Poor people ‘surviving not living’ as UK social contract collapses, says report
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I'm earning less than 33K as a cybersecurity engineer and I'm struggling to save up for a house, my student loan has increased from interest since graduating, and I'm the frugal one at work.
UK wages have been stagnant for over a decade while the cost of living has increased so much.
There are better paying companies I could move to, and I'm keeping an eye out, but as the article states - there are systemic problems in this country that the people in power are failing to tackle.
I’d expect a big boost in wages since they left Europe due to a loss of available employable market but it seems the opposite.
Salaries have spiked, immediately after brexit, but have stagnated because no new investments are gonna happen in a country that's separated from the EU single market, so all new big tech has decided to expand instead to Amsterdam, Dublin and Berlin.
33k is pretty low for cyber security but there is this: https://metro.co.uk/2023/03/30/hm-treasury-listed-head-of-cy...
At the top end, yes, but there's also the long tail of very poor paying tech jobs relative to how expensive it is compared to continental Europe.
Which UK companies paid 200k 8 years ago?
Despite Brexit having arguably been driven by immigration concerns, immigration to the UK has increased since that vote, and reached a record of 606k in 2022 [1]. It has been increasing since 1995, and in 2015 13.2% of the UK population was foreign-born [2] - so not counting children of immigrants.
[1] Britain’s record-high immigration — in charts - https://www.ft.com/content/cb9120d8-0595-49d9-8f66-92b95acba... - unpaywalled: https://archive.ph/Wqalm
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/imm...
SF gets all the press for having loony real estate costs but vs wages it’s actually not the worst. The craziest places are those with $1-2M starter homes and low pay.
How can a market even exist?
So people don't need to buy housing with their own resources in many cases. It can also include the resource of two more people, or even 6 more people (grandparents chip in).
This is absolutely not true. I don't know where you're taking this from.
The endless lectures of Dave Ramsey on not wanting to provide a "hammock" for kids are also an abundant source of information.
North American parents won't consistently have a college fund for their kids. Also planning to pay for the down payment on their home is absolutely not normal for them.
Canada's housing bubble (?) existed since at least the early 2000s when I was in grad school. Everyone expected the bubble to pop. When condo prices continued to be strong during covid (who the heck would buy condos), I just had to admit I was wrong. This is not a bubble but we did not see the true factors driving things. Immigration is the biggest one. People do indeed bring suitcases of cash from all over the world (including Ukraine). After covid, we had a torrent of international students enter, and these folks are bolstering rents (real-estate investment is probably the most profitable activity in Canada).
The rest, well, it's some of those factors, but it's also the whole system designed to be static and reward pensioners with property and investors. Every facet of the system is fucked, and it ain't gunna get better.
Good for those with existing capital who can access the credit and use growing equity to leverage new investments. Terrible for anyone without existing capital actually earning an income.
Both of these factors appear to be changing in many places (very significantly here in NZ). Interesting times ahead.
Plenty of British Nationals and foreigners across the world will buy property in London, causing downstream impacts on housing across the rest of the UK.
In addition, British cities are artificially constrained from building due to the "Green Belt" construction bans from the 1930s-60s to prevent mass sprawl. All it did was essentially block construction though [0]
On top of that, the UK has a very severe inequality issue - almost all (relatively) high paying jobs are located in Greater London, which forces prices to go into hypergrowth in an area smaller than Santa Clara County.
Also, the UK has been in a lost decade since austerity kicked in around 2008 when several MASSIVE banks in the UK collapsed, which causes wages and spending within most industries and govt services in the UK to essentially be frozen at 2000s levels. [1]
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_belt_(United_Kingdom)
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-12/a-lost-de...
Shared equity schemes are popular - both with investors and property buyers.
Lending criteria have been relaxed again, it’s easier to get a mortgage.
There’s a view in the UK that house prices can only go up. The shortage of housing stock bolsters this view.
Your main point stands though - tech jobs pay much worse than they do in the states. The only two competitive uk tech jobs I seen are DeepMind and hedge fund (not even investnent banks are competitive)
Problems start when these institutions get systematically dismantled and salaries don’t change to make up for them.
Healthcare costs can be very important for Americans working in low-wage positions, but are essentially irrelevant for tech workers.
Here's how healthcare costs impact my life on an hours-worked basis:
Monthly health insurance premium: 20 minutes of my wage per month
Office visit at a primary care doctor: 12 minutes of my wage
Office visit at a specialist: 15 minutes of my wage
Maximum amount I can possibly pay in a year (eg, if I get in a car accident and spend months in intensive care): 20 hours of my wage
To be clear, the American who is driving Uber full-time or cooking food at McDonalds would have a drastically worse situation, and their costs might be multiple hours worked to see a doctor or multiple weeks of wages to cover a catastrophic hospitalization. But on a tech salary, healthcare is trivially covered.
Presumably your employer pays much more than that? Which still technically money you earn, you just don’t see it
With the salaries US tech workers are earning, healthcare, welfare and childcare benefits don't substantively impact their take-home for it to matter.
Anyone tech worker buying a home now needs a bigger down payment or will face a massive mortgage. Add in the inflation of food and hygiene products, a $100-$150k year salary has the buying power of $50k a couple decades ago.
The politicians know exactly which screws to turn to prevent the proles from getting too much leverage. It’s been part of the playbook for decades, we were just not honest decades ago:
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...
It’s all sleight of hand. Buying power is being nerfed to spank the kids into compliance.
The UK (possibly influenced heavily by US culture) seems to reject it as something that doesn't apply to them.
Not that the end results are great. But it only sets the bottom and usually people negotiate up from there.
I agree there are many causes well known even 15 years ago (including propensity to prefer social welfare to investments and hard work), but the collective blindness is astonishing.
Why every time when someone points out the fact that tech workers in Europe are severely underpaid in relation the US someone always sees it as a personal attack.
How does that in any way justify lower salaries pretax?
> With these institutions in place life looks qualitatively different at any salary.
I’m not sure it does. People who earn above the median rarely have access go welfare (unless its child related). Also working for an American tech company you’ll have decent insurance and can save another 50k per year just in case anyway..
As someone who's worked at high income levels in both the US and the UK: The US is emphatically better at high income levels. The employer-paid benefits were miles ahead of my socialised care (or even private insurance) in the UK. Yes, they're employer-tied, and that's a real risk worth considering, but from a purely personal standpoint that's a risk I'm willing to take.
(Don't get me wrong, I'd prefer that this wasn't the case, and that life was qualitatively better for lower earners even if it was marginally worse for high earners in the US.)
London may as well be considered its own country with the difference in cost of living to the rest of the country
You and your mates don't work in a "high tech profession" typical if they're being scammed with those salary ranges. That's not normal.
Now, the UK is definitely going to shit in terms of social contract and taxes, fueling wars and corrupt bureocracy instead of betterment of society, but that doesn't change the fact that the salary you have should not be such.
Conservative governance is the opposite of supporting people as individuals and worse as population.
They're going backwards as a social politik
- remove irrelevant non-tech jobs from your CV and LinkedIn, even if they were long stints
- I don't know the market for cybersecurity engineers, but I guess that it might be too narrow of a niche in a small country
- don't just 'keep an eye out': actively look for jobs; also consider that some US companies are willing to hire remote in the UK
- given you already have some python experience and a strong mathematical background, my suggestion would be to learn as much as possible about software engineering and data science, and consider building a career in one of those fields; most people can't study stats due to weak math foundations, but you don't have that problem
- if you don't think a remote job is a good fit for you, consider moving to London
- surround yourself with smart, hardworking people
This is a recipe for potential disaster: London cost of living, especially housing, is out of league against the rest of the UK. It is however true that its where the ICT sector is, and joins Fintech and other market segments. Reading is also worth thinking about for ICT, or Bristol, Oxford and Cambridge but none of these are good housing markets.
GBP33k is right on the median salary for the UK. That should of course NOT be poverty line living. It speaks volumes for the crisis in the UK economy that the cost of rent, heating has gone through the roof, and that this is no longer a comfortable paypoint. It's not nothing, but its value in real terms has dropped significantly. People on 33k should be able to save money and have a safety net. From speaking to family who live in the UK (I emigrated 35 years ago) many of them don't have this buffer. It's scary.
>surround yourself with smart, hardworking people
This is honestly the #1 reason I haven't moved yet, I've never worked anywhere with so many knowledgeable people willing to share their experience. I can't go into details but the learning opportunities I've had this year have been way beyond what I could get somewhere else.
While some people might think I'm making a mistake, I'm willing to take the monetary inconvenience for a bit longer if I can use that knowledge wherever I go next.
- even if you stay in cybersecurity forever, I'd guess that increasing your software engineering capability is worth some amount of effort
- the knowledge can help you in the job, and in an interview, but in most cases it's your CV that gets you the interview; someone reading your CV will likely look at your past accomplishments, so it would be good if those learning opportunities also allow you to have some impact
What are your qualifications and experience? Also are you based in Greater London?
I'm the primary engineer creating/delivering a SIEM solution for my employer so there're some details I can't share publicly but pm me if this meets your criteria?
Based in Yorkshire but open to relocation/hybrid/WFH depending on the role.
A lot of the kind of skills you've mentioned have become very commodified, and being based in North England is limiting your career as most buyers are located within Greater London.
I'd recommend
1. Moving to Greater London - most of the companies that have the budget are located there
2. Skill towards cloud and containers skills (eg. CKA for Kubernetes, AWS Solution Architect, Azure Solution Architect). Most large companies have active 3-5 year roadmaps to move core apps to the cloud, especially within Europe. It will also help you move laterally into DevOps/SRE of Platform SWE roles.
3. Implementation roles don't pay well in Europe. It's better to work as a Sales Engineer or a Professional Services Consultant for a (usually) American or Israeli vendor (eg. Splunk, AWS, IBM, Checkpoint, etc). This will require some experience but if you have 2+ YoE and are willing to move to Southern England, you can break £55k+ for sure
CKA is definitely on my short-term roadmap, the SIEM I'm working on uses Kubernetes and I'll be working towards an AWS implementation so those certs will be available to me too.
Where they will never be able to afford to buy a house. Something that would be possibly on a £33K wage in Yorkshire.
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/find.html?loca...
Plenty of MSSPs have been founded by people who have done that.
Thet said, there is no denying that the demand for tech skills simply isn't there outside of Southern England and a wee bit in Edinburgh.
I can definitely relate. I had a good year last year, and have been client-less since June and having to borrow for rent. At least our rent is lower than SF (1600), but still not easy to come by.
Also, I'm in Utah, not UK as article talks about.
I can’t think of any other place where people’s sense of net worth is as tied up with their house price as it is in the UK, while at the same time the increase in house price that people have been conditioned to believe is the norm over the last decades is wholly unsustainable given the stagnant wages. Take a look at house price to wage ratio over the last two decades.
Something has to give eventually either a mighty correction in the housing market that will shock many that were lead to believe it is the only safe investment, or an uprising of those who have no chance of getting on the ladder.
I would love to be proven wrong by a sudden influx of broad-based well-paying jobs, but I just don’t see how and where they will come from.
Does the UK have a large supply of houses? Does London have a lot of spare land where they can build new houses? Is the population of the UK increasing or decreasing? These are the only question you need to ask to predict what will happen to real estate values.
And supply of capital in search of investment vessel.
Wage workers are just taken along for the ride.
Most properties in UK are bought and traded for investment purposes. Home ownership of UK is one of the lowest in EU.
Not really.
Its about on par with France and significantly above Germany.
House prices are very sticky on the way down. People simply don't sell rather than take a loss, unless they are forced to.
Here is the tldr: in country where most people buy houses on mortgages, and mortgages are given based on a person’s income then wages will pay a direct and very important role on house affordibity.
Also house supply is important but far from the only factor effecting house prices. If gov builds 1000 new houses and they instantly get bought by, say, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund it will have virtually no impact on house prices.
I beg your pardon?
That's 1000 lots of land out of circulation.
In no uncertain terms, this will have an affect on local market prices, by making the remaining land more valuable.
If they are empty then prices will remain the same or increase. If they are being rented out then prices to buy should decrease since there will be less demand (since more peopel will be renting and rents will probably decrease).
Well yes and no. I would argue, treating housing as an investment vehicle for both corporate and foreign interests has had the biggest influence on low end housing prices around the world. Corporate buy-ups, government backed loans and "affordability" scemes have all actually pushed pricing higher.
To be clear A large percentage of corporate and foreign ownership isn't actually needed to have a large influence on pricing simply because of where they are most likely to invest. Just a couple of percent adds significant upwards pressure on the low end of the market where affordability is felt the most keenly. After all buy low sell high.
Interest rates have a massive impact on how much people have available to spend.
Canada.
So shelter is an essential base layer, and by promoting home ownership, banks are now being used to mess people around if they get out of line in a deniable ops way. If you cant even afford a home, you have that psychological inferiority put on you by only being able to rent.
The state is always looking to reduce costs because it can claim to be a low taxation nation, and in reality prisons cost alot, so rather than feel the long arm of the law and end up in prison with todays global technology and ability to look anyone up, causing trouble in peoples home life is now the 5 eyes modus operandi.
All sorts of low level stuff going wrong designed to keep a individual busy rectifying said problem, whilst also getting flack from those around them.
Its thought people will fight/work harder trying to maintain their home and their life and their families life, so all sorts of low level bad things will happen to an individual or household.
Its actually quite nasty some of the things that get done to people, but its always in a deniable way, made to look like incompetence or bad luck, and thats hard to prove because of the way society works. You couldnt tell if a washing machine engineer has deliberately sabotaged your washing machine in a planned obsolesce way or not, but the military leak rumours about people and then people take it upon themselves to contribute to that harassment and intimidation.
Things like reddit malicious compliance can give you a taster of some of the things people choose to engage in, but others will take it to the next level which puts peoples lives at risk. Ultimately its called Karma, but the military will pursue you around the country so you even get hassled on holiday.
This is a list of some of the things thats been done to me. Stopped by the side of a busy road, engaged in conversation and casually positioned so my back is to the road before individual did something to make me step back into the road in front of moving traffic. Its a high curb so I would have fallen backwards into the road.
Head (nose) shot by someone using a silenced snipered rifle whilst walking my dog around a footpath in a farm.
Ex directory, countless unknown numbers, international numbered phone calls or call centres. Got a new phone line put in, and started to get the same on that number even though I'd only given the number out to one car dealership.
Hassled when holidaying in various places of the UK.
Post going missing.
Arrow fired into garden, drones flown into garden.
Someone filing tax returns for me, when I havent.
1mm diameter x 25-30mm long metal added to takeaway kebabs designed to get lodged in the throat, or do damage to the inside of you mouth.
Someone release a small deer in front of the car on an unlit section of dual carriage. Person was hiding behind the armco barrier that makes the central reservation and was trying to cause me to swerve and crash.
Over powered cars pulling out to over take forcing me into the verge to avoid a head on crash.
NHS claiming letters lost in the post. Fake stuff added to doctors notes, creating fictional events.
Courts claiming letters lost in the post in a bid to secure a conviction in my absence for speeding.
Countless malware forcing me out of business.
Program code being changed so my own software stops working.
GCSE Exam results marked down, A-level courses getting messed around with making it untenable to study.
Been drugged in social and home settings, and had things done to me.
You'll literally get driven to suicide but the ambulance staff will resuscitate you, for more of the same.
Reported to police, police not interested!
All of this has taken place in the UK. The people behind it are in a position to deny their activity as they automatically have more authority than I would have in court. It also coerces you to get more security, like cctv fitted inside the home and office which enables greater surveillance which is what the spooks want.
Or maybe not so interestingly.
Without diminishing the scale of the crisis in the UK: Canada checking in here.
United States. In inflation-adjusted dollars, house prices are up 118% since 1965, but income is up only 18% [1]; alternatively, house-price-to-income ratio has increased from 90x in 2012 to 135x in 2022 [2]. US Millennials have been deemed "the unluckiest generation" when it comes to home ownership in the US.
[1] https://www.realestatewitch.com/house-price-to-income-ratio-...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/591435/house-price-to-in...
I live in Texas where they don't build houses with basements because the soil won't support it. First place I lived was a typical working class family home built in the 1940s: 2 bed, 1 bath, kitchen, living room, laundry room - 1100 square feet total.
Meanwhile most new construction homes here are over 2000 square foot.
But that 1300sqft was average. Which meant a lot of homes were smaller than that. My brother once owned a 600 sqft detached house from that era.
All I have to do is look around to see that can't possible be true.
Inflation adjusted income - purchasing power - is in the ballpark of 20% since 65.
Ireland, that learned nothing from the 2007 crisis.
I'm not sure how to interpret this since clearly raising income does allow people to pay these costs. If the report is saying the government needs to intervene in the housing, energy and childcare markets, then that would be a breath of fresh air.
Is this private childcare setting its own rates in a market, or some public childcare service paid for with increased taxes, or some hybrid (i.e. private with supplemental government funding, or private with mandated limits on pricing)?
I have a hard time separating agendas from reality these days, but I'd love to get someone who is smart on the UK's to understand how that country got there, especially considering my (probably wrong) impression that things like healthcare, a major expense here in the U.S., seem to be taken care of. I understand wages are stagnant, but... why?
It's garbage front to back. We elect fucking idiots who are in thrall to a tiny clique of rabidly anti tax arseholes who would rather set their granny on fire than pay any tax at all. And then we wonder why the country is on fire.
We didn't in fact elect the Truss administration in any meaningful sense. Nor did we elect the current Sunak administration in any meaningful sense. In fact historically close to half of our Prime Ministers have landed the job without first leading their party to victory in a general election.
Our system of government places the vast majority of the real power at national level. That power is normally wielded by a Prime Minister who is only indirectly elected by commanding majority support among the directly elected MPs in the House of Commons. That means the PM and the government they in turn appoint can change without any general election taking place.
In theory MPs are supposed to hold the government to account on our behalf. Unfortunately those MPs are themselves elected via a First Past The Post voting system that is infamously unreasonable on almost any mathematical basis that should matter. It frequently results in a large majority of MPs for a single party that did not win anything like a majority in a general election while simultaneously reducing smaller parties that still won a significant minority of the popular vote to parliamentary irrelevance.
As ever with these political problems the feedback loops consistently prevent anything being significantly improved. At any given time the one of our two largest parties that almost always has a majority of MPs and runs the government as a result would have to surrender its dominance in order to effect meaningful change in our democratic structures and turkeys rarely vote for Christmas. So we end up with a situation not so different to the US, where there are effectively only two parties that matter and the real decisions are often made before the main election when the parties select their preferred candidates internally. And each party ends up being a "broad church" with a lot of internal disagreement and inconsistency because breaking up into smaller parties that more faithfully represent the true opinions of their members would guarantee losses in every election forever if the other guys didn't do the same thing.
Next labour will get in, not be able to fix anything because they have no real policies, and they'll be back again.
As an outsider, that's what it seem like to me.
Its a short read.
Part of it seems to be that the UK based companies don’t expect massive success. They have a thing, it makes some people at the top a pretty good living, that’s enough. They obviously could create massively successful companies based on the talent available, but no one wants to.
Or possibly more accurately: the people who want to realize that proximity to other like-minded people is critical to success, and they leave.
Every originally-from-the-UK tech worker I know in the US is well aware of how lucky they were to get out.
Software engineer salaries in the UK are on the 75th percentile of earnings vs the 90th percentile in the US. The US also has higher variance of income, so at the 90th percentile one would earn 2.6x the median salary vs 2.0x in the UK. If you are a highly paid professional the US is a pretty good place to be.
Just before the banking crash of 2008 pay for software engineers in London working in finance were fairly competitive with Silicon Valley. You generally got paid better as a contractor, £500-600/day which was then about $950-1150/day which if you worked all year (six month contracts were common) worked out at £120k/year ($230k) which was about double what you'd get as an employee so lots of senior engineers would do that (no need to worry about healthcare!)
Since the crash of 2008 the US dollar has increased a lot against other currencies and has grown much more than Europe. The Obama administrations stimulus helped the US recover more quickly while the Eurozone was forced into austerity while it was forced to work through the contradictions in the way the Euro was set up, with countries issuing debt in a currency they no longer controlled.
The US tech sector went through a huge boom in the past decade which drove up tech salaries here more generally. It was also pretty good for UK tech salaries as Google and Facebook opened large offices in London.
The UK was a huge financial centre similar in size to New York with bank bailouts spread over just 60M instead of 300M people, but being outside the Euro the UK was not forced into austerity in the same way many EuroZone countries were. The Tory government used it as a way to shrink the state. This stymied growth and ultimately sowed the seeds for Brexit which I think was a misguided anti-establishment backlash, in its way quite similar to Trump in the US but with longer lasting consequences.
The government's Office of Budget Responsibility estimates Brexit to ultimately end up costing about 4% of GDP over 15 years. Certain financial services jobs are moving to the EU for regulatory reasons and it could well kill off much of the UK car industry which was heavily integrated with the EU. The UK was particularly focussed in engines/powertrains so will be heavily hit by the switch to electric vehicles and there seems little reason for global car makers to invest in the UK when they could invest in the much larger EU.
Even now, software developer salaries in London are higher than pretty much everywhere else in Europe except Zurich. But the rental costs are just obscene. Sometimes I think about moving back to Europe for a while but I'm not sure I'd move back to the UK since after a decade of austerity it all seems a bit grim.
Even though we will get rid of this awful Tory government soon the Labour Party has promised not to make any substantial changes to ameliorate the costs of Brexit, ruling out rejoining the single market.
When two people in their mid 50s complain about the cost of living, you know the system has completely and utterly failed us. I can only look with pity at the naive mass of people that still believe a better world is just an election away.
It's about time punk started to turn on the rat race.
As an outsider looking in, one gets the sense that things are devolving and faith in British institutions is declining.
Once the rug is pulled and cost of living goes up or the government sucks you’re screwed. If you had a high salary you could just pay your way out of this mess yourself.
People are not getting more intelligent, but the jobs evolve to require more and more intelligent and versatile people to be productive.
For example, in the past you could spend a lot of time training to do a job, which you then performed for the rest of your life. This lets less intelligent people be productive in jobs they normally would not be able to do (intelligence defined as ability to handle novel problems). This is no longer an option.
Another problem is that companies become better at detecting who is and who is not productive. There is still a lot of possibility of improvement and this should be scary to people, because in my understanding most people in most organisations are unproductive.
Given that we can't stop the progress, I think it is important to start thinking how to deal with masses of people that will never be able to find place in the new market. In the past, they would be used as peasants and slaves to do marginally profitable jobs but this is no longer available except for special cases (like cab or delivery drivers) that are going to be vanishing soon.
For some reason people call this socialism and put a negative stigma on it. I like to think it is a necessary for the future of our civilisation.
The primary export of the UK are services, making almost half (~48%) of their total [1]. I can't help but compare this with France at ~34% [2], and Germany at ~19% [3].
As the rest of the world rises, how defensible is this sector for the UK? Germany exports a lot of industrial machinery, pharmaceutical products and vehicles, which means factories, a complex supply chain, brand recognition, patents, etc. Overall, things that are hard to move or replicate abroad.
- 28% of the UKs exports are Information Communications Technology. It has IMO a weirdly broad definition (including "marketing, manufacturing, assembling, servicing, installing, maintaining and/or repairing systems, software, equipment, machines, devices and apparatus" [4]), but it sounds to me like it's in large part knowledge-based, digital work.
What prevents an industry that doesn't involve machinery, factories, and supply chains from moving to India, for example? Net (exports minus imports), the UK accounted for 24.3% of ICT worldwide in 2003, and India for 3.3%. Now India is 16.3% net and the UK 13% [6].
- 13% of the UKs exports are Insurance and Finance. In 2003 the UK, net, was %40.7 worldwide. now it's 28%, mostly to the gain of the USA [7].
The UK has been running a trade deficit of about ~1.5% of GDP every year since 1998 [5][8], without the USA's capacity to print USD. I'm no expert. I just wonder if the UK is betting too much of its economy on industries where it'll have a hard time remaining as competitive as it currently is.
[1]: https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore?country=81&queryLevel=...
[2]: https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore?country=77&queryLevel=...
[3]: https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore?country=61&queryLevel=...
[4]: https://www.michalsons.com/blog/what-is-ict/2525#:~:text=%E2...
[5]: https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/stack?country=undefine...
[5]: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/tra...
[6]: https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/stack?country=undefine...
[7]: https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/stack?country=undefine...
[8]: Interestingly, France seems to also have a long-standing trade deficit (since ~2006). Germany has had a surplus since ~1993.
I suspect Germany has been able to buck the trend in Europe because it is particularly well run and the UK has been struggling because it is so poorly governed.
What’s really helping, for now at least, is that housing is still relatively affordable (with the exception of Cluj, a very IT-focused city). If that housing affordability were to disappear then, yeah, the optics would definitely change.
Back where I'm from, things aren't looking as bleak as they are in the UK. I found that comment amusing really. The assumption that since Britain has historically been wealthy and a one of the better places to live, if things are not looking great there, they must be so everywhere or something.
In eastern Europe it's common to see young people building their own houses in rural towns near the big cities. They earn less money, yes, but they don't waste 50% of it on rent.
It's a different way of survival.
Now there's a western-centric statement, if ever I saw one. Why do you assume "the poorer EU countries" are like the west, only worse? Other replies give more nuance.
Writing is on the wall.
I'm not exactly optimistic about the UK's long-term, but I'm struggling to think of anywhere in the west that doesn't have similar trends.
A lot of the UK's legal system itself rests on convention, tradition, and precedent, and isn't written, and moreso going back in time as evidence of this.
Enforcement has historically sometimes taken the form of kings' heads on pikes, when the explicit law is that the king does what he wants and suffers no consequences. The implied contract of just rule takes precedence.
I think it's worth acknowledging that belief in some types of things makes them real - "self fulfilling", if you will. The social contract is one such thing, Santa Claus is another. As such, belief isn't limited to being just a mental reflection of truth - it can also be a statement of intent about what you want the world to be. When I say "I believe in you", I am not simply stating my assessment of your capabilities, I am trying to help you. It is an action. Likewise when I say "I believe in the rule of law", or "I believe causing pain is wrong" - I am trying to make them true.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/66591-all-right-said-susan-...
For entities as large as the state, I think there is an informal contract for people not to engage in anarchistic or revolutionary violence until their living circumstances becomes untenable. The degree to which their circumstances are understood as unjust will interact with the response they get from society.
IMO such agreements must be informal and fuzzy, and a lot of peace is maintained through these extra-legal structures.
elections have consequences
Doesn't mean they deserve what is happening to them though...
Note that Hong Kong used to be at the top of this list prior to 1997 when China started taking away their freedom.
So no conflation.
Ref to definition: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/capitalism.html
The legislature is worthless and is more concerned with getting re-elected and getting rich in office, than doing actual legislation.
The supreme court legislating from the bench is result of a lame duck congress and senate.
Scarcity necessitates tighter control. "Freedom" is easier to guarantee in prosperity. Also, at a global scale, if you're a rich country, it sounds like you'd want to spread a system that benefits those who have capital.
It's popular these days to dismiss negative consequences for all sorts of things as fake, but side effects need to be confronted and actually dealt with, not just waved off. Would you let the 'communism has never been tried actually' people off the hook?
The council of Birmingham (biggest in the UK) just went bankrupt today. Liverpool is also totally gutted with poverty and no real employment or investment, and has had its council put on special measures for the past couple of years due to widespread corruption. Place is a bit of a shit show. It's just London and minor areas now, barely even a country. Only hope is to become even more of a financial rogue state and channel more of the world's dirty money.
2) I'm not sure really any of them could be considered as "similar" enough to properly compare, even though they all now run on neoliberalism and free-market economies.
2a) if you compare it to Australia which really is similar in terms of mindset as a former colony, the UK is a sh*tshow. But Australia has endless mineral wealth to dig out of the ground and a large amount of primary economy like farming, which the UK doesn't have. It's more egalitarian, better wages, better opportunity, better chance to do what you want and be successful, all based on a British foundation. The UK has just crumbled outside of London and the south. People had money and kept it, those that didn't, still don't and it's hard to get it.
I’m an ambitious guy with lots of success and I work day and night. But I’d never reckon bravery in someone who’s working day and night, they have it easy, since they ecosystem is answering positively to more work from their side. So I just had to bring in the work. Oppositely, when the economy pulls of down by your bootstraps, it takes real courage to be ambitious.
I see a lot of very well educated non-feral people in the UK struggling to make good wages and a ‘proper’ standard of living. I think that’s what is meant by a broken social contract ?
What Thatcher said:
"There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first."
Which touches the crux of the matter here.
The UK is an inherently classist society. No need for disdain when it's been the case for literally a thousand years that certain people are afforded excellent education, and others… aren't. Any disdain of education among the working class is more a consequence than a cause.
Immigrants from South and East Asia have children who fare much better than those from the "white working class". It's not because of society or money, it's because of culture and values.
I am not blaming 'victims' but on the other hand if you don't do anything to help yourself you can't expect success...
A personal anecdote: we tried to get one of our children into a grammar school and so got private tuition for 11+ exam preparation. 90% of those attending were of Indian origin, very few 'Brits'. And we are also immigrants.
Write laws that:
- Prevent non-humans entities (trusts, shell-companies, foundations etc. from buying houses for the next 10 years)
- Ban airbnb
- Increase property taxes on vacant properties.
Increase supply (build more), keep demand steady (sane interest rates, sane immigration rates, speaking as an immigrant), and housing costs simply must fall. Yes, even if a single corporation buys every last house in the UK.
Fight supply and demand at your peril.
Define everywhere. Japan and Greece have seen population declines in the last few years, for example.
The globalization of the real estate market has always been a setup for a scam and everybody knows it, yet keeps doing it, and the whole west is now stuck in this catch-22.
Supply can be vastly increased by punishing large owners severely for letting their properties stay empty.
Every year they’re losing a big chunk of money to inflation and opportunity cost.
Yes, and in some circumstances that might have been enough. But the fact that we got to where we are now proves that we are not in thise circumstances, because it isn't enough.
For what it's worth, the tax system is aggressively punitive towards companies that want to buy real estate. Landlords with mortgages can't offset the interest against profit any more so a bunch of those are no longer viable concerns and sold up.
Some conquence to vacant property might be good, beyond the already punitive stamp duty when you go beyond the first one. I think you get hit for capital gains when selling non-primary residence as well.
The destruction of the provision of social housing has been a disaster.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/08/over-1m-home...
Social housing used to be famous for the government simply not following building codes (whether that meant maximum land occupancy or isolation/material standards), and disclaimed responsibility when it lead to accidents. But it made a lot of people home owners.
The reality is that they can often make far more profit by building the expensive houses first, drip feeding them onto the market, and possibly never finishing the whole estate as originally approved. It's no accident that many homes are approved but never built. It's just a small group of wily giant building firms playing the system and getting away with it.
In theory local authorities who administer the planning system should call them on it. In reality it's a David and Goliath situation. Attempting enforcement actions can result in years of expensive legal battles ultimately funded by local taxpayers with no guarantee of success even in what appear to be cut-and-dried cases.
It turns out that if the demand is effectively infinite thanks to immigration, you can't reduce prices by increasing supply.
Edit: Patrick Condon (who wrote that biv.com article) seems terrible. Here he is opposing connecting UBC to Vancouver’s SkyTrain: https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2019/01/29/Last-Voice-Against-Sky...
My point exactly. Meanwhile Canada has had sub-replacement fertility since 1973:
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CAN/canada/fertility-r...
And that's by design. Every human coming into the planet should start from a reasonably same starting point. By not taxing inheritance, the super wealthy's children start much further than the children born to non-wealthy families.
The tax on inheritance is the best way to ensure that there is "some" inheritance but not enough that the children start at a starting point that is insanely ahead of others.
Looking at the last three decades I see wealth just accumulate in mega corporations who now seem to operate at levels above that of many nation states. Large banks that can demand bailouts and demand “quantitive easing” which simply aggregates wealth in these banks and corporations. Literally transferring wealth from the bottom to the top by government decree.
Good living conditions are like a magnet for economic migrants, and the wholesale arrival of migrants will start a race to the bottom which will destroy any quality of life.
Countries with fertility rates of 1.5 shouldn't be throwing stones at immigration.
Yes, they should be working to encourage more native women to have children. You can't immigrate your way out of a population decline.
Canada is the same way except massive immigration, temporary foreign worker program, and foreign students allowed to work 40 hours a week (in case you were wondering if the student visas are legit) have driven up the price of housing beyond any reason. Probably multiple generations of canadians whose financial future was sacrificed so the current government can run their seemingly ideological immigration program.
Good. Let them.