Tyrannical metrics, a game of monopoly, and will somebody please build some houses?

A Bank Holiday can only mean one thing… not sunbathing or camping with the kids, but a whole extra day for reading this week’s offerings. That and a recovery phase from everyone shouting about how the local election results confirm exactly what they’ve always been saying… sigh.

While you’ll all be out in the sunshine over the weekend, spare a thought for everyone that works at RF. They’re all getting ready to launch the final report of our Intergenerational Commission on Tuesday morning – bringing together two years’ worth of analysis and policy recommendations. For those of you trying to keep the productivity of the country up by not coming to the launch, you can still watch it live here from 9am. And don’t worry if You Tube isn’t your thing – we’ll have some bonus charts in next week’s email with the highlights of the report.

Op-eds actually work. Everyone’s always desperate to become a newspaper columnist – and now we know why. New research from Yale tests whether newspaper op-eds ever actually change people’s minds . Perhaps surprisingly they do. So for those of you desperate to never change your mind, be careful what your read.

Tyranny of metrics. We love a bit of data at the Foundation, so I’m slightly loath to share this one… You may have head of a recent book, The Tyranny of Metrics. Here’s an essay by its author, Jerry Muller, making his case that companies, governments and everyone else are in the grip of a ‘metric fixation’. Measuring things rather than bothering with old fashioned ideas like professional judgment improves short-term output – but there are costs (who’d have thought): first we game the metrics and ignore other important things, second we all get (even more) short-termist and less keen on innovation, and third it takes up a lot of time doing all this measuring. There’s a lot in that – although let’s not forget there are plenty of cases where overconfident experts are beaten by mechanical predictions or even random choices.

You say monopoly, I say monopsony. We’ve always worried about consumers getting ripped off by companies that are so big they monopolise a market. A new blog discusses two bits of research that focus instead on the impact on workers’ wages when a few employers dominate a job market – the so called risk of monopsony power. First, via a look at manufacturing firms, we learn that where an employer dominates a jobs market it’s bad for wages and that smaller proportion of productivity gains get doled out to workers (unless those workers are unionised….). Second, a look at 40,000 job search websites finds that this kind of employer power isn’t unusual (in the US). The problem is apparently less bad in bigger cities, where longer commutes are common. I knew there was something good about living on the end of the Piccadilly line… This whole monopsony issue is something we’ll be doing more research on in the UK context soon.

The Eurozone = some light relief. We thought you might be bored of the Brexit chat. So for light relief here’s another never ending debate about a hugely important but very difficult to solve policy problem: what reform is needed to safeguard the future prosperity of the Eurozone. It’s a debate with a whole host of interesting perspectives being curated on Vox EU (which is often worth a read). We’re busy debating how to take back control – they are spending their time arguing about how much more to give up. But at least they never mention the customs union….

Chart of the week: can England build 300,000 houses a year? Tuesday’s final report of our Intergenerational Commission gives pride of place to housing in its recommendations. But should we be optimistic about the chance of getting any more homes built? Well the government’s current target for house-building is that it will deliver 300,000 more units per year in England. It’s an ambitious one. But, as the chart below shows, we’ve done it before and we can do it again. And we can’t exactly do any worse than the recent past: we haven’t added over 200,000 homes a year since the late 80s, but we managed it for almost every post-war year before that. Can we build it? Yes we can.