Jethro F Elsden

Chief Economist at @yimbyinitiative. Views my own.

[Jethro F Elsden @JethroFElsden]

Career update - leaving the civil service and joining @yimbyinitiative as Chief Economist

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

This report proposes:

- Limiting developed world annual economic growth to 0–0.5%
- Capping GDP per capita at $69k in every country
- Requiring a three-day working week
- Reducing construction hours worked by 70%, manufacturing by 87%, and leisure by 58% (in absolute terms)

[Rory Sutherland @rorysutherland]

I'm glad these local "conservation" groups are getting the grief they deserve. You knew you were moving to Soho. If you don't like noise, there are hundreds of alternatives. I like street noise. It's fundamentally lovely.

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

Tax in the UK is the highest it’s been since 1945. That’s well understood – but another trend has been largely missed: the number of taxes in the UK is at its highest since the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

[Jethro F Elsden @JethroFElsden]

@RajivShah90 @NigelBiggar @ZiaYusufUK How would you fix the ECHR problems? Leave and default to the pre 1998 HRA situation in the UK? Reform the ECHR multilaterally with other European nations? Something else?

[Javier Blas @JavierBlas]

CHART OF THE DAY: On Apr 16, the IEA made a headline-grabbing warning: Europe had "maybe 6 weeks or so of jet fuel left." It's week seven; the planes are still flying. Since those headlines, European wholesale jet fuel prices have fallen ~30% to a ~3-month low.

[Sam Dumitriu @Sam_Dumitriu]

Is AC banned in British new builds?

In theory, no. But in practice it is ruled out in most cases for new builds.

In this blog, I explain the specific barriers within Part O of the Building Regulations that block AC being installed in most new builds.

https://t.co/8llackkpTR

[Maxwell Marlow 🇺🇦 @maxwell_marlow]

Great to hear @JamesCleverly calling for “crap buildings” to be pulled down, and to revoke protections for ugly “vomit” concrete monstrosities so we can improve them. All at the @RICSnews x @yimbyinitiative panel at @UKREiiF

[Sebastian Galiani @SFGaliani]

What I find remarkable is not whether one ultimately agrees or disagrees with him, but that the President of a country is publicly discussing the deepest debates of 20th century macroeconomics.
In a recent lecture, President Javier Milei revisited the question of the neutrality of money.
In broad terms, he argued that in one-good models with a representative agent, monetary neutrality is not a surprising result at all. It is almost natural. If there are no meaningful relative prices to distort, and the entire economy behaves as if it were a single optimizing individual, changes in the money supply rescale nominal variables rather than altering real allocations.
He then explains why the textbook IS-LM model generates monetary non-neutrality. In his view, this emerges largely from modeling errors related to the treatment of the money market and the determination of interest rates, rather than from deep structural features of the economy itself.
Finally, he discusses how Friedman and Lucas recovered monetary neutrality through monetarism, rational expectations, and models with stronger microfoundations. @fedesturze

[Sean Fitzgerald (Actual Justice Warrior) @IamSean90]

Best comment ever on data centers

[Neil O'Brien @NeilDotObrien]

-UK borrowing costs are rising.
-More and more out of line with other countries.
-The result of Labour's massive borrowing.

I have a new post on what this is costing you.

First, look how we are diverging since Autumn 2024:
(1/9)

[Sam Dumitriu @Sam_Dumitriu]

NEW: Natural England are set to delay Hinkley Point C by insisting on even more measures to protect fish.

A two-year delay to Hinkley Point C Unit 1 would mean about 24TWh less clean firm power on the grid, between 2-4bn cubic metres more gas burnt, and between 4-8m tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Even though EDF have spent £700m on fish protection, including a £50m acoustic fish deterrent that is 93% effective, regulator Natural England wants them to do even more.

This is likely to involve creating a salt marsh on nearby farmland. This could take years.

https://t.co/w2qfze7Vxy

[Ed Conway @EdConwaySky]

🧵The "Energy Independence Bill" just mentioned in the King's Speech is something of a bombshell.
Why?
Because it compels the govt to rally Parliament behind fresh legislation to ban new North Sea oil/gas licences (this has NOT been written into law yet).
This is a v big deal!

[Adam Wren @aswren]

We need to get palantir out!

also let’s build a massive database of every picture taken ‘with every phone and device in the country’

[Antonin Bergeaud @a_bergeaud]

For the past few days we’ve been reading that once we correct for rising prices, living standards in the United States would be comparable to (Western) Europe.

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

Krugman's "Don't worry, be happy" message to Europe this weekend is damaging to Europe's reform agenda. He uses current-price PPP to wave away the structural productivity gap that @a_bergeaud and others have carefully documented. Europe is not collapsing, but it is stuck in a two-speed trap: Eastern catch-up, Southern stagnation, a chronic innovation gap with the US frontier since the mid-1990s, as I wrote this week in Silicon Continent. (Both posts linked in replies.)

The gap reflects how we lost our tech leadership in the ICT revolution (as PK does recognize) and now risk something more serious with AI. Draghi called it a near-crisis for a reason. Read @a_bergeaud's thread below on why the methodology, and the choice between current and constant-price PPP, matters, and why current PPP is not the right way to think about long term growth.

[Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico]

Telling the Cabinet he doesn't care what they think, they can resign if they want to, & he's off to an owl sanctuary for the afternoon is almost certainly the coolest thing Keir Starmer has ever done. Where has this guy been these past two years?

[Nicolas Badre @BadreNicolas]

The odds of having dementia at age 85 were close to 1 in 3 in the 80s; now they are 1 in 10.

I don’t think we have a great explanation: better cardiovascular health, diet, and education are often mentioned. Good news nonetheless.

Carnall Farrar. (2025, March 27). Dementia trends.

[Julian Jessop @julianHjessop]

Chart of the Day 🤓

This morning's ONS estimates suggest that total public service productivity (TPSP) grew by 0.6% in 2025, but was still 3.1% lower than the pre-Covid peak in 2019.

Note also that TPSP grew steadily between 2010 and 2019, after years of stagnation... 🤔

[UK Property Insight @ukhpinfo]

LONDON FLATS: % SELLING AT A LOSS

Consistent with the recent poor performance, London Flats have reversed the trend of experiencing lower loss rates than the national picture.

Nearly 20% of London Flat sellers are realising a loss - much higher than the equivalent numbers in the Global Financial Crisis.

[Kristian Niemietz @K_Niemietz]

Data is counterculture.