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Chris Dillow

@chrisdillow.bsky.social
6K followers 1.7K following 1.8K posts

Bourgeois interests, proletarian instincts.

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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Yes. And tax rises could actually exacerbate the problem, even though they might well be necessary.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
True: warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/econ...
warwick.ac.uk
The Visual Politics of Decline: How Empty High Streets Fuel Populism
May’s local elections saw a surge in support for the right-wing populist party Reform. What might be driving this swing away from mainstream parties? Do the results reflect what voters are seeing in t...
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Reposted by Chris Dillow
Unofficial BBCNews (UK) Bot @bbcnews-uk-rss.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Codebreaker, 103, kept his WW2 heroics a secret for decades
bbc.co.uk
Codebreaker, 103, kept his WW2 heroics a secret for decades
Fred Vanke was sworn to secrecy but has now been honoured by Bletchley Park.
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Pete Miles @petermiles.eurosky.social · 09/10/2026
Geoff Mulgan makes the case for 'Cognitive Rearmament' to tackle misinformation and cognitive decline. (The term Collective Stupidity appears, like it.) geoffmulgan.substack.com/p/the-case-f...
geoffmulgan.substack.com
The Case for Cognitive Rearmament
Taking misinformation and cognitive decline seriously
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Sathnam Sanghera @sathnam.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Dear tv and radio producers. Thankyou for the invitation. But, no, I do not want to appear on your show to defend the idea that I am English, after 50 years of living and working here, because the increasingly feral right want to turn this into a "debate" and you cannot see how you're being played
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Dan Neidle @danneidle.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Kemi Badenoch wants to exempt the family home from inheritance tax. But that creates a perverse incentive for elderly people to *upsize* to save IHT. That could double the cost of the policy, and push £100bn+ from savings into housing. A 🧵 on bad tax cuts.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I wrote yesterday that the BBC was complicit in the country's dumbing down. Today, it cuts Thinking Allowed & Free Thinking. There was a time when the ruling class at least tried to prove us Marxists wrong; now, it has given up.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Yes. We can add compound growth to the long list of economic concepts that politicians don't understand.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
New substack: why there's no place for good ideas in politics: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/who-needs-...
chrisdillow.substack.com
Who needs thought?
Capitalist politics now militates against good ideas in politics
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Tories on Tuesday: "we'll spend £10bn on a missile system we don't understand". Tories on Wednesday "we'll cut taxes!" These are not serious people.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
"Don't speak ill of the dead" they say. But if you do, don't hold back: anwilson.substack.com/p/jeffrey-ar...
anwilson.substack.com
Jeffrey Archer
Fraudulence on a criminal scale
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
"Stop outsourcing your thinking to poorly understood polls and focus groups" is good advice for everyone.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
In fairness, countless technologies have been adopted that have had downsides (eg all those that contributed to climate change). The qns are: do the upsides of AI outweigh the harms? (Don't know). And: do we have the political institutions to actually decide this for the benefit of us all? (No).
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
"Spending more on defence" is such a stupid framing. What we need (if that) is more personnel, materiel, organization etc. "More spending" confuses inputs with outputs, & could be merely corporate welfare for military contractors.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Yes! Also, it's a hollow threat. If the project is profitable, other investors will step in.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
But he had to hammer it home, & discredit & marginalize the Tories as vandals. Instead, he accepted some of their agenda (eg on immigration).
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears" wrote Shakespeare, although there's no record of him actually attending Julius Caesar's funeral.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I agree! One of my beefs with Starmer is that he made zero effort to prove us wrong.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
But my point is that he didn't need a fully articulated programme, good though that would have been. What he needed was: "The Tories have wrecked everything; it'll take years to fix it." This would have bought him time.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
No, he didn't - and he was obviously wrong even at the time.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
True. I was surprised Starmer didn't emphasize this more. He should have given a full audit of public sector failures, presenting the Tories as wreckers; repeated that the fire brigade isn't accountable to the arsonist; & stressed that the repair job would take years.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
This reminds me of one of my favourite papers ever: Werner Troesken on snake oil sellers: www.nber.org/system/files...
nber.org
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
An under-appreciated fact is the extent to which our preferences are shaped by what we perceive to be available. This matters for (among other things) debates about social mobility, immigration or the state of the public sphere.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
This is naive of Burnham. If ADUG's investments in Manchester were profitable, somebody else would have made them. And if they're not, it's reputation laundering. Luckily, there's no precedent for there being any corruption in urban regeneration. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
Andy Burnham 'really concerned' if Man City owners sell up after rule breaches
The prime minister compares the allegations against Man City to the plight of his own club Everton.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
"Too technical" is the point! Some issues should be decided by expertise, not polling. That's why we put "representative" into representative democracy.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I said yesterday that "treating the triple lock issue as one of pensioners vs non-pensioners is silly identity politics". The Tories always live down to expectations.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Good qn. To the extent that we don't, it's precisely because we cannot rely on our political system to do the right thing.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Praise for Burnham's speech is OK; it was better than Healey's vacuous drivel. But it misses a key point about politics - that we over-rate words & under-rate power, interests, administration etc.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
We'd be giving up some years of larger pension rises than the TL would provide, & this absence compounds over time.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I'd suggest: "Keep the TL: the state is better than the private sector at providing for our retirement." "Scrap it: it's one of the prices worth paying for social care insurance". For me, though, the test of these arguments is not public opinion; people defer far too much to this.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
If these are the arguments for keeping or scrapping the TL, then gawd help 'us, coz they're abysmal.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Treating the triple lock issue as one of pensioners vs non-pensioners is silly identity politics. The qn is: how do we best prepare for our retirements, & should we sacrifice some of this preparation to pay for social care insurance? I need convincing.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
True. Labour should be calling higher petrol/diesel prices & higher bond yields the Trump tax - which is far more accurate than saying that Truss crashed the economy.
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Ewan McGaughey @ewanmg.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
My report on fixing the water system is out with @cmmonwealth.bsky.social: 💦transfer the leakiest, polluting companies to public hands for £0 🌊audit the rest to gauge repair costs, and public ownership is likely to cost £12bn, saving up to £1.4bn in 3 years www.common-wealth.org/publications...
common-wealth.org
Crystal Clear: the Solutions for Clean, Running Water
The clearest and most cost-effective route to genuine public control of England's water is through public ownership.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Thanks! I suspect tax resistance stems in part from voters having lost confidence in the ability of the state to solve collective action problems. Whether this loss is warranted or not, the fact is that we have a big problem with our political culture.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Yes it does. This is why young people must support the TL too; their alternative is to work longer or hand money over to inefficient private pension providers.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
New substack: nobody wants free markets any more: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/who-wants-...
chrisdillow.substack.com
Who wants free markets?
Support for free markets has died, partly for bad reasons.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
The TL is affordable! It's existence is one of the very few sensible things govts have done since 2010. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
theguardian.com
Scrapping the pensions triple lock would disadvantage young people in future | Chris Dillow
The main beneficiaries of ending the government guarantee would be fund managers, says the economics writer Chris Dillow
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
It's not pensioners who benefit most from the triple lock: the bigger beneficiaries are younger people, as these have more years of pension growth ahead of them.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Coz the alternative is a lottery in which we each risk losing £000s. I don't want to face this risk coz some dickheads have an imbecile ideology.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Yes! Our problem is that the public sphere has suffered a tragedy of the commons. The answer is either to repair it, which requires strong collective action, or to ignore the media as noisy propaganda & get on with the job of good government. Labour is mostly doing neither.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
The problem of social care is largely one of a missing insurance market. The obvious solution is to pay for care via general taxes, treating these as if they were insurance premia. Cutting benefits or the triple lock are bad alternatives.
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Will Jennings📉🗳️ @drjennings.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I'm increasingly disillusioned with the (policy) ideas ecosystem in the UK - it seems like underlying (social) scientific research is less and less influential and there's increasing dominance of PR and pseudo-research.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
£17bn is absurdly over-precise. But the general message is OK if you want to attract Tory waverers: "if you want tax cuts, we need to rejoin the single market." www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
theguardian.com
Ed Davey promises £17bn income tax cut if Lib Dems are elected
Growth created by rejoining EU single market and customs union would fund change, Davey tells the party’s conference
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Yes. It's odd partly because Russian society at the time was so odd. One thing Dostoyevsky was great at was writing scenes that stay with you - eg the horse-beating.
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Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Here's a chart from the post.... quite a change in a single generation.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Good thread. Marx called it commodity fetishism - the process whereby a relationship between people looks like one between people and things: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/marx-on-ai
chrisdillow.substack.com
Marx on AI
Technical change is an issue of what capitalism does to workers.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Yes. Funnily enough, though, nobody cares about well-functioning free markets now.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
This whole issue is framed wrongly. As I've written: "Worrying that some migrants won’t pay their way is a displacement activity - an attempt to blame migrants for the failings of British capitalism." chrisdillow.substack.com/p/on-the-fis...
chrisdillow.substack.com
On the fiscal costs of immigration
Are immigrants a drain on the tax-payer? It's a silly question.
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Chris Dillow @chrisdillow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Maybe. What we can say is that you don't become a billionaire merely by being clever. You become one by working long after you've made more than enough money. That requires particular motives: at best, a love of the job; at worst psychopathic egotism.
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