Yesterday, I interviewed the labour MP Frank Field, the man whose parliamentary question sparked this week’s furore over the statistics on immigration. He correctly identified a bungle in the government statistics and provoked two separate revisions of the government’s view on how many new jobs immigrants are now doing.
Mr Field is, of course, in favour of bold benefit reforms. His question was provoked, he said, by his wondering how to square a booming economy with large numbers of people still claiming benefits. And when I went to talk to him about his own views on migrant worker statistics, he was quick to turn the conversation to welfare reform.
I have a lot of respect for Mr Field, a thoughtful politician who was at pains to emphasise his admiration for hard-working migrants. But I am a little depressed that a man who wants to talk about welfare reform feels his cause best served by using immigration as a starting point. I wasn’t convinced that there is any connection between immigration and welfare reform, and I am not sure Mr Field is convinced either. Mr Field told me that the debate he had sparked would move, in a few days, from immigration to welfare reform. I’ve seen no signs of that.

Update: George Parker has more.

My esteemed colleages Clive Crook and John Gapper are now blogging. Please take a look.

David Warsh finds much to like about Partha Dasgupta’s book, Economics: A very short introduction:

The result is a serious textbook treatment shaped around the lives of two ten-year-old "literary grandchildren," Becky in a small Midwestern suburb where her father works for a firm specializing in property law, Desta in a village in southwestern Ethiopia, where her father farms half a hectare of land.
Photographs depicting the wealth of a typical European or American family, laid out in the driveway of a two-car garage, contrasted with the meager personal belongings of a family arrayed before their thatch-roofed hut, have become common enough in introductory texts in recent years, but Dagupta follows his conceit throughout his book, demonstrating with particular force the extent to which institutional arrangements are at the heart of the differences between both places.

Warsh also touches on the work of - ahem - other popular economics writers.