Gordon Hughes
Affiliations and potential conflicts of interest
Since May 2024 I have been a Senior Fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics, a think-tank focusing on energy policy based in Washington DC. This reflects my interest in making comparisons between energy policies in the UK, Europe, the United States, and other OECD countries.
I am also a Professorial Fellow in the School of Economics at the University of Edinburgh.
Finally, I am a Director of several companies including Borders Online Ltd and Polare AI Ltd. Borders Online is a community company set up to provide wireless and other broadband services in rural parts of Scotland. Polare AI develops AI-based software and hardware for the efficient management of energy use, taking advantage of variability in market prices.
Context
I started this Substack in the autumn of 2023 as an outlet for disseminating my work on issues of energy, environment, infrastructure, land use and economic policy that have been the focus of my work for more than five decades. The early articles include a biography and a piece explaining my background and approach to policy issues. These shape what I write about and how.
For the first two decades of my career I was an academic, first at Christ’s College and the Faculty of Economics and Politics at the University of Cambridge, and then at what is now the School of Economics at the University of Edinburgh. At the turn of the 1990s I was increasingly drawn into policy advisory work by the economic revolution that was occurring in the former Soviet bloc.
In 1991 I joined the World Bank as a senior advisor focusing on energy, environment and infrastructure in Europe and the Middle East. Gradually my geographical focus expanded to cover East Asia, Latin America and South Asia. For personal reasons I returned to the UK in 2001 but continued with the same focus in projects around the world. In 2010, tired of continuous travel, I switched my focus to the UK and Europe. I have limited tolerance for bureaucracy and am far more interested in entrepreneurship and technical innovation.
My formal training was in economics, mathematics and statistics. I have published academic articles in journals spanning a range from entomology to social anthropology, but my core skills are a combination of applied statistics, computer software and policy analysis. I have acquired a lot of knowledge of finance, accounting and computer science from my advisory work as well as the demands of setting up and running businesses dealing with computer networks and energy management.
Writing and academic publishing
I have retained strong links with the Schools of Economics and Informatics at the University of Edinburgh for many years. I have continued to publish articles dealing with technical and policy issues in my fields of interest. However, I have little sympathy with the conventions of academic publishing, which greatly limit what can be published and how.
For a time I administered a highly prestigious academic journal and was an Associate Editor of other journals. I have peer reviewed hundreds of papers. The academic publishing process is completely broken. The idea that peer review is a useful criterion for quality is nonsense. Many peer reviewers are either prejudiced or technically incompetent, while editors are swamped with papers which are usually mediocre and sometimes incomprehensible.
The process of academic publishing in policy areas takes far too long. The inevitable consequence is that anything interesting and useful is circulated either via pre-print sites or on Substack. For those interested in economic policy, the only way of judging the quality of research and policy analysis is to draw upon such sources and make your own judgements. The academic insistence on peer review is simply a modern version of medieval scholastics attempting to exclude challenges from unruly outsiders.
One of the other elements of the academic creed is a requirement to pay obeisance to past or current gods by including citations to papers that the authors have probably never read. My work is primarily empirical and I see no point in providing anything more than is essential to understand the analysis and its implications. I am not interested in increasing the citation counts for colleagues and others.
Challenges and corrections
No doubt some readers may disagree profoundly with some of what I write, either on the grounds that the analysis is wrong or the conclusions drawn from the analysis fail to give proper weight to other considerations. Such disagreements, provided that they are polite, can be constructive. So if you disagree with anything substantial in this Substack please contact me and explain why. I am happy to correct articles and to acknowledge anyone who points out error.
However, I regard some behaviour as beyond the pale. In 2013 David MacKay, when he was Chief Scientific Advisor at the (then) Department of Energy and Climate Change, circulated a paper in which he claimed that I had made a basic error in examining the performance of wind farms over time. Unfortunately, though he was a distinguished applied physicist he was not familiar with statistical methods. His claim rested on a misunderstanding of the way in I had applied what are known as instrumental variables in statistics.
Eventually, he admitted privately that his claim was wrong but refused to withdraw or correct the paper that he circulated. That is a classic bureaucratic response which highlights what is wrong with too much policy debate in many countries. The probability of being wrong sometimes is a cost of carrying out serious policy analysis.
My philosophy is that one should admit and learn from one’s mistakes. This is often not easy, but it is essential for both progress and the maintenance of a civilised community.
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