Joined November 2013
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Mar 8
This week's column: choose your university wisely
Post-1992 providers have been rapidly expanding business, law and computing courses. Yet the returns for students 5 years after graduating from these courses have, to date, been woeful
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Jun 11
A reminder that the government can simply freeze student loan repayment thresholds, or keep interest rates high, whenever it needs to raise a bit more cash
Chief Treasury Secretary Lucy Rigby has defended the Government’s decision to not reduce interest rates on student loans, saying the money is being used to fund benefit schemes including ‘free breakfast clubs’ and lifting the two child benefit cap.
Trapping graduates in a lifetime of debt in order to fund breakfasts for children whose parents should be feeding them at home is not beneficial to anyone - children, families or young adults starting out in life.
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Jun 10
A slightly different way to look at fertility from today's ONS release.
Women born from 1995 onwards have been having drastically fewer children by the age of 30. Will they catch up in their 30s?
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Tom Calver retweeted
It’s typical of the MSM to ignore the big scrap between Nigel Farage and Andrew Bailey. It’s times like this that X really comes into its own as a serious news source.
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Tom Calver retweeted
Jun 8
It's interesting how much of a premium foreign students seem to be willingly to pay to study medicine at Cambridge, given the NHS doesn't recognise one exists at all.
The NHS believes all doctors are equally fungible goods, as long as they got a passing grade.
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"Overseas students starting at the University of Cambridge this autumn will pay at least £450,000 for a medicine degree over six years of study"
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Tom Calver retweeted
Jun 7
Is our race to net zero boosting the economy?
Last week a new report claimed the “net zero economy” is worth £105bn.
But zoom out, and there is little evidence that the shift to renewables has boosted growth at all. In fact, the opposite may be true
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Tom Calver retweeted
Jun 7
Good stuff. A simpler heuristic, even—any sector in receipt of big govt subsidies would show up as a big, and possibly growing, share of GDP.
That alone says nothing about whether those subsidies are well-spent. (Here: lots of reasons, not least world-high bills, to imply not.)
Jun 7
Is our race to net zero boosting the economy?
Last week a new report claimed the “net zero economy” is worth £105bn.
But zoom out, and there is little evidence that the shift to renewables has boosted growth at all. In fact, the opposite may be true
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Jun 7
Is our race to net zero boosting the economy?
Last week a new report claimed the “net zero economy” is worth £105bn.
But zoom out, and there is little evidence that the shift to renewables has boosted growth at all. In fact, the opposite may be true
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Jun 5
It's worth thinking about the consequences of this for the housing ladder.
Whereas previous generations could ride the equity train, young flat owners wanting to move somewhere bigger basically have to start again saving for another deposit
My column from February: thetimes.com/comment/columni…
Jun 5
Why half of London's small flats sell at a loss as the crash spreads trib.al/JsW9kmN
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Jun 5
Oh and then once you've saved up for a second deposit, you remember that you basically need another one for the stamp duty!
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Tom Calver retweeted
The Times has launched Times Data, a new public dashboard bringing together 40 daily-updated indicators to show “Britain at a glance”, from NHS waiting lists and inflation to the cost of a coffee and a pint thetimes.com/data
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Tom Calver retweeted
May 28
Britain has a tax on instruments that don’t exist any more.
It raises no revenue. It never applies. It was meant to be abolished this year, but wasn't.
It still exists.
Anyway, I made a chart of all 85 UK taxes.
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Tom Calver retweeted
May 27
The collapse in UK birth rate becomes even more obvious when you strip out the new arrivals
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May 24
Greatest picture I have laid eyes on
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May 24
Amid all the talk of freezing the price of groceries, I looked at what goes into the cost of a pint of milk.
Two things jump out...
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May 24
Two: when milk prices did increase, between 2020 and 2022, it was not because of soaring profits.
The biggest contributors: farming costs, overheads, and, most significantly, labour!
The idea that prices rise because of profiteering is for the birds
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May 24
Are supermarkets really ripping us off on the price of milk?
thetimes.com/article/f304c56…
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Tom Calver retweeted
May 24
The queue for The Gunners pub in Highbury at 9.45am #Arsenal
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