[flagged]
Why Northern England is poor
41–50 of 164 posts
Re: Why Northern England is poor
#42We also shifted largely into a service based economy, shutdown a lot of mines and mills (for better or for worse) which were primarily more north based. More than 2/3rds of my graduating physics class went straight into banking, as there was no relevant industry to pick them up... and as someone with several postdoctoral degrees, yet no house or meaningful assets... who could blame them for going into banking in this…
>More than 2/3rds of my graduating physics class went straight into banking How does one get hired into banking with a physics degree? For what kinds of jobs? Where I live right now you only get into banking with a economics/business degree. Anything else and your resume goes in the bin.
A bank is a very diverse organism. There was a group at our bank, they knew very little English and none of the business/economy. Their task was to solve differential equations, something physicists are trained to do.
Re: Why Northern England is poor
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
The process is quite simple and fairly obvious. Government policy is the bedrock of all economic development. Government officials will always have the most knowledge about the capital, so all policy is tailored to it. It's no surprise that they don't make policies that benefit the North given that they don't live there.
Neither Albany, NY not Sacramento, CA feel like the centers of their states.
Having spent my teen years in backwater Sacramento, I can confirm that it did not feel much like the center of anything.
Adding a few more examples to your list, neither Olympia (WA), Salem (OR), nor Carson City (NV) are economic or social centers of their respective states.
Re: Why Northern England is poor
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly this. Don't think of it as "moving to a service-based economy", think of it as "outsourcing manufacturing and resource extraction". They are two sides of the same coin, but people tend to only look at the one shiny side. Like any race to the bottom, it works great until you hit the bottom. Only now you don't have any of the fundamental industry, and you've lost all of the domain knowledge of those industries.…
It also creates this weird power imbalance. 'Advanced economies' are supposed to be just that, yet 'developing economies' cutting off their grain, steel and manufacturing is a far bigger threat than an advanced economy cutting off digital services, luxury goods, and financial markets.
But "advanced" means "gone farther in a particular direction", not "more powerful", "independent", or some such. Mostly it's about giving the population more comfort. Equally, staying on a sofa can give you more comfort than hitting a gym, but it usually does not make you stronger.
Re: Why Northern England is poor
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most developed economies have shifted to services. Its a natural progression that results from higher productivity and higher wages. I think the big problem is too much reliance on on service sector.
It's a consequence of companies outsourcing to countries where they can get away with slave labor and a complete lack of environmental regulation. There's nothing natural about it.
Its not that simple. The UK experts a lot of manufactured goods to exactly those sorts of countries, and imports a lot from the EU and the US.
What you say is true of cheap consumer goods, but remember everything else. Even with some consumer goods, its pretty even - the UK exports cars about as much as it imports (by value, not numbers though). https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-trade-in-numbers...
Its other big goods exports are things that are not that visible to consumers.
Re: Why Northern England is poor
#46I think there's a fundamental gap in this analysis, which is how hyper-local many of the inequalities are. Manchester has a GDP per capita of £59,000. Tameside, the poorest area in Greater Manchester, has a GDP per capita of £19,000. Leeds has a GDP per capita of £42k; ten miles away, Bradford has a GDP per capita of £23.6k. Those disparities are really difficult to explain in terms of infrastructure or commercial in…
To a certain extent, would making the productive parts of manchester, even just 2X more productive not fix this over time in the same way that it has in London? If you look back even say 30 years ago in London, you'd of said the same thing about places like Hackney, as you do now about Tameside. Today it houses some of the most desired and valuable real estate not only in London, and by extension the UK, but in the w…
>30 years ago in London, you'd of said the same thing about places like Hackney...[and] today it houses some of the most desired and valuable real estate
are you saying that gentrification of Hackney did not simply entail wealthier people moving in and displacing the local population, but rather soaring incomes for the people who lived there?
Re: Why Northern England is poor
#47I think there's a fundamental gap in this analysis, which is how hyper-local many of the inequalities are. Manchester has a GDP per capita of £59,000. Tameside, the poorest area in Greater Manchester, has a GDP per capita of £19,000. Leeds has a GDP per capita of £42k; ten miles away, Bradford has a GDP per capita of £23.6k. Those disparities are really difficult to explain in terms of infrastructure or commercial in…
To a certain extent, would making the productive parts of manchester, even just 2X more productive not fix this over time in the same way that it has in London? If you look back even say 30 years ago in London, you'd of said the same thing about places like Hackney, as you do now about Tameside. Today it houses some of the most desired and valuable real estate not only in London, and by extension the UK, but in the w…
One could argue that the money flowing into Hackney was largely from the London media/finance elite who probably were made 2X more productive by IT and City deregulation. The result was Hackney's gentrification.
But gentrification, is not the same as a community leveling up. The former provides an influx of new residents with money to spend in the community. The latter creates new opportunities for the existing residents within the community.
Re: Why Northern England is poor
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most developed economies have shifted to services. Its a natural progression that results from higher productivity and higher wages. I think the big problem is too much reliance on on service sector.
It's a consequence of companies outsourcing to countries where they can get away with slave labor and a complete lack of environmental regulation. There's nothing natural about it.
OK, let it be not outsourcing to places with lower cost of labor, but to machines. There are whole factories that are operated by half-dozen people who mostly oversee its interaction with other human-run systems, such as trucks.
It will still keep most population away from industrial production. Same thing happened is agriculture a century ago, when machines made 90% of agricultural workers redundant, and huge farms are run by half-dozen people.
(Wait until AI will make a ton of service workers redundant.)
Re: Why Northern England is poor
#49The brain drain from northern England to London is massive.
There are four high income tech/finance/media households on my culdesac in east London, thankfully including my own. Of the eight adults, I am from London but the other seven are from the midlands or north of England.
Re: Why Northern England is poor
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
The process is quite simple and fairly obvious. Government policy is the bedrock of all economic development. Government officials will always have the most knowledge about the capital, so all policy is tailored to it. It's no surprise that they don't make policies that benefit the North given that they don't live there.
What policy would benefit the north, without (even further) subsidising it? If we could invest £10Bn and get £20Bn back for the economy with our money back over time then not a single politician would turn that down, there's actually been a load of support over the past ~5+ years for "levelling up" (AKA investment in the north) but we've not invested much because the returns are abysmal. Meanwhile there's a whole sta…
The reason for investing in the North is pretty simple: people live there. We have three options: do something productive with he area, do nothing and continue to pay for its decline, or move all the people to London and let house prices rise accordingly. What you said about first mover advantage rings true here. We can either pick the most developed city and devote resources elusively that area, or we can accept a proportionally smaller economy spread out across the whole country.
I also fail to see how London is subsidising these areas. It seems to me that they'd be much better off if they were able to run themselves. This is a classic case of purposeful under-investment. You see it in business as well. If someone wants to kill off a given project, they'll deprive it of funding to he point it can't operate properly then use the lack of profit generated as an excuse to axe it. The issue we have is that we can't just axe the North.
There is also the issue of measuring productivity. You say investments in London are more productive because they generate more profit, but consider that an equal investment in the North might have a much greater effect on the quality of life for the people living there. Should we measure investments by how much money they return or how much they improve people's lives? I am reminded of industrial strategy in the Soviet Union. They invested only in the most "productive" (highest ROI under capitalism) things such as heavy industry and very little in consumer technologies that make people happier. The result was rapid industrialisation which probably had the best effect in the long run. The question is how long term are we thinking? At some point, you've gotta start paying to make people happy instead of just investing in the most profitable area.