Knowing and Making

A bit of personal news first: CountMyVote was mentioned on Rory Cellan-Jones' blog and over 7,000 people arrived via that or the twitter links that followed it - an excellent combination of PR and viral marketing. Some very striking results emerged - the Lib Dems are way out in the lead on 62%, with Tories and Labour both in the mid-teens. This of course reflects a very specific demographic on twitter, but more importantly the emergence of a nascent movement, Obama-style. Other campaign news today : The Institute for Fiscal Studies has accused all three parties of hiding from voters the extent of public spending cuts required after the election. I would dispute their economics a little, but the behavioural point is that it creates an opportunity for one party to get some social proof by changing course and publishing a list of cuts which might win IFS approval. The IFS, incidentally, is universally described as a "respected" think tank whenever it's quoted on T...

End of week three of a campaign that has been very unpredictable. Yet despite the twists, I find myself frequently impatient for something else  to happen. Am I spoiled by life at the speed of twitter? "Internet speed" doesn't quite describe it any more - I realise with amazement that I'm not far from my twentieth year on the Internet, and life certainly didn't feel like it was unfolding at this pace when I started. I built a new  website  from scratch on Thursday, launched it on Sunday and it reached 7,000 visits on Tuesday. Yet I'm already impatient that it only had 3,000 on Wednesday and trying to work out how to promote it further tomorrow. Tonight I've been interviewed on the BBC and tomorrow I'm meeting a major industry figure to discuss the rise of behavioural economics. So why do I need extra political news to keep me even busier? Well, today we've definitely had some of that. However, I'm still a couple of days behind on these report...

Martin Wolf has described  the eurozone rescue package for Greece, correctly, as "a fudge". However, he thinks this is a bad  thing. Here's why it might not be. One of the key goals in designing a rescue package is to avoid creating moral hazard  - the risk that other countries look at the bailout, assume that they will be rescued too and therefore continue to borrow. If the rules for the bailout are clearly stated, that creates an anchor  which encourages people to trade up to it. The most obvious example is the Maastricht treaty rule which stated that countries in the EU must keep their fiscal deficit below 3% of GDP. Guess what size of deficit most countries ended up with? Around 2.9% was a pretty common figure. So if the rules for the rescue were made explicit, it would give governments very clear guidance on exactly what risks they could take. Inevitably, some would be tempted to push it to the limit - and fall over that limit, in the knowledge that the ...

If Labour's going to make a fightback, it better start today . Nick Clegg may have made his first tactical mistake - allowing himself to be led, in a TV interview, into making an apparent commitment not to enter a coalition with Gordon Brown as prime minister if Labour comes third in share of the vote. This is a surprisingly concrete commitment, and provides more ammunition for opponents to use against him than it does for him to strengthen his position. By precommitting himself, he loses a lot of power in electoral game theory ; he has to hope that it gains him enough to make up for it. The other problem for the Lib Dems is that the News of the World has dug up a poll showing their support falling by about eight percent, putting them well back in third place. Together, these events offer the other parties the chance to create a narrative about Lib Dem hubris, overreach and collapse. Some policy today. Labour with a believable, therefore clever, attack on Tory policy - sugge...

Saturday is often a quiet day in the campaign, and both Nick Clegg (day off) and David Cameron (sister's wedding) were spending time with their families today. Gordon Brown wasn't - instead, he spent it with an Elvis impersonator in a somewhat ill-judged campaign stunt. Labour seems to be showing a bit of desperation in its strategy at the moment. I'm all in favour of lots of activity - the more you expose yourself to voters, the more chance one of your messages will resonate. It's the salami-slicing principle again. But there are two caveats to this: The first is that the UK's balanced coverage laws mean that even if Labour holds five times more campaign events than the Tories, they have to get the same amount of TV and radio coverage. So it may be better to have a small number of events with a highly focused, controlled message than dozens of half-hearted low-quality promotions. This argument doesn't apply to newspaper coverage, and it could be a succe...

Note: blogging has been slightly delayed the last few days - I've been working on a new website, CountMyVote , where UK voters can state their voting intentions in order to gauge whether their chosen party has a chance or if it's worth voting tactically. If you're in the UK, please click through and cast your vote and help us build a picture of likely voting across the country. Friday , of course, was all about debating the outcome of Thursday's debate. The consensus that emerged (after a disputed Yougov poll put Cameron slightly ahead) was that everyone was about equal, but some were more equal than others. Gordon Brown got more negative than positive ratings, and Labour continues to trail in most polls. Better news for Brown in the real world, as the economy grew by 0.2% in the first quarter. David Smith thinks this number is likely to be revised upwards, with good reason. Labour still have about twelve days to capitalise on this, but they'll have to start ...

This week's word cloud from the economics blogs. I generate a new cloud every Sunday, so please subscribe using the RSS or email box on the right and you'll get a message every week with the new cloud. The words moving up and down the chart are listed here . I summarise around four hundred blogs through their RSS feeds. Thanks in particular to the Palgrave Econolog who have an excellent database of economics blogs; I have also added a number of blogs that are not on their list. Contact me if you'd like to make sure yours is included too. I use Wordle to generate the image, the ROME RSS reader to download the RSS feeds, and Java software from Inon to process the data. You can also see the Java version in the Wordle gallery . If anyone would like a copy of the underlying data used to generate these clouds, or if you would like to see a version with consistent colour and typeface to make week-to-week comparison easier, please get in touch.