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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 1h

Reform of patent protections as a way to weaken rentier behaviour seems like a good goal of policy. I'm not sure ditching them altogether is sound but it does seem an area where serious reform-minded governments ought to be looking.

Aaron Sojourner @aaronsojourner.org · 2h

What policy:
- increases competition,
- lowers prices,
- lowers high-end taxes,
- lowers inequality?
@deanbaker13.bsky.social tells us. Preredistribution?
substack.com/inbox/post/1...

Weakening Patent Monopolies: The Most Effective Wealth Tax
It's better not to give the billionaires the money in the first place than to develop schemes to tax it away
Dean Baker
Oct 08, 2025
The idea of a wealth tax has gained considerable popularity in the dozen years since Thomas Piketty first popularized it with his book, Capital for the 21st Century. I have always been a skeptic myself, not because I have any trouble with taxing billionaires, but I think it faces enormous practical and political obstacles.

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 2h

Ask a good question. Will see what I can dig up.

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Chris Hanretty @chanret.bsky.social · 2h

This x100. Business degrees are cheap to run, easy to run badly, and face seemingly inexhaustible demand

Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 2h

Something grimly predictable about the way that the conversation about 'ripoff degrees' in the UK is always about degrees that aren't rip-offs, but are instead fairly obvious 'this student has chosen something unlikely to pay off economically' rather than the short tail of crap business degrees:

Everyone needs educating in the fight over university degrees

Political confusion over the purpose of these institutions means the obvious fixes are being neglected

www.ft.com

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 2h

And this is *not* a public HY story

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 2h

Can you spot where private credit lending has been going?

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 1d

This is a cool paper on how direct lending interacts with private equity (and the underlying portfolio companies). knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/12380...

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 1d

The more I think about this the more I worry that the UK is lacking one of the growth narratives that might actually, you know, work…

Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 2d

There is a potential political project around shifting the burden of taxation away from firms, simplifying VAT, supporting start-up ecosystem. But it likely means more tax for wealthier pensioners, more tax on property, and probably still higher income taxes. There’s no constituency for that.

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 1d

*who almost certainly work in media

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 1d

Less energy use isn’t necessarily de-growth

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 1d

He’s just realised that, if there’s an afterlife, his odds ain’t great

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 1d

LHR -> BOS (for anyone still keeping count)

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 1d

Not sure how I feel about the long sleeves though

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 1d

The Cameron project was that the state could pull back and the private sector would fill the gaps. There wasn’t really much outside of that conviction. And when it failed, the response was to keep plugging leaks rather than address the broader systemic issue causing the holes.

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 1d

We now have a choice about whether to go all in on “jack labour power up to 11 and see if we can wring out productivity gains” or a middle ground approach of encouraging business via incentives (at the marginal cost of households) while protecting labour rights. And there’s no party offering either!

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 1d

Narratively, there was a period where labour had it a little too good vs capital so some rebalancing was inevitable. Then Cons overdid it and (big L)abour came back into power. They used brute force state spending to rebalance vs capital/labour frictions. And then Cam et al kneecapped that approach.

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 1d

That’s what they said about the mining communities. And what happened to those badgers?

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 1d

Why do you want canine unemployment Alan?

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 1d

The more I think about this the more I worry that the UK is lacking one of the growth narratives that might actually, you know, work…

Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 2d

There is a potential political project around shifting the burden of taxation away from firms, simplifying VAT, supporting start-up ecosystem. But it likely means more tax for wealthier pensioners, more tax on property, and probably still higher income taxes. There’s no constituency for that.

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 1d

Yeah, learning the binary wrong lesson from Sunak is a cardinal sin here - he couldn’t rescue the legacy and basically folded into a bad version of the alt-right model by the election. It was just a poor fit. People were tired of the Tories in government, and the party threw out the entire project.

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 1d

The most frustrating thing being that a pro-business, broadly socially laissez faire party would be (I think) really pressuring Labour right now. Path dependence is such a nasty constraint.

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 1d

Fear of Reform will skew the result in the exact wrong direction for actually beating Reform. And at almost any point over the last two decades I would have chuckled - except for this one.

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 1d

We have firmly reached the stage of desperately wanting her to be better. Almost cheerleading for her to start actually doing the job.

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 1d

Look at e.g. railway speculation, South American speculative bonds, the dot-com boom. This really isn’t that unusual.

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George Eaton @georgeeaton.bsky.social · 1d

This isn’t a picture of Mel Stride and the shadow chancellor being misidentified on ConHome feels quite indicative of where the Tories are at.

Tim Bale @timbale.bsky.social · 2d

Not sure I would have gone with headline - unless I actually wanted people to laugh out loud....

Mel Stride: Conservatives are the only people who tell the truth, and have a plan for growth that means something | Conservative Home

It falls to us, the Conservatives, to win back the country’s trust and reverse the economic vandalism of this Labour government. We can and we will.

conservativehome.com

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Tomas Hirst @tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 2d

Ok, so I think we need a rundown of Conservative economic theory and why the party cannot get its head around any coherent stance.

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