Comment by avianlyric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avianlyric | Hacker News Reader

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> Boris didn't necessarily like big spending...

Not sure that’s true. One of the first things Boris did after Brexit was start pushing hard on infrastructure spending with projects like HS2 (already on the books, but Boris explicitly threw his weight behind it, and got rid of objectors) and “levelling up” the north.

Think Boris realised that all those labour voters that voted for him wouldn’t hang around unless he substantially improved the quality of life outside of London. Big infrastructure projects are the obvious path to take.

Boris also increased business rates as well, along with being caught saying “fuck business”. Boris isn’t your standard conservative, looking for economic stability or growth. He’s only interested in what keeps him in Number 10. And big spending up North looked like a pretty good strategy. Who cares about ROI for the tax payer, when it’s gonna keep him in office?

Personally think the spending is/was a good thing on the whole. But I really don’t like Boris, and his complete lack of any conviction, except his conviction of reminding in Number 10.

Not looking for an argument, what did "levelling up" mean?

I think it was about regions further from London becoming more prosperous, partly through development of transport links and broadband internet

There is actually a minister for "levelling up" - Michael Gove IIRR and he is making some hay with it.

The idea is that Britain is massively massively centered around London Metro Area. And the regions suffer lack of investment, brain drain, lack of jobs as a result. The idea is to "level up" the rest of the UK to London levels (seen as a big Brexit lodestone)

However, 1. no extra actual money seems to be allocated to it, 2. it's not quite clear how to do it.

30 years ago the surprisingly prescient comedy show Yes Prime Minister had a similar idea, to move the Army up North and spark new job creation.

It would take massive scale action to do this - tax incentives, infrastructure, etc.

It's worth noting that we have to spend vast vast sums to become climate neutral (revamp most housing infrastructure to be heat efficient, get rid gas boilers, replace the car fleet, move to vegetarian diets). So we could just spend that money in a different part of the country.

And it's also worth pointing out that only Germany has this kind of levelled society - mostly because for 50 years Berlin was a no go area so Hamburg and other cities got an industry each (Frankfurt got finance etc).

Paris, Rome, Madrid all have similar "Black Hole" status

The best way to actually disperse economic access is from the ground up: target the inputs to industry and create regional cost advantages.

The US famously did this by electrifying Appalachia via hydroelectric dam construction, which created a power cost advantage, which drove power-hungry heavy industry (chemical, metallurgy) to the area.

Unfortunately, this is a 30+ year long game, so requires more interest in true change and outcomes vs ones political career.

Black hole-ism in Europe seems like a historical response to a geopolitically fractured and competitive continent, as disparate states all tried to centralize their most valuable / productive industry in their (mostly) centralized capitals.

Why invest in a border city, if for much of European history there was a good chance of it changing hands?

>> The best way to actually disperse economic access is from the ground up: target the inputs to industry and create regional cost advantages.

I'm dubious this still can work. Electrification was like steam - fundamentally transformative compared to all previous human history. It's hard to now put "cheap" inputs into almost any part of the UK - coal? nuclear? We have been mining the raw resources for something like 5,000 years in cornwall. There is not a lot left.

Interested in counter examples or ideas but this feels a lot like "build cities not so centred around cars"

Edit: are you saying that you give cost advantages to a region in a country? Say Cornwall will be the tech hub, North East will be aerospace, etc? Which it's probably possible to make an area an aerospace local maxima. but will that compete globally? do we set up tariffs?

I genuinely am interested because otherwise it's a crapshoot.

It's really two different questions. #1 How do you create incentives to locate profitable businesses in economically depressed areas? #2 How do you create competitive global businesses?

The latter question is really a more complicated valuation of possible end state, current global market state and opportunities, and how much capital the nation is prepared to invest. South Korea and Japan (and SE Asia) would be modern examples.

The former question is a bit simpler, because all the levers are in national government hands (or proxies for those levers). Although it's a process that still takes time, as businesses organically form, relocate, and scale in light of the new local maximum, and economies of colocation organize.

If asked to pick, I'd say the biggest modern inputs that can be influenced by the government would be: temporary tax incentives, capital access at competitive rates, access to sufficient local supply of trained and knowledgeable labor, low carbon / cheap power, global network access at reasonable rates (or at least sufficient capacity to nearest backbone), and local upstream suppliers (or room for same).

Something worth considering is how tiny the UK is compared to the US. The Appalachia region is 200,000sq miles, over double the area of the UK (94,000sq miles). The UK is smaller than the top nine largest states in the US, you can drive the entire length of the the UK in 14 hours.

We’re a tiny nation compared to the US (we only have a single power distribution grid!). Creating meaningful regional advantages can be tricky in the UK because the regions are so small, and so close together. Interestingly the approach we seem to be following is increase mobility and regional integration, thus making it easier for companies to hire outside of London, without taking a hit due to distance. That way companies and employees can take advantage of lower wage and cost of living respectively, them that outflow of money can pour into local communities around the UK as employees spend their wages.

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