Lucy Barnes
@lucy-barnes.bsky.social
1.9K followers 820 following 62 posts
Professor of Political Economy, UCL. She/her. Here to lurk.
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lucy-barnes.bsky.social
100% correct response
lottelydia.bsky.social
lol fuck you
resprofnews.bsky.social
Ministers ‘want to shift funds away from low-quality research’ .

Universities UK president says institutions cannot afford “unfunded hobbyist research”.

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...
Reposted by Lucy Barnes
lucy-barnes.bsky.social
Almost: some of us got lucky and own it
p-hunermund.com
Academia is basically a collection of people who got lucky early on and mistook it for genius. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Reposted by Lucy Barnes
lucy-barnes.bsky.social
My hunch is that it is hard to reconcile perceived levels of inequality (high, growing) with the idea that taxes are (sufficiently) progressive
lucy-barnes.bsky.social
This, but also for research
bencollins.bsky.social
Also talked about The Onion being inefficient on purpose.

www.status.news/p/the-onion-...
What has it been like shifting from reporter to media executive, managing a staff instead of filing stories yourself? And do you write any of the jokes at The Onion? Or are you strictly managing the business?

The Onion’s process is deeply, beautifully inefficient. Every day, our writers take 150 headlines into a physical writers room in Chicago and whittle them down to maybe one or two. These people throw away the funniest sentence I will ever write in my life six times by noon every weekday.

The point of taking over this place was to preserve this process, which I learned this week is almost assuredly more rigorous than The New York Times.

That’s why I don’t touch any of it. I just try to get more people to pay attention to the output, and get our work into different mediums and new places. We brought back the paper, reinvested in the Onion News Network, bought a full page ad in The Times for something they were going to write anyway. The role is to make the world-class work they’re already doing seep into everyday American life more frequently, and that’s working.

You actually can do this, you know. You can just try to highlight the beauty of things you like and not try to vampirically extract value at every step.

If people get one thing out of this whole Q&A, I hope it’s that. You do not have to make an A.I. version of your own employees that operate at 1.5x speed but produce purely iterative garbage, especially in media and journalism. People don’t actually want that shit. Make a good, human thing and people will bend over backwards to support you. This is a valid way to run a company.
lucy-barnes.bsky.social
populism<->austerity doom loop, anyone?
Reposted by Lucy Barnes
jowolff.bsky.social
Want people to understand your academic work better? Answer these questions in your writing:

What are the motivations of this project? (Why do it?)

Who are you arguing against?

What alternatives are you rejecting and why?

What follows if you’re right?

These are also good questions for Q&A.
lucy-barnes.bsky.social
Love this but think the gaming element is the cherry; the “seeing like a market” (or if you prefer, the Beatles (can’t buy me love)) is the cake
Reposted by Lucy Barnes
danielsohege.bsky.social
Gender neutral spaces have existed for years, we all know that. It isn't trans and non-binary individuals attacking women without any repercussions, that's men. Nothing about demonising trans and non-binary individuals makes women safer. It does make people more vulnerable though. 3/5
Reposted by Lucy Barnes
bjpir.bsky.social
📣 New BJPIR article out now!

'The political effects of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone' by Andrew McNeil and Frieder Mitsch

⬇️ Find the full article in #OpenAccess here: buff.ly/QIn8Bm9

@polstudiesassoc.bsky.social
buff.ly
Reposted by Lucy Barnes
janus.bsky.social
“define a woman” fine ok, so you know when shania twain says “let’s go girls”? if you go then you’re a woman
lucy-barnes.bsky.social
Struck in part 1 by the extent that criticisms of MT (not smart, just works hard; micromanages (“too bossy”); no ideas of her own) echo highly gendered tropes.

more surprising than even the explicit misogyny.

Ofc some women are unoriginal, not smart, conscientious micromanagers, but 🤷‍♀️
Reposted by Lucy Barnes
robfordmancs.bsky.social
The core trilma here remains the same - the govt needs to accept one of three things: high student migration, higher domestic student fees (or higher taxes to fund universities) or university bankruptcies. Those are the only options, given where we are. Pick one.
gsoh31.bsky.social
The UK government is proposing to finally finish off its universities by further tightening the terms of the graduate visa route. The stupid fools. Playing with dangers they don't even understand. www.ft.com/content/f441...
UK Home Office’s reform of graduate visas runs into opposition
[FREE TO READ] Education department at odds with plan to curb number of overseas students allowed to stay in Britain
www.ft.com
lucy-barnes.bsky.social
Maybe if there were better news 🙁
hetanshah.bsky.social
'The proportion who say they have a high interest in news has almost halved in the UK over the last decade, from 70% in 2015 to 38% last year, according to the @reutersinstitute.bsky.social.'
That's why most of us on this platform are a weird sample!
www.theguardian.com/media/2025/a...
Outlets seek fresh strategies as UK poll shows ‘news avoidance’ on the rise
Negative content and distrust among reasons given by audiences as industry works on how to keep them engaged
www.theguardian.com
Reposted by Lucy Barnes
willpooley.bsky.social
writing books is so easy, i just type out all of the true and original ideas i have about a topic in the correct order but also to exactly the right length without any digressions or mistakes and then bask in the well earned acclaim from my very reasonable peers who recognize pure truths when they s
lucy-barnes.bsky.social
I’m fairly confident that “The Economist”, not the mention the economists, is the answer to this question
lucy-barnes.bsky.social
Congrats, happy to see this come out!
lucy-barnes.bsky.social
Right, but why don’t the bond markets want us to have a functional police force (e.g.)?
lucy-barnes.bsky.social
Taking this at face value, what beliefs/behaviour enforce the straitjacket? One or more of voters, markets, or HMT has to be either extremely short sighted or irrational (in different ways) to prefer the total collapse of the public sector to higher taxes/borrowing. And impervious to persuasion.