This is now more temporally distant from us than it was to the abdication crisis. No, don't thank me.

Wrong question. The issue isn't: how much money would a wealth tax raise? It's: how many real resources would it release? If the rich pay the tax by merely cutting savings, the answer's: none. And so there'll be no labour released to work in public services.

True this. Problem is, voters opinions have been formed somehow, & our political class is incurious about just how: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/what-the-p...

One thing about Starmer is that he had what many people want in a politician - a successful career before entering politics. And yet this doesn't seem to have been much use.

in which I think about Goodhart's Law, and end up concluding that it's usually a sign you're trying to do something you shouldn't. backofmind.substack.com/p/trying-to-...

If you haven't seen it, you might be interested in this recent debate in Political Quarterly: politicalquarterly.org.uk/blog/sortiti... politicalquarterly.org.uk/blog/differe...

New substack: our political culture deters sane people from becoming MPs. Tackling this requires radical change: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/the-burden...

Free market economics and a pacificist foreign policy might seem an odd combination now, but it wasn't always so: it was the politics of Richard Cobden, for example. This is but one example of how our politics lacks serious cognitive diversity.

Good thread. There's tons a serious leftist govt could do whilst running a tight fiscal policy, as I said here: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/some-lefti... Social democrats' habit of viewing economic policy only through a "tax & spend" lens is a barrier to serious thinking about the economy.

"The Labour right is behaving as if its incentives are not to win the next election but to get cushy jobs outside politics after it." I wrote that a few weeks ago: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/bad-incent... It'd be nice if they at least tried to prove me wrong.

Perhaps it would permit more cool-headed discussion if these people could spell out precisely what the "valid concerns" are about immigration, as distinct from the invalid ones. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

I preferred the Friedman view - that "there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to ...increase its profits" www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/a...

The state should do its job and pool the damn risk instead of burdening ordinary citizens, most of whom don't want this. I don't know if the political economy exists to get us from here to there, but if lefties are so desperate to nationalise something, they might want to look at pensions

Sad to see this. His shows in the 80s introduced thousands of us to great music we might well not have heard otherwise. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"Almost all organizational structures tend to produce false images in the decision-maker, and...the larger and more authoritarian the organization, the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds" - Kenneth Boulding. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I'd like someone from a govt point of view to explain why it was worth the risk of having Mandelson as US Ambassador - coz to an outsider the risks were much more obvious than his abilities relative to career diplomats.

Just got back from an NT live screening of Arthur Miller's All My Sons. Do yourselves a favour and go see it if you can. It's absolutely brilliant.

New substack: markets, if they are to work for everyone, must be embedded in particular institutions and cultures. It’s far from clear that 21st century capitalism has these. chrisdillow.substack.com/p/the-cost-o...

It’s genuinely staggering how little substance there is to today’s instalment of the BBC’s attempt to create a national crisis out of a few unproven allegations of immigration fraud 1/

New substack: income inequality has fallen slightly, but inequalities of power are a big problem: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/one-cheer-...

Good this: www.cer.eu/insights/ene.... Calls for more military spending might be an example of the medieval doctrine of signatures. A better way to protect ourselves from people being dickheads in the middle east is investment in green energy rather than the military.

I hate it when we go from "committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" to "committee for managing the personal fixations of a small number of billionaires"

US: imposes tariffs on UK, forces up prices of oil & food. China: sells good value cars. Reform: China is a threat to the UK economy. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

It’s the 78th anniversary of Oxford graduate (with a first), bestselling author, Fabian, public philosopher, after-dinner speaker, parliamentary candidate, and BBC radio ‘Brains Trust’ personality Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad monumentally fucking over his own career by being done for fare-dodging 🧵

New substack: "Dilettantes and ironists might be more civilized people than fanatics, but, on their own, civilized people don’t defeat Nazis." chrisdillow.substack.com/p/fanatics-v...

Anyone confidently predicting that technological change will drain away the economic rent that a high value profession extracts needs to confront the obvious counterexample: finance. It's taken 5%+ from the economy forever, even as computers, communications etc has constantly revolutionised it 3/

New post out: "Understanding MAGA" I look at the four different strands that make up MAGA philosophy (such as it is), the contradictions between them, and whether it can survive as a movement post Trump. (Free to read) open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/u...

I'm shocked - shocked - to discover that somebody who supported fiscal austerity at the zero bound knows nothing about economics.

New substack: whereas well-functioning markets can make bad people do good things, political systems can make even good people do bad things. chrisdillow.substack.com/p/in-it-for-...

The US's greatest asset is its music, film & TV. These make foreigners feel they know the country. This gives it exorbitant privilege (willing to lend to it at low rates); exaggerates its internationalism (eg contribution to WWII); & disguises the fact that it's in some ways a rogue state.

I muse on what it is about Palantir's business model that triggers my spidey sense ... backofmind.substack.com/p/brain-dono...

Thread. For Tories, like bad managers, the purpose of employment isn't to get things done, but to submit to hierarchy.

Stories of what happens when institutions/cultures work well (those of science) and when they don't (those of politics).

Phil Burton-Cartledge On Trashing MPs averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2026/04/on-t...

Many good points here, on both sides. But I suspect there's not a single thing that'll boost growth everywhere. We need a broad spectrum approach; we can build trams AND stop restricting universities AND [insert many other policies here].

Why do our second-tier cities underperform? Why do we have fewer trams in the UK? I try my best to give an answer to these two interconnected questions. chriscurtismk.substack.com/p/to-grow-th...

Adam Smith famously said that people have a "disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful". He omitted to add this this is true even when the rich and powerful have absolutely zero moral or intellectual worth.

Unpopular opinion: we shouldn't talk only of inequalities of wealth and income, but also of inequalities of power - not just in politics but in work and marketplaces. It's plausible that these do more economic harm than income inequalities.

I'm not worried that politicians are out of touch with people. Instead, my concern is that MPs, by the very virtue of being MPs, have a distorted view of the world. Here's one I wrote earlier: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/weird-poli...

This is one of many examples of how mainstream Westminster politics is entirely innocent of any knowledge of the social sciences.

New substack: "Talk about migrants being a drain on the exchequer is a pseudo-technocratic cover for disliking immigration on other grounds." chrisdillow.substack.com/p/on-the-fis...

Folk are rightly dunking on this. But maybe young MPs would be more aware of the importance of price signals if our loudest voices since the 80s had made a proper case for free markets rather than use them as cover for increasing inequality. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I'm a big fan of the triple lock. But this defence of it is stupid: there's no need to play off old against young (quite the opposite; the thing about the lock is that it benefits younger people more), nor to pretend that the lock is only affordable if we cut other benefits.

Good. Problem is, though, that once you say that the biggest political decision of recent years was wrong, you have to look at why our public sphere was so bad as to cause such a decision.

It's such a common blindspot for the left, to advocate a centralising, universalising state, only to later find that state weaponised for regressive ends

"Far too often, politicians have tried to make difficult problems go away by encouraging people not to talk about them." This is far truer of our economic problems than it is of immigration - a fact Lam doesn't mention. These are not people of good faith.

Trump's presidency vindicates the view of right libertarians & classical liberals that government can be stupid & evil. You'd imagine, therefore, that these would be noisy & growing in numbers. But they are (mostly) not - which vindicates the most cynical view of them.

The exact opposite of what should be done. If there is a case for fiscal easing (a big if), it should consist in a tax cut, not in suppressing the price signal telling us to use less oil.

Royal Mail is exhibit A for the idea that economists should take technical regress seriously (management is, among other things, a technology): chrisdillow.substack.com/p/technical-...