Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain
economist.com
Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain
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Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain
#2Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain
#3When profit becomes the main motivator, quality of services always seem to drop.
I get that the government can be annoying, but I feel like there are many services that we should aim to provide as a society where profit isn’t the goal. For example, you don’t need to price gouge people for electricity, but charging enough to cover expenses and future infrastructure upgrades is fine and to be expected. No costly CEO or shareholder overhead thrown in there.
Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain
#4> Since then the sector has accumulated £53bn in debt while distributing £72bn to shareholders, the majority of whom are international investors
someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying
Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain
#5The Economist, publishing an article (even just an opinion piece by a guest author) about privatisation being a failure? Wow...
Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain
#6When profit becomes the main motivator, quality of services always seem to drop. I get that the government can be annoying, but I feel like there are many services that we should aim to provide as a society where profit isn’t the goal. For example, you don’t need to price gouge people for electricity, but charging enough to cover expenses and future infrastructure upgrades is fine and to be expected. No costly CEO or…
Add education to that too. It should be pretty obvious to everyone that quality education is a matter of national security but here we are, with people proudly uneducated, who - in their wilful ignorance - harm others.
Thank you to everyone who flagged me and now I can't respond or comment in this thread <3
Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain
#7[dead]
Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain
#8> Since then the sector has accumulated £53bn in debt while distributing £72bn to shareholders, the majority of whom are international investors someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying
Stop buying candles.
Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain
#9I am a deep believer in free markets as the most efficient mechanism for distributing goods and services, creating better offerings and lower prices through competition and encapsulating risk in innovation.
Unfortunately, none of these apply to the privatization of inherently public commodities that run on top of an underlying network infrastructure. This can be streets, railway tracks or water pipes - whenever there’s a shared, standardized network that needs to be maintained by all market participants a lot of the mechanisms that make privatization appealing don’t apply anymore and you basically end up with the same tragedy of the commons only in private hands.
I believe the best way to make this work is by keeping the network itself in public hands and then having a competition of contributors to the network - e.g. electricity providers that add energy to the grid.
Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain
#10The Economist, publishing an article (even just an opinion piece by a guest author) about privatisation being a failure? Wow...
The Economist holds to it's guns, until it's proven 100% the other side of the argument in fact is correct. After which they change tack. It's not only value but ALSO data driven publication. Although it's in some positions ridiculously conservative, it's also an excellent bellweather on the current 'accepted norms' in discussions on "macro scale economy stuff".
They changed tack on climate change and ecosystems disasters about a decade ago. After that it was pretty obvious the current trend on full economy scale climate action (starting from Wall Street using ESG in major fashion as a criterion) was coming.