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Things to think about #16 - Fatherhood, The Spectator, The Untethered Soul and the Dragonlance novels

My wife gave birth to our daughter, Veera, at the start of December, and it’s been a wild ride so far. Your job in the first few weeks and months, I now realise, is basically to keep your baby alive, which involves submitting yourself, and (in)famously your sleep patterns, to the needs of a lizard brain in a human suit that it has no control over. She feeds, sleeps, pees and poos, and screams in between all of these. More recently, she’s been doing mostly screaming.

Trying to look beyond this very intense period—and the miracle that my daughter is—can be difficult. People with children will tell budding parents that their life is about to permanently change, which is true, but in what way? It depends, I guess. Parenthood—in this case, fatherhood—is a strange initial feeling for me, best described as low-key dread and fear that something will go wrong and I won’t be able to help my daughter, mixed with a profound sense of responsibility. Cometh the hour, cometh the new father, I hope.

December 24 - The economics of Santa Claus' Christmas Operation

The economics of Santa Claus’s Christmas operation is perhaps the most ambitious logistics problem ever conceived. Each December, a vast global enterprise mobilises to deliver gifts to hundreds of millions of children, perfectly timed for the night of the 24th and the morning of the 25th. Behind the folklore lies an implicit economic system of remarkable efficiency, balancing production, inventory, transport, and distribution in a single night. If one treats Santa’s workshop not as magic but as a model economy, it becomes a fascinating exercise in applied economics—an improbable, but internally consistent, operation that obeys the logic of scale, incentives, and coordination.

Advent Calendar, Something Differentclaus vistesenDecember 24, 2025Santa Claus, Christmas, economics

December 23 - Currency Crisis Models

The economics of currency crises has evolved through successive “generations” of models, each reflecting the historical experience and intellectual climate of its time. From the fixed exchange rate collapses of the 1970s to the financial crises of the 1990s and beyond, economists have sought to explain why speculative attacks occur, how they unfold, and what policy choices can prevent or exacerbate them. The three generations of models—spanning from mechanical balance-of-payments inconsistencies to self-fulfilling expectations and financial fragility—together trace a trajectory from deterministic to strategic and behavioural understandings of crises. Yet, in a modern world of complex capital markets and hybrid monetary regimes, each generation’s insights also reveals its limitations.

December 22 - Business Cycle Theory

The economics of business cycle theory revolves around understanding the recurrent fluctuations in aggregate economic activity—expansions and contractions—that characterize market economies. These cycles, while irregular in timing and amplitude, display certain regularities in employment, production, investment, and prices. Over the past century, economists have developed two main traditions in explaining them: one empirical and inductive, epitomised by the work of Geoffrey H. Moore and Victor Zarnowitz; the other theoretical and deductive, culminating in Real Business Cycle (RBC) theory. The contrast between these approaches highlights a broader tension in macroeconomics between data-driven description and model-based explanation.

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