Hacker News Reader

Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

As if Britain didn't have real problems to deal with:

- Long term unemployment is at a 17 year high.

- Government debt is at 90 percent of GDP.

- Violent crimes is worst in EU.

For years Britain has feared loosing sovereignty to the European Union. To me it seems like they should maybe worry more about American influence with all the wars they fight, the spying on their citizens and now the neo puritanism.

View on HN

What do you think is easier for Cameron:

To fix the above, or to push through moralistic laws that will keep the media busy and get positive treatment in papers like Daily Mail to draw attention away from the problems?

He will do the latter and prevent larger problems (protests, growing opposition) with his new censorship infrastructure. Which, in my opinion, is his main motivation.

I have no doubt he'll do the latter. But I don't think he'll dare use it to prevent protest - if he does, he will face much larger opposition. Heck, I'll take to the streets if that happens, and the only demonstration I've taken part in in the last 15 years or so was a single anti-Iraq war demonstration that happened to take place across the street from me...

If we get that far, I'll also throw 10k towards darknet infrastructure if someone comes up with a viable project.

For some perspective:

Rates of murder and violent crime have fallen more rapidly in the UK in the past decade than many other countries in Western Europe http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22275280

Homicide rate is less than loads of EU countries (and Canada!) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...

Murder rate is one of the best proxies for comparing violent crimes in different countries because it's usually defined more similarly than other violent crimes.

At 1.2 the UK still has higher murder rate than most of its neighboring countries: Germany (0.8), Denmark (0.9), Norway (0.6), the Netherlands (1.1), France (1.1). In that end of Europe, only Belgium (1.7) and Ireland (1.2) is doing worse or equally bad.

The "loads of" EU countries doing worse are mainly some of the new member states from Eastern European, which are much poorer than the UK. Only Belgium and Finland seem like countries the UK would like to compare themselves to that are actually doing worse.

Your original comment was "Violent crimes is worst in EU." This is clearly not true.

If you'd like to reword your comment to "UK violent crime is worst in an ad-hoc collection of countries I've decided on" I'll withdraw my comment.

I think it's quite interesting how uniform are the murder rates across western europe.

> "- Government debt is at 90 percent of GDP."

Describing debt as percentage of GDP is a subjective anti-debt framing of the issue. Here's why:

Units of debt: $ (here pounds). Units of GDP: $/year. So, units of debt/GDP: years, not percent.

Since "100%" sounds like a high number, this way of framing the numbers is useful for scaring people. Putting it mathematically correct "11 months" sounds much less scary.

GDP is a measure of the size of the economy to allow comparison between different years and different countries. Putting things in fractions of GDP allows the same comparison to be made meaningfully.

> Putting it mathematically correct "11 months" sounds much less scary.

Yes, and for exactly this reason it's dishonest: It implies that you could, if you wanted, repay the debt in 11 months - which is impossible.

Anyway, 90% debt is only scary if we decide that there is a threshold below 90% that is un-scary. If the threshold was 150%, then Greece is scary but UK isn't. If it's 10% then everywhere is scary.

Personally, I'm more scared and/or outraged by the way the money is wasted than by the exact size of the debt.

100% agree with your last sentence.

Now, I'm not really replying to you as such, but I don't quite understand the alarmism over, say, a debt of 100% of GDP.

UK tax revenues are 39% of GDP (so, very naïvely, the government's "income") and with a debt of 90% of GDP, that's 2.3x income. Or a typical £25k earner having a long term debt, like a mortgage, of £57.5k.

I confess this is an extremely naïve analysis since personal and government budgets are chalk and cheese, but it doesn't strike me, as a taxpayer, as being a number to get alarmed over. Or am I totally missing something?

What you're missing is the fact that having a mortgage implies having an asset (a house) worth something more than the mortgage principal. The government does spend on investment, but the vast majority of the budget in sunk into running costs. Then, the more appropriate comparison would be a £25k earner with £57k in credit card debts, which is obviously a lot more scary - but again not completely comparable as the guy would be paying 20-30% interest while the government pays close to 0%, mostly because they have the power to raise their income on demand if they need to in order to service their debts.

> Yes, and for exactly this reason it's dishonest: It implies that you could, if you wanted, repay the debt in 11 months - which is impossible.

It does not imply that. It's simply the mathematical truth of the units. I'm arguing that using percent is factually _false_, with as aim scaring people. I prefer truthful facts with explanation. Feel free to use a different thing than debt/GDP, but don't use something that's equivalent to claiming that 1+1=3.

while i understand the unit, what does 11 months _mean_?

When you put debt as a percentage of GDP, it is understood to mean the "size" of the debt, with the implied "size" of 100% being bad (whether this is true or not, i m not sure).

Yes, though of course, the numbers should get their scare value from something more objective. I.e. some kind of study about how much debt is actually harmful (or not?).

The problem with that is that it's very hard to get a substantial body of empirical evidence in which you can isolate the variable. There was incredibly high debt during and after WW2, and the UK survived that, but then there's the elephant in the room of the uniquely united nation having just fought off a very real and direct existential threat. We don't exactly have that level of common sense of purpose today.

... because the government is one person, unable of accomplishing multiple tasks at the same time?

> - Violent crimes is worst in EU.

Why would that be Britain's problem ?

I think what OP meant was that Britan has the highest rate of violent crimes in the EU. This was all over the news a few years ago, and it's still fairly high, but it's important to note that the UK is very lax in what it considers "violent crime". Whether that's a good thing or not is another matter.

I think you read that wrong. That Britain has the worst violent crimes in the EU is definitively Britain's problem.

Indeed, I read "worse" instead of "worst". My bad.

You should parse that sentence as "Britain has the highest occurrence of violent crime in the EU," which is very much our problem.

He means that Britain has the worst level of violent crimes of any country in the EU.

Worst != Worse

Reply on news.ycombinator.com