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The strange case of Britain’s demise

economist.com

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Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#131

Post by RachelF »

bsnnkv wrote: post #10

I recently posted some of my feelings related to watching the UK post-2019 from the US as a Brit that left as part of the ongoing brain drain.[1] I received my Green Card since that post and I've booked my flights for a visit to the UK for early next year. Mostly I just want to share how sad reading this article made me feel this morning. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33682030

Yes, the UK has supplied competent people to the world via emmigration for a long time.

One wonders if the average intelligence of the place is going down?

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#132

Post by mistermann »

grog454 wrote: post #128
recuter wrote: post #38

Ben Page, the boss of Ipsos, a global research firm, points to what he terms the “loss of the future”, common across the West but acute in Britain. In 2008, as the financial crisis struck, only 12% of Britons thought youngsters would have a worse quality of life than their parents, Mr Page notes. Now that figure is 41%. As elsewhere, people worry about immigration and feel threatened by globalisation. All this makes…

> this is day 0. Only looking forwards, how do you thrive economically in the 21st century under these current conditions with the cards you have to play Counterpoint: how do you avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and learning from them by pretending they never happened?

Not pretending/perceiving that the memetic/reductive/imprecise/misinformative/incorrect way we describe them is accurate would be a good start.

Human communication in 2022 is a train wreck, and there are plentiful artifacts of that in this very thread, in this much more intelligent than average community.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#133

Post by sega_sai »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #122
mmarq wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hardening eviction rules is economic suicide. No, it isn’t. The current state of affairs in England (even Scotland and Wales have different regulations) only causes misery and an immense waste of resources on housing. Or do you think Germans or Frenchmen spend 3 months a year doing house viewings? Nowhere in the civilised world you can evict a family that doesn’t have rent arrears and nowhere in the civilised world…

The reason you spend that time is because of the rules. Actually, the homeless rate in Edinburgh (which actually has an eviction ban and, even, rent controls now) is 3x the rate of SF...the reason why is that most of the rental market disappeared because eviction control meant that landlords could only sell properties at the end of rental periods (and when these came up in September, they all just removed properties…

"is 3x the rate of SF" -- citation needed. I live in Edinburgh and have been in SF and very much struggle to believe it.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#134

Post by jrumbut »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #54
prof-dr-ir wrote: post #35

As a former inhabitant of England, I always thought that those in charge suffered from a uniquely wide 'competence gap' which I would like to define as the difference between someone's self-perceived competence and someone's actual competence. (The term is probably useful more broadly...) Maybe it is the historically class-based society alluded to in the article, but it always stunned me how those at the top, and in…

A competence gap is a very polite way to put it. In Britain we live in an inverted meritocracy which rewards smug stupidity, elevates bullshit, while punishing and marginalising our most talented people. I thought this was going to be another cynical Economist hit piece like the earlier "Europe not pulling its weight" [1] but was surprised how on-the-money it is. Some well chosen quotes; "A family with the wrong memb…

From the outside, the most painful part of UK politics to watch is this instinctual reaction of "well, that didn't work, so let's do anything else." It takes a lot of luck to do that and land on a good idea.

Again, from the outside, the UK looks like a country that has a lot to lose but it's acting quite desperate and it's hard to see why.

> What worries me is that, if tomorrow our country came to its senses and asked genuinely competent people to take the helm, it would already be far, far too late.

I agree with much of the post, but it's this kind of statement that worries me. I think there is a lot of room for incremental improvement in the UK, the dull work of growing in competence, but the appetite seems to be for sweeping measures.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#135

Post by jemmyw »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #79
skippyboxedhero wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Labour isn't a popular vote. It is a popular vote AND a union vote (and the PLP, although they have never mattered in practice, they tried to oust Corbyn three times iirc...didn't work). Corbyn had popular support but, like Miliband, relied relatively heavily on unions...and one union at that: Unite (and btw, his popular support was always overstated hugely...in late 2019, you had a sizeable minority who thought…

Corbyn and McDonnell were essentially communists and therefore unelectable. Blair took the realistic route: Socialism does not work, let's have a market economy create wealth that can then be used to finance social programs. A flavour a social democracy. I think a reason Corbyn was so popular among the young is that enough time has passed so that this generation has no idea what socialist countries in Europe were act…

They weren't essentially communists, that is taking the Tory press talking point. They were further left than any other recent popular politicians. Left in the form of worker rights, unionism that sort of thing, not communism.

Given how far we've gone into a low wage and poor rights economy I don't think a hard left leadership would have been that bad, especially as it would have been tempered by the rest anyway. However, I don't like Corbyn's extreme passivism.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#136

Post by rawgabbit »

BMc2020 wrote: post #126
recuter wrote: post #38

Ben Page, the boss of Ipsos, a global research firm, points to what he terms the “loss of the future”, common across the West but acute in Britain. In 2008, as the financial crisis struck, only 12% of Britons thought youngsters would have a worse quality of life than their parents, Mr Page notes. Now that figure is 41%. As elsewhere, people worry about immigration and feel threatened by globalisation. All this makes…

Thank you for reading that meandering near stream-of-consciousness bit of fluff so the rest of us don't have to.

I got dumber after reading the article.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#137

Post by LatteLazy »

Britain's been decaying since at least 1940. Basically everyone left alive here knows only failure. The idea of any success is as alien and revolutionary as suggesting we all convert to a new religion or give up private property. So any time things look like they might be succeeding, people, from voters to PMs self sabotage.

The press helps by giving people plausible deniability. Letting them pretend they didn't know. Politicians help by enacting terrible policies they know will fail just to stay in power for 6 more months. And other groups help by blaming each other (the hard left blames the centre left, right wing nationalists blame right wing free traders).

That's why people looked at the expert advice (that we would be prosperous and successful and might end up part of a world super power of we kept this EU business up) and immediately quit. That's why people were so willing to accept the bullshit and pretend it was real (like that we could leave the EU and stay in the EU).

Brexit is but a symptom of this, a big one but just one. It infects every aspect of our national identity. From the housing market to jobs to education.

Until things get a lot worse people won't be ready to try succeeding. So here we are, 5 years into a(nother) lost generation.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#138

Post by rr808 »

I think its just a return to normal service after a spectacular period in the 90s and early 2000s. Back then everything was close to perfect, economy, music, politics UK became the best at everything. Now its kinda back to how it was in post war era which is fine but not great.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#139

Post by mytailorisrich »

mmarq wrote: post #113
skippyboxedhero wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardening eviction rules is economic suicide. The problem with unsuitable housing is a side-effect of lack of supply. If you make it harder to evict, you make it harder to foreclose, make it harder to buy houses (because landlords can only sell to other landlords)...it is very bad news. This happened almost immediately after Scotland brought in their rules...because politicians there have been blocking new builds for…

> Hardening eviction rules is economic suicide. No, it isn’t. The current state of affairs in England (even Scotland and Wales have different regulations) only causes misery and an immense waste of resources on housing. Or do you think Germans or Frenchmen spend 3 months a year doing house viewings? Nowhere in the civilised world you can evict a family that doesn’t have rent arrears and nowhere in the civilised world…

No-one evicts a good, rent paying tenant in England.

Issue #1 is that the supply does not keep up with demand so rents keep going up. Issue #2 is that tenants don't know the law.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#140

Post by skippyboxedhero »

notahacker wrote: post #119
hermitcrab wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have no idea how you measure fluency, but most of the population we are concerned with learned a foreign language until the age of 16. I live in the UK and I am struggling to think of more than 1 or 2 British born people I know personally that speak anything other than English with any fluency.

There are quite a few, it's just that none of them learned it from two hours a week between the ages of 11 and 16. (Mostly they learned it because their parents and many members of their local community speak Welsh or Punjabi or Urdu...)

Two hours a week between 11 and 16? I love this place. People speak with total authority about stuff they clearly do not understand.
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