horror and monstrosity of factory farming without numbers. The suffering of chickens is bad, might make us feel a little queasy, but it's not until you appreciate that we raise and kill over a billion every week that you get the atrocity.
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I remember reading @robfordmancs' Revolt on the Right and thinking what a remarkable achievement it was for the SNP to attract + hold so many Scottish voters that looked demographically like the UKIP base. I think that breaking down is the cause of Reform's rise.
Reform's success in Scotland (relative to UKIP in 2015) is fascinating. Very interested in explanations . (I'm guessing the long term journey is from Labour>SNP>Reform?).
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How have I only just noticed that there is no apostrophe in "Champions League"?.
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Have you seen my job, and thought it looked fun/interesting/worthwhile? Or that you could do it better perhaps? Well apply for it! . I'm staying at SMF, moving to a different role, so you would have to work with me. I'll leave you to decide whether that's a pro or a con.
📣We are #hiring for a Chief Economist/Senior Researcher!. This is an opportunity to join an influential Westminster think-tank in a senior role, working on the biggest economic & social problems facing the UK. 🚨DEADLINE: Wednesday 28 Sept, 12 PM🚨.
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MPs get a lot of flak, but I think some credit is due to those sticking their necks out on a cause as morally worthy but deeply unpopular as defending the aid budget:
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One of the most interesting economic policy questions right now is quantity vs quality of employment, and while for obvious political reasons the govt won't explicitly say there are too many low wage, low productivity hospitality jobs, that's what their actions would suggest. .
🚨 NEW: Pizza Hut plans to spend £10m on new technology, including touch-screen kiosks and contactless table ordering, to offset the tax rises announced in the Budget. [@BBCNews].
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This is all well and good, but I think it gets harder and more complicated as soon as you give any weight to animal welfare.
This super @PopovichN chart is imo the single most important message to give people about diet and climate change. You can cut your dietary carbon footprint almost as much by replacing beef & lamb with other meat, as by going totally veggie. Eating green needn’t mean no meat.
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Just looking over an old Facebook message from @willmacaskill from 2012 in response to something I wrote on a random blog about Effective Altruism "woo! People are writing about me". Suspect it takes more to get that response these days. .
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Around a quarter of schools students in England are persistently absent, missing 10% of classes. Any effort to understand and address the problem should probably recognise that other countries are facing the same issue. .
I wrote about the extremely worrying school attendance figures. How it's connected to a whole set of post covid problems. And why it can't be allowed to drift.
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My favourite thing is the way the government got bored of the bit, and so now in addition to the annual ritual of the freezes, we now have the "temporary" 5p cut that is now entering its fourth year.
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Every time I encounter it I'm astonished anybody thinks "global majority" is a good label. Not just cringily euphemistic, but offensively lumps very different people together and emphasises that you see the key distinction as white vs other.
The idea that all Japanese people and all African people are part of a common "global majority" group with all UK minorities & all other minorities in all majority white countries is an obviously meaningless & absurd assertion that People Who Are Not White is a global identity.
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Student loans in England operate like a bizarro income tax. I try to figure out why:
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Q: Do I want to embrace becoming the "just give people money" guy?.
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And now it isn't just 'slow down AI', 'it's give cash to poor people', 'stop insect farming', 'lobby LMICs to regulate pollution/tobacco/alcohol' and dozens of other things. As it should be.
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This is genuinely how I overcame my teenage low self-esteem: the evidence that I was not in fact terrible was so strong it would have been unreasonable to maintain that view.
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And people of all backgrounds and life circumstances seem to be better off, suggesting the improvement is being caused by some factor we all have in common:
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Really interesting analysis from my SMF colleagues. 'Anglosphere' countries (UK, Ireland, Australia, NZ, Canada) tend to act like they have uniquely terrible housing crises - but they have more in common than distinguishes them. And we in the UK are broadly middle of the pack.
Overall, the UK clearly has serious housing problems, especially on homelessness, housing costs and social housing waiting lists. But its experiences are in the middle of the pack compared to other anglosphere countries, and less bad than New Zealand’s
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This is a great thread. It's a constant struggle to avoid rationalising what you want to do anyway as morally justified. And the direction EA has taken in recent years has (for me personally at least) made such self-justifications easier.
I think what most people want from an ethical system is some kind of plausible account of why being a really good person doesn’t require much change — just do normal stuff, hang out with like-minded people, affirm a certain set of political views.
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