{"id":702,"date":"2012-11-23T14:12:34","date_gmt":"2012-11-23T14:12:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/xislblogs.xtreamlab.net\/slwoods\/?p=702"},"modified":"2012-11-24T11:30:45","modified_gmt":"2012-11-24T11:30:45","slug":"bristol-festival-of-economics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/?p=702","title":{"rendered":"Bristol Festival of Economics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s nigh on four decades since I was taught basic economics by Lew Davies at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in the first year of my degree. Lew, who always described himself as a &#8216;labour economist&#8217; (<em>by which I&#8217;ve always understood to be related to toil rather than anything partisan<\/em>), didn&#8217;t have an easy job, trying to instil an understanding of economics into a diverse bunch of freshers who&#8217;d never encountered it before; and let&#8217;s face it, economics can be terribly dry and dusty.<\/p>\n<p>However, Lew did a splendid job. For instance, he taught us all about the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.economicshelp.org\/microessays\/costs\/diminishing-returns.html\">law of diminishing returns<\/a> with an anecdote about a favourite nephew and his love of strawberry ice cream! I still have a collection of his more outrageous sayings from his lectures; even nowadays these raise a wry smile.<\/p>\n<p>Since those undergraduate days economics has not featured largely in my life. Until now.<\/p>\n<p>Tonight the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ideasfestival.co.uk\/?p=4627\">Bristol Festival of Economics<\/a> starts and I&#8217;ve been kindly offered a season ticket by organiser Andrew Kelly (<em>thanks Andrew!<\/em>). The first session starts at 6 pm tonight with a panel session entitled &#8216;The Future of Capitalism&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>I shall be covering the festival live on Twitter, using the festival hashtag <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/search?q=%23economicsfest\">#economicsfest<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s nigh on four decades since I was taught basic economics by Lew Davies at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in the first year of my degree. Lew, who always described himself as a &#8216;labour economist&#8217; (by which I&#8217;ve always understood to be related to toil rather than anything partisan), didn&#8217;t have an easy job, trying to instil [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[40],"class_list":["post-702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bristol","tag-bristol"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=702"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":709,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702\/revisions\/709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}