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I've Always Been Scared Of Advertising Folk. I've Met Them At Parties And I've Been To Their Offices And I've Always Found Them Intimidatingly Cool. At One Company I Visited, They Held Their Meetings In A Caravan That Had Somehow Been Installed In The Place, A Rather More Exotic Place To Gather Than The Typical Bbc Glass Box.

-Evan Davis

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I've Always Been Scared

Evan Davis

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I've Always Been Scared Of Advertising Folk. I've Met Them At Parties And I've Been To Their Offices And I've Always Found Them Intimidatingly Cool. At One Company I Visited, They Held Their Meetings In A Caravan That Had Somehow Been Installed In The Place, A Rather More Exotic Place To Gather Than The Typical Bbc Glass Box.

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If You're Not Making Some Mistakes, It Probably Means You're Not Trying Hard Enough.

In Principle, There Are Only Three Main Components Of Spending That Much Matter To Monetary Policy: Consumer Spending, Business Investment And Exports And Trade.

One Of The Key Problems Is That The Germans Know What They Do Because Everywhere They Go There's A 'made In Germany' Label On It - They Can Feel Proud Of Volkswagens And Audis And Mercedes.

The Two Questions That Anyone Ever Asks Me Are: 'are House Prices Going To Go Down?' And 'is It A Good Time To Fix My Mortgage Rate?'

It's Amazing, If You Know What You Want To Say, How Fast It Is To Write.

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.

For Industry To Settle In A Country, You First Need Electricity; For Electricity, You Need Some Trained Workers; For Trained Workers, You Need Some Schools; For Schools You Need Some Money; For Money, You Need Some Industry.

Even The 'today' Programme Involves A Balance Between The Worthy-but-heavy Items With The Worthless-but-entertainingly-light Ones.

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.

When A Population Saves A Lot, The Funds Are Invested Outside The Country As Well As Inside. If The Japanese Invest In The United States, It Pushes Their Exchange Rate Down And Makes Their Manufacturing More Competitive.

For Years, We've Grown Dependant On American Consumers As The World's Spenders Of Last Resort. They've Kept Europe Out Of Recession, Allowed China To Industrialise, And Prevented Global Deflation. But At The Same Time, They've Not Been Looking After Their Own Futures.

We All Know That Americans Love Their Statistics - In Sport, Obviously. And In Finance Too.

Personally, I Don't See Old Economics And Behavioural Economics As Opposed. It Is Useful To Assume People Are Rational As A Good Approximation To Their Long Term Behaviour, But It Would Be Unwise Not To Think How In Practice Their Behaviour May Deviate From That Simplifying Assumption.

For Me, The Main Principle For Broadcasters Has To Be That If People Stand To Benefit From An Interview, They Should Be Prepared To Face Some Downside As Well.

The Key Thing About Me Is That I'm Really Not Very Interesting.

Very Interesting

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.

Interestingly, Human Irrationality Is A Hot Topic In Economics At The Moment. Behavioural Economics It's Called, On The Cusp Of Economics And Psychology.

Historically, The British Have Always Been Rather Wary Of Grand Engineering Projects - Perhaps Understandably, Given That Many Of Them Have Been Delivered Late And Over Budget.

We Are More Likely To Cheat If We See Others Doing So. We Tend To Conform To Accepted Norms Of Reasonable Behaviour, Rather Than Adhere To Strict Rules.

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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.

Black Friday Is Not Another Bad Hair Day In Wall Street. It's The Term Used By American Retailers To Describe The Day After The Thanksgiving Holiday, Seen As The Semi-official Start Of Christmas Shopping Season.

At The Bbc We've Had Plenty Of Women In Good Management Jobs. It Comes And Goes But There's Been Plenty. On Air, I Think There's Quite A Bit More We Can Do.

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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.

Put Simply, Behavioural Economics Argues That Human Beings' Decision-taking Is Guided By The Evolutionary Baggage Which We Bring With Us To The Present Day. Evolution Has Made Us Rational To A Point, But Not Perfectly So. It Has Given Us Emotions, For Example, Which Programme Us To Override Our Rational Brain And Act More Instinctively.

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.

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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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.

What Comes With A Job As A Staff Member Of The Bbc Is A Certain Self-censoring That You Get Utterly Used To. You Don't Say Everything You Think. You Hold Back On Some Things.

Now Undoubtedly, We Face Some Very British Challenges When It Comes To Infrastructure. We Rightly Cherish Our Back Yards And Green Spaces, And We'll Defend Them Passionately When Projects Are Announced. We Live In A Democracy, And We Like To Debate These Things, Often For Many Years.

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Phyllis Is One Of The Tunnel Boring Machines For Crossrail And One Of The Most Extraordinary Characters I Met, Visiting Some Of The Most Exciting Infrastructure In Britain. Crossrail Is The New Railway Which Will Run From West To East Right Across London. It Is The Biggest Engineering Project In Europe - And Phyllis Herself Is Not Exactly Dainty.

A Chair's Function Is Not Just To Provide A Place To Sit; It Is To Provide A Medium For Self-expression. Chairs Are About Status, For Example. Or Signalling Something About Oneself. That's Why The Words Chair, Seat And Bench Have Found Themselves Used To Describe High Status Professions, From Academia To Parliament To The Law.

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I Don't Particularly Like Going On About Being Gay Or Making A Big Thing About It, But I Think It's A Bit Of A Pain To Be Secretive About It.

What Is So Striking About Liberia Is That In A Place Where There Is So Much To Be Done, I Have Never Seen So Many People With Nothing To Do.

All Socio-political Phenomena In The U.k. Come Laden With The Baggage Of A Class-based Theory Or Two Attached To Them. In The Case Of Gay Tories, There Is One Particularly Silly Variant Of The Category, Which Asserts That Gayness Is Bred In Public Schools And Thus Fits With Conservatism Like Hand In Glove.

I Don't Keep It Secret That I Live With My Partner Gio. I'm Very Proud Of My Gayness. But There Is Lots I Wouldn't Want The Press To Write About Me... It Is A Matter Of Regret That Being Gay Is The Most Interesting Thing About Me.

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