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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

#601

Post by BeFlatXIII »

Johanx64 wrote: post #513
reverendsteveii wrote: post #4

Everyone who bought into neoliberalism in the 80s is now experiencing economies that are mysteriously failing to thrive. Correlation isn't cause, except when it is.

>Everyone who bought into post-industrial "service-based" economies in the 80s is now experiencing economies that are mysteriously failing to thrive. Fixed it for you. I don't understand how people expect "service-based" economies to actually create any long term wealth, growth or prosperity. Unless you're serving increasingly ever more lattes to each other, and increasingly more "banking-services" and rents upon ren…

At the same time, uncapped growth of physical goods is simply impossible on a finite planet. No matter how you slice it, forever growth is delusional.

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

#602

Post by DrScientist »

junto wrote: post #503
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 same narrative is being pushed on Germany for instance. I think it’s quite simple. Renewable energy is a route to energy independence for various nations that were previously highly dependent on foreign nations and corporations and there are very powerful fossil fuel interconnected groups / nations that are terrified of that. Russia wants Germany to buy Russian gas. The U.S. wants Europe to buy their gas’s too. T…

Note in terms of nuclear - using current technology you still need to dig your fuel out of the ground from very specific places in the world - though a different set of countries ( apart from Russia ).

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

#603

Post by have_faith »

quantum_panda wrote: post #451
Rovanion wrote: post #363

This article is plain wrong. It ignores that the largest amount of housing ever built in Britain was council housing post war through to Thatcher.

But the quality of what was built was worse than what the commies built in the Eastern Europe. That's quite an achievement!

I grew up in council housing built during this period. It's not exactly premium but it was built fairly well and they sold well when many of them eventually made it onto the private market many decades later. Good sized gardens and I remember the council doing necessary repairs and upgrades throughout my time there.

I'm not exactly familiar with buildings from ex-soviet eastern Europe but I'd be surprised if it was a much higher build quality.

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

#605

Post by FredPret »

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...

Check out these numbers:

GDP per capita for the US, EU, and some others: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?end=2023...

The US was & is ahead per capita but you can see the EU and Canada taking a big hit in 2008 and going sideways after that.

Here's full GDP. It tells a different story due to the EU's larger population. There have been several occasions where it actually had a larger economy than the US; but every time it seems to hit a roadblock and go sideways for a decade (1980, 1995, 2008): https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?end=2023...

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

#606

Post by DrScientist »

dan-robertson wrote: post #450
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…

I’m not sure this is a fossil fuel industry thing. I think there are just people who really dislike the appearance of windmills in the landscape. Onshore, it is often better to put windmills on hills where they will be more prominent and so any one windmill can be ‘local’ to many people. Offshore, wind farms may ‘spoil’ a view out to sea, though they are also harder to oppose. P.s. I think you meant to write fomentin…

It's why I specifically mentioned offshore - there has been huge growth in the UK of these - and most of them are so far out to see you'd be lucky to see them even on a clear day.

The logic against them seems to be - can't rely on wind power alone ( true - but nobody is suggesting that ), so we must destroy them all as a symbol of 'netzero'. It makes no sense.

>p.s. I think you meant to write fomenting

Yep. Thanks.

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

#607

Post by tehjoker »

noja wrote: post #568
rickdeckard wrote: post #480

"These problems are obvious to many British politicians. Leaders in the Conservative and Labour Parties often comment on expensive energy and scarce housing. But their goals haven’t been translated into priorities and policies that lead to growth." I can't find this mentioned anywhere in the article, but the current imbalance of supply and demand and the resulting high prices is quite beneficial for parts of the real…

Why is the answer always more real estate, and not private ownership of housing? If you don’t live in it you can’t have it.

I don't at all see how private ownership would help anything.

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

#608

Post by throwawayffffas »

robertlagrant wrote: post #582
graemep wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely key. The lobbies are very rich (because they own lots of land) and therefore very influential.

You don't even need lobbies. Anyone who owns a house isn't bothered by this, unless they are particularly fair-minded. It only affects people who don't own their own home, which is a much smaller voting group.

Not only are they not bothered. If they are even slightly aware of the situation they know it's in their financial interest. And if they are not aware of the economics most still have a bias against new construction especially high density in their area, because of the "nuisance" that construction will cause.

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

#609

Post by jodrellblank »

tsimionescu wrote: post #357
jodrellblank wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans in the UK killed and ate over 111,000,000 birds just in January 2025. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/poultry-and-poultry...

They also raised about 110,000,000 birds that otherwise would never have been born. This is completely irrelevant to wind turbines or any other power generation tech - the impact on wild birds is what is of concern, because, by definition, we're not able to raise any number of wild birds we'd like to have.

It isn't completely irrelevant; they didn't mention wild birds, or any wider context - the way they commented was as a shock number, the intent of that is "wind turbines kill $bignum, stop wind turbines". The relevance of the much bigger shock number is to put it in context - human activity slaughters a lot of animals.

Okay, something else which affects wild birds: "Bird corpses were counted - and, where possible, identified - at 166 locations throughout Britain during the summer of 1985. The survey covered all roads except motorways. It is the most recent such study, and the most comprehensive. The results were depressing. A minimum of 30 million birds are killed on Britain's roads every year. Depending on the assumptions made in the statistical analysis, the death rate could be even higher: 70 million a year is not impossible."[1] And that's as well as wild rabbits, hedgehogs, badgers, foxes, deer, and so on killed by cars which wind turbines don't affect.

So the wildlife in the UK would be much better off if we built more viable alternatives to driving and road trucking than if we scrapped wind turbines. We can also note that people are working on wind turbines that don't kill birds, e.g. [2]. It's not a fixed fact that all wind turbine designs do the same damage.

In the context of a world where fossil fuel propaganda really does exist[3] and Trump's recent executive order on unleashing energy generation where he tells government departments to look for all kinds of energy sources on their land - geothermal, hydroelectric, oil, gas, anything - except wind or solar - exists, and in the wider climate change context where there isn't a magically perfect answer - and where the UK is uniquely well suited in Europe to wind power - it can't just be left that "sensational $bignum means stop wind turbines" with nothing else mentioned.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/carnage-on-...

[2] https://www.audubon.org/magazine/surprisingly-simple-solutio...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX2aZUav-54 - Climate Town video on how the gas industry sets up groups of 'concerned citizens' which pay social media influencers to post about how great cooking with gas is, and agitate politically while obscuring the source of their funding, among other things.

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

#610

Post by taneq »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #505
rickdeckard wrote: post #480

"These problems are obvious to many British politicians. Leaders in the Conservative and Labour Parties often comment on expensive energy and scarce housing. But their goals haven’t been translated into priorities and policies that lead to growth." I can't find this mentioned anywhere in the article, but the current imbalance of supply and demand and the resulting high prices is quite beneficial for parts of the real…

Here in Australia, there are 227 sitting Members of Parliament, of those: one in three federal politicians (71) own two properties; one in three (77) own three or more properties, and about one in three (67) own one property. Eleven federal politicians don't own a home, at least not in their name, and of those only one is known to be a renter. I don't know why we call it Parliament House, it should be call the House…

And somehow this group, in the name of 'affordable housing', keeps coming up with ways to enable people to pay more and more for houses, rather than coming up with ways to make home ownership less expensive. I guess it's just one of those mysteries we may never solve.
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