This website makes some claims about what has caused both growth and decline that are pretty contentious.
I think that many would argue that the growth following the second world war was the result of massive state investment in public services like creating the NHS and the building of council housing.
They baffelingly attribute yhat growth to the Conservative Govrernment of the 1930s rather than the post war labour government.
Similarly this page attributes growth in the 80s to the Conservative government privatisation program. Again many would argue that was actually the start of the decline which we are feeling the pain of now with things like a terrible and fractured rail service and not enough housing.
I think a perfect example of this is our water companies that have been private since the 80s and have done nothing but pay dividends to shareholders and now we have a disaster with shit being poured into all our rivers and costs to households rising dramatically.
Edit: I read on and they use the drop in passengers in the railway in 1965 as an argument against nationalisation of the rail service, somehow neglecting to mention the beeching cuts! That is incredibly missleading given 55% of stations were axed due to a /reduction/ of state infrastructure at that time.
> Again many would argue that was actually the start of the decline which we are feeling the pain of now with things like a terrible and fractured rail service and not enough housing.
I agree, this is pretty wild and made me immediately look up who was behind this. Conservative think-tanks gotta conservative think-tank.
It's growing steadily through the 60's-2000's, has a notable dip[1] at the 2008 financial crisis, then starts growing again until just about 2015. And it's been flat since.
The UK had found a profitable niche as the transatlantic hub of finance and commerce, and threw it out the window in a fit of nativist pique over the wrong languages being spoken on street corners.
[1] More pronounced than comparable nations, to be fair. The UK was always more dependent on finance.
>The UK had found a profitable niche as the transatlantic hub of finance and commerce, and threw it out the window in a fit of nativist pique over the wrong languages being spoken on street corners.
But we’ve imported millions of people that speak different languages since 2015 , why hasn’t line gone up?
I think this is sarcasm, but just to spell it out: this is a causation/correlation fallacy. Immigration is a result of global trade, not its cause. Brexit killed the trade part without actually doing anything about immigration policy.
The incredibly stupid part of all this is that the conservative government insisted on wrecking the trade side because reducing immigration was deemed more important, and then entirely voluntarily issued a lot of work permits.
(without even getting into the more obligatory areas of immigration like refugees and marriages)
One of the authors is from the Centre for Policy Studies. Another is from the Adam Smith Institute. These are the gang of shady right-wing think tanks that brought us Truss and Kwarteng. That tells you everything you need to know about their economic competence.
Their solution is to allow private funds to fund essential infrastructure, it seems.
Which to me just rings hollow, or at best, only a part of the answer. They're correct on some aspects of it, other parts they just gloss over. IE They say that there has been an "erosion" of the industrial base in the UK, while actually the blame could be laid at the feet of Thatcher's service-led policies.
They are not wrong on that thet just make the same error the socialisys do in thinking that is the solution for all time. The solution foe all time ia to both realize the end state of a free market is monopoly and the end state of a state monopoly is stagnation so one needs to focus the government on being proactive and allowing both to compete and put the finger of government on the scale to favor private when public is stagnating and favor public when private ia monopolizing.
Gotta love the fact they go “Hey, look how great France’s infrastructure is.” and then immediately advocate for yet more private infrastructure deals without mentioning that France’s infrastructure was largely government funded (using those taxes they seem to hate).
> From 2010 to the summer of 2024, Britain was run by Conservative-led or Conservative Governments. The Conservatives are the traditional party of business, and in the 1930s and 1980s they pushed through reform programmes that successfully renewed Britain’s economy. Virtually any Conservative minister from the past fourteen years would speak warmly about that heritage if asked, and would express the hope of being its inheritor. And yet, with honourable exceptions, the governments of the last fourteen years failed in this vocation. Failing systems remained unreformed, continuing to stifle Britain’s prosperity. Today Britain is ruled by a Labour Government that recognises this failure to build, and which has articulated high ambitions for changing this. But it remains doubtful that they will be any better at delivering on those ambitions than the Conservatives were.
Depending on the specifics, that sounds congruent with some of Adam Smith's economic theories so it's not surprising to see such arguments used, especially if some of the authors are from the Adam Smith Institute.
His whole invisible hand metaphor is about society advancing as a whole from agents acting in their self interest.
It's more likely a sincerely held belief than an attempt at misdirection.
> His whole invisible hand metaphor is about society advancing as a whole from agents acting in their self interest.
That theory is predicated on the market being composed of buyers and sellers of broadly similar financial power. This is no longer the case in most markets, certainly not in the UK as far as ordinary people or most small companies are concerned.
What happened wasn't primarily due to her budget. It was due to a meltdown in the pension sector triggered by over-leverage, arguably caused by the BoE not doing its regulatory duties correctly.
Don't get me wrong, a budget that cuts taxes without cutting spending is no good. But the idea that what happened was a direct consequence of that doesn't make much sense as it had been telegraphed a long way in advance, giving the markets plenty of time to adjust. The central bank changed monetary policy a day before the mini-budget, and changes in that are kept secret until the moment of announcement. Additionally, UK spending has since blown through what the mini-budget would have created without any sudden market turmoil.
Regulators failed to anticipate the dangers that borrowing by pension schemes posed to the stability of the UK’s financial system, according to a parliamentary report into the turmoil that hit the gilt markets following Liz Truss’s disastrous “mini” Budget in September last year.
Pension schemes suffered multibillion-pound losses after they were forced to sell assets to ensure that complex derivative-linked strategies — known as liability driven investments (LDI) — did not implode when gilt yields jumped as investors rejected the then prime minister’s economic strategy.
Also, Truss is basically correct that the UK needs more growth. Disagreeing on her tactics is reasonable, disagreeing on her goals isn't. She was unfortunately attempting to create growth from a position of weakness: in a party that didn't want to do anything hard like cutting spending, and with a fragile/over-leveraged financial sector.
Pull the other one. Only some of the tax cuts had been telegraphed in advance. Abolishing the top rate of income tax and cutting the basic rate early hadn’t been. They ignored all the warnings they were given and sidelined the OBR. The Truss/Kwarteng budget directly crashed the economy and trying to pretend otherwise is some serious revisionism.
The committee report only looked at the regulator. To be sure, the regulator and the pensions industry should have done more. But the idea that Truss and Kwarteng are blameless innocents in the whole fiasco is ridiculous.
That's my point. Crazy economists are not responsible for the damage, it's the elected people who listened to them and followed through. To create an intentionally extreme parallel, imagine they have chosen a group of idk, satanists. Would you blame the group of satanists for being satanists, or the people in charge of a country who contacted a group of satanists for advice?
Of course, the second most upvoted comment is an ad personam dismissal that doesn't even engage with its arguments. How's that for HN-level intelligent discourse?
None of what the website says is actually contentious outside of Labour/left wing circles. Economic growth isn't that complicated when coming from behind - but as they say, it's hard if there isn't enough energy or housing.
> I think that many would argue that the growth following the second world war was the result of massive state investment
I don't think anyone with a strong grip on economics or British history would argue that. The fact is that post-war rationing continued longer in the UK than it did in Germany, the country that actually lost the war, and Germany recovered far faster in other ways too. Decades of very left wing governments left the UK in a terrible state by the 1970s relative to its peers - it was called the sick man of Europe and needed an IMF bailout - a situation fixed only by Thatcher. This history is well known not only in the UK but internationally. The website provides supporting evidence if you aren't familiar with this.
> our water companies that have been private since the 80s and have done nothing but pay dividends to shareholders
That this sort of absurdly false belief gets repeated unchallenged so often in Britain is exactly why it's falling behind. Thames Tideway, one of the largest engineering projects in Europe and the biggest upgrade to London's sewage system ever, is organized and financed by the private sector (pension funds, Allianz, Amber IG, Dalmore Capital and DIF).
It's literally being built right now and yet you claim the private sector hasn't invested. The reality is the opposite. As the website points out, British governments have historically struggled to do capital investments because the moment money becomes available the unions always take it all. Only the private sector has sufficiently good labour relations to actually build things and the water industry is a good example of that in action. Compare to the NHS where the government has regularly tried to ringfence money for capital investments (repairing leaking hospital roofs etc), only to see its direct orders ignored and the money used for pay rewards instead.
> 55% of stations were axed due to a /reduction/ of state infrastructure
The stations were axed due to long term decline in passenger numbers, a situation that reversed immediately upon privatization:
According to the graph on this site, ALL countries in the world have very bad water, at least after I move my mouse pointer around the map: all the countries turn orange.
I'm confused at your point - I look at the countries we typically view as more left leaning and both Canada and Europe as a whole has better water quality. If anything, it seems to be a delineation of first world status.
> US is good while countries with more left leaning setups do bad.
Huh? This is a map of the industrialized countries - western Europe, the US and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Japan and South Korea. Not sure how "left leaning setups do bad", the Scandinavian countries seem to have good water.
> the Scandinavian countries seem to have good water.
We certainly do here in Norway. And it's provided by the kommune (the local authority) not a private company. Where I live it is what I dilute my Scotch with. It's easily as good as or better than any bottled water.
"It may have been the greatest rapid expansion in a given economic sector in British history, and it was the key reason we didn’t experience a Great Depression while Germany, the USA, and France did. "
But Great Britain (as it was then) did experience a great depression. 3.5 million people were unemployed in 1932.
Ok - one could say that the depression in GB was less pronouced vs. the situation from 1918 on, but I think that there is a lot of cherry picking & spin in this article. Comparisons are not made consistently and the context from history mean some things matter less in the UK and matter more, and have happened for particular reasons. For example folks often talk about reservoirs, but fundamentally the UK's reservoirs were largely built to support an industrial demand that is simply not there - and this capacity remains despite the loss of demand.
There are some good points, but I think they are obscured by the polemic.
It appears to have been produced by a right wing think tank, justifying its seeming lack of focus on how public funds could help build infrastructure vs the author's seeming obsession with private financing.
This is pretty bleak reading for a resident of the UK! It's a good explanation for why there's stagnation (generally not allowed to build here). I'm a fan of their work (see the housing theory of everything [1] which is also good).
I'd be interested to read what they think can be done about the planning issue. The new government hasn't really come through on their promise to address it. They ran out of low hanging fruit pretty quickly. They're focusing more on rental reform rather than on supply. Gov modified the NPPF in odd ways (e.g. reduced targets in London, where need is highest). They set up a panel to look at new towns which will report back in a year.
This bit at the end made me laugh:
> it need simply remove the barriers that stop the private sector from doing what it already wants to do
Unfortunately these supply-side policies causing stagnation are representative of what our ageing population actually wants. The average 50+ voter thinks demand is too high and should be cut until supply catches up (in 33 years) [2][3].
The "new Government" has not yet been in power for 100 days. How exactly have they not "come through on their promise to address it"? Given the old government didn't come through on similar promises on planning for 14 years, I think we can give them another year or so to get policy and statutes in place, no?
Yes I hope they’ll find a solution and get re-elected. In some cases changes to frameworks require a 1 year consultation (planning permission to change planning permission rules!) so I am sure it will take years to see an increase. My point was their changes announced so far seemed bitty and wouldn’t address much of the issue.
The problem is hard! Even if you do build 500k homes a year (2x current) in places people don’t want you to build, it will still take 15 years to catch up, and they might be voted out before then because voters don’t want it.
At this point in time I'm just jaded about the whole political discourse - it seems that 90% of the discussion is devoted to "what they did" and "what we could do", with almost none about "what we did, and here's how we believe it actually affected your life"
> Unfortunately these supply-side policies causing stagnation are representative of what our ageing population actually wants.
This is basically it. The pensioners don't want change. They might theoretically want some nebulous "improvement", but only if it doesn't cost anything, doesn't involve building anything, or even a change of use, doesn't make any noise, doesn't increase traffic, and doesn't involve any immigration.
> Nor can austerity or the hangover from the financial crisis explain Britain’s malaise. The financial crisis was at least as turbulent in the United States as here.
Yes it can. For the UK the financial sector was a dramatically important one, more so than practically for any other major country. London was the undisputed financial center for whole Europe and beyond, a legacy of Empire days, the pound as reserve currency etc. This had serious distorting effects: Abysmal center-periphery inequalities; the fatal attraction of talented people to lucrative but mostly pointless financial engineering games; the neglect of "bricks and mortar" etc.
The financial crisis and Brexit demolished this fragile, hyperconcentrated economic posture. Not in the sharp and seemingly recoverable fashion that, e.g., COVID damaged the tourism industry of various countries but in a chronic, gentle decline kind of way.
In the long-term one would think that the immense cultural heritage of Britain across pretty much the entire knowledge spectrum would somehow translate into a way forward. But as we increasingly get to know all too well, the problems of modern societies are self-inflicted and they reflect fundamental breakdowns of social contracts. Yes, despite what that British lady said, there is an emergent phenomenon called "society" and if you deny its existence you will get devoured by demons of its own creation.
The financial crisis was a specific event and other countries had put it behind them within a few years. The UK's growth inflected around that time and never recovered since. It doesn't make much sense to argue a temporary event changed UK productivity or economic growth permanently, especially as the only reason to think that is rough temporal proximity. There were other things going on at that time too that are equally or more plausible e.g. mass immigration from eastern Europe was kicking into gear around that time as well, which created a glut of cheap labour. Cheap labour always kills productivity growth because there's no reason to invest in automation.
> Yes, despite what that British lady said, there is an emergent phenomenon called "society" and if you deny its existence you will get devoured by demons of its own creation.
Thatcher was responding to people who asserted that for any given problem, "society" should solve it or pay for it. Her answer made the obvious point: when it comes to taxation, there really is no such thing as society. To complete the quote: "they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families".
I left the UK almost 20 years ago, and cannot imagine returning for any length of time.
My personal take on this is the UK got so used to having an empire, and specifically India, which could absorb more British bureaucrats than the UK could possibly produce. Consequently when Indian independence occurred this massive pipeline of producing people for running colonies had nowhere to go, and a large number moved back to the UK. What you have now is a class of people have been trying to run the country as a colony of itself with rather predictable results.
The UK has a broken culture, and until they start valuing things appropriately they will stay that way.
The Indian Civil Service was always tiny. There were so few British in India that in 1950 when the Indian government surveyed the populace to try and see if they knew the British had left they discovered the average Indian wasn’t aware there had ever been a British Empire. The British Empire in India and the British Army in India at all but the most rarefied levels were staffed by Indians and there weren’t even that many of them.
> At the time of the partition of India and departure of the British, in 1947, the Indian Civil Service was divided between the new Dominions of India and Pakistan. The part which went to India was named the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), while the part that went to Pakistan was named the "Civil Service of Pakistan" (CSP). In 1947, there were 980 ICS officers. 468 were Europeans, 352 Hindus, 101 Muslims, two depressed classes/Scheduled Castes, five domiciled Europeans and Anglo-Indians, 25 Indian Christians, 13 Parsis, 10 Sikhs and four other communities.
I’m not British, I’m just not ignorant of Indian history. At partition the entire British population of India was about 100,000 including the army, civil service, civilians and family of same.
Even if you round up to 1,000 the number of ICS officers and dectuple to 10,000 you get a trivial number of returnees to the UK. The British Army in India returning would have had nugatory impact considering the British had just fought WW2.
Leaving India was bad for the British upper classes because there were fewer jobs as officers that would keep a man in the store to which he had become accustomed on salary in the army. The ICS was less important than that in terms of numbers and its peak social impact was as an inspiration for the British civil service. The ICS is the only organisation in British India that might plausibly have had a large impact on the culture of the British civil service and it was too small to have had an impact by numbers alone as you originally posited.
> Even if you round up to 1,000 the number of ICS officers and dectuple to 10,000 you get a trivial number of returnees to the UK.
Why are we obsessed with restricting discussion to ICS? The bureaucracy is not just that, but extends throughout the entire service sector these people rely on, such as banking, schooling, transportation, manufacturing management and so on.
There is real denial going on here as to the extent of what happened.
> Why are we obsessed with restricting discussion to ICS? The bureaucracy is not just that, but extends throughout the entire service sector these people rely on, such as banking, schooling, transportation, manufacturing management and
There is no plausible mechanism by which these people could have effected a radical change in the general British culture or the culture of the British civil service. The culture of the British in India was an expatriate one, not one of colonial settlement or intermarriage (certainly not after 1900).
They weren’t different enough from the British population to have any noticeable effect even though in class composition the civilian element was elevated in education and social class compared to the general population.
The pied noirs in Algeria were settlers and they were distinctly different in terms of ethnic composition, being disproportionately Spanish, Maltese and Italian in ancestry compared to French from l’Hexagone and it’s still a matter of debate if their descendants are noticeably different from other French. The British in India were just that. Not a lot more culturally influential in the home country than the British in the UAE. As of 2015 there were A quarter of the million Britons in the UAE. That’s more than twice as many people from Britain in a petrostate then were ever in India.
> There is no plausible mechanism by which these people could have effected a radical change in the general British culture or the culture of the British civil service.
These people were somehow capable of running India and yet at the same time could not cause a change in the UK if they returned en masse?
> They weren’t different enough from the British population to have any noticeable effect
You have a very odd view of life in the UK if you believe this.
>> They weren’t different enough from the British population to have any noticeable effect
>You have a very odd view of life in the UK if you believe this.
If all 250,000 Britons in the UAE returned to the UK in the next three months I would expect it to have no noticeable effect a year from now. By the same token I wouldn’t expect much from 100,000 Brits moving from India to the UK in 1947. West Indian migration starting in the 1960s or Ugandan Indians in the 1970s are movements of people who are genuinely different in important ways.
Those had no great effect on the civil service culture either.
> If all 250,000 Britons in the UAE returned to the UK in the next three months I would expect it to have no noticeable effect a year from now.
Those 250k Britons in the UAE are not state supported colonists, and so do not have the attitudes and culture of state supported colonists.
Edit: specifically the colonial attitude that the inhabitants of a colony exist as a natural resource to be exploited purely for the benefit of the colonists. This is now the attitude that exists throughout the UK state towards the inhabitants of the UK.
I don't think this is about the number of civil servants so much as the attitude of running everything from the Imperial core. Becomes apparent when you ask questions like "now that there is a Scottish Parliament, what exactly does the Scotland Office do?". There's no California Office in the American government, no Jura office in the Swiss government, because those are federal systems with a clear division of power across different levels.
See also terrible attitudes to local government. Part of London's recovery is getting its own governance back after the abolition of the GLC. Ihe Assembly is also slowly imposing sensible ideas like Regent Street pedestrianisation on London's councils. Andy Burnham is doing great as mayor of Manchester.
I’ll need to sit down and read this properly, but I would say there is a real stench of decline in England at the moment and pretty much everyone here would agree. It’s readily apparent the new government won’t save us already.
Public services in particular: 2 weeks to see a Dr, a year for an operation, unlikely for the police to attend your call out, stagnant economy, high cost of living and low wages. And all whilst we have one of the highest tax burdens in our history.
> It’s readily apparent the new government won’t save us already.
I dont follow this line of reasoning too well. The conservative party was in power for fourteen years, 2010 to 2024. The new Labour government has been in power for less than fourteen weeks. Isnt it too soon to make any claims about their performance fixing the structural issues identified in this report?
Maybe but probably not by this point. If Starmer were engaged and keen to fix these problems, he would have clearly articulated the problems outlined on the website, stated a plan to solve them and now be doing things to advance it.
What he's actually done is the opposite. For example, the website makes the point that British governments often don't do enough capital investment so state-controlled infrastructure rots away. Instead spending rises get used to buy off unions. Sure enough, within just months of Labour coming into power it's already handed out around £10 billion/yr worth of pay rises:
This type of behavior led to pay spirals in the 60s and 70s.
We see this problem elsewhere. Labour's plan to build new prisons is simply to override local councils that are blocking planning applications, but that won't yield funds for actually building them. Where's the capital going to come from in a government that capitulates immediately to union pay demands, and which is already financially over-stretched? To do this they would need to make major cutbacks in other areas, but they have no plans to do this.
I've been to my GP half a dozen times in the last year, always same day.
Last time I went I was sent for a chest x-ray, which wasn't done at the GP, I had to drive to the place and wait 40 minutes for that, bit of a pain.
Main problem I see is housing. It drags the entire economy -- people are living in overcrowded, people in their 30s living with parents etc.
Anyone living on their own sees all their income drained by landlords, who then pump it into ever increasing housing costs as they out-bid each other. Anyone else never becomes an adult and pumps their money into things like onlyfans and coke.
It is for us. Our surgery has a triage system where you phone in the morning and if you need an appointment you get it the same day. I don't think it's that uncommon.
The problems are mostly concentrated in the poorer areas where they struggle to attract staff.
We have to call at 8am along with the hordes. If your call isn’t answered by 8.05am then you are out of luck. If you eventually do get through then you’ll be given an appointment with a “nurse practitioner” in a weeks time. I’ve heard about these things called GPs but haven’t personally confirmed their existence.
> Anyone living on their own sees all their income drained by landlords
The entire country's economy feels like a property-indexed Ponzi scheme, with everyone (including the government) rather keep fueling the ponzi as long as possible rather than breaking it up.
> And all whilst we have one of the highest tax burdens in our history.
It's easy to have a low tax base when you subsidise the state spending with North Sea Oil from the 80s onwards... Prior to that we had really bad balance of payments crises from the Second World War onwards as the empire fell apart.
Low and middle earners in the UK pay pretty much the lowest taxes in Western Europe. We've eroded our tax base all over the place and somehow expect European services.
I don't agree, and your data points don't match my own. How is it readily apparent the new government won't "save us" when they haven't even got to 100 days in, yet?
Quack medicine products used to be sold (and sometimes still are) by asking in adverts "do you feel vaguely unwell?" and promising to vaguely cure the condition. Similarly, it's easy to sell the public on a vague sense of national decline, and this is a long-standing key part of populist politics.
British GDP per capita has been flat since 2008 while the US’ has gone from $49K to $81K. The UK has declined in relative terms compared to what used to be a near peer.
It may also be true that there's a national decline, I'm just saying to be very cautious about getting swept up in the idea. For instance, apparently America needs to be Made Great Again, facts notwithstanding.
It's hard to understand how people view the NHS. Some people claim it's the national treasure, but how does that work if service is as abysmal as what you describe ?
It's because the experience you get is completely random and heavily weighted towards the fatal. If you show up with something life threatening they're actually pretty good.
But your experience of non-life threatening can be anything from good, to indifference/boredom to aggressive dismissal. This also applies to things that could be markers of something fatal, analogy would be they do little when smoke is coming out from under the door but do jump into action when the flames are coming out from under the door. Most of the interactions start on off the foot that you're assumed to be a timewaster too.
Keep begging my parents to just go private because I don't like trusting their lives to the random chance they have a good doctor when I can instead have one incentivized by their continued existence.
The issue is that underfunding the NHS has become so bad that even very serious cases can't be handled appropriately. I know it's an anecdote, but I've had a fairly bad experience recently after a serious bike incident in the middle of a workday, and they took over an hour to send an ambulance, about an hour to be checked, and over 7 hours in the Royal Hospital waiting for treatment.
Legitimately was a worse and slower service than I would have had at my grandparents' place in Eastern Europe, it's a disgrace. It still makes me angry that it's the experience I get after paying 1000s of £ in NHS contributions.
Your description of the NHS sounds exactly like the Canadian healthcare system.
>>Keep begging my parents to just go private [...]
Except for this difference as we don't have the option to choose private care except for a out-patient services (e.g. physical therapy) and certain drugs & therapies. I'm speaking primarily about Ontario and British Columbia, but I think the other provinces and territories are similar.
Hospitals, diagnostic services and physicians are all funded by public taxpayer dollars at both the provincial and federal level, but it is indeed a single healthcare system.
It's the case nationwide in Canada due to rules in the Canada Health Act: if a service is provided by provincial governments (so MSP in BC or OHIP in ON) then it cannot be offered privately.
There have been some workaround attempts in BC (such as the Cambie Surgery Centre, which lost a court case recently-ish) and AB's recent move to give contracts to Catholic health care providers, but the only true "private" option in Canada is the airport.
I could go on about this at length and how it makes me a pariah amongst a flood of anti-American conspiracy theories, but this is a thread about the UK (of which I'm also a citizen) so I'll resist.
Main problem with systems outside the NHS and I'm really talking about the US here is if you have a major accident or a terminal illness you can easily be bankrupted if you make a wrong decision around insurance and that's not cool. I see far too many GoFundMe's for people with illnesses in the states and that is no way to run a country.
Where I am from the village health services act as gatekeepers for the more central services. Just in my direct circles I know of several situations where the central services gave the village services an earful for failing to refer people faster, in at least one case directly leading to death.
Those central services also seem to get further away every few years.
a) it hasn't always been bad (although it has always been a right-wing punching-bag); b) it has the potential to be a lot better than it currently is; c) a lot of the people actually in it care desperately about seeing that happen, and because of its size that's a surprising proportion of the population.
Its the same in USA if you want to see a specialist. There is a worldwide shortage of qualified doctors.
I waited about 1.5yrs to get a routine endoscopy at northwestern hospital in chicago. We've gone to northwestern in downtown for decades and have never seen waits this bad.
My brother had a hip replacement in Paris this week. He booked the operation two weeks ago. His angiogram (required for the surgery) was performed 3 hours after his consultation with the surgeon. The clinic is considered the best one specializing in joint replacement surgery in all of France.
Total cost for surgery, follow-up, and 3 days in hospital (he lives in a French Overseas Department so he gets reimbursed): 18,000 Euros.
yea could be my specific hospital. I've heard from indian colleagues that if you sprain your ankle you can see someone immediately but if you get cancer and need to specialist then you are competing with thousands of ppl to see that doctor.
Endoscopy wait times are kind of a notorious worst-case, right? There's something weird going on with them here. I had specialist care in Chicago (at Rush, not NWU) booked and delivered inside of a couple weeks.
I think 2 things are true at the same time, some specialists are impossible to get access to and others are easy.
I’ve been able to get an orthopedic surgery issue diagnosed and booked in weeks (Rush). But routine care with my pain specialist (Northwestern) can need months long lead times.
OK so ignore me, I'm definitely wrong. Though: my wife is a Rush neurology pt (migraines, super problematic migraines) and she's gotten scheduled p. quickly (but for probably simple appointments).
(I don't know why I hadn't placed you as a Chicago person before; you should come out with us sometime!)
I've been able to see a Dr on the day I've called several times in the last couple of years. Operations happen reasonably quickly if they are "required", it's the non urgent ones that now have ridiculous waiting lists. The economy/wages issue, seems to be worldwide since covid and the various recent wars.
The new Government has had no real time to do anything yet everywhere on twitter/fb I see hundreds of people complaining, who didn't do enough complaining in the last 14 years. What happens with the current Government is yet to be seen, but it's certainly difficult to make any meaningful change in a single term.
Real GDP per capita has been flat since 2008 while official population figures show population has increased by 10m. Total failure to grow the economy in 14 years of Tory rule and Labour aren’t exactly showing signs of having ideas to grow either.
Really interesting and well researched read. The main take away seems to be that Britain has seen a lack of state funded infrastructure development and it's paying the price for this, especially in the energy sector.
I'm obviously oversimplifying, but I think that's an ok rough summary. I think it's well argued and evidenced in the article, but I'm interested in this question: why isn't the US stagnating?
My understanding is that it has had a similarly low infrastructue development, but conversely is doing well economically. What's the deal?
The US has a huge internal market, with free interstate trade and no need for localization.
The US has accumulated colossal scientific and R&D resources, which regularly produce industrial breakthroughs. Lower taxes help, too. (Lower taxes is what a country can afford for general benefit, not a sloppy pro-rich policy.)
But most importantly, USD is effectively the world's reserve currency, so the US can literally print money, and much of the rest of the world would gladly take it; it's like gold, only buttressed by the US's economic and military might.
The UK has none of these advantages. The British Empire had some of these, but it's gone. Another large factor is that the US emerged from WWII relatively unscathed, while Britain was badly hit, and could not grow as fast.
You know, if you put it this way, it's really a miracle that britain as an independent country still exists at all, that it's not been conquered from the continent since 1066, and that has been in no small part thanks to a british foreign policy of making sure that no country in europe becomes so dominant that they might take on britain, a foreign policy which included that security guarantee to Poland.
I don't think "state funded" is the important part to take away from the piece, it's a shortage of infrastructure in general, both state and private, in part due to incredibly restrictive rules. These days you can easily trap a planned piece of infrastructure in court cases for years for largely spurious reasons.
Having recently visited the US, the infrastructure there (at least in the parts of California I visited) is noticeably worse than in Europe (including the UK). So I don't think it can just be about infrastructure.
It’s not so much restrictive rules, as it is a planning system that prioritises local concerns, regardless of how minor, or incorrect, over any kind of national priority.
Our planning system is literally designed to maximally empower NIMBYism. There are no well defined planning rules, or zoning, or planning process. Every council develops their own planning policy, and broadly has the power to block any project. The result is building anything requires millions of pounds, and years of effort, to work through a councils arbitrary, and ever changing planning rules, with no guarantee of any kind of success.
Most of the rest of the world operates some kind of permitted development zoning policy, where planning policy tends to provide clear rules around what can always be built in a specific area. So it possible to start a development process knowing that certain aspects of your project must be approved, as long as you follow the rules. Unlike the UK where you project might be approved if you managed to somehow follow all the undocumented, arbitrary, and changing local rules.
Consequences are quite simple, only projects that are absolutely guaranteed to return large profits if successful are built. And for those projects there’s very little incentive for high quality building, because there’s no competition in the area, and costs of getting permission are so high, that a developers unique selling point is their ability to get permission, not their ability to actually build well.
With regards to Grenfell, that’s the consequence of have shambolic building regulations (I.e. regulations on the quantity and safety of buildings), and a construction industry that can only make money by cutting corners, because the supply of actual work is so low.
While not denying in any way that this sort of thing is a real problem, I think you're overstating differences between the UK and "the rest of the world".
Although zoning in the USA does work to a degree as you say ("must be approved if you ..."), in reality lots of projects that seem as if they ought to be a sure thing for approval face years of process-based objections from local groups, leading to them never being built at all, or having to be significantly revised due to changes demanded or created by circumstances shifting.
The UKs planning system is pretty much unique. Almost no other country in the world operates a planning system where every local authority basically gets to make up their own rules around planning, and where it’s practically impossible for national government to enforce simple things like minimum house building quotas.
If you want to understand why building infrastructure in the UK is so difficult, then you need to look no further than our planning system. It has uniquely managed to completely strangle infrastructure building. Sure NIBYism exists in the U.S., and there’s lots of planning red tape, and plenty of very poorly considered planning rules (such as single use zoning, and a strange obsession with single family homes). But in comparison to the UK, it’s practically pleasant to work with.
Of course it helps that the U.S. has a crap ton of spare land just handing around. Much easier to build a new shopping mall, highway or suburb on a completely empty plot with no neighbours in sight. But in the UK you, you can’t swing a cat without hitting an existing building, or actively worked farm.
The thames tunnel costing as much in planning as Norway spent actually building the longest tunnel in the world. Construction projects are so fraught with regulatory burden that most of these costs are going to legal fees. It's not that they're not spending money. It's that public infrastructure is a money pit of legal fees
Building a tunnel through a stable and self supporting granite mountain is a bit different from building one under a river that is on top of a slab of clay and sand so I don't think the two projects are directly comparable.
And the regulations are really not that different here in Norway. What is different is that there is a less adversarial society. We are a little more inclined to thrash out the problems in discussion rather than litigation.
But there are plenty of infrastructure projects here that take longer and cause more disruption than they should. For instance the upgrade to the E18 between Oslo and Drammen on which 17 billion kroner (1.7 billion USD) has already been spent without getting halfway and the southern half of the project has been scrapped because of the cost of buying out the people who live in the way of the new route.
Environental impact assessments now run to millions of pages. Every big infra planning application tries to anticipate any possible complaint, and the whole cost balloons.
US is energy independent and is desirable place for middle and higher class specialist.
Compared to overtaxed and energy starved England which live from legacy sectors and cheap immigration workers and is not desirable for anyone not working in finances.
Importing energy while ramping up your own production with wind and tidal, and importantly, nuclear, is not "starved". Is there a lack of energy in the UK? Blackouts like the ones in Texas?
Man blackout != energy starved, you can have blackouts cause your infrastructure is attacked or just random natural disaster, look at energy prices compare it to China or even US not even speaking about oil rich countries.
Finance in UK is indeed legacy it is mostly big old banks there is still a bit of fintech and ofc. head funds, but UK is bleeding both talent and market share to CN and US. Not even speaking about tech salaries 10 years ago London was one of the top paying places for finance tech, now it is (ofc.) USA and CN (especially with cost of living).
> Finance in UK is indeed legacy it is mostly big old banks there is still a bit of fintech
Many fintech b2c innovators come from the UK. Revolut and Monzo provide features with a UX and API that US banks couldn't even dream of.
> Man blackout != energy starved, you can have blackouts cause your infrastructure is attacked or just random natural disaster, look at energy prices compare it to China or even US not even speaking about oil rich countries.
Yes you can, but that's not why Texas has blackouts. The UK has expensive electricity, imports a lot, but on what planet is it "energy starved"?
I mean isn't UK starving? it can't produce enough energy, it cost is extremely high to produce anything and it can't get proper industrial/manufacture power base cause of that? (and a lot of other stupid reasons)
No blackouts, but it's now very expensive. The system management is quite good but the cost is a serious political issue.
(It's also an oddity that the Conservative government presided over a lot of green transition in the energy sector, but can't take credit for it because of their base)
Since the crisis of 2008 the USA has had several trillion dollars in stimulus spending. Very roughly speaking, Europe pursued policies of austerity, whereas the USA followed a more Keynesian route of big spending. On this matter, the Keynesians have been vindicated. In 2007 the GDP of the EU was slightly larger than the USA, but now it has fallen far behind: $16 trillion ($18 trillion if it still had the UK) versus $25 trillion for the USA. And the most important policy difference since 2008 has been large stimulus spending in the USA, versus relative austerity in Europe. More recently, President Biden was able to push through some big infrastructure bills, which should power the USA through the 2020s. (There are some qualifiers to be added about weaknesses in the USA system of funding and allowing construction, in particular the aggressive system of "substantive due process" that allows for any project to be stalled by lawsuits, but despite that, the USA has done better than Europe.)
Most of the difference in GDP was because Dollar was a lot cheaper compared to Euro pre Recession.
Also EU just stagnate from 1990 until now it is yearly losing global share of GDP.
"Most of the difference in GDP was because Dollar was a lot cheaper compared to Euro pre Recession."
Yes, but why? There was a theory that massive stimulus spending would weaken the dollar because of the additional debt, but instead, the opposite happened. The USA did more stimulus spending and the dollar became stronger. Many people were surprised by this. Those people need to revisit their initial assumptions.
You say that but the UK has not experienced the kind of energy disruptions that, for example, the Texans have since the 1970s.
Let’s also not forget the railroad problems you face. You’re probably the only country that makes Britain look good for its rail infrastructure.
Having driven on both American roads and British roads, I’d say UK rural roads are to a much higher standard. However that I can give America a pass on that particular issue because the vast distances in some rural parts does change the problem somewhat. But it is another example of how private investment doesn’t reach all parts of the US infrastructure.
Internet access in rural communities is much better in the UK.
Mains water quality is to a higher standard and available to more rural communities.
And let’s not even get started on the sorry state of US healthcare. The NHS might have its problems but at least it’s not leaving people choosing between medical treatments and bankruptcy.
The problem is, whenever the US government tries to step in to improve things, the ultra conservatives and libertarians then compare those policies to communism. Which is absurd.
England is a small country, smaller than the US state of Georgia. It's much easier to maintain way shorter roads with its much higher population density. Nonetheless, the rural roads in the US are generally of good to excellent quality.
> England is a small country, smaller than the US state of Georgia. It's much easier to maintain way shorter roads with its much higher population density.
The article you link to explains that the Three Day Week led to the collapse of the Conservative gov in 74, and while Thatcher became leader, she did not come into power until 79. If the power outages led to anything, it was to a Labour gov.
(this is unrelated to the correct statement that there were widespread outages throughout the 70s)
The US has one of the largest freight rail networks in the world. We don't have as big of a passenger rail investment because nobody would ride most of it
Has it occurred to you that nobody rides passenger rail in the US because there’s zero investment in passenger rail, and as a consequence the U.S. has managed to build a rail system that more difficult to use that flights, and somehow still slower than cars.
I can’t think of anywhere else in the developed world where the train system is the slowest form of motorised transport around.
People ride passenger rail where it makes sense. The acela line being a good example. But if they built a high speed rail between Texas and Ohio, nobody would ride that, because flying would still be faster. We could build some HSR between major cities in Texas, Florida, California, and the Northeast corridor, but it would account for a handful of straight railways. There are major problems with building these (California is several billion over budget on their high speed rail and I don't think they've even started building), so the criticism of US overregulation is valid, but the main reason we don't have as extensive of a passenger rail system is because it wouldn't be economically viable in a country as sparsely populated as the united states
Many areas of the USA have population densities entirely comparable with large parts of Europe. The upper-central midwest (eastern MN, WI, IL, IA) is a good example - it compares favorably to most of France or Germany.
This is another example of how it is almost always a mistake to use a unitary description of anything when it comes to the USA. Yes, certainly where I live (New Mexico), population density is extremely low and long-haul rail transportation likely makes little sense. But talk about that as if it applies to "the united states" is a category error.
It's fairly common, but even in Europe, it's frequently cheaper to fly than to take a train, unfortunately. I would not point to Europe as a place that does passenger rail extremely well; that honor goes to Japan. Europe might be better than the US at it, but that's not saying much.
Not to mention the other issue: even if it's easy to get into another city via rail, how do you get from the train station to your final destination? Very few cities have public transit anywhere close to NYC's. Of course flying has the same issue, but the airport has a car rental desk.
This is another part of infrastructure Europe generally does better: inner city public transport.
There are some European cities that are still car dominated, however quiet a few are easier to navigate via public transport and some have even gone as far as entirely banning private cars from the city centre.
It’s an ironic comment to make, given the U.S. was literally built using railways. Passenger railways covered the entire U.S. long before highways ever did.
The only reason why passenger rail doesn’t exist today, is because the U.S. chose to stop investing in rail, and instead chose to only invest in car infrastructure. There’s was a huge period where auto manufacturers were buying up local rail and trams systems, for the sole purpose of running them into the ground, and forcing people into cars instead.
There’s absolutely no reason you can’t build high speed passenger rail today. High speed rail takes up less space than a highway, for far higher speeds and capacities. And building high speed rail using highway style construction in one of the most cost effective ways of building passenger rail (it’s how countries like France can build high speed rail at such low costs).
For some reason nobody thinks it’s silly to link up U.S. cities with highways, but for some reason, rail is too hard (despite being the faster, higher throughput, and more economical, form of transportation).
>Let’s also not forget the railroad problems you face. You’re probably the only country that makes Britain look good for its rail infrastructure.
You give the US a pass on roads due to great distances, but not on rail? Rail is even more expensive than roads.
On the subject of roads, it is important to remember that US roads vary greatly in quality based on geography, weather, and economic conditions. Every state gets some federal money and fuel taxes to pay for roads.
>Internet access in rural communities is much better in the UK.
The US had plans to subsidize Starlink for rural communities but the current administration interfered with it for petty political reasons. Again with this, the distances involved matter a lot.
>And let’s not even get started on the sorry state of US healthcare. The NHS might have its problems but at least it’s not leaving people choosing between medical treatments and bankruptcy.
NHS has problems like, you might not get treatment in a timely manner despite the high taxes you pay for that service. The US has issues with cost. We pay more than practically any other country including on medication. I think that is due to corruption. The issue is not that the state does not pay for it. It often does end up paying exorbitant prices for people without insurance, or on government benefits, to be treated. A majority of elderly people in the US are collecting government benefits and healthcare. It's not much but it does cover a significant amount of stuff.
>The problem is, whenever the US government tries to step in to improve things, the ultra conservatives and libertarians then compare those policies to communism. Which is absurd.
It is true that government can invest in worthwhile things sometimes, but when the government messes things up on a regular basis then you instinctively reject whatever it proposes. Neither the UK nor the US can afford our existing social programs. Yet here you are proposing that we here in the US spend even more so we can be like the UK. No thanks, we have enough problems as it is without higher taxes and more government scams.
If you want to argue about distances then let’s talk about Europe as a wider entity rather than just one country. And Europe still comes out on top for quality of infrastructure.
The problem with the NHS is due to the amount of budget cuts from the Tory government.
The problem with the American health system is the exact opposite, it costs too much because private entities are greedy. Government intervention would be more legislative than financial.
Everything costs more in the US except for imported stuff. It's not because of corporate greed. It's because labor costs so much here, primarily.
>The problem with the NHS is due to the amount of budget cuts from the Tory government.
I don't know all about UK politics but I know that the current social programs and government spending are unaffordable. The US and other Western countries can't afford it either. The problem is not that spending is not enough, the problem is that our countries are not competitive or productive enough on the world stage for this exorbitant spending.
You can consider Europe all together but it is still a smaller and denser area than the US as a whole. You need to look at places with similar population densities (and perhaps geography) to have an accurate comparison.
> Everything costs more in the US except for imported stuff. It's not because of corporate greed. It's because labor costs so much here, primarily.
Your first sentence isn’t true and your conclusion isn’t true either. Then there’s the issue that American healthcare is massively disproportionally more expensive than the rest of the world. So even if your first two points were correct, they still don’t account for your cost of healthcare.
> I don't know all about UK politics but I know that the current social programs and government spending are unaffordable. The US and other Western countries can't afford it either.
The problem isn’t that they’re unaffordable. The problem is that people don’t want to pay for it. Or more specifically, people in the higher tax bands don’t want to because they view public services as an expense (which for them it is, because they’ll often be using private services instead). But this is another example of the self sabotage I was talking about in my earlier comment.
> You can consider Europe all together but it is still a smaller and denser area than the US as a whole. You need to look at places with similar population densities (and perhaps geography) to have an accurate comparison.
To be honest it doesn’t matter how accurate the comparison, you’re just going to argue that the free market fixes everything. Because that’s exactly what you’ve been brainwashed to believe. Capitalism is Americas #1 religion after all.
To be fair, I don’t think public services are the answer to everything either. There does need to be a balance between government oversight and spend; and of leaning into the private sector. The UK hasn’t found that right balance either. ButAmerica is waaaay of the mark and it’s destroying your country from the inside.
>Your first sentence isn’t true and your conclusion isn’t true either. Then there’s the issue that American healthcare is massively disproportionally more expensive than the rest of the world. So even if your first two points were correct, they still don’t account for your cost of healthcare.
My first two points are correct but if you don't agree we can stop talking because I am not gonna sit here and prove the obvious to you. I can't say we pay more for everything on average than literally anywhere else, but we do pay more on average for everything than most other places. As for why our healthcare is expensive, yes some of it is due to regulations and lack of competition. But the simple fact that it costs so much to live well in the US means that people must be willing to pay way more than elsewhere. That translates into higher pay for doctors. If you can pay $8 for a coffee then paying a couple hundred for a doctor's visit is not out of the question. If you can pay $50k for a basic boring car then paying $50k for a life-saving surgery is not unreasonable.
>The problem isn’t that they’re unaffordable. The problem is that people don’t want to pay for it. Or more specifically, people in the higher tax bands don’t want to because they view public services as an expense (which for them it is, because they’ll often be using private services instead). But this is another example of the self sabotage I was talking about in my earlier comment.
No it's not the fault of the rich that we can't afford it. Privately held wealth in the US is only about $130 trillion. Meanwhile there was $210 trillion of unfunded liabilities in the current system: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmauldin/2017/10/10/your-pen... as of 2017! So even seizing everything from everybody would not solve our problems. It would also destroy our quality of life, make the best and brightest (and richest) people run away, etc. You need to do some rudimentary research before trying to tell people stupid shit like they can enslave the rich to get free stuff.
>To be honest it doesn’t matter how accurate the comparison, you’re just going to argue that the free market fixes everything. Because that’s exactly what you’ve been brainwashed to believe. Capitalism is Americas #1 religion after all.
You're assuming an awful lot here. I haven't been "brainwashed" any more than you have. I just know that lots of things the government does are scams. Free markets do require some regulation to prevent certain breakdown cases involving unfair competition. But letting the government do things instead with no competition won't be an improvement. America is #1 in many things but budgeting and protecting our own interests aren't among those things.
The UK ran the NHS as a high quality first tier health service for 50 years or more, during times when the UK was still making debt repayments to the US to cover costs from WWII.
Once Thatcherite neoliberalism (specifically: market-oriented reform policies such as "eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers" and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, state influence in the economy.) took hold and wealth transfer from the many to the few became increasingly common the Conservative contributions to the NHS steadily decreased and eroded the service.
"Free trade" globalism aka outsourcing everything is indeed self-destructive. Liberals are just as much to blame as conservatives when it comes to not protecting our national interests. They can say whatever works, but if they get out of line with the globalist establishment then they are systematically pushed out by big money interests.
At this point, cutting spending is the right move in general. But that isn't going to happen because it's too unpopular. And whether we do cut spending or not, hard times are ahead.
> the current administration interfered with it for petty political reasons
I'm not entirely sure that doubts about handing fistfuls of cash to a corporation headed by an increasingly politically extreme CEO whose 2nd generation satellites are leaking so much radio energy that radio astronomy in that band of the spectrum looks doomed is "petty".
The persecution of Elon Musk is entirely political, and he is not "extreme" just for disagreeing with the entire media/corporate/state establishment and supporting basic human rights like freedom of expression as enshrined in the FIRST Amendment of the US Constitution. The persecution has nothing to do with the costs or merits of his products, which vary but are generally the best in class or very competitive. He was the darling of the libs until he dared to point out the insanity of their recent policies.
If you watch the video, you'll see they replaced Starlink with a solution that cost 10x as much. I'm sure whatever minor inconvenience comes to those scientists can be fixed somehow. We have far bigger things to worry about in any case.
> I'm sure whatever minor inconvenience comes to those scientists can be fixed somehow.
\1. It's not a "minor inconvenience" at all.
\2. Problem started with Starlink 1.0. The fix was Musk promising better shielding and attention to leaks in Version 2.0 and to turn off Starllink sats over Murchison Radio Quiet Area etc.
\3. Starlink V2.0 has 30x more noise (Musk lied | didn't deliver) and remains noisy over quiet areas (Musk lied | didn't deliver).
> The persecution of Elon Musk is entirely political
What's your solution? This kind of satellite system is going to get built and improved over time regardless of what you think of it.
>It's more due to Musk lying and not delivering.
No, it's not. I think you know it too. Biden and a bunch of EU politicians have literally threatened Elon over Twitter, as recently as last month. Everyone was cool with his hype game until they cashed out and/or discovered that Elon has the views of a liberal from about 2010.
Let's look at Elon's accomplishments objectively. He oversaw a new and inexpensive reusable rocket program, cutting-edge electric cars which libs begged for, solar systems for houses, and satellite internet. Not to mention his original online payment system in the early days. All of those projects are very competitive and widely used. Did he promise more? Sure, he did. But he also delivered more than any of the naysayers. I have some sympathy for a man trying to do what was considered impossible, like developing autonomous taxis.
The 2nd generation of starlink satellites is worse than the first one: they leak radio spectrum energy at a massively higher level than the 1st generation.
Why have sympathy for anyone trying to do something stupid? Why do we need autonomous taxis? What problem is this solving, other than helping the already richer get a bit richer?
IMO the Starlink interference problem is being overblown to spite Elon for political reasons. In any case, satellites have long existed and other countries are going to build their own version of Starlink with the same problems. If they don't have the same problems then presumably Starlink will learn from them. There are other satellites made to observe stuff from space, and maybe the new SpaceX rockets will facilitate radioastronomy stations built on the dark side of the moon (if that's even important enough to build).
I actually don't want autonomous taxis or autonomous vehicles in general but some people do. When new technology is developed, usually most people experience benefits. It makes sense for some of the spoils to go to investors. Stop hating on people who make money. They are what funds everyone's pensions after all.
> Stop hating on people who make money. They are what funds everyone's pensions after all.
I was the 2nd employee at Amazon. It's not like I hate people who make money. And people making money is not what funds everyone's pensions, other than in some glib 8th grade sort of way.
Do feel free to continue on with your defense of incredibly rich people who don't actually give a damn about any of the things you do and do not need your assistance.
> IMO the Starlink interference problem is being overblown to spite Elon for political reasons.
That's your opinion. It's wrong.
There is a list of papers as long as an arm going back to the start of Starlink that measure the noise spectrum and point out exactly why it's a real problem for pre existing programs that have had billions invested in new science programs.
There are proposed work arounds which have been ignored.
Unless you are actively working on this issue I will consider your opinion no more valid than mine. There may be papers about the issue but that does not in itself prove how bad the issue is. I don't have time to find and read "a list of papers as long as an arm" anyway and I would bet good money that you didn't read them either.
>There are proposed work arounds which have been ignored.
Do you know if there is a legitimate technical reason why those might not have been implemented? Will any of those billions going to radio astronomy go toward reengineering the technical marvel that is Starlink? Doesn't the FCC inspect and approve all of our privately-owned satellites?
I'm not an astronomer or a rocket scientist but it seems to me that emitting continuous "noise" aka a radio signal is fundamental to the operation of satellite internet on such a scale. You don't have to respond with another pompous "Nah uh" because I don't care anymore.
> What's your solution? This kind of satellite system is going to get built and improved over time regardless of what you think of it.
So you've reversed your " opinion " and tacitly admitted it's more than a a minor inconvenience then?
As I outlined above the solution proposed was that the Ver 2.0 sats be better shielded and set to turn off over Radio Quiet Zones such as the Murchison as discussed and agreed to when this was raised some years back.
>> It's more due to Musk lying and not delivering.
> No, it's not.
Yes. It is. At least so far as the radio telescope community and this Starlink issue is concerned. He made promises and didn't keep them.
> Biden and a bunch of EU politicians ...
Has nothing to do with Starlink noise.
> Let's look at Elon's accomplishments objectively.
Sure. He promised to fix Starlink noise. He did not. He delivered a Ver 2.0 that's noisier than the the first.
He promised Full Self Driving cars "next year" for a decade. Still hasn't happened.
>So you've reversed your " opinion " and tacitly admitted it's more than a a minor inconvenience then?
No I didn't. I heard about some noise a long time ago and it did not sound like a devastating development. I am merely putting forward a conditional argument: If the noise is a problem, then the problem will likely affect other satellites which are already being built. In any case I expect the problem to be solved.
>Yes. It is. At least so far as the radio telescope community and this Starlink issue is concerned. He made promises and didn't keep them.
I was not aware of these promises. Without context I cannot say whether he had a legitimate reason to not implement that proposed solution. Can you at least admit there might be a technical reason for it to not be done?
>he promised[...]
He does tend to promise more than he delivers but nobody has delivered better satellite internet, EVs, or autonomous driving to the public. Your gripes are extremely uncharitable.
Again I must point out that Elon's habit of overhyping things was well-tolerated by all for years, until he revealed views slightly to the right of the most extreme leftists and questioned their pet issues. Then the media and all liberals acted like he's the devil. I have a coworker who has been affected by this propaganda campaign. He is extremely environmentally conscious, yet refuses to buy anything from an Elon company. He will not buy a Tesla despite the fact they are practically the best and most proven EVs on the market. Instead he bought a Leaf or something, which is objectively worse than a Tesla. This mentality is totally irrational and I would say un-American. But this bad attitude is common, unfortunately.
"Nobody has delivered better ...." is not a reason to be less negative towards Musk. Because somebody manages to do a quality-but-fundamentally-problematic job on satellite internet, a generally OK but quality-plagued job on EVs and a basically useless job on autonomous driving that nobody wanted does not mean they are exempt from criticism or griping.
It is extremely American to use commerce for political ends.
Boycotting people with political views you find problematic is as American as apple pie (and actually, maybe more so). The right and the left do it, and have done for ages.
His hype was well-tolerated by the people you read and listen to, perhaps, but in the stuff I read he's been criticized for more than a decade for his empty bullshit. Tesla also lots of issues with their cars, more than most other EV makes, but it is true that they do have more time in the market and have done some cool stuff.
An important aspect is that the US is that its economies and regional cultures are diverse and dispersed. The US is simply too decentralized to stagnate effectively. It is not a monoculture in any practical sense which creates a system that can respond quickly to evolutionary pressure. Everything good and bad you hear about the US usually only applies to a subset of the country and often only a handful of cities.
There is a high degree of regional specialization in the US as a consequence. No matter what happens in the world, some part of the US is perfectly positioned to take advantage of that. Combine this with general American risk tolerance and business acumen, and you have a country that is unusually organically adaptive to changing global economies.
Its also that its really expensive. The reasons given are the cost of planning but I also suspect given all that has been exposed over the past 40 years that widespread corruption by governments in power is actually a big part of the ballooning costs.
A lack of infrastructure development combined with a population being artificially increased by high levels of immigration, which is applying downward pressure on wages while pushing property costs (the source of most of the UK's problems) ever higher.
A population increase of around 1% per year may not seem huge until you consider what 1% of the UK road network or 1% of the NHS actually looks like, and what it'd take to build infrastructure and expand services at that rate year upon year.
The reality of building infrastructure in the UK is HS2 - a 20+ year project to build a little over 100 miles of high speed railway (with future northern phases predictably cancelled), at a cost over over half a billion quid per mile - it'll likely put any government off attempting any significant infrastructure construction ever again.
> 800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families.
Why the focus on second homes? I would care more about utilisation of homes by home-owners: walk around London at night, so many apartments are dark. The locals say investors own them.
The French are richer than the British. They have more stuff and a higher quality of life. It would be good for more British people to have more stuff and a higher quality of life. Building more housing allows both for more people to afford a (better quality of) primary residence, and for more people to have a holiday home. Those are all good. Focussing on utilisation is Green Party, NIMBY, degrowth, pro-poverty thinking. It sees a fixed pie and thinks how to distribute it instead of trying to make everything better for everyone.
More housing. A holiday home should be an utterly normal thing for a middle class family like in Finland or Spain.
Agreed. Thankfully we know what it takes to make housing a crappy investment vehicle. Build more housing. Build so much housing that returns on capital invested are flat, live Tokyo since 2000, or negative, like Seattle over the last five years.
Make building housing legal again.
Also. Renters deserve housing too. Restricting housing to the owner occupied is a great way to hate things by social class but I see no reason to further favour a population that’s richer and more powerful than the rest of the population already.
Greed, combined with a housing shortage, and the housebuilding that is going on being poorly planned (no new infrastructure, as many homes crammed onto small patches of land as possible, usually designed around car ownership but without space for the cars, etc) and focused on maximum profit.
There are more 2nd homes in France because rural housing is relatively cheap and there are lots of land. However the way the employment market works in France has screwed the younger people, I think. It's easy to stay in a job once you have one but hard to get started as a younger person. If I had to guess, France, Italy, Spain etc are in way more decline than the UK as a whole and Germany is spending hard to prop up a lot of the EU.
That's not true. In France you pay both taxe foncière (on any and all property you own) and taxe d'habitation (unless you're renting it for the whole year) on second(and more) homes you own. With some exceptions like newbuilds, newly renovated for better insulation, in very rural places, etc.
Regarding housing (and land ownership) specifically, France is over twice the size of the UK with a similar population. So there are underlying constraints that cannot easily be papered over with policy.
I'm not so sure counting lights on at any given moment is a good measure of occupancy.
The resident might be at work, at the gym, out for dinner or at the cinema, at a friend's house, in another room, might have good blackout curtains and only use lamps for ambience instead of the ceiling light, on holiday. I bet if you stood outside one of these buildings where "most of the lights are off" for the entire evening, you'd see lights come on and off, and in aggregate find that most of the flats were in fact occupied.
By the same logic, I could look outside my window right now, count zero cars driving down the road and declare it a useless waste that nobody uses.
We have fully embraced the parasite economy in the UK, however unlike big American tech we feed on one another. The safest business for a long time has been property, poor quality reno-flips and rentals, which adds nothing except burden to the people who might bring foreign income through being entrepreneurial.
This graphic[1] show how insane the European electricity market regulation has been for both France and the UK: going from electricity prices on par with the US to 2-3 times the price in less than a decade !
Similar points were covered in the recent Tyler Cowen podcast with Tobi Lütke[1] regarding economic stagnation in Canada & Germany (relative to the US).
The UK has a cynical view on progress, likely leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy. The US seems to have a contrasting view with an optimistic by default outlook.
If most of that are technical drafts going down to smallest details, I can imagine how it could be sort of reasonable. Large things like, say, nuclear power plants or huge ships have literally millions of parts.
Seems pretty reasonable actually. Final reports contain -everything- and I really do mean everything.
Design docs and drawings obviously (easily 1k pages more if you fit it on a4), since each trade needs it's own views. Specifications are included, as a legal document that calls out which regulations every possible system will follow and calls out exceptions (proof they apply). All possible testing from receiving it (and documentation including pictures), proof of setup, proof of commissioning (IE construction essentially needs to do what a tech bro would do with automated testing, by hand with with each step documented and signed for, and each possible state the system could be in). Any other type of test report NETA/material quality/thermography/whatever (a single breaker easily comes to two pages of test report, a voltage/current meter easily comes to three pages per phase). Pictures are likely kept to only two per A4 page.
Basically it's a "declaration from ignorance", since big numbers sound scary and wasteful to others who haven't worked in the field.
The question is, why did it cost significantly more to produce that document than it cost Norway to just build an even bigger tunnel? Pages might be misleading, but cash is not.
> Seems pretty reasonable actually. Final reports contain -everything- and I really do mean everything.
No it doesn’t. It’s an outrage and a powerful argument against the entire system that produced it. There is no sane way that spending more money on stakeholder consultation for a comparable tunnel than Norway spent on building one can be defended.
there is no poor energy rich country. with the U.K having expensive energy it means they're slowly becoming a poor country. it already feels poor as it is. But this will accelerate the rate
TL;DR the UK planning system is too restrictive and is stopping investment.
However, some of the comparisons made don't really stack up.
Yes. France has a better housing supply, and roughly the same area. But France has over twice the area, and under half the population density, even before you account for the almost uninhabited mountainous areas in Wales, Northern England and Scotland. So our populations are squeezed into smaller areas.
There are some good points made though. The gold plating of a lot of projects is ridiculous. And don't get me started on the Elizabeth Line. I get it, it is clearly hugely beneficial and I have no doubt it pays for itself. But then you visit places like Maerdy in the Welsh valleys, devastated by the closure of the coal mines, and it seems obscene to spend all that money in so small an area.
As for Wales ... This pattern repeats itself all over Europe. Only a few places "made" the transition from industrial settings to current economy.
I am from a former mining city of Ostrava, CZ. It is not completely dead, and it has been slowly improving lately, but it sorely needs something like high-speed rail to become relevant again. (The location is favourable: almost equidistant from Prague, Vienna, Warsaw and close to Krakow; a major railway hub.)
But the pattern really repeats itself all over Europe. Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, Germany, Czechia, Poland - former heavy industry hotspots tend to collapse in a very similar fashion. As far as I have seen, Bilbao (ES) and Katowice (PL) were able to rebuild and reinvent themselves the best. Everyone else struggles or gave up the fight entirely.
You'd think that exactly because it's such a common pattern, there would be best practices how to help those communities overcome. Yet, the only pattern I see is mainstream politics ignoring it, locals struggling, and rightwing winning them over. It's so obvious that you really have to ask yourself whether there's some hidden agenda somewhere in there. Just like mainstream politics ignoring the younger generations - both as plans for them and as ways to communicate with them - and again who's winning? The rightwing. It's everything in the open.
There have been projects that pour money into some of these places but it doesn't seem to make much difference. Modern economies seem to prefer cities.
>it seems obscene to spend all that money in so small an area
Greater London has a population nearly three times that of Wales. So the bang-for-buck in this small area is much greater. I completely agree that we under-invest in areas like Wales. But that doesn't mean that under-investing in the most productive part of the country is a good idea.
In the sense of labour productivity, measured in output per hour[1]. The products could be anything, but I'd guess they're primarily services like finance, technology, media etc.
It's hard to find any European country that didn't have any government projects that went wildly over budget or were very much delayed.
So I don't think this is a UK specific problem, and it doesn't explain why Britain has stagnated compared to most of the EU.
Transport projects seem to be particularly expensive these days in Anglo countries compared to European countries. For instance, we currently have a planned short tunnel in the UK (under the Thames but not in London itself) where the actual planning process has so far cost $400m.
Stronger property rights tend to backfire in the 2020s as NIMBYs have emerged everywhere and do their best to block anything around them, usually by weaponizing environmental laws.
The remedy will probably consist of a combination of legal changes and a change in attitude; YIMBY must become a thing. People respond to social pressures.
Does the UK have stronger property rights than, for instance, Norway that was mentioned by another contributor here as being so much more efficient? Yet Norway has abandoned, for now at least, the south western half of the Oslo to Drammen E18 road upgrade because buying out the owners of expensive houses on the route would be too expensive.
Are you claiming that other comparable democracies have such weak property rights that this significantly affects infrastructure projects? Which ones?
> Yes. France has a better housing supply, and roughly the same area. But France has over twice the area, and under half the population density, even before you account for the almost uninhabited mountainous areas in Wales, Northern England and Scotland. So our populations are squeezed into smaller areas.
If you compare population density maps of France vs the UK, you can see that it's pretty similar - there are clusters of population in certain locations, and wide areas with barely any inhabitants.
But at ground level it seems to get less done, less well. Just look at the dreadful state of repair of the average British town compared to comparable French towns.
Not at all? Someone has to manufacture the parts and materials and surely they could be in the same country. Having to buy those things from another country, especially now that the UK is out of the EU is surely a more complicated thing than buying them in the country. So surely there must be some connection.
The UK was, and to some senses still is, a culture that strongly values who your parents are vs what you’ve personally accomplished. The head of state is the child of the previous head of state. The House of Lords is still a thing. Prestige based on family lineage is considered a big deal.
In the US and other parts of Europe it’s very different. People value you a lot more because of what you’ve done vs who you are and, with some exception, nobody cares who your parents were. If you have a rich daddy most people don’t care. If you’re rich because you inherited wealth vs earning it that’s see as “less” than those who are self made. While there are certainly exceptions, most of our richest people are in the self-made category and that’s a source of pride. “The American Dream” while a bit of a glossy story is generally a very real thing.
Passing off wealth and prestige by lineage has long been shown to be a bad idea. The next generation typically just screws it up.
Until the UK truly does away with its still quite hereditary ways and focuses a lot more on valuing individual achievement it will likely only continue to stagnate against other economies that have long since broadly moved on from such archaic mental models.
> Prestige based on family lineage is considered a big deal
Are you in the UK? The monarchy and House of Lords are an obvious anachronism and they need abolishing [1], but I would say it's a very small minority who care who you parents are/were (mainly people who think their own parents are/were a big deal) — and a similar small minority who might also ask "which school did you go to?".
I suggest this exercise: Pick a random person from Queen Victoria's court. Look up where their descendants are today.
Chances are, they're still running the country in some capacity. (The example I'm thinking of was a Duchess. Her descendant was a beak at Eton who taught Boris and the haunted pencil).
People with Norman names wealthier than other Britons
People with "Norman" surnames like Darcy and Mandeville are still wealthier than the general population 1,000 years after their descendants conquered Britain, according to a study into social progress.
(Alec d'Urberville in "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" is a nouveau riche person who adopted the name rather than a descendent of the original d'Urbervilles. Probably that happens in real life, too, though I expect the people who did the study have taken that into account and have done the best they can in the absence of reliable public ancestry data.)
If you read that paper carefully (it's been a while so I might have this wrong), I think you'll see that while they're using Norman vs not-Norman surnames, the comparison is between Victorian and contemporary wealth and life expectancy data.
(Obviously the discrepancy has to start with the Conquest, I'm just saying that strictly speaking you can't use that paper to support that conclusion).
I don't think that's actually a fact. I don't know what figures you're using, but eyeballing the Global Social Mobility Index puts the UK as pretty middling in Europe. Less mobile than France or Germany, more so than Italy, Spain, or Poland.
If your point is the UK is just about in the lowest 50% of European countries by social mobility (keeping in mind Europe is pretty good on a global scale for social mobility), it's basically a non-point altogether. If the UK were at the end of the scale it might, but it's not, so it doesn't.
I think that if you look at the people in positions of control in political and economic sectors (and mass media, which is a key element), the vast majority came from just a few schools.
> The UK was, and to some senses still is, a culture that strongly values who your parents are vs what you’ve personally accomplished.
I think this statement's accuracy depends heavily on how you're defining things.
If I go up to the average Brit and tell them my father is the deputy editor-in-chief of some newspaper? They won't be impressed, they'll think I'm a prick.
On the other hand, if I want to pursue a career in journalism? My father will have made sure I've studied the right things, funded me through the right unpaid internships, and will be able to get my job application in front of the right hiring managers.
Does "UK culture strongly value" who my father is, if 99.99 % of brits don't care, but the remaining 0.01 % can have an outsized impact on my career?
(Of course if I've inherited a hundred million quid some people will think I'm important / suck up to me due to the power such wealth confers - but there's nothing uniquely british about that)
>> On the other hand, if I want to pursue a career in journalism? My father will have made sure I've studied the right things, funded me through the right unpaid internships, and will be able to get my job application in front of the right hiring managers.
I've been here for 5 years and am almost thirty years old. I still have people regularly asking me where I went to secondary school. They are obsessed with class.
I somehow keep ending up working at places where 90% of the employees grew up with staff in the house. Dozens of people with wikipedia pages about their families.
So, people who grew up with staff in the house are obsessed with class. That's perhaps disappointing, but not really surprising.
I'd bet, in the US, you'd find the same among people who grew up with staff in the house. The difference may be that, in the US, it's a lot harder to find people like that.
I don't think that's really true, outside some niche cultural arenas. Sure, if you're at a posh member's club or a party of aristocrats people might be impressed by your lineage.
I would concede that in politics a degree from Oxbridge has an outsized cachet, and those universities traditionally recruited from elite private schools. However, this is diminishing over time, both because those institutions are proactively recruiting from a wider base, and because people are pointing out the unrepresentitive composition of political parties, which then self-correct to stay politically relevent.
The hereditary parts of the House of Lords are increasingly unimportant, and the Lords is of minor importance to the political process anyway. Royalty has been politically vestigial for more than a century.
But in industry and most business spheres your lineage is unimportant. Just like those other parts of the world you mentioned, it's personal accomplishment that matters.
Britain has big problems, but I think archaic veneration for family lineage is only a small force within them.
Not sure who could be down voting you, because you're right. If your parents didn't send you to the right school to learn the right plummy accent, you don't stand much chance.
One of the exceptions in the US seems to be around the White House. For a while, when Hillary Clinton was running for President in 2008, it was possible that the US would have had a member of the Bush or Clinton families as either VP or President every year from 1981 thorough to 2017. Such political families are not unique to the US, of course, and the UK has a fair few, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_family
With that, Bill Clinton has very humble ancestry, as does Hillary; both trace back to traveling salesmen, small business owners, coal miners, such kind of folks.
Parental families of, say, Nigel Farage or Margaret Thatcher were somehow more sophisticated, even though not tracing back to some nobility.
Not that coming from a well-off family is bad; I just would like to emphasize that the "American dream" of coming to high social positions based in merit, not lineage, worked for Clintons.
Revolutionary France never made it across the channel... On the other hand, this significantly dismiss the UK contributions to the world on global trade and during the industrial revolution.
Britain had multiple revolutions earlier on. There was The Anarchy, Magna Carta, Cromwell, and 1688 when Britain decided to be Dutch for a while. The Declaration of the Rights of Man was inspired by Enlightenment philosophy, and a lot of that was English (or Scottish). The general mood was to look at the French as latecomers.
Isn't socio-economic status more heritable in the US than the UK? In the UK, inheritance tax is 40% and there's probably more redistributive taxation in general.
Worth pointing out that not only is the UK more American-style entrepreneurial than the rest of Europe (London gets about as much VC investment as France and Germany together), but that UK wealth inequaslity is low by European standards.
Like, there's work to do here, but by European standards the UK is doing pretty well.
>Passing off wealth and prestige by lineage has long been shown to be a bad idea. The next generation typically just screws it up.
In Japan there's an old saying that the success of a family is determined with the third generation.
The first builds the family empire. The second grows up seeing the first build it up and thus knows how to maintain it. The third grows up already having the empire and doesn't know how to maintain it, whether he can pass it on is essentially a dice roll. The fourth generation onwards, if the third succeeded, can refer to the family records and keep things going mostly indefinitely or realizes it's time to hand it off to different blood at that point.
"People value you a lot more because of what you’ve done vs who you are and, with some exception, nobody cares who your parents were."
Maybe on individual level, but as far as economy goes, mainland EU is still stuck with very old corporations and rarely generates some interesting startup (not just in IT). There has been a notable dearth of new European corporations since the 1970s at least. The old guard controls everything.
And London is full of European youngsters who came there to study and do some business, because the possibilities are broader there, including some VC culture. Try founding a new company in Germany; you will be met by a merciless paper storm that can only be weathered with help of a professional specialized in dealing with bureaucracy, and may take several months to overcome.
The UK is too complicated to fit into one neat box. It has its peers in medieval gowns, but at the same time, London is a very modern 21st century city, more modern than many metropolises on the continent. Perhaps Warsaw is more modern than London.
Sometimes I'll read a biography of a famous British person and the first chapter is dedicated to the full family lineage of them. You won't even hear the subject's name until chapter 2 because it was more important to discuss what his grandfather did in India in 1895. I think biographies of Americans tend to start at the childhood of the subject and will mention their family life and parents when relevant
To a certain extent I agree, however the head of state is only token position (albeit well paid!). It's not very different in the US, the "name" - Kennedy, Clinton, Obama, Bush, etc takes you most of the way there... Trump too I guess!
Type of article: country X or company Y or city Z has it bad for such and such decisions, policies, culture. My rule of thumb for these kind of articles: if they don't mention external factors they are not worth reading.
An entity's situation is influenced by much more than its agency. There's competition from other similar entities, historical circumstances, geography, weather, happenstance, the list goes on and on and on. We like to think that everything depends on what we decide when in reality it's far from it.
These observations have been triggered in myself by reading history. Leadership is always blamed in difficult situations even if they were not (or not completely) responsible for the situation.
One thing I will never forget from my short time living in London is how un-insulated the homes there were. Single or thin double-glazed windows, full-brick homes without a hint of thermal insulation. Sure there were exceptions but not many. At the time in Central Europe the movement to heavily insulated, nearly-passive homes was already in full swing. Many central European countries were much poorer than the UK, not even mentioning London, and energy prices were lower, so, naively I thought, everyone with an old house in the UK should be busy insulating it. It would pay off in a few years. Why didn't they?
And I think one of the reasons is that the governments, indeed the ruling class as a whole, just didn't care that the commoners are paying over their heads for energy and are freezing in moldy houses, because the class divide is just so big. It would be interesting to live in an alternate universe where Karl Marx would live in a different country - perhaps his theory would place a smaller emphasis on social class.
As I understand it from a couple of my British friends talking about insulation, the old homes were built to breathe, so you can't just seal them up and put insulation in, because you'll end up with humidity problems.
I think Karl Marx only serves as an expensive lesson in what destructive ideas look like. Everywhere that has implemented any version of it has ended up impoverished, unfree, and frequently with millions killed. China's success came only after they junked Marxism, and Xi Jinping's quasi return to it has seen Chinese prosperity slowly drop.
Yes, but there are ways to handle that. Even the insulation can let water vapor through, of course you can't in that case use the cheapest styropor.
> I think Karl Marx only serves as an expensive lesson in what destructive ideas look like.
I fully agree implementing his dumb ideas mostly from the Communist Manifest led to huge tragedies, but they were implemented partly because he was a hugely influential philosopher and that was not some random success. His critique of capitalism is worth reading, or at least reading about.
The reason that Britain has stagnated is the same reason most of western Europe has stagnated (in that GDP per capita hasn't increased for around a decade): continuously increasing debt and an aging population. It's a classic empirical economic result that a high enough level of government debt leads to reduced growth rates, and it's also well-known that growth rates decrease as the average age of the population increases. Over the past couple decades the UK population has been getting older and older on average and the national debt has been getting higher and higher.
The article is fairly misleading. Despite claims to the contrary the list of facts is nothing more than "disconnected observations". They lack any serious context or nuance. For every single one it's possible to ask whether the observation is a fair comparison or something that should be the case. Take the number of second homes relative to France. Is more second homes a good thing? Take electricity production, might we not argue that the UK uses energy more efficiently rather than lagging what other countries generate?
The climax of this system where the wealthy control everything is that the wealthy grab literally all of the wealth, spending that wealth in their endless competition with each other, leaving only scraps for the rest of us. And then the rest of us fill all our time stressed out and squabbling over crumbs with no time to do something better.
On a tangent, what is astonishing to me as an outsider is the cultural stagnation. Even in times of economic decline Britain was a cultural powerhouse. Modern music, theater, cinema, tv, literature, sports, etc. were permanently shaped by post-war Britain (especially in Europe). Whatever the cultural norm dictated by the behemoth that is the USA, Britain always had something new, something fresh to give. There's no point listing specific examples, they are numerous.
What happened in the last 15 years is a mystery to me. I doubt it's economic stagnation (been there before) and I doubt it collapsed under the weight of US culture (which is still enamored with anything British). Maybe the modern internet and social media diluted everything. I don't know, but I miss it. (sorry for the off-topic)
Whenever you ask someone in the creative industries, they point to the aggressive tightening of the benefits system. People could write music and books while on the dole in the 80s, and become commercial successes. Now it's an area that's only accessible to people who can afford to have their parents "loss leader" their first few years in the industry, and as a result has lost all "realness".
I don't think it's entirely off-topic, though I only have a vague sense of the connection. I knew 1980s Japan, a society of supreme confidence, and contrast it with modern Japan, a society that has really lost its mojo. What I think happened is that the depression of the 1990s so thoroughly shook their confidence that they still haven't recovered.
I've only observed English culture from abroad, but my sense since the late 1990s is that the English have become somehow ashamed to be openly proud of their culture. I don't have a feeling for what brought this about.
must commend this briton for his unparalleled sense of humor, razor-sharp wit, subtle, effortlessly charming and perfectly timed quips. While American humor tends to be more direct and sometimes louder, this dry, understated delivery is a unique gift.
I'd expect the cultural stagnation to lead the economic. The article is clearly political but it is pointing out some really obvious long term trends. The fact that the UK elite haven't been able to grapple with them at any point in the last few decades showcases that, as a culture, they've lost the spark of competence.
The UK media and upper class have failed to identify energy, housing or infrastructure more generally as requiring serious responses too. Their entire system appears to be off the rails. Their failure relative to countries like China really is quite astonishing, although it doesn't set them far apart from the greater western bloc. It makes sense that we aren't seeing cultural leadership out of them; where would they lead us too? Nowhere good.
I'm not sure 15 years is enough to look back. I'm struggling to think of a time since the 80s that some formerly strong areas of British culture were vibrant and interesting.
See eg. BritPop, a vacuous derivate outpouring of jumped-up pub rock relying on waving the flag to justify it's existence.
Some areas have still produced decent stuff, eg comedy (The Office, Borat, Peep Show), etc. Our twists on black American music (eg grime, drill) seem ok.
But it's a real struggle to think of much that is vital and original as a culture from Britain in the last 30 years I'd say.
> With almost identical population sizes, the UK has under 30 million homes, while France has around 37 million. 800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families.
I'm not sure that's a fair comparison, France has double the area of UK, and more of it is usable.
But the UK is nowhere near full in terms of housing. The Netherlands is the densest large country in Europe, and rocks double the population density of the UK. Despite this, the two countries have a roughly equal ratio of people to homes (~2.2). It's not as if a country actually needs that much land to build homes - humans simply don't take up that much space in terms of housing.
But the Netherlands are in a huge housing crisis at the moment.
If you want to compare the UK against the Netherlands, you'd have to compare the numbers in the article: how many Dutch own houses, how many have second homes. And adjust the numbers to be relative to population size of course. I'm not sure how well the Netherlands would come out of that comparison.
This doesn't really seem relevant since no one is disputing whether the UK as a whole has enough space for more houses. The relevant comparisons are Paris vs London and then the various 2nd tier cities in the countries. Paris has a MUCH HIGHER population density than London, in part due to the housing mix, e.g. Parisian mansion blocks.
Prosperity comes from cities where densification is allowed (far too much of inner London is only 2-storeys) and being able to affordably put in supporting infrastructure.
My main question/challenge would be: if the problems have been constant since the 1950s-1980s - e.g. planning and failure to build - then how come we were doing so well until 2008? Why did problems only start biting then?
I think Britain has got rich during early 18 century by dominating and getting into other countries like India, Africa and now nothing has left in the world to concur, that's why they're stagnated (maybe for forever)
The list of issues that the article list seems very ad hoc. Some are compared to EU countries, but apparently only where this makes the UK come out worst.
It also ignores the fact that the UK might do better in some area's than other countries, it would be fair to lists these as well. Otherwise you could make a list like this for any country in the world.
Also some issues seem irrelevant. E.g. the crime rate was given, and it was mentioned that this had been actually going down in the recent years. But then it was compared to the crime rate after WO2, and yes, compared to that it went up.
"These are not just disconnected observations", says the article. Yeah, but they might be actually. For instance the one about France producing more electricity is because France famously over-invested in nuclear power stations and that's why its electricity price recently went negative. Meanwhile the UK probably needs to increase supply slightly, but the comparison is misleading.
One of the authors is from the center for policy studies, which is a thinktank that was founded by Margaret Thatcher and 2 others. The other two authors seem to be the founder and one of the main contributors to https://worksinprogress.co/ which describes itself as "a magazine of new and underrated ideas to improve the world."
So I'm going to guess it's gonna be that sort of thing. Someone with a neoliberal economic perspective who stands to benefit from government investments in largescale infrastructure projects.
This is one of the worst comments I've read on HackerNews and engenders the decline in critical thinking that has become so pervasive here in recent years.
You find a bunch of ways to frame the authors as the out-group, then cast a totally baseless aspersion. Presumably so you don't have to engage with any of the actual points in the article.
I'm not framing them in terms of an out group at all. It's the exact opposite- they are the most "in" of in-groups. In the UK, government policy for the last 15 years has been hugely influenced by this specific thinktank and two or three similar ones. It's an extraordinarily small group. If Britain is in decline due to lack of infrastructure investment it's in no small part because of the policy positions that they have advocated and implemented during that time.
I care a great deal about the actual points in the article. It's just important to understand this is not in any sense a neutral analysis.
This section really shows where they're coming from:
Privatisation, tax cuts, and the curbing of union power fixed important swathes of the UK economy. Crucially, they tackled chronic underinvestment in sectors that had been neglected under state ownership. Political incentives under state ownership encouraged underfunding – and where the Treasury did put money in, it tended to go on operational expenditures (e.g., unionised workers’ wages rather than capital investments). This problem has immediately reemerged as the Department for Transport has begun to nationalise various franchises (which it promises to do to all of them).
It is bizarre to me that they can claim that under government ownership the incentives were towards underfunding, implying that somehow the incentives are any different under private ownership (although admittedly, there's been great investment in ticket barriers...)
> who stands to benefit from government investments in largescale infrastructure projects
I'm unsure if there's anyone in the country who wouldn't benefit from that. Hell, you can even wipe "government away", the essay talks at length about re-enabling private infrastructure investment too.
I would say most people benefit from working infrastructure. What we have seen in the last decade or so is a lot of government spending on infrastructure analysis (eg the "levelling up" agenda which brought spending mostly in London - the exact opposite of the stated intent or HS2 which has seen 15bn of spend mostly on slideware and consultants) without much in the way of actual infrastructure being developed.
There is unquestionably a large swathe of the UK (in particular the North, North East and most of Wales) which would benefit tremendously from improved infrastructure.
What an ugly, impoverished view of the world. Someone sees that the UK is poorer than it would be if economic policy wasn’t a disaster and wants to publicise that so it can be improved and tens of millions of people’s lives improved and you’re looking for an “angle”.
They were thinking...about the backhanders. Look at Cyprus, gateway for dirty Russian money in to the EU, swimming in Russian money, all sanctioned by the government and EU thanks to all the bribes they receive
The list of things the consider is long almost exhaustive. Most of the points have already been made, some by other people too, if you follow these things online. While there is nothing there earth-shattering, it's good to see it all nicely laid out. People dismissing everything with a sentence, are not doing it justice.
However. The report is thin on recommendations "What is to be done now?", or did I miss them really!? That really surprises me. If I were to define it in two sentences: UK central gov is ultra centralised in Whitehall (#1) (almost Stalinist in that respect!!), and then that centralised power is further held in a strangle hold by the Treasury Brain - Deep State - OBR complex (#2). So together they are like Centralisation^2.
Atm that ensures - #1 nothing can be done by anyone else, and #2 they've settled on "do nothing" b/c everything costs money, and #2 care disproportionally more about that cost, and much less about what capability assets etc that cost buys UK. Once nothing tangible is done, laziness is naturally encouraged, activity punished, and every promotion every jostling in the hierarchy becomes entirely a beauty contest, divorced from any real-word results. All this seen afar by outsider without any insider knowledge. Just listening to Rory Stewart and Dominic Cummings relying info about the inner workings of UK gov machine.
So any intervention would have to come (walking backwards) into point #2, and or at point #1.
Point #2 means smashing the power of the Treasury. They are good servant, but a bad master. No.10 (the PM) needs to re-assert itself over and above No.11 (the FinMin) by 1st-ly taking decision powers out of No.11 hands. No.10 would have to work much more on getting things done, take interest in that, and leave behind the media PR Circus it's totally devoted to atm. Just assume you will serve 1 term (or less!), drop the "permanent electioneering mode" (that nowadays the position goes into while in gov??), don't think of re-election and try get stuff done, assuming you've run out of time. Can't see how a change like that can come but directly from the top, from the PM. Supported by legislation and votes to dismantle the 1000 roadblocks, via the political power of MPs voting in Parliament.
Point #1 means decentralisation of power. UK for a long time used to have vigorous local authorities that could innovate in various ways. Admired once at the riches of local gov building in Birmingham (UK 2nd largest city). The idea that some pimply fresh graduate 20yo SpAd 120 miles away in London would be telling these people how many pencils they should buy I presume would have seemed to the people running the City gov absurd, like a Monty Python sketch to us.
Mid-term UK needs to build another 10mil strong cities agglomeration, e.g. Liverpool - Manchester - Leeds - Sheffield - Hull, by connecting them with transport links, and building housing along the links for commuting whichever way people fancy. With Birmingham half-way between this new MegaCity and the old London. So London gets some competition, and raises its game too. Atm feels London is coasting because TINA.
Weird how Western Europe stagnated after 1990, only Germany get some more “gas” for growth thanks to CEE and cheap energy. now it seems that importing tens of millions of low skilled refugees and workers with high social benefits is killing any innovation while taxing middle class and all high skilled Europeans prefer to move to US or even east Asia.
Which makes whole industry lag behinds and UK is probably biggest example of that it is just big banking and service hub with no money for any investments in infrastructure outside London making it more and more depending on single city with legacy service sector.
Even Poles are coming back to Poland a country that was 7-10 times poorer 20 years ago.
There were times in the 1990s when people like the Dutch commissioner Frits Bolkenstein sincerely tried to liberalize and open the internal market.
But at least since Brexit, possibly earlier, the EU has made a turn towards protectionism and closedness (at least economically; as you mention, it is way, way easier to ship people from Africa into the EU than bananas), a French attitude so to say.
Frankly, we the Czechs are missing Britain in the fold. It was a balancing power against the Franco-German attempts to micromanage and regulate absolutely anything. Together with NL and DK, they were a force for economic freedom within the Union.
BTW other nations are threatened by the very same development, see the shenanigans around FAA and their überlengthy process of licensing of space launches. But I am more optimistic about the US being able to cut red tape than the EU.
By putting red tape in scare quotes, do you want to express an opinion that every regulation is good and red tape is just a myth? More papers, more prosperity, without any limits or any inflection point?
The UK has argued for the Brexit with red tape removal, in practice this meant less protection.
Standards are useful. To be outside a large population area of standardization and regulation only means, that nobody cares about your small-country standards and that the population gets the worst of both worlds: inferior local standards and very little influence in international standards.
This website makes some claims about what has caused both growth and decline that are pretty contentious.
I think that many would argue that the growth following the second world war was the result of massive state investment in public services like creating the NHS and the building of council housing.
They baffelingly attribute yhat growth to the Conservative Govrernment of the 1930s rather than the post war labour government.
Similarly this page attributes growth in the 80s to the Conservative government privatisation program. Again many would argue that was actually the start of the decline which we are feeling the pain of now with things like a terrible and fractured rail service and not enough housing.
I think a perfect example of this is our water companies that have been private since the 80s and have done nothing but pay dividends to shareholders and now we have a disaster with shit being poured into all our rivers and costs to households rising dramatically.
Edit: I read on and they use the drop in passengers in the railway in 1965 as an argument against nationalisation of the rail service, somehow neglecting to mention the beeching cuts! That is incredibly missleading given 55% of stations were axed due to a /reduction/ of state infrastructure at that time.
> Again many would argue that was actually the start of the decline which we are feeling the pain of now with things like a terrible and fractured rail service and not enough housing.
I agree, this is pretty wild and made me immediately look up who was behind this. Conservative think-tanks gotta conservative think-tank.
Indeed, this is spun nonsense. The problem with the UK right now is brexit. You can see it on a GDP graph: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/GBR/uni...
It's growing steadily through the 60's-2000's, has a notable dip[1] at the 2008 financial crisis, then starts growing again until just about 2015. And it's been flat since.
The UK had found a profitable niche as the transatlantic hub of finance and commerce, and threw it out the window in a fit of nativist pique over the wrong languages being spoken on street corners.
[1] More pronounced than comparable nations, to be fair. The UK was always more dependent on finance.
>The UK had found a profitable niche as the transatlantic hub of finance and commerce, and threw it out the window in a fit of nativist pique over the wrong languages being spoken on street corners.
But we’ve imported millions of people that speak different languages since 2015 , why hasn’t line gone up?
I think this is sarcasm, but just to spell it out: this is a causation/correlation fallacy. Immigration is a result of global trade, not its cause. Brexit killed the trade part without actually doing anything about immigration policy.
The incredibly stupid part of all this is that the conservative government insisted on wrecking the trade side because reducing immigration was deemed more important, and then entirely voluntarily issued a lot of work permits.
(without even getting into the more obligatory areas of immigration like refugees and marriages)
One of the authors is from the Centre for Policy Studies. Another is from the Adam Smith Institute. These are the gang of shady right-wing think tanks that brought us Truss and Kwarteng. That tells you everything you need to know about their economic competence.
Their solution is to allow private funds to fund essential infrastructure, it seems.
Which to me just rings hollow, or at best, only a part of the answer. They're correct on some aspects of it, other parts they just gloss over. IE They say that there has been an "erosion" of the industrial base in the UK, while actually the blame could be laid at the feet of Thatcher's service-led policies.
They are not wrong on that thet just make the same error the socialisys do in thinking that is the solution for all time. The solution foe all time ia to both realize the end state of a free market is monopoly and the end state of a state monopoly is stagnation so one needs to focus the government on being proactive and allowing both to compete and put the finger of government on the scale to favor private when public is stagnating and favor public when private ia monopolizing.
Gotta love the fact they go “Hey, look how great France’s infrastructure is.” and then immediately advocate for yet more private infrastructure deals without mentioning that France’s infrastructure was largely government funded (using those taxes they seem to hate).
> From 2010 to the summer of 2024, Britain was run by Conservative-led or Conservative Governments. The Conservatives are the traditional party of business, and in the 1930s and 1980s they pushed through reform programmes that successfully renewed Britain’s economy. Virtually any Conservative minister from the past fourteen years would speak warmly about that heritage if asked, and would express the hope of being its inheritor. And yet, with honourable exceptions, the governments of the last fourteen years failed in this vocation. Failing systems remained unreformed, continuing to stifle Britain’s prosperity. Today Britain is ruled by a Labour Government that recognises this failure to build, and which has articulated high ambitions for changing this. But it remains doubtful that they will be any better at delivering on those ambitions than the Conservatives were.
What is shady about them? Are they criminals?
Their agenda is to frame the self-serving interests of a very narrow group as the economic interests of everyone. That's shady.
Depending on the specifics, that sounds congruent with some of Adam Smith's economic theories so it's not surprising to see such arguments used, especially if some of the authors are from the Adam Smith Institute.
His whole invisible hand metaphor is about society advancing as a whole from agents acting in their self interest.
It's more likely a sincerely held belief than an attempt at misdirection.
Adam Smith is probably spinning in his grave.
> His whole invisible hand metaphor is about society advancing as a whole from agents acting in their self interest.
That theory is predicated on the market being composed of buyers and sellers of broadly similar financial power. This is no longer the case in most markets, certainly not in the UK as far as ordinary people or most small companies are concerned.
I doubt Adam Smith would agree with anything the Adam Smith Institute says.
As rjsw says, they refuse to disclose who funds them. See https://www.monbiot.com/2022/10/07/thinktanking-the-country/ for some background.
If you consider tanking the UK economy to the tune of hundreds of millions if not billions of pounds, then yes, absolutely.
How could they possibly do that?
They are referring to the liz truss budget.
What happened wasn't primarily due to her budget. It was due to a meltdown in the pension sector triggered by over-leverage, arguably caused by the BoE not doing its regulatory duties correctly.
Don't get me wrong, a budget that cuts taxes without cutting spending is no good. But the idea that what happened was a direct consequence of that doesn't make much sense as it had been telegraphed a long way in advance, giving the markets plenty of time to adjust. The central bank changed monetary policy a day before the mini-budget, and changes in that are kept secret until the moment of announcement. Additionally, UK spending has since blown through what the mini-budget would have created without any sudden market turmoil.
https://www.ft.com/content/4701b6ac-851e-43fd-a2b2-b38dd07c7...
Regulators failed to anticipate the dangers that borrowing by pension schemes posed to the stability of the UK’s financial system, according to a parliamentary report into the turmoil that hit the gilt markets following Liz Truss’s disastrous “mini” Budget in September last year.
Pension schemes suffered multibillion-pound losses after they were forced to sell assets to ensure that complex derivative-linked strategies — known as liability driven investments (LDI) — did not implode when gilt yields jumped as investors rejected the then prime minister’s economic strategy.
Also, Truss is basically correct that the UK needs more growth. Disagreeing on her tactics is reasonable, disagreeing on her goals isn't. She was unfortunately attempting to create growth from a position of weakness: in a party that didn't want to do anything hard like cutting spending, and with a fragile/over-leveraged financial sector.
Pull the other one. Only some of the tax cuts had been telegraphed in advance. Abolishing the top rate of income tax and cutting the basic rate early hadn’t been. They ignored all the warnings they were given and sidelined the OBR. The Truss/Kwarteng budget directly crashed the economy and trying to pretend otherwise is some serious revisionism.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/63229204
You're arguing with the conclusions of the official investigation, not me.
The committee report only looked at the regulator. To be sure, the regulator and the pensions industry should have done more. But the idea that Truss and Kwarteng are blameless innocents in the whole fiasco is ridiculous.
So it is the elected representatives who are responsible for choosing them and implementing whatever they suggested?
Being elected doesn't remove your obligations to follow sane, moral policies.
That's my point. Crazy economists are not responsible for the damage, it's the elected people who listened to them and followed through. To create an intentionally extreme parallel, imagine they have chosen a group of idk, satanists. Would you blame the group of satanists for being satanists, or the people in charge of a country who contacted a group of satanists for advice?
Surely you blame both? Being consistently evil and living up (or down?) to ones reputation for evil doesn't make one less evil.
They refuse to say who funds them.
Hats. The fedoras they wear shades their faces from view, m’lady
Of course, the second most upvoted comment is an ad personam dismissal that doesn't even engage with its arguments. How's that for HN-level intelligent discourse?
If the asset prices don't grow, how will the rich people get paid for being rich? Won't anyone think of the poor rich people!
None of what the website says is actually contentious outside of Labour/left wing circles. Economic growth isn't that complicated when coming from behind - but as they say, it's hard if there isn't enough energy or housing.
> I think that many would argue that the growth following the second world war was the result of massive state investment
I don't think anyone with a strong grip on economics or British history would argue that. The fact is that post-war rationing continued longer in the UK than it did in Germany, the country that actually lost the war, and Germany recovered far faster in other ways too. Decades of very left wing governments left the UK in a terrible state by the 1970s relative to its peers - it was called the sick man of Europe and needed an IMF bailout - a situation fixed only by Thatcher. This history is well known not only in the UK but internationally. The website provides supporting evidence if you aren't familiar with this.
> our water companies that have been private since the 80s and have done nothing but pay dividends to shareholders
That this sort of absurdly false belief gets repeated unchallenged so often in Britain is exactly why it's falling behind. Thames Tideway, one of the largest engineering projects in Europe and the biggest upgrade to London's sewage system ever, is organized and financed by the private sector (pension funds, Allianz, Amber IG, Dalmore Capital and DIF).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Tideway_Tunnel#Funding_...
It's literally being built right now and yet you claim the private sector hasn't invested. The reality is the opposite. As the website points out, British governments have historically struggled to do capital investments because the moment money becomes available the unions always take it all. Only the private sector has sufficiently good labour relations to actually build things and the water industry is a good example of that in action. Compare to the NHS where the government has regularly tried to ringfence money for capital investments (repairing leaking hospital roofs etc), only to see its direct orders ignored and the money used for pay rewards instead.
> 55% of stations were axed due to a /reduction/ of state infrastructure
The stations were axed due to long term decline in passenger numbers, a situation that reversed immediately upon privatization:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail#...
Water quality by country.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/water-qua...
US is good while countries with more left leaning setups do bad.
It is not as black and white as you imply.
According to the graph on this site, ALL countries in the world have very bad water, at least after I move my mouse pointer around the map: all the countries turn orange.
I'm confused at your point - I look at the countries we typically view as more left leaning and both Canada and Europe as a whole has better water quality. If anything, it seems to be a delineation of first world status.
> US is good while countries with more left leaning setups do bad.
Huh? This is a map of the industrialized countries - western Europe, the US and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Japan and South Korea. Not sure how "left leaning setups do bad", the Scandinavian countries seem to have good water.
> the Scandinavian countries seem to have good water.
We certainly do here in Norway. And it's provided by the kommune (the local authority) not a private company. Where I live it is what I dilute my Scotch with. It's easily as good as or better than any bottled water.
"It may have been the greatest rapid expansion in a given economic sector in British history, and it was the key reason we didn’t experience a Great Depression while Germany, the USA, and France did. "
But Great Britain (as it was then) did experience a great depression. 3.5 million people were unemployed in 1932.
Ok - one could say that the depression in GB was less pronouced vs. the situation from 1918 on, but I think that there is a lot of cherry picking & spin in this article. Comparisons are not made consistently and the context from history mean some things matter less in the UK and matter more, and have happened for particular reasons. For example folks often talk about reservoirs, but fundamentally the UK's reservoirs were largely built to support an industrial demand that is simply not there - and this capacity remains despite the loss of demand.
There are some good points, but I think they are obscured by the polemic.
It appears to have been produced by a right wing think tank, justifying its seeming lack of focus on how public funds could help build infrastructure vs the author's seeming obsession with private financing.
This is pretty bleak reading for a resident of the UK! It's a good explanation for why there's stagnation (generally not allowed to build here). I'm a fan of their work (see the housing theory of everything [1] which is also good).
I'd be interested to read what they think can be done about the planning issue. The new government hasn't really come through on their promise to address it. They ran out of low hanging fruit pretty quickly. They're focusing more on rental reform rather than on supply. Gov modified the NPPF in odd ways (e.g. reduced targets in London, where need is highest). They set up a panel to look at new towns which will report back in a year.
This bit at the end made me laugh:
> it need simply remove the barriers that stop the private sector from doing what it already wants to do
Unfortunately these supply-side policies causing stagnation are representative of what our ageing population actually wants. The average 50+ voter thinks demand is too high and should be cut until supply catches up (in 33 years) [2][3].
[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every... [2]: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/trackers/the-most-import... [3]: At the current rate of house building it would take 33 years for the UK to reach France's current dwelling to person ratio, assuming UK's population growth stops.
The "new Government" has not yet been in power for 100 days. How exactly have they not "come through on their promise to address it"? Given the old government didn't come through on similar promises on planning for 14 years, I think we can give them another year or so to get policy and statutes in place, no?
Yes I hope they’ll find a solution and get re-elected. In some cases changes to frameworks require a 1 year consultation (planning permission to change planning permission rules!) so I am sure it will take years to see an increase. My point was their changes announced so far seemed bitty and wouldn’t address much of the issue.
The problem is hard! Even if you do build 500k homes a year (2x current) in places people don’t want you to build, it will still take 15 years to catch up, and they might be voted out before then because voters don’t want it.
At this point in time I'm just jaded about the whole political discourse - it seems that 90% of the discussion is devoted to "what they did" and "what we could do", with almost none about "what we did, and here's how we believe it actually affected your life"
feels like the government need to set the tone for the rental market first then both owners and builders can decide if they want to participate.
> Unfortunately these supply-side policies causing stagnation are representative of what our ageing population actually wants.
This is basically it. The pensioners don't want change. They might theoretically want some nebulous "improvement", but only if it doesn't cost anything, doesn't involve building anything, or even a change of use, doesn't make any noise, doesn't increase traffic, and doesn't involve any immigration.
The people demand stagnation.
> Nor can austerity or the hangover from the financial crisis explain Britain’s malaise. The financial crisis was at least as turbulent in the United States as here.
Yes it can. For the UK the financial sector was a dramatically important one, more so than practically for any other major country. London was the undisputed financial center for whole Europe and beyond, a legacy of Empire days, the pound as reserve currency etc. This had serious distorting effects: Abysmal center-periphery inequalities; the fatal attraction of talented people to lucrative but mostly pointless financial engineering games; the neglect of "bricks and mortar" etc.
The financial crisis and Brexit demolished this fragile, hyperconcentrated economic posture. Not in the sharp and seemingly recoverable fashion that, e.g., COVID damaged the tourism industry of various countries but in a chronic, gentle decline kind of way.
In the long-term one would think that the immense cultural heritage of Britain across pretty much the entire knowledge spectrum would somehow translate into a way forward. But as we increasingly get to know all too well, the problems of modern societies are self-inflicted and they reflect fundamental breakdowns of social contracts. Yes, despite what that British lady said, there is an emergent phenomenon called "society" and if you deny its existence you will get devoured by demons of its own creation.
The financial crisis was a specific event and other countries had put it behind them within a few years. The UK's growth inflected around that time and never recovered since. It doesn't make much sense to argue a temporary event changed UK productivity or economic growth permanently, especially as the only reason to think that is rough temporal proximity. There were other things going on at that time too that are equally or more plausible e.g. mass immigration from eastern Europe was kicking into gear around that time as well, which created a glut of cheap labour. Cheap labour always kills productivity growth because there's no reason to invest in automation.
> Yes, despite what that British lady said, there is an emergent phenomenon called "society" and if you deny its existence you will get devoured by demons of its own creation.
Thatcher was responding to people who asserted that for any given problem, "society" should solve it or pay for it. Her answer made the obvious point: when it comes to taxation, there really is no such thing as society. To complete the quote: "they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families".
> For the UK the financial sector was a dramatically important one
The Finance Curse: Britain and the World Economy
• Outlines harms caused to countries hosting an oversized financial sector
• Argues Britain is subject to a Finance Curse, which carries many similarities with the Resource Curse, afflicting mineral-exporting countries
• Provides a narrative and framework to analyse the political economy of finance and financialisation
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/136914811561279...
The Resource Curse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
I left the UK almost 20 years ago, and cannot imagine returning for any length of time.
My personal take on this is the UK got so used to having an empire, and specifically India, which could absorb more British bureaucrats than the UK could possibly produce. Consequently when Indian independence occurred this massive pipeline of producing people for running colonies had nowhere to go, and a large number moved back to the UK. What you have now is a class of people have been trying to run the country as a colony of itself with rather predictable results.
The UK has a broken culture, and until they start valuing things appropriately they will stay that way.
The Indian Civil Service was always tiny. There were so few British in India that in 1950 when the Indian government surveyed the populace to try and see if they knew the British had left they discovered the average Indian wasn’t aware there had ever been a British Empire. The British Empire in India and the British Army in India at all but the most rarefied levels were staffed by Indians and there weren’t even that many of them.
> At the time of the partition of India and departure of the British, in 1947, the Indian Civil Service was divided between the new Dominions of India and Pakistan. The part which went to India was named the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), while the part that went to Pakistan was named the "Civil Service of Pakistan" (CSP). In 1947, there were 980 ICS officers. 468 were Europeans, 352 Hindus, 101 Muslims, two depressed classes/Scheduled Castes, five domiciled Europeans and Anglo-Indians, 25 Indian Christians, 13 Parsis, 10 Sikhs and four other communities.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Civil_Service
It takes more than the civil service to run a colony.
It is quite curious both you and the other replier jumped to that conclusion, and says quite a lot about the current British malaise.
I’m not British, I’m just not ignorant of Indian history. At partition the entire British population of India was about 100,000 including the army, civil service, civilians and family of same.
Even if you round up to 1,000 the number of ICS officers and dectuple to 10,000 you get a trivial number of returnees to the UK. The British Army in India returning would have had nugatory impact considering the British had just fought WW2.
Leaving India was bad for the British upper classes because there were fewer jobs as officers that would keep a man in the store to which he had become accustomed on salary in the army. The ICS was less important than that in terms of numbers and its peak social impact was as an inspiration for the British civil service. The ICS is the only organisation in British India that might plausibly have had a large impact on the culture of the British civil service and it was too small to have had an impact by numbers alone as you originally posited.
> Even if you round up to 1,000 the number of ICS officers and dectuple to 10,000 you get a trivial number of returnees to the UK.
Why are we obsessed with restricting discussion to ICS? The bureaucracy is not just that, but extends throughout the entire service sector these people rely on, such as banking, schooling, transportation, manufacturing management and so on.
There is real denial going on here as to the extent of what happened.
> Why are we obsessed with restricting discussion to ICS? The bureaucracy is not just that, but extends throughout the entire service sector these people rely on, such as banking, schooling, transportation, manufacturing management and
There is no plausible mechanism by which these people could have effected a radical change in the general British culture or the culture of the British civil service. The culture of the British in India was an expatriate one, not one of colonial settlement or intermarriage (certainly not after 1900).
They weren’t different enough from the British population to have any noticeable effect even though in class composition the civilian element was elevated in education and social class compared to the general population.
The pied noirs in Algeria were settlers and they were distinctly different in terms of ethnic composition, being disproportionately Spanish, Maltese and Italian in ancestry compared to French from l’Hexagone and it’s still a matter of debate if their descendants are noticeably different from other French. The British in India were just that. Not a lot more culturally influential in the home country than the British in the UAE. As of 2015 there were A quarter of the million Britons in the UAE. That’s more than twice as many people from Britain in a petrostate then were ever in India.
> There is no plausible mechanism by which these people could have effected a radical change in the general British culture or the culture of the British civil service.
These people were somehow capable of running India and yet at the same time could not cause a change in the UK if they returned en masse?
> They weren’t different enough from the British population to have any noticeable effect
You have a very odd view of life in the UK if you believe this.
>> They weren’t different enough from the British population to have any noticeable effect
>You have a very odd view of life in the UK if you believe this.
If all 250,000 Britons in the UAE returned to the UK in the next three months I would expect it to have no noticeable effect a year from now. By the same token I wouldn’t expect much from 100,000 Brits moving from India to the UK in 1947. West Indian migration starting in the 1960s or Ugandan Indians in the 1970s are movements of people who are genuinely different in important ways.
Those had no great effect on the civil service culture either.
> If all 250,000 Britons in the UAE returned to the UK in the next three months I would expect it to have no noticeable effect a year from now.
Those 250k Britons in the UAE are not state supported colonists, and so do not have the attitudes and culture of state supported colonists.
Edit: specifically the colonial attitude that the inhabitants of a colony exist as a natural resource to be exploited purely for the benefit of the colonists. This is now the attitude that exists throughout the UK state towards the inhabitants of the UK.
I don't think this is about the number of civil servants so much as the attitude of running everything from the Imperial core. Becomes apparent when you ask questions like "now that there is a Scottish Parliament, what exactly does the Scotland Office do?". There's no California Office in the American government, no Jura office in the Swiss government, because those are federal systems with a clear division of power across different levels.
See also terrible attitudes to local government. Part of London's recovery is getting its own governance back after the abolition of the GLC. Ihe Assembly is also slowly imposing sensible ideas like Regent Street pedestrianisation on London's councils. Andy Burnham is doing great as mayor of Manchester.
The power dynamic is apparent when you have to refer to provinces as “countries”.
We ran the empire with a lot less civil servants than we have now: https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/uk-government-did-we-ru...
In the census in 1921 there were over 150000 British Subjects in India. Over 40000 of them were women, so we are not talking just army.
In 1891 there were 238,409 with english as their mother tongue (before the census broke this out).
I’ll need to sit down and read this properly, but I would say there is a real stench of decline in England at the moment and pretty much everyone here would agree. It’s readily apparent the new government won’t save us already.
Public services in particular: 2 weeks to see a Dr, a year for an operation, unlikely for the police to attend your call out, stagnant economy, high cost of living and low wages. And all whilst we have one of the highest tax burdens in our history.
> It’s readily apparent the new government won’t save us already.
I dont follow this line of reasoning too well. The conservative party was in power for fourteen years, 2010 to 2024. The new Labour government has been in power for less than fourteen weeks. Isnt it too soon to make any claims about their performance fixing the structural issues identified in this report?
Maybe but probably not by this point. If Starmer were engaged and keen to fix these problems, he would have clearly articulated the problems outlined on the website, stated a plan to solve them and now be doing things to advance it.
What he's actually done is the opposite. For example, the website makes the point that British governments often don't do enough capital investment so state-controlled infrastructure rots away. Instead spending rises get used to buy off unions. Sure enough, within just months of Labour coming into power it's already handed out around £10 billion/yr worth of pay rises:
https://inews.co.uk/news/public-sector-pay-deals-cost-323074...
This type of behavior led to pay spirals in the 60s and 70s.
We see this problem elsewhere. Labour's plan to build new prisons is simply to override local councils that are blocking planning applications, but that won't yield funds for actually building them. Where's the capital going to come from in a government that capitulates immediately to union pay demands, and which is already financially over-stretched? To do this they would need to make major cutbacks in other areas, but they have no plans to do this.
I've been to my GP half a dozen times in the last year, always same day.
Last time I went I was sent for a chest x-ray, which wasn't done at the GP, I had to drive to the place and wait 40 minutes for that, bit of a pain.
Main problem I see is housing. It drags the entire economy -- people are living in overcrowded, people in their 30s living with parents etc.
Anyone living on their own sees all their income drained by landlords, who then pump it into ever increasing housing costs as they out-bid each other. Anyone else never becomes an adult and pumps their money into things like onlyfans and coke.
>I've been to my GP half a dozen times in the last year, always same day.
Good for you, but I think that is absolutely not the typical UK experience.
It is for us. Our surgery has a triage system where you phone in the morning and if you need an appointment you get it the same day. I don't think it's that uncommon.
The problems are mostly concentrated in the poorer areas where they struggle to attract staff.
We have to call at 8am along with the hordes. If your call isn’t answered by 8.05am then you are out of luck. If you eventually do get through then you’ll be given an appointment with a “nurse practitioner” in a weeks time. I’ve heard about these things called GPs but haven’t personally confirmed their existence.
> Anyone living on their own sees all their income drained by landlords
The entire country's economy feels like a property-indexed Ponzi scheme, with everyone (including the government) rather keep fueling the ponzi as long as possible rather than breaking it up.
> GP half a dozen times in the last year,
you are going to GP every two months? Usually you get referred to a specialist if you are that sick.
> And all whilst we have one of the highest tax burdens in our history.
It's easy to have a low tax base when you subsidise the state spending with North Sea Oil from the 80s onwards... Prior to that we had really bad balance of payments crises from the Second World War onwards as the empire fell apart.
Low and middle earners in the UK pay pretty much the lowest taxes in Western Europe. We've eroded our tax base all over the place and somehow expect European services.
I don't agree, and your data points don't match my own. How is it readily apparent the new government won't "save us" when they haven't even got to 100 days in, yet?
It's not readily apparent, it's just FUD to lay the ground for the tories to come back. They're all the same, after all :-)
Quack medicine products used to be sold (and sometimes still are) by asking in adverts "do you feel vaguely unwell?" and promising to vaguely cure the condition. Similarly, it's easy to sell the public on a vague sense of national decline, and this is a long-standing key part of populist politics.
British GDP per capita has been flat since 2008 while the US’ has gone from $49K to $81K. The UK has declined in relative terms compared to what used to be a near peer.
It may also be true that there's a national decline, I'm just saying to be very cautious about getting swept up in the idea. For instance, apparently America needs to be Made Great Again, facts notwithstanding.
Certainly one should take TFA with a pinch of salt rather than at face value. It is incredibly partisan.
It's hard to understand how people view the NHS. Some people claim it's the national treasure, but how does that work if service is as abysmal as what you describe ?
It's because the experience you get is completely random and heavily weighted towards the fatal. If you show up with something life threatening they're actually pretty good.
But your experience of non-life threatening can be anything from good, to indifference/boredom to aggressive dismissal. This also applies to things that could be markers of something fatal, analogy would be they do little when smoke is coming out from under the door but do jump into action when the flames are coming out from under the door. Most of the interactions start on off the foot that you're assumed to be a timewaster too.
Keep begging my parents to just go private because I don't like trusting their lives to the random chance they have a good doctor when I can instead have one incentivized by their continued existence.
The issue is that underfunding the NHS has become so bad that even very serious cases can't be handled appropriately. I know it's an anecdote, but I've had a fairly bad experience recently after a serious bike incident in the middle of a workday, and they took over an hour to send an ambulance, about an hour to be checked, and over 7 hours in the Royal Hospital waiting for treatment.
Legitimately was a worse and slower service than I would have had at my grandparents' place in Eastern Europe, it's a disgrace. It still makes me angry that it's the experience I get after paying 1000s of £ in NHS contributions.
Your description of the NHS sounds exactly like the Canadian healthcare system.
>>Keep begging my parents to just go private [...]
Except for this difference as we don't have the option to choose private care except for a out-patient services (e.g. physical therapy) and certain drugs & therapies. I'm speaking primarily about Ontario and British Columbia, but I think the other provinces and territories are similar.
Hospitals, diagnostic services and physicians are all funded by public taxpayer dollars at both the provincial and federal level, but it is indeed a single healthcare system.
It's the case nationwide in Canada due to rules in the Canada Health Act: if a service is provided by provincial governments (so MSP in BC or OHIP in ON) then it cannot be offered privately.
There have been some workaround attempts in BC (such as the Cambie Surgery Centre, which lost a court case recently-ish) and AB's recent move to give contracts to Catholic health care providers, but the only true "private" option in Canada is the airport.
I could go on about this at length and how it makes me a pariah amongst a flood of anti-American conspiracy theories, but this is a thread about the UK (of which I'm also a citizen) so I'll resist.
Main problem with systems outside the NHS and I'm really talking about the US here is if you have a major accident or a terminal illness you can easily be bankrupted if you make a wrong decision around insurance and that's not cool. I see far too many GoFundMe's for people with illnesses in the states and that is no way to run a country.
The local variation is incredible.
Where I am from the village health services act as gatekeepers for the more central services. Just in my direct circles I know of several situations where the central services gave the village services an earful for failing to refer people faster, in at least one case directly leading to death.
Those central services also seem to get further away every few years.
Everyone loves the NHS in an abstract sense, but mostly if you ask them, they'll have stories about how terrible actually being treated by the NHS is.
It's the national religion.
a) it hasn't always been bad (although it has always been a right-wing punching-bag); b) it has the potential to be a lot better than it currently is; c) a lot of the people actually in it care desperately about seeing that happen, and because of its size that's a surprising proportion of the population.
> 2 weeks to see a Dr, a year for an operation
Its the same in USA if you want to see a specialist. There is a worldwide shortage of qualified doctors.
I waited about 1.5yrs to get a routine endoscopy at northwestern hospital in chicago. We've gone to northwestern in downtown for decades and have never seen waits this bad.
Ironically, a lot of the US medical professional problem mirrors housing -- supply limited by fiat, to the advantage of existing suppliers.
https://www.medicaleconomics.com/view/match-day-2023-a-remin...
> There is a worldwide shortage of qualified doctors.
I'm not sure you can extrapolate that it's worldwide because things are the same in UK and US.
FWIW, I had surgery in Spain recently and had to wait like two-three months tops. Probably depends a lot on the type of surgery and how urgent it is.
My brother had a hip replacement in Paris this week. He booked the operation two weeks ago. His angiogram (required for the surgery) was performed 3 hours after his consultation with the surgeon. The clinic is considered the best one specializing in joint replacement surgery in all of France.
Total cost for surgery, follow-up, and 3 days in hospital (he lives in a French Overseas Department so he gets reimbursed): 18,000 Euros.
How are you calculating the total cost?
yea could be my specific hospital. I've heard from indian colleagues that if you sprain your ankle you can see someone immediately but if you get cancer and need to specialist then you are competing with thousands of ppl to see that doctor.
Endoscopy wait times are kind of a notorious worst-case, right? There's something weird going on with them here. I had specialist care in Chicago (at Rush, not NWU) booked and delivered inside of a couple weeks.
I think 2 things are true at the same time, some specialists are impossible to get access to and others are easy.
I’ve been able to get an orthopedic surgery issue diagnosed and booked in weeks (Rush). But routine care with my pain specialist (Northwestern) can need months long lead times.
Rush has gotten me in for endoscopy twice this year with two-three months notice.
It took 6 months to get into neurology there, and they rescheduled my 6 month follow-up to be a 14 month follow-up
OK so ignore me, I'm definitely wrong. Though: my wife is a Rush neurology pt (migraines, super problematic migraines) and she's gotten scheduled p. quickly (but for probably simple appointments).
(I don't know why I hadn't placed you as a Chicago person before; you should come out with us sometime!)
I've been able to see a Dr on the day I've called several times in the last couple of years. Operations happen reasonably quickly if they are "required", it's the non urgent ones that now have ridiculous waiting lists. The economy/wages issue, seems to be worldwide since covid and the various recent wars.
The new Government has had no real time to do anything yet everywhere on twitter/fb I see hundreds of people complaining, who didn't do enough complaining in the last 14 years. What happens with the current Government is yet to be seen, but it's certainly difficult to make any meaningful change in a single term.
> real stench of decline in England at the moment
Real GDP per capita has been flat since 2008 while official population figures show population has increased by 10m. Total failure to grow the economy in 14 years of Tory rule and Labour aren’t exactly showing signs of having ideas to grow either.
Same in Scotland. And our tax burden is even higher (if you’re a middle or high earner at least)
Really interesting and well researched read. The main take away seems to be that Britain has seen a lack of state funded infrastructure development and it's paying the price for this, especially in the energy sector.
I'm obviously oversimplifying, but I think that's an ok rough summary. I think it's well argued and evidenced in the article, but I'm interested in this question: why isn't the US stagnating?
My understanding is that it has had a similarly low infrastructue development, but conversely is doing well economically. What's the deal?
The US has a huge internal market, with free interstate trade and no need for localization.
The US has accumulated colossal scientific and R&D resources, which regularly produce industrial breakthroughs. Lower taxes help, too. (Lower taxes is what a country can afford for general benefit, not a sloppy pro-rich policy.)
But most importantly, USD is effectively the world's reserve currency, so the US can literally print money, and much of the rest of the world would gladly take it; it's like gold, only buttressed by the US's economic and military might.
The UK has none of these advantages. The British Empire had some of these, but it's gone. Another large factor is that the US emerged from WWII relatively unscathed, while Britain was badly hit, and could not grow as fast.
(Edit: typos.)
Another factor is that Quantitative Easing (QE) kind of works for the US, but not for the UK: https://youtube.com/watch?v=goA9kkaDfTE / https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/goA9kkaDfTE
That's a consequence of being world's reserve currency
The UK emerged from WWII massively indebted to the US. That's not entirely unrelated to the UK's position post-war.
That security guarantee to Poland turned out quite expensive in the end.
You know, if you put it this way, it's really a miracle that britain as an independent country still exists at all, that it's not been conquered from the continent since 1066, and that has been in no small part thanks to a british foreign policy of making sure that no country in europe becomes so dominant that they might take on britain, a foreign policy which included that security guarantee to Poland.
Which was the type of unforced error that almost brought together the Molotovian facist-communist tagteam that almost destroyed the entire world.
And Poland got occupied anyway. Truly Metternich-level stuff.
I don't think "state funded" is the important part to take away from the piece, it's a shortage of infrastructure in general, both state and private, in part due to incredibly restrictive rules. These days you can easily trap a planned piece of infrastructure in court cases for years for largely spurious reasons.
Having recently visited the US, the infrastructure there (at least in the parts of California I visited) is noticeably worse than in Europe (including the UK). So I don't think it can just be about infrastructure.
> incredibly restrictive rules.
Like what?
Are you referring to the self-regulation at Grenfell Tower?
It’s not so much restrictive rules, as it is a planning system that prioritises local concerns, regardless of how minor, or incorrect, over any kind of national priority.
Our planning system is literally designed to maximally empower NIMBYism. There are no well defined planning rules, or zoning, or planning process. Every council develops their own planning policy, and broadly has the power to block any project. The result is building anything requires millions of pounds, and years of effort, to work through a councils arbitrary, and ever changing planning rules, with no guarantee of any kind of success.
Most of the rest of the world operates some kind of permitted development zoning policy, where planning policy tends to provide clear rules around what can always be built in a specific area. So it possible to start a development process knowing that certain aspects of your project must be approved, as long as you follow the rules. Unlike the UK where you project might be approved if you managed to somehow follow all the undocumented, arbitrary, and changing local rules.
Consequences are quite simple, only projects that are absolutely guaranteed to return large profits if successful are built. And for those projects there’s very little incentive for high quality building, because there’s no competition in the area, and costs of getting permission are so high, that a developers unique selling point is their ability to get permission, not their ability to actually build well.
With regards to Grenfell, that’s the consequence of have shambolic building regulations (I.e. regulations on the quantity and safety of buildings), and a construction industry that can only make money by cutting corners, because the supply of actual work is so low.
While not denying in any way that this sort of thing is a real problem, I think you're overstating differences between the UK and "the rest of the world".
Although zoning in the USA does work to a degree as you say ("must be approved if you ..."), in reality lots of projects that seem as if they ought to be a sure thing for approval face years of process-based objections from local groups, leading to them never being built at all, or having to be significantly revised due to changes demanded or created by circumstances shifting.
The UKs planning system is pretty much unique. Almost no other country in the world operates a planning system where every local authority basically gets to make up their own rules around planning, and where it’s practically impossible for national government to enforce simple things like minimum house building quotas.
If you want to understand why building infrastructure in the UK is so difficult, then you need to look no further than our planning system. It has uniquely managed to completely strangle infrastructure building. Sure NIBYism exists in the U.S., and there’s lots of planning red tape, and plenty of very poorly considered planning rules (such as single use zoning, and a strange obsession with single family homes). But in comparison to the UK, it’s practically pleasant to work with.
Of course it helps that the U.S. has a crap ton of spare land just handing around. Much easier to build a new shopping mall, highway or suburb on a completely empty plot with no neighbours in sight. But in the UK you, you can’t swing a cat without hitting an existing building, or actively worked farm.
The thames tunnel costing as much in planning as Norway spent actually building the longest tunnel in the world. Construction projects are so fraught with regulatory burden that most of these costs are going to legal fees. It's not that they're not spending money. It's that public infrastructure is a money pit of legal fees
Building a tunnel through a stable and self supporting granite mountain is a bit different from building one under a river that is on top of a slab of clay and sand so I don't think the two projects are directly comparable.
And the regulations are really not that different here in Norway. What is different is that there is a less adversarial society. We are a little more inclined to thrash out the problems in discussion rather than litigation.
But there are plenty of infrastructure projects here that take longer and cause more disruption than they should. For instance the upgrade to the E18 between Oslo and Drammen on which 17 billion kroner (1.7 billion USD) has already been spent without getting halfway and the southern half of the project has been scrapped because of the cost of buying out the people who live in the way of the new route.
https://www.nettavisen.no/okonomi/ny-nasjonal-transportplan-...
The main issue in the UK is the ridiculous circle of environmental impact assessments, and statutory consultees.
The list of organisations that can by law be required to be consulted on any development is insane: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/consultation-and-pre-decision-ma...
Environental impact assessments now run to millions of pages. Every big infra planning application tries to anticipate any possible complaint, and the whole cost balloons.
It was regulations that made the cladding be installed in the first place, I thought?
Poor quality of regulation allows sociopath installer who well knows the risk to use lowest cost materials to line their pockets.
Yes, or no regulation at all an unsafe cladding is not installed.
OP is more likely to be referring to e.g. Green Belt planning restrictions.
I give them the benefit of the doubt. They are of the opinion its hard to get anything built because of regulations at the planning stage.
Difficult to see anybody but piggy sticks trying to get away with building with highly flammable materials.
Bad faith reply
US is energy independent and is desirable place for middle and higher class specialist. Compared to overtaxed and energy starved England which live from legacy sectors and cheap immigration workers and is not desirable for anyone not working in finances.
> live from legacy sectors
Finance is a legacy sector now?
> energy starved
Importing energy while ramping up your own production with wind and tidal, and importantly, nuclear, is not "starved". Is there a lack of energy in the UK? Blackouts like the ones in Texas?
Man blackout != energy starved, you can have blackouts cause your infrastructure is attacked or just random natural disaster, look at energy prices compare it to China or even US not even speaking about oil rich countries.
Finance in UK is indeed legacy it is mostly big old banks there is still a bit of fintech and ofc. head funds, but UK is bleeding both talent and market share to CN and US. Not even speaking about tech salaries 10 years ago London was one of the top paying places for finance tech, now it is (ofc.) USA and CN (especially with cost of living).
> Finance in UK is indeed legacy it is mostly big old banks there is still a bit of fintech
Many fintech b2c innovators come from the UK. Revolut and Monzo provide features with a UX and API that US banks couldn't even dream of.
> Man blackout != energy starved, you can have blackouts cause your infrastructure is attacked or just random natural disaster, look at energy prices compare it to China or even US not even speaking about oil rich countries.
Yes you can, but that's not why Texas has blackouts. The UK has expensive electricity, imports a lot, but on what planet is it "energy starved"?
I mean isn't UK starving? it can't produce enough energy, it cost is extremely high to produce anything and it can't get proper industrial/manufacture power base cause of that? (and a lot of other stupid reasons)
No? The UK's industrial base is comparable to France, and about 9th-10th worldwide. On what planet is that "starving"?
> I mean isn't UK starving
No?
No blackouts, but it's now very expensive. The system management is quite good but the cost is a serious political issue.
(It's also an oddity that the Conservative government presided over a lot of green transition in the energy sector, but can't take credit for it because of their base)
Since the crisis of 2008 the USA has had several trillion dollars in stimulus spending. Very roughly speaking, Europe pursued policies of austerity, whereas the USA followed a more Keynesian route of big spending. On this matter, the Keynesians have been vindicated. In 2007 the GDP of the EU was slightly larger than the USA, but now it has fallen far behind: $16 trillion ($18 trillion if it still had the UK) versus $25 trillion for the USA. And the most important policy difference since 2008 has been large stimulus spending in the USA, versus relative austerity in Europe. More recently, President Biden was able to push through some big infrastructure bills, which should power the USA through the 2020s. (There are some qualifiers to be added about weaknesses in the USA system of funding and allowing construction, in particular the aggressive system of "substantive due process" that allows for any project to be stalled by lawsuits, but despite that, the USA has done better than Europe.)
Most of the difference in GDP was because Dollar was a lot cheaper compared to Euro pre Recession. Also EU just stagnate from 1990 until now it is yearly losing global share of GDP.
"Most of the difference in GDP was because Dollar was a lot cheaper compared to Euro pre Recession."
Yes, but why? There was a theory that massive stimulus spending would weaken the dollar because of the additional debt, but instead, the opposite happened. The USA did more stimulus spending and the dollar became stronger. Many people were surprised by this. Those people need to revisit their initial assumptions.
The US has a more robust system for supplying infrastructure through private investment - including in the energy sector.
You say that but the UK has not experienced the kind of energy disruptions that, for example, the Texans have since the 1970s.
Let’s also not forget the railroad problems you face. You’re probably the only country that makes Britain look good for its rail infrastructure.
Having driven on both American roads and British roads, I’d say UK rural roads are to a much higher standard. However that I can give America a pass on that particular issue because the vast distances in some rural parts does change the problem somewhat. But it is another example of how private investment doesn’t reach all parts of the US infrastructure.
Internet access in rural communities is much better in the UK.
Mains water quality is to a higher standard and available to more rural communities.
And let’s not even get started on the sorry state of US healthcare. The NHS might have its problems but at least it’s not leaving people choosing between medical treatments and bankruptcy.
The problem is, whenever the US government tries to step in to improve things, the ultra conservatives and libertarians then compare those policies to communism. Which is absurd.
England is a small country, smaller than the US state of Georgia. It's much easier to maintain way shorter roads with its much higher population density. Nonetheless, the rural roads in the US are generally of good to excellent quality.
> England is a small country, smaller than the US state of Georgia. It's much easier to maintain way shorter roads with its much higher population density.
A point I made in my post.
> You say that but the UK has not experienced the kind of energy disruptions that, for example, the Texans have since the 1970s.
The energy disruptions the UK had in the 70s were how Thatcher came into power.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week
The article you link to explains that the Three Day Week led to the collapse of the Conservative gov in 74, and while Thatcher became leader, she did not come into power until 79. If the power outages led to anything, it was to a Labour gov.
(this is unrelated to the correct statement that there were widespread outages throughout the 70s)
Those "disruptions" occured because of political action.
The disruptions in Texas are because their power grid and associated infrastructure is shite.
Entirely different things.
The US has one of the largest freight rail networks in the world. We don't have as big of a passenger rail investment because nobody would ride most of it
Has it occurred to you that nobody rides passenger rail in the US because there’s zero investment in passenger rail, and as a consequence the U.S. has managed to build a rail system that more difficult to use that flights, and somehow still slower than cars.
I can’t think of anywhere else in the developed world where the train system is the slowest form of motorised transport around.
People ride passenger rail where it makes sense. The acela line being a good example. But if they built a high speed rail between Texas and Ohio, nobody would ride that, because flying would still be faster. We could build some HSR between major cities in Texas, Florida, California, and the Northeast corridor, but it would account for a handful of straight railways. There are major problems with building these (California is several billion over budget on their high speed rail and I don't think they've even started building), so the criticism of US overregulation is valid, but the main reason we don't have as extensive of a passenger rail system is because it wouldn't be economically viable in a country as sparsely populated as the united states
Many areas of the USA have population densities entirely comparable with large parts of Europe. The upper-central midwest (eastern MN, WI, IL, IA) is a good example - it compares favorably to most of France or Germany.
This is another example of how it is almost always a mistake to use a unitary description of anything when it comes to the USA. Yes, certainly where I live (New Mexico), population density is extremely low and long-haul rail transportation likely makes little sense. But talk about that as if it applies to "the united states" is a category error.
It’s common to travel between European counties by rail instead of plane. In fact I’ve done this myself.
It's fairly common, but even in Europe, it's frequently cheaper to fly than to take a train, unfortunately. I would not point to Europe as a place that does passenger rail extremely well; that honor goes to Japan. Europe might be better than the US at it, but that's not saying much.
In the US southwest, it's not the distance, it's the very small numbers of people who are moving around that is the problem.
Not to mention the other issue: even if it's easy to get into another city via rail, how do you get from the train station to your final destination? Very few cities have public transit anywhere close to NYC's. Of course flying has the same issue, but the airport has a car rental desk.
Or avoid that entirely by driving your own car.
This is another part of infrastructure Europe generally does better: inner city public transport.
There are some European cities that are still car dominated, however quiet a few are easier to navigate via public transport and some have even gone as far as entirely banning private cars from the city centre.
I remember these things called taxis. But I'm an old, and I think they've been replaced by something called "Ubers" and "Lyfts". But don't mind me ...
Which are expensive.
Sorry, I meant to reply to the person before you about how people chose to fly rather than go by rail.
It’s an ironic comment to make, given the U.S. was literally built using railways. Passenger railways covered the entire U.S. long before highways ever did.
The only reason why passenger rail doesn’t exist today, is because the U.S. chose to stop investing in rail, and instead chose to only invest in car infrastructure. There’s was a huge period where auto manufacturers were buying up local rail and trams systems, for the sole purpose of running them into the ground, and forcing people into cars instead.
There’s absolutely no reason you can’t build high speed passenger rail today. High speed rail takes up less space than a highway, for far higher speeds and capacities. And building high speed rail using highway style construction in one of the most cost effective ways of building passenger rail (it’s how countries like France can build high speed rail at such low costs).
For some reason nobody thinks it’s silly to link up U.S. cities with highways, but for some reason, rail is too hard (despite being the faster, higher throughput, and more economical, form of transportation).
>Let’s also not forget the railroad problems you face. You’re probably the only country that makes Britain look good for its rail infrastructure.
You give the US a pass on roads due to great distances, but not on rail? Rail is even more expensive than roads.
On the subject of roads, it is important to remember that US roads vary greatly in quality based on geography, weather, and economic conditions. Every state gets some federal money and fuel taxes to pay for roads.
>Internet access in rural communities is much better in the UK.
The US had plans to subsidize Starlink for rural communities but the current administration interfered with it for petty political reasons. Again with this, the distances involved matter a lot.
>And let’s not even get started on the sorry state of US healthcare. The NHS might have its problems but at least it’s not leaving people choosing between medical treatments and bankruptcy.
NHS has problems like, you might not get treatment in a timely manner despite the high taxes you pay for that service. The US has issues with cost. We pay more than practically any other country including on medication. I think that is due to corruption. The issue is not that the state does not pay for it. It often does end up paying exorbitant prices for people without insurance, or on government benefits, to be treated. A majority of elderly people in the US are collecting government benefits and healthcare. It's not much but it does cover a significant amount of stuff.
>The problem is, whenever the US government tries to step in to improve things, the ultra conservatives and libertarians then compare those policies to communism. Which is absurd.
It is true that government can invest in worthwhile things sometimes, but when the government messes things up on a regular basis then you instinctively reject whatever it proposes. Neither the UK nor the US can afford our existing social programs. Yet here you are proposing that we here in the US spend even more so we can be like the UK. No thanks, we have enough problems as it is without higher taxes and more government scams.
If you want to argue about distances then let’s talk about Europe as a wider entity rather than just one country. And Europe still comes out on top for quality of infrastructure.
The problem with the NHS is due to the amount of budget cuts from the Tory government.
The problem with the American health system is the exact opposite, it costs too much because private entities are greedy. Government intervention would be more legislative than financial.
Everything costs more in the US except for imported stuff. It's not because of corporate greed. It's because labor costs so much here, primarily.
>The problem with the NHS is due to the amount of budget cuts from the Tory government.
I don't know all about UK politics but I know that the current social programs and government spending are unaffordable. The US and other Western countries can't afford it either. The problem is not that spending is not enough, the problem is that our countries are not competitive or productive enough on the world stage for this exorbitant spending.
You can consider Europe all together but it is still a smaller and denser area than the US as a whole. You need to look at places with similar population densities (and perhaps geography) to have an accurate comparison.
> Everything costs more in the US except for imported stuff. It's not because of corporate greed. It's because labor costs so much here, primarily.
Your first sentence isn’t true and your conclusion isn’t true either. Then there’s the issue that American healthcare is massively disproportionally more expensive than the rest of the world. So even if your first two points were correct, they still don’t account for your cost of healthcare.
> I don't know all about UK politics but I know that the current social programs and government spending are unaffordable. The US and other Western countries can't afford it either.
The problem isn’t that they’re unaffordable. The problem is that people don’t want to pay for it. Or more specifically, people in the higher tax bands don’t want to because they view public services as an expense (which for them it is, because they’ll often be using private services instead). But this is another example of the self sabotage I was talking about in my earlier comment.
> You can consider Europe all together but it is still a smaller and denser area than the US as a whole. You need to look at places with similar population densities (and perhaps geography) to have an accurate comparison.
To be honest it doesn’t matter how accurate the comparison, you’re just going to argue that the free market fixes everything. Because that’s exactly what you’ve been brainwashed to believe. Capitalism is Americas #1 religion after all.
To be fair, I don’t think public services are the answer to everything either. There does need to be a balance between government oversight and spend; and of leaning into the private sector. The UK hasn’t found that right balance either. ButAmerica is waaaay of the mark and it’s destroying your country from the inside.
>Your first sentence isn’t true and your conclusion isn’t true either. Then there’s the issue that American healthcare is massively disproportionally more expensive than the rest of the world. So even if your first two points were correct, they still don’t account for your cost of healthcare.
My first two points are correct but if you don't agree we can stop talking because I am not gonna sit here and prove the obvious to you. I can't say we pay more for everything on average than literally anywhere else, but we do pay more on average for everything than most other places. As for why our healthcare is expensive, yes some of it is due to regulations and lack of competition. But the simple fact that it costs so much to live well in the US means that people must be willing to pay way more than elsewhere. That translates into higher pay for doctors. If you can pay $8 for a coffee then paying a couple hundred for a doctor's visit is not out of the question. If you can pay $50k for a basic boring car then paying $50k for a life-saving surgery is not unreasonable.
>The problem isn’t that they’re unaffordable. The problem is that people don’t want to pay for it. Or more specifically, people in the higher tax bands don’t want to because they view public services as an expense (which for them it is, because they’ll often be using private services instead). But this is another example of the self sabotage I was talking about in my earlier comment.
No it's not the fault of the rich that we can't afford it. Privately held wealth in the US is only about $130 trillion. Meanwhile there was $210 trillion of unfunded liabilities in the current system: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmauldin/2017/10/10/your-pen... as of 2017! So even seizing everything from everybody would not solve our problems. It would also destroy our quality of life, make the best and brightest (and richest) people run away, etc. You need to do some rudimentary research before trying to tell people stupid shit like they can enslave the rich to get free stuff.
>To be honest it doesn’t matter how accurate the comparison, you’re just going to argue that the free market fixes everything. Because that’s exactly what you’ve been brainwashed to believe. Capitalism is Americas #1 religion after all.
You're assuming an awful lot here. I haven't been "brainwashed" any more than you have. I just know that lots of things the government does are scams. Free markets do require some regulation to prevent certain breakdown cases involving unfair competition. But letting the government do things instead with no competition won't be an improvement. America is #1 in many things but budgeting and protecting our own interests aren't among those things.
The UK ran the NHS as a high quality first tier health service for 50 years or more, during times when the UK was still making debt repayments to the US to cover costs from WWII.
Once Thatcherite neoliberalism (specifically: market-oriented reform policies such as "eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers" and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, state influence in the economy.) took hold and wealth transfer from the many to the few became increasingly common the Conservative contributions to the NHS steadily decreased and eroded the service.
"Free trade" globalism aka outsourcing everything is indeed self-destructive. Liberals are just as much to blame as conservatives when it comes to not protecting our national interests. They can say whatever works, but if they get out of line with the globalist establishment then they are systematically pushed out by big money interests.
At this point, cutting spending is the right move in general. But that isn't going to happen because it's too unpopular. And whether we do cut spending or not, hard times are ahead.
> the current administration interfered with it for petty political reasons
I'm not entirely sure that doubts about handing fistfuls of cash to a corporation headed by an increasingly politically extreme CEO whose 2nd generation satellites are leaking so much radio energy that radio astronomy in that band of the spectrum looks doomed is "petty".
The persecution of Elon Musk is entirely political, and he is not "extreme" just for disagreeing with the entire media/corporate/state establishment and supporting basic human rights like freedom of expression as enshrined in the FIRST Amendment of the US Constitution. The persecution has nothing to do with the costs or merits of his products, which vary but are generally the best in class or very competitive. He was the darling of the libs until he dared to point out the insanity of their recent policies.
If you watch the video, you'll see they replaced Starlink with a solution that cost 10x as much. I'm sure whatever minor inconvenience comes to those scientists can be fixed somehow. We have far bigger things to worry about in any case.
> I'm sure whatever minor inconvenience comes to those scientists can be fixed somehow.
\1. It's not a "minor inconvenience" at all.
\2. Problem started with Starlink 1.0. The fix was Musk promising better shielding and attention to leaks in Version 2.0 and to turn off Starllink sats over Murchison Radio Quiet Area etc.
\3. Starlink V2.0 has 30x more noise (Musk lied | didn't deliver) and remains noisy over quiet areas (Musk lied | didn't deliver).
> The persecution of Elon Musk is entirely political
It's more due to Musk lying and not delivering.
>It's not a "minor inconvenience" at all.
What's your solution? This kind of satellite system is going to get built and improved over time regardless of what you think of it.
>It's more due to Musk lying and not delivering.
No, it's not. I think you know it too. Biden and a bunch of EU politicians have literally threatened Elon over Twitter, as recently as last month. Everyone was cool with his hype game until they cashed out and/or discovered that Elon has the views of a liberal from about 2010.
Let's look at Elon's accomplishments objectively. He oversaw a new and inexpensive reusable rocket program, cutting-edge electric cars which libs begged for, solar systems for houses, and satellite internet. Not to mention his original online payment system in the early days. All of those projects are very competitive and widely used. Did he promise more? Sure, he did. But he also delivered more than any of the naysayers. I have some sympathy for a man trying to do what was considered impossible, like developing autonomous taxis.
The 2nd generation of starlink satellites is worse than the first one: they leak radio spectrum energy at a massively higher level than the 1st generation.
Why have sympathy for anyone trying to do something stupid? Why do we need autonomous taxis? What problem is this solving, other than helping the already richer get a bit richer?
IMO the Starlink interference problem is being overblown to spite Elon for political reasons. In any case, satellites have long existed and other countries are going to build their own version of Starlink with the same problems. If they don't have the same problems then presumably Starlink will learn from them. There are other satellites made to observe stuff from space, and maybe the new SpaceX rockets will facilitate radioastronomy stations built on the dark side of the moon (if that's even important enough to build).
I actually don't want autonomous taxis or autonomous vehicles in general but some people do. When new technology is developed, usually most people experience benefits. It makes sense for some of the spoils to go to investors. Stop hating on people who make money. They are what funds everyone's pensions after all.
> Stop hating on people who make money. They are what funds everyone's pensions after all.
I was the 2nd employee at Amazon. It's not like I hate people who make money. And people making money is not what funds everyone's pensions, other than in some glib 8th grade sort of way.
Do feel free to continue on with your defense of incredibly rich people who don't actually give a damn about any of the things you do and do not need your assistance.
> IMO the Starlink interference problem is being overblown to spite Elon for political reasons.
That's your opinion. It's wrong.
There is a list of papers as long as an arm going back to the start of Starlink that measure the noise spectrum and point out exactly why it's a real problem for pre existing programs that have had billions invested in new science programs.
There are proposed work arounds which have been ignored.
>That's your opinion. It's wrong.
Unless you are actively working on this issue I will consider your opinion no more valid than mine. There may be papers about the issue but that does not in itself prove how bad the issue is. I don't have time to find and read "a list of papers as long as an arm" anyway and I would bet good money that you didn't read them either.
>There are proposed work arounds which have been ignored.
Do you know if there is a legitimate technical reason why those might not have been implemented? Will any of those billions going to radio astronomy go toward reengineering the technical marvel that is Starlink? Doesn't the FCC inspect and approve all of our privately-owned satellites?
I'm not an astronomer or a rocket scientist but it seems to me that emitting continuous "noise" aka a radio signal is fundamental to the operation of satellite internet on such a scale. You don't have to respond with another pompous "Nah uh" because I don't care anymore.
>> It's not a "minor inconvenience" at all.
> What's your solution? This kind of satellite system is going to get built and improved over time regardless of what you think of it.
So you've reversed your " opinion " and tacitly admitted it's more than a a minor inconvenience then?
As I outlined above the solution proposed was that the Ver 2.0 sats be better shielded and set to turn off over Radio Quiet Zones such as the Murchison as discussed and agreed to when this was raised some years back.
>> It's more due to Musk lying and not delivering.
> No, it's not.
Yes. It is. At least so far as the radio telescope community and this Starlink issue is concerned. He made promises and didn't keep them.
> Biden and a bunch of EU politicians ...
Has nothing to do with Starlink noise.
> Let's look at Elon's accomplishments objectively.
Sure. He promised to fix Starlink noise. He did not. He delivered a Ver 2.0 that's noisier than the the first.
He promised Full Self Driving cars "next year" for a decade. Still hasn't happened.
>So you've reversed your " opinion " and tacitly admitted it's more than a a minor inconvenience then?
No I didn't. I heard about some noise a long time ago and it did not sound like a devastating development. I am merely putting forward a conditional argument: If the noise is a problem, then the problem will likely affect other satellites which are already being built. In any case I expect the problem to be solved.
>Yes. It is. At least so far as the radio telescope community and this Starlink issue is concerned. He made promises and didn't keep them.
I was not aware of these promises. Without context I cannot say whether he had a legitimate reason to not implement that proposed solution. Can you at least admit there might be a technical reason for it to not be done?
>he promised[...]
He does tend to promise more than he delivers but nobody has delivered better satellite internet, EVs, or autonomous driving to the public. Your gripes are extremely uncharitable.
Again I must point out that Elon's habit of overhyping things was well-tolerated by all for years, until he revealed views slightly to the right of the most extreme leftists and questioned their pet issues. Then the media and all liberals acted like he's the devil. I have a coworker who has been affected by this propaganda campaign. He is extremely environmentally conscious, yet refuses to buy anything from an Elon company. He will not buy a Tesla despite the fact they are practically the best and most proven EVs on the market. Instead he bought a Leaf or something, which is objectively worse than a Tesla. This mentality is totally irrational and I would say un-American. But this bad attitude is common, unfortunately.
"Nobody has delivered better ...." is not a reason to be less negative towards Musk. Because somebody manages to do a quality-but-fundamentally-problematic job on satellite internet, a generally OK but quality-plagued job on EVs and a basically useless job on autonomous driving that nobody wanted does not mean they are exempt from criticism or griping.
It is extremely American to use commerce for political ends.
Boycotting people with political views you find problematic is as American as apple pie (and actually, maybe more so). The right and the left do it, and have done for ages.
His hype was well-tolerated by the people you read and listen to, perhaps, but in the stuff I read he's been criticized for more than a decade for his empty bullshit. Tesla also lots of issues with their cars, more than most other EV makes, but it is true that they do have more time in the market and have done some cool stuff.
An important aspect is that the US is that its economies and regional cultures are diverse and dispersed. The US is simply too decentralized to stagnate effectively. It is not a monoculture in any practical sense which creates a system that can respond quickly to evolutionary pressure. Everything good and bad you hear about the US usually only applies to a subset of the country and often only a handful of cities.
There is a high degree of regional specialization in the US as a consequence. No matter what happens in the world, some part of the US is perfectly positioned to take advantage of that. Combine this with general American risk tolerance and business acumen, and you have a country that is unusually organically adaptive to changing global economies.
Its also that its really expensive. The reasons given are the cost of planning but I also suspect given all that has been exposed over the past 40 years that widespread corruption by governments in power is actually a big part of the ballooning costs.
A lack of infrastructure development combined with a population being artificially increased by high levels of immigration, which is applying downward pressure on wages while pushing property costs (the source of most of the UK's problems) ever higher.
A population increase of around 1% per year may not seem huge until you consider what 1% of the UK road network or 1% of the NHS actually looks like, and what it'd take to build infrastructure and expand services at that rate year upon year.
The reality of building infrastructure in the UK is HS2 - a 20+ year project to build a little over 100 miles of high speed railway (with future northern phases predictably cancelled), at a cost over over half a billion quid per mile - it'll likely put any government off attempting any significant infrastructure construction ever again.
> 800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families.
Why the focus on second homes? I would care more about utilisation of homes by home-owners: walk around London at night, so many apartments are dark. The locals say investors own them.
The French are richer than the British. They have more stuff and a higher quality of life. It would be good for more British people to have more stuff and a higher quality of life. Building more housing allows both for more people to afford a (better quality of) primary residence, and for more people to have a holiday home. Those are all good. Focussing on utilisation is Green Party, NIMBY, degrowth, pro-poverty thinking. It sees a fixed pie and thinks how to distribute it instead of trying to make everything better for everyone.
More housing. A holiday home should be an utterly normal thing for a middle class family like in Finland or Spain.
> Building more housing allows both for more people to afford a (better quality of) primary residence
As long as residential homes are a vehicle for investors rather than _living in_ (by the owner) you will have a problem.
Agreed. Thankfully we know what it takes to make housing a crappy investment vehicle. Build more housing. Build so much housing that returns on capital invested are flat, live Tokyo since 2000, or negative, like Seattle over the last five years.
Make building housing legal again.
Also. Renters deserve housing too. Restricting housing to the owner occupied is a great way to hate things by social class but I see no reason to further favour a population that’s richer and more powerful than the rest of the population already.
Why not enable a dynamic rental sector so people can move around the country to better jobs? Feels mean to trap people.
Greed, combined with a housing shortage, and the housebuilding that is going on being poorly planned (no new infrastructure, as many homes crammed onto small patches of land as possible, usually designed around car ownership but without space for the cars, etc) and focused on maximum profit.
We should build more housing so that homes aren't such good investments that people are tempted to do this.
There are more 2nd homes in France because rural housing is relatively cheap and there are lots of land. However the way the employment market works in France has screwed the younger people, I think. It's easy to stay in a job once you have one but hard to get started as a younger person. If I had to guess, France, Italy, Spain etc are in way more decline than the UK as a whole and Germany is spending hard to prop up a lot of the EU.
Note that in France, unlike on your first home, you don't pay taxes on your second home. See e.g. https://chasebuchanan.com/property-tax-in-france-residential....
That's not true. In France you pay both taxe foncière (on any and all property you own) and taxe d'habitation (unless you're renting it for the whole year) on second(and more) homes you own. With some exceptions like newbuilds, newly renovated for better insulation, in very rural places, etc.
https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F59/per...
https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F42
Regarding housing (and land ownership) specifically, France is over twice the size of the UK with a similar population. So there are underlying constraints that cannot easily be papered over with policy.
I'm not so sure counting lights on at any given moment is a good measure of occupancy.
The resident might be at work, at the gym, out for dinner or at the cinema, at a friend's house, in another room, might have good blackout curtains and only use lamps for ambience instead of the ceiling light, on holiday. I bet if you stood outside one of these buildings where "most of the lights are off" for the entire evening, you'd see lights come on and off, and in aggregate find that most of the flats were in fact occupied.
By the same logic, I could look outside my window right now, count zero cars driving down the road and declare it a useless waste that nobody uses.
We have fully embraced the parasite economy in the UK, however unlike big American tech we feed on one another. The safest business for a long time has been property, poor quality reno-flips and rentals, which adds nothing except burden to the people who might bring foreign income through being entrepreneurial.
This graphic[1] show how insane the European electricity market regulation has been for both France and the UK: going from electricity prices on par with the US to 2-3 times the price in less than a decade !
[1]: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/7SNeG/full.png
If you only look at the price, then you don't get the full picture.
Similar points were covered in the recent Tyler Cowen podcast with Tobi Lütke[1] regarding economic stagnation in Canada & Germany (relative to the US).
The UK has a cynical view on progress, likely leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy. The US seems to have a contrasting view with an optimistic by default outlook.
1. https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/tobi-lutke/
How can there be a 360, 000 page document to build something. That number seems so outrageously high. Is the font size massive or something?
I live in the catchment area. The amount of consultations etc they have to hold to mollify the general anti-growth fanatics and newt-fanciers is insane: https://nationalhighways.citizenspace.com/ltc/lower-thames-c...
If most of that are technical drafts going down to smallest details, I can imagine how it could be sort of reasonable. Large things like, say, nuclear power plants or huge ships have literally millions of parts.
I believe this Map Men video has the answer : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWZ9ZVRQ0Nw
The environmental report itself requires an environmental report -- how many trees have to be cut down to print it?
Seems pretty reasonable actually. Final reports contain -everything- and I really do mean everything.
Design docs and drawings obviously (easily 1k pages more if you fit it on a4), since each trade needs it's own views. Specifications are included, as a legal document that calls out which regulations every possible system will follow and calls out exceptions (proof they apply). All possible testing from receiving it (and documentation including pictures), proof of setup, proof of commissioning (IE construction essentially needs to do what a tech bro would do with automated testing, by hand with with each step documented and signed for, and each possible state the system could be in). Any other type of test report NETA/material quality/thermography/whatever (a single breaker easily comes to two pages of test report, a voltage/current meter easily comes to three pages per phase). Pictures are likely kept to only two per A4 page.
Basically it's a "declaration from ignorance", since big numbers sound scary and wasteful to others who haven't worked in the field.
The question is, why did it cost significantly more to produce that document than it cost Norway to just build an even bigger tunnel? Pages might be misleading, but cash is not.
> Seems pretty reasonable actually. Final reports contain -everything- and I really do mean everything.
No it doesn’t. It’s an outrage and a powerful argument against the entire system that produced it. There is no sane way that spending more money on stakeholder consultation for a comparable tunnel than Norway spent on building one can be defended.
It isn't, it's largely environmental impact studies. The actual plans are a tiny part of the submitted document.
why was this flagged ?
there is no poor energy rich country. with the U.K having expensive energy it means they're slowly becoming a poor country. it already feels poor as it is. But this will accelerate the rate
Presumably because Americans like that Britain is declining but don’t want people to figure out why
Long essay.
TL;DR the UK planning system is too restrictive and is stopping investment.
However, some of the comparisons made don't really stack up.
Yes. France has a better housing supply, and roughly the same area. But France has over twice the area, and under half the population density, even before you account for the almost uninhabited mountainous areas in Wales, Northern England and Scotland. So our populations are squeezed into smaller areas.
There are some good points made though. The gold plating of a lot of projects is ridiculous. And don't get me started on the Elizabeth Line. I get it, it is clearly hugely beneficial and I have no doubt it pays for itself. But then you visit places like Maerdy in the Welsh valleys, devastated by the closure of the coal mines, and it seems obscene to spend all that money in so small an area.
As for Wales ... This pattern repeats itself all over Europe. Only a few places "made" the transition from industrial settings to current economy.
I am from a former mining city of Ostrava, CZ. It is not completely dead, and it has been slowly improving lately, but it sorely needs something like high-speed rail to become relevant again. (The location is favourable: almost equidistant from Prague, Vienna, Warsaw and close to Krakow; a major railway hub.)
But the pattern really repeats itself all over Europe. Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, Germany, Czechia, Poland - former heavy industry hotspots tend to collapse in a very similar fashion. As far as I have seen, Bilbao (ES) and Katowice (PL) were able to rebuild and reinvent themselves the best. Everyone else struggles or gave up the fight entirely.
You'd think that exactly because it's such a common pattern, there would be best practices how to help those communities overcome. Yet, the only pattern I see is mainstream politics ignoring it, locals struggling, and rightwing winning them over. It's so obvious that you really have to ask yourself whether there's some hidden agenda somewhere in there. Just like mainstream politics ignoring the younger generations - both as plans for them and as ways to communicate with them - and again who's winning? The rightwing. It's everything in the open.
There have been projects that pour money into some of these places but it doesn't seem to make much difference. Modern economies seem to prefer cities.
>it seems obscene to spend all that money in so small an area
Greater London has a population nearly three times that of Wales. So the bang-for-buck in this small area is much greater. I completely agree that we under-invest in areas like Wales. But that doesn't mean that under-investing in the most productive part of the country is a good idea.
> most productive part of the country is a good idea.
In what sense is London productive? What are the products?
In the sense of labour productivity, measured in output per hour[1]. The products could be anything, but I'd guess they're primarily services like finance, technology, media etc.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/economicoutputandproductivity...
Financial services? Software? Scientific research?
Tax revenue
It's hard to find any European country that didn't have any government projects that went wildly over budget or were very much delayed. So I don't think this is a UK specific problem, and it doesn't explain why Britain has stagnated compared to most of the EU.
Transport projects seem to be particularly expensive these days in Anglo countries compared to European countries. For instance, we currently have a planned short tunnel in the UK (under the Thames but not in London itself) where the actual planning process has so far cost $400m.
Stronger property rights tend to backfire in the 2020s as NIMBYs have emerged everywhere and do their best to block anything around them, usually by weaponizing environmental laws.
The remedy will probably consist of a combination of legal changes and a change in attitude; YIMBY must become a thing. People respond to social pressures.
> Stronger property rights
Does the UK have stronger property rights than, for instance, Norway that was mentioned by another contributor here as being so much more efficient? Yet Norway has abandoned, for now at least, the south western half of the Oslo to Drammen E18 road upgrade because buying out the owners of expensive houses on the route would be too expensive.
Are you claiming that other comparable democracies have such weak property rights that this significantly affects infrastructure projects? Which ones?
> Yes. France has a better housing supply, and roughly the same area. But France has over twice the area, and under half the population density, even before you account for the almost uninhabited mountainous areas in Wales, Northern England and Scotland. So our populations are squeezed into smaller areas.
If you compare population density maps of France vs the UK, you can see that it's pretty similar - there are clusters of population in certain locations, and wide areas with barely any inhabitants.
The main reason Britain is failing is it wiped out its industrial base.
Without that, it cant build anything effectively.
The UK's manufacturing sector is comparable to France's in size.
But at ground level it seems to get less done, less well. Just look at the dreadful state of repair of the average British town compared to comparable French towns.
Housing state of repair and a country's manufacturing sector aren't much to do with each other. Like, at all.
Not at all? Someone has to manufacture the parts and materials and surely they could be in the same country. Having to buy those things from another country, especially now that the UK is out of the EU is surely a more complicated thing than buying them in the country. So surely there must be some connection.
The parts and material for building repair are a vanishingly small portion of almost any countries' economy.
That was what I was implying. Not sure if its accurate, just a gut feeling atm.
Ah you're right. Fair. I thought France was in between UK and Germany, but actually its comparable. Germany being much higher.
The UK was, and to some senses still is, a culture that strongly values who your parents are vs what you’ve personally accomplished. The head of state is the child of the previous head of state. The House of Lords is still a thing. Prestige based on family lineage is considered a big deal.
In the US and other parts of Europe it’s very different. People value you a lot more because of what you’ve done vs who you are and, with some exception, nobody cares who your parents were. If you have a rich daddy most people don’t care. If you’re rich because you inherited wealth vs earning it that’s see as “less” than those who are self made. While there are certainly exceptions, most of our richest people are in the self-made category and that’s a source of pride. “The American Dream” while a bit of a glossy story is generally a very real thing.
Passing off wealth and prestige by lineage has long been shown to be a bad idea. The next generation typically just screws it up.
Until the UK truly does away with its still quite hereditary ways and focuses a lot more on valuing individual achievement it will likely only continue to stagnate against other economies that have long since broadly moved on from such archaic mental models.
> Prestige based on family lineage is considered a big deal
Are you in the UK? The monarchy and House of Lords are an obvious anachronism and they need abolishing [1], but I would say it's a very small minority who care who you parents are/were (mainly people who think their own parents are/were a big deal) — and a similar small minority who might also ask "which school did you go to?".
[1] e.g. https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/
I suggest this exercise: Pick a random person from Queen Victoria's court. Look up where their descendants are today.
Chances are, they're still running the country in some capacity. (The example I'm thinking of was a Duchess. Her descendant was a beak at Eton who taught Boris and the haunted pencil).
Try Norman times:
People with Norman names wealthier than other Britons
People with "Norman" surnames like Darcy and Mandeville are still wealthier than the general population 1,000 years after their descendants conquered Britain, according to a study into social progress.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/842...
Also surnames like d'Urberville?
(Alec d'Urberville in "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" is a nouveau riche person who adopted the name rather than a descendent of the original d'Urbervilles. Probably that happens in real life, too, though I expect the people who did the study have taken that into account and have done the best they can in the absence of reliable public ancestry data.)
Like Anton Du Beke? (Real name Tony Beke) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Du_Beke
If you read that paper carefully (it's been a while so I might have this wrong), I think you'll see that while they're using Norman vs not-Norman surnames, the comparison is between Victorian and contemporary wealth and life expectancy data.
(Obviously the discrepancy has to start with the Conquest, I'm just saying that strictly speaking you can't use that paper to support that conclusion).
That's probably true, but it's a quite separate problem (it's about power rather than attitudes).
Also, Victoria is only about 100 years ago. I suspect power and wealth are pretty strongly hereditary over that time span in many other democracies.
I don't think people care what school you went to, but the fact remains that the UK has one of the lowest rates of social mobility in Europe.
I don't think that's actually a fact. I don't know what figures you're using, but eyeballing the Global Social Mobility Index puts the UK as pretty middling in Europe. Less mobile than France or Germany, more so than Italy, Spain, or Poland.
It's below average, and lower than all of Scandinavia, Austria etc. Yes, it beats Southern Europe and ex-communist countries.
My source was the Sutton Trust and Oxera.
well, that's not one of the lowest really is it
"One of"
If your point is the UK is just about in the lowest 50% of European countries by social mobility (keeping in mind Europe is pretty good on a global scale for social mobility), it's basically a non-point altogether. If the UK were at the end of the scale it might, but it's not, so it doesn't.
I think that if you look at the people in positions of control in political and economic sectors (and mass media, which is a key element), the vast majority came from just a few schools.
> The UK was, and to some senses still is, a culture that strongly values who your parents are vs what you’ve personally accomplished.
I think this statement's accuracy depends heavily on how you're defining things.
If I go up to the average Brit and tell them my father is the deputy editor-in-chief of some newspaper? They won't be impressed, they'll think I'm a prick.
On the other hand, if I want to pursue a career in journalism? My father will have made sure I've studied the right things, funded me through the right unpaid internships, and will be able to get my job application in front of the right hiring managers.
Does "UK culture strongly value" who my father is, if 99.99 % of brits don't care, but the remaining 0.01 % can have an outsized impact on my career?
(Of course if I've inherited a hundred million quid some people will think I'm important / suck up to me due to the power such wealth confers - but there's nothing uniquely british about that)
>> On the other hand, if I want to pursue a career in journalism? My father will have made sure I've studied the right things, funded me through the right unpaid internships, and will be able to get my job application in front of the right hiring managers.
It also helps to get an internship if your Dad is literally the editor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Mackie
I've been here for 5 years and am almost thirty years old. I still have people regularly asking me where I went to secondary school. They are obsessed with class.
I've been here for 30 years, and am 30 years old, and I don't think anyone has ever asked me where I went to secondary school.
What kind of people ask you that?
I somehow keep ending up working at places where 90% of the employees grew up with staff in the house. Dozens of people with wikipedia pages about their families.
So, people who grew up with staff in the house are obsessed with class. That's perhaps disappointing, but not really surprising.
I'd bet, in the US, you'd find the same among people who grew up with staff in the house. The difference may be that, in the US, it's a lot harder to find people like that.
I've never been asked that and I'm in my sixties.
I don't think that's really true, outside some niche cultural arenas. Sure, if you're at a posh member's club or a party of aristocrats people might be impressed by your lineage.
I would concede that in politics a degree from Oxbridge has an outsized cachet, and those universities traditionally recruited from elite private schools. However, this is diminishing over time, both because those institutions are proactively recruiting from a wider base, and because people are pointing out the unrepresentitive composition of political parties, which then self-correct to stay politically relevent.
The hereditary parts of the House of Lords are increasingly unimportant, and the Lords is of minor importance to the political process anyway. Royalty has been politically vestigial for more than a century.
But in industry and most business spheres your lineage is unimportant. Just like those other parts of the world you mentioned, it's personal accomplishment that matters.
Britain has big problems, but I think archaic veneration for family lineage is only a small force within them.
Not sure who could be down voting you, because you're right. If your parents didn't send you to the right school to learn the right plummy accent, you don't stand much chance.
I mean, depends on the field. Journalism, possibly. Tech, wat?
One of the exceptions in the US seems to be around the White House. For a while, when Hillary Clinton was running for President in 2008, it was possible that the US would have had a member of the Bush or Clinton families as either VP or President every year from 1981 thorough to 2017. Such political families are not unique to the US, of course, and the UK has a fair few, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_family
With that, Bill Clinton has very humble ancestry, as does Hillary; both trace back to traveling salesmen, small business owners, coal miners, such kind of folks.
Parental families of, say, Nigel Farage or Margaret Thatcher were somehow more sophisticated, even though not tracing back to some nobility.
Not that coming from a well-off family is bad; I just would like to emphasize that the "American dream" of coming to high social positions based in merit, not lineage, worked for Clintons.
Hillary is not linked hereditarily to Bill, so really you’re talking about 3 people- Bush Sr and his 2 kids.
Political dynasties in the US are notable because they’re uncommon, rather than part of the law as in the UK.
Revolutionary France never made it across the channel... On the other hand, this significantly dismiss the UK contributions to the world on global trade and during the industrial revolution.
Britain had multiple revolutions earlier on. There was The Anarchy, Magna Carta, Cromwell, and 1688 when Britain decided to be Dutch for a while. The Declaration of the Rights of Man was inspired by Enlightenment philosophy, and a lot of that was English (or Scottish). The general mood was to look at the French as latecomers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17...
Isn't socio-economic status more heritable in the US than the UK? In the UK, inheritance tax is 40% and there's probably more redistributive taxation in general.
Worth pointing out that not only is the UK more American-style entrepreneurial than the rest of Europe (London gets about as much VC investment as France and Germany together), but that UK wealth inequaslity is low by European standards.
Like, there's work to do here, but by European standards the UK is doing pretty well.
>Passing off wealth and prestige by lineage has long been shown to be a bad idea. The next generation typically just screws it up.
In Japan there's an old saying that the success of a family is determined with the third generation.
The first builds the family empire. The second grows up seeing the first build it up and thus knows how to maintain it. The third grows up already having the empire and doesn't know how to maintain it, whether he can pass it on is essentially a dice roll. The fourth generation onwards, if the third succeeded, can refer to the family records and keep things going mostly indefinitely or realizes it's time to hand it off to different blood at that point.
"People value you a lot more because of what you’ve done vs who you are and, with some exception, nobody cares who your parents were."
Maybe on individual level, but as far as economy goes, mainland EU is still stuck with very old corporations and rarely generates some interesting startup (not just in IT). There has been a notable dearth of new European corporations since the 1970s at least. The old guard controls everything.
And London is full of European youngsters who came there to study and do some business, because the possibilities are broader there, including some VC culture. Try founding a new company in Germany; you will be met by a merciless paper storm that can only be weathered with help of a professional specialized in dealing with bureaucracy, and may take several months to overcome.
The UK is too complicated to fit into one neat box. It has its peers in medieval gowns, but at the same time, London is a very modern 21st century city, more modern than many metropolises on the continent. Perhaps Warsaw is more modern than London.
Sometimes I'll read a biography of a famous British person and the first chapter is dedicated to the full family lineage of them. You won't even hear the subject's name until chapter 2 because it was more important to discuss what his grandfather did in India in 1895. I think biographies of Americans tend to start at the childhood of the subject and will mention their family life and parents when relevant
The same last names are mentioned in the context of many US elections. US is not as far removed as you might think.
To a certain extent I agree, however the head of state is only token position (albeit well paid!). It's not very different in the US, the "name" - Kennedy, Clinton, Obama, Bush, etc takes you most of the way there... Trump too I guess!
Type of article: country X or company Y or city Z has it bad for such and such decisions, policies, culture. My rule of thumb for these kind of articles: if they don't mention external factors they are not worth reading.
An entity's situation is influenced by much more than its agency. There's competition from other similar entities, historical circumstances, geography, weather, happenstance, the list goes on and on and on. We like to think that everything depends on what we decide when in reality it's far from it.
These observations have been triggered in myself by reading history. Leadership is always blamed in difficult situations even if they were not (or not completely) responsible for the situation.
Ctrl-f "class" -> "world-class". Checks out.
One thing I will never forget from my short time living in London is how un-insulated the homes there were. Single or thin double-glazed windows, full-brick homes without a hint of thermal insulation. Sure there were exceptions but not many. At the time in Central Europe the movement to heavily insulated, nearly-passive homes was already in full swing. Many central European countries were much poorer than the UK, not even mentioning London, and energy prices were lower, so, naively I thought, everyone with an old house in the UK should be busy insulating it. It would pay off in a few years. Why didn't they?
And I think one of the reasons is that the governments, indeed the ruling class as a whole, just didn't care that the commoners are paying over their heads for energy and are freezing in moldy houses, because the class divide is just so big. It would be interesting to live in an alternate universe where Karl Marx would live in a different country - perhaps his theory would place a smaller emphasis on social class.
England your England by George Orwell is essential background reading for understanding why the UK looks the way it does in my opinion.
As I understand it from a couple of my British friends talking about insulation, the old homes were built to breathe, so you can't just seal them up and put insulation in, because you'll end up with humidity problems.
I think Karl Marx only serves as an expensive lesson in what destructive ideas look like. Everywhere that has implemented any version of it has ended up impoverished, unfree, and frequently with millions killed. China's success came only after they junked Marxism, and Xi Jinping's quasi return to it has seen Chinese prosperity slowly drop.
> the old homes were built to breathe
Yes, but there are ways to handle that. Even the insulation can let water vapor through, of course you can't in that case use the cheapest styropor.
> I think Karl Marx only serves as an expensive lesson in what destructive ideas look like.
I fully agree implementing his dumb ideas mostly from the Communist Manifest led to huge tragedies, but they were implemented partly because he was a hugely influential philosopher and that was not some random success. His critique of capitalism is worth reading, or at least reading about.
The reason that Britain has stagnated is the same reason most of western Europe has stagnated (in that GDP per capita hasn't increased for around a decade): continuously increasing debt and an aging population. It's a classic empirical economic result that a high enough level of government debt leads to reduced growth rates, and it's also well-known that growth rates decrease as the average age of the population increases. Over the past couple decades the UK population has been getting older and older on average and the national debt has been getting higher and higher.
The article is fairly misleading. Despite claims to the contrary the list of facts is nothing more than "disconnected observations". They lack any serious context or nuance. For every single one it's possible to ask whether the observation is a fair comparison or something that should be the case. Take the number of second homes relative to France. Is more second homes a good thing? Take electricity production, might we not argue that the UK uses energy more efficiently rather than lagging what other countries generate?
The climax of this system where the wealthy control everything is that the wealthy grab literally all of the wealth, spending that wealth in their endless competition with each other, leaving only scraps for the rest of us. And then the rest of us fill all our time stressed out and squabbling over crumbs with no time to do something better.
That's Britain.
The way rail project costs are totalled up is different from one country to another -what costs are included and excluded.
In other words this website is making enormous oversimplifications and not bothering to explain or justify them.
It's OK if history is not in our favor, we will just rewrite it.
On a tangent, what is astonishing to me as an outsider is the cultural stagnation. Even in times of economic decline Britain was a cultural powerhouse. Modern music, theater, cinema, tv, literature, sports, etc. were permanently shaped by post-war Britain (especially in Europe). Whatever the cultural norm dictated by the behemoth that is the USA, Britain always had something new, something fresh to give. There's no point listing specific examples, they are numerous.
What happened in the last 15 years is a mystery to me. I doubt it's economic stagnation (been there before) and I doubt it collapsed under the weight of US culture (which is still enamored with anything British). Maybe the modern internet and social media diluted everything. I don't know, but I miss it. (sorry for the off-topic)
Whenever you ask someone in the creative industries, they point to the aggressive tightening of the benefits system. People could write music and books while on the dole in the 80s, and become commercial successes. Now it's an area that's only accessible to people who can afford to have their parents "loss leader" their first few years in the industry, and as a result has lost all "realness".
I don't think it's entirely off-topic, though I only have a vague sense of the connection. I knew 1980s Japan, a society of supreme confidence, and contrast it with modern Japan, a society that has really lost its mojo. What I think happened is that the depression of the 1990s so thoroughly shook their confidence that they still haven't recovered.
I've only observed English culture from abroad, but my sense since the late 1990s is that the English have become somehow ashamed to be openly proud of their culture. I don't have a feeling for what brought this about.
> There's no point listing specific examples, they are numerous.
Four of them, if you include Ringo.
must commend this briton for his unparalleled sense of humor, razor-sharp wit, subtle, effortlessly charming and perfectly timed quips. While American humor tends to be more direct and sometimes louder, this dry, understated delivery is a unique gift.
I'd expect the cultural stagnation to lead the economic. The article is clearly political but it is pointing out some really obvious long term trends. The fact that the UK elite haven't been able to grapple with them at any point in the last few decades showcases that, as a culture, they've lost the spark of competence.
The UK media and upper class have failed to identify energy, housing or infrastructure more generally as requiring serious responses too. Their entire system appears to be off the rails. Their failure relative to countries like China really is quite astonishing, although it doesn't set them far apart from the greater western bloc. It makes sense that we aren't seeing cultural leadership out of them; where would they lead us too? Nowhere good.
I'm not sure 15 years is enough to look back. I'm struggling to think of a time since the 80s that some formerly strong areas of British culture were vibrant and interesting.
See eg. BritPop, a vacuous derivate outpouring of jumped-up pub rock relying on waving the flag to justify it's existence.
Some areas have still produced decent stuff, eg comedy (The Office, Borat, Peep Show), etc. Our twists on black American music (eg grime, drill) seem ok.
But it's a real struggle to think of much that is vital and original as a culture from Britain in the last 30 years I'd say.
Well, British TV in the 1990s was great.
> With almost identical population sizes, the UK has under 30 million homes, while France has around 37 million. 800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families.
I'm not sure that's a fair comparison, France has double the area of UK, and more of it is usable.
But the UK is nowhere near full in terms of housing. The Netherlands is the densest large country in Europe, and rocks double the population density of the UK. Despite this, the two countries have a roughly equal ratio of people to homes (~2.2). It's not as if a country actually needs that much land to build homes - humans simply don't take up that much space in terms of housing.
But the Netherlands are in a huge housing crisis at the moment.
If you want to compare the UK against the Netherlands, you'd have to compare the numbers in the article: how many Dutch own houses, how many have second homes. And adjust the numbers to be relative to population size of course. I'm not sure how well the Netherlands would come out of that comparison.
This doesn't really seem relevant since no one is disputing whether the UK as a whole has enough space for more houses. The relevant comparisons are Paris vs London and then the various 2nd tier cities in the countries. Paris has a MUCH HIGHER population density than London, in part due to the housing mix, e.g. Parisian mansion blocks.
Prosperity comes from cities where densification is allowed (far too much of inner London is only 2-storeys) and being able to affordably put in supporting infrastructure.
I loved this paper, it's full of new ideas.
My main question/challenge would be: if the problems have been constant since the 1950s-1980s - e.g. planning and failure to build - then how come we were doing so well until 2008? Why did problems only start biting then?
The financial crisis had an outsized impact on the UK plus we topped it off with a poorly implemented separation from the EU.
Probably a decline in North Sea oil revenue
I think Britain has got rich during early 18 century by dominating and getting into other countries like India, Africa and now nothing has left in the world to concur, that's why they're stagnated (maybe for forever)
OK, why is this flagged?
The list of issues that the article list seems very ad hoc. Some are compared to EU countries, but apparently only where this makes the UK come out worst.
It also ignores the fact that the UK might do better in some area's than other countries, it would be fair to lists these as well. Otherwise you could make a list like this for any country in the world.
Also some issues seem irrelevant. E.g. the crime rate was given, and it was mentioned that this had been actually going down in the recent years. But then it was compared to the crime rate after WO2, and yes, compared to that it went up.
"These are not just disconnected observations", says the article. Yeah, but they might be actually. For instance the one about France producing more electricity is because France famously over-invested in nuclear power stations and that's why its electricity price recently went negative. Meanwhile the UK probably needs to increase supply slightly, but the comparison is misleading.
The fact it's a whole site dedicated to this article means there's some angle to it. Would be interesting to know who paid for this.
One of the authors is from the center for policy studies, which is a thinktank that was founded by Margaret Thatcher and 2 others. The other two authors seem to be the founder and one of the main contributors to https://worksinprogress.co/ which describes itself as "a magazine of new and underrated ideas to improve the world."
So I'm going to guess it's gonna be that sort of thing. Someone with a neoliberal economic perspective who stands to benefit from government investments in largescale infrastructure projects.
This is one of the worst comments I've read on HackerNews and engenders the decline in critical thinking that has become so pervasive here in recent years.
You find a bunch of ways to frame the authors as the out-group, then cast a totally baseless aspersion. Presumably so you don't have to engage with any of the actual points in the article.
I'm not framing them in terms of an out group at all. It's the exact opposite- they are the most "in" of in-groups. In the UK, government policy for the last 15 years has been hugely influenced by this specific thinktank and two or three similar ones. It's an extraordinarily small group. If Britain is in decline due to lack of infrastructure investment it's in no small part because of the policy positions that they have advocated and implemented during that time.
I care a great deal about the actual points in the article. It's just important to understand this is not in any sense a neutral analysis.
If this is one of the worst comments you’ve read on HN, you must be new to the site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism
This section really shows where they're coming from:
Privatisation, tax cuts, and the curbing of union power fixed important swathes of the UK economy. Crucially, they tackled chronic underinvestment in sectors that had been neglected under state ownership. Political incentives under state ownership encouraged underfunding – and where the Treasury did put money in, it tended to go on operational expenditures (e.g., unionised workers’ wages rather than capital investments). This problem has immediately reemerged as the Department for Transport has begun to nationalise various franchises (which it promises to do to all of them).
It is bizarre to me that they can claim that under government ownership the incentives were towards underfunding, implying that somehow the incentives are any different under private ownership (although admittedly, there's been great investment in ticket barriers...)
> who stands to benefit from government investments in largescale infrastructure projects
I'm unsure if there's anyone in the country who wouldn't benefit from that. Hell, you can even wipe "government away", the essay talks at length about re-enabling private infrastructure investment too.
And who doesn't like infrastructure investment?
I would say most people benefit from working infrastructure. What we have seen in the last decade or so is a lot of government spending on infrastructure analysis (eg the "levelling up" agenda which brought spending mostly in London - the exact opposite of the stated intent or HS2 which has seen 15bn of spend mostly on slideware and consultants) without much in the way of actual infrastructure being developed.
There is unquestionably a large swathe of the UK (in particular the North, North East and most of Wales) which would benefit tremendously from improved infrastructure.
What an ugly, impoverished view of the world. Someone sees that the UK is poorer than it would be if economic policy wasn’t a disaster and wants to publicise that so it can be improved and tens of millions of people’s lives improved and you’re looking for an “angle”.
Poverty is bad. There’s the angle.
Tufton Street thinktanks [1] are not trying to reduce poverty.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/55_Tufton_Street
"But it remains doubtful that [Labour] will be any better at delivering on those ambitions than the Conservatives were."
This one sentence in the introduction belies an article not entirely based on factual evidence.
If only there was some factual evidence to point to to suggest were wrong and Labour might do better than the Tories.
Funny how everyone in the West was dependent on Russia si much. People weren't thinking at all?
They were thinking...about the backhanders. Look at Cyprus, gateway for dirty Russian money in to the EU, swimming in Russian money, all sanctioned by the government and EU thanks to all the bribes they receive
The UK didn't import much oil or gas from Russia but we are subject to a global market for these commodities.
Rightoid propaganda
The list of things the consider is long almost exhaustive. Most of the points have already been made, some by other people too, if you follow these things online. While there is nothing there earth-shattering, it's good to see it all nicely laid out. People dismissing everything with a sentence, are not doing it justice.
However. The report is thin on recommendations "What is to be done now?", or did I miss them really!? That really surprises me. If I were to define it in two sentences: UK central gov is ultra centralised in Whitehall (#1) (almost Stalinist in that respect!!), and then that centralised power is further held in a strangle hold by the Treasury Brain - Deep State - OBR complex (#2). So together they are like Centralisation^2.
Atm that ensures - #1 nothing can be done by anyone else, and #2 they've settled on "do nothing" b/c everything costs money, and #2 care disproportionally more about that cost, and much less about what capability assets etc that cost buys UK. Once nothing tangible is done, laziness is naturally encouraged, activity punished, and every promotion every jostling in the hierarchy becomes entirely a beauty contest, divorced from any real-word results. All this seen afar by outsider without any insider knowledge. Just listening to Rory Stewart and Dominic Cummings relying info about the inner workings of UK gov machine.
So any intervention would have to come (walking backwards) into point #2, and or at point #1.
Point #2 means smashing the power of the Treasury. They are good servant, but a bad master. No.10 (the PM) needs to re-assert itself over and above No.11 (the FinMin) by 1st-ly taking decision powers out of No.11 hands. No.10 would have to work much more on getting things done, take interest in that, and leave behind the media PR Circus it's totally devoted to atm. Just assume you will serve 1 term (or less!), drop the "permanent electioneering mode" (that nowadays the position goes into while in gov??), don't think of re-election and try get stuff done, assuming you've run out of time. Can't see how a change like that can come but directly from the top, from the PM. Supported by legislation and votes to dismantle the 1000 roadblocks, via the political power of MPs voting in Parliament.
Point #1 means decentralisation of power. UK for a long time used to have vigorous local authorities that could innovate in various ways. Admired once at the riches of local gov building in Birmingham (UK 2nd largest city). The idea that some pimply fresh graduate 20yo SpAd 120 miles away in London would be telling these people how many pencils they should buy I presume would have seemed to the people running the City gov absurd, like a Monty Python sketch to us.
Mid-term UK needs to build another 10mil strong cities agglomeration, e.g. Liverpool - Manchester - Leeds - Sheffield - Hull, by connecting them with transport links, and building housing along the links for commuting whichever way people fancy. With Birmingham half-way between this new MegaCity and the old London. So London gets some competition, and raises its game too. Atm feels London is coasting because TINA.
14 years of Tory rule.
Which, since these people are from the CPS, they would have supported by the way.
TL;DR: you need energy if you want to build/transform/produce/transport things
I once held a British passport, I'm glad I now hold another.
Have you renounced your British citizenship? Couldn't you keep both?
You can have British citizenship whilst holding another citizenship, unless that second citizenship prevents you from holding another one.
The treaties the UK has with Ireland even gift anyone born in Northern Ireland with dual citizenship off the bat.
I'm aware of the conditions, and there's no impediment.
"Couldn't you keep both?"
Why would I want to? Did you actually read the story?
Why, and which one?
Seems you didn't read the story.
It doesn't tell me your reasons or where you moved to. (And it ends on a positive note)
1. A clue: our mob comes from above 55N. 2. I haven't time to write the book. 3. I see no reason to have that info indexed by the web.
Weird how Western Europe stagnated after 1990, only Germany get some more “gas” for growth thanks to CEE and cheap energy. now it seems that importing tens of millions of low skilled refugees and workers with high social benefits is killing any innovation while taxing middle class and all high skilled Europeans prefer to move to US or even east Asia.
Which makes whole industry lag behinds and UK is probably biggest example of that it is just big banking and service hub with no money for any investments in infrastructure outside London making it more and more depending on single city with legacy service sector. Even Poles are coming back to Poland a country that was 7-10 times poorer 20 years ago.
Europe failed to keep its bureaucracy at bay.
There were times in the 1990s when people like the Dutch commissioner Frits Bolkenstein sincerely tried to liberalize and open the internal market.
But at least since Brexit, possibly earlier, the EU has made a turn towards protectionism and closedness (at least economically; as you mention, it is way, way easier to ship people from Africa into the EU than bananas), a French attitude so to say.
Frankly, we the Czechs are missing Britain in the fold. It was a balancing power against the Franco-German attempts to micromanage and regulate absolutely anything. Together with NL and DK, they were a force for economic freedom within the Union.
BTW other nations are threatened by the very same development, see the shenanigans around FAA and their überlengthy process of licensing of space launches. But I am more optimistic about the US being able to cut red tape than the EU.
The British voted for Brexit to enjoy poorer standards.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/09/...
Good luck with removing "red tape".
By putting red tape in scare quotes, do you want to express an opinion that every regulation is good and red tape is just a myth? More papers, more prosperity, without any limits or any inflection point?
The UK has argued for the Brexit with red tape removal, in practice this meant less protection.
Standards are useful. To be outside a large population area of standardization and regulation only means, that nobody cares about your small-country standards and that the population gets the worst of both worlds: inferior local standards and very little influence in international standards.