Swindon & Wiltshire News
PowerPoint banned at Bristol’s Festival of Economics
Economics. In a Festival. You just know there will be no bouncing around a field to music, unless it’s to count BPM or calculate the percentage difference between the price of Strongbow at the festival bar compared to your regular pub compared to the ones you smuggled into your bag via Tesco.
This one is firmly for seat-bound patrons listening to people on stage, literature festival style.
Bristol’s Festival of Economics, brought to you by Bristol Ideas, is for the mid-nerds. Yes, it does discuss economics like ‘What’s next for central banks?’ but it also has a decent event spread from the life-relevant Money Clinic at Bristol Grammar School to future-gazing stuff such as ‘How do we build a future where everyone has a home’, at the Watershed.
As someone who can barely read a bank statement and gets confused over a mobile phone statement normally I’d run a mile from the hard maths of economics.
Thankfully the Festival is there to remind me that economics is one of those important societal structures, like politics. It’s pointless hating it or running scared. Better to understand it and make it work on the side of the angels.
A great place to start is ‘Making Economics easily digestible’. Yes that’s a food pun. Speaker Ha-Joon Chang uses food stories to explain economic theory. Yes it includes chocolate. And for all you worried mid-nerds, I-leave-all-that-to-the-accountant types, jargon and PowerPoint are banned.
And with Halloween pumpkins still glowing in the rear view mirror, ‘Cautionary Tales’ at St George’s sounds like the financial version of Tales of the Unexpected. It’s a live recording of Tim Harford’s podcast and a Pay What You Can/Pay it Forward event which helps the micro-economics of household finance. I’d imagine Tim heartily approves of the frugality of a leg of lamb doubling up as a murder weapon and dinner.
Bristol’s Festival of Economics takes place 13-16 November 2023.
*Edible Histories also linked chocolate and Bristol economics.*
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