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Econ to Icon

Econ to Icon

By: Michael Kell
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What does it actually take to turn economic thinking into real-world change? Not in the textbook sense, but in the messy, political, human sense, where the best analysis can still get killed in a Treasury meeting, where losing an election at five in the morning in a leisure centre is how a career ends, and where a pension reform you care about has to be disguised as a Lib Dem concession before it gets through. Econ to Icon is a podcast about the people who have lived that gap between economic theory and economic reality. Hosted by economist Paul Johnson and careers coach Michael Kell, it brings together figures who have shaped British economic life from the inside — as ministers, civil servants, journalists, regulators, and advisors — and asks them not just what they did, but what it was actually like. The conversations go places that policy papers don't. Steve Webb describes the precise moment he decided to enter politics — watching a Conservative hold a seat on election night, furious at his own mild-mannered IFS neutrality. Sharon White reflects on implementing austerity while working inside the Treasury that designed it, and what she wished had been done differently. Stephanie Flanders talks about the vertigo of going live on the BBC economics editor, knowing that someone in the audience will catch you if you're wrong. Tim Harford explains how he wrote his first book with no agent, no publisher, no journalism experience — just 80,000 words and a conversation over coffee. Amelia Fletcher navigates two parallel careers — competition economist and indie rock musician — and finds they're less different than you'd think. Dan Corry reveals how a shadow budget designed to reassure voters instead handed the Conservative Party its most effective attack line. Each episode covers the substance — pension reform, the minimum wage, digital regulation, austerity trade-offs — but always alongside the human story: the turning points, the moments of doubt, the unexpected ways careers actually unfold. If you're interested in economics, in public policy, or simply in how people build careers that matter, Econ to Icon offers something rare: candour from people who were genuinely in the room.2026 Career Success Economics Political Science Politics & Government
Episodes
  • Dan Corry: Power, Influence and the Art of Getting Things Done

    Dan Corry: Power, Influence and the Art of Getting Things Done
    May 22 2026
    Dan Corry has spent most of his career close to the centre of British economic policy-making — but largely out of public view. As a civil servant, a think-tank economist, a special advisor across multiple government departments, and ultimately as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors at the Treasury during the 2008 financial crisis, he has been one of the more quietly influential figures in recent British economic history. In this episode he talks to Paul Johnson and Michael Kell about how policy actually gets made, what influence looks like when it doesn't come with a public profile, and what he found when he eventually left government for the charity sector. The career in brief Dan grew up in Barnes, south-west London, in a Labour-supporting household that was, he notes, probably the only one in the area with a Labour poster in the window. He read PPE at Oxford intending to focus on politics and philosophy, but gradually moved toward economics. After graduating he joined the Government Economic Service, working first at the Department of Employment and then at the Treasury during the Thatcher years — an interesting position, as he puts it, for someone whose sympathies lay firmly elsewhere. He left the civil service in 1989 to join the Labour Party's newly created Economic Secretariat, working through the years of opposition, then spent time at the Institute for Public Policy Research before returning to government as a special advisor in 1997. He worked across the Department of Trade and Industry, Number 10, and the Treasury — including at the heart of the response to the 2008 financial crisis — before moving in 2010 to lead the charity New Philanthropy Capital, where he spent over a decade. He remains involved in the charity sector and continues to advise government, most recently conducting a review of environmental regulation for DEFRA. On working for a government you disagreed with Dan is thoughtful about his years as a civil servant under Thatcher. He didn't experience it as a crisis of conscience — the civil service's job is to serve the elected government, and he did it — but he is honest that the atmosphere was slightly strange, peopled largely by those who had stayed in the public sector precisely because they believed in it, while those more sympathetic to the free market had left for the City. He also quietly got involved in the Labour Economic Strategies Group, a network of centre-left economists trying to develop credible policy thinking outside the party machinery. On the 1992 shadow budget One of the episode's most historically resonant passages covers Dan's involvement in John Smith's shadow budget ahead of the 1992 election — the document that has since become totemic in Labour folklore as a possible contributor to the party's defeat. Dan is proud that the numbers were never successfully challenged. But he reflects honestly on what went wrong politically: Labour had committed to significant increases in pensions and child benefit, had to find the money somewhere, and the National Insurance changes that resulted allowed the Conservatives to construct their "Labour will put up taxes by £1,000 per household" attack — which they ran regardless of what Labour actually said. The shadow budget was designed to reassure; it ended up providing ammunition. He draws an explicit line from that experience to Labour's self-imposed tax constraints in 2024. On life as a special advisor Dan gives one of the clearest accounts in the series of what special advisors actually do — and don't do. They are political appointees who can do things civil servants cannot: liaise across departments, push back on proposals that officials are recycling from a previous minister, and act as a conduit between the Secretary of State and the political world beyond the department. But the job is brutal in one specific way: your employment ends the moment your minister leaves. Dan had three Secretaries of State at the DTI — Margaret Beckett, Peter Mandelson, Steven Byers — and stayed through all three, which he describes as unusual. Watching civil servants test new ministers with proposals their predecessors had rejected was one of the more instructive lessons in how departments actually work. On the minimum wage Dan is rightly proud of his role in the introduction of the minimum wage — work that began during his time at the Department of Employment, continued through his years at IPPR, and came to fruition when Labour won in 1997. He traces the intellectual shift clearly: the standard civil service answer when he started had been that a minimum wage would destroy jobs, based on simple supply and demand. But American academic work — David Card and others — was beginning to show that in labour markets with monopsony characteristics, the opposite could be true. He credits the Low Pay Commission model — bringing together the CBI, TUC, small business representatives and academics to reach a ...
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    51 mins
  • Amelia Fletcher: Competition, Creativity and the Economist Who Rocks

    Amelia Fletcher: Competition, Creativity and the Economist Who Rocks
    May 22 2026
    Amelia Fletcher is almost certainly unique in British public life: a highly regarded competition economist who has spent decades at the centre of some of the biggest questions about how markets work, while simultaneously sustaining a serious and still-active career in music. In this episode she talks to Paul Johnson and Michael Kell about both — how she ended up in economics almost by accident, what competition policy actually does and why it matters, and what it means to have kept two very different creative lives running in parallel for forty years. The career in brief Amelia studied PPE at Oxford having done science A-levels and stumbled into economics almost by elimination — she liked the idea of philosophy and politics, turned out to be good at the economics, and ended up too qualified not to pursue it. After a PhD supervised by John Vickers, she moved into economic consulting, then joined the Office of Fair Trading as Chief Economist — a role she held for twelve years as the OFT became the Competition and Markets Authority. She is now a professor at the University of East Anglia, sits on various regulatory boards, and has been closely involved in shaping the UK and EU's approach to regulating digital markets. Alongside all of this, she has fronted a succession of indie bands since her first year at Oxford — most recently finding a new generation of listeners via TikTok, with her band Heavenly currently attracting around 430,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. On the music — dialling up the rock star The episode opens with Michael pressing Amelia to set aside her modesty and give full credit to her musical career. She obliges, up to a point. Her first band, Talulah Gosh, formed in her first year at Oxford, was offered a major label deal — which she turned down rather than leave university, thereby setting the template for the next four decades. Her doctorate-era band Heavenly became associated with the Riot Grrrl scene, and it is that catalogue that is now finding a new audience online. Her most rock-and-roll moment? Playing a white stadium in Spain with the entire audience singing along. She has never thrown a television out of a window. "I've been quite an economist-y sort of rock star," she says. On what competition policy actually does Amelia gives one of the clearest explanations in the series of why an economic institution that most people have never heard of shapes almost everything about daily life. The OFT and its successor the CMA exist to make markets work well for consumers — through competition enforcement, merger scrutiny, and consumer protection. She illustrates the point with two concrete examples: the long campaign against unauthorised overdraft fees, which took a Supreme Court defeat and years of regulatory pressure before the practice was effectively ended; and a cartel case against around 120 building companies who had been colluding on bids for public works. On the Facebook-Instagram merger One of the episode's most striking moments is Amelia's frank admission that the OFT cleared the Facebook acquisition of Instagram at phase one — when Instagram had around ten employees, almost no revenue, and looked like a photo filter app. She calls it straightforwardly: "That is seen as having been a highly problematic merger that we should have looked at in a lot more detail. That's my bad. I learned." On digital markets and the Furman Review A substantial part of the episode covers Amelia's work on the regulation of big tech. She was a member of the Furman panel — commissioned by the Treasury to examine competition in digital markets — which concluded that competition law alone was insufficient to address the dominance of Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook, and recommended a new regime of pro-competitive regulation. She explains clearly what makes digital markets structurally different: massive economies of scale, powerful network effects, the centrality of data as both input and output, and the ecosystem lock-in that makes it almost impossible for rivals to compete even with better products. The EU's Digital Markets Act and the CMA's new digital markets powers are the direct descendants of that work. On the CMA and growth Amelia pushes back — carefully but clearly — on the current government's pressure on the CMA to be more permissive about mergers in the name of growth. Competition, she argues, is generally what drives growth, not what impedes it. She is equally clear that the CMA can be outgunned politically — large companies can spend far more on lobbying than a public authority can resist — but that on the economics, the CMA's staff are remarkably good, motivated by genuine belief in what they're doing rather than salary. On economics and music — are they really so different? Paul frames the two sides of Amelia's life as almost diametrically opposed — economics as structure and logic, music as emotion and creativity. Amelia pushes back on ...
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    48 mins
  • Tim Harford: The Accidental Economist

    Tim Harford: The Accidental Economist
    May 22 2026
    Tim Harford is one of Britain's best-known explainers of economics — author of multiple bestselling books including The Undercover Economist, longtime columnist at the Financial Times, and presenter of BBC Radio 4's More or Less. But as this episode makes clear, almost none of it was planned. Tim talks to Paul Johnson and Michael Kell about a career built on curiosity, accident, and a willingness to follow what genuinely interested him rather than what seemed sensible. The career in brief Tim grew up in the south of England, a self-described nerd who wanted to write fantasy novels and published a role-playing fanzine as a teenager. He read PPE at Oxford — almost dropping economics at the end of the first year before a handwritten note from his tutor changed his mind — then spent a year teaching at University College Cork, returned to Oxford for a master's degree, and briefly considered academia before being told directly by his thesis supervisor that it wasn't where his comparative advantage lay. After an unhappy stint in management consultancy and a more interesting period working on Shell's scenarios team, he began writing The Undercover Economist in his spare time with no agent, no publisher, and no clear plan. An internship at the Financial Times, a stint at the World Bank, and then in 2006 everything came together at once: the book was published, the FT offered him a full-time role, and Radio 4 came calling. He has been presenting More or Less ever since. On almost not studying economics Tim is disarmingly honest about how little thought went into his academic choices. He ended up at Brasenose College partly because his father had been there. He chose PPE because it let him hedge between arts and sciences. He nearly dropped economics at the end of his first year and would have done so had his tutor, Peter Sinclair, not bothered to write him a letter. "If Peter had not written that letter, we certainly wouldn't be having this conversation," he says. It is a recurring theme: small moments of intervention or accident that redirected everything. On being told you're not good enough for academia When Tim was considering a return to academia, he phoned his thesis supervisor Paul Klemperer — a formidably brilliant economist — and asked what he thought. Klemperer told him plainly that it wasn't where his strengths lay. Tim recalls not feeling wounded by it at all. "He wasn't saying I was incompetent. He was saying this was not where my comparative advantage lay — and he was completely right." It is one of the episode's most memorable moments: the value of someone who respects you enough to tell you the truth. On writing The Undercover Economist The book began over coffee at Shell, when Tim told science writer David Bodanis he wanted to write something like E=mc² but for economics. Bodanis's response: "Are you waiting for permission? Who's stopping you?" Tim spent the next five years writing the book in his spare time, sending it to agents who responded with "maybes" rather than rejections, doing an internship at the FT, working at the World Bank — and then in 2006 it all clicked. The book caught a wave partly created by Freakonomics, which had come out six months earlier. Tim is modest about its success but characteristically analytical: "Sometimes books are popular because they're popular." On explaining economics without dumbing it down Tim is thoughtful about the craft of economic communication — finding the starting point in everyday life, making the familiar seem strange, and then explaining why it's strange. He's also clear-eyed about the limits: the book was written in the mode of a student rather than a reporter, with no interviews, no sources, just reading and observation. That constraint, he suggests, may have been part of what made it accessible. On More or Less and why numbers matter Now in his eighteenth year presenting More or Less, Tim makes a compelling case for why the programme matters: the BBC using its authority to take statistical claims seriously, to ask whether numbers are actually big or small, and to correct misinformation before it hardens into accepted wisdom. He gives a recent example spanning the menopause's effect on women's workforce participation and Manchester United's financial valuation — a range that captures exactly what the programme does. He is also honest that they make mistakes, and that the ones most likely to slip through are the ones where no one expects Tim to be wrong. On what economists should understand better Asked for the most important economic ideas he'd want people to grasp, Tim offers two: the possibility of non-zero-sum gains — that situations exist where everyone can be better off, and that economics is largely the business of finding those hidden free lunches — and the importance of scale, of asking whether something is actually big or small rather than just expressing it in impressive-sounding units. His third observation is...
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    45 mins
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