Consider the Vector, not just the Scalar.
The direction, the trajectory, of these places.
I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
151–160 of 340 posts
Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
What compounding inequality? The UK's Gini coefficient has been trending downwards since the global financial crisis. 14 years of Conservative government made this country more equal, not less, because they flattened the income distribution by making everybody poorer. The big pattern among rich people in the UK nowadays is not that they're getting richer, it's that they're leaving.
The major change to income levels has been the massive increase in minimum wage. This removes the incentive to work hard and get skills because they aren’t valued, especially outside of London. The other major change is the continual divergence of wealth. If you are a 20 year old living near London you can get a crap paying junior job and live rent free for 5 years with parents while you save a 100k deposit (which us…
We've also seen a huge compression in net income as the tax thresholds haven't kept up with inflation. So someone who paid a 20% marginal rate twenty years ago is now paying 40% on the same real-terms income. And the 0% personal allowance has been eroded too.
Not to mention the 60% effective marginal rate between £100k and £125k - 69% if you have student debt, oh and that's not even counting employee's NICs.
And don't get me started on the stealth tax that is employer's NICs. (Those were just increased even further, and the morons are all defending it by pretending it doesn't come from wages... where exactly do they think the employer gets the money from?)
Plus all the insane traps where earning extra money can actually reduce your net income. E.g. there are situations in which increasing your salary by £1 can leave you thousands of pounds poorer because certain benefits are withdrawn with a cliff.
What's the point in working harder? You'd think that with such eye-wateringly high levels of taxation, we'd at least have something to show for it in the public sector, but... okay, I need to stop writing now for the sake of my blood pressure.
Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
#153Loved the fact that this post didn't go where I expected it to (or at least, didn't remain there). That a book like this probably wouldn't be published today, or would be less popular today, is a point that has been made many times by many people, about many different books, TV shows, jokes, etc. But the author actually moves on from there; the observation is that even in his own opinion , the same joke isn't funny t…
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Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Gini coefficient of the UK is about the same now as it was then: https://equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed/ What has actually changed? A whole bunch of other economic malaise, but also perceptions, amplified to your personal taste by social media.
Gini coefficient usually only measures income inequality. Wealth inequality is hard to measure for various reasons but… https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/ “for the UK as a whole, the WID found that the top 0.1% had share of total wealth double between 1984 and 2013, reaching 9%.” “If the wealth of the super rich continues to grow at the rate it has been, by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200…
Highly unlikely because the rich are now just running away from UK pulling all their cash with them; it's likely that leftists will get what they want - reduction of wealth inequality - just not in the way that pleases them: with the cash being simply gone.
Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what I was going to say. Back then, a book like this would have been perceived as the UK making fun of itself. Now it’s perceived as being cruel to those less fortunate. I think it’s worth putting into context that the economy was doing great in the era this book was first published and huge progress was being made with things like homelessness, inequality, and poverty. It felt like the country had turned a c…
The Gini coefficient of the UK is about the same now as it was then: https://equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed/ What has actually changed? A whole bunch of other economic malaise, but also perceptions, amplified to your personal taste by social media.
What has actually changed is that thirty years ago, the ratio between house prices and average earnings was about 4. By twenty years ago it had doubled and, most importantly, it has been at that level ever since with no real sign of dropping [1].
This is a structural change. We now have at least one, and perhaps two, generations of people who can't really alter their economic situation through hard work. That's the classic recipe for populism to thrive.
[1] https://www.schroders.com/en-gb/uk/individual/insights/what-...
Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gini coefficient usually only measures income inequality. Wealth inequality is hard to measure for various reasons but… https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/ “for the UK as a whole, the WID found that the top 0.1% had share of total wealth double between 1984 and 2013, reaching 9%.” “If the wealth of the super rich continues to grow at the rate it has been, by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_... Very little change in U.K. over 20 years
It looks to me like Equality Trust put a fair amount of thought and research into their website, did their best to paint a picture of what's going on in the UK by using multiple reputable sources, and tried to explain why that picture is dire, not just for those with a net worth that rounds to £0 but for the nation at large, with several dozen citations to back that up.
Thank God we have this one number from some Credit Suisse marketing material to invalidate all of that.
Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gini coefficient usually only measures income inequality. Wealth inequality is hard to measure for various reasons but… https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/ “for the UK as a whole, the WID found that the top 0.1% had share of total wealth double between 1984 and 2013, reaching 9%.” “If the wealth of the super rich continues to grow at the rate it has been, by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_... Very little change in U.K. over 20 years
Gini is a very rough tool. It’s trying to describe the shape of a curve with a single number. It describes the average inequality between any two people.
The curve can be skewed without the Gini number changing significantly if, say, the bottom 99% became increasingly more equal in income/wealth by becoming poorer overall, transferring income/wealth to the upper 1%.
Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I re-watch comedy like ‘The Young Ones’ or many other funny series from the 80s or 90s, I don’t find it funny any more. It’s not that the jokes weren’t good and that I didn’t find it funny at the time, it’s just that humour changes. In that case, it’s nothing to do with the jokes becoming ‘unacceptable’.
I find Yes Minister funny now, and I'm too young to have watched when it first aired.
The institution yes minister makes fun of has barely changed in 400 years, let alone 40, the jokes on the whole thus remain fresh.
Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
#159Twenty years ago, I think there was still a sense that we were collectively laughing with each other about the dullness of small towns. We all had the same shops - Woolworths, Dixons, Our Price, BHS. We all had a leisure centre that looked like everyone else's leisure centre. Some towns were better off than others, some towns had parts that you were better off avoiding after dark, but the majority of towns belonged t…
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There is more to puritanical attitudes than sex. It generally means anti-pleasure.
One thing the real puritans are against that people have turned against very strongly is alcohol. It never stopped being a problem in the US, of course, but there are far more preachy teetotalers in the UK than there used to be, and government policy is very anti too.
Then there is the push for achievement and the acquisition of wealth. You are supposed to dedicate your life to the cause of high achievement, rather than stop to enjoy it.
Sex acts online actually fit in with all this as they are safe and controlled alternative to enjoying sex in real life.
Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
#160> "I mean: incredibly, governments and local councils didn’t read my work and decide to mend their ways. The UK did not get better. Instead we got more than a decade of Tory austerity, Brexit, and all the accompanying neglect and bad feeling." This bit made me laugh. I read the original book when it came out and it was funny and - in some ways - true. I was born and bought up in the town ranked #4 in the original lis…
I was curious - what was the angle on Hythe in the book? These days Hythe seems like a posh seaside town with a Waitrose, a nice canalside park, a cute steam railway, lots of boutiquey shops and cafes, etc. I know a lot of places in the area (e.g. Folkestone, Margate, Whitstable) have all been heavily "gentrified" in the last few years, but I sort of assumed Hythe was always this way? Is that not the case? And even a…
Crap Towns called Hythe "...quite possibly the most spirit-crushingly tedious town in Kent." and "...the place that makes nearby Folkestone look like Las Vegas."
As someone who grew up in Hythe in the 80s and 90s I'd point out that the Rotunda was a far cry from Vegas.
https://www.warrenpress.net/FolkestoneThenNow/The_Demolition...