Chris Dillow

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.

Absolutely. Almost all politicians are ignorant of economics; chrisdillow.substack.com/p/politics-v... Singling out Polanski is mere partisanship.

It isn't orthodox economics that got us into this mess: it opposed austerity & Brexit, for example.

Wasn't there another more famous playwright who was a small-town grammar schoolboy?

Thanks. You're very kind. But I - like (eg) Dan Davies, Jo Michell, & Simon Wren Lewis don't have the profile of those Zack mentions.

Everyone's dunking on Polanski for this. But it's a sign of the general dearth of public intellectuals that there are so few good high-profile leftist economists.

This was my answer - "bygones are bygones" open.substack.com/pub/backofmi...

Here is a list of reasons why some of my hearings and trials this year have been delayed and kicked off into the long grass, stuck in our record court backlog. Serious allegations which will now be tried *years* after the event. 🧵👇

MPs and peers do worse than 10-year-olds in maths and English Sats Campaigners seeking abolition of year 6 SATs staged event at which children invigilated tests on parliamentarians

That MP isn't untypical: www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Starmer to back Budget after Reeves accused of misleading public The prime minister will commit the government to going

Is it possible to lie about something that is fictional anyway? This is a question about the philosophy of literature; it has sweet diddly to do with economics. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Also, the first five gigs many of us saw were in poky basements by unknown bands that we've long forgotten.

I sense (maybe wrongly) that "burn the heretic" comes more from the political establishment than from economists. That said, I find the orthodox-heterodox distinction deeply tiresome. What matters is what works, as the man said.