David Davidson

Management researcher at Edinburgh and Henley Business Schools, 30 years a management consultant, and 18 years a landscape, wildlife and travel photographer.

[David Davidson @DDofShiplake]

@GoodwinMJ @TheAliceSmith A Scot who’s lived over half his life in England, all I can say it has ever been thus. Englishness has never been celebrated as other UK countries have done. England’s more diverse regional differences across an area 10 times bigger than any neighbour maybe makes it different.

[David Davidson @DDofShiplake]

@LeeAndersonMP_ My 8 year old son once said to me - I know a bad word. What is it? I can’t say it. So spell it. Ok - BOLX.

[David Davidson @DDofShiplake]

@afneil Gi’es a job - go on gi’es a job.

[David Davidson @DDofShiplake]

@PolitlcsUK You would have to be a complete numpty not to find this wishful thinking hilarious.

[David Davidson @DDofShiplake]

@PolitlcsUK Will that apply to fake discounts on our energy bills - ie where a government
subsidy is taken off one source of energy and swapped onto another?

[David Davidson @DDofShiplake]

@7Kiwi He can talk to a 1000 people over a couple of weeks, learn little and issue some sound bites - or spend a few hours with subject experts such as yourself on a range of critical areas, become better informed and then address the key issues with appropriate actions.

[juan @juanbuis]

i can’t believe someone solved recipe design decades ago and everyone just decided to ignore it

[David Davidson @DDofShiplake]

@PolitlcsUK It’s just missing the U after the I and O.

[David Davidson @DDofShiplake]

@jamesmurray_ldn @hmtreasury @andyburnham @JohnHealey_MP Propaganda HMT!

[David Davidson @DDofShiplake]

@andyburnham You aren’t very far north, south west, south east, Scotland or Wales. Manchester isn’t the centre of the UK.

[David Davidson @DDofShiplake]

@ArchRose90 What was the travel and exes bill for all these attendees. This is on top of what they’d normally get when attending Downing St. why not have it in Newcastle say and Torquay to show he represents people other than Mancunions.

[David Davidson @DDofShiplake]

@PolitlcsUK @StephSpyro How about “Set us free”.

[David Davidson @DDofShiplake]

@jbhearn Very generous of you.

[Handre @Handre]

In 1945 Hayek published four pages in the American Economic Review that dismantled the entire socialist calculation project. "The Use of Knowledge in Society." Read it. He showed that the central planner faces a problem no supercomputer solves: the knowledge required to run an economy does not exist in any single place. It lives scattered across millions of minds, in the particular circumstances of time and place. The tin dealer in Kuala Lumpur who knows a mine flooded. The baker in Vienna who knows his regulars want more rye this week. That knowledge is fleeting, local, often unspoken.

Prices carry it. When tin gets scarce, the price rises, and a thousand people who have never heard of the flooded mine start economizing on tin. Nobody ordered them to. They saw a number and acted. Hayek called this a marvel, and he meant it literally: the price system communicates dispersed information faster and more honestly than any planning bureau ever could.

Now watch what happens when you destroy the signal. Gosplan in Moscow set 24 million prices by decree and produced shortages of bread alongside warehouses of unsold shoes nobody wanted. Venezuela froze the price of gasoline and got empty pumps in a country floating on oil. You cannot plan what you cannot know, and you cannot know what only the market reveals through free prices.

The economy is not an engineering problem with a solution waiting to be computed. It is a discovery process. Competition is a procedure for finding out things that would otherwise stay hidden. Kill competition and you kill the finding-out. The planners in 1920 thought Ludwig von Mises was being difficult when he told them socialism could not calculate. Hayek spent the next fifty years explaining why, and in 1974 the Nobel committee agreed.

Here is what should keep you up at night. Every central bank on earth sets the price of money by committee, twelve people around a table in Washington pretending they know the correct interest rate for 330 million strangers. Hayek showed you exactly why they cannot.

[Prof. Feynman @ProfFeynman]

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

[Muriel Gray @ArtyBagger]

This is simply magnificent.

[David Davidson @DDofShiplake]

@tomhfh There are hundreds if not thousands of houses around Reading built of bricks made 100 or more years ago. My house is 125 years old and not a brick has been replaced. indeed when we extended the house 10 years ago we reused the original bricks in the new building.

[David Davidson @DDofShiplake]

@KathrynPorter26 @RichardGCorbett 17.4m individuals voted to leave and 16.1m to remain. 406 constituencies voted leave, 242 remain. 9 Regions were for leave, 3 for remain. And 160 MPs voted for leave and 486 for remain. And there lies the problem that has dogged parliament and British Politics since.

[David Davidson @DDofShiplake]

@SBarrettBar 17.4m individuals voted to leave and 16.1m to remain. 406 constituencies voted leave, 242 remain. 9 Regions were for leave, 3 for remain. And 160 MPs voted for leave and 486 for remain. And there lies the problem that has dogged parliament and British politics since.