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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

> Curators with years of experience get as little as £12,000 a year and many complain they cannot afford to live in London.

Curious if that statement came from Higgs.

And possibly this incident inspired him to do later do the same.

Note the original article said this as well:

> He had been described by the UK government as “a world-renowned curator” in 2015 after helping to return a stolen 2,000-year-old statue to Libya. Dr Higgs later appeared on BBC’s Crimewatch to describe his work.

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Based on the original article, it sounds like the British Museum was heavily politicized with well heeled donors strongarming museum staff to do their bidding.

> One big donor threatened to withdraw her funding from the museum when she was told that she could not drink red wine in one of the galleries during a party. At another function, a catering trolley rammed into a glass case and damaged a valuable artefact. Although the incident happened five years ago, the artefact is still being repaired.

I think this is what Dr. Higgs used to rationalize his thieving - the donors clearly didn't care about the works but collectors did, and it I'm getting paid it's a win-win.

I guess it's another vaunted institution that has turned rotten, like much of the UK.

But tbf, £12,000 in London in the early 2000s was not great but livable (equivalent to $18k in 2002)

12k was shockingly bad for London in the early 2000s.

You can't really convert currency and/or then apply inflation or try to compare to 2002 US living costs.

London back then still cost a fortune to live in, 12k definitely wouldn't have been comfortable.

Yes, the pound was stronger against the dollar back then, but that's little comfort for someone trying to live in London!

Fair point!

I guess I was assuming almost $20k a year back then would have been livable back then, like it was for much of the US excluding a handful of cities like NYC or SF at the time.

I think minimum wage was around £9k/yr back then so I assumed 25% above minimum wage was acceptable (not great, but acceptable)

Clearly not though.

London is the UKs capital city, and largest most wealthy city. It’s cost of living in more-or-less on par with cities like New York and San Francisco.

It’s substantially higher than the rest of the UK, and minimum wage in London has generally been higher than the rest of the UK (either in law, or as a de-facto standard, with companies paying a “London bonus”)

> It’s cost of living in more-or-less on par with cities like New York and San Francisco

More like Chicago in my limited experience, but the pre-tax salaries are way lower in London than for similar roles in the US.

I never understood how people can afford to live in London by the late 2010s/early 2020s.

> It’s substantially higher than the rest of the UK, and minimum wage in London has generally been higher than the rest of the UK (either in law, or as a de-facto standard, with companies paying a “London bonus”)

Ofc, I'm just assuming London used to be relatively cheaper 20+ years ago and the cost of living ratio was not as bad then compared to today.

Like Tower Hamlets seemed to have only started gentrifying in the early 2000s.

If we are doing straight comparisons, London is comparable cost of living to NYC and SF.

20k USD was not livable for either of those cities.

Nah London is definitely a bit cheaper than those cities. But yeah even so £12k is very low.

pretty sure that around 2001/2002 I was earning little over £5/hr. Wikipedia suggest I was being paid more than minimum wage at that time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Wage_Act_1998...

> I guess I was assuming almost $20k a year back then would have been livable back then, like it was for much of the US excluding a handful of cities like NYC or SF at the time.

You're excluding the reasonable comparables. London is the UK's equivalent of NYC or SF.

There’s a current open role for a “project curator” at just under £30K:

https://bmrecruit.ciphr-irecruit.com//templates/CIPHR/jobdet...

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