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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

#591

Post by optimalsolver »

nickdothutton wrote: post #579
optimalsolver wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Declined relative to its peak in the 2010s. It's climbing again. Ironically the decline set in after Brexit. It's also way higher than it ever was back when Britain was monoracial.

GDP per capita growth [1] has been more or less flat since 2008. The time of the GFC. I think people are starting to forget what productivity growth even feels like it has been so long. Subsequent governments set immigration to infinity to make GDP go up, but this has further exposed the fact that per-capita it is flat. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/uni...

So the graph there shows a huge jump in GDP per capita after Labour took power and opened up the UK to mass immigration in 1997.

Am I reading this info right?

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

#592

Post by lurk2 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #306
lurk2 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not the OP but look at the difference between what governments can do when there is a sense of urgency (i.e it is wartime or one is in recent memory) vs what they do when it's not. Every example I can think of involved rushing through legislation and policy changes that were not looked upon kindly given a moment of retrospection. The New Deal, Japanese internment camps, the PATRIOT Act, Zero COVID policies, etc. Th…

> Every example I can think of involved rushing through legislation and policy changes that were not looked upon kindly given a moment of retrospection. The New Deal? > rushing Really? This was rushed? Wiki says: > During Roosevelt's first hundred days in office in 1933 until 1935, he introduced what historians refer to as the "First New Deal", which focused on the "3 R's": relief for the unemployed and for the poor,…

There is a long tradition which views Roosevelt's policies as both ineffective and unjustifiable. In 1933, he confiscated privately-held gold by executive order in 1933. That same year, he instituted a policy paying farmers to slaughter their livestock and leave their fields fallow. The effects of this policy are described (in somewhat flowery language) in John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. He then attempted to pack the courts in 1937.

It's notable that none of these policies were particularly effective. Of the major industrial economies of the period, only France lagged behind America in terms of economic recovery.

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

#593

Post by lurk2 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #308
gottorf wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only idiots think immigration is uncontrolled. Practically all immigration is from government granted visas. "Uncontrolled" in this context doesn't mean people hopping the border unbeknownst to the authorities. It means immigration at a rate high enough that it's beyond the capacity of the host nation to integrate the newcomers to its culture. A village of a thousand people can accept one additional person per year…

> It means immigration at a rate high enough that it's beyond the capacity of the host nation to integrate the newcomers to its culture. This resistance falls away quickly when food price inflation spirals out of control because you cannot find cheap labour for your harvests. (In 2025, there are zero highly developed nations, (yes, including Japan!) that do not heavily depend upon seasonal migrant labour to help with…

You can allow foreign laborers to work on farms without giving them a pathway towards citizenship that will lead to their becoming fiscal liabilities.

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

#594

Post by alvah »

cycomanic wrote: post #454
Manuel_D wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capacity factor is calculated in. But intermittency is not. The issue is that once demand is saturated during periods of peak production, the excess energy is wasted so the effective capacity factor drops as adoption grows. E.g. once you saturate daytime energy demand, further investment in solar energy yields no more useable energy. Intermittent sources are a good way to supplement dispatchable sources of energy lik…

> Capacity factor is calculated in. But intermittency is not. The issue is that once demand is saturated during periods of peak production, the excess energy is wasted so the effective capacity factor drops as adoption grows. E.g. once you saturate daytime energy demand, further investment in solar energy yields no more useable energy. > > Intermittent sources are a good way to supplement dispatchable sources of ener…

>Intermittent sources are baseload

This statement is about as incorrect as it is possible to be, as even a cursory attempt to check this before posting would show.

It is difficult to understand why anyone makes claims such as this, unless they are consciously or unconsciously attempting to redefine a word that already has a well-understood meaning.

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

#595

Post by glenstein »

geye1234 wrote: post #573
mytailorisrich wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the year ending June 2024 the net migration into the UK was 728,000. That is the root cause. The government (and this hasn't started with the current government) has a policy of high immigration then makes noise about the need of doing more to solve the "housing crisis"...

You are correct. Immigration exploded under Blair, and exploded again (from its previous high) under Johnson. That is the root cause of the housing crisis. Look at how many people in their 20s were able to buy homes in the 1990s, then look at immigration levels in that decade. You and the other person who pointed this out got downvoted. As you say, it's forbidden to bring this up. But it's true. Immigration has benef…

I think it's the same issue as with deficits. The issue isn't that it's a forbidden subject but that people are put off by arguments that don't fully address the causality.

With deficits it's not just spending but also how much revenue you're raising which is instrumental to understanding the problem, and anyone who tries to tell you it's only one or the other is not a reliable narrator. It is similarly the case that access to housing has every bit as much to do with housing policy as it has to do with population dynamics.

>Immigration has benefited the very wealthy and upper-middle classes

A great reason to make more housing and to make housing more accessible to lower and middle classes. Your comment was so rich with pro housing policy subtext that I just want to bring that to the foreground.

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

#596

Post by BeFlatXIII »

tacker2000 wrote: post #157
patrickdavey wrote: post #81

Fascinatng that `brexit` isn't mentioned once in that article. Making trading harder with your closest neighbour can't be a great move for the economy.

Yes that’s really funny. Im not sure how you can write an article like this and never even mention it once. Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself, and the full effects are just starting to come to the surface now. I dont think the UK will ever fully recover from it.

The US seems determined to beat that record.

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

#597

Post by [deleted] »

ethbr1 wrote: post #239
bumby wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the artificial constraint of assuming technology is constant? In not necessarily one to hope that tech will automatically bail us out, of the growth in the previous decades has been from tech innovations like automation.

Technology has a ceiling for a given time, across the world, which is really what you're competing with in a globalized economy. Which is to say that more technology isn't a solution out of a demographic hole, when you're competing with a country that has the same technology and better demographics.

[deleted]

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

#598

Post by DrScientist »

pjc50 wrote: post #486
DrScientist wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a lot of irrational online hate for wind power - even going as far as wanting to dismantle offshore farms. I do wonder who is fermenting this - the obvious place to look here is the fossil fuel industry - they have the means, the motive and a track record of flexible morals. A lot of currently very rich and powerful people lose in a world where most countries and even people can generate most of the power they…

The conservative media (Daily Mail, Telegraph etc - e.g. James Delingpole, climate change denier) are quite capable of formenting this kind of thing all on their own, simply for clicks. The average reader is old and afraid of change. Anything new is scary to them and can easily be magnified into a massive, largely fictitious, horror. People might object to the view of wind farms, but they'll also object to any other…

I get your point about a click cycle - but I think papers like the mail and telegraph are a bit more intentional than that.

BTW I was talking about offshore farms - they are typically only just visible if you are at the coast on a clear day.

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

#600

Post by awkward »

cbeach wrote: post #543
optimalsolver wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK's birth rate is 1.44. Someone is going to have to pay for your upkeep in old age. Most political problems of today stem from the fact that politicians are unwilling to explain this basic fact to their none-too-bright constituents. Reality is reality. This is why the fascist-lite Italian PM actually increased immigration from Africa after assuming office and taking one look at the numbers.

Lucky then, that immigrants don't age. Otherwise you'd be turning your country into one hell of a demographic Ponzi Scheme...

By the definition of Ponzi Scheme being used here, is there any capitalist country that is not running a Ponzi?
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