Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

ukfoundations.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 344 posts

Re: Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

#91

Post by card_zero »

csomar wrote: post #56
JCM9 wrote: post #4

The UK was, and to some senses still is, a culture that strongly values who your parents are vs what you’ve personally accomplished. The head of state is the child of the previous head of state. The House of Lords is still a thing. Prestige based on family lineage is considered a big deal. In the US and other parts of Europe it’s very different. People value you a lot more because of what you’ve done vs who you are a…

Revolutionary France never made it across the channel... On the other hand, this significantly dismiss the UK contributions to the world on global trade and during the industrial revolution.

Britain had multiple revolutions earlier on. There was The Anarchy, Magna Carta, Cromwell, and 1688 when Britain decided to be Dutch for a while. The Declaration of the Rights of Man was inspired by Enlightenment philosophy, and a lot of that was English (or Scottish). The general mood was to look at the French as latecomers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17...

Re: Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

#92

Post by barry-cotter »

fidotron wrote: post #83
barry-cotter wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Indian Civil Service was always tiny. There were so few British in India that in 1950 when the Indian government surveyed the populace to try and see if they knew the British had left they discovered the average Indian wasn’t aware there had ever been a British Empire. The British Empire in India and the British Army in India at all but the most rarefied levels were staffed by Indians and there weren’t even that…

It takes more than the civil service to run a colony. It is quite curious both you and the other replier jumped to that conclusion, and says quite a lot about the current British malaise.

I’m not British, I’m just not ignorant of Indian history. At partition the entire British population of India was about 100,000 including the army, civil service, civilians and family of same.

Even if you round up to 1,000 the number of ICS officers and dectuple to 10,000 you get a trivial number of returnees to the UK. The British Army in India returning would have had nugatory impact considering the British had just fought WW2.

Leaving India was bad for the British upper classes because there were fewer jobs as officers that would keep a man in the store to which he had become accustomed on salary in the army. The ICS was less important than that in terms of numbers and its peak social impact was as an inspiration for the British civil service. The ICS is the only organisation in British India that might plausibly have had a large impact on the culture of the British civil service and it was too small to have had an impact by numbers alone as you originally posited.

Re: Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

#93

Post by dukeyukey »

emmet wrote: post #42
JCM9 wrote: post #4

The UK was, and to some senses still is, a culture that strongly values who your parents are vs what you’ve personally accomplished. The head of state is the child of the previous head of state. The House of Lords is still a thing. Prestige based on family lineage is considered a big deal. In the US and other parts of Europe it’s very different. People value you a lot more because of what you’ve done vs who you are a…

I've been here for 5 years and am almost thirty years old. I still have people regularly asking me where I went to secondary school. They are obsessed with class.

I've been here for 30 years, and am 30 years old, and I don't think anyone has ever asked me where I went to secondary school.

What kind of people ask you that?

Re: Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

#94

Post by dukeyukey »

lithos wrote: post #58
langsoul-com wrote: post #23

How can there be a 360, 000 page document to build something. That number seems so outrageously high. Is the font size massive or something?

Seems pretty reasonable actually. Final reports contain -everything- and I really do mean everything. Design docs and drawings obviously (easily 1k pages more if you fit it on a4), since each trade needs it's own views. Specifications are included, as a legal document that calls out which regulations every possible system will follow and calls out exceptions (proof they apply). All possible testing from receiving it…

The question is, why did it cost significantly more to produce that document than it cost Norway to just build an even bigger tunnel? Pages might be misleading, but cash is not.

Re: Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

#95

Post by misja111 »

barry-cotter wrote: post #67
noja wrote: post #53

> 800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families. Why the focus on second homes? I would care more about utilisation of homes by home-owners: walk around London at night, so many apartments are dark. The locals say investors own them.

The French are richer than the British. They have more stuff and a higher quality of life. It would be good for more British people to have more stuff and a higher quality of life. Building more housing allows both for more people to afford a (better quality of) primary residence, and for more people to have a holiday home. Those are all good. Focussing on utilisation is Green Party, NIMBY, degrowth, pro-poverty thin…

Note that in France, unlike on your first home, you don't pay taxes on your second home. See e.g. https://chasebuchanan.com/property-tax-in-france-residential....

Re: Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

#97

Post by barry-cotter »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #38

I’ll need to sit down and read this properly, but I would say there is a real stench of decline in England at the moment and pretty much everyone here would agree. It’s readily apparent the new government won’t save us already. Public services in particular: 2 weeks to see a Dr, a year for an operation, unlikely for the police to attend your call out, stagnant economy, high cost of living and low wages. And all whils…

> real stench of decline in England at the moment

Real GDP per capita has been flat since 2008 while official population figures show population has increased by 10m. Total failure to grow the economy in 14 years of Tory rule and Labour aren’t exactly showing signs of having ideas to grow either.

Re: Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

#99

Post by dukeyukey »

seanhunter wrote: post #20
dist-epoch wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact it's a whole site dedicated to this article means there's some angle to it. Would be interesting to know who paid for this.

One of the authors is from the center for policy studies, which is a thinktank that was founded by Margaret Thatcher and 2 others. The other two authors seem to be the founder and one of the main contributors to https://worksinprogress.co/ which describes itself as "a magazine of new and underrated ideas to improve the world." So I'm going to guess it's gonna be that sort of thing. Someone with a neoliberal economic…

> who stands to benefit from government investments in largescale infrastructure projects

I'm unsure if there's anyone in the country who wouldn't benefit from that. Hell, you can even wipe "government away", the essay talks at length about re-enabling private infrastructure investment too.

And who doesn't like infrastructure investment?

Re: Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

#100

Post by dukeyukey »

noja wrote: post #73
barry-cotter wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The French are richer than the British. They have more stuff and a higher quality of life. It would be good for more British people to have more stuff and a higher quality of life. Building more housing allows both for more people to afford a (better quality of) primary residence, and for more people to have a holiday home. Those are all good. Focussing on utilisation is Green Party, NIMBY, degrowth, pro-poverty thin…

> Building more housing allows both for more people to afford a (better quality of) primary residence As long as residential homes are a vehicle for investors rather than _living in_ (by the owner) you will have a problem.

Why not enable a dynamic rental sector so people can move around the country to better jobs? Feels mean to trap people.
Post reply on HN