Skip to main content

Birkbeck economist challenges myths surrounding election debate

Coinciding with the release of his latest book, Professor Andy Ross, associate lecturer in Economics at Birkbeck, has been conferred a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Professor Andy Ross, associate lecturer in Economics at Birkbeck, has been conferred a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

A former deputy director of the UK Government Economic Service and deputy director at HM Treasury, the award of a Fellowship to Professor Ross recognises the role he has played in promoting high quality economic thinking, analysis and policy development as well as engagement across the social sciences within government.

He said: “I’m delighted to have been given this honour, which I know has come to me because of my work as a practitioner of economics, rather than because of any distinguished academic record, but I hope I can use my Fellowship of the Academy to bring about a greater integration of economics with policy and other social sciences – economics is best when it interacts with other disciplines.”

A Birkbeck alumnus, Andy left school at 15 ‘semi-literate’ and was a telephone engineer before taking A-levels in his mid-twenties.

He says: “The years in between leaving school and going back to studying were formative, and gave me social insights that would have been difficult to come by any other way. I eventually went to LSE and then on to Birkbeck to do a Master’s.

Teaching at Birkbeck

“Studying in the evening while I worked during the day was the only route by which I could gain a Master’s. There’s a lot to be said for working your way through study – I’m not sure I believe in full time higher education! Teaching adults who are out in the real world, and who really want to be at Birkbeck in the evening, is particularly rewarding.”

Andy worked in academia before joining the civil service in 2000 to jointly found the OECD’s leading micro-econometric laboratory at the Office for National Statistics, before moving to HM Treasury in 2005. He is a visiting Professor at Reading University, and a visiting research fellow at Leeds University.

A patron of the Economics Network and employer representative on the QAA subject benchmark panel for economics, Professor Ross has also recently published It’s the Economy, Stupid, an analysis of the economic issues he believes will decide the outcome of the general election, with co-authors Vicky Pryce and Peter Urwin.

Challenging myths

He said: “The book is for the general reader and is intended to provoke by challenging the widely held myths surrounding the election debate, such as on the economy itself and related big issues such as immigration and the NHS. Hopefully, it  helps rebalance what people are reading in the tabloid press, but we also feel there is too big a disjoint between what economists do and what people are interested in.  Economics can become fixated with answering questions nobody’s asked or bogged down in arcane minutiae - we wanted to explain economic and financial events as simply as possible.

“Academics have a responsibility to explain their subject in ways that the lay person can understand, and economics is far too important to be left to economists! When you are in government you don’t see issues bracketed as disciplines – they are a mixture of politics, psychology, historical context, sociology and more.

“Economists working in government have to take decisions based on imperfect knowledge, make judgements and give their best interpretation of the future: It’s generally about dilemmas rather than lemmas. I see the social sciences as a tremendous power for good, but their potential is underexploited. There’s too big a gap between academics and politics.”

Find out more

More news about: