Andrew Gunn 🇺🇦

Why does UK #HigherEd have a Teaching Excellence Framework? My new book ‘Teaching Excellence? Universities in an Age of Student Consumerism’ tells the #TEF story amazon.co.uk/Teaching-Excel… blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/produ… @SAGEPublishers @EducationUoM

Never were truer words said @WilliamJHague

Today is the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, one of the most important books ever. If you don’t have the stamina to read it all, we made a film about him a few years ago. My favourite part is when his metaphor of “the man of system” comes alive.

This student does not understand the economics/signaling value of higher education. (A committee of Harvard faculty has proposed capping the percentage of A's per class at 20%.)

Good architecture is a posterchild public good: non-rival and non-excludable. Had great fun using the economics toolbox to study why developments look rather underwhelming and simulate what policies could lead to more beautiful cities. Plus, so cool to work with my amazing former and current @LSEGeography PhDstudents... github.com/Ahlfeldt/DPs/b…

You can see the soul drain from society in real time.

Quite literally, our political parties are aging and dying (research by Tim Bale et al ⁦@QMUL⁩)

Counter to the prevailing view, soft skills more than quantitative competency have seen the biggest rewards in the labour market over recent years, writes John Burn-Murdoch. ft.trib.al/Kf3UYah

Here for example is @benwansell's map of voting intention by occupation. Big left-wing clump (Lab and Lib indistinguishable!). Big culturally right-wing grouping, with Tories less right on culture, more on econ and Reform vice versa. Big gap between. benansell.substack.com/p/british-poli…

This new paper shows how journal special issues can operate as a closed academic social network of cronies. Sad but true. link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Professor Arif Ahmed, the Office for Students’ Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom, speaking at our annual Navigating Academic Freedom conference, is drawing on philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s distinction between civil and enterprise associations. He argues that universities have drifted from the civil model — a community bound by rules that protect independent inquiry — toward an enterprise model that enforces shared moral missions like EDI. Defending academic freedom means returning to the civil model.

These results suggest that getting a PhD causally worsens mental health, or at least receiving psychiatric medicines. The reversal post PhD degree is particularly convincing. But the up trend among the control group is intriguing. The highly educated are in distress.

✨Read all about our terrific @ECPRKnowledge Knowledge Politics and Policies section with its 9 exciting panels on academic freedom, Artificial Intelligence, science diplomacy, universities & more at #ecprgc25 in Thessaloniki in August here era.ideasoneurope.eu/2025/09/21/ecp… @ECPR

My guest essay in @nytimes today. I make 5 key points: 1. There’s little clear evidence of AI eliminating jobs at scale yet. But waiting to see is risky. Pittsburgh’s steel towns saw early signs with mini-mills before the losses showed up. Service capitals like London and New York should prepare now rather than after the shock. 2. Diversification helps—but only so much when the disruptor is a general-purpose technology. Being “in many industries” isn’t a shield if the same tool touches them all. 3. High-skill, knowledge jobs have big local multipliers. Each manufacturing job supports 1.6 local jobs; each high-skill tech/professional role supports 5. That means even modest losses of analysts, developers, or paralegals can ripple through restaurants, retail, and transit systems. 4. AI needn’t fully replace workers to matter. It only needs to make work easier. As location and experience matter less at the margin, more work will offshored to cheaper places (e.g. India, UAE, or Philippines). 5. The lesson from deindustrialization isn’t inevitability—it’s reinvention. Detroit poured resources into legacy industries and still declined. Boston repeatedly bet on talent, education, and new sectors.

You *must* read this brilliant new paper linking industrial policy to geopolitics. It outlines a three-tiered hierarchy of nations’ ability to implement industrial policy in the modern world economy — with wealthy nations at the very top.

Did you know that your neighbors influence your political party? New in The Journal of Politics: Panel data on 41M voters show that people are more likely to switch political parties to match their neighbors.

Piketty has just discovered dependency theory ;)

Really fascinating looking at voting intention by life satisfaction: Both the Green Party and Reform do much better with people with lower life satisfaction, Labour is only convincingly ahead with people who rate their life satisfaction at 10/10

Karl Marx and Adam Smith, despite their differences, approached economics in a similar way. They both understood that economics is shaped by human values, social norms, and ideologies. According to Marx and Smith, to be an economist is also to be a philosopher.

We’ve got a new book coming out! And it’s relevant to @alexandreafonso’s recent argument that an imbalance in the supply of left and right-wing academics, yet equal media demand for them, creates incentives to espouse reactionary positions. More here… thepathnottaken.net/p/academic-und…