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How the U.K. broke its own economy

theatlantic.com

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Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#691

Post by owenversteeg »

riffraff wrote: post #287
owenversteeg wrote: post #226

>Per capita electricity generation in the U.K. is now roughly one-third that of the United States, and energy use per unit of GDP is the lowest in the G7. By these measures, at least, Britain may be the most energy-starved nation in the developed world. Yikes. Housing is the big issue that gets everyone’s attention, but this is huge. Cheap energy drives economic growth at all levels. It’s incredible that the various…

I think those are intentionally misleading numbers. The UK is a finance power house, not a manufacturing one, so of course it derives a larger share of GDP from less energy. Italy has a higher % of GDP from manufacturing but way more expensive energy.

Hmm, I could see the case for energy use per unit of GDP being misleading in some ways. But per capita electricity generation? That’s not related at all.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#692

Post by smcl »

WalterBright wrote: post #689
smcl wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah that's a boomer favourite! There are a bunch of articles from the early 2010s of Americans laughing at China for exactly this ... and a handful of more recent ones from the latter part of that decade conceding that actually those "ghost cities" are rapidly filling up. They don't do articles on them any more, it's too embarrassing because they're filling up and just turning out to be normal cities. You can get…

From one year ago: https://x.com/60Minutes/status/1762205898217283781

The link in that tweet leads to an article: U.S. ambassador on why China competition must be managed while keeping "the peace"

Did you click the tweet or did just spend thirty minutes looking for a source to support the "ghost cities" claim, then rush to paste it here without looking that closely at it?

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#693

Post by sdenton4 »

gadders wrote: post #661
sdenton4 wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, no, actually. It's not hard to look at the expected effects of brexit and examine whether they are occurring. For example, decline in small forms exporting to Europe due to trades friction. "But the working assumption of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the government's independent official forecaster, is still that Brexit in the long-term will reduce exports and imports of goods and services by 15%…

You mean the same civil service that was against Brexit from the start, still tries to justify it being a bad idea? Amazing. You even didn't include the paragraph prior to your quote: "It's also clear UK services exports - such as advertising and management consulting - have done unexpectedly well since 2021." I realise Brexit was a horrible shock for the middle classes that they are still coming to terms with, but I…

Right - I included the bottom line on trade. There's plenty more context in the article, and only a small sliver is at all good for the Brexiteer. Everyone agrees it's been between 6-30% worse on the trade front, and the OBR estimate is middle-of-the-road in that regard.

Enjoy the kool-aid.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#694

Post by lenerdenator »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #643
lenerdenator wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't get local population to grow, you have to bring in your labor from somewhere else. And of course, like most wealthy nations, the British birth rate has been in the toilet since the 70s. This is also a reason that Brexit happened. Arguably the reason, even. There are a lot of working-class people whose families have been in the British Isles for centuries who look at the lack of progress relative to what…

>If you can't get local population to grow, you have to bring in your labor from somewhere else. Self-fulfilling prophecy... local populations can't grow when they're starved of housing, energy, and most importantly of all, jobs.

If I didn't know any better, I'd say that the current system of capital distribution wasn't providing those things adequately.

But that'd be silly.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#695

Post by Aromasin »

milesrout wrote: post #278
Aromasin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out Thatcherism only works as long as the state still has assets to sell off. The delusion that assets would stay in the hands of the working and middle class, and not end up with the wealthy inheriting class, has to be one of the biggest political failures of our government on the modern era. It's lead to the possible death of the Conservative Party if they fail to fight off Reform and the Liberal Democrats.

It works as long as you have an economy and eyes to see it worked with her policies in place and didn't work before she was elected. The Tories benefited massively from Thatcher because her policies massively benefited Britain. Without them, Britain would be far poorer today. Britain's problems today are not because of too much Thatcherism but because of far too little. The areas of greatest concern are those areas t…

Thatcherism is shortermism manifest. It's the same attitude that plagues the corporate world - focusing on next Quarter profits rather than the next 20 years. It leaves nothing left at the end but a broken state and more billionaires than we ever had medieval kings, while the rest of us slide back into Dickensian poverty, be you doctor, engineer, soldier, or social worker. We traded state wealth (sold off massive amounts of passive income generating assets like housing and utilities) for short term economic GDP growth in the 90s and early 00s, and now we brunt the cost of it because our passive income has gone. The Tories were more worried about re-election than they were keeping the middle class alive.

Our utilities and infrastructure are now drain us for every penny we're worth, and guess what? They're largely owned by other countries now. Our train networks, our energy companies, our communications, and so on, go to pay the French/Chinese/Scandinavian/etc government's. Somehow other countries manage to make profit on state asset; something which Thatcher never had the capacity to do. That's not considering the private industry, which makes £MM in profit, pocketing it instead of reinvesting it in the state which is the primary mandate of public ownership. Individuals abroad or in the 0.1% profit make money from our state, while the rest of the country withers.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#696

Post by manquer »

tsimionescu wrote: post #442
tempfile wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would hardly call it "utterly irrelevant" that in a discussion about "killing birds is bad" someone mentions that it is not usually considered bad to kill birds for food.

Killing wild birds accidentally is completely different from raising and bucthering birds for food, from virtually any point of view I can imagine. People who have no problem with eating meat will still not find it OK to kill a pet pig, and might still consider sport hunting wild boars to be barbaric.

Life is still life, pain(not only death) caused needlessly whether windmills or in factory farms is still cruel. Birds are intelligent, curious, emotional, they are social animals and get depressed.

Other attributes the bird may have (wild/bred) or species (rare/common) has no bearing on the pain and kind of death they suffer. The importance of those attributes is lens we see from, it does not change their suffering.

> People who have no problem with eating meat will still not find it OK to kill a pet pig

It doesn't make it acceptable to view life raised for food[2] as a lesser (therefore ok to be tortured) than other life because they are pets, merely because it is common practice.

How is it different than valuing human life was valued differently in age of slavery or even today if you say correlate level of aid, support, news coverage or empathy to simple numbers on human conflict impact[1].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-armed-conflicts...

[2] The argument here is not becoming vegetarian, it is about not torturing needlessly what we need to eat. The human equivalent is akin to not following Geneva conventions in a war not abolish war altogether, while ideal everyone agrees is not practical today.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#698

Post by grumpy_coder »

matt-p wrote: post #628
sevensor wrote: post #616

From the US (where we have problems of our own, believe me), the UK, and especially England, look like a powerful case for federalism. As far as I can tell, the entire country is run by and for rich Londoners, with no countervailing local power having the opportunity to make sane government decisions.

We do have devolved powers, so Scotland and Wales* have functioning Regional Governments, with devolved funding from a formula that gives them substantially more money than they collect in tax. So they should be doing great right? Wrong. They massively struggle and yet live in a "best of both worlds" scenario, they can run the health service, transport, taxation policy and all things that affect regular people withou…

Then when you need to buy a house you have to leave.

Net migration to London from the rest of England and Wales is only positive for those aged 20 to 27

There's plenty of great experienced people outside London, but all the rich (business owners) are openly prejudice to everywhere else. https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cwy57v07gn2o

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#699

Post by keybored »

WalterBright wrote: post #677
keybored wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like building transport infrastructure to nowhere, hmm? And then they build all the other infrastructure around it.[1] Because with such central planning you don’t need to build around and on top of existing infrastructure—you can build like in Sim City. That vacant “Paris” also turned out to become populated later. Ha ha they centrally planned a city and didn’t move people into it before it was done... like what you…

google "vacant cities in china"

I guess you would trust Bloomberg:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-01/chinese-g...

Or via Wikipedia since it’s paywalled:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underoccupied_developments_in_...

Google "critical media analysis".

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#700

Post by amai »

127 wrote: post #525
amai wrote: post #523

"More than a decade ago, Germany began to phase out nuclear power while failing to ramp up other energy production. The result has been catastrophic for citizens and for the ruling government. In the first half of 2024, Germans paid the highest electricity prices in the European Union." Catastrophic? If I have to pay 33% more for electricity now than in 2010? And if corrected for inflation the electricity costs in Ge…

Sure, if you don't care about climate change at all you can just activate and build coal power plants.

"Germany's carbon dioxide emissions fell to their lowest in 70 years in 2023, touching levels last seen in the 1950s"

https://etn.news/buzz/germany-emissions-fall-re-dominates-en...

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