Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Northern England is poor

tomforth.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 164 posts

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#101

Post by spacebanana7 »

Jensson wrote: post #97
spacebanana7 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,.

It’s not that these degrees are totally without value. Most banks and consultancies accept any quantitative degree as long as it’s from a prestigious university.

But if you know you’re going into banking anyway you might as well do something vaguely relevant like accounting, economics or statistics.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#104

Post by tom_ »

CapeTheory wrote: post #99

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.

The diagram of the northern "urban" centre also fails to point out the Peak District, though you can detect it by noticing what looks like an obvious gap in the middle of the circle. In the middle of the London circle is, of course, the centre of London, world-famous capital city of the United Kingdom, seat of power of its government and monarchy. In the middle of the Northern circle? Some mountains and the occasional picturesque little village...

(The weather might also be a factor here too. The elevated regions are much colder, snowier and windier, causing problems with transport. Getting between Sheffield and Manchester at this time of year can be a painful business.)

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#105

Post by thomasforth »

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…

Thanks for reading.

For my precise work on the hyper-local angle you're asking after I did this analysis of Greater Manchester when I lived there in 2018 and it holds up really well. https://www.tomforth.co.uk/inequalityingreatermanchester/

Specifically on the GDP per capita numbers you quote, it's important to know what the "capita" means here. In your numbers, the capita is of residents. So people who commute into Manchester to work are counted in the GDP side of the equation and not in the capita side of the equation giving a largely meaningless number when comparing the strength of an economy. In the case of Leeds and Bradford that you mention it's largely the same effect. When someone commutes from Ilkley or Harrogate to Leeds to work their GDP is counted in Leeds but their capita is counted in Bradford or North Yorkshire.

While I agree that looking at smaller geographies is useful, and indeed I do in the link top, we need to consider that overall Greater Manchester, and all of the North's other cities, just have very little prosperity to go around. There are pockets of wealth, but they are pockets against a backdrop of poverty. And of course in London there are pockets of poverty, but they are pockets against a backdrop of wealth. You can convince yourself of this by looking at the ONS small area income estimate dataset and map.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#106

Post by thomasforth »

sjclemmy wrote: post #25

I have never heard it referred to as North England. Northern England or the North of England yes. As a reluctant “northerner” it dunt sarnd reet.

I agree it sounds odd. It's a phrase I've moved to using after fifteen years of being shouted at for using other phrases. North England, while sounding a bit odd, generates much fewer rage replies than other formulations. There's also a slight preference on my part for shorter phrases because of social media.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#107

Post by AnimalMuppet »

dang wrote: post #76
sjclemmy wrote: post #25

I have never heard it referred to as North England. Northern England or the North of England yes. As a reluctant “northerner” it dunt sarnd reet.

Ok, we've erned it in the title above. Thanks!

"Erned it". Dang, you don't usually make me LOL, but you got me there.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#108

Post by thomasforth »

tom_ wrote: post #104
CapeTheory wrote: post #99

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.

The diagram of the northern "urban" centre also fails to point out the Peak District, though you can detect it by noticing what looks like an obvious gap in the middle of the circle. In the middle of the London circle is, of course, the centre of London, world-famous capital city of the United Kingdom, seat of power of its government and monarchy. In the middle of the Northern circle? Some mountains and the occasiona…

In my comparisons with the Netherlands I explore this in detail. The centre of the Netherlands' main urban region is a six metre below sea level swamp that the Dutch never have and never will build on and which is just as much of an obstacle to agglomeration as the Pennines. So I really don't think this matters.

As for the weather, Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Denmark are hardly renowned for their fantastic weather and they're all doing much better than North England. Meanwhile Southern Spain, Southern Italy, and Greece are lovely places but not doing well economically. I don't think the weather is a good excuse for Northern underperformance.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#109

Post by thomasforth »

skrebbel wrote: post #10

> Limited success such as in Manchester, whose economy has nearly kept up with East German cities while the rest of North England falls behind, Woa is this a typo? I know little about England, and I hadn't realized that "keeping up with East German cities" is considered a success. I mean isn't East Germany rather well known for not keeping up all that well with the rest of Germany either?

Not a typo I'm afraid. East Germany's economy overtook North England's economy in 2010. Excluding Berlin, East Germany's economy overtook North England's economy in 2013. Every East German large city (Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, Halle, Chemnitz) is today a stronger economy than every North English large city except Manchester. Manchester is still a weaker economy than Berlin, Dresden, and Leipzig.

All the data is from the OECD using comparable definitions of the cities and collecting at https://tomforth.co.uk/humancapital/

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#110

Post by Kon-Peki »

nine_k wrote: post #56
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.

The US somehow avoids this, likely by putting state capitals and the national capital into smaller cities. Hence NYC, SF, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Seattle, etc are all big urban agglomerations, but are not the points that concentrate everything important in their respective areas.

Those cities aren’t really good examples of intentionally putting a state capital in a smaller city of the state.

Albany is older than NYC, and anyway the concept of NYC as a single large city is barely 125 years old. The original capital of Illinois is (strangely) west of the Mississippi River and south of St. Louis. By treaty between Great Britain and France, the current area of Illinois was off limits to European settlement, until after the revolution when the US said “that treaty doesn’t apply to us”. Chicago wasn’t a big or important city until the civil war.

Los Angeles has been the wealthiest and most populous area in Alta California since like 1800 or so. But it was established as a puebla and not a mission, so it could never be a center of government under Spanish rule.

Miami was fairly unlivable until air conditioning and malaria control, and its geographic location was extraordinarily inconvenient until after the interstate system.

The US government established a customs house in Olympia when it and Seattle were little more than a handful of homesteads. And guessed wrong on which would grow faster.

Post reply on HN