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Why Northern England is poor

tomforth.co.uk

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Re: Why Northern England is poor

#91

Post by musicale »

ceuk wrote: post #55
jdietrich wrote: post #26

I 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…

100% I live down the road from OP in Harrogate and it's an incredibly desirable and affluent place Also while I'm commenting. I know OP isn't saying the North is shit. Just poor(ish). Nevertheless I just want to say I love the north of England and genuinely think it's one of the best places in the world. We've already established that I'm in one of the better areas so my perspective might be a little skewed, but I ho…

> Harrogate and it's an incredibly desirable and affluent place

Did they fix the smell issues?

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#92

Post by pinkmuffinere »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #63
tetris11 wrote: post #3

We 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 This is why I advise people to never study physical sciences or non-software engineering. There just aren’t many jobs for it in the UK. And even fewer that pay well.

I do wonder how long this will hold up. It's true (though cliche) that software is "eating the world", but as the low hanging fruit gets automated away you do need people that understand more complex underlying processes to work on the software. I feel the right combination at this point is to do a little of both.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#93

Post by jltsiren »

WorkerBee28474 wrote: post #80
nickff wrote: post #2

Interesting perspective, but it really seems like state capitals just tend to siphon money from far away to invest nearby, and consequently, grow. Selecting a major city as your capital seems to accelerate the process, but even countries which select minor towns as their capitals have had this happen.

I think there's truth to that, it seems like every state has 1 major city. Possibly not always the capital (e.g. Toronto vs Ottawa, Albany vs NYC vs DC). I've heard that the book Cities and the Wealth of Nations [0] might talk about this more. I've been meaning to read it. [0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-cities-and...

It mostly depends on stable borders and a culture of centralization. Some US states such California and Texas have multiple major cities. Germany and the surrounding areas were historically fragmented, leading to many regions having multiple mid-tier cities instead of a single dominant city.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#94

Post by vkou »

EarlKing wrote: post #53
nine_k wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

OK, sounds good... hey, you're going to pay taxes on those machines, right? Because no business operates in a vacuum. Gotta pay for that military, police, and fire that allow you to continue operating. Think of it as the labor element of the manufacturing sector shifting to the defense sector. It's natural. :D

Machines can't go on strike, and don't need to be ordered back to work at gunpoint. The part of the defense sector allocated to manufacturing was much bigger prior to automation.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#95

Post by Jensson »

threatofrain wrote: post #66
Retric wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply displacing a population can make an area more wealthy but it does little for the overall population. So, I don’t think we care about land here but rather people.

> but it does little for the overall population. Not sure about that.

It just makes the poor people move elsewhere, they are still around.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#96

Post by glompers »

stg22 wrote: post #82
matt-p wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Historically, the UK was run for the benefit of an elite and the regions they lived in, but they discovered that that ran counter to their own interests. They reversed the economic parts of that in Ireland in the 1890s ("Killing Home Rule with Kindness"), and they did so in Northern England after the Wall Street Crash. For example, for part of the 20th century, companies were banned from expanding anywhere outside of…

There's already a literature analyzing this. For instance William Lazonick's 1983 Business History Review article, "Industrial Organization and Technological Change: The Decline of the British Cotton Industry," and his subsequent book "The Decline of the British Economy: An Institutional Perspective" (1987)

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#97

Post by Jensson »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #63
tetris11 wrote: post #3

We 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 This is why I advise people to never study physical sciences or non-software engineering. There just aren’t many jobs for it in the UK. And even fewer that pay well.

Them going into banking shows it is still a valuable degree,.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#98

Post by scarby2 »

Jensson wrote: post #95
threatofrain wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it does little for the overall population. Not sure about that.

It just makes the poor people move elsewhere, they are still around.

Specific to London but there were a lot of working class home owners who bought under the right to buy schenlme who have benefited hugely from gentrification (not just from increased home prices but from lower crime, better schools etc).

Also a lot of non-market housing being rented, all those people also benefit.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#99

Post by CapeTheory »

Any article which seeks to explore the problems of northern England and doesn't mention the weather is fundamentally incomplete.

I've lived in every part of England, but being in the north west for the last decade has highlighted how much our mental health can be damaged by constant grey skies and rain. A population predisposed to feeling hopeless naturally leads to a less vibrant economy.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#100

Post by intalentive »

The author says that the region is poor because, after the decline of industry, it didn’t have universities to drive tech, finance and services. But it sounds like the problem is simply deindustrialization in the first place, same as the US Rust Belt.

Material wealth means having stuff. You can only get stuff by making it or taking it from the earth.

Meanwhile Chinese cities are sparkling and new, and their workers enjoy a high standard of living at low cost, not unlike Northern England or Cleveland, Ohio 100 years ago.

Because they make a lot of stuff. It’s that simple.

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