Monday, 18 July 2011

Lookalike - Nice... but dim?

This from the recently published CRESC Research Report: How not to build trains...

But what has happened now, with the train crash at Bombardier?

The public debate about the Siemens Thameslink contract reveals that like Hugh Grant, the Coalition ministers and civil servants who make industrial policy uneasily sense that something is wrong.

But the problem is not simply that the micro-economic answers aren’t answers, though this, of course, is true.

More profoundly, the problem is the long reign of micro-economic question framing in the Whitehall centres of policy making, in the broadsheet media, and in the economics departments of the ancient universities.


These distinct spheres are of course densely interconnected, not least through elite careers. Many of the best and brightest undergraduates may now choose the City, but the BIS and Treasury middle ranks are still heavily populated with Oxbridge recruits and those trying to pass as such.

Indeed.