Chris Dillow

"He did get a degree of sorts at Oxford, and I suppose you can always fool some of the people some of the time" - P.G.Wodehouse.

Of course it is expensive, but that doesn't mean it's not worth doing.

The Day the Music Dies? Why time is running out to tackle the decline in UK music education - Royal Northern College of Music Dr Jo Yee Cheung, pianist and Chief Executive/Founder of Olympias Music Foundation A moment of optimism first. Around […]

Not just jazz - all music. www.rncm.ac.uk/news/the-day...

Top tip: if you want a decent England cricket team, try teaching the game in state schools so the team isn't drawn from just a minority who have dads who love the game or who are privately educated.

Yes. The problem, though, isn't merely the ethical one of reducing people to economic units. It's also the narrowly economic one that one's wage isn't equal to one's marginal social product. If you must be a narrow technocrat, at least be a competent one.

Man of the people Nigel Farage says he 'doesn't listen to music, watch TV or read' The Ukip leader spoke following a challenging couple of weeks for his party

Yes. I found this both revealing and damning: www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

Also, the idea that one's wage is a good measure of one's contribution to the economy (let alone society) is just ideologically-motivated drivel.

Young people on benefits to be offered construction and hospitality work The government says it will fund training and work experience for 350,000 not in work or education.

In fairness to Labour, if these are quality jobs rather than just a way of massaging down the numbers on benefits, this would be very good: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Do you mean that time in 2008, or in 1992-93 or in 1987?

Loads of people are thick; the problem is that these thick people have significantly more political influence than smarter people. That's a problem of structures, not individuals.

Wanting the UK to reindustrialize is like Sultana wanting to
nationalize everything: unless you've done *a ton* of careful thought, it's just a mindless whim.

The significant fact about Truss isn't merely that she is a stupid narcissistic lunatic; it's that a majority of Tory members and a good portion of the press thought that she'd be a good PM.

Delegitimating Labour Not only are the right wing press in this country poisonous, they're petty-minded. Their latest victim is Rachel Reeves. The story, in case ...

"... pedantically scrutinising what Reeves did when she was 14, all the sheer absurdity and oil tankers of bile shows they're not content to box Labour in politically, but would rather this party, this interloper in their politics, be squeezed out for good."

But the political class has in recent years been surprised by: support for Brexit; support for Corbyn; the collapse & subsequent rise in govt borrowing costs; & the rise of racism. It's not obvious therefore that those who do it for a job are doing it well.

But it's tricky: eg the loudest voices might well be unrepresentative and a focus on everyday events can overlook slow-moving trends.

The problem isn't simply: how do MPs communicate with voters in a post-newspaper age? It's also: how do they learn about what's happening in the country, given that the media no longer reliably tells them?

Why can't the English teach their politicians how to think? How warped incentives are shallowing out our discourse

🚨NEW BLOGPOST🚨

Are our politicians stupid?

Not really, no. But incentives and attitudes mean they often seem it. Rarely do they speak at length, with intellectual clarity. Not because they can't, but because there is little space to.

www.joxleywrites.jmoxley.co.uk/p/why-cant-t...

That piece confirms my view that the good things about MMT aren't modern: govts used credit & price controls and anti-monopoly policy to combat inflation in the post-1945 years. (IMO the case for these varies according to circumstance.)

You could. But MMT as such tells us nothing about the merits of doing so.

Yes you can. But investments require real resources. How many of these we can use without stoking inflation is a purely empirical matter: I fear there are fewer than we actually need - hence, IMO, the need for tax rises.

I'd always assumed they were different answers to different questions, and so are as consistent or not as you'd like. But I might be wrong: I've never devoted much time to general theories of everything.

Don't. Quite a bit is ideology wrapped up in maths. I was very lucky to have learned before the great forgetting, and on the job for the empirics.

I fear so. That's the point I was making here: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/the-fiscal... The qn of how binding is the inflation constraint is a purely empirical one, in which MMT per se is irrelevant.

Yes. But much of what's good in MMT isn't M: you can find it in Beveridge's Full Employment in a Free Society or Dow & Saville's Critique of Monetary Policy. But then, quite often what we need isn't new thinking, but old thinking.

Yes: the US's exorbitant privilege means finance is even less of a constraint than it is elsewhere. And yes, there's something conservative about MMT, insofar as it does distract us from questions of ownership.

"You can create money out of nothing, but you can’t create doctors, schools, or consumer goods." Nail. Head.

read it in the original a call for indications of interest

in which, I reveal an exciting new intellectual luxury goods market! backofmind.substack.com/p/read-it-in...

He has James Meadway, who's good. But he could be advised by the best economists of all time and he'd still get as much stick as he does now; most of his critics don't really care about intellectual standards.

Thank God for that. I was dreading it would be Amol Rajan.

I didn't intend it as a defence. All parties have been guilty of gross ignorance of basic economics.