once again, the irony of ASI/AGI guys is that if what they were claiming was true, they are essentially proving the Second International correct in thinking that capitalism does in fact overturn itself automatically into post-capitalism

I don't usually write personal stuff, but a few words about my experience of being interviewed by Gary Stevenson. It started with a nice chat, comparing taste in hoodies... then the tone changed. He demanded to know why I'd deleted a tweet criticising him.

Is welfare spending ''out of control''? It's estimated to be 11.1 per cent of GDP this financial year. That's just 1.1 per cent of GDP higher than in 2007-08, and total welfare spending has actually fallen by 0.9 per cent of GDP since 2012-13 ⤵️

Britons tend to feel it's more important for an Andy Burnham government to pursue policies it believes are right than to stick to the policies in the Labour manifesto Pursue policies it believes are right: 48% Stick to manifesto promises: 16% Something else: 14% yougov.com/en-gb/daily-...

Labour is up/the Greens are down 3 points in the polls since the local elections

once again

Not to obsess over decentralisation but I think fundamentally the UK Government's approach to local government reform in England is paradoxically neither small nor big enough, when compared with pretty much any other country outside these (very bad at local government) islands.

Community detection and force directed graph layout for local authorities in England and Wales based on 2021 commuting flows

The top 10 largest urban areas in the UK according to the OECD city (continuous area of >=1,500 pop/sq. km) and FUA (city + local authorities where >=15% commute to city) definitions

Among the G7, IMF forecasts UK to have second lowest debt and deficit by 2030 www.ft.com/content/c2de...

i will say that one way in which i agree AC is worsening climate change is that it has allowed more Americans to live in the South

I dont get this "AC is a new world only technology" take. AC is in basically every building in East Asia and was stated by LKY as a primary driver behind Singapore's economic miracle It's ok to Be Chill

The prospect of a Reform government makes me even more convinced that parliamentary sovereignty is not good

It's really depressing that the Labour right's lesson from New Labour broadly seems to have been 'relentlessly target what you perceive to be the median voter' instead of 'be Keynesian and welfarist instead of statist and authoritarian'

I'm amazed at how many things these people believe with the sum total of evidence being vibes

Three charts, since the UK's fiscal position is in the news (again). Any discussion of this issue really needs to recognise (i) the long average maturity of UK government debt, and (ii) the tightening already baked into the UK government's fiscal plans. (1/4)

The BES panel has some cool data on where voters place parties and themselves on immigration and redistribution. Voter perceptions of Labour under Starmer (wave 20) on have moved a lot further to the auth/right than they moved to the lib/left under Corbyn (waves 7-19)

My theory is that voters are surprisingly indifferent to scale, so if you’re going to do something to piss them off you might as well do a *big* (and ideally slightly dull) thing that gives you the potential for impact. bsky.app/profile/tacj...

I agree that employer NICs was a suboptimal way to raise revenue compared to raising income tax, VAT, or employee NICs, but the fact that they did actually do a big broad-based tax increase on wage income kind of undercuts the argument that avoiding the tax pledge would have made a big difference

Fascinating the extent to which people responsible for billions of pounds base their views on nothing but vibes.

High executive turnover is one of those things that seems bad but is there any actual evidence that it is bad? Italy and Japan had high turnover during both their post-war boom periods as well as their stagnation since the mid 90s

Rising productivity + a weakening labour market is consistent with both the employment rights + minimum wage + employer NICs is killing low productivity jobs story and a weaker than expected aggregate demand story. I wonder if we have been assigning too much weight to the former vs. the latter

This is old news already, but I genuinely wonder why someone for whom "raise taxes to spend more on welfare" is a proposition they can reject out of hand would want to join a social democratic political party in the first place

After adjusting for regional price parity within the US and PPP with the UK, hourly wages in the UK are as high or higher than California up to the median -- but 25% lower at the 90th percentile

The Lab+LD+Green vote share is unchanged on 2024 and the Con+Ref+Restore vote share up by 1 point

Not the main point but it’s hilarious to me that all of the Labour nostalgic fantasising about their lost coalition is pining for days when that coalition was also woefully insufficient and they lost almost every election

I've written pieces setting out the case for how the UK would be a happier place if its elites accepted that the most stable outcome for their state is to become Sweden with nukes, but the problem with that take now is that the Swedes are going to hit 3% of GDP for defence a decade before the Brits

I read the report this morning. I'll have more to say when I have time, but it is largely a series of unsubstantiated assertions, airing of grievances, and basic misreporting of data. But on this one issue, here are the actual median wages of graduates and non-graduates

UK tax has gone up significantly over the last 25 years But the tax paid by the average UK worker has not This apparent miracle was achieved by taxing “other people”: higher earners, capital, property, banks, etc The strategy has run out of road A 🧵 on what happens next.

I think Ethan is the only one I've seen flag this vibes paper. One of the most striking graphs of the decade--all of a sudden spending completely decoupled from sentiment and correlation has stayed at near zero for years

DfE pupil data is out today and shows that the number of private school pupils has dropped 5.6% since VAT was introduced. Not 25% like the independent schools council predicted. Or the 50% we saw in some right-wing papers. 5.6%.

Last year, we shared a paper showing that Labour's accommodation of the radical right did not work. We now have a new version of the paper online: osf.io/preprints/so...

Apropos of the ongoing debate, here is the PWT GDP per capita figures for both EU-27 and EU-15 countries relative to US. Using current PPP (Krugman), constant national prices (Aghion et al.), and the chained PPP (which I prefer).

Core benefit rates for young people have fallen considerably compared to wages since 2013-14. work incentives have actually increased for young people in receipt of benefits in recent years. So, UC rates are unlikely to be incentivising more young people to remain out of work. ➡️ buff.ly/gABGpwv

I wrote about immigration policy in Britain this week. Britain has shut the door on the most economically desirable kind of migrant. www.economist.com/britain/2026...

The household in the Telegraph's Henry game actually isn't in that high of a household income percentile. Henry's annual net income of £58,200 is only 11% higher than the median once you adjust for household size and composition according to the DWP's latest HBAI stats (www.gov.uk/government/s...)

Zohran just cited Minneapolis, Austin, and Auckland as cities that lowered housing costs via upzoning certified ball knowledge, Auckland is a deep YIMBY cut

One mildly interesting thing: Blair's recent essay is a total repudiation of Blairism. It doesn't at all resemble what he did as PM, especially on tax and spend. And yet 'Blairites' are largely applauding it as a serious document (it isn't). Maybe it really is just vibes all the way down.

it’s more that the essay rejects Blairism as it actually existed: - the minimum wage and social chapter - doubling nhs spending and record satisfaction - falling pensioner and child poverty It’s far more detached from the condition of Britain than Labour in 90s or 2000s

I have no comment on the policy or political implications of this, but personally I'm already not super happy about my state pension age being 68 and would gladly choose a lower pension/no further increases in age outcome

Three facts that people often get mixed up: - income inequality stopped rising in the UK after the 1980s - it is *much higher* than it was in pre-Thatcher - income inequality in the UK is higher than most OECD countries (and all of the European ones)

Unpopular opinion: it's fine to not have a Growth Strategy because governments have limited influence over growth in the first place. Not having a political economy is a much bigger problem.

While Tony Blair is trashing UK govt energy policy, NESTA analysis finds "early signs [it] may be working" 2022: Gas prices went up 100%, electricity 83% (roughly 1:1) 2026: Gas +28%, elec 6% (5:1 = "electricity beginning to decouple from gas") www.nesta.org.uk/blo...

Tony Blair’s role in government was to convince people that a left wing policy agenda was centrist. Tony Blair’s role in retirement is to convince people that being very right wing is centrist.

Public spending is up by 3.5 percentage points of GDP in the last decade, just over half of which is debt interest, with the rest split roughly evenly between investment and current spending (welfare spending is down on 2015/16)

The truth, awkwardly for an essay that argues that policy not politics must come first, is that this is an essay that puts politics not serious policy first

Good to see a minister push back against the content of the Blair piece. Particularly on the incredibly lazy "taxes have risen because of benefits" stuff.

Bleakly ironic that the "Blairite" proposals i set out here - more "liberal", open, market-friendly policies on EU, migration and tax - are rejected by 2026 Blair. www.ft.com/content/7235...

Except it isn't what he did in government! He raised spending massively, raised taxes, increased welfare spending, increased immigration and was pro-EU integration. Now he's against all those things.

In what world does welfare spending matching 2015/16 levels as a % of GDP count as it "ballooning"?