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That’s a point. Not the point.

It's driving me insane. The govt spends £1.4 trillion a year. Borrowing estimates are often by tens of billions over a year. But we're supposed to imagine money is budgeted to the last penny.

But also as @karlwhelan.bsky.social has pointed out it's just preposterous that this amount of spending has to be rhetorically 'matched' by a reduction elsewhere! This is back-of-the-sofa money for a UK government.

This is equivalent to someone on the median salary in the UK explaining to their partner how they will cut other spending to buy something worth £14.

Christ almighty. The British obsession with itemized “pay fors” for everything is insane. This is just really not how fiscal policy or government works anywhere functional.

An economics research/consumer report mashup. One of the simplest questions you can ask when viewing a bookmaker's odds is what their expected profit percentage is. Lots of internet sites offer to answer this for you. But most of them do it wrong finemarginskarlwhelan.substack.com/p/i-tested-g...

My latest Substack post asks a practical question: Can you figure out the bookmaker's profit margin on a bet? It also provides links to spreadsheets that do these calculations for you. Many of the existing one that do this do it wrong. finemarginskarlwhelan.substack.com/p/how-to-cal...

On my Fine Margins Substack. Economics as the X-ray specs for seeing how sports betting really works. Cheesy analogy maybe but once it was in my head, I couldn't get it out, so it's in the book. finemarginskarlwhelan.substack.com/p/economics-...

Any instructors interested in using some of this material in their own courses, send me an email. I also used my draft book chapters as a supplment to the lecture notes this year and that worked well.

The topic is a nice way to get undergraduates to study optimization, decision making under uncertainty, statistics, market structure, behavioural economics and big data while the students feel they are learning about something they are really interested in.

A free resource that some people might find interesting. As well as my research, my forthcoming book stems fram a course "Economics of Betting Markets" that I have taught in recent years at UCD. The lecture notes are now freely available at www.karlwhelan.com/bettingmarke...

Hi BlueSkyers. An announcement. My book Fine Margins: How Economics Explains Sports Betting will be released soon. I have set up a Substack and will be posting articles and other resources relating to the book. Subscribe free at finemarginskarlwhelan.substack.com

Key thing being they don't need to hire me again because it is now someone junior guy's job to do this every day before lunch.

Happy to quit my professor job for this. I turn up on Day 1. We get 20 people on a room - Chrome - Firefox - Edge - Safari PC, Mac, Linux whatever If everything works, I go away. If not, I come back the next day and the guys it didn't work for try again. Every day until it works then I go away

Not that anyone is asking me to but if I was a senior executive at a firm that generates revenues from the internet, I have would have someone come to work every day and try to order my product using every browser. Every day. Incredible how many sites only work on some browsers sometimes.

Goddamn that's fire.

You expect the BBC to misunderstand this stuff, perhaps even willfully since it is still, somehow, in full-on Farage mode despite two years of a (Kinnock voice ....) Labour government. But RTE really should know better.

For example, I get my passport checked in Dublin every time I come home from the UK. I don't get it checked when I fly to the UK -- that is their choice. And if someone is a citizen of neither Ireland or UK, they have no entitlement to live and work in either country - that is what CTA is about.

- Sinn Fein arguing we need Irish sea border checks for people, so they can feel Ireland is more distant from the GB. And pretty much everyone not knowing what the Common Travel Area is. It is not about border checks but the right of citizens to live and work in both countries.

- Unionist politicians using the same fiction to lobby for a hard border that would cause genuine harm but makes them feel more distant from the Republic. Ignoring the reality that far greater numbers of asylum seekers have been coming south to the Republic from NI.