Words matter. These are the best Evan Davis Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The key thing about me is that I’m really not very interesting.
I actually profoundly think the world’s a better place when economics is fairly boring… The more boring the better.
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 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.
Most people hugely underestimate the amount of ’empty space’ we have in our country. Fly over the U.K., and you see that human settlement does not fill up the U.K. at all. It accounts for something of the order of 15 per cent of the landmass.
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.
I’ve never enjoyed sleep as much until I got the ‘Today’ job. There is something about early sleep that’s much better than late sleep. I feel myself going to sleep; I don’t just plonk my head on the pillow. It’s a sort of winding-down thing.
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.
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.
Nice guys finish last, but we get to sleep in.
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.
I don’t want to sound like ‘chirpy Evan’ who’s just bouncing around with his unrealistic views and doesn’t understand what’s going on.
Art can help a town by attracting a certain Bohemian population that adds life to the bars, character to the streets and a buzz to the name. Employers may then follow. But art can’t do much if every town does it. There aren’t enough Bohemians.
There is a strong link between the following three things: exporting, manufacturing and the degree of saving by the population. It’s complicated, but if the population doesn’t save, the economy will not tend to export as much, and if it doesn’t export as much, it won’t manufacture enough.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some people harbour an awkward clash of feelings – homosexual attraction on the one hand and shame or embarrassment about that attraction on the other. It is well known that the mind struggles to sustain conflicting views.
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.
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.
It’s amazing, if you know what you want to say, how fast it is to write.
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.
Mistakes are nothing to be ashamed of.
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?’
Personally, I’d like us to have a few more women on the ‘Today’ programme.
It is no wonder that bank capital is regulated. When borrowing and lending is profitable, it is tempting for banks to scale up their operations and to borrow and lend too much in relation to their capital, in effect reducing the effectiveness of the potential capital cushion.
It’s not a bad idea to occasionally spend a little time thinking about things you take for granted. Plain everyday things.
Men don’t know much about women. We do know when they’re happy. We know when they’re crying, and we know when they’re pissed off. We just don’t know in what order these are gonna come at us.
Crossrail is a prime example of infrastructure. It is a rather deadly word, but I think it is exciting stuff, the civil engineering which makes Britain tick – the bridges, tunnels, power and water networks, which bind us together.
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.
Interestingly, human irrationality is a hot topic in economics at the moment. Behavioural economics it’s called, on the cusp of economics and psychology.
In principle, there are only three main components of spending that much matter to monetary policy: consumer spending, business investment and exports and trade.
Interest rate cuts have an effect in stimulating an economy by directly or indirectly making someone, somewhere, spend more than they otherwise would. That extra spending increases demand and ensures that we all carry on with work to do, without us having to slash our prices or our wrists.
As it happens, I have personally been something of an enthusiast for the London Olympic games, mainly on the grounds a) that a bit of wasteland will be made nice and b) that it tends to make everybody happy that their country should be the centre of world attention for a couple of weeks in their life.
But beginners to the World Economics Forum have to understand there is no single Davos experience, and there is no single Davos community either. There are numerous tribes who interact only at a minimal level.
I swing both ways. I can see things from a kind of conservative point of view and from a more socially liberal or left-wing point of view.
My instinct is to assume that we consumers are an inconsistent bunch. We like competition if it delivers low prices, but grumble if it delivers the bad news that prices need to go up.
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.
