Andrew Sissons

Very excited to publish this: an essay from @antonhowes on energy transitions of the past, with an intro by me. It gives a great insight into how economies can create energy abundance, how it changes lives and how it can be squandered nesta.org.uk/feature/what-t…

New personal post - should we give every 18 year old their own plot of land? acjsissons.medium.com/a-bad-idea-giv…

I’m over here now if anyone still wants a random mix of climate, energy and economics stuff. Will also try to post a bit more work stuff on LinkedIn… bsky.app/profile/acjsis…

@GandonAmy BSky seems to have taken off in the last two days (certainly among UK policy wonks). Would def recommend - pretty easy to get going now, should be many familiar faces!

Think I’ve finally had enough of Musk, and this platform. Would other people in policy wonk / politics land recommend blue sky? Any tips on making most of the switch?

Update: I have written up the full case for Manchester bidding for the 2036 Games for the @ManchesterMill! Go check it out! manchestermill.co.uk/p/manchester-s…

I know this is all contentious, but having one of your biggest airports surrounded by car-choked countryside, having one of your more successful cities constrained to stay fairly small…seems worth fixing to me

But there are also bad reasons it is difficult. The Green Belt is one formidable, entirely man-made barrier. The other is that Bristol airport - and almost all of this scheme - is in North Somerset, not Bristol. Which makes everything much more fraught.

Bristol Airport is the 8th busiest in the UK, but has no train or tram link. The parking situation there is mad - the whole area is a giant car park. The Bristol area also needs a lot more homes. If only there was a way to ease both pressures at once… bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

@Samfr Their coverage of the big sports is often pretty bad as well - much better to do a wider range of sports than doing second-rate coverage of a few

Strongly believe that the BBC should bring back Grandstand to show Olympics sports on weekend afternoons through the year. They can't afford the big sports any more anyway.

@Guy_Stallard @Samfr Already got the local BBC radio work to build on for the county champ, would be easy to slightly improve on the current streaming

@Samfr They could championship cricket as a filler in the summer. Could really push basketball forward

@Chris_Carus Oh wow that is good

Here’s the original piece btw And a clarification: Baumol doesn’t just apply to public services, but to any with low productivity growth. “Public services” - like health & education - can be private sector, but still tend to have low productivity growth acjsissons.medium.com/the-baumol-eff…

So I think rather than treating taxes as a necessary evil, we should pitch them as a route to get people more of what they want. While focusing relentlessly on public sector productivity, of course. It turns out to be one of the logical conclusions of Baumol for me…

One of the responses to my piece on the Baumol effect was: it means spending more on public services, and therefore higher taxes over time. I think that’s broadly right, but: as our incomes rise, we seem to want more of the types of services often provided by the state

@RichardALJones Thanks Richard!

A good post making a really important point: Baumol's so-called "cost disease" is not a disease at all, but the all-important mechanism by which the benefits of necessarily uneven rates of productivity growth in different sectors are spread across the whole economy.

@aveek18 The fact that demand for those services seems to increase as people get richer also seems important! But it’s a fair point, and I think makes productivity growth in those services more important imo

Final plug for my new personal blog. The Baumol effect is one of the most powerful forces in the economy,raising wages for everyone. And yet it is normally described as a “cost disease”, wrongly imo. I think we should embrace the Baumol effect more acjsissons.medium.com/the-baumol-eff…