Podcast: Key Figures – David Bell

Transcript

00:00:07 Mairi Spowage

Hello and welcome to the latest Fraser of Allander podcast.

00:00:11 Mairi Spowage

Loyal listeners will know that we’ve been doing a series of interviews with former staff of the Institute, particularly focusing on some of the people who’ve led the Institute over the years.

00:00:23 Mairi Spowage

I’m delighted to say that joining me today is a former member of the Institute who was around as far as I can tell at the very start of the Institute in 1975.

00:00:34 Mairi Spowage

Professor David Bell.

00:00:36 Mairi Spowage

So thank you very much for joining me today.

00:00:38 David Bell

Thanks, Mairi.

00:00:40 Mairi Spowage

Now, the sorts of people who listen to our podcast, David, I’m sure will be familiar with you, a legend in Scottish economics that you are.

00:00:48 Mairi Spowage

But for those who aren’t, if you could just say a little bit about yourself, your sort of journey into economics and how you ended up at the FAI.

00:00:58 David Bell

Thanks, Mairi.

00:00:59 David Bell

So I was brought up in Dornoch in Sutherland.

00:01:03 David Bell

which is now where I currently am.

00:01:06 David Bell

And in school, I actually focused on maths and physics.

00:01:11 David Bell

And when I went to university, that was my intention was to do maths and physics.

00:01:18 David Bell

But I had a hankering for something different.

00:01:21 David Bell

So I opted to do those subjects in the arts faculty, which was possible in Aberdeen at that time.

00:01:32 David Bell

Natural physics was natural philosophy at the time.

00:01:35 David Bell

And a friend recommended me that I do this other subject called political economy, which I’d never previously studied.

00:01:44 David Bell

So I ended up actually doing a degree in economics and statistics at Aberdeen.

00:01:54 David Bell

And after that, I went to the London School of Economics, where I did the

00:02:01 David Bell

master’s degree in econometrics and mathematical economics, which was a very intensive year, I’ve got to say.

00:02:12 David Bell

There’s a very famous statistic in time series analysis called the Durbin-Watson statistic, and we had Durbin in one term and Watson in the following term.

00:02:24 David Bell

So we…

00:02:25 Mairi Spowage

That’s impressive.

00:02:28 David Bell

So after that, I

00:02:30 David Bell

wanted to get back to Scotland and actually there was a vacancy in the statistics department at St Andrews and I went to St Andrews and spent a happy year there, but their main interest was in ecological environmental statistics, which wasn’t my field at all.

00:02:53 David Bell

And so

00:02:54 David Bell

I heard, I can’t remember how on the grapevine that this new institute was being set up at Strathclyde.

00:03:03 David Bell

So in 1975, I joined and the people there then were David Simpson, Jim McGilvray and Ian McNichol and not forgetting Isabel, the secretary.

00:03:18 Mairi Spowage

Oh no, we can’t forget Isabel.

00:03:19 Mairi Spowage

She’s come up in every discussion we’ve had.

00:03:22 David Bell

So, and we moved into Cathedral Street in the converted library, I think it was, on something like the 5th floor.

00:03:33 David Bell

And that’s where we started, I guess.

00:03:36 Mairi Spowage

That’s great, David.

00:03:38 Mairi Spowage

So that’s how you ended up there.

00:03:39 Mairi Spowage

What are your memories of those early days, as the institute was being established?

00:03:44 Mairi Spowage

And what was your role in establishing the institute and the first source of outputs it was producing?

00:03:51 David Bell

So in a way, I was, I guess, slightly different from David Chilman, Ian, in that they all had a grounding in input output analysis.

00:04:06 David Bell

And my interest was in econometrics and in econometric modelling.

00:04:11 David Bell

And I was eventually going to do a PhD in Strathclyde, which was about regional econometric modelling.

00:04:21 David Bell

So while the others concentrated on building an input-output model for Scotland, along with the Scottish executive people, I guess, at that time, I ended up doing the rest, which involved effectively setting up the commentary and kind of keeping up to date.

00:04:49 David Bell

The statistical base was relatively sparse at that time, but there had been no significant regular publications

00:05:05 David Bell

prior to the commentary, which focused on the Scottish economy and its future prospects.

00:05:11 Mairi Spowage

Yes, and we’ve got, you know, the original commentary that was published, the first one was in July in 1975.

00:05:21 Mairi Spowage

So yeah, it’s really quite fun to look back at the issues that were being discussed then.

00:05:27 Mairi Spowage

In some ways, the issues seem

00:05:29 Mairi Spowage

The same.

00:05:30 Mairi Spowage

And obviously in some ways they’re very different because the economy is very different.

00:05:38 Mairi Spowage

So how long were you at Strathclyde and as part of the institute, David, before you moved on to your next challenge?

00:05:46 David Bell

So I was there until 1980, I think, before I joined what was called the Macroeconomic Modelling Bureau at the University of Warwick.

00:05:58 David Bell

So I was still retaining a focus on macroeconomic, sorry, on econometric modelling.

00:06:08 David Bell

One of the reasons that I got the job, though, was that I actually managed to link the computer at Strathclyde with the computer at Warwick and send, I can’t remember, send some files across.

00:06:24 David Bell

This was prior to the internet being invented and involved masses of obscure commands to the two computers.

00:06:40 David Bell

That convinced the director of the macroeconomic modelling bureau, Ken Wallace, that I was vaguely competent.

00:06:47 Mairi Spowage

It’s interesting, actually.

00:06:49 Mairi Spowage

I think there’s a theme in some of these discussions you’re having about you all hiding your light under Bishop, I would say.

00:06:55 Mairi Spowage

But just for like, you know, younger listeners, you know, what does it mean to say, you know, you’re talking about using the computer at Strathclyde and linking it to

00:07:07 Mairi Spowage

You mentioned obviously the Internet didn’t exist at that point.

00:07:09 Mairi Spowage

What practically was it like using that sort of technology in the late 70s?

00:07:15 David Bell

So I remember I had to go across to the main building in Strathclyde to use the computer at all.

00:07:24 David Bell

And there were these huge card punch machines.

00:07:28 David Bell

And basically, I think I was programming in Fortran.

00:07:34 David Bell

at that time.

00:07:34 David Bell

So you had basically one line of code was one card.

00:07:39 David Bell

What you really didn’t want to do was to mix up the cards because obviously they had to be in the right order.

00:07:46 David Bell

And if you dropped them, we used the elastic bands to hold the programs together, but if you dropped them, that was a disaster.

00:07:54 David Bell

And then you handed them in and you – there was a huge machine.

00:08:00 David Bell

I think actually it was initially an ICL computer

00:08:03 David Bell

which in which you your program was fed along with many others.

00:08:09 David Bell

And then you got these massive printouts which were like way bigger than A4 folded paper and very simple alphanumeric printing on them.

00:08:24 David Bell

So you had to make some sense of what it was you got out given what you’d put in.

00:08:31 David Bell

And it was

00:08:33 David Bell

challenging, let’s say, compared with computing nowadays.

00:08:38 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, I think anyone who’s done any sort of programming in R or Stata or whatever to analyse a data set, like the way that you can run it, there’s an error, it’ll fix it, run it, you know, like the process back then would have been very different if you discovered you’ve made an error somewhere.

00:08:57 David Bell

Yeah, I mean, just one letter in the wrong place on a card within your deck was enough to throw the whole thing out.

00:09:06 David Bell

And of course, you’d had to join the queue again at the back of the queue.

00:09:10 David Bell

So it was all, it was challenging.

00:09:14 Mairi Spowage

So from your time at the FAI,

00:09:18 Mairi Spowage

obviously established in 1975.

00:09:20 Mairi Spowage

I think that the IO tables were published maybe in 78 or made available at that sort of time.

00:09:26 Mairi Spowage

And the commentary was published all through that in those early years.

00:09:30 Mairi Spowage

Are there particular things that you remember or stand out apart from the massive computer, of course, and the punch cards that, you know, you still, you’re sort of, you’re proud of or you think were good things that the Institute didn’t in its early days that you were part of?

00:09:43 David Bell

I mean, I think we did draw attention fairly quickly to the activities of the institute.

00:09:52 David Bell

The publication, sorry, the publicity that the commentary got was beneficial for the institute itself, but also for the university.

00:10:02 David Bell

You know, it was a sort of little badge of honor for the university to be quoted so much in relation to

00:10:11 David Bell

the concerns of the day.

00:10:15 David Bell

And of course, the concerns of the day, we were just coming out of pretty serious inflation.

00:10:23 David Bell

We were going into the Winter of Discontent.

00:10:27 David Bell

There were all kinds of things going on which were challenging for the economy at that time.

00:10:33 David Bell

And then, of course, towards the end of my period, Mrs.

00:10:39 David Bell

Thatcher was elected.

00:10:41 David Bell

Of course, with quite a different agenda.

00:10:45 David Bell

So I think when I started, manufacturing accounted for about 1/3 of the Scottish workforce, and now it’s something like 5% or thereabouts.

00:10:58 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, the workforce, yeah, about 10% of the economy, but yeah, that’s not much more productive than other sectors.

00:11:06 David Bell

So yeah.

00:11:07 David Bell

I mean, that was the start of the sort of de-industrialisation period and a massive change which took place over in the Scottish economy.

00:11:19 David Bell

Of course, another thing that was happening was that the workforce was becoming more educated.

00:11:26 David Bell

When I went to university, around 5% of the people went

00:11:32 David Bell

to university and now it’s around hovering around 40, 41%.

00:11:39 David Bell

So again, a massive change was, societal change was taking place.

00:11:46 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, absolutely.

00:11:49 Mairi Spowage

When I went to university in the sort of the Blair years, obviously, and that was when the UK government were saying we wanted, was it half of people or something, to go to university?

00:12:01 Mairi Spowage

which has had its own legacy, I think.

00:12:03 Mairi Spowage

You’ve written a lot on things like underemployment, for example.

00:12:07 Mairi Spowage

But yeah, really interesting how much that’s changed.

00:12:10 Mairi Spowage

Although I will say, having gone to study maths and statistics at St Andrews, they’re still very focused on environmental and ecological government.

00:12:19 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, it’s very much still their specialism, which is interesting.

00:12:23 Mairi Spowage

Some things change and some things don’t.

00:12:25 Mairi Spowage

You left the FEI in 1980 and I first met you, David, when you were Professor of Economics at Stirling University, I think, was when we first came across each other.

00:12:37 Mairi Spowage

But so you’ve watched the kind of institute evolve and change over the years from afar.

00:12:44 Mairi Spowage

Have you any reflections over the sorts of things the institute has done over those years?

00:12:50 Mairi Spowage

I mean, did you keep in touch with people and the sort of outputs the institute was producing?

00:12:56 David Bell

So I do keep in touch with people.

00:13:01 David Bell

I mean, there were people who passed through during my time there that I still keep in touch with, likes of Andrew Oswald, Alan Carruth, Frank Kerwin was at the Institute then, Frank Harrigan.

00:13:23 David Bell

but I haven’t been in touch with him for a long time.

00:13:27 David Bell

And also, while I was there, George Lowenstein passed through as a visiting scholar.

00:13:34 David Bell

He’s a very famous behavioural economist.

00:13:39 David Bell

So

00:13:41 David Bell

a lot of interesting people passed through the institute while I was there

00:13:49 David Bell

So I came back to Glasgow before I went on to Stirling.

00:13:53 David Bell

So I spent a few years teaching in Glasgow.

00:13:58 David Bell

And I kept, I always kept an interest in what was going on.

00:14:01 David Bell

And, you know, I think the

00:14:04 David Bell

Institute has flourished.

00:14:06 David Bell

We’ve had a variety of directors, obviously yourself, very notably.

00:14:12 David Bell

I know Graham, I still keep very much in touch with Graham Roy, who’s a big figure in the Scottish economic scene.

00:14:21 David Bell

So, I mean, it seems to me that the Institute is the number one place within Scotland for objective advice about what’s going on.

00:14:33 David Bell

And that now covers a much wider range of economics related subjects.

00:14:40 David Bell

Because another thing that has happened since I started studying economics is that it has become pervasive.

00:14:50 David Bell

People have understood that economics can be applied to many, many different areas.

00:14:57 David Bell

Actually, when I was in Stirling, I taught the economics of sport.

00:15:00 David Bell

which in itself was a fascinating year.

00:15:03 David Bell

But there, I mean, economics has undermined quite a lot of subjects who thought they had the world to themselves, like education, like health.

00:15:17 David Bell

And the perspective of economists has had a very marked effect on those disciplines.

00:15:26 David Bell

And

00:15:26 David Bell

The Fraser Institute has played an important role within Scotland and indeed outside Scotland in relation to those.

00:15:34 Mairi Spowage

No, absolutely.

00:15:35 Mairi Spowage

And you know, one of the things we’re trying to do through various bits of work that we’re doing is to sort of demonstrate

00:15:45 Mairi Spowage

what you’ve said, which is that these tools that we develop and use can bring insights to lots of different issues.

00:15:51 Mairi Spowage

And really it’s about thinking about things in an analytical way and using the best data and modelling and all these things to bring insights.

00:15:59 Mairi Spowage

And you can do that to pretty much any area.

00:16:01 Mairi Spowage

We’ve obviously specialised in recent years and quite a lot of social policy issues, but we’re also doing quite a lot on things like trade and other things.

00:16:09 Mairi Spowage

So it’s, yeah, it’s quite a variety that we work on, sometimes driven by

00:16:15 Mairi Spowage

the excellent people we’ve been able to bring in.

00:16:17 Mairi Spowage

And sometimes driven by things like, great funding opportunities, such as our Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy, for example.

00:16:26 Mairi Spowage

So you can sort of drive it and be driven a little bit by events and what’s most impactful.

00:16:31 Mairi Spowage

And we always want to make sure we’re talking about the things that actually are going to resonate in the public debate, I suppose.

00:16:37 David Bell

And it’s interesting that some of these tools

00:16:42 David Bell

are actually quite simple, it may appear simple to you and me.

00:16:48 David Bell

I used to do the fast stream interviews for the civil service and I remember

00:16:59 David Bell

being advised that, candidates who understood the concept of opportunity cost had a big advantage over those that didn’t.

00:17:10 David Bell

And it isn’t, it’s not really too difficult the concept, but it does take you a long, way.

00:17:19 David Bell

And sometimes it’s something that people in public bodies struggle with for reasons I don’t fully understand.

00:17:29 Mairi Spowage

No, I think that’s fair.

00:17:30 Mairi Spowage

I can’t tell you how many times every week that I use that phrase, opportunity cost.

00:17:36 Mairi Spowage

And quite often, as you say, it can be in the context of something like government spending, where there can be the focus on whether this element of spending, this pot of spending will have an impact of some kind and how to quantify that.

00:17:50 Mairi Spowage

But that isn’t the important question, is it?

00:17:52 Mairi Spowage

It’s not whether it has an impact, it’s whether it’s the best way to spend limited resources to get the maximum impact we can on the actual we want to achieve, you know, and the best value for the public purse.

00:18:03 Mairi Spowage

So that’s, you know, it’s the wrong question asking if spending money has an impact because it always will in some way, but it’s whether it’s the most efficient way to do it and the most efficient way to use very limited resources.

00:18:14 David Bell

I mean, yeah, I mean, there is a thing there.

00:18:17 David Bell

So

00:18:20 David Bell

British economics, in my opinion, was actually going down a rabbit hole when I was being taught, because I was taught time series analysis and LSE when I was there, which has very limited applicability now.

00:18:40 David Bell

Well, it has some applicability, but it is not at the forefront of economics research now.

00:18:46 David Bell

And much, much more effort is directed towards evaluation and understanding causal impacts.

00:18:59 David Bell

And a lot of that is to do with what we call natural experiments.

00:19:05 David Bell

And most of that work really came from the US associated with people like Heckman.

00:19:14 David Bell

and people later on.

00:19:17 David Bell

But I think those of us who were taught at my time kind of where we’re going in the wrong, well, in what appears at the currently to be the wrong direction as far as understanding the full

00:19:39 David Bell

the full breadth of the potential application of economic techniques.

00:19:45 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, that’s fair.

00:19:46 Mairi Spowage

And it’s really interesting some of the work we do to try and evaluate policy interventions.

00:19:54 Mairi Spowage

we would do these sort of what we call these quasi-experimental methods where you’re exploiting these natural experiments.

00:20:01 Mairi Spowage

And in the public policy sphere, it can often be quite challenging to get the data you acquired to be able to do this properly.

00:20:08 Mairi Spowage

Anyone who’s interested can look at our report on the small business bonus scheme, for example, which was a form of quasi-experimental methods, very difficult given data challenges.

00:20:20 Mairi Spowage

And some of the work we’ve been doing recently actually with third sector delivery bodies is just how challenging it is for them to either have the resources or the analytical capacity to design monitoring so that evaluation can be done properly for us really to understand the value of the public money that’s being spent, which I think is sort of a real challenge.

00:20:41 Mairi Spowage

And I know it can be challenging for

00:20:45 Mairi Spowage

the public sector to think about putting aside this money to ensure that this is done properly.

00:20:50 Mairi Spowage

But if we don’t do it, then we’re never going to know what really works and what’s most effective.

00:20:55 Mairi Spowage

I mean, yeah.

00:20:57 David Bell

If I had one frustration with Scottish Government over the years is its lack of willingness to engage with the idea of proper evaluation and putting aside sufficient resource.

00:21:15 David Bell

to design evaluation exercises properly and to, after the event ex ante, carry out a proper evaluation.

00:21:30 David Bell

And, I’ve been to the States and been involved in these kinds of discussion about social policy and

00:21:41 David Bell

And it’s just accepted there, that’s what you do, I think.

00:21:45 David Bell

It’s accepted south of the border as well.

00:21:47 David Bell

That’s what you do.

00:21:48 David Bell

You do a proper evaluation if you want to see whether a policy has been effected.

00:21:55 David Bell

Sorry, has been effective.

00:21:57 David Bell

And I think far too often we seem to design policies that have a multiplicity of objectives and the lack of clarity of how on earth you assess whether they’re working or not is really a problem.

00:22:15 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, it’s a sort of combination, isn’t it, of, and we’ve said this, several times publicly, of the lack of acknowledgement of trade-offs, you pursuing one thing for a particular aim, which might have an impact on other objectives you have, but you accept that and acknowledge it, which isn’t sort of flushed out because quite often policies aren’t appraised and quite a kind of structured way to look at all the different options.

00:22:42 Mairi Spowage

And then, not really wanting to know if things do or don’t work because you’ve done it now, so all of which is not good for the what we would understand to be the sort of policy making cycle of learning from what you’ve done in the past to ensure that you, improve and you spend money in the most efficient way.

00:23:00 Mairi Spowage

So, again, I mean, I don’t know if there’s a kind of…

00:23:05 Mairi Spowage

maturity that needs to come in terms of how we do policy making in Scotland.

00:23:10 Mairi Spowage

Maybe since devolution and, early years of devolution, there was quite a lot of money around in terms of budgets and things.

00:23:18 Mairi Spowage

And yeah, it’s difficult to know why that kind of culture has developed, but I definitely think it’s an issue in Scotland and particularly accepting that, you know, maybe we can’t have a

00:23:29 Mairi Spowage

a fairer, greener, growing economy with excellent public services all at once.

00:23:36 Mairi Spowage

And every policy we do will tick all of those boxes all of the time because it’s just not possible to do that.

00:23:42 David Bell

Yeah, I mean, funnily enough, just before I came on, I was looking at the community wealth building policy.

00:23:50 David Bell

And it’s exactly that.

00:23:51 David Bell

It’s a multiplicity of objectives.

00:23:54 David Bell

and you just don’t know.

00:23:56 David Bell

I would be at a complete loss to understand how on earth we evaluate whether public money associated with that policy is being well spent.

00:24:10 Mairi Spowage

I think that’s probably fair.

00:24:13 Mairi Spowage

And I guess one of the frustrations the folks like us might have, I mean,

00:24:19 Mairi Spowage

I know you’ve been working on Scottish economy longer than me, David, but I started working in the Scottish government.

00:24:27 Mairi Spowage

Actually, 20 years ago this month, I started as a staffer.

00:24:29 David Bell

Oh, did you?

00:24:29 David Bell

Okay, so yeah, it’s exactly 50 years ago I started.

00:24:35 Mairi Spowage

So, you know, you can get quite cynical, particularly if you, know, you’ve been sort of hoping this will happen and calling for things for all of your career.

00:24:43 Mairi Spowage

It can be quite depressing to see that sort of move on.

00:24:48 Mairi Spowage

Just thinking about that evolution, I mean, thinking back to the 70s and then the various roles that you’ve had, how is the Scottish economy or the economy in the UK maybe evolved and like, completely different ways than was expected, you know, back in the 70s and 80s?

00:25:04 David Bell

Yeah, well, so we had the de-industrialisation and then the sort of

00:25:18 David Bell

boom in services that took place under Thatcher.

00:25:22 David Bell

We had in Scotland still a large share of inward investment into things like making chips, silicon chips, I mean, which had a pretty big impact across the central belt.

00:25:47 David Bell

But the

00:25:51 David Bell

that kind of petered out as the loss of competitiveness to the Far East kind of materialised.

00:26:01 David Bell

And although we managed, the economy was growing well during the Blair years, there is a question of whether it was it its growth was being exaggerated by

00:26:16 David Bell

the financial sector and what had been what had been going on there.

00:26:21 David Bell

And then you’ve got 2008, which is, just a milestone and the slow growth of productivity since then.

00:26:32 David Bell

So Scotland still does get more than its fair share of inward investment.

00:26:36 David Bell

But I think the scale of that is we don’t we don’t get large investments employing hundreds of people anymore.

00:26:46 David Bell

So we’ve had this massive shift into services, slow growth in productivity and people starting to get, I think, after, I guess, 17 years gone since 2008 now, people becoming cynical about the ability of government to improve their basic standard of living.

00:27:14 David Bell

And that’s associated with the slow growth in productivity.

00:27:19 David Bell

And I know the institute has done a lot of work on productivity, but it is, it seems to me to be a very difficult nut to crack at the moment.

00:27:30 David Bell

And that’s true for the UK as a whole, as well as in Scotland.

00:27:35 David Bell

So I guess I’ve gone from a period where there was remarkable

00:27:42 David Bell

Change.

00:27:46 David Bell

But people still retained an optimistic outlook, although there was a period where unemployment went very, very high.

00:27:54 David Bell

Just after I left, basically, and was that was down in Warwick.

00:28:02 David Bell

But we are at we’re now at a situation where it’s not the unemployment rate

00:28:12 David Bell

that really is catching the attention.

00:28:15 David Bell

It’s the inactivity rate, particularly inactivity associated with ill health.

00:28:23 David Bell

And that has come as a complete, complete surprise.

00:28:27 David Bell

You know, I did not anticipate that happening.

00:28:33 David Bell

And I’ve done I’ve done a lot of work with David Blanchflower

00:28:42 David Bell

who was at Warwick at the same time as I was and subsequently joined the Monetary Policy Committee and is now at Dartmouth College in the US, but he’s done a lot of work recently about declining mental health, especially of young people.

00:28:58 David Bell

And that is an issue that is of real concern, not only in and of itself, but also of the economic implications of it.

00:29:10 Mairi Spowage

No, absolutely.

00:29:11 Mairi Spowage

And one of the interesting things about the discussion recently is obviously that the knowledge about really what’s happening is quite hampered by the challenges on the labour market data side.

00:29:21 Mairi Spowage

You know, to what extent is the inactivity a statistical artifact?

00:29:27 Mairi Spowage

You know, I do really understand this.

00:29:28 Mairi Spowage

Obviously, people are linking it to things like the increase in disability related benefits, but we don’t actually know whether those people are employed or not.

00:29:35 Mairi Spowage

So how much of this is

00:29:37 Mairi Spowage

about in-work poverty or in-work people declaring they have disabilities when maybe they didn’t in the past.

00:29:45 Mairi Spowage

there are all these interesting things that might be going on, but one of the things that’s hampering is a little bit is the quality of the evidence to really be able to pinpoint it, which is difficult for policymakers to then respond, you know, when we don’t really know why these things are happening.

00:30:00 David Bell

So I’m on the awareness advisory group for the Labour Force Survey.

00:30:07 David Bell

and it has gone through horrid times in recent years.

00:30:15 David Bell

Partly the ONS perhaps didn’t do enough to keep the sample size up.

00:30:21 David Bell

But also there seems to be a genuine problem, particularly post-pandemic, to engage people with surveys.

00:30:31 David Bell

And this is partly due to the internet now

00:30:35 David Bell

bombarding you with questions about what you think of this product, what do you think of that product?

00:30:43 David Bell

And a serious survey that is trying to gather objective data, it is kind of lost in the melee of questions that people are being bombarded with through the internet.

00:31:00 David Bell

And this provides a real challenge.

00:31:03 David Bell

I am

00:31:05 David Bell

Actually, and I’m sure you are involved in this too, is, do we kind of largely give up on surveys and just use techniques like scraping the internet and or administrative data?

00:31:22 David Bell

So it seems like, at least we know that the tax data is going to be reasonably accurate, doesn’t capture everyone.

00:31:32 David Bell

But it does capture, a large proportion of the workforce.

00:31:37 David Bell

So as you say, that on these big issues like inactivity where there’s a cloud of uncertainty associated with understanding what is really going on.

00:31:54 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, absolutely.

00:31:55 Mairi Spowage

And

00:31:56 Mairi Spowage

Declaring and just myself, I’m a non-exec director now on the UK Statistics Authority Board, which oversees the ONS, I joined earlier this year.

00:32:04 Mairi Spowage

Obviously, it has been a torrid time for the organisation, but I think the question that you raise, you know, as somebody who’s worked in statistics for a long time, you can see there will always be a need to ask people who they feel about things, whether they’ve been looking for work, you know, these sorts of things that you need to actually collect to be able to understand whether someone is actually classified as unemployed or not.

00:32:27 Mairi Spowage

But the things that we collect through these, we’re probably going to have to collect them in different ways and in shorter surveys.

00:32:33 Mairi Spowage

And we have to limit it to those things that we really need to ask people about rather than other things that we could potentially get from administrative data.

00:32:40 Mairi Spowage

So yeah, we’re all going to have to think about how we collect this information in a better way, I think.

00:32:46 Mairi Spowage

So we focus on those things we really need to get through surveys.

00:32:49 David Bell

And there are ethical concerns around that, which are genuine

00:32:56 David Bell

but do make it very difficult.

00:33:00 David Bell

I was involved in, doing some analysis of multimorbidity in Scotland.

00:33:12 David Bell

This was just pre-pandemic.

00:33:14 David Bell

And understandably, there are lots of

00:33:22 David Bell

concerns about accessing people’s health data, it really is a huge challenge.

00:33:28 David Bell

It is extraordinarily difficult to get that kind of access, even though the payoff from good effective studies could be very substantial because, of course, health and social care are our biggest spend.

00:33:48 Mairi Spowage

Yeah.

00:33:49 Mairi Spowage

And for me, a lot of the assumptions that we use to think about how things might evolve in the future and conversations about fiscal sustainability are actually based on, could and should be based on better research about what’s happening in the UK and how, you know, how much we spend or use of health services changes by income or age, you know, like we need much more and better research on these things for the UK.

00:34:13 Mairi Spowage

But these challenges often mean that researchers

00:34:17 Mairi Spowage

We do it on any other country apart from the UK because of the data access challenges are likely to be a bit less, which is a challenge in academia.

00:34:25 Mairi Spowage

Just to finish off then, David, taking a step back, you’re still involved obviously in the Scottish public debate.

00:34:32 Mairi Spowage

We were chatting before we started recording about how we’re both on a parliamentary committee later this week together about social security.

00:34:42 Mairi Spowage

what do you see in terms of what we’d add to the public debate in Scotland over the next few years?

00:34:48 Mairi Spowage

are there other things that you think that the FAI should maybe be doing in terms of research programme or, maybe others, it would be great to have other independent voices, obviously.

00:34:57 Mairi Spowage

Graham and Roy and I have had a similar conversation as part of the series and, you know, he was saying, it would be great obviously to see a richer kind of independent research and think tank environment in Scotland.

00:35:11 David Bell

There is a huge amount of effort put into researching the political state of Scotland.

00:35:23 David Bell

And I’m, you know, it’s easy publicity for newspapers to report on that on a regular basis.

00:35:37 David Bell

I’m

00:35:39 David Bell

Not entirely sure, you know, it whether one can really – well, reallocating that would be difficult.

00:35:46 David Bell

But there’s it seems to me to be a much stronger sort of environment of independent research in London than is than is the case in Scotland.

00:36:06 David Bell

Actually, I think the private sector is pretty badly represented in Scotland.

00:36:11 David Bell

There are voices that get attention regularly around charities.

00:36:20 David Bell

And of course, our NGOs are not short of their own publicity efforts.

00:36:31 David Bell

But independent research

00:36:36 David Bell

could be much better.

00:36:39 David Bell

Sorry, that’s not, well, I’m not wanting to take away from the Fraser Institute, but there could be a wider group of institutions that participate in the economic and political process.

00:37:01 David Bell

There is a, it seems to me there is an issue of how we make that effective.

00:37:08 David Bell

And I think, to be honest, the Parliament has been disappointing in that respect.

00:37:15 David Bell

Firstly, the committees have not taken on board sufficiently the issues around opportunity cost in general, but also the sort of economic arguments also.

00:37:27 David Bell

And

00:37:29 David Bell

The strength of the debate about the economy in the Scottish Parliament, I think, is not good.

00:37:36 David Bell

It’s weak.

00:37:38 David Bell

Other issues dominate the time that the parliamentary time.

00:37:47 David Bell

And ultimately, you know, standards of living, economic growth, child poverty, all of these things are dependent on having

00:37:57 David Bell

a well-functioning, efficient economy.

00:38:01 David Bell

And it seems to me that the Parliament, sometimes you get the impression that it’s not terribly interested.

00:38:09 David Bell

I.

00:38:11 Mairi Spowage

Wonder if it’s linked to the discussion we had earlier about, you know, really being willing to appraise policy properly, you know, so not just looking at

00:38:21 Mairi Spowage

if I spend money on this or if we change this regulation, then it’ll have this consequence.

00:38:27 Mairi Spowage

But also thinking about all of the unintended consequences that you would identify through structural, you know, more structured appraisal processes.

00:38:35 Mairi Spowage

Because to me, that can quite often be the economic discussion we don’t have, which is this policy will have this consequence that we intend, but it also might have an investment or economic consequences that we don’t intend, but we still need to

00:38:51 Mairi Spowage

try and measure what they might be and think about how we could, mitigate or reduce them if we still want to go ahead with the policy.

00:38:58 Mairi Spowage

Or you might think, well, those consequences mean that we shouldn’t do it.

00:39:02 Mairi Spowage

So I agree with you.

00:39:03 Mairi Spowage

I think that might be part of that.

00:39:06 David Bell

Yeah, I mean, unintended consequences is a great phrase that we ought to introduce to the lexicon of our parliamentarians.

00:39:18 David Bell

Perhaps only the Finance Committee has asked committees when doing their scrutiny to think about if they were recommending something, what would they recommend be taken away to substitute for that particular additional spending that they’re talking about?

00:39:38 David Bell

And, you know, the Finance Committee has had many reports and I guess there’s a problem in that

00:39:48 David Bell

how does the Scottish Government react to the reports of the committees and the Finance Committee in particular?

00:39:56 Mairi Spowage

It’ll be interesting to see, you know, this might not come up during the election campaign at all, because it might be too like a wonkish point, but you know, whether the effectiveness of the committee system in Holyrood and how that could evolve and change in a more mature Parliament, you know, I would hope it would be discussed

00:40:16 Mairi Spowage

as part of the election campaign, but it might not.

00:40:18 Mairi Spowage

But I mean, I think it is something that many seem to think needs to be kind of looked at and for us to think about again, whether it’s been a spectrum it could be.

00:40:25 David Bell

Yeah, I mean, I think the UK Parliament committees, and it’s partly because there are a lot of MPs who are perhaps not that, or feel that they’re not all that likely to get a governmental position.

00:40:42 David Bell

and who are genuinely well informed about whatever committee it is they happen to be on, the cut and thrust in these committees tends to be much more pertinent than is the case with the Scottish committees, unfortunately.

00:40:57 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, I would agree with that, definitely.

00:41:01 Mairi Spowage

Listen, David, we’re sort of setting the world to rights, which is great.

00:41:06 Mairi Spowage

But just thank you so much for your reflections.

00:41:09 Mairi Spowage

It’s been really interesting to hear your thoughts.

00:41:14 Mairi Spowage

This is one of a series of podcasts we’re doing with people who were there right at the start of the FAI and then throughout the years.

00:41:22 Mairi Spowage

You can see the rest of the podcasts that we’ve got on this on our website.

00:41:26 Mairi Spowage

And please don’t forget to sign up for our conference on the 18th and 19th of September.

00:41:31 Mairi Spowage

And we are running a bit low on places now.

00:41:34 Mairi Spowage

So if you are keen to come, please sign up as soon as possible.

00:41:38 Mairi Spowage

Because I think we’re going to have to start a waiting list soon.

00:41:40 Mairi Spowage

But hopefully everyone who’s able to who wants to come will be able to come along to the conference.

00:41:45 Mairi Spowage

It should be a great event.

00:41:47 Mairi Spowage

So thank you very much, David, for joining me today.

00:41:50 Mairi Spowage

And we’ll see you again soon for the next Fraser of Allander podcast.

00:42:00

Ben Cooper

Hello, 2025 marks a significant year for the Fraser of Allander Institute. Founded in 1975, the Institute celebrates 50 years of leading economic research in Scotland. Given this, we have a series of exciting events and content planned for the remainder of this year to mark this milestone.

This includes our anniversary conference on the 18th and 19th of September this year at the University of Strathclyde’s Technology and Innovation Centre. We have a number of speakers and themed sessions planned for the day in order to highlight the breadth and importance of the Economic Research being conducted across Scotland.

As well as this we have a number of other events planned, including our reception at the Scottish Parliament in December and one at the Scotland Office in London in October.

You’ll also see some unique content published in the coming months, including a podcast series with past institute directors and some articles on the history of the Institute, as well as some other eye-catching covers from some of our reports from over the years in the coming months.

In order to be kept up to date with any of these events and to be the first to know about our 50th anniversary publications, visit our website, fraserofallander.org and you can join our mailing list.

If you are interested in engaging with us also, whether you previously work for or with the institute, why not get in touch? We have a designated 50th anniversary e-mail fraser50@strath.ac.uk. We hope you’re as excited as we are and look forward to celebrating this exciting milestone with as many of you as possible.