Evan Davis Quotes

Now I can broadcast to an audience of several million people on the 'Today' programme. I can talk about the day's news. But on radio, believe it or not, we have notes and scripts. And while we might ad lib the odd wryly amusing asides, they come at the frequency of a suburban bus. About one every 90 minutes.
Now undoubtedly, we face some very British challenges when it comes to infrastructure. We rightly cherish our back yards and green spaces, and we'll defend them passionately when projects are announced. We live in a democracy, and we like to debate these things, often for many years.
Once we are fed, heated, housed and healthy, our extra consumption inevitably has an element of luxury about it. And once luxury enters the scene, the practicalities are in trouble, as women who wear expensive stiletto heels can testify.
One of the key problems is that the Germans know what they do because everywhere they go there's a 'made in Germany' label on it - they can feel proud of Volkswagens and Audis and Mercedes.
Personally, I don't see old economics and behavioural economics as opposed. It is useful to assume people are rational as a good approximation to their long term behaviour, but it would be unwise not to think how in practice their behaviour may deviate from that simplifying assumption.
Personally, I'd like us to have a few more women on the 'Today' programme.
Put simply, behavioural economics argues that human beings' decision-taking is guided by the evolutionary baggage which we bring with us to the present day. Evolution has made us rational to a point, but not perfectly so. It has given us emotions, for example, which programme us to override our rational brain and act more instinctively.
Reducing every issue to an argument can become stale but it's often a very good way of clarifying issues.
Some people harbour an awkward clash of feelings - homosexual attraction on the one hand and shame or embarrassment about that attraction on the other. It is well known that the mind struggles to sustain conflicting views.
The fact that radio is so hopeless at delivering data makes it an uncluttered medium, offering the basic story without the detailed trappings. But it does mean that if data is important, radio is probably not your place.
The Germans are clear about what they do - cars and machine tools; the Japanese are clear about what they do - electronics; the Chinese are clear about what they do - they're the workshop of the world.
The key thing about me is that I'm really not very interesting.
The new industries are brainy industries and so-called knowledge workers tend to like to be near other people who are the same. Think of the City of Hollywood. People cluster. This means you have winning regions, such as London and Cambridge, and losing regions. The people who want to be top lawyers in Sunderland are hoovered up by London.
The two questions that anyone ever asks me are: 'Are house prices going to go down?' and 'Is it a good time to fix my mortgage rate?'
There is a strong link between the following three things: exporting, manufacturing and the degree of saving by the population. It's complicated, but if the population doesn't save, the economy will not tend to export as much, and if it doesn't export as much, it won't manufacture enough.
We all know that Americans love their statistics - in sport, obviously. And in finance too.
We are more likely to cheat if we see others doing so. We tend to conform to accepted norms of reasonable behaviour, rather than adhere to strict rules.
We Brits print banknotes out in Debden in Essex, and have contracted it out to the private sector. Here in the U.S. it is a government operation right in the heart of Washington next door to the Holocaust Museum.
We escaped the last big bursting of a bubble - the dotcom bubble - with a relatively light U.S. recession. On that occasion, the world economy found its way back on track fairly quickly.
What comes with a job as a staff member of the BBC is a certain self-censoring that you get utterly used to. You don't say everything you think. You hold back on some things.
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AuthorName
Evan Davis
Profession
Economist
BirthDate
08 April, 1962
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