Why does Britain feel so poor?
martinrobbins.substack.com
martinrobbins.substack.com
What’s changed is that no one cares about the public sphere anymore. You wouldn’t believe the contrast between Britain’s crumbling high streets and the lavish interiors of some of these homes. I’ve seen marble floors, $10K TVs, $100K kitchens, $150K bathrooms. Home offices decked out with $50K worth of gear. Wine cellars, indoor spas, private gyms—you name it.
Even on the commercial side, it’s wild. It’s not uncommon to walk into a privately-owned or government-owned building and be greeted by a $5 million art piece in the lobby. Then you start looking around and adding up the costs—“they probably spent $10K just on that fancy trim around the doorframe.” Or you notice a particularly heavy door, Google it, and realize it costs $15K per door. Then you start counting the doors—there are thousands. The rabbit hole goes deep, and the amount of wealth becomes staggering. It’s just hidden in plain sight.
But all of this wealth is cloistered. No one’s investing in the public-facing world. There’s a broad cultural resignation—from the elites to the average person: “Why bother fixing the outside world? Just survive the workday and retreat into your private kingdom.” The mindset has shifted toward building personal fortresses rather than shared prosperity.
So yes, Britain feels poor—but it’s not because the money is gone. It’s because it’s been withdrawn from the commons and buried behind closed doors.
Because we've been fed a narrative that there's only "one right way" to care for the external world. For example, in my city of Portland, they recently revamped the public library. Was it done to make the beautiful building up to code so that people could enjoy books for a hundred years more until the next renovation?
Oh no... that would have 'exacerbated inequality'. Instead, we removed the books, shortened the bookshelves, and got rid of seating so that homeless men would have a place to walk around drugged-out and not be found masturbating behind tall bookshelves. That was the 'one true way' of using public funds, according to those in charge. Don't disagree or you might get labeled a fascist.
We see this all around the world. Just look at the reaction to Ezra Klein's book 'Abundance'. Such obvious solutions, things we can all agree on (I consider myself a conservative and enjoyed the parts of the book I've read). But if you look at the reaction it's getting, it's the same tired rhetoric. We are not allowed to have nice things. Wanting nice things is apparently chauvinistic, racist, classist, something supremacist, some other -ist, etc.
In the meantime, anyone who has not followed the 'one true path', has basically resigned themselves, and many have become actively resentful of the system writ large.
Whole quote here: https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689
She doesn't just mention real people, she also says "and families" in the same breath, which is the part I always found most strange of the whole argument. So "society" doesn't exist but "families" do? Why stop there, specifically? Aren't families just "individual men an women" as well?
Thatcher was making this argument because in the 1980s the [British] left was still very Marxist, so they tended to demand extremely expensive things and when challenged as to who will do/pay for that they'd answer with society. It was a form of rhetorical evasion because what they actually meant was "someone else but not me". Thatcher was railing against that tactic by pointing out that there isn't some specific entity with a big wad of cash you can go to called Society and ask them to do something. Society is your neighbours, your friends, your coworkers, your family, it's you and everyone around you. So if you say society should pay, what you actually mean is the people around you should pay but not yourself, without being willing to say so clearly.
Arguably the post-Marx neo-left actually did listen to her and stopped talking like that. You didn't hear people like Tony Blair claim that "society" would pay for their latest ideas. But the old left were never willing to give up the stupid linguistic game playing and reacted by fully stripping her words of context, to try and make it sound like she rejected the idea of bonds between people. Which is not only not what she said, but the conservatism she stood for was all about the primacy of friends/family/workplace/church/social clubs etc, vs the alternative Tony Benn style worldview in which the primary organizing unit of people was either the state or the unions.
That's... incomplete.
Society is the obligations and responsibilities collectively imposed on these people.
It's indicative that part of Thatcher's intent was to remove the obligation of people to each other.
More profitable when choosing to help others is instead at one's discretion...
"It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation [...]"
She certainly puts the framing as individualistic, but I think she very much understood the obligations are a necessary part of the system.
The latter has never worked at scale to remind the wealthy that they need to look after the societies which allowed them to create that wealth.
This is the core behind so much popular rhetoric about taxation (the 99%, wealth taxes, supporting individuals ripping off businesses). The selfish motivation where you accuse the people you want to tax of being selfish.
The second part is cutting down the successful - a very popular game down under. Although we do laud our sportspeople.
I was once debating between granite countertops that ranged from 5k to 10k—like it was a make-or-break decision for my budget—only to walk into a home where the owners start rambling on about how much of a pain it was to get custom wood countertops imported from Brazil, sourcing the same industrial kitchen range that michelin star cook cooks use, industrial fridge/freezer setups, marble floor tiling, and every single top-of-the-line thing in a kitchen you can possibly think of.
Considering I spent 25k on a modest kitchen with brand new top of the line Samsung appliances in a fairly large house in a "high-income" area, I’d say these folks are spending 4-5 times what I did. And honestly, my guess might be an underestimate. The elites and upper-middle class have DEEP pockets.
Obviously there is more hands-on involved the cheaper you want to go.
Also "full" is probably doing a lot of lifting here. He likely didn't do plumbing for the kitchen from scratch nor electrical.
If you just need to replace cabinets + appliances, there's no reason why you can't get any kitchen done under 30k.
When you have a customer base with 1000x average income, you will rapidly find there's a 1000x priced option... even if it's only 2% better than something priced 10x average (or often, simply labelled differently).
I’m no economist, but after working closely with many UK clients, I’ve noticed something: the upper-middle class here may not be flush with current cash flow, but they're sitting on a ridiculous amount of generational wealth that's been safely accumulated over the last 200 years within tight-knit family networks. In my view, the elites have both robust current cash flow and deep generational wealth, while the upper-middle class primarily relies on that generational cushion. They might not be buying Bugattis like the elites, but they're still living extremely luxurious, lavish lifestyles. Anyone without that kind of inherited wealth—unless you hit it big with a million-dollar tech idea—is stuck in the rat race, whether you're working at Starbucks or engineering at a tech firm.
The US seems a bit different. Here, there’s more opportunity to generate enough cash flow within one generation to set up the next with “generational” wealth. In the UK, it takes longer—about 3–4 generations—to build that legacy. But once a family in the UK secures this wealth, it tends to provide a relatively stable, luxurious life for the next 2–3 generations. In the US, while you might build wealth in just one generation, it can just as quickly vanish—sometimes within a single generation or even half one—due to medical debt, mismanagement, or economic swings. It takes a structured effort, clear strategy, and a strong individual family culture to preserve wealth in the US. If it’s not properly secured, that wealth ends up transferring to someone else who is setting up their own cycle of generational prosperity.
I also think the UK’s cultural and systemic setup makes it much harder for wealth to move from family networks at the top down to the working class. Over the past 10 years, globally, more wealth has shifted from the working class to the upper-middle and elite tiers. In the UK, that wealth is now entrenched at the top for the next four generations—even if the flow stops today, it’s going to stay that way for another 50 years or so. In the US, although wealth has also moved upward, there’s a genuine chance for it to “expire” at the top within 5-10 years and start cycling back down to the working class. I think this is the major difference in US economics as opposed to much of the world.
That said, who really knows what will happen given today’s global political climate? Everything’s kind of up in the air right now, and we'll have to see how it all settles over the next few years.
"Upper middle class" in the UK comprises the top 5% or so of the population. They tend to be senior professionals or business owners, are likely to be privately educated, will probably speak with a "received pronunciation" (rather than regional) accent, and have significant asset wealth.
"Upper class" is reserved for landed gentry, nobility, etc. They're people who can live off long-standing inherited wealth and don't need jobs or even education (though many still do have them, of course).
I see there could be like 3 options: 1) hide wealth / do not spend this money; 2) distribute to economy / i.e. pay a tradesman to curve the frame; 3) donate money to a fund or throw from a balcony to the crowd.
It doesn't seem that 1 cold be helpful to anyone. We see 2 in those examples, but it seem you imply that it's not the best way. So we have the only the 3rd option left, with donations. Is that what is considered as the best option? Is it sustainable in a long term?
"Consider that about ten percent of Americans will spend at least a year in the top one percent and more than half of all Americans will spent a year in the top ten percent[1]. This is visibly not the same for the more static –but nominally more equal –Europe. For instance, only ten percent of the wealthiest five hundred American people or dynasties were so thirty years ago; more than sixty percent of those on the French list were heirs and a third of the richest Europeans were the richest centuries ago. In Florence, it was just revealed that things are really even worse: the same handful of families have kept the wealth for five centuries."
And there is more quoted here: https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d...
Full disclosure, I travel all over Europe for work and in the last 3 years, 1 of them was in the UK. The divide between the rich and poor is incredible.
Further, the only place I’ve seen so many young homeless men on the streets is in the UK. Not seen it anywhere else.
> So yes, Britain feels poor—but it’s not because the money is gone. It’s because it’s been withdrawn from the commons and buried behind closed doors.
This is not necessarily related. People don't care because the fabric of society is eroded and the essence of what makes a country and a culture is diluted to a point that it is almost non-existant. Those factors are correlated but not causally determined.
You can find far, far more luxurious hotels in South Africa or the Philippines than in Switzerland or England.
Some days I think the difference between 1st world and 3rd world is not so much wealth, but the division of wealth.
For example, Grab/Uber rickshaw/tuk-tuk drivers in India may technically earn over $10 a day, but many of them remain homeless because the price of food and rent has risen, and they often support a lot of their family members who have no jobs.
They often sleep on their rickshaws and work more than 20 hours a day, seven days a week, relying on excessive amounts of caffeine and other substances to keep going.
Many of them sleep on their motorcycles or near them on the sidewalk.
That happened in the 80s. This is not a new sensation in England, just a worsening one.
Go back to my childhood (Australia) and a playground was a very basic slide, possibly weathered and with minimal regard for safety and no landscaping beside mown lawns. A public plaza would've been pretty austere. Now, either have quite premium fit-outs - high end playgrounds, thoughtful and professional landscaping, etc. The budgets would be huge. And there are still very premium fit-outs in many houses.
> in large part because they’re mandated to write blank cheques for social care with no support or strategy from central government. Individual cases in Central Bedfordshire are now costing up to £750,000 per year, a quarter of the entire libraries and leisure budget and an amount that is rising rapidly with no apparent ceiling. As I wrote previously, “In a single year, residential care costs for children have increased by £2,000 per child… per week,” taking the average cost for a single case from ~£200,000 to ~£300,000 per child per year, again with little explanation as to where the money is going or how this is even possible.
> Similarly, “school transport costs have increased by over 100% - from £9m to £20m - in just 4 years” - that’s driven by an unexplained rise in the number of SEND pupils eligible for support and it amounts to roughly the same as - deep breath - the transport, roads, parking, libraries, leisure, housing benefit, public protection and safety budgets combined. Central Bedfordshire Council is not an outlier here - collectively, council overspends on SEND services are set to hit £2bn in the next year, risking further bankruptcies. Again this is not about pitting children against libraries, but asking if we seriously believe we’re addressing either of these things well?
Local councils have to pay the very large bills for social care and supporting SEND children but have basically little control over how it's spent or levers to help control the bills.
Fixing this so councils can once again spend relative minor amounts of money improving the public realm could go a long way to improving day to day experience. Definitely some other large structural problems (see the huge costs of HS2) but it would provide a noticeable improvement in people's lives and potentially isn't too hard for a government willing to make some bold changes around taxation, local government funding and providing proper national strategy and funding on social care.
Of course the actual place continues to exist so the local authority will continue to exist in another form, this time with fewer major capital assets and they're paying rents to the people who now own them instead.
As pointed out in the article you could see this happen when something entirely out of the authorities control (e.g. spending on SEND children due to the massive increase in eligible children in Central Bedfordshire's case) causes it too.
Which may be perceived as a actual goal of this mandate if you have enough of tinfoil in your hat.
It's the standard neoliberal playbook - defund and cripple public services, complain they're not working, then insist the only solution is for-profit privatisation because it's "more efficient".
The result is that all utilities and much of the infrastructure are being run down for profit, and have to be regularly bailed out by central government at vast expense.
Which is fine, because this creates a transfer of wealth from tax payers to the already wealthy.
The aristocracy literally cannot imagine a country which isn't run for their personal benefit. And the consequence is that many of the areas in the UK are now poorer than anywhere in Europe, or even the US deep south.
By far the poorest state in the US, Mississippi (the deepest south you can get) has a GDP per capita just $1,500 less than Germany.
The 2nd and 3rd and 4th poorest states (all southern), West Virginia, Arkansas, and Alabama, have GDPs per capita $6k higher than Germany.
Georgia and Tennessee, 2 other states in the Deep South have GDPs per capita higher than all European countries except Luxembourg, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway and Iceland.
https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/01/03/the-poorest-us-...
It’s a skewed European attitude to look down on the southern US as the poorest place they can think of outside of Africa or Asia. When in fact the vast majority of the South is better off than economically than 90% of European countries.
I once talked to someone traveling to Atlanta ask “do you get CNN down there?” CNN is based in Atlanta.
By all of those measures, the poorest states in the Deep South rank higher than many European countries.
So saying "poorer than anywhere Europe, or even the US Deep South", implies that you think the Deep South is poorer than anywhere in Europe. This is an absurd statement because the poorest places in Europe are much poorer than the poorest places in the US.
If you take the poorest zip code in the United States and look at the median income, 1st quartile income, (or even percent of people under the global poverty line adjusted for PPP), it's not even close to last place among European countries.
People have a very skewed view of the Deep South. Because parts of it are poorer than average for the rest of the country doesn't mean it's objectively poor when compared to the rest of the world.
HDI and Inequality adjusted HDI are not an objective measurement?
I can’t find IHDI by state, but given that the US only drops a few spots between HDI and IHDI, Mississippi isn’t likely to be anywhere near the bottom.
All southern states except Mississippi rank in the top 50% of European counties by HDI btw.
My point stands.
> My point stands.
Funny stuff.
and child is being looked after by barely qualified minimum wage worker (often actually paid below minimum wage if you add unpaid overtime and foreign workers not knowing the laws), meanwhile owners of care services live opulent lifestyles in places like Dubai. UK services market is not free, which is part of the problem.
This is also a cultural issue. In large cities, people often don't feel as being part of the community and they don't take pride in their surroundings. They put rubbish everywhere, vandalise. There is little done to change that. They see neighbour has nice flowers in the garden? Instead of admiring, they will cut them off.
I don't think this aligns with the lived-experience of most Britons. The big cities are mostly litter-free areas, and people can have well tended gardens go unmolested by neighbours.
Vandalism is a difficult one. But it's likely because the people doing it don't have anything better to do, no hobbies, jobs, families, responsibilities, etc. And also, broken window syndrome.
But then you look at e.g. east or southeast asia and they have things like neat closed off bus stops with heating and you're like, "Why can't we have nice things?". We're stuck with glass booths with a beam for leaning against at best. Glass so that people in there are visible and don't use it as a public toilet, uncomfortable seating so people don't use it as a hang-out or sleeping spot. But the design adapts to a problem, one which the government has little interest in fixing - or which would infringe on people's rights.
We also have free bulky waste collection, so again, we actually already have that. You just have to arrange for it. You are very poorly informed.
There are also free council run recycling centres (previously known as tips), where you can take stuff yourself. Some have a charge for hardcore, that's about it. Businesses cannot use them though and must pay for waste disposal themselves.
Fly tipping is fairly rare in the UK, I saw an armchair fly tipped on a train journey yesterday and it was notable because you rarely see that sort of thing.
There are areas with fly tipping problems, but usually because those people are lazy, not because of cost. And the council will clear it up (at least eventually depending on the area).
We are having a problem with councils struggling to perform their usual role at the moment. Running out of money. Potholes are a hot topic.
This is actually because our councils are mandated to provide care for old people, and the cost has sky rocketed in the last 2 decades, while they've been capped on how much they can raise their tax. So now almost 90% of my council tax gets spent on old person care instead of what most people might think it was for, bins, schools, parks, etc..
[1] It's not worth going into different taxes here, think of it as a state tax instead of a federal tax. In fact the UK government have a large degree of control in that they force the councils to spend most of it on mandated services and can dictate how much the councils are allowed to raise it by
This just isn't true. The council takes taxes at pain of going to jail to eventually pay for this service. Saying "make it free and the behaviour will change" is just nonsense. Things can't all be free. People need to make an effort to keep their neighbourhoods nice.
If they don't feel that a neighbourhood is "theirs" - that's more likely to be a problem.
SEND = "Special educational needs and disabilities"
I can't help feeling like this is a vicious cycle - the lack of community facilities is causing greater isolation, causing a rise in health needs and so on.
This is because America's alleged welfare queens are undocumented, whereas Britain's are there legally and the government actually has very good data on which groups are a net boon and which are a net draw on the economy.
I'm not a Brit and I could care less at the end of the day, but it does seem kind of bonkers to me to be importing people while your own country suffers.
All this is a direct result of bad, ideological law making combined with a biased judiciary that interprets it in bad, ideological ways. Unfortunately it's the ideology Labour is in thrall too and they're in power for several years at minimum and maybe much longer if the right stays split, so the state of Britain's infrastructure will continue to sharply decline.
Where can I read about this?
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_d7ff3a8f-9cf7-4ff3-837a-0bbb...
Although Grok thinks the problem lies in "deep rooted inequalities", whereas I'd say it's pretty normal for jobs like bin men to be paid more than cleaners. It's one of the most dangerous jobs you can do, due to the frequency with which they get hit by cars.
The summary did not support your claim court cases and equity laws said any gender pay gap was the result of discrimination. It said the plaintiffs argued successfully they were paid less for work of equal value. It was not clear cleaning and refuse collection were determined equal value. The summary mentioned also contract clauses.
It sounds like the real issue is you disagree with the value of work calculated for some jobs.
paywall bypass: https://archive.is/MLC49
It only mentions councils in passing and doesn't cover them going bankrupt over it, but it covers the issue at hand, which affects the private sector as well.
Local authorities are forced to sell off assets and fire direct employees, then get charged a fortune to provide basic services and child and adult social care.
And for contracts and outsourcing, the ownership of the contract itself is the thing that gives value, not providing the actual service. Creating a whole set of perverse incentives.
A council should look at a pot hole in a road as a massive opportunity. Here is a chance to provide good quality work for local people and local resources, but the opposite happens.
We have a whole layer of service retailers e.g. for electricity and gas and communications, who are not more than a spreadsheet speculating on long term prices, a call centre and a web site. Their entire business model being based on a) not messing up the spreadsheet calculation b) enough people being lazy and not renewing or switching their contract every year.
Our financial services industry has massive positive PR, seen as a net good for the country. When in reality it is focused not on basic things like providing banking and direct insurance, but in attracting our best and brightest individuals from around the country and instead of having them put their talents to something productive. Instead reward them for creating and maintaining complex systems to move wealth around, asset strip regions, hide it from tax and create a layer of gambling and financial products on top of these systems.
I could go on.
Reprivatize shit and put it in the hands of someone competent. Also, increase wages so that government agencies don't depend so much on expensive consultants / contractors.
Competition works best for commodities. How is your electricity bill looking? And electricity is a fabulously strong example of a commodity. Have you noticed petrol prices are not that competitive even though petrol is a commodity?
3/4 of my leccy bill is a distribution cost: I think it is a fixed cost that any electricity supplier I choose oncharges. I can choose different suppliers that will make a small difference to the other variable kWh by time charges but it's not real competition. I could buy solar and batteries - but the initial investment and payback period is so long that it would cost me far more than the distribution cost I currently pay.
I think the average english person fundamentally lacks the mindset for capitalism to work, there is little trust in an individual, and too great a desire to have daddy government come make it safe. It's the unquestioning faith in top down measures that has lead to the current system, and pulling things back to public ownership won't fix that.
Sadly the author I think is getting distracted by specific issues. Focusing on school or social costs. Or specific large project over runs.
While I do not agree with him on many things, I think Dominic Cummings's treatment of the subject digs deeper: https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/q-and-a
You need to read through a ton, but it paints a picture of a government chasing newspaper headlines. And an overall ineffective method of running a country from the top down.
How could it be that an act of parliament is being held up by local councils? Parliament's orders used to be the law of the land. Now it is but one of many.
Often treatments of British decline read as if the authors wished Britain had been fire bombed to smithereens, and benefited from the Marshel Plan. Yet this undersells the British people. They know how to build new houses. They know how to build trains. Yet Britain as a whole is still searching for that win-win. The path to fixing problems without compromises.
Meanwhile Britain's managerial and governing class is so incompetent, it is hard to imagine replacements who would perform worse.
If you go for Brexit the "hard way" as the country did then your way forward to compensate and to create growth is to find new competitive advantages and there are not many options apart from going low tax low regulations.
This never happened. Truss/Kwarteng made a bad and short-lived attempt and that was it.
I am not saying Brexit was a good idea but this is one of those massive changes of course that require "going big or going home" instead of trying to keep things as they were when that's impossible, and slowly fail (it does not mean that it would necessarily succeed but at least you're going for it).
The lasting effect of Truss was to make the national debt problem much worse by pushing up interest rates.
Even if you don't agree with him (and I know many don't for various reasons..) You have to admit that he does bring a new perspective to the table and (as a layman economist) it just makes logical sense.
Regardless, the main stream economists have not been able to either predict the economy or improve it (for the general majority of people) and it seems that every western economy is following the same trajectory where
- governments are broke and pulling back on their services to the public (health care, education etc.)
- working class is broke, living pay check to paycheck barely scraping by
- middle class is shrinking and financing their lives with ever increasing amounts of debt (mortgages)
You can achieve far greater enlightenment by simply droping your preconceptions about rich and poor people and understanding the very basic day to day things happening around you than you will achieve listening to him.
Is it? Nothing in the FT articles indicates that, and they clearly state that 2 years prior a trader got a $100 million personal bonus (so on profits much higher than that). There can be good and bad years, but I seriously doubt $35 million would be the best worldwide, and all of his colleagues who agreed to speak seem to agree with that.
He possibly had the highest p&l on his desk ($35mil) in 2011 - was not top in 2011 in the bank, and certainly not in the world. $35mil - rookie numbers in this game, and in a seat at Citibank, middling at best.
I listened to him being asked a question on UK / US trade and his answer was very generic - something something Amazon.
To be a forex trader, you would live and breathe detail on stuff like this. To be in the top 1% of forex traders you would be far beyond that.
yes he isn't in that position now, but I expected some novel insight that you could only get from a specialist, not something that anyone could come up with.
This isn't the only example.
I don't disagree with most of what he is saying, and I'm very happy for him that he has managed to break through in a small way to get his message out.
but still something iffy.
Crashcourse economics likely provides much more value to anyone really looking to learn.
People with money pretty readily deploy that money into investments that beat inflation.
but "tax on savers ie the rich"
rich normally are rich enough to protect their savings from inflation. e.g. by putting it in an effective monopoly - land or housing (housing is a monopoly if you also are rich enough to have some influence on what / where houses are built / not built)
The deadlock today comes from people needing to sell for much since they are bound up by massive loans, but that could have been avoided.
----
> Housing and energy could both be dirt cheap and the money would still go to rich people.
----
So the working class is being forced to give the wealthy all of their money. On prices set by the wealthy and coupled with policies encouraged by the wealth. And if the wealthy just stopped being so greedy and took a small hit, everything would be fine. And the wealthy aren't the problem?
They tried that before and got The Aberfan disaster, Newgate Prison, and child labor.
"Trust me baby, I've changed!"
I feel more optimistic that the energy issue will be solved with a shift to nuclear and renewables.
Housing just seems so hard to fix as so many people have a vested interest in not fixing it.
The "I.T. Revolution" was supposed to bring a vast payoff from improved productivity. Did the benefits of society-wide process improvement get snarfed up by... vastly more inequality ?
Stock market/trading is a kind of zero sum game. For him to gain, someone else has to lose.
However, real economy is not a zero sum game and I dont think he understands that. AFAIK never was an entrepreneur, or created a business.
He advocates for a wealth tax, ie a tax on unrealised gains.
For realised gains, we already do wealth tax and thats called capital gains tax.
In other words while the real economy might be growing as a "non-zero sum game" the growth of the elite and the rich far exceeds that and outpaces it. Net effect is that their wealth is wealth away from everyone else.
Probably seeing a lot of new/upper segment cars and well maintained houses.
It is a reasonable response to high-crime areas, and it is unusual for the wealthiest parts of a city to be high-crime areas. But an area being less affluent doesn't make an area high-crime.
If you look at the other comments you can see people are actually keying off how much of a sense of community and civic pride there is in an area, as well as commercial activity. Which is going to probably distinguish between upper and lower class - even that isn't certain - but that isn't actually relevant to the topic because there is always going to be an upper and lower class. It isn't going to get a great read on how affluent they are at any given moment.
> There's a reason your original post is a very light shade of gray.
In an academic sense, yes. But no-one knows what it is - some people might be in your shoes where they read "affluent", misinterpreted it and had a fear response. Or they might have other opinions as some of the other comments lay out. Or there could have been other reasons.
One of the philosophical underpinnings of HN is that downvotes don't contain a lot of information and are a poor tool for promoting discussion - it is a wonderfully mature approach to moderation.
You'll notice my response to the thread going long was more arguments. It keeps the discussion more respectful when people only push on when they have arguments to make. Not the only option, but insinuation specifically is a weak long term strategy. As are insults, for that matter.
How well upkept are the buildings? Are they clean and well maintained or are they dingy and broken with overgrowth? Are there a lot of open shops around? Do people seem to be buying things? What kind of clothes are the people wearing? Does it seem like many people are homeless? How is the state of the transit (both public and private?) Do people feel the need to have bars on their windows and security stationed around to prevent theft, or do storefronts feel safe enough to even have merchandise sitting out? Are people eating in restaurants? Are those expensive or cheap restaurants? Do people seem to be comfortable spending a night out on the town, going to bars and shows or are the streets empty because people can't afford outside entertainment?
You can find relative class status of an area by the number of beggars, I grant you that. But you aren't going to get a bead on the actual affluence of the high-class people. Are they thousandairs or billionairs? All we really know is they aren't beggars.
Google suggests that line would be about 127 miles long, or about 200 kilometers. That’s one different consent form for every 25 meters of track. Mind boggling.
> That’s one different consent form for every 25 meters of track. Mind boggling.
I can easily imagine Sir Humphrey lecturing Bernard on why 8276 is not enough consents and why they need more of them.
Our country inherited/modeled our civil services and bureaucracy based on the British system. We know the effort it takes to get things done.
Gary's angle is mostly based on wealth being a zero sum game. I think new wealth does get created but I agree that the vast majority of wealth is existing assets and their growth probably dwarfs any net new wealth creation.
Some links:
Gary's Economics on Youtube - whether or not you agree, he articulates his economic view: https://www.youtube.com/@garyseconomics
This podcast where Gary debates with Daniel Priestly who has opposing views. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yohVh4qcas
No conspiracy theory beliefs required to see this one. At the end of the day, what we are buying and selling is compute time on our brain CPU cluster. We can reshuffle what gets our attention, and the relative cost of things can change, but ultimately the only way to increase "wealth" is to get more underlying resource: human brainpower.
I see the counter argument coming from a mile away: yeah, but your poor is not your grandfathers poor. You have an iPhone, gramps did not. My counter is again simple: relative value. Electronics were a frontier at the time, and are a commodity now. They are now cheap, and this is compensated by a huge increase in the cost of basics like housing.
Perhaps the bigger issue is old wealth destruction. We live in a world of effectively infinite low cost electronics, clothes and food, but the things which used to be abundant are now actually quite scarce.
Housing is most obvious example here - but the costs of driving (excluding vehicle purchase), childcare, wedding, and energy are now radically higher than ever before. In these areas it feels like we've gone backwards in productivity.
Wealth is created by taking less valuable inputs and producing something new of greater value. For the HN crowd, that might mean using a little energy and a cheap computer to produce software that provides something even more value than the sum of its parts. Clearly you can create wealth out of "thin air".
Perhaps you mean in the net? Where new wealth is created, equal old wealth must be destroyed? But wherein that aforementioned software was additional value destroyed in order for the net wealth to remain the same?
> It only looks that way because of devaluing currency and population growth.
Not really. While we often measure wealth in currency, which is subject to fluctuations over time, wealth is not the measurement itself. In the same vein, the physical distance you currently know as a kilometre will still be the same distance even if we redefine the kilometre.
The effective pay of a person making £80k per year in London isn't really all that different from a minimum wage worker in social housing. Especially when things like child benefit, student loans, and potential council tax reductions are involved.
I think it's better to be at the top of the working class than the bottom of the middle class.
£80k a year works out at £4,166.14 per month (assuming plan 2 student loan and 0 pension contributions).
Full time minimum wage works out at £25,397.00 per year or £1,819.48 per month (assuming no student loan or pension contributions).
That works out as a difference of £2,346.66 per month. It's plausible the cost difference between social housing and private rent for a 3 bed in Westminster could make up that difference alone.
Westminister social housing is obviously a favourable case, but we also have to consider benefits:
In the scenario of 2 kids on that min wage salary it seems like you'd get £34.15 per month in universal credit.
Whilst small on its own, the universal credit status unlocks many other benefits and perks. Potential discounts of up to 100% of council tax could be possible depending on local authority (avg council tax in London is £157.75 per month). The NHS low income scheme can be accessed: getting free prescriptions and support with health travel. Another big thing would be getting access to social tariffs on energies and utilities. Together these could add up to hundreds of pounds per month.
The min wage worker would also child benefit at £187.17 monthly.
Firstly, if you earned £80k and needed a 3-bed flat, you would categorically not try to live in Westminster. The rent alone would come out well over £3k per month [0]. It's one of the most expensive places to rent in the country. Looking at the disposable income from £80k for a 3-bed flat is highly selective.
Secondly, money isn't the only factor when it comes to social housing. Consider that social housing is notoriously ill-maintained and has characteristics in line with the poorest 40% households [1]. And if you do live somewhere unsatisfactory, the waiting time for a 3-bed is around 3 years for non-high-priority applicants [2].
[0] https://committees.westminster.gov.uk/documents/s9851/Afford...
[1] https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/2023-06/Housing-quali..., p12
[2] https://www.ukpropertymarketnews.co.uk/how-long-does-it-take...
It's crystal clear we can build new houses and new businesses, so suggesting 'wealth' is a zero sum game is ideological folly.
As to his thesis, here's the demolition of mathematics within it: https://birchlermuesli.substack.com/p/copy-garys-badeconomic...
Can you point me to other theories which articulate the cause of my observations?
In your example of building more, in order to a new building get erected someone owns the land, someone owns the materials, someone owns all the assets and the capital required to build. The people who invest to this will of course want to turn a profit on it.
In England, only the King owns the land, and Parliament can deploy any resources in the UK it wishes by simple Act of Parliament.
The only other thing there is is human labour, and that can similarly be deployed if we choose to.
As we discover every time we go to war.
So no there is no cabal of hoarders preventing anything, and no shortage of stuff or money. All that is preventing regeneration is the political will to do so.
In reality Gary is a member of the Outer Party, and he wants to take money off the Inner Party and give it to his mates so they can all play at looking after the Proles while value signalling to one another.
So we've gone from "everyone will have flying cars" to "the rest of you will eat bugs." Castles and jets for the few; austerity for the rest of us. Which certainly isn't new, but it's not what was promised, or what seemed possible within living memory.
That's the median voter.
Or at least the picture of the median voter all the parties are chasing. Which is very bad news for the working population, because policy gets heavily influenced by clueless retirees.
Britain is a retirement home with a handful of warships attached.
Partly this is because of the myopic policies of the coalition and then conservative governments, which didn't invest in growth and what seems like a blindingly obvious consequence of this is that there was then no growth.
> Britain’s houses are cramped, ancient and in the wrong places
Ain't that the truth. And actually you're better off getting the ancient ones because they're less cramped.
I think I agree quite a lot with this article, as someone now watching from overseas - something needs to be done as the state just seems to soak up ever more money for ever less benefit to the average person. Things are getting worse and more expensive over there. Time to change tack and at least have them get better if it's going to cost more!
This is true of Europe in general vs the US because economic growth in Europe has been low compared to the US since at least the financial crisis. At the time GDP of the Eurozone was comparable to the US' now the US is almost twice as big. As a consequence every European country ranks low compared to US states on GDP per capita:
"Italy is just ahead of Mississippi, the poorest of the 50 states, while France is between Idaho and Arkansas, respectively 48th and 49th. Germany doesn't save face: It lies between Oklahoma and Maine (38th and 39th)." (2023) [1]
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2023/09/04/the-gdp...
No, You're just comparing change in the EUR/USD exchange rate here. In 2007, the euro was at a high point of 1.48, and in 2024 it's at a low of 1.02. Inflation has not been higher in Europe than in the USA over that period.
If we look at GDP at purchasing power parity from 2007 to 2023 we have this:
- European Union: 31,162 → 61,217, +96% (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...)
- USA: 48,050 → 82,769, +72% (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...)
Which shows a slight catching-up by the European Union over the period.
"Between 2010 and 2023, the cumulative growth rate of GDP reached 34% in the United States, compared with just 21% in the European Union and 18% in the eurozone. This measure of GDP in volume does not depend on changes in exchange rates." [2]
[1] https://www.futuribles.com/en/sur-le-decrochage-economique-e... [2] https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/economy/ec...
2. I'm glad that people in the UK have access to healthcare. I'd be very happy if that went to the US. That doesn't change the raw GDP figures though.
I agree it may change the experience they have of being poor if you aren't also deprived of medical care. But here's another thing - people in the UK are less satisfied than ever with the NHS as well - it appears to be floundering.
(In answer to the below "people have always been less satisfied with the NHS" - perhaps so, but this time it's serious, they haven't been this less satisfied before - https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/apr/02/patient-sati... )
That's assuming they're relevant, and spoiler, they aren't for the topic at hand.
How is any individual's life better because they work at a café selling $20 coffee vs £5 coffee? Because if you measure GDP, person one is drastically more productive, but in reality, it doesn't matter, really. If both are earning minimum wage, the person in the UK with the cheaper coffee has higher income (outside of a few US states). But what is their quality of life? That's highly dependent on where they live, what are their housing costs (which are quite high in the UK in most desirable locations), etc. In any case, GDP doesn't evaluate that, and it's probably the main thing people care about and what they mean by "poor".
I agree, GDP is an incomplete measure, but it does provide a comparison point.
Environmental impact assessments, engineer stamps, etc, etc, for minor projects that wind up prescribing some petty stormwater solution which adds up to more cost than if the Taj Mahal of stormwater solutions had just been fired from the hip in the general direction of the problem. Graft reducing procurement processes that have grown over time to cost more to run on an annualized basis than the graft they were intended to prevent.
At least if we took best guesses when implementing solutions to ancillary problems and awarded contracts based on favor trading at least we'd have the solutions and the stuff to show for it even if the solutions and stuff aren't perfect.
Similar argument to the article, but in much more depth.
In a nutshell, the UK has made it legally difficult to construct new housing and many forms of infrastructure- electricity plants, roads/tunnels, railway, hospitals, etc.
As a result, these things take up a larger fraction of ordinary people's budget and also limit mobility and hence productivity, resulting in poverty or effective poverty even for someone with an income that would make them globally rich.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/20/britai...
"For those born in the 1940s and 1950s, incomes would typically double from their late 20s to their early 50s. However, those born in the 1960s only saw income grow by around 50% over that period, whilst those born more recently look set to see weaker growth still as they age."
https://ifs.org.uk/articles/income-and-wealth-inequality-exp...
* Naval and trade dominance (a legacy of Venetian methods, transferred through the Netherlands).
* Financial systems (London as the hub of insurance, lending, and later offshore banking).
* Intelligence networks and manipulation (from the East India Company to MI6).
* Colonial exploitation (enclosures, the Opium Wars, the Bengal famine of 1943, suppression of the Sepoy Rebellion, the exploitation of Ireland, etc.).
* Enclosures (16th–18th centuries) – Peasants driven off the land for landlord profits.
* The Irish Famine (1845–1849) – Grain was exported to England while millions starved.
* "Divide and rule" policies – From India to Northern Ireland, preventing unity among the oppressed.
* Austerity – Post-2008 budget cuts
- UK poverty has been falling continually for decades
- UK real disposable household income (median) after housing costs is higher than ever
(the latest report came out a few days ago and actually the latest year is a slight worsening of household income, but not far off the high from 2022)
The numbers do paint a picture of a fairly anemic 5-10% increase between 02/03 and 23/24 in 'inflation-adjusted' median household income.
However, I note that that the data is 'equivalised' which to me somewhat muddies the waters; the numbers are inherently tied into the population's demographics, and I'm not confident that I understand what effect things like demographic shifts (which are obviously ongoing) would have on these numbers.
It’s still a travesty that the UK has not gotten much richer in the last 20 years than it has, but the constant refrain of “living standards are collapsing” and “no one can afford a house” just doesn’t match the data IMO.
I think it muddies the waters because it's possible that the numbers are higher because people are choosing to have fewer children (which may be driven by affordability), or more people are living in HMOs. It makes it much harder to argue about cause and effect. Are these equivalised incomes rising because people are having fewer children, because there are more people living in HMOs - or are more people doing these things because of a crisis of affordability?
> but the constant refrain of “living standards are collapsing” and “no one can afford a house” just doesn’t match the data IMO.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...
The price of housing in England has doubled relative to the median income since 2000.
House price ratio has doubled since 2000 but over the last twenty years in the UK it’s flat. The doomsaying is not justified.
Now come on, data is data, if you want your arguments to live on the cite-able data, then you must accept that your arguments can also die on the cite-able data.
Take a look at a longer term view of the data and tell me you wouldn't be angry: https://www.schroders.com/en-gb/uk/individual/insights/what-...
And remember that this says nothing about the quality of housing, or its suitability for the needs of the household.
The housing crisis is not primarily one of homelessness (although many are forced to live in poor quality temporary accommodation waiting decades on lists for affordable housing), but of people living in the wrong accommodation for their needs; some of them forced to live in dangerous accommodation but unable to move, a greater number forced to rent, some people being forced to live with their parents; these are the things that happen when affordability decreases.
Do me a favour and do some real research on the topic before you dismiss other people's problems as nonsense. I think you owe them that.
It is of course a lot higher than the 1950 - 2000 period, but I think two things explain this.
1. Women started having careers eventually doubled the borrowing power of the typical household
2. The housing is much higher quality (50s lodgings may not even have had indoor toilets; central heating wasn’t common until the 70s/80s)
So I think we’re essentially at a natural plateau of the house/earnings ratio, subject to volatility from outside factors. You could argue that housing has been unaffordable since the early 2000s, but the (false) narrative that’s usually pushed is of ever worsening conditions.
Nobody believes that about the bat tunnel. HS2 designed the most expensive thing they could think of because that maximises the profit. They say Natural England approved it but why wouldn't they? In a non-government project the contractors would negotiate with Natural England to agree on the cheapest thing that complied with the law. HS2 presented the most expensive thing and said can we do this? And they got the answer they wanted.
The longer it takes the more the companies involved in making it receive, because the government will cover the bill.
Everybody is lazy, nothing works, and nobody is going to do anything about it because doing something would require fighting an army of bureaucrats. And, dear reader, who would blame you for not doing that?
I had British Telecom around to fix a wiring issue. The rental agency said they'd be coming by on Thursday or Friday and I should pick. Simultaneously, I get a text from BT that they'll be by on Wednesday. The gent shows up Tuesday. I ALSO get a call on Friday (while I'm at work): "Mate, I'm about 15 minutes away from your house...".
Everything is like this. Everything.
data for 2024
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1536/cpsprodpb/7EF2/production...
I made my peace with not earning London salaries but being able to comfortably live in a nice area and pay off my mortgage early a long time ago.
My parents weren't of the University generation, so I'm ~better off than they were at the same point in our lives. On the other hand, we're worse off than my in-laws would have been at the same time, because of housing. But housing is a fixable problem. The government just needs to legislate to allow the building of more of it. Even in London, the real answer, whether politicians want to say it or not, is the densification of suburbs - allow redevelopment of suburban areas into higher density developments, and prices will come down.
Same with public sector - we had an ecosystem of small businesses delivering services and that was destroyed. Any public sector body buying these services got fined and "nudged" to buy from more expensive big corporations.
So you get no productivity, brain drain and big corporations taking massive profits overseas, where small business would spent the money locally stimulating the economy.
It's a slow car crash, nobody is paying attention to.
I agree the implementation of IR35 is an absolute, grade-A clusterfuck, and leaves workers having to do things like buy IR35 insurance, and make in/out determinations themselves, only for HMRC to come up with new ways to try and classify them as 'managed service companies', or a myriad other ways to undermine the entire sector, such that financial ruin can be dangled over people's heads like the sword of damocles...
But working class? Pull the other one!
In reality, IR35 has had a broad and damaging impact on a much wider group of skilled workers - IT contractors, engineers, healthcare professionals, tradespeople - many of whom built small, legitimate limited companies as a way to work flexibly, compete fairly, and build some financial security. It was one of the few viable paths to independence left, and IR35 has made it effectively unworkable for many.
Large corporations didn't like losing contracts and talent to smaller, more agile competitors. IR35 conveniently removed that competition by making small operators too much of a compliance risk to hire. Meanwhile, public sector bodies were discouraged—sometimes even penalised—for engaging small suppliers, further consolidating the power of the big consultancies.
The media focus on celebrity cases wasn't accidental. HMRC gained free publicity and public support by targeting high-profile individuals - knowing it would reinforce the idea that IR35 was closing tax loopholes rather than quietly dismantling a thriving small business ecosystem. The result is a workforce with less autonomy, less incentive to go above and beyond, and fewer opportunities to build something for themselves.
This isn't just about tax - it's about economic structure, incentives, and who gets to participate in the rewards of their own labour. And when those opportunities disappear, so does productivity, innovation, and local economic resilience.
You're not disagreeing with me, other than that I don't consider those "working class" occupations. In general in the UK those are quite often middle to upper middle class.
> tradespeople
Still do run small limited companies AFAICT. Certainly the ones I used to interact with. Mostly because they have multiple clients and are a lot harder to point at and say "that's not a real business!"
Upper-middle class is mostly bankers, barristers, surgeons, some politicans and so forth.
While permanent IT staff are often regarded as generic office workers, usually in poorly performing small to medium enterprises in backwaters around the country, in London and in Finance this is not really the case.
Consultant IT people can make out like bandits, IR35 or no, and even those perm people in the backwaters are middle class in earning and habits. It’s absolutely not a working class occupation.
Incidentally this attitude from middle management in (mostly) non-London SMEs is a big part of why they are doomed to fail - they value middle-management above skilled workers and end up in a doom spiral of low pay, low productivity and low expectations. If you’re in one of those situations - get out, opportunity is out there. But you won’t find it in a shabby office at the back-end of an industrial estate in Basingstoke.
Many skilled workers set up limited companies not to "make out like bandits" but to gain a small degree of control in a system that otherwise offers very little. IR35 took that away, not from boardrooms or multinational firms, but from individuals trying to carve out their own space. It wasn't just a policy shift—it was a signal: you're not allowed to operate outside the machine.
This has little to do with London versus the rest. It's about how the economy is increasingly structured to funnel all meaningful work through large gatekeepers, whether private or public. The destruction of small-scale service businesses - especially in the public sector - didn't just hurt livelihoods. It erased entire layers of local innovation, independence, and pride in craft.
The result is exactly what we see now: a drained workforce with no stake in the outcome, no reason to go above and beyond, and no path to build something of their own. That's not a London problem or a Basingstoke problem. That's a systemic one.
It certainly needs reform, but it hasn’t killed the contracting sector. Far from it. It’s still massively lucrative.
Yes, the public sector restrictions a few years ago changed some things, but from friends in the public sector AFAICT what it changed was that it cut down on a culture of people who were for all intents and purposes employees, who had often been in positions of managerial responsibility in councils and other bodies for years, pretending they were independent businesses and avoiding tax while (comparatively) charging the earth.
However you want to paint it class -wise, when someone is acting as an officer in a company or council for half a decade, they’re not an independent creative struggling to have some control, they’re working a job like any other schmuck.
Honestly, I think the UK tax laws need to be reformed so that it doesn’t matter for income - you make money in a company structure as a contractor, or make it as an employee, tax is the same. Dividend or income, tax is the same. It would sort the unholy mess out and take away the incentives to use contracting as a tax dodge and for HMRC to retroactively fuck up someone’s life.
It’s how it works here in Australia. No IR35 required, for the most part income is income is income and it all counts towards your taxable total. Then you work how it best suits you.
Here's the reality: a one-person limited company providing services to a council for several years is treated as "dodgy" or "cheating the tax system." But if a big consultancy sends in a contractor to sit at the same desk for the same duration, it's completely exempt from IR35 scrutiny. The only difference? Ownership. The first is worker-owned, the second is not.
IR35 doesn't prevent "disguised employment." It just channels it through structures that protect and enrich corporate intermediaries. And those same intermediaries are often billing 2–3x the rate a direct contractor would charge—while extracting value from someone else's labour, then exporting the profits.
You also dismiss repeat clients as a sign of disguised employment - but by that logic, any successful small business with loyal customers should be disqualified from existing. Long-term client relationships are the goal of any serious enterprise. It's only when those relationships threaten the margins of large incumbents that they suddenly become suspect.
IR35 wasn't about fairness or tax efficiency. It was about reclaiming market share - removing small, independent operators who were too competitive, too flexible, and too accountable to clients, and replacing them with firms who could play the compliance game and charge more for less.
So no—IR35 didn’t just "clean up abuse." It entrenched it. It created a two-tier system where actual independence is punished, and corporate dependency is rewarded. That's not reform - that's capture.
IT has been one of the only modern trades where working-class people could genuinely break through - without inherited privilege, connections, or expensive qualifications. All it took was a computer, determination, and skill. For decades, it offered an alternative route to upward mobility that wasn't gatekept by traditional class boundaries.
To say those people aren't "working class" anymore simply because they found success in a high-paid field is to misunderstand how class mobility works - and to dismiss the significance of what's been lost. IR35 didn't just hit a few middle-class professionals - it cut off a rare path to independence that was uniquely accessible to people from working-class backgrounds.
That's what makes it so damaging. It's not just about tax or regulation - it's about who's allowed to build something for themselves, and who gets pushed back into being a compliant employee for a large organisation.
> Still do run small limited companies AFAICT
You're absolutely right—tradespeople doing B2C work are largely unaffected, because IR35 targets B2B relationships, especially when the client is a medium or large company. But that actually reinforces the concern: it's access to the broader market - especially corporate and public sector clients - that’s been cut off.
For working-class professionals who moved into areas like IT, healthcare, or consulting, IR35 has closed the door to operating as a small business in those spaces. They can still work - but now only as employees or through intermediaries, with fewer rights and no control. They’re denied the same freedom tradespeople still have in B2C, despite offering equally legitimate, client-driven services.
So yes, plumbers and electricians can run limited companies - but if someone from a similar background wanted to build a small IT consultancy or contract directly with the NHS, that’s now a legal minefield. The playing field isn’t level - it’s skewed in favour of large firms, and that restriction disproportionately hurts those without generational wealth or corporate safety nets.
It’s clear we’re talking past each other. I disagree that IR35 has had a specific effect on social mobility, but am happy to leave the conversation here!
If someone is a professional, they are engaged in a middle class job on a middle class income. Unless you consider “working class” to be something that is indelibly stamped on someone’s soul at birth…
Being a professional or in management is pretty much the definition of middle class - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_class_in_the_United_K...
This is what I mean by talking past each other - I don’t think we’re working from the same dictionary.
Many working-class people entered fields like IT, engineering, or contracting not because they were "born middle class", but because those were accessible paths that didn't require elite credentials, family connections, or private education. They built businesses, gained skills, and carved out independence - often still without the security, assets, or cultural capital traditionally associated with the middle class.
By your definition, the moment they succeed, they're no longer working class - which conveniently absolves the system of any responsibility for making life harder for them. It's circular: "If you’re struggling, you're working class. If you succeed, you were never working class." That's what's classist—defining people's identity by a fixed socioeconomic role and then erasing their background the moment they transcend it.
Social class isn't just about job title - it's about access to capital, power, mobility, and resilience in the face of economic shocks. IR35 disproportionately affected people who were just starting to get a foothold in those areas - often without the safety net others take for granted.
And yes, we may be using different definitions - but mine accounts for lived experience and systemic barriers, not just an abstract Wikipedia definition from a table written decades ago.
That's not what I've been saying at all, and IMHO that's pretty disingenuous. It doesn't absolve anyone of anything, it's a definition.
You do you though I guess.
My point is: when you define class that narrowly, it becomes easy to dismiss systemic barriers people face once they gain a bit of success. It makes it seem like they've escaped and no longer face structural disadvantages, which just isn't true for many. Especially when policies like IR35 are designed to push them out of ownership and back into dependency.
Because IR35 is not the major issue facing the UK that you seem to think it is...
Devil's advocate as I, too, dislike how it was basically lobbied by big corps but really it seems unsustainable for high tax Euro countries to allow their people too much working freedoms?
The idea that "too much working freedom" is unsustainable in high-tax countries reflects a deeply top-down, corporatist mindset. It assumes that ordinary people being in control of how they work is somehow a problem to be fixed - especially if they start competing with entrenched players.
In reality, IR35 wasn't about tax fairness. It was a response to small businesses becoming too competitive - delivering the same services as large consultancies, but with more agility and less overhead. The legislation didn't level the playing field - it tilted it to protect big corporations from small rivals, using misleading narratives to justify it.
Other countries may have similar pressures, but few have responded by attacking independent economic agency as directly as the UK has.
though of course it's not surprising, productivity is vastly higher in cities. but that's an argument for allowing and helping them to grow more.
urbanization started many hundreds of years ago, it's nothing new.
in fact, instead of committing to economically (and ecologically) sustainable high-density cities (and withdrawing from the crazy American Dream/Nightmare suburbs)
letting people piss away their lives in shitty none of the above places
The government could and should make an effort to spread growth around more.
Growth requires economic/business opportunities, infrastructure that can serve said growth, like-minded people to help manifest said growth, and ... that silly corporate thing, what was it, ah, synergies! Spreading all these things out leads to kick-ass local music scenes, but otherwise helps no one.
A total failure of the field of economics.
Just like economists insisted that the economy is doing badly because of vibes, they also insist that many people are part of the middle class based on an arbitrary threshold that isn't what it used to be.
Housing, energy, and education have increased astronomically compared to 30 years ago.
The cost of housing doubled in 10 years in my city. All while the schools got worse and the cost of college is astronomical. The cost of childcare doubled in 10 years as well. Energy bills also doubled in just 4 years.
What used to be a great stable income, we're even above the official line for what counts as middle class, is now just scraping by.
Being middle class used to mean that you were financially secure and could say have kids and a house. By that metric many people have fallen out of the middle class.
High costs of
1. Energy 2. Transport 3. Housing
Are the cause of low private and public investment.
The author treats the lack of public productivity growth as separate from the lack of public investment but the latter causes the former
Excellent piece about it here.
TLDR: "it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere. This prevents investment, increases energy costs, and makes it harder for productive economic clusters to expand. This, in turn, lowers our productivity, incomes, and tax revenues."
Housing is probably the biggest culprit. More on that here.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
Blocking green energy investment is the biggest area of frustration. You cannot demand to never see a pylon and then turn round and complain about your electricity bills. The press/public are fundamentally unserious about this. I got mildly radicalized when I read that someone was trying to block an offshore connection using the presence of "grade 2 listed concrete anti-tank cubes" on the beach.
Edit: example of listed cubes https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1...
I'm not against protecting historical heritage, of course, but society should serve the people currently living there. Just because something is over a few decades old doesn't mean it's worth bending over backwards to protect 100% intact without any changes. Would it really be so bad if a building from 1910 gets some double glazing, changing the appearance slightly? I'd say it's not.
Add a crowdfunding frontend. Put the sponsor's name on the website next to the building. Have a little thing promoting all the unsponsored buildings. Run a lottery which pays back some of the collected fees to privately-held listed building owners to help pay for upkeep.
But if nobody cares enough to reach into their pocket and spend the equivalent of a mildly expensive restaurant dinner on keeping this building listed? Maybe it's not actually important or significant at all. Fewer, better-maintained historic buildings, rather than just having them with the owner quietly waiting for them to burn down so something useful can be built.
Government's job within a capitalist country in a lot of ways is to ensure stability, a stable populace and stable society leads to stable markets theoretically. But what do you do if there is not enough jobs to go around to ensure that stability?
Simple: you just make jobs up, you make busywork up, you increase the bureaucracy to subsidize people who would otherwise be destitute and rioting on the streets. Technical innovation has driven out so many people from jobs at this point that we're reaching a true crisis against the cultural expectation that everyone that's "useful" works a job.
GDP growth: basically 0% for years. You're stagnating and losing economic time. Bad news.
Unemployment looks to be rising but overall not terrible. Participation rate seems high, grandma and grandpa still working it seems?
Interest rate of 4.5% is rough. Housing is problematic.
Balance of trade is negative, you're getting poorer.
Govt debt to gdp is up against the 100% barrier. Looking at central bank balance sheet, it does look like you just avoided bankruptcy.
Consumer confidence hasnt been positive in 10 years.
corporate tax rate of 25%? personal income tax of 45%. sales tax of 20% Yikes.
Seems to me the UK government is holding the economy back with far too high taxes.
A country cannot go bankrupt. After the war the debt to gdp ratio was 250%, and from that position the government nationalised 20% of industry, built houses, create the NHS and welfare state and developed a nuclear programme.
> corporate tax rate of 25%
on profit yes, but if you are big enough you declare as little profit as possible.
> personal income tax of 45%
that's the highest band there is, payable only on income over £125,140
> sales tax of 20% Yikes.
well it's a tax on added value on every step thorough the retail chain, collectable by the end retailer. It's zero rate on food and child clothes and some other things.
Taxes are indeed on the wrong places in many cases: e.g. dividend tax on unearned income should be equalised with income tax, income tax thresholds should be increased in line with inflation / wages and not frozen as they currently are. but I don't think overall tax burden is the issue here.
Correct that there isn't a bankruptcy legislation, but there's a factor of cant pay the creditors and you just stop. Which mostly implies that retirees go back to work.
If you'd like to invent a new word for it, fine but bankrupt is what many western countries are right now.
>but I don't think overall tax burden is the issue here.
This is without talking about property, tv, etc taxes. The total tax burden is probably over 100% and you're feeding people into specific tax free things like food. Definitely total tax burden problem.
The problem comes up against thermodynamics. The longer you run taxes at these high levels, the worse things get. That includes roads and everything. Even though in theory taxation should at least maintain those things. So your country becomes poorer and poorer. Not sustainable.
in the UK case then £895 of the debt is owned directly by the bank of England. So in the case of about 1/3rd of the debt the 'creditor' is your own central bank.
The government can of course pay interest on gilts by simply issuing more gilts. It's one of the advantages of running a country, intergeneration debt.
> The total tax burden is probably over 100%
Compared to what? income? capital gains? GDP?
total tax in UK through all taxes is 36.1% of GDP.
Taxes are not high in historical terms. USA for example had much higher tax rates (90% top income tax band) while it was arguably undergoing its phase of highest development.
Roads (and everything) get worse if governments do not invest in roads, or they invest in roads, but have outsourced to multiple layers of contractors who end up extracting a lot of the investment in profit and squeezing of labour costs and not in quality of road building.
Most other affluent nations have some form of zoning instead, which make planning much much easier. Most other affluent nations have more central control over planning too, which makes consensus over megaprojects easier to reach.
If you want the extreme of "cheap and run down", some Eastern European countries fit the bill. If you want the other extreme of "expensive and well-kept", Switzerland.
But Britain is in a unique place of both "expensive and run down".
Why Britain doesn’t build (worksinprogress.co) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36477481
The proposed recommendations to Starmer et al are also very vague, at least to me, Labour insiders or public affairs consultants might have obvious context to fill them in, I don't know.
Huge income taxes on low wages and limited wealth tax is not exactly enticing compared to welfare or moving overseas.
Well, not quite that simplistic. And WWI was also pretty brutal for both Britain's situation and outlook.
IIR, Adam Smith was very clear about the differences between healthy, virtuous capitalism, and the evils of maximize-how-much-the-self-serving-rich-can-squeeze-out-of-the-little-people feudalism.
I agree it's concerning that major speeches like this are so hard to find.
Sucked the life out of the middle and lower classes. A progressively weakening economy.
Then Brexit delivered the KO punch.
It's not difficult.
You're welcome.
Young, ambitious people in London are doing fantastic in their jobs and bring so much energy into their careers but are increasingly getting nowhere in their personal lives without help from bank of mum and dad. For many I know, it's driving increased rates of burnout and most are simply checking out of the country for the likes of Dubai/Singapore et al. because they see no desirable alternative.
Those that continue to grind on in London have to choose one of the tradeoffs between getting a home within an hour of their work, getting married or starting a family. To do any of these means drastically cutting back your expenditure, and as a result local independents/ pubs etc start to close down and get replaced by your clone town shops. Planning, gentrification and other reasons also contribute to all of this, but it means grassroots in the country are just getting stamped out and it makes it hard to ever really imagine a 'garage startup' in a cheap part of town being a realistic image.
The problem is though, that because a vast majority of the jobs, institutions and national infrastructure revolves around London, it's hard for any other cities to rise up to provide an alternative. So you get graduates who are ambitious flocking to the city, which attracts their friends and their friends friends. This overflowing workforce attracts more companies, more industries more investment. It creates an unbreakable cycle.
Ultimately the only constraint that faces any city growing like this is physical space. Once that runs out you get all of the negative externalities which are driving productivity. Dislocation of community, 1hr+ commutes wasting 10hrs a week of your most productive populations time, price spikes, increased crime, loss of identity, community and culture, the commercialisation and financialisation of everything and the feeling of everything is at breaking point everyday.
It's a troublesome place to be in. Your creatives and engineers don't have the physical space to tinker with things or to mend stuff, and to hire the space is extremely cost prohibitive. So they end up getting jobs in design agencies or investment banks. They aren't really dealing with physical things anymore and you start to lose sparks of innovation or inspiration. Everyone gets stuck in these bubbles and it impacts the rest of the country.
It's a massive shame, because a good life can be found elsewhere in the UK. Those I know in Manchester earn a combined income of £70-80k, own a 4 bed semi-detached (£350k) in an increasingly popular part of the city. They have a garden and a garage where they tinker with ideas. They learned how to use tools whilst renovating their property. They know their neighbours. They get to the national parks and swim in waterfalls within an hour of their home. Their friends live in adjacent streets and mend cars, join local community groups, share an allotment etc. I'm sort of rambling, but what I'm trying to say is the lack of pressure and the space to breathe is giving them access to experiences and opportunities that a London 5 year qualified grad earning 100k living in a 2 bed high rise flat couldn't even fathom (yet would benefit immensely from). In fact they probably pay £££ to do some basic household tasks in a controlled environment, but it's packaged up as a boozy [insert skill like painting] social event.
What actually needs to happen?
- We need to get our most energetic, creative and inspired people into some of the emerging areas across the UK regions. We need to de-stigmatise 'not moving to London does not mean you're a failure'. We need to drive cultural change through stories, film, music etc to help people imagine what a life elsewhere might feel like. To give them the confidence to revitalise areas in the UK. This will make the move more desirable.
- We need to fundamentally get more jobs and opportunities into our second cities. This will make the move more financially viable.
- To get more jobs into cities, we need to boost populations within 30-45 minutes of the CBD so companies can actually hire for the roles they need. To do that you need to invest in intra-city transport (trams/metros, cycle lanes, bus systems). You could also lean into hybrid more, build HS2 in full, so people can live in the North and go to the office in London twice a week within 1hr 30. You also need to regenerate old mill land thats derelict in the inner city areas, build easy to rent affordable flats so people can move to a city easier and get their bearings before buying. Make it more feasible.
We basically need to realise that the country is nearly 70m people, and to rely on/ only invest in just 8m in the London region to pick up the weight is always going to end badly. I truly believe London is now overheated, and the Richard Florida theory of agglomeration effects is probably now getting diminishing returns.
Tom Forth gets closer to the structural reasons in here: https://tomforth.co.uk/whynorthenglandispoor/
The best way to get young ambitious people to give a shit about the UK again is to make them feel like they have a stake in society. That's becoming more impossible everyday in London due to house prices (the traditional route). Get them into our next cities, founding start ups with less risk (lower costs) or joining local grad schemes with fresh energy, combined with investment into transport, get those cities productivity up and I promise Britain will turn a corner in a decade.
There was a definite split between my friends from south of Birmingham and those north of Birmingham though. The default for those from south of Birmingham seemed to be to move to London whereas for everyone else it was much more 'acceptable' to move to Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham post-University, even >10 years ago.
We already know how to do it all as a country - autonomous light rail, placemaking/ regeneration, connectivity, governance etc - we just have failed to ever do any of it more than once.
I've noticed similar trends re: where people move vs where they're from. A lot of my generation (currently 28-40yo range) were brought up with a 'it's grim up north' mentality and it still persists today. I'm hoping the next generations that make their first visits to alternate cities in the future don't feel the same thanks to the massive improvements seen over the past 10 years.
I still like living here more than other countries I've lived in - friendly people, lovely countryside, NHS. But I must admit housing is, and always has been, an issue.
Councils expanded the number of SEND pupils eligible for free school transport, increasing spending from £9m to £20m - how is that being poor? It’s an improvement in quality of life…? Ok, it might be a waste of money (or might not be) but it’s not a cut is it.
Being poor is like your country sends 10 athletes to the Olympics and they all get eliminated in the heats. No Western nation is actually poor. All Western nations are roughly the same, there’s nothing notable about the UK other than it is towards the richer end and is a cultural superpower.
Because the money is sucked out of the council coffers and they then can't provide a lot of the basics. It's not an improvement in quality for people who are, for instance, not SEND pupils. The point being that more and more expenses like this appear each year and then the budget is gone when it comes to looking after the library, fixing potholes etc, Small every day things that make the country look and feel like it's functioning are ignored until everywhere just feels a bit grim and broken.
I hope this will just be the first step.
I'd say he does bring pretty convincing arguments to the table and his logic does make sense.
if you take all the wealth and give it one group of people who don't put it back into the circulation but rather just invest it, it makes sense that there's no resources left for anyone else and "everyone" else is comparatively poor.
That's a typically successful but dangerous social media recipe.
There is "investment" that doesn't cause more activity, like having a second home for speculation purposes that you keep empty. But in general, investment leads to more production, and ends up creating employment.
https://birchlermuesli.substack.com/p/copy-garys-badeconomic...
Call it biased, but I'm also a priori skeptical of any public intellectual that points to their one pet theory as the cause of society's ills.
Managed to get on Question Time because he's very good at telling people what they want to hear.
First, there are a lot hooligans, drunks and layabouts. In recent years, add in lots of illegal migrants. Many people on social welfare, living in social housing, with either no ability or no desire to better their lot.
Then you have the NHS. Anecdote: one friend with severe back pain from a herniated disk waited a year for surgery. When she was put off again - make due with hot baths - she went out of the country and paid for it privately. That is not first-world health care.
The infrastructure feels like it's crumbling. I particularly remember the rail system, because I commuted weekly by train. They claimed something like a 95% punctuality rate ("excluding conditions not in their control"). In the course of one year, my train arrived on-time exactly once. Not very much is under their control.
Being a DIY type, I was appalled at the building standards. First anecdote: Visiting a friend whose bathroom has just been professionally renovated. They had another electrical plug installed, so the electrician just strung a loose wire across the wall. Then the painter painted over it - not behind it, just over it - so if it shifted you saw the old color.
Second anecdote: the apartment we lived in was in an old building, and water was added later. To get the water pipe into the apartment, they had just bashed a hole in the brick wall above the front door. When we lived there, decades after this had been done, it was still exactly that: a pipe going through a hole bashed in the wall. Oh, and the wallpaper was installed upside-down.
All this grousing shouldn't be taken the wrong way. Britain is a great place to visit, and I enjoyed temporarily living there. But for the average Brit or Scot? By Western standards, Britain is poor.
Yup. It's no understatement to say a good tradesperson is extremely difficult to find. They all charge the inflated going rate regardless of their skill level, as people are desperate. They often get pretty shiry/nasty if you demand things or want to check their work - to keep you afraid and to accept their very subpar work.
Materials are shockingly terrible across the board too
I've been putting off renovations because I've had so, so many bad experiences with tradespeople in the past.
It looks like (just like everywhere else in the world) the rich become waaaayy richer and the rest are taxed/inflated to death. It's not that a house that 'was priced' at GBO 200k is 20 years ago is worth GBP 1.5m. It's not that a house that is 20 years older than before has turned to gold and its value has grown. It is the constant devaluation of the GBP. Brexit simply accelerated an already bad situation. I still wait for Boris Johnson and his team to show us the GBP 350m per week to be redirected to the NHS.
I think that "you will own nothing and be happy" is happening in the UK already with below 35 to never own property (unless inherit it) and by then they have to sell it to have a 'modern' lifestyle.
Swings and roundabouts: life expectancy for the poor will fall, but we will have another handful of billionaires.
TL;DR: It's not by accident that Britain feels poor.
- GDP Per Capita at the same level as in 2018. - Number of British Billionaires increased by 20% in the same period.
Markets are not zero sum until they are.
Embracing that nonsense (including rampant neoliberalism) has really rotted the backbone out of our society.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization
2. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Evolution-of-the-GDP-sha...
In comparison, China has actively suppressed over financialisation and results speak for themselves.
I'm no communist, just someone who recognizes the social and economic benefits of abundant housing, cheap energy, and forward thinking transport policy.
I have no idea how we'll get back on the track of improving human development but it's not going to be easy.
See also: Detroit, Rio de Janeiro, highway sides of Silicon Valley.
The peasants in England were still incredibly poor. The British Empire was the largest empire in history, and the nobility and elites sucked up all the imperial wealth.
Because remember, being rich isn't about the amount of money you have, it's about the amount of money you have more than the average person. The goal of capitalism under oligarchical control is the maximization of the gap.
What has made everyman's life better has been technology. It was never capitalism and finance.
But, no.
>> The big picture is pretty simple: we have a huge debt burden sucking over £100bn out of the budget every year (more than the entire education budget and nearly double the defence budget); and that would be okay-ish if the economy were growing, but it’s not.
No no. The economy is not growing. That's the problem. It's a bottom line on a spreadsheet.
And do you know who is responsible for all this? Well according to the author of the piece above that's all the useless public officials and quangos (maybe we should take ... a chainsaw at them?) and the crazy overspending the must obviously be responsible for (or at least that seems to be the allusion in the article, though never stated directly like that).
Sorry but given all of the above I have very serious doubts about the article. I mean it's clear there is an agenda here and it's not about poverty, or not about reducing poverty anyway. It sounds more like it's all about increasing richess, the richess of people for whom poverty doesn't mean a trip to the local food bank, but a trip to the Greek islands in a friend's jet because you can't afford the fuel for your own.
And maybe that's the reason why the UK is a rich country but so many of its people are poor. It's not a matter of quantities of money, it's a matter of distribution.
___________
[1] https://cpag.org.uk/sites/default/files/2024-01/CPAG-Poverty...
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/68574869
[3] https://england.shelter.org.uk/what_we_do/updates_insights_a...
[4] https://theconversation.com/rail-disruption-in-the-uk-is-so-...
[5] Personal experience: 3 out of 5 of all train journeys during my four-hour commute would be cancelled or delayed. Fortunately I could WFH.
[6] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clynvjgynp8o
[7] https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/staff-shortages-in-the-nh...
[8] https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2024-079474
[9] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-62253893
[10] https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/hundreds-queue-around...
[11] Personal experience. I live in an affluent student town by the sea but outside this affluent enclave it's like another country and you can see why people would jump at the chance to bury the current political class and piss on their graves.
"How did you go bankrupt?" "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly."
Lee Kuan Yew commented upon it in From Third World to First: "As Britain’s worldwide influence shrank, so did the worldview of its younger parliamentarians and ministers. Some old friends, British commanders who had fought in the last world war and had served in Singapore defending us against Sukarno’s Confrontation, compared the old generation British leaders to oak trees with wide-spreading branches and deep roots. They described their younger leaders as “bonsai oak”, recognisably oak trees, but miniaturised, because their root area had shrunk."
I fear the same thing is coming for the USA as it, inevitably, loses its standing as the world's sole great superpower (which it only had for maybe 20 years at most!). We could easily get stuck in a permanent cycle of demagogue after demagogue promising to, well, make us "great again."
You see it in individuals too. The root of the word celebrity is celebrate. Make someone a celebrity and put them on a pedestal, and it often ruins them forever. It's a fickle thing. When they inevitably go back to being just a regular person, the effect is often to leave the person permanently feeling like a has-been. They flail around for the rest of their lives trying to recapture something that is fleeting instead of enjoying the fact that (1) they achieved something few people achieve and (2) they have the rest of their lives ahead of them.
Success is more psychologically dangerous than failure.
There's a saying: "whom god wishes to destroy, he first makes mad." I think a better version is "whom god wishes to destroy, he first raises up."
Actually, that's not quite right. The root of both "celebrate" and "celebrity" is a Latin word whose original meaning is something to do with crowdedness. Celebrity (in the older sense of "being famous") means being someone that people crowd around. The original meaning of "celebrate" was to hold a religious service, attended by crowds of people. Later "celebrity" evolved to also mean a person who has the quality of celebrity-in-the-old-sense, and "celebrate" evolved to also mean to hold some other kind of event that attracts crowds. But "celebrity" didn't ever primarily mean "person who is admired", it was always "person who attracts attention".
(It is still true that people who are famous and then not famous can find it hard to adapt to the change, of course.)
I think you are right, but I also think it afflicts the ruling class a lot more. In particular, politicians, who are power seekers by nature, feel the loss more than ordinary people do. IN their minds, not being a super power equates to declined, even if life improves for ordinary people (which it did).
2) They decided they wanted to punish hard workers and productive investment and aggressively reward capitalists that "park money" in non-productive assets (like real estate).
England could easily reverse these decisions and aggressively reward hard work and investment in productive assets, open the doors to intellectuals, and the hard, smart working people and investment would come pouring in.
But, they'll never do that, because boomers.
The problem with England is the problem elsewhere. The amount your society needs to improve to let ~1% more people not work every year for ~30 years is incredible. The entire west has done it. But the benefits are going almost exclusively to the retiree class.
In the not too far future, if trends continue <50% of adults will be working with very high standards of living. This is absolutely UNHEARD of. At the same time, you'll see basically no benefit at all for the people who actually do the work.
This doesn't seem like the best way to distribute productivity gains to society, but it's the way we've chosen, and as long as old people have a say, you better bet they're gonna vote for the status quo or even bigger pension payouts in the future.
> Like with every colonial power...
Some colonial powers may have genuinely increased the wealth of the imperial state. The Spanish and Mongol empires stand out in my mind here, although I don't have a precise source of accounting.
But blaming whole countries for the actions of single entrepreneurs has been the MO for a very long time now, so I can see how you feel correct making that statement
Trade imbalances like that always lead to war. historically.
Ego, corruption, etc are explanatory. The statewide economics just never quite worked.
Happy to engage, just need to understand :-)
Yeah and why didn't people praise me when I released all the puppies from my puppy kicking factory?
So until you return what is stolen from every country around the planet, keep the BS to yourselves because it only angers the rest of us, you pathetic thieves. Totally deserving what is going on in the UK. And I fear it is too late to turn that ship around in the next couple of decades. Especially with the politicians that are running the show and the younger ones in the pipeline.
And it is a great pity because I have lived and worked in the UK and I loved the people and the place. But hold your tongues and stop biting your own tails (you snakes) and perhaps you will have a better life in 20-30 years. :)
Yes a bunch of individuals got rich, but my position is that their tax payments (and wider economic contributions) never justified the cost of maintaining the colonies.
It would have probably been better if the government just gave the upper class money directly, rather than indirectly by paying for navies to acquire land for them.
I learned about it from watching Coup 53 [1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2WaMdGl0uw&list=PLanJEt7jLo...
But they provide a very good standard of living for their citizens.
The Suez Crisis happened 70(!) years ago, the article is talking about where modern day UK spends its money. It's literally right there in the opening sentence, if you only bothered to open it:
>Britain is a rich country with the world’s 6th largest economy and the highest tax income for decades, which raises a simple question - why do we seem so broke?
Aside from strictly technical topics, this community is now worse than Reddit.
Power != Prosperity
> One reason for this is that parts of the British state are fundamentally misaligned with goals like ‘improving living standards’ or ‘increasing wealth’, whether that’s through hand-wringingly incompetent procurement processes, long-term failure to invest in the infrastructure and management required to support ‘moar frontline staff!!’, acute treasury brain, or endless cohorts of committees and quangos.
> The current level of ambition, of vision, just doesn’t match up to the situation we’re in.
It’s about a failure of state capacity. The article’s entire argument hinges on why British institutions can no longer turn wealth into functioning systems. The post-imperial loss of strategic vision among British elites is not a distraction: it’s the historical foundation of the current malaise.
Suez was the moment Britain exited the world stage and never figured out what it stood for domestically in the vacuum that followed.
You can’t talk about the failure to invest, coordinate, or reform over decades without asking why the ruling class stopped trying.
Which isn't a bad thing. But the key there is in building frameworks. Instead, we seem to have built large portions of the public into thinking these are the only frameworks that matter. And so everything has to be tied back to them.
The most plausible models for UK decline that I've encountered come from a Youtuber named Britmonkey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZxzBcxB7Zc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5aJ-57_YsQ
He talks about housing as _ongoing existential crisis_, contra widespread apathy on the subject, and about how since Thatcher, the political rule has tended to integrate the worst aspects of center-left and center-right governments.
Ezra Klein's _Abundance_ has been in the news lately, and there are some very similar arguments made there, focused on the US context.
Much was made of the double rainbow that appeared when the queen died, and I say that was God saying, "Things are going to be better now, now that that evil bitch is dead."
Maybe if the royals weren't spending their world rapings on 13 pomeranians (or whatever), there'd be more money for the poors.
I do like Harry, though, he's got enough of his awesome Mum in him to counteract his father's evil.
And now King Donald is decimating America. Such is the way of kings, my friends.
- Not taxing the wealthy;
- Austerity measures that do nothing but destroy government services; and
- Housing prices.
You see this kind of disconnect all the time. For example, in the Biden administration, people would point to how well the NASDAQ is doing to say "the economy is doing great", which says nothing about the job market or living standards.
These economic measures really tell you nothing about wealth and income distribution.
House prices all over the developed world have to come down. This is arguably the biggest problem. But voters will resist that because it's their nest egg. At this point, this only goes one of two ways: fascist police state or socialist revolution.
Hoarding or denying shelter or food is violence.
There aren't enough wealthy to cover the shortfall. Doing this is a moral issue, not a national economy issue.
But yea, the rest I think I agree with.
> This is because average tax rates rise more quickly with income in the UK, and are already higher at the top relative to the median, than in most of the European countries that raise more revenue overall.
> Austerity
Tories spent more on government than 2000s labour as % gdp
Perverse incentives are an absolute disaster for the economy of our countries. Recently the socialist party approved in Germany an income limit for parents to receive income replacement benefits when being on parental leave. What was the result? From my group of friends in all cases the lesser earner from the marriage (the woman most of the time) has stopped working in order to not reach the income limit. This results in less income tax collection for the State, a poorer family and a less productive company. No one wins.
But more taxes alone won’t fix the problems outlined in the article—namely, the misaligned incentives across different branches of the State and the shockingly low return on each pound spent. That inefficiency is probably also a symptom of poor alignment among the individuals involved in procurement, as well as broader societal incentives.
Over the past few decades, States have grown so large that the original incentive structures they were built on are now being challenged by competing incentives emerging from individuals and various sub-organizations within the State itself.
These kinds of conflicts are far less common in the private sector. There, the company’s goal—profit—is usually well aligned with the customer’s goal—getting the best product at the lowest price. And that alignment tends to cascade through every level of management, all the way down to the last employee.
I dunno, that strategy worked fine for Americans. Am I supposed to believe that liberal use of eminent domain will turn Britain into an overnight utopia?
It's, among other things, part of the body of evidence that Civil Law may be notably more efficient than Common Law. Britain's also unusually bad in this department, though not as much as the US (the Civil vs Common thing probably isn't the whole story anyway—it's rarely that simple)
Unless it's roads