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f small experiments and ventures failures and successes alike unplanned by any higher authority and invisible to the eye its failure is more like an ennervating sickness than a series of spectacular injuries and did the spending review do anything to fix it well you don t know posted by freethinkingeconomist june 16 2025 june 16 2025 posted in uncategorized tags economics economy finance growth inflation politics spending review 2 comments on you have no idea if the spending review boosted growth the hunt for the 45bn a month ago i whiled away a lunch break asking bluesky for the origin of a massive number the figure 45bn had acquired a kind of solidity by repetition in what we pretentious types call the political discourse 45bn was meant to be how much the government might save if it were to replace manual paper based and poor quality interactions with the state that are sucking up time and resource that could be allocated elsewhere quote source the thread details an amusing and frustrating chase through the citations and footnotes often seeming to end back where i started yes this is how i amuse myself but somehow this drew the attention of the dsit committee as well as lord theodore agnew and last week dsit published its response explaining how the number is arrived at all of this reflects well on everyone in my view nobody is hiding when ministers think tanks and government reports go out claiming something extraordinary they are subject to visible public scrutiny and letters are published politely this is not how the whole world operates nevertheless nothing in the response diminishes my disquiet at this number being taken so seriously hold it a mo diminishes my disquiet why am i trying to put it so decorously no i think this number and numbers like it tbi analysis are usually garbage and the scant detail we have here gives me no reason for reassurance a number this large enough to fix all of rachel reeves problems is like the proverbial elephant being explored blindly by touch it must be examined from a number of angles here are a few always be sceptical of massive numbers and look for analogs 45bn is a vast vast amount something like three times all mod service and personnel costs or in the same area as the cost base of a globe spanning bank when such a bank embarks on a cost reduction programme it is hard yards maybe 1 of the cost base taken out in a year five times that at the end of the programme source of guesswork difficult decisions the whole way these are moreover information economy entities par excellence the very sorts of organisation ideally suited to the implementation of digital cost saving ideas why would it be easier for a government in part this is because as matt clifford put it nicely there are no ai shaped holes lying around there is a huge amount of business transformation to do before your ai thing sits where your human process thing was another way of saying it if your contention is that ai is going to tranform activity xx then you need to be an expert not just in ai but very much in xx too and xx will be different depending on whether it is running a prison teaching pre schoolers triaging health services administering welfare claims or procuring weapons the method for deriving ai savings simply cannot take a portion of public services and extrapolate where there are ai shaped holes they are most likely in administrative word play jobs it is unavoidable that many of the optimists about the impact of ai can be found in the word business read superb wordsmith ian leslie s informative post words in words out is what llms literally do i have no doubt that governments could make more use of them but the admin budget of the government is a very small part of the whole less than 2 moreover most of the problems impeding productivity are not if only i could get better words faster without paying people as much they mostly involve harder problems of energy and human services in particular this point has never been put better than by tyler cowen in his endlessly patient discussion with an extreme ai optimist as he tries to explain the logic of thinking at the margin as the supply of one factor gets cheaper intelligent words the ones that don t get cheaper increase in significance look up baumol s cost disease in the end in his words the bottleneck is humans this is why it mattered much more for human flourishing when light began getting cheaper than the last tiny leap to leds why is there not more curiosity about how technological transformations have worked in the past the past eighty years have not exactly been short of administrative innovations as typewriters were replaced by wordprocessors paper legers by online databases secretaries by desktop pcs and expensive snail mail by maddening volumes of email the most tedious part of any minister s technology speech is always that bit when he wonders at the pace of change around us all as if the audience hadn t spotted that they can get live football on their phones yet throughout this period of transformation admin spending has not shifted down and hours have not reduced either this chart shows labour volume all klems data note by the way that the 45bn number has a new context it is about half of the entire gva of the whole admin sector of the uk economy nobody can deny that there have been astonishing efficiencies in office work we don t need pocket calculators for calculation rooms full of books for basic facts phone calls to communicate or a giant printing press to get thoughts out to a wider audience but whatever savings these generate appear to dissipate through new uses of the resource a sort of rebound effect some consumer surplus and the way technology creates new demands as well as supply solutions email has given us a quicker way of communicating but also more to plough through and there is also david edgerton s insight that old technologies hang around for far longer than you expect as managers and consultants slowly generate the technology shaped hole for the new one to fit into a priori it is hard to accept confidently any predictions on a technology s impact and squinting at history feels more reliable than detailed micro examinations of tasks our economies when they do respond do so to new technologies in ways that are not as straightforward as the optimistic analyses suggest the tasks that economies ask are constantly changing ai or not ai and new demands are constantly created the more than analysts claim to be using detailed granular methods for assessing exactly what ai is meant to do as the tbi seem to the more you suspect some kind of gosplan fallacy where they think they can analyse in detail what a gigantic complex system with billions of separate incentives is going to do in response to a change it is time to conclude over a decade ago i was asked to review a book that predicted the professions law medicine accountacy etc would be savagely gutted by ai the authors view was that what once hit cloth weavers and miners and is now happening to cashiers and travel agents will eventually sweep up the advanced professions the traditional ways of working currently enjoyed by lawyers and doctors will be broken and revolutionised this will happen through the encroachment of open it systems and ever more capable artificial intelligence able to make the sort of fine judgements including those with a moral angle that currently rely on experienced human beings i thought the book made some good points and it was prescient in forecasting how ai could soon beat humans at cognitive tasks but i didn t see a future of lawyers on the dole because their job is not just to compute but to decide and take responsibility and they will ultimately contest ownership of the economic rents inherent in what they do gifted a new tool they will find more uses of their labour i don t see it being very different in the public sector posted by freethinkingeconomist april 30 2025 posted in uncategorized tags ai artificial intelligence chatgpt government public sector efficiency technology writing leave a comment on the hunt for the 45bn against vibes based economic prognosticating here is how it goes let s say it starts with the government doing something bad like raise a tax by 20bn to fund a bunch of stuff people don t like tax according to science and so those affected complain there are plenty of ways that they might complain to the journalists ringing around asking for views on the budget on social media in response to surveys and so on they report it to the treasury officials tasked with calling them up to find out how the budget went down who then say things like badly to the anxious ministers and spads the vibes are bad the thing appears to snowball those surveys come back breaking down all the negative ways business is going to react to this egregious tax since everyone only ever had just enough money to start with the tax is going to have to come from somewhere virtuous it will hit investment it will hit hiring it will hit wage growth it will raise prices the 20bn intervention appears to metastize into something attacking all the vital organs of enterprise no one wants to hire invest and spend and everything is going to be really expensive this is then promulgated through surveys into the media and back into politics journalists calling spads hear what spads read in the media about what businesses who read newspapers say in response to surveys and opinion pieces are written about how bad it is business groups report widespread depression well crafted notes from investment banks land in the inboxes of well connected great or good people with charts and paragraphs reporting how bad things are the vibes are really bad very senior well connected people call downing street and report that sentiment is really bad and hear back from no10 advisers that they too have heard it is bad ad hoc roundtables convened by whitehall hear from serious besuited people who have read some well crafted notes and excoriating sunday times pieces that the vibes are bad and they worry that the government literally doesn t understand the following stunning insight businesses much prefer lower taxes to higher call this a growth plan at this stage some economic adviser tasked with finding out how things are going collects all the strings of this web and can only report back to the chancellor they are going badly the vibes are really bad not only do businesses hate the tax rise but now we have lower hiring to contend with price rises wage cuts and cancelled investment and they hated it at our roundtable in the state dining room and that guy on the flight who sat near the pm was horrible why on earth would anyone want to do anything in this economy now huh now type in your guestimate for uk growth this year what is it zero probably why terrible vibes and no plan to deal with them meanwhile in the non vibes based world of obr forecasts the uk economy was seen growing by 3 8 in cash terms this year to put it in concrete terms an economy with 2882bn of production in the year to 2025 will somehow turn into one with 3 006bn in the following year yes there will be inflation too incredible how can the obr not have anticipated the bad vibes why on earth would incomes rise when everyone is so devastatingly depressed dumb technocrats ok enough of the caffeinated hyperbole what is the point i am making the vibes based way of assessing how things are going is horribly prone to double counting i am not denying for a second that the tax thing is bad i have written so myself it has an income effect less money for business and an incentive effect relative cost of hiring gone up neither are welcome ceteris paribis but the obr took that into account when assessing the effect the vibes are not something extra i will have less money and behave accordingly is not extra information the obr s model did not anticipate no behavioural response to a tax rise and the way everyone reads and repeats back what everyone else has said creates a misleading amplifying effect all of these are echoes of the one original bad thing the 20bn rise in a 3trn economy but because jeremy repeats what rafael heard from emma who put it in a report to tim who spoke to jessica who put it in a note that jeremy read and passed back to morgan the whole thing just becomes an echoing din there was still only one original thing it gives far too much weight to what people say talk is cheap i have no doubt about the sincerity of people saying they are going to have to make up for having less money but survey and journalist ring round responses are also a way to express your view on what happened if sentiment now improves all because people generally liked the cut of reeves jib when she did that heathrow third runway speech just after defenestrating a regulator i will think my point is proven how many businesses expect this year or next to be affected by whoever is chair of the cma or the restart of the third runway this is a very flimsy variable the vibes analysis is partial and one sided in the case of reeves budget the extra funds raised and also borrowed will go into investment and higher public spending very normal macro economists will agree that the net impulse from a budget can only be understood when you take all the effects into account the increase in the deficit is a positive fiscal impulse hence higher rates and inflation in the short run this is all about the extra money in workers pockets the extra investment which is some company s future sales but the survey method will invariably ignore macro it won t ask companies what they expect to get from second order or distant effects that they are not expecting to experience directly nor does the analysis think about what that not hired worker goes off to do the vibes way of looking at the world is ignoring the bank reaction function let us all concede that an emplyer nics rise is a bad way of raising money and let us even pretend that the other positive fiscal impulses just don t work are too late etc animal spirits are down come on class what does that mean it means the budget has damaged future spending more than maybe realised and that will affect inflation growth and ngdp in general and if ngdp is going to be much lower than hitherto expected the bank is going to act to rebuild it i need to reiterate this point the bank is still responsible for keeping that escalating ngdp pathway on track and if the bank makes a mistake things are bad and that ngdp level is easily the most important variable in the economy you may have doubted this during the period of near zero rates but you cannot any more if you really honestly think that the 20bn nics rise is going to hit actual spending and investment in the economy then it falls to the bank automatically and not the treasury to address it they have to so even if you think 2025 is going to be shittier than you thought before you shoul...
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