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Why Northern England is poor

tomforth.co.uk

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Re: Why Northern England is poor

#151

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #138
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #7

Lot's of coal mining, used for steel production, used for boat building ... The high paying jobs are centered around London and the financial industry (20% of UK GDP), although post-Brexit the whole country is not doing well. Glad I left in the late 80's.

>Lot's of coal mining Coal mining used to employee over a million people[1] at the start of the last century. It's effectively zero now. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/371069/employment-in-coa...

It was still big up until the 70's at least - I remember the huge Miner's Galas in Durhan, attended by people like Harold Wilson, Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill. There are still lot's of former miner villages in the area that don't look like they've changed much. Maybe my comments on steel & ship building are equally dated(?), but I think it was coal driving these related industries that got the north entrenched as a poorer working class part of the country. Of course there is also the fishing industry and sheep farming due to poor quality land, again all low paying jobs.

One of the best predictors of individual financial success is the wealth of your parents, and I wonder how many generations this effect lasts for ...

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#152

Post by desas »

arpinum wrote: post #143

I'd put less blame on London and more on secondary cities than the author does because he misses an important point: London is the only UK city that tolerates growth. The UK system heavily centralised in tax-and-spend powers, but heavily decentralised in veto powers. Secondary cities have used their veto powers to either stop development or make it so expensive that very little gets developed. City centres are not be…

> I'd put less blame on London and more on secondary cities

> HS2 is cut short because of money that people outside of London demand be spent on making it so expensive on a per-mile basis.

I'm not sure that's accurate. Cost overruns have also come from inability to find efficiencies, high inflation in the construction sector, low contingency estimate (half cross rails) and a misunderstanding of ground conditions.

The expense increases due to consultation / public demand have come from demands made on the route between London and Birmingham. For example the Chiltern tunnel extension. There aren't many cities in that gap, and most of that area is London facing rather than Birmingham or north facing.

HS2 between London and Birmingham has the worse cost:benefit ratio of the whole initial plan, and yet it's the only bit being built.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#153

Post by Cumpiler69 »

growse wrote: post #85
Cumpiler69 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a vague answer that doesn't answer my specific question. I also have a STEM degree (electrical engineering) but would never be considered for finance roles.

I have a chemistry degree and an entire career doing software / system engineering in financial services. I've also hired a boatload of people with STEM degrees. In fact (massive generalisation warning) I prefer hiring them to those with computer science degrees.

How does one pivot into finance with a stem degree and computer engineering experience? What are you looking for in a resume and what's the interview process like?

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#154

Post by jmye »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #88
growse wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usefulness of that depends on whether you think academic higher education is vocational ("I'm doing a chemistry degree so that I can be a chemist") or inquisitive ("I'm doing a chemistry degree because it's so heckin' interesting"). I'd tend to advise people to study stuff they find interesting. I'd wager the percentage of degree holders doing a job that's directly related to their degree is in the minority, and…

Inquisitive education is great for people who’re independently wealthy or academically exceptional. But the average person takes a real risk of underemployment with that approach. A friend of mine with a degree in marine biology works as a barista, another with a philosophy degree works as a retail assistant.

Those people don’t have those jobs because of their degree.

As a non-wealthy, not particularly bright creative writing major, the focus of your degree only holds you back if you let it, or if you are utterly unwilling to work outside of your focus area. Tech, especially, has an absurd number of on-ramps for anyone willing to do the tiniest modicum of extra-curricular work.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#155

Post by snowwrestler »

intalentive wrote: post #100

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 e…

Industrialization worked for China recently for the same reason it worked for western nations more than a century ago: you can drive local economic growth even if the population has low education.

Once you have a strong local economy based on manufacturing, you have to drive innovation to sustain it. So you use the economic output to fund education and research, to create new categories of products and services, which create durable competitive advantage.

The U.S. has succeeded wildly with this playbook. China is currently following this playbook. The author is saying that the playbook in Northern England was interrupted by the South.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#156

Post by schiffern »

pastureofplenty wrote: post #79
ceuk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You guys certainly have some of the nicest accents in the Anglosphere, imo.

I expect the accent is part of it, actually. Call it the Henry Higgins effect.

  Rose: If you ARE an alien, how come you sound like you're from the North?

  The Doctor: Lots of planets have a North!
(the joke lands better for American audiences if you mentally replace "North" with "South"; in many ways the economics/stereotypes are similar)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svi-fBXZzqI

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#157

Post by spratzt »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #150
spratzt wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately in 2025 you can probably add software engineering to the list of degrees to avoid.

At the moment on LinkedIn there are about 15k results for jobs containing the “software engineer” keyword in the UK, compared to just over 3k for the “biology” keyword. Despite this, 56k people graduated in biological sciences but 24k people graduated in computer science. (Graduation data is from 2019/20 so may have changed slightly, but unlikely enough to move the needle) https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/sb2…

The vast majority of jobs on LinkedIn are fake. Even so your figures confirm my claim; 24k graduates versus 15k jobs. The supply is greater than the demand.

As a sibling comment has pointed out, there are too many software engineers in the UK.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#158

Post by spratzt »

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 slightly more nuanced than that. Investment banks and consultancy companies are really interested in graduates who are smart and articulate. The nature of their degree is not that relevant.

I know an extremely clever young woman who graduated in performance arts. She had no difficulty in getting a job at a top tier consultancy company. This company was far more interested in her than some mediocre plodder who hacked his way through a comp. Sci degree.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#159

Post by ninalanyon »

jdietrich wrote: post #117
thomasforth wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Totally fair response, I'm an idiot, please give this guy my upvotes.

I don't think you are an idiot. Being mistaken or providing an incomplete analysis doesn't make you an idiot, it most likely just means you had neither the time nor the tools to do better just now. Your response clarified the article for me.

And admitting to the error puts you right at the top of the list of non-idiots in my opinion!

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#160

Post by rich_sasha »

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…

Isn't this similar in, say, US cities? I'm not well travelled in the US, but Chicago, New York, LA, are all incredibly wealthy cities with pockets of abject poverty.

Same elsewhere in (some parts of) Europe. Paris for example, though perhaps for different reasons.

It would appear that just having access to good education (or worse, merely being close to places with good education) doesn't mean you can consume it and advance in life. Probably ditto for other levelling up tools like apprenticeships, jobs etc.

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