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Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

ukfoundations.co

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Re: Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

#71

Post by gadders »

noja wrote: post #63
tommy5dollar wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> incredibly restrictive rules. Like what? Are you referring to the self-regulation at Grenfell Tower?

It was regulations that made the cladding be installed in the first place, I thought?

Re: Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

#72

Post by gadders »

gmac wrote: post #11
JCM9 wrote: post #4

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 a…

> 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.sortition…

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.

Re: Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

#73

Post by noja »

barry-cotter wrote: post #67
noja wrote: post #53

> 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 thin…

> 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.

Re: Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

#74

Post by gadders »

langsoul-com wrote: post #23

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...

Re: Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

#75

Post by gadders »

flir wrote: post #28
gmac wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.sortition…

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...

Re: Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

#77

Post by barry-cotter »

fidotron wrote: post #68

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 t…

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

Re: Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

#78

Post by nine_k »

docdeek wrote: post #19
JCM9 wrote: post #4

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 a…

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_f…

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.

Re: Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

#79

Post by gadders »

michaelt wrote: post #66
JCM9 wrote: post #4

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 a…

> 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…

>> 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

Re: Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

#80

Post by card_zero »

misja111 wrote: post #6

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 give…

"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.
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