British - Economist | April 8, 1962 -
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.
Evan Davis
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But sometimes it's good to dare yourself to do the unthinkable. And rather than stand in front of an audience with no clothes on, I decided to have a go at stand-up comedy.
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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.
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Being funny, it turns out, is like being a bank. It's a confidence trick. As long as everyone believes in you, you are fine.
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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.
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As it happens, I have personally been something of an enthusiast for the London Olympic games, mainly on the grounds a) that a bit of wasteland will be made nice and b) that it tends to make everybody happy that their country should be the centre of world attention for a couple of weeks in their life.
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I rarely come away from presenting the 'Today' programme without some sense of regret. There is always some question that I should have asked, or some point that I should have made. This is annoying but not surprising. Perfection is hard to achieve in a three-hour live programme.
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Even though disciplined sleeping habits and the adrenalin of live radio ensures that we are very awake while on duty, there is evidence of a phenomenon called circadian desynchronosis which causes one's brain to function slowly at those times of day when it thinks it should be asleep, regardless how wide awake the body is.
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It is no wonder that bank capital is regulated. When borrowing and lending is profitable, it is tempting for banks to scale up their operations and to borrow and lend too much in relation to their capital, in effect reducing the effectiveness of the potential capital cushion.
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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.
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My instinct is to assume that we consumers are an inconsistent bunch. We like competition if it delivers low prices, but grumble if it delivers the bad news that prices need to go up.
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We all know that Americans love their statistics - in sport, obviously. And in finance too.
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