99 years of tax subsidies, he surely had a good life without many regrets. It's beyond my comprehension why humans still keep these hereditary regimes, constitutional or absolutist, alive
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
They draw in crowds of tourists to the UK, and they aren’t that expensive to maintain.
Their £67m yearly grant[1] works out to about £1/year per person in the UK. That’s pretty cheap for a fantastic PR service. Yes there is probably added costs on top like police/security but overall/net they don’t feel like a massive burden on the finances. Maybe £5-10/pp in the UK? (Just me guessing!)
1. https://britishheritage.com/royals/royal-family-cost-british...
> No role in politics aside from ceremonial.
Except when it comes to defending their interests. Remember that the 'spider memos' now can't be revealed under FOI requests, for one example?
(The Guardian have been covering Queen's Consent recently which should shatter any illusions that they aren't involved in politics)
London hosts more visitors than Paris[1], although France overall hosts more visitors than the UK.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_internatio...
The city statistics include business travel. And I don't know what point you're trying to make with them.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-fea...
> Moreover, we should treat even estimates of economic activity linked to the royals with a large dash of scepticism.
> The economic boost from visits and festivities related to royal celebrations should certainly be treated with caution given these can displace economic activity as well as create it.
> In the end, the question of whether the Royal Family is worth it, or not, is probably less a financial question than a political, moral and aesthetic one.
"That was when I got infected. That was when I thought: "I don't want this life: I want that one. Once I'd found a guitar to play I found a friend to help me get there," he told the Guardian.
Quoting from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/10306480/Stin...
Example: I know an engineer and process optimization (six sigma) expert who worked with a major US aerospace manufacturer that had operations in the UK. He observed that in the UK the management and much of engineering was from elite UK schools like Oxford and Cambridge, and that these people basically refused to mix with the regular shop floor folks. He had to drag these upper crust UK people kicking and screaming into donning proper gear and walking out onto the shop floor to look at shit. In the US he hasn't encountered nearly as much implicit classism, though there still is a little. The US has its own elite university system but he says it's nowhere near as powerful as in the UK and its strength diminishes (in the US) as you move West.
I can attest to the latter point. I have lived in Cincinnati, Boston, Asheville (NC), California, and now I'm back in Cincinnati. The further you get from "BosNyWash" (the Eastern Seaboard) the less often anyone ever asks where you went to school. In Boston it's the first question, and I got the sense there that if you didn't go to a top-ten school there was a ceiling for your career. In California I was never asked about where I went to school in eight years of working and living there. I've only rarely been asked in Cincinnati and NC and it's mostly about "where are you from?" than class distinction.
Edit: this is in-re a peer of the parent post but it wouldn't let me post it so here it is... thought it was interesting enough to copy/paste here.
A friend who went to Harvard in the USA once told me that the #1 thing he got from Harvard was "permission" to excel. "At Harvard they tell you you're the best, so you try to be the best." That stuck with me.
Search for research on social self-limitation. There have been some interesting experiments, like putting A students in a class and telling the teacher they're C students and vice versa. Hint: the students tend to conform to expectations.
This is part of why I am so skeptical of people who try to put too much weight on IQ and draw vast conclusions from it. IQ is a mushy psychometric number with a lot of variance within the same person, not a hard physical measurement like mass or distance. It's also why I am open to ideas like "internalization of oppression" and the idea that eliminating discriminatory rhetoric from society might help people who have been historically told they're inferior. When someone is told they're inferior, maybe they believe it and act accordingly?
Lastly I have this weird speculation that this may be a reason that psychopathic personality types often rise to great heights (if they don't end up in jail). A side effect of their antisocial nature may be that they do not self-limit. No idea how you'd test that, but I wonder about it. Same goes for some high-functioning autistic types.
7 of the Top 10 democracies are constitutional monarchies:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#By_country
As a Canadian, I have no particular issue about getting rid of the monarchy, but anyone pushing for that will have to demonstrate that the new system will keep us in the Top 5 (or at least 10).
What exactly would be improved by removing the Crown?
Unless you're advocating for the abolition of capitalism as a whole... But then you should focus your criticisms on the rich in general.
Imagine the same path today. Kim Dynasty in North Korea could turn into constitutional hood ornaments gradually. Or Chinese Communist party would become the House of Lords. 100 years from now people wold admire them just like they do royals now.