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

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!

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.

Build a tram to the airport. Build a few thousand homes at every stop. Use the proceeds to help pay for the tram. I know there are good reasons it might be difficult. But afaik a feasible route has been identified (I think to the other side of the reservoirs from my silly line)

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/c886…

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

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

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-ba…

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…

I’ve written about this more airily in the past. When you ask “what would make life better?” in rich economies, I think most of the answers involve more public sector or collective action (health, environment, transport etc.). So probably higher taxes. acjsissons.medium.com/what-w…

Baumol’s “cost disease” only works if demand for lower productivity services is income elastic (we want more as we get richer) and price inelastic (we only want a bit less as prices rise). Vollrath piece here makes this point if you don’t believe me: growthecon.com/feed/2017/05/…

That means productivity in public services is important (notwithstanding measurement issues). But it’s also an important point in its own right. If people want more of these services as they get richer, we should give them more of these services. Even if that means higher taxes.

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

Thanks Richard!

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

Thanks! That’s a fair point. One thing I’d flag though is that demand for these services seems to rise as we get richer. Means productivity growth in those sectors still important, but might tell us something about what people value…

Fair point - I think you might file this under “measurement issues” (which I think are really important!) Because we measure the GVA of services primarily based on market values, you can get some unusual values