Three pathways, one sector: early career economists in economic development

Introduction

David Marlow [00:08]
What drives young people to choose economic development as their profession, and then, within that, a specific career pathway?

Mike Spicer [00:17]
And in a period where recruiting, retaining and developing talent is consistently flagged as one of the biggest challenges facing local economic development and placemaking, what do early career economists need from their employers and their peers to achieve their full potential?

David Marlow [00:32]
And if you get three early career economists, each of whom has followed a different pathway, into a podcast studio to talk about their experience of economic development and their ambitions for the future, how is their conversation going to go? I'm David Marlow,

Mike Spicer [00:48]
and I'm Mike Spicer, and you're listening to a very special episode of LED Confidential, the podcast that tries to lift the lid on those intractable, enduring challenges facing those of us working in and on local economic development and placemaking today. David, this is one you've been waiting to do for a while now, isn't it?

David Marlow [01:05]
Yes, it really is, Mike. I could claim it's almost as long as I've been an economist myself. If I look all the way back to my late mum, actually, she'd have been thrilled, first of all, to hear that she was being mentioned on a podcast that I was doing professionally. We went through my life where she was immensely proud of me, but she never really knew what I actually did. Sorry, Mum. But I think that does say something about one of our profession's challenges, which is explaining what we actually do in our day-to-day jobs, and to what end.
And myself, I think, as all of you know, I went into economic development because I was really interested in developing countries in the global South, and I managed to secure an Overseas Development Institute fellowship, an ODIF, which is a scheme that places young economists in finance and planning ministries as advisers in developing countries. It is still, I believe, one of the standard routes into international economic development careers. I took mine in the early 80s. It was sometime before any of our guests today were born. But one of our guests, William Hamilton, was an ODIF himself, before a career that has progressed to a place at the Asian Development Bank, which he took up earlier this month.

Mike, you and I both now practise our trade as consultants, and another of our guests, Megan Smith, is currently working in a consultant role with Amion, which is a well-known boutique firm in LED and placemaking. Megan has just been nominated as an Institute for Economic Development Rising Star. Well done, Megan, and good luck when the competition unfolds.

And I suppose perhaps one of my most treasured associations in recent years has been with Newcastle University and the Improving Inclusive Innovation Outcomes programme, I3O, which was featured on this podcast several times. At Newcastle I've been delighted to work with our third guest, Luke Green, whose economic pathway has taken him into PhD and postdoc research, while also being policy facing as a research associate at Insights Northeast. So we've got three early career economist guests, three distinctive pathways. You are all very, very welcome on LED Confidential.

But what brought you to this point on your economic development journeys, and where do you hope to go from here? So I'm going to shut up now. But perhaps, Megan, can I ask you to lead off with your thoughts on our provocations at the top of the show, and where you'd like the conversations to go with Luke and William over the next 40 to 45 minutes?

Three routes into economic development

Megan Smith [03:55]
Yes, thank you, David, and thank you, Mike, for the introductions and for the Rising Star mention. I can also really relate to people not fully grasping what being an economist really means, and I suppose we can touch on that throughout the conversation. But from my perspective, what I would like to explore is how deliberate each of our different career paths actually was. We're all economists, but we've all ended up applying economics in a slightly different way, and in my case that certainly wasn't mapped out from the beginning. I'm also really interested to learn what we've learned from starting our careers, what support has genuinely helped us, what the reality of our jobs looks like compared to what we expected, and what each of our different career paths and roles could learn from one another.

So, Luke, William, maybe starting right at the beginning: how deliberate were your routes into what you're doing now? Did you actively choose your particular pathway or, like me, did you discover it as you went along? I'll start with Luke.

Luke Green [04:58]
Thanks, Megan. So, as David described, I'm an academic economic geographer. I think of myself as a geographer rather than as an economist, which means I'm interested in how economic forces play out in particular places, what that means for the people in those places, and how people and places in turn respond to and shape those forces. Interestingly, as an economic geographer, the role of place thinking in policy making has increased and grown significantly over the last couple of decades. I think, to some extent, we're all economic geographers now. If we're thinking about economic development in terms of space and place, and, as I say, we're talking about place more and more, but also about scale, governance, and the relationships between different levels of decision making, then we're necessarily thinking like economic geographers. So I think that creates a really exciting opportunity for people in my field, and for graduates of geography, and it's in that context that I have developed, I guess, a career in local economic development.

I have a pretty conventional academic career trajectory so far, and my role is as a research associate at Newcastle University in a team called Insights Northeast, which is a bit different to the typical academic role in the sense that I work in an outward-facing team that engages with local and regional partners, predominantly local and regional authorities, to provide research and evidence that relate to policy challenges and questions. So I don't belong to an academic subject area, but to an interdisciplinary team concerned with mobilising place-based evidence to inform place-based policy development.
And I didn't find local economic development. I'm not sure anyone necessarily does. It certainly found me. I had the good fortune of working as a PhD student on several research projects, which we might call side hustles, which were broadly concerned with LED planning and policy. I approached these as intellectual exercises, on the basis that I had some academic knowledge to bear. But I think colleagues that I worked with could see, and I possibly run the risk of sounding immodest here, that I was able to discuss these not just as intellectual questions, but as problems for policy and practice. There are a few qualities that I think are important in anyone, particularly any academic, seeking to do that kind of work, but the more I did that kind of work, and the more I engaged with practitioners and policymakers in this way, the more I realised that I was okay at it, and that I was enjoying it as well.

And what drew me into the role at Insights Northeast is that I think of policy-adjacent academic work, or policy work in general, as the ultimate intellectual question. Academics do complicated things. They build complicated models and smart-sounding theories. But putting those theories and models to work is actually much more complicated than coming up with them in the first place. So I'm drawn, perhaps masochistically, to that much more intractable, complicated task of turning ideas into actual action, and I certainly find that combination of thinking and doing very exciting.

So, as I say, I think LED found me. I don't think I would have thought five or 10 years ago that I would be in my current role. I don't know how that story resonates with you, Will, or whether you are a much more determined and focused prospective LED thinker.

William Hamilton [09:06]
Thanks, and thanks for passing it on there. I'd say much more a series of steps. It's quite a lot of luck, in trying to keep the option set open. Where I've ended up now is a lot more working with governments across the world in more resource-constrained settings, working out what's part of the possible, as it were. So when you're saying that policy work is the main problem you're looking to resolve, it's very much that: what is possible with the information that is available. So part of turning up here is probably listening to hear how you go about it, and how Megan goes about it, and that sort of nosiness, really, about what could be in the counterfactual.

But in terms of how I've fallen into using economics as a toolset, as a professional skill set, it has gone from finding it an interesting way to think about how people make decisions, small or large scale, and then thinking that would still be interesting. And then, at each stage, so undergrad to master's, then master's after that, it was about what keeps options open, and then taking the option that seems most interesting at the time, as opposed to anything a bit more dogged than that, I don't know. Probably pass back to Megan in terms of how that... does that resonate, or is it much more that you'd like to use it, and where you've ended up now is the place you always wanted to be?

Megan Smith [10:37]
No, I definitely wouldn't say it was linear for me, and I think my route into economic development wasn't something I'd planned from university. I loved economics at A level; it was my favourite subject. But I hadn't done maths A level, and at the time I wasn't aware that you could study economics at university without having studied maths A level. So it was something I naturally ruled out, and I actually started, and did a year at Sheffield Uni, studying politics and international relations instead. During my first year, two of my housemates were studying economics, and I'd hear them talking about it, and I thought, gosh, I miss it. I want to go back to it, and I found that Sheffield did offer a course in which you didn't have to have studied maths A level; you could study it alongside your first year. So I started first year again, studying economics, and even then I didn't have any idea what an economics career would look like, and I certainly didn't know that economic development consultancy existed at all.

After uni, I went on to join a typical graduate scheme at United Utilities, the water company up in the north-west. They do a three-year graduate scheme, and I sat in the strategy, policy and regulation team as an economist. I did three three-month rotations, working on things like the price review there, and it was really valuable. First of all, it showed me how economics was applied in a real-world setting, and helped me work out what I enjoyed. I realised that moving between different areas wasn't something I particularly loved, though, and I wanted one particular role that I sat in and got comfortable with, and got used to the team. And I think that's what drew me to Amion, where I'm working now. I found the role, and it just looked brilliant, and it's fully remote, so I was able to move back to Sheffield, the city that I absolutely love. When I found the role, I realised there was this whole area of economic consultancy that I just hadn't known about at all. It still had that analytical side that I took from United Utilities, but the questions and the skills that I used were much broader, around places, businesses, skills, investment, and how we actually improve local economic outcomes.

And that's essentially what I do in my role now. I mainly work with local authorities, combined authorities, universities, or other public sector organisations, and no two projects for me are really the same. One day I could be developing an economic strategy for an area, looking at the growth potential of that area. The next day I could be looking at the growth potential of a particular sector, doing a skills study, assessing the economic impact of an investment, or evaluating whether a programme has worked. And I think my role is much more people-facing than I probably expected an economics career to look like.
So, in a nutshell, that was a bit of a ramble, but I wouldn't say I deliberately chose consultancy. I gradually found it by working out what I enjoyed: that variety, learning quickly, working with people predominantly, and applying economics to real-world problems.

Do universities show how broad the careers are?

Megan Smith (continued)
And just listening to our different routes into our roles, do we think, Luke, that we're doing enough as a profession to show students just how broad the careers available to economists actually are? Sorry, Luke, to put you on the spot, but I'll come to you first if that's okay.

Luke Green [14:05]
Yeah, it's certainly, I think, a contemporary concern, isn't it? The question of to what extent universities prepare students for the big wide world, and what responsibility they have for doing that. I can speak to the full trajectory of the student experience, all the way from undergraduate through master's and PhD, and overwhelmingly my honest answer is that I don't think universities necessarily prepare their students terribly well, whether that's economists or geographers or other social scientists, for the world of work generally, or for the particular careers associated with local economic development. I don't think that's entirely the responsibility of universities, though. What we've probably described, between the three of us, is, to be fair to us, a commitment and a drive amongst ourselves to decide what it is we find interesting and to seek out opportunities to develop those interests, and the attributes and skills that an LED career provides.
But inevitably, as the policy challenges that LED practitioners grapple with are increasingly cross-disciplinary, increasingly complex and increasingly multifaceted, and I suppose this is more of an academic reflection, universities will need to be better at training graduates within a particular subject area to think across subjects and to think more expansively about the types of careers they might want to engage with. I think that's important from an LED perspective because one concern of mine is that it's a profession that understandably might appeal to people with economics degrees or geography degrees, but actually there's space in the profession for people with different interests and backgrounds and disciplinary knowledges as well.

So I think there's a role for universities in providing students with the space to develop real-world interests, but it's also important that they do that in a way that doesn't shoehorn particular disciplines, or particular types of students, into particular careers.

William Hamilton [16:51]
Yes, and to add on, I think it's complementing that, really, as a defence of the breadth of economics. There's a lot of discussion about it. A little while ago, when I was doing the degrees, right, it was about the breadth: can you fit it all into one course? And it's a bit like the march of the economists sometimes in policy work, which is good, but perhaps inviting, building a rod for my own back, in terms of inviting the plurality of views there, that breadth of where everyone can go with it. Here, an economics degree, I think, validates it as a skill set to approach problems and take beyond, as opposed to thinking: if I do an economics degree, I have to end up in this one place afterwards, or if I do this particular degree, I need to end up at this particular place. And I think there's a slight mix-up occasionally between where people end up having done economics and then say why my degree didn't entirely suit where I've ended up, versus being able to end up in such a range of places from where you had some training in the beginning.

How the issues of the day shape careers

Mike Spicer [18:12]

I was just thinking, speaking to your observation there, how the issues of the day do inform your view about where to go. In the early days for me the big economic policy questions, and this is showing my age hugely here, as David will know, were things like should Britain join the euro? That was still a live question then. And from an international development point of view, by far the biggest question was how could countries in Eastern Europe transition successfully to market-based economies. That was reflected in the choices people took in their careers, but more so, perhaps, in what they studied at university. I'd be interested to know from you guys how you feel the big policy issues of the day have shaped you as early career economists, where your interests lie, and perhaps how that's influenced your choices, both academically and career-wise.
Megan, you mentioned your early days on the United Utilities scheme, and actually, in a strange echo, I think that was one of my first projects when I started as an economist, but from the consultancy side: advising United Utilities on one of their price reviews, from a technical economic forecasting point of view. But going back to my question, Megan, do you feel the issues of the day have animated your interests and decisions, and how is that reflected in your career?

Megan Smith [19:59]
Yeah, definitely. I don't think I started my career with a particular set of economic issues that I knew I wanted to focus on. My interests have really, as you say, been animated by the things that I've been exposed to through my work. You mentioned United Utilities, and that's interesting because within that role I was exposed quite early to some huge policy questions around infrastructure investment, affordability, regulation and resilience in the water sector, which at the time, and still, is under a lot of heat. Working around PR24, which is the price review that water companies have to undergo, made those trade-offs and those issues feel very real. There are some enormous long-term investment needs, but also, as I said, questions about affordability: how do you balance the interests of the environment, customers and companies?

Since leaving that role and moving into Amion, and local economic development more broadly, my interest and understanding have broadened quite considerably. I'm now working on issues like productivity and skills, economic inactivity, inequality between places, and major investment. And I think that has made me particularly interested in the question of who actually benefits from economic growth. You can have a major investment coming into a place and talk about thousands of jobs, or significant GVA. But for me that immediately raises another set of questions. Will local people actually have the skills to get those jobs? Can they actually access them? Will local businesses benefit from the supply chain, and will people on the ground actually feel the benefits of that growth?

So, to go back to your question, I think the issues I've worked on and been exposed to have pushed my interests. "Pushed" is perhaps not the right word. It's something I've found naturally, but towards place, inclusive growth and the relationship between major investment and outcomes for people. That's something I wouldn't necessarily have identified as a particular interest when I graduated, but it's increasingly what I find most interesting about economics and local economic development. So I'd be really interested to hear whether that's been the same for Luke and Will: has your interest driven the work you've chosen, or has the work you've ended up doing shaped what you're interested in? Start with Luke again.

Luke Green [22:31]
I think there's an element of the two reinforcing each other. Having done the conventional academic thing of doing a PhD, where you look at one topic in almost forensic detail, you get very comfortable with being interested in a fairly narrow set of topics or area of research, and I certainly bring that to my subsequent work, which is much more varied and thematically expansive. But your interests inevitably shift as you grapple with a wider set of questions. What probably stays the same, as Will was describing earlier, is the set of approaches or methods you're trained to bring and offer to a set of questions, but also the normative aspects, the underlying assumptions and objectives of your work.

For me, one of the things that makes applied research and policy work so interesting is a frustration, actually: that oftentimes things don't change. Policy interventions come and go, but the underlying challenges they're designed to address don't change. The dial often never shifts, and if it does, it's often only marginally. So I think ideas and concepts and framings come and go, in no small part because governments come and go. Right now, geographers, and probably to some degree economists, are thinking about the everyday, the foundations. Increasingly, politicians are invoking a sense of renewal and fixing the foundations of economies, and they're interested in inclusion, which you described, Megan. But these aren't totally new. We've thought about these kinds of problems in different ways before. We've just returned to the issues. I think contemporary concerns inevitably shape what we're interested in, but there's also, as I say, a requirement for us to bring our skills, and our frustrations with policy, to bear in order to meaningfully change that, and not allow (and this is something academics are as guilty of as anyone) conceptual fads and fashions to distract from the work, the importance of thinking long term and seeking to develop long-term policy solutions. Did you have any thoughts, Will?

William Hamilton [25:33]
So for me, it's where the opportunities come. I started my career in Fiji, as a Fijian civil servant, as David's described, on the ODI Fellowship scheme, and that was in a period where peak aid had passed, but the optimism of the money was still there. So there was quite a broad range of work that could come, and then from that we seem to see a shift in the realpolitik of development. You see that elsewhere with people accepting industrial policy, which I'm sure the other four on the call are probably a few steps ahead of where most debates have been. But accepting that, where that's come through is more transactional aid programmes occurring in countries where there's a pretty known geopolitical benefit for the donor, and a generally shrinking public appetite for that to go on. And then you have the major examples where peak aid did go on and it collapsed, thinking of Afghanistan there. The narrative does shift and does shape where the opportunities come and go.

There's also been a relatively large shift towards working with governments to help manage the bulk of finances, because for almost every government in the world, their domestic revenue and domestic expenditure is far higher than what the donor market will be. So where the implementation and policy making can be around there to help that become more effective, that has shifted the opportunities and where we've moved. But again, that's in the earlier theme of taking the opportunities as and when they come.

Mentorship and peer learning

David Marlow [27:25]
One of the things I was really interested to hear is the extent to which oldies like me can best support your career journeys. Is that to do with the generic career development processes of your individual organisations, or is there something to do with peer learning that older economists should bear in mind when they're working with people who are starting out in the profession?

William Hamilton [27:58]
What I've always found useful is less saying, "Okay, Mike, David, how have you done what you've done?", because, as you mentioned, the problems and the interests have changed in the window. It's more, "This is what I'm thinking about doing. I'd like to end up in a similar position to the person you're talking to. What do you think would be a good move given what's available?" And that's always been quite helpful, because I think history doesn't exactly repeat, but it chimes, and so where you can go from there. Any other thoughts on this one, Mike and Megan?

Megan Smith [28:36]
Yeah, I think for me, just to touch on the IED's mentorship scheme that they run, in which they pair mentors and mentees together: individuals at the beginning of their careers in economic development and individuals in the latter stages of their careers. David and I were paired together about a year ago now, I think, and I've found there's been huge value in learning from David, and learning from somebody at a completely different stage in their career,

David Marlow [29:12]
and vice versa, I hasten to add.

Megan Smith [29:15]
Yeah, thank you. I hope so. I hope so. Having access to somebody that doesn't work for Amion, but has seen lots of economic ideas, policies and priorities come and go, has worked in different environments and has that longer perspective on the profession that I possibly can't at this stage of my career, has been really, really useful. And as you said, David, hopefully that learning can go both ways. Early career economists like us three are coming into the profession with different tools now, different expectations, things like AI changing the ways that we work. So I think the value is partly bringing together the perspective of those at the beginning of their career and those at the later stages, rather than one generation simply teaching the other.

Luke Green [30:02]
Yeah, it's great to hear that you've had access to a formal, established mentoring programme. For me, I've found that the most valuable support or mentorship I've had is of the invisible kind. As Will said earlier, LED and policy making is about the art of the possible, and academics aren't generally trained to accept that. They're often concerned much more with rigour and method, and rightly so, but when you're doing policy work, or seeking to do applied academic work, there's also a need to be flexible, to compromise, and to be humble as well: to accept that your understanding of an issue is not the only one. That probably sounds totally self-evident to a practitioner, but academic training doesn't necessarily instil that mindset.
And so the most valuable mentorship I've had is from those who've taught me to be flexible and to compromise, and to turn a research interest into a useful policy question, or to understand not what I might think the policy maker might be interested in, but what they actually could meaningfully need, or might be able to apply, in a particular time in a particular place. I think that's a big transition, actually, coming from an academic background: realising that a good piece of research and producing something that's useful and impactful aren't necessarily the same thing. The mentors who've helped me make that transition have been the most valuable to me.

William Hamilton [32:10]
Is that what you expected to hear, David?

The profession in 10 years: AI, judgement and relevance

David Marlow [32:13]
Yes, actually, that is really quite helpful, in the sense that the IED mentorship scheme is a professional association's scheme, and I think what none of you have done is focus on the nurturing or development work that your employers have explicitly done, which I guess is quite interesting. We're going to have to start drawing it to a close fairly soon. Looking forward, where do you, as a different generation to me, for example, and Mike to some extent, think the profession will be in 10 years' time, when you're mid-career, probably at your peaks or whatever it is? If you were looking 10, 15 years hence, and one of you mentioned AI, for example, what will economics as a profession be doing that is different to now, and what will economists have to be able to deliver to make the profession increasingly relevant, or still relevant? Let's start with you, Will.

William Hamilton [33:31]
I think there are two elements to respond to there. One is not mentioning the employers, and in part, for me, I have to admit, I should probably apologise to past employers for being somewhat mercenary - I know I've hopped around a few times, and they have been good. But you go to the external network in part because the internal one is less fixed.

And then, in terms of where that goes in 10 years' time… your forecast of tomorrow's your nowcast of today. Personally, though I've probably rattled on about this a few times, it's approaching those problems with a similar toolset. If you do start to get displacement of jobs, or you start to look at different sectors coming along, or changing comparative advantage between countries, and where your tax bases will start to lie, that will gradually shift. But your fundamentals, at least for me - looking at how you help get a macroeconomy richer, how you help balance a budget – stays the same. It's just where you're applying that. Now, this could be horrifically wrong come 2040, and it could be quite an amusing little piece, you know, picked up by AI in the future as what not to be taught and what not to be said in terms of a forecast. But I'd like to think that the general approach to a changing set of problems will continue to be robust, and we'll see how that pans out. Luke, I guess this is a somewhat academic question, if it's over with you.

Luke Green [35:09]
Yeah, I could answer this in multiple ways: to think about where academia and the world of universities might be in 10 to 15 years, and where specifically people like me, who bridge the worlds of university and policy, might be. With regard to the former, I'm not necessarily super hopeful. It goes without saying that universities are going through a bit of a moment right now, and that's putting their potential to do all of the good that they do in some jeopardy. With regard to the latter, I'm a lot more hopeful. I think the role of universities in contributing to local economic development broadly, but specifically to the planning and policy-making functions of localities and regions, will only increase, and their ability to do that will mature and develop over the next few years. Even in the last few years alone, in the space in which I now work, university policy engagement has grown and matured and professionalised quite considerably. So I really hope, for the sake of my own career at least, that that continues.

I think probably a more common challenge for all three of us, and we'll have to maybe repeat this podcast in 10 years to give us the opportunity to reflect, is around how our roles shift inevitably in the context of AI, which will make at least some forms of data analysis much faster, and will increase the production of new datasets, new forms of knowledge. I think, though, that leaves a big gap, which is basically an interpretation and judgement gap. I'm sure AI will do lots of good things in the world of local economic development, but I still think there's a huge role for thinkers, whether they be based in universities, in consultancies, or in international development organisations, to work out the right and timely questions to ask, what kinds of interpretations might be valuable, and what they mean for policy interventions and planning and so forth. So I think we're in an interesting moment in the development of academic knowledge production, of local economic development policy and practice, and in our own careers. I think there are as many reasons to be hopeful as there are to be cynical. I don't know if you share that view, Megan.

Megan Smith [37:59]
Definitely, yeah. Thank you, Luke. And just to go back to your comment, David, I should also mention the role that employers play in developing early career economists. Amion has been brilliant in that respect, and I've been trusted with a lot of responsibility early on, but I always know I've got experienced managers and directors to fall back on.

But looking further ahead, I think that definitely resonates with me, Luke. And one of the really interesting questions is what our profession will look like in 10 years' time, particularly in the context of AI. A lot of the tasks that have traditionally formed part of an economist's job, so finding information, processing data, can now increasingly be supported by AI, and that is a huge opportunity because it potentially gives us more time to think, interpret and solve problems. But there's also, I suppose, a challenge for early career economists, because a lot of that initial groundwork is how you learn. And if AI starts doing more of that for us, how do we still develop the judgement to know whether an answer is actually right or useful? And I think, as you say, Luke, that's where the human side of economics becomes even more important. And that's something that Amion is really good at.

We're not just sitting behind a desk analysing datasets. A huge part of our work, particularly my team, is going into places, talking to communities and businesses, running workshops, listening to different perspectives, and understanding what's actually happening on the ground. The data might tell us, and it has done in the past, that an area has a particular skills problem, but it might not necessarily tell you why, whether that's transport, healthcare, childcare or employer practices, and you often only understand those nuances properly by talking to people. I think that is what will keep our profession relevant. I don't think our value is just producing the number at all. It's bringing together the numbers with the people, with the places and the context, exercising our judgement, and then communicating that, in a way that helps somebody who isn't an economist make a better and more informed decision. So I'm excited to see where the profession will be in 10 years' time. But I agree, I see AI and the current changes in context at the minute as both an opportunity but also a slight challenge as well.

Closing reflections

David Marlow [40:29]
Mike, do you want to take us away? Just before Mike rounds us up, thank you so much for joining. Inevitably we could go on for a lot longer. We probably could go on for 10 years, actually. But the idea of coming back and sticking this in a time capsule, and letting the AI bots mull it over in 10 years' time, and by then they'll be laughing amongst themselves at what we predicted, is fascinating. I do actually remember, as an ODIF, first going to Belize, and having to work out how much the Belize government's interest payments to the Caribbean Development Bank were going to be on particular loans by calculator. But to pick up your point, and the story that I always tell, and Luke at least will have probably heard this before: in the first week I was in Belize, I was asked to advise on setting the price for rice for that particular season, which of course is ultimately quite a political balancing decision. So I do think the technical tasks will change immeasurably, but someone still has to advise politicians in countries that set a state price for rice. That will always require interpretation and judgement of the evidence. But Mike, what have you made of this? And do you want to round us off?

Mike Spicer [41:56]
Yeah, I'll finish off, I guess, by picking up Megan's point, because I think it's a really important one: how do you gain your experience when some of the formative experiences that we remember, like your struggle with the calculator, David, are the experiences that teach us? Just a quick anecdote before we sign off. I can remember in the very early days of my career, working at an economic forecaster, I was given the task of extracting data from spreadsheets, because it was a total mess in those days with the Office for National Statistics. It was all over the place, in different places, and my job was to write a computer programme that could distinguish between the East of England and the East Midlands. There were seven or eight different names used for the East of England, and programmes would sometimes get confused. So my task was to do that, and I had to look at dozens and dozens and dozens of printed periodicals and spreadsheets before I could work out what series of tests you had to apply to be certain that you had the right dataset. In doing that, you had to set up things like: if the dataset differs in this particular way, does it mean that a factory is being coded to the wrong postcode? Something like that. And you got to learn the patterns. If you see things at that volume, you start to see it, and then of course that informs your later experience working directly with local authorities or regional authorities. I wouldn't trade those experiences for anything. I think they were absolutely painful to go through at the time, but I do think they grounded me in real-world problems.

So, Megan, your point: if those sorts of problems are no longer the ones that an early career economist might typically face, where do you get your learning from? I do think the answer probably lies in more stakeholder-facing work, being out there in the wild, as it were, and that's possibly something where AI can be of help. If we can transcribe interviews and things much faster, we can do more stakeholder-facing work, and we pick up new experiences that way.

But it'd be great to do a Seven Up-type exercise, wouldn't it? I don't know if you've heard of that, guys. It was a long-standing check-in with members of the public to see how their worlds had evolved. It would be great to do something analogous to that with this, and see you guys again, and we can check in on the state of the world and where you are in your careers, and reflect back. I think it would be a great exercise to do.
But let me take the opportunity to sign us off. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. I really appreciate you being here. It's been a great talk for our listeners. As ever, you can get anything LED Confidential related over our website, which is www.ledconfidential.co.uk. You can access previous episodes, bonus materials, tip sheets and a whole host of other things, and you can also contact David and me through the website and give us some suggestions for future episodes. So thanks for listening. Until the next time.