Good karma for a former colonialist empire…anyways, their ceremonial king is a billionaire while the average citizens bear the grunt of the decline.
What a detestably callous comment. Do your job, dang.
BOE Chief Economist Says Britons ‘Need to Accept’ They’re Worse Off
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Re: BOE Chief Economist Says Britons ‘Need to Accept’ They’re Worse Off
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no tax shortfall. Taxing tax havens is fine but you shouldn't expect it to limit inflation very much.
The British government levying spurious taxes on its remaining colonies. I am absolutely sure that's going to go well.
> levying spurious taxes
"The British Virgin Islands were ranked as the “greatest enabler of corporate tax abuse”"
Ahh yes, leveling the playing field is now "spurious taxes" on wealthy individuals and corps...
Re: BOE Chief Economist Says Britons ‘Need to Accept’ They’re Worse Off
#73A lot of commenters are obsessed with just finding money. You can't eat money. You can't build a house out of it (advisably). Money is only as valuable as the amount of stuff in an economy. More money with the same amount of stuff is just inflation. The Pound does not need more inflation. Money and trade are only valuable in so much as they aid exchange and efficiency. On a real, practical-level Brexit made England m…
"Money is only as valuable as the amount of stuff in an economy. More money with same amount of stuff is just inflation." What if the number of people in the country's economy significantly changes, up or down? Nothing? Can one simply ignore this variable or should it be part of the analysis? Perhaps there is a hidden assumption here that it is held (more or less) constant. NB. "stuff" can be natural resources, or ot…
A country's "number of people" isn't an independant parameter that you can just slide down so that your GDP/person increases.
If you reduce the "number of people" (i.e. by reducing immigration) you are typically reduce your GDP at a much higher rate, and thus will have a lower GDP/person overall. Your eating into your economy's ability to support the division of labour, specialization and other efficiencies that can only emerge at a large scale. Intuitively, think of it this way, do you think a village of 10 people, or a city of 2 million people will produce more GDP per capita?
Going back to the example of immigration, you're basically reducing a stream of young, educated workers who are consistently net creators of jobs, especially in Western countries with a very high ratio of aging senior citizens (Boomers) to young workers.
Re: BOE Chief Economist Says Britons ‘Need to Accept’ They’re Worse Off
#74A lot of commenters are obsessed with just finding money. You can't eat money. You can't build a house out of it (advisably). Money is only as valuable as the amount of stuff in an economy. More money with the same amount of stuff is just inflation. The Pound does not need more inflation. Money and trade are only valuable in so much as they aid exchange and efficiency. On a real, practical-level Brexit made England m…
> A lot of commenters are obsessed with just finding money.
Right and wrong. We are maybe obsessed with finding money to transfer instead of decreasing standards of living of the average person. The key is in your last sentence:
> You can do what you want to make the distribution more equal, but it can also be true that the pie is smaller for everyone.
Exactly! If you have 9/10th of the original pie and the rest of us are sharing 1/10th, then when the pie gets smaller it makes sense to keep our meager share numerically the same by giving us some of your share of the reduced pie. That is not equal distribution, but it needn't be!
In the economic sense this would mean taxing richer people more to fund social safety nets, while increasing interest rates to cool inflation. Lord Fotheringay will just have to make do with one less Bentley.
Re: BOE Chief Economist Says Britons ‘Need to Accept’ They’re Worse Off
#75How about they start the "acceptance" at the BOE. Cut their salaries. Then, cut all MP salaries. Then, cut government employee salaries. Then, tax the wealth of the rich (and not just income). When these noble people "accept" poverty themselves, that ought to bring inflation down.
I have an unpopular opinion, MPs aren’t paid enough. For the level of public scrutiny and the responsibility/power they hold it is underpaid. A mid level engineering (not tech) manager can earn the same outside of London and most senior devs will be on around the same. If it were paid better then it would attract better quality candidates and reduce the desire to “earn” money from other means, and reduce the proportion of people coming in who are already wealthy.
Government employee salaries are also generally lower than the private sector do again, if you want to attract the best and brightest then pay more
Re: BOE Chief Economist Says Britons ‘Need to Accept’ They’re Worse Off
#76John Authers, a Bloomberg columnist, discusses this a bit in https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-26/uk-inf... and thinks his friend got a bit of a raw deal here in the public reaction. If you like Matt Levine's columns, you might find Authers's newsletter worth a look.
https://archive.ph/r8E4M
Considering Pill's boss Andrew Bailey was excoriated for making the exact same point last year, Pill can't claim he had no idea he would be misinterpreted. Or perhaps he is just as stupid as his boss (an incompetent buffoon who failed at the FCA but failed upwards because he was the only Brexiteer the Tories could find for the job). This wouldn't be out of character for the upper reaches of the British establishment.
Authers' loyalty to his classmate is admirable, unlike the Cambridge alums who turned a blind eye to the Cambridge Five, but the incestuousness is a good part of why the UK is so badly misgoverned.
As for how ordinary people can take action beyond striking for higher wages, one example is how they are switching to hard discounters Aldi and Lidl for their groceries (food inflation is at 17%). Luxury retailers like Waitrose or midrange ones like Tesco and Sainsbury thought, incorrectly, they were above the fray and tried to preserve their margins. The customers they have lost to Aldi and Lidl will not be coming back, even after inflation subsides.
Re: BOE Chief Economist Says Britons ‘Need to Accept’ They’re Worse Off
#77A lot of commenters are obsessed with just finding money. You can't eat money. You can't build a house out of it (advisably). Money is only as valuable as the amount of stuff in an economy. More money with the same amount of stuff is just inflation. The Pound does not need more inflation. Money and trade are only valuable in so much as they aid exchange and efficiency. On a real, practical-level Brexit made England m…
Money is zero sum and it determines who owns the 'stuff'. Higher wages mean working-age generations are able to generate some wealth whereas until now only older generations could, as their assets continuously appreciated without losing value due to inflation.
I see the whole thing as intergenerational conflict. Pre-genX'ers went through a period of high inflation, which was also one of historically low inequality, followed by a period of very low inflation and very high inequality. This enabled them to accumulate and maintain vast wealth. Now post-genX'ers think it is their turn.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yonatan-Berman/publicat...
Re: BOE Chief Economist Says Britons ‘Need to Accept’ They’re Worse Off
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Economists keep chiding us about how that will ruin the economy too. They tell us our population must keep growing to keep the economy healthy.
Economically, it’s best to not have children at all and depend on immigration. You don’t have to waste resources educating people. Someone else does that, and you just pay them a slightly higher wages. Much cheaper than a well-funded education system.
That’s assuming there are no externalities whatsoever to immigration and that the immigrants will be able to satisfy the demand in labor and in entrepreneurs as well as the natives.
From my own experience, in France, both of those assumptions are heavily violated. It can vary depending of the type of immigration though, I bet the story is different for California
Re: BOE Chief Economist Says Britons ‘Need to Accept’ They’re Worse Off
#79All that free stuff from the government is expensive. "the British people need to accept they are poorer instead of seeking to claw back a historic drop in living standards after a jump in inflation."
It's not expensive. It's expensive if you don't spend on good quality public services. Without the NHS then there would be no economy. Without social care then people are taken out of the economy to care for relatives. Without child care then parents can't afford to go back to work. The main issue is that an every increasing proportion of money spent on services ends up in profits for private companies, and in the ad…
> Without the NHS then there would be no economy.
There was a British economy before the NHS.
Re: BOE Chief Economist Says Britons ‘Need to Accept’ They’re Worse Off
#80A lot of commenters are obsessed with just finding money. You can't eat money. You can't build a house out of it (advisably). Money is only as valuable as the amount of stuff in an economy. More money with the same amount of stuff is just inflation. The Pound does not need more inflation. Money and trade are only valuable in so much as they aid exchange and efficiency. On a real, practical-level Brexit made England m…
There’s also a lot of productive work that used to be done in the UK that the UK has no workers for anymore. I suspect in the short term this has hurt the UK’s wealth and standard of living more than anything else. Fewer doctors, nurses, vegetable pickers, butchers, cleaners, etc means that less productive work is being done in your country, and the few remaining workers to do that will now charge a lot more money since they have to take on more responsibility and have to pay more for everything for all the other workers who are also charging more money. So even as your wages go up, your standard of living doesn’t.
Food for thought for all those decrying immigration in a country with less than 5% unemployment (and especially in an industry where the people in the US commonly tout how software devs in the US are paid higher than devs anywhere else in the world).