Nick Cowen

Neoliberalism and social justice. My talk and Q&A at the LSE: youtube.com/watch?v=0HJGso…

Those new service sector jobs

I know it's boring and repetitive to talk about how grossly evil Trump is, but the fact remains: Trump is grossly evil, in a way that's pretty much unprecedented in this country.

The draft GMC Order 2026 consultation just dropped. Buried in it is a fundamental change to who can be awarded a Certificate of Completion of Training (CCT). This matters enormously. Let me explain why.

This Land Is Our Land - by Maia Mindel someunpleasant.substack.com/p/this-land-is…

I was inspired by Adam Smith to develop what I call 'the invigilator within the breast'. Listen to our discussion here and also on all good platforms! thecurioustask.podbean.com/e/is-an-examin…

I always enjoy speaking to @AlexAragona on the Curious Task podcast. This time we spoke about my new working paper defending the role of some exams not for externally validating education but as a tool for developing what people in the ed biz call 'metacognition'.

This is the sort of logic and sense that would be great to see on the Supreme Court

@Antunes1 you can't separate organ donation and euthanasia decisions jme.bmj.com/content/47/10/…

We asked young men who are unsure about marriage why they hesitate. The top reason, again, is: "it is hard to find the right person to marry." This theme shows up across young adults, men and women. And it's the same story with family formation: the #1 reason Americans are not having the number of children they desire is "Still looking for the right spouse/partner to have children with." Why is it so hard to find the right person to marry and have children with? I covered this in more detail in this essay and offered ideas for change @FamStudies: ifstudies.org/blog/why-ameri…

Disability pay gap reporting is another great example of this government pursuing policy in two contradictory directions, in that it directly rubs up against their stated policy aim of getting more disabled people into work. A company that hires disabled people at the bottom of the pay pyramid, which is what you'd expect they'd be doing if they hired someone long term unemployed, will end up looking worse on their pay gap reporting!

I think this is very foolish. We should not be creating loads of ad hoc implicit taxes in the system. - We are forcing people to constantly 'have their wits about them' when they earn, spend, and save. The system can't be trusted to treat people fairly, so they are obliged to learn its Byzantine rules. - We're giving people huge incentives to hide income, something that we simply do not have the state capacity to track or stop. - We are giving people a disincentive to earning and saving money closer to a 60-80% tax rate at many margins, but pretending we are a low-tax country. It has to stop. We need to create a new norm, probably backed up by a reformed OBR, strongly stigmatising off-balance-sheet taxes and spending like this.

Why did Scotland punch so far above its weight in the age of industrialisation and enlightenment? The usual answer is education. But I argue that this puts the cart before the horse, and that it was almost entirely down to capital: ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-inven…

NEW Cambridge-headquartered tech giant Arm Holdings announces it will manufacture its own AI chips - a significant change after 3 decades of success getting its chip designs in 350 billion devices worldwide - IPhones, cars, data centres etc… partnerships announced with most of the worlds tech giants including OpenAI and Meta. The chips will be specialised for AI use, especially the deployment of “agents”. CEO Rene Haas tells BBC: "This marks the next phase of Arm’s journey - building on our roots in Cambridge, and the strength of our teams across the UK and around the world…” which puts Arm and the UK at the centre of global AI transformation.

Just a reminder that DOGE failed at every possible level: * At the micro level, they misread, misled and straight up lied about many of the 'savings'. They'd announce '500m saved!' and it would be some contract where the money was 98% already spent and already wasn't being renewed. * At the macro level, they didn't impact spending at all. The government spent more in 2025 than 2024. * At the institutional level, they didn't even convince the GOP that deficits are a problem worth caring about. The GOP only signature bill in 2025 exploded the deficit by trillions of dollars. * At a personal level, Elon got run out of town with his tail between his legs. The most notable public facts about the Cracked Coders are that one of them was a mini-Hitler, one was called 'big balls', and none of them bothered to learn how the government actually works before they set it on fire. They gutted a bunch of important institutions, fired whole departments at random, decimated medical research funding, killed millions of people dependent on USAID, and still failed at every possible level.

One in four people raised Muslim have left Islam, which means that all polls of Muslim opinion substantially understate the degree of Muslim immigrant assimilation since leaving Islam is a type of assimilation. In my post today I document how big this bias...

It would be good to see this independently validated but it’s certainly promising

My book (and many others!) are available at a stunning 50% discount from now until March 27th! A truly 'just' price. Use code ISAC26 at the checkout. e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/neoli…

@MichaelDnes1 @TonyJuniper @TomSanders4 @lfg_uk Isn't it funny how all that extra road in France and Germany does NOT induce more demand

@TonyJuniper @TomSanders4 @lfg_uk As it happens, I wrote the white paper that fact comes from. And it’s from this table. I’d respect there are many valid views on this (see my bio for more duality) but the right hand column gives you reason to think

Is this acceptable? Since 1990, Spain has built nearly 7,000 miles of motorway. So ... what about the UK? We have built 422 miles of motorway in 35 years. 35 years – 422 miles. Thats only twelve miles every year. Why have we stopped building?

@actsmaniac @s8mb Demure policy

@s8mb very technocratic, very evidence-based

I hadn’t realised that Reform was planning to replace stamp duty in Scotland (LBTT) with a property tax, kicking in at the next transaction. Really good policy.

By now, I have published a fair number of papers, and one more acceptance would have close to zero marginal impact on anything that matters professionally. But getting my survey on “Deep Learning for Solving Models” accepted into the Journal of Economic Literature made me genuinely happy, for reasons that have nothing to do with my CV. I had the misfortune of studying my undergraduate degree in economics at a quite awful institution. Two professors, David Taguas and Alfredo Arahuetes, were outstanding, and I owe them a great deal. The rest were well below any reasonable professional level, and some violated the basic standards of ethical conduct. They had no business teaching economics at any level, let alone at a university that charged tuition and claimed to prepare students for professional life. I had to work out most of my education on my own. The surveys published in the Journal of Economic Literature were how I did it. I spent hours in the library’s reading room going through one survey after another on topics I had never been properly taught. Some helped more than others, but collectively they gave me a solid enough foundation that, when I arrived at Minnesota for my PhD, I discovered, to my considerable surprise, that I was ahead of nearly all the other first-year students, including some who held master’s degrees, despite the fact that I had finished my undergraduate degree just six weeks before. I owe the Journal of Economic Literature a debt I will never be able to repay. Publishing a survey there is the closest I can come to trying. So, the thought that some student somewhere, working on her own in a library or on a laptop, might find my survey useful gives me tremendous satisfaction. But there is a broader point worth making. Even in the world of AI, the profession has an important mission in making educational material widely available. Textbooks, surveys, teaching slides, these are public goods in the economist’s sense: high social value, insufficient private incentive to produce. This is also why I post all my slides and teaching material online: sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/deepl… We do not reward these activities nearly enough, and their supply is well below what any reasonable social planner would choose. I do not have a good proposal for changing this, and I would welcome suggestions. What I do find heartbreaking is that many of the great economists of the past couple of generations never wrote textbooks on their areas of expertise. I do not mean this as criticism. All of them maximize, and perhaps they all suffer from the same bias I suffer from: the belief that one can always do it next year. But I often think about the hours of pure intellectual pleasure I would have had reading “Time Series Econometrics: An Advanced Textbook” by Chris Sims or “Methods in Structural Estimation” by Pat Bajari. Those books do not exist. They should.