I can't speak to the poverty side, but anecdotally my colleagues and I work in a high-tech profession and our salaries are hardly competitive.
I'm earning less than 33K as a cybersecurity engineer and I'm struggling to save up for a house, my student loan has increased from interest since graduating, and I'm the frugal one at work.
UK wages have been stagnant for over a decade while the cost of living has increased so much.
There are better paying companies I could move to, and I'm keeping an eye out, but as the article states - there are systemic problems in this country that the people in power are failing to tackle.
I had been considering moving back home after 10 years of living in Australia so started researching wages for Engineering roles and the salaries were so low, with the cost of living nowhere near balancing out against the low salaries.
I’d expect a big boost in wages since they left Europe due to a loss of available employable market but it seems the opposite.
>I’d expect a big boost in wages since they left Europe due to a loss of available employable market but it seems the opposite.
Salaries have spiked, immediately after brexit, but have stagnated because no new investments are gonna happen in a country that's separated from the EU single market, so all new big tech has decided to expand instead to Amsterdam, Dublin and Berlin.
Up voting this isn't enough. London can pay well, better than everywhere in Europe even, at the right company and with good negociating power. If a UK firm contact you, you're set and have us-level salaries (upward 200k 8 years ago in medtech). If you're just going back to europe for a routine job however, you should first check Switzerland (then Netherlands. They also have the most interesting jobs if you're a low-level guy)
I'm not the one who got hired (sadly), but the person who got the offer was a nodejs developer who wrote some random promise libraries (he was really good at optimizing calls, both real-time and async, and knew js better than anybody I've met since), and I think I remember he talked about a private clinic or something (private monitoring?). He ended up being tech lead at an online bank for less money.
> I’d expect a big boost in wages since they left Europe due to a loss of available employable market
Despite Brexit having arguably been driven by immigration concerns, immigration to the UK has increased since that vote, and reached a record of 606k in 2022 [1]. It has been increasing since 1995, and in 2015 13.2% of the UK population was foreign-born [2] - so not counting children of immigrants.
I ask this all the time: how can real estate costs in particular be so high with these wages?
SF gets all the press for having loony real estate costs but vs wages it’s actually not the worst. The craziest places are those with $1-2M starter homes and low pay.
My theory is the change in cultural demographics. European/North American parents find it weird to help their kids buy housing. In Chinese culture, that is very much the norm. My Indian friend will get his down payment from his parents.
So people don't need to buy housing with their own resources in many cases. It can also include the resource of two more people, or even 6 more people (grandparents chip in).
Coming from a working class / poor background it absolutely is true. Until I graduated and working in a wealthy area with upper middle class background people, I had never heard of anyone having their parents pay for their house. This is really split based on how Wealthy your background is.
While not straight up buying a house for their children, in my experience (middle class, PNW) it is, while not common, not unheard of for parents to assist their kids in buying a house, be it by providing some/most of the downpayment, or co-signing on the home loan.
In North America its often considered "crippling" children to give them too much help. I've seen it repeatedly, with some families giving children 3 months after graduation to begin paying rent.
Everything from parents kicking their kids out or charging them rent at 18 (or ever) to anecdotes from North American friends of how they got pushed out of home to pay rent while in university.
The endless lectures of Dave Ramsey on not wanting to provide a "hammock" for kids are also an abundant source of information.
North American parents won't consistently have a college fund for their kids. Also planning to pay for the down payment on their home is absolutely not normal for them.
It's similar to other places, like Canada. Demand far outpaces supply. This leads to what I call a "propertied spiral", where people with property (propertied class) are enormously in favour of protecting the market value of their property to the point of constraining attempts at increasing supply (often but not always), where people who are just able to afford property live with quite a bit of precarity and large debt to income ratios, where people who are just unable to afford are still renting, which heightens demand on rental properties, pushing rents higher (because of the supply constraints), which squeezes even hard on people who are barely able to survive. And so on and so on. This is actually a picture of most real-estate markets pre-WWII, if I understand right.
I was going to reply to the parent and say Canada but you beat me to it.
Canada's housing bubble (?) existed since at least the early 2000s when I was in grad school. Everyone expected the bubble to pop. When condo prices continued to be strong during covid (who the heck would buy condos), I just had to admit I was wrong. This is not a bubble but we did not see the true factors driving things. Immigration is the biggest one. People do indeed bring suitcases of cash from all over the world (including Ukraine). After covid, we had a torrent of international students enter, and these folks are bolstering rents (real-estate investment is probably the most profitable activity in Canada).
I know why I wouldn't buy a condo now (it's impossible) or particular condos in particular markets, but I don't see why someone wouldn't in general, though I'd probably prefer something at ground level. As long as I agree with the conditions, a condo would be fine.
The rest, well, it's some of those factors, but it's also the whole system designed to be static and reward pensioners with property and investors. Every facet of the system is fucked, and it ain't gunna get better.
The government is more than happy to use inane schemes like "government-backed loans for 20% the cost of new-build properties" to prop up the market and ensure house buyers end up with the absolute largest amount of debt possible. Somehow, these schemes are then marketed to voters as "helping first-time buyers"
Cheap credit and a rising market are all you need.
Good for those with existing capital who can access the credit and use growing equity to leverage new investments. Terrible for anyone without existing capital actually earning an income.
Both of these factors appear to be changing in many places (very significantly here in NZ). Interesting times ahead.
It's a deal with the political devil: if people view their house as an investment, housing prices must rise faster than inflation, or they're a horrible investment. But if they rise faster than inflation, new entrants to the housing market are priced out.
In the UK, it's because Real Estate is a massive investment conduit.
Plenty of British Nationals and foreigners across the world will buy property in London, causing downstream impacts on housing across the rest of the UK.
In addition, British cities are artificially constrained from building due to the "Green Belt" construction bans from the 1930s-60s to prevent mass sprawl. All it did was essentially block construction though [0]
On top of that, the UK has a very severe inequality issue - almost all (relatively) high paying jobs are located in Greater London, which forces prices to go into hypergrowth in an area smaller than Santa Clara County.
Also, the UK has been in a lost decade since austerity kicked in around 2008 when several MASSIVE banks in the UK collapsed, which causes wages and spending within most industries and govt services in the UK to essentially be frozen at 2000s levels. [1]
If you are on 33K doing cyber then you must be in an area where houses are cheaper than normal. If you are in London, then as you acknowledged you are doing it real wrong and you should be upping your job search game.
Your main point stands though - tech jobs pay much worse than they do in the states. The only two competitive uk tech jobs I seen are DeepMind and hedge fund (not even investnent banks are competitive)
Competitive salaries with the US isn’t really a thing in countries with socialized healthcare, welfare, etc. With these institutions in place life looks qualitatively different at any salary.
Problems start when these institutions get systematically dismantled and salaries don’t change to make up for them.
It looks like you've been misled about the US. The US welfare budget is mind-bogglingly large, over a Trillion dollars per year. Yes, Trillion with a T.
Healthcare costs can be very important for Americans working in low-wage positions, but are essentially irrelevant for tech workers.
Here's how healthcare costs impact my life on an hours-worked basis:
Monthly health insurance premium: 20 minutes of my wage per month
Office visit at a primary care doctor: 12 minutes of my wage
Office visit at a specialist: 15 minutes of my wage
Maximum amount I can possibly pay in a year (eg, if I get in a car accident and spend months in intensive care): 20 hours of my wage
To be clear, the American who is driving Uber full-time or cooking food at McDonalds would have a drastically worse situation, and their costs might be multiple hours worked to see a doctor or multiple weeks of wages to cover a catastrophic hospitalization. But on a tech salary, healthcare is trivially covered.
This is selling the narrative that enables the continued wealth disparity of EU and UK tech workers. This narrative was bought into (by workers imagine that). For all our collective bargaining we've bought into our Stockholm Syndrome enough not to bargain for wage equality.
With the salaries US tech workers are earning, healthcare, welfare and childcare benefits don't substantively impact their take-home for it to matter.
Anyone tech worker buying a home now needs a bigger down payment or will face a massive mortgage. Add in the inflation of food and hygiene products, a $100-$150k year salary has the buying power of $50k a couple decades ago.
The politicians know exactly which screws to turn to prevent the proles from getting too much leverage. It’s been part of the playbook for decades, we were just not honest decades ago:
You seem to assume that workers could get higher salaries if only they were angry enough and believed they should get more. It's not the case, you're not going to get offers way above the current local market rate just because you believe that rate is too low.
That's the case today in France, high taxes, poor salaries and crumbling social healthcare.
I agree there are many causes well known even 15 years ago (including propensity to prefer social welfare to investments and hard work), but the collective blindness is astonishing.
Same in Germany. I have relatively unspecific, but serious medical problems, and while I do receive standard GP and surgeon care, I've been waiting for months to see specialists regarding the underlying causes. Best guess of multiple doctors is to take antibiotics, which at this point seems like the medical professions "have you tried turning it off and on again?".
Why every time when someone points out the fact that tech workers in Europe are severely underpaid in relation the US someone always sees it as a personal attack.
How does that in any way justify lower salaries pretax?
> With these institutions in place life looks qualitatively different at any salary.
I’m not sure it does. People who earn above the median rarely have access go welfare (unless its child related). Also working for an American tech company you’ll have decent insurance and can save another 50k per year just in case anyway..
> With these institutions in place life looks qualitatively different at any salary.
As someone who's worked at high income levels in both the US and the UK: The US is emphatically better at high income levels. The employer-paid benefits were miles ahead of my socialised care (or even private insurance) in the UK. Yes, they're employer-tied, and that's a real risk worth considering, but from a purely personal standpoint that's a risk I'm willing to take.
(Don't get me wrong, I'd prefer that this wasn't the case, and that life was qualitatively better for lower earners even if it was marginally worse for high earners in the US.)
I can't speak to your circumstances but even graduate engineers in the East/south-east of England wouldn't get out of bed for <£50k. Maybe you need to move.
33k is criminal, mate. You may be dealing with stuff and not want to "switch" right now but, find a short/mid term plan to switch because, even though UK is not US in terms of salary, it's also not Spain. The cost of living is very high not to have something that feels at least moderate.
You and your mates don't work in a "high tech profession" typical if they're being scammed with those salary ranges. That's not normal.
Now, the UK is definitely going to shit in terms of social contract and taxes, fueling wars and corrupt bureocracy instead of betterment of society, but that doesn't change the fact that the salary you have should not be such.
- remove irrelevant non-tech jobs from your CV and LinkedIn, even if they were long stints
- I don't know the market for cybersecurity engineers, but I guess that it might be too narrow of a niche in a small country
- don't just 'keep an eye out': actively look for jobs; also consider that some US companies are willing to hire remote in the UK
- given you already have some python experience and a strong mathematical background, my suggestion would be to learn as much as possible about software engineering and data science, and consider building a career in one of those fields; most people can't study stats due to weak math foundations, but you don't have that problem
- if you don't think a remote job is a good fit for you, consider moving to London
- surround yourself with smart, hardworking people
> - if you don't think a remote job is a good fit for you, consider moving to London
This is a recipe for potential disaster: London cost of living, especially housing, is out of league against the rest of the UK. It is however true that its where the ICT sector is, and joins Fintech and other market segments. Reading is also worth thinking about for ICT, or Bristol, Oxford and Cambridge but none of these are good housing markets.
GBP33k is right on the median salary for the UK. That should of course NOT be poverty line living. It speaks volumes for the crisis in the UK economy that the cost of rent, heating has gone through the roof, and that this is no longer a comfortable paypoint. It's not nothing, but its value in real terms has dropped significantly. People on 33k should be able to save money and have a safety net. From speaking to family who live in the UK (I emigrated 35 years ago) many of them don't have this buffer. It's scary.
Thanks for the advice! I've considered data science and even did an internship at a startup in Toronto, but I didn't find the work as enjoyable.
>surround yourself with smart, hardworking people
This is honestly the #1 reason I haven't moved yet, I've never worked anywhere with so many knowledgeable people willing to share their experience. I can't go into details but the learning opportunities I've had this year have been way beyond what I could get somewhere else.
While some people might think I'm making a mistake, I'm willing to take the monetary inconvenience for a bit longer if I can use that knowledge wherever I go next.
Thanks for the additional context. A few final thoughts:
- even if you stay in cybersecurity forever, I'd guess that increasing your software engineering capability is worth some amount of effort
- the knowledge can help you in the job, and in an interview, but in most cases it's your CV that gets you the interview; someone reading your CV will likely look at your past accomplishments, so it would be good if those learning opportunities also allow you to have some impact
Considering that 33k is exactly the median wage in the UK, and google says the average starting computer science salary in the UK is 44k, I’d hazard that there seems to be some relevant information missing from your story
I've got a Masters in Physics and taught myself cybersecurity to make the career change. I've got CompTIA Security+ and Network+ and I'm working towards RHCSA.
I'm the primary engineer creating/delivering a SIEM solution for my employer so there're some details I can't share publicly but pm me if this meets your criteria?
Based in Yorkshire but open to relocation/hybrid/WFH depending on the role.
Sadly it doesn't fit our criteria, but this does explain the £33k package.
A lot of the kind of skills you've mentioned have become very commodified, and being based in North England is limiting your career as most buyers are located within Greater London.
I'd recommend
1. Moving to Greater London - most of the companies that have the budget are located there
2. Skill towards cloud and containers skills (eg. CKA for Kubernetes, AWS Solution Architect, Azure Solution Architect). Most large companies have active 3-5 year roadmaps to move core apps to the cloud, especially within Europe. It will also help you move laterally into DevOps/SRE of Platform SWE roles.
3. Implementation roles don't pay well in Europe. It's better to work as a Sales Engineer or a Professional Services Consultant for a (usually) American or Israeli vendor (eg. Splunk, AWS, IBM, Checkpoint, etc). This will require some experience but if you have 2+ YoE and are willing to move to Southern England, you can break £55k+ for sure
CKA is definitely on my short-term roadmap, the SIEM I'm working on uses Kubernetes and I'll be working towards an AWS implementation so those certs will be available to me too.
I'm a senior fullstack dev (php, js, react, vue, python, etc). I mostly consult and do freelance work as it works better for my ADHD, but my best years I do 70-90k, my worst years <20k (covid+depression+anxiety destroyed my motivation in 2021).
I can definitely relate. I had a good year last year, and have been client-less since June and having to borrow for rent. At least our rent is lower than SF (1600), but still not easy to come by.
There is a breakdown of education and personal ambition. Once someone has been brought up to be 'feral' with no education and even a disdain for education, it tends to knock down families for generations.
My kids assume they will never own their own home. They had their education trashed by covid. It is hard to be ambitious when you see success as impossible.
Shaming people for being losers is not a good way to enroll them again onto a path to success. It actually causes murders, if you count the incels that are shamed until they commit a mass murder to have their suffering heard.
I’m an ambitious guy with lots of success and I work day and night. But I’d never reckon bravery in someone who’s working day and night, they have it easy, since they ecosystem is answering positively to more work from their side. So I just had to bring in the work. Oppositely, when the economy pulls of down by your bootstraps, it takes real courage to be ambitious.
Genuinely interested here, who are you referring to as ‘feral’?
I see a lot of very well educated non-feral people in the UK struggling to make good wages and a ‘proper’ standard of living. I think that’s what is meant by a broken social contract ?
The Thatcherite maxim of "there's no such thing as society" is what the Conservative government still have in place today, and have done since the 80s.
The point is that 'society' is not something distinct from us that we can blame. Society is only the average result of each and all of us individually, like the big, bad 'market' is.
What Thatcher said:
"There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first."
The UK is an inherently classist society. No need for disdain when it's been the case for literally a thousand years that certain people are afforded excellent education, and others… aren't. Any disdain of education among the working class is more a consequence than a cause.
Immigrants from South and East Asia have children who fare much better than those from the "white working class". It's not because of society or money, it's because of culture and values.
I am not blaming 'victims' but on the other hand if you don't do anything to help yourself you can't expect success...
A personal anecdote: we tried to get one of our children into a grammar school and so got private tuition for 11+ exam preparation. 90% of those attending were of Indian origin, very few 'Brits'. And we are also immigrants.
I really don't understand. A drop in prices of housing alone will fix all the problems (as long as banks are backed by the central bank like they are in the US).
Write laws that:
- Prevent non-humans entities (trusts, shell-companies, foundations etc. from buying houses for the next 10 years)
Increase supply (build more), keep demand steady (sane interest rates, sane immigration rates, speaking as an immigrant), and housing costs simply must fall. Yes, even if a single corporation buys every last house in the UK.
Given UK age demographics that is going to happen over the next few decades anyway, putting all efforts into increasing supply could lead to the opposite problem in the not too far future.
Unlikely, all UN demographics predictions were/are wrong. Population is mostly grows everywhere unless that region a war zone. Being that growth driven by births, immigration, refugies or illegal move is irrelevant in context of supply/demand.
It's more 'define the interval'. For Japan and Greece that's more a stagnation - population didn't grow or fell much in last 30 years. On a interval of 2-3 generation (20-60 years) most of countries show growth, not decline in population. Many times predicted population decline in Germany turns to be slow growth during last 30 years.
the war has made construction hugely more expensive in many countries
The globalization of the real estate market has always been a setup for a scam and everybody knows it, yet keeps doing it, and the whole west is now stuck in this catch-22.
> But they are being punished for having unproductive capital.
Yes, and in some circumstances that might have been enough. But the fact that we got to where we are now proves that we are not in thise circumstances, because it isn't enough.
It seems likely the houses are overvalued, on the basis that ratio of house price to income has increased dramatically, and also that a significant fraction of the pension provision in the country is investment in property. I'm not sure what the housing market collapsing would mean for the UK but am doubtful it would fix more problems than it spawns.
For what it's worth, the tax system is aggressively punitive towards companies that want to buy real estate. Landlords with mortgages can't offset the interest against profit any more so a bunch of those are no longer viable concerns and sold up.
Some conquence to vacant property might be good, beyond the already punitive stamp duty when you go beyond the first one. I think you get hit for capital gains when selling non-primary residence as well.
The issue (elsewhere than the UK) is that regulations have also made building so expensive that it's actually not worth it. People cannot pay for new houses, even on very cheap land. I don't even understand how it's supposed to work, by the current building standards in .be I'd say about 80% of all houses (mostly older ones) would be torn down if we follow the letter of the law. And a lot of those building standards (e.g. electrical safety, piping safety) apply to existing housing, not just to newly built ones.
Social housing used to be famous for the government simply not following building codes (whether that meant maximum land occupancy or isolation/material standards), and disclaimed responsibility when it lead to accidents. But it made a lot of people home owners.
That's partly because developers of large estates often have conditions on their planning permission such as including a certain proportion of "affordable" homes within their mix and funding various community facilities. So on paper they have approval to build all of that.
The reality is that they can often make far more profit by building the expensive houses first, drip feeding them onto the market, and possibly never finishing the whole estate as originally approved. It's no accident that many homes are approved but never built. It's just a small group of wily giant building firms playing the system and getting away with it.
In theory local authorities who administer the planning system should call them on it. In reality it's a David and Goliath situation. Attempting enforcement actions can result in years of expensive legal battles ultimately funded by local taxpayers with no guarantee of success even in what appear to be cut-and-dried cases.
Tripled its housing supply since 1960 according to that article. Meanwhile Vancouver’s population went up by more than 4x. So it doesn’t seem surprising affordability would get worse!
I’m in the USA but if I don’t put my house into trust for my kid then he has to go through probate and spend tens of thousands to get it when I die. I agree corporations and investors shouldn’t own houses just for investment purposes, but you also need some amount of rentals allowed because not everyone wants to buy a home. I’m not sure where it is, but there’s a fine line separating the moral investment into houses from immoral rent seeking.
> I’m in the USA but if I don’t put my house into trust for my kid then he has to go through probate and spend tens of thousands to get it when I die.
And that's by design. Every human coming into the planet should start from a reasonably same starting point. By not taxing inheritance, the super wealthy's children start much further than the children born to non-wealthy families.
The tax on inheritance is the best way to ensure that there is "some" inheritance but not enough that the children start at a starting point that is insanely ahead of others.
Hmm maybe but that puts a lot of trust in the system. Do you think taxing inheritance will result in the democratizing of said assets to society at large?
Looking at the last three decades I see wealth just accumulate in mega corporations who now seem to operate at levels above that of many nation states. Large banks that can demand bailouts and demand “quantitive easing” which simply aggregates wealth in these banks and corporations. Literally transferring wealth from the bottom to the top by government decree.
Good living conditions are like a magnet for economic migrants, and the wholesale arrival of migrants will start a race to the bottom which will destroy any quality of life.
A population decline doesn't lead to a race to the bottom. Less people means the economic output is likely to shrink in absolute terms, but it doesn't have to shrink in per capita terms. On the other hand, less pressure on natural resources, less pollution and less people overall makes arguably a nicer environment to live in.
What you're missing, is that all the property owners take out massive amounts of credit, believing that the rise in property values will cover it and they can just remortgage in 5 years. So they buy pointless shit like Range Rovers even though they live in the city and take luxury holidays they wouldn't be able to afford otherwise. The smarter ones use the extra credit to buy more houses. If the property prices tank all these people go bankrupt. No government will let it happen because they'll become unelectable for decades. It's truly absolute dogshit.
property owners who over leveraged themselves forced to sell properties should help drop the price, so its actually a positive in terms of the solution, its just radioactive on the political end.
Canada is the same way except massive immigration, temporary foreign worker program, and foreign students allowed to work 40 hours a week (in case you were wondering if the student visas are legit) have driven up the price of housing beyond any reason. Probably multiple generations of canadians whose financial future was sacrificed so the current government can run their seemingly ideological immigration program.
If there was much more modest immigration, which there probably should be at least for some time, we'd eventually have severely inflated house prices anyway, because that's the system they built. Various types of immigration are just some of the parts of it, and it's much more complex than just "dial the knob down and we're golden".
As a Romanian I can confirm that, all things considered, we are not doing that bad. Inflation hurts a lot of people, of course, but we’ve had way, way worse than this back in the ‘90s, so those of us who are older than 40 or so just sigh, maybe swear at the politicians and then hope that things won’t get worse.
What’s really helping, for now at least, is that housing is still relatively affordable (with the exception of Cluj, a very IT-focused city). If that housing affordability were to disappear then, yeah, the optics would definitely change.
The "new" European economies are poorer but they're also more egalitarian. Lower average income, but more people near the average. That creates the odd situation where a young person born into poverty in, for example, Poland, or Estonia, may have better prospects than someone born today into poverty in the UK, or even France. More of a real chance at social advancement, ending up middle class and socially-economically secure. Quite a reversal from just a few decades ago.
I was recently in the UK and a friend there expressed a similar pessimistic sentiment— "things are really bad here, the whole world is going down the drain".
Back where I'm from, things aren't looking as bleak as they are in the UK. I found that comment amusing really. The assumption that since Britain has historically been wealthy and a one of the better places to live, if things are not looking great there, they must be so everywhere or something.
Romania has the highest home ownership in Europe. Hungary is third. The UK is near the bottom.
In eastern Europe it's common to see young people building their own houses in rural towns near the big cities. They earn less money, yes, but they don't waste 50% of it on rent.
Now there's a western-centric statement, if ever I saw one. Why do you assume "the poorer EU countries" are like the west, only worse? Other replies give more nuance.
This here is one example of the mindset that made britain poor. The individual is poor but at least others have it worse. The shocking news is that apparently the poor of east europe are richer than the poor of britain. At least in tech, pay is better once you factor in the cost of living.
So while people like you slave away for a mortgage and a cheap holiday those people grow their investments and improve their lifestyle.
Apparently the poor of east europe are doing better than the poor of britain. And in tech, a lot of folks in east europe actually own and can afford things.
I mean, listen to modern UK music for about 10 minutes and you’ll hear this. I like “nothing great about Britain”. “Top Boy” isn’t exactly about people thriving.
A recent discovery of mine are "Sleaford Mods", a genre I like to call austerity punk.
When two people in their mid 50s complain about the cost of living, you know the system has completely and utterly failed us. I can only look with pity at the naive mass of people that still believe a better world is just an election away.
Never thought I would see the Sleaford Mods mentioned in a Hacker News thread. As a 50-something UK male I agree the world has gone a bit weird when the rallying cry for revolution is a well articulated by my peers as by the youth.
They are an acquired taste, but I learned to appreciate how modern and punk their music feels. Not aimed at authority, like the 80s punk movement, but angry at how mediocre, mundane and unfulfilling our daily lives have become in the past 30 years.
It's about time punk started to turn on the rat race.
It does seem like the frustrations are really bubbling through in art. I've been listening to a band called Yard Act whose lyrics are overtly political and also seem to capture the anger younger people are feeling.
As an outsider looking in, one gets the sense that things are devolving and faith in British institutions is declining.
I use the definition: "Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned."
Weird definition of capitalism. Tons of systems respect property rights and individual freedoms. And, in fact, none of these states operate under the condition where all property is privately owned. Where they fall on those measures doesn't correlate with the weal of the people either, at least not the way you are implying.
Which tons of systems? The US currently does not qualify as capitalist by that definition, we currently have a statist system with an unelected 4th branch of government, etc.
Is this causation or correlation? Those "free countries" seem to correlate pretty closely with colonial powers.
Scarcity necessitates tighter control. "Freedom" is easier to guarantee in prosperity. Also, at a global scale, if you're a rich country, it sounds like you'd want to spread a system that benefits those who have capital.
Capitalism inevitably devolves into crony capitalism/corporatism. Indeed, what is happening in the UK is literally after decades of of increasing liberalization! So "works without fail" seems to be an exaggeration at least.
To the extent that the government regulates/controls commerce, you will have corruption and cronyism. Restore freedom and remove the government from commerce, and cronyism goes away. I'm guessing the UK government is HIGHLY involved in all aspects of commerce.
Remove governance and corporations will flood in to fill the void. Personally I'd rather have a master I can vote out rather than a bunch of corporations dictating how I live.
The winning formula that seems to work without fail for personal productivity is crystal meth (not overdose or paranoia/psychosis or permanent heart and brain damage of course).
It's popular these days to dismiss negative consequences for all sorts of things as fake, but side effects need to be confronted and actually dealt with, not just waved off. Would you let the 'communism has never been tried actually' people off the hook?
"poverty cannot be tackled by raising incomes alone, and highlights housing and childcare costs, the additional costs of disability, and energy and travel costs as areas to be addressed"
I'm not sure how to interpret this since clearly raising income does allow people to pay these costs.
If the report is saying the government needs to intervene in the housing, energy and childcare markets, then that would be a breath of fresh air.
our costs for these things are insane, $2000 monthly.v netherlands is richer than UK but their childcare costs half as much. In germany it's free. Same story for housing, I have friends around europe and people with twice as much floor space pay much less rent
> netherlands is richer than UK but their childcare costs half as much. In germany it's free.
Is this private childcare setting its own rates in a market, or some public childcare service paid for with increased taxes, or some hybrid (i.e. private with supplemental government funding, or private with mandated limits on pricing)?
What that statement means is that measures to facilitate supply side volume are also necessary, giving the demand side money is not the only option. If it is too cost-prohibitive and risky for incumbent firms and potential new competitors to supply an increasing volume of services or goods then buyer subsidies will only inflate prices further.
I think that's safe to assume, since income is contingent on employment and occupation at any given point - keep those services affordable to reduce the risk of citizens losing access to them
Poor people voted for Brexit, as it would mean more jobs.
Well, time to start working 3 of them. Reduces your housing costs as well, as you should always be at work. Hard to have much sympathy for people voting for the leopards to eat faces getting their faces eaten.
What about the people who voted against Brexit but still have to suffer the consequences? There are millions, and millions more who couldn't even vote e.g. because they were too young at the time. "You voted for this so suffer" seems like a remarkably cruel response.
Free from a superpower that trashes the countries who try to leave them. Free from a superpower where you only get one vote every 5 years and the rest is managed by administrations outside of democratic rule. When I see my country not allowed to negotiate with UK, because we have to let the EU diplomats negotiate, it’s horrible.
It’s horrible what we’re doing to the UK people. It’s bullying. It’s revenge for leaving us. Let’s not dismiss how important is the role of the EU in the fall of the UK.
He is talking about a 5 eye state and nuclear power, which left an economic union, losing the benefits of said union and calls it bullying as if nation states were toddlers.
The nation states in the EU agreed to join knowing they'd negotiate with third party countries as a bloc. And they benefit from that. The EU is doing to the UK what it's meant to do, protecting the interests of EU nation states. The UK wants to do 1:1 negotiating because then it's a more even playing field, but that's almost certainly a detriment to each state within the EU.
Occasionally some politician in the EU is going to be swayed to argue in favour of individual negotiation. But, as far as I know, no nation is pushing for a change at the EU level. If they were I'd expect it to be for political rather than economic reasons anyway, i.e. somewhere like Hungary wanting to have a trade relation with Russia against EU policy.
Yeah I find it strange that the EU technocrats believed and still do believe that Brexit was a UK problem. It was a wholesale failure of the EU project, even just at the level of truly convincing people that it was worthwhile and good for them, when there was a (slight) majority in the UK who didn't believe that when the choice was put to them. Those that run the EU seem to be blinkered to the idea that other people might not agree with their full-speed-ahead mission of federalism. They were openly laughing at Nigel Farage (not a fan of him but...) in the EU parliament, like laughing out loud to his face in public, when he announced that he was going to get the UK to leave. They couldn't even conceptualise such an event. Now nobody is laughing, and it has been labelled as simply a British problem.
Jean Baudrillard summed it up brilliantly in responding to the 2005 referendum in France that voted 'non' to the Lisbon treaty, which again, they couldn't believe at the time. But then they just rewrote the treaty in a different form and passed it anyway, almost in whole. Same sentiment from Baudrillard applies to the Brexit referendum, and ongoing today:
1 vote every 5 years for a town is acceptable. It’s only 3000 decisions. And you can have an impact on your city through other means.
1 vote every 5 years for a country barely is; 1 vote for a continent is nothing. We have absolutely no control on what happens in Brussels. It’s basically an autocracy with occasional buy-in from citizen.
Even when we vote “no” when asked, we stay in Europe. And even though France was asked in 2005, and said no, they stayed in Europe. The same risked to happen in UK when they said no in 2015, politicians didn’t want to implement, so the people had to vote out TWO governments until they actually implemented the brexit.
Politicians will ask us again in France or elsewhere once there is an overwhelming majority of yes. That’s why they don’t ask currently.
This is the danger of living somewhere with low salaries but justifying it by low cost of living and robust government welfare.
Once the rug is pulled and cost of living goes up or the government sucks you’re screwed. If you had a high salary you could just pay your way out of this mess yourself.
If you're making a comparison with the US, there is the severe flaw that not everyone in the US has a high salary either, which means they're extra doubly screwed, and then all the high-salaried people still have to live in a country riddled with the social problems that causes. Then they go on the internet and complain about homeless people in San Francisco.
Had a handful of UK-based employees join our company in a merger; I was shocked at how underpaid experienced professionals were compared to our (U.S.) wages – and I was incensed when our investors balked at a (nominal) raise for them.
I have a hard time separating agendas from reality these days, but I'd love to get someone who is smart on the UK's to understand how that country got there, especially considering my (probably wrong) impression that things like healthcare, a major expense here in the U.S., seem to be taken care of. I understand wages are stagnant, but... why?
Read "Britania Unchained" (available at various shadow libraries). Then, when you've read it, realise that it was written by Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Liz Truss.
It's garbage front to back. We elect fucking idiots who are in thrall to a tiny clique of rabidly anti tax arseholes who would rather set their granny on fire than pay any tax at all. And then we wonder why the country is on fire.
We didn't in fact elect the Truss administration in any meaningful sense. Nor did we elect the current Sunak administration in any meaningful sense. In fact historically close to half of our Prime Ministers have landed the job without first leading their party to victory in a general election.
Our system of government places the vast majority of the real power at national level. That power is normally wielded by a Prime Minister who is only indirectly elected by commanding majority support among the directly elected MPs in the House of Commons. That means the PM and the government they in turn appoint can change without any general election taking place.
In theory MPs are supposed to hold the government to account on our behalf. Unfortunately those MPs are themselves elected via a First Past The Post voting system that is infamously unreasonable on almost any mathematical basis that should matter. It frequently results in a large majority of MPs for a single party that did not win anything like a majority in a general election while simultaneously reducing smaller parties that still won a significant minority of the popular vote to parliamentary irrelevance.
As ever with these political problems the feedback loops consistently prevent anything being significantly improved. At any given time the one of our two largest parties that almost always has a majority of MPs and runs the government as a result would have to surrender its dominance in order to effect meaningful change in our democratic structures and turkeys rarely vote for Christmas. So we end up with a situation not so different to the US, where there are effectively only two parties that matter and the real decisions are often made before the main election when the parties select their preferred candidates internally. And each party ends up being a "broad church" with a lot of internal disagreement and inconsistency because breaking up into smaller parties that more faithfully represent the true opinions of their members would guarantee losses in every election forever if the other guys didn't do the same thing.
Yeah but at the same time, tons of d*ckheads in the south keep voting for the same cohort of Tory Ratbags, so the faces change but the policies and chaos remain.
Next labour will get in, not be able to fix anything because they have no real policies, and they'll be back again.
Every US company I’ve worked with that ended up with a London dev branch as part of an acquisition seems well aware of the wage disparity. They pull over the cream of the crop on L1 visas. It’s like temp-to-perm except 1000 times worse because it’s Sr resources with families broken on the countrywide collusion to underpay IT workers.
Part of it seems to be that the UK based companies don’t expect massive success. They have a thing, it makes some people at the top a pretty good living, that’s enough. They obviously could create massively successful companies based on the talent available, but no one wants to.
Or possibly more accurately: the people who want to realize that proximity to other like-minded people is critical to success, and they leave.
Every originally-from-the-UK tech worker I know in the US is well aware of how lucky they were to get out.
Software engineer salaries in the UK are on the 75th percentile of earnings vs the 90th percentile in the US. The US also has higher variance of income, so at the 90th percentile one would earn 2.6x the median salary vs 2.0x in the UK. If you are a highly paid professional the US is a pretty good place to be.
Just before the banking crash of 2008 pay for software engineers in London working in finance were fairly competitive with Silicon Valley. You generally got paid better as a contractor, £500-600/day which was then about $950-1150/day which if you worked all year (six month contracts were common) worked out at £120k/year ($230k) which was about double what you'd get as an employee so lots of senior engineers would do that (no need to worry about healthcare!)
Since the crash of 2008 the US dollar has increased a lot against other currencies and has grown much more than Europe. The Obama administrations stimulus helped the US recover more quickly while the Eurozone was forced into austerity while it was forced to work through the contradictions in the way the Euro was set up, with countries issuing debt in a currency they no longer controlled.
The US tech sector went through a huge boom in the past decade which drove up tech salaries here more generally. It was also pretty good for UK tech salaries as Google and Facebook opened large offices in London.
The UK was a huge financial centre similar in size to New York with bank bailouts spread over just 60M instead of 300M people, but being outside the Euro the UK was not forced into austerity in the same way many EuroZone countries were. The Tory government used it as a way to shrink the state. This stymied growth and ultimately sowed the seeds for Brexit which I think was a misguided anti-establishment backlash, in its way quite similar to Trump in the US but with longer lasting consequences.
The government's Office of Budget Responsibility estimates Brexit to ultimately end up costing about 4% of GDP over 15 years. Certain financial services jobs are moving to the EU for regulatory reasons and it could well kill off much of the UK car industry which was heavily integrated with the EU. The UK was particularly focussed in engines/powertrains so will be heavily hit by the switch to electric vehicles and there seems little reason for global car makers to invest in the UK when they could invest in the much larger EU.
Even now, software developer salaries in London are higher than pretty much everywhere else in Europe except Zurich. But the rental costs are just obscene. Sometimes I think about moving back to Europe for a while but I'm not sure I'd move back to the UK since after a decade of austerity it all seems a bit grim.
Even though we will get rid of this awful Tory government soon the Labour Party has promised not to make any substantial changes to ameliorate the costs of Brexit, ruling out rejoining the single market.
Probably the UK central banker has the worst job in the world right now.
I can’t think of any other place where people’s sense of net worth is as tied up with their house price as it is in the UK, while at the same time the increase in house price that people have been conditioned to believe is the norm over the last decades is wholly unsustainable given the stagnant wages. Take a look at house price to wage ratio over the last two decades.
Something has to give eventually either a mighty correction in the housing market that will shock many that were lead to believe it is the only safe investment, or an uprising of those who have no chance of getting on the ladder.
I would love to be proven wrong by a sudden influx of broad-based well-paying jobs, but I just don’t see how and where they will come from.
I can’t follow these kinds of comparisons, because housing isn’t a function of wages. The only thing that affects housing prices is the supply of houses.
Does the UK have a large supply of houses? Does London have a lot of spare land where they can build new houses? Is the population of the UK increasing or decreasing? These are the only question you need to ask to predict what will happen to real estate values.
A house can be priced as high as it wants...if no one can afford the mortgage then I guess its just going to sit there with a For Sale sign for decades?
I suggest you do a bit of research on how income relates to house prices.
Here is the tldr: in country where most people buy houses on mortgages, and mortgages are given based on a person’s income then wages will pay a direct and very important role on house affordibity.
Also house supply is important but far from the only factor effecting house prices. If gov builds 1000 new houses and they instantly get bought by, say, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund it will have virtually no impact on house prices.
If they are empty then prices will remain the same or increase.
If they are being rented out then prices to buy should decrease since there will be less demand (since more peopel will be renting and rents will probably decrease).
> The only thing that affects housing prices is the supply of houses.
Well yes and no. I would argue, treating housing as an investment vehicle for both corporate and foreign interests has had the biggest influence on low end housing prices around the world. Corporate buy-ups, government backed loans and "affordability" scemes have all actually pushed pricing higher.
To be clear A large percentage of corporate and foreign ownership isn't actually needed to have a large influence on pricing simply because of where they are most likely to invest. Just a couple of percent adds significant upwards pressure on the low end of the market where affordability is felt the most keenly. After all buy low sell high.
Real estate is a lucrative investment only because demand outpacing supply and prices expected to grow indefinitely. If supply will substantially increase it would depress prices and investors will move to jurisdictions where government helps them by restricting supply.
> I can’t think of any other place where people’s sense of net worth is as tied up with their house price as it is in the UK, while at the same time the increase in house price that people have been conditioned to believe is the norm over the last decade is wholly unsustainable given the stagnant wages.
Also New Zealand.
Surprise! It's a global phenomenon where governments across the world have done everything to ensure housing is the safest investment there can be.
As prices go up up up those with, gain, and those without are left paying outrageous sums for rent to pay for someone else's higher and higher mortgage prices.
No its a 5 eyes psychological warfare program based on Maslows Hierarchy of Needs.
So shelter is an essential base layer, and by promoting home ownership, banks are now being used to mess people around if they get out of line in a deniable ops way. If you cant even afford a home, you have that psychological inferiority put on you by only being able to rent.
The state is always looking to reduce costs because it can claim to be a low taxation nation, and in reality prisons cost alot, so rather than feel the long arm of the law and end up in prison with todays global technology and ability to look anyone up, causing trouble in peoples home life is now the 5 eyes modus operandi.
All sorts of low level stuff going wrong designed to keep a individual busy rectifying said problem, whilst also getting flack from those around them.
Its thought people will fight/work harder trying to maintain their home and their life and their families life, so all sorts of low level bad things will happen to an individual or household.
Its actually quite nasty some of the things that get done to people, but its always in a deniable way, made to look like incompetence or bad luck, and thats hard to prove because of the way society works. You couldnt tell if a washing machine engineer has deliberately sabotaged your washing machine in a planned obsolesce way or not, but the military leak rumours about people and then people take it upon themselves to contribute to that harassment and intimidation.
Things like reddit malicious compliance can give you a taster of some of the things people choose to engage in, but others will take it to the next level which puts peoples lives at risk. Ultimately its called Karma, but the military will pursue you around the country so you even get hassled on holiday.
This is a list of some of the things thats been done to me.
Stopped by the side of a busy road, engaged in conversation and casually positioned so my back is to the road before individual did something to make me step back into the road in front of moving traffic. Its a high curb so I would have fallen backwards into the road.
Head (nose) shot by someone using a silenced snipered rifle whilst walking my dog around a footpath in a farm.
Ex directory, countless unknown numbers, international numbered phone calls or call centres. Got a new phone line put in, and started to get the same on that number even though I'd only given the number out to one car dealership.
Hassled when holidaying in various places of the UK.
Post going missing.
Arrow fired into garden, drones flown into garden.
Someone filing tax returns for me, when I havent.
1mm diameter x 25-30mm long metal added to takeaway kebabs designed to get lodged in the throat, or do damage to the inside of you mouth.
Someone release a small deer in front of the car on an unlit section of dual carriage. Person was hiding behind the armco barrier that makes the central reservation and was trying to cause me to swerve and crash.
Over powered cars pulling out to over take forcing me into the verge to avoid a head on crash.
NHS claiming letters lost in the post. Fake stuff added to doctors notes, creating fictional events.
Courts claiming letters lost in the post in a bid to secure a conviction in my absence for speeding.
Countless malware forcing me out of business.
Program code being changed so my own software stops working.
GCSE Exam results marked down, A-level courses getting messed around with making it untenable to study.
Been drugged in social and home settings, and had things done to me.
You'll literally get driven to suicide but the ambulance staff will resuscitate you, for more of the same.
Reported to police, police not interested!
All of this has taken place in the UK. The people behind it are in a position to deny their activity as they automatically have more authority than I would have in court. It also coerces you to get more security, like cctv fitted inside the home and office which enables greater surveillance which is what the spooks want.
> I can’t think of any other place where people’s sense of net worth is as tied up with their house price as it is in the UK, while at the same time the increase in house price that people have been conditioned to believe is the norm over the last decades is wholly unsustainable given the stagnant wages. Take a look at house price to wage ratio over the last two decades.
United States. In inflation-adjusted dollars, house prices are up 118% since 1965, but income is up only 18% [1]; alternatively, house-price-to-income ratio has increased from 90x in 2012 to 135x in 2022 [2]. US Millennials have been deemed "the unluckiest generation" when it comes to home ownership in the US.
And in the same time period, the average house size has doubled from 1300sqft to 2600 sqft. So people are paying about twice as much for twice the house.
This is a true but it's a trick. Sqft in real estate isn't purely the dimensions of the home. A 1300sqft home can become a 2600sqft by virtue of hanging some drywall in the basement. Houses aren't really twice the size they were just sold with unfinished basements new, the occupants later finished the basement (mostly just drywall and a little hvac work) and then it was sold again at its "larger" size.
Houses have gotten bigger though, it's not just people drywalling their basements...
I live in Texas where they don't build houses with basements because the soil won't support it. First place I lived was a typical working class family home built in the 1940s: 2 bed, 1 bath, kitchen, living room, laundry room - 1100 square feet total.
Meanwhile most new construction homes here are over 2000 square foot.
And I think this is really crummy and unfortunate. Myself, my wife, and my one child would be very happy in a 1,300 sqft house but really don't need or want a 2,600 sqft house. So house prices increasing along with house size is still problematic.
1300 sqft homes are still common, in my experience. They're not detached homes, but most people in the market for 1300sqft homes are looking to save money, and compromising on lot size saves a lot of money.
But that 1300sqft was average. Which meant a lot of homes were smaller than that. My brother once owned a 600 sqft detached house from that era.
Yes. Parts of the south and isolated pockets are prosperous, the rest has been run into the ground. No jobs, no real wages where you're not back on £-0 at the end of the month so just working to work (if you're lucky), public services cut and cut to the bone. It goes on and on.
The council of Birmingham (biggest in the UK) just went bankrupt today. Liverpool is also totally gutted with poverty and no real employment or investment, and has had its council put on special measures for the past couple of years due to widespread corruption. Place is a bit of a shit show. It's just London and minor areas now, barely even a country. Only hope is to become even more of a financial rogue state and channel more of the world's dirty money.
1) I wouldn't really know because I haven't visited enough of them.
2) I'm not sure really any of them could be considered as "similar" enough to properly compare, even though they all now run on neoliberalism and free-market economies.
2a) if you compare it to Australia which really is similar in terms of mindset as a former colony, the UK is a sh*tshow. But Australia has endless mineral wealth to dig out of the ground and a large amount of primary economy like farming, which the UK doesn't have. It's more egalitarian, better wages, better opportunity, better chance to do what you want and be successful, all based on a British foundation. The UK has just crumbled outside of London and the south. People had money and kept it, those that didn't, still don't and it's hard to get it.
I always chuckle a bit when I hear the term social contract. It's not legally enforcable, isn't codified, people can't choose to partake in it, and has always been intentionally vague. Almost like a trick to convince the masses that they're owed something by the "leaders."
That's a perspective from leveraging one limited mode of thought, albeit a prevalent one in the modern Western world. I think throughout most of human history, most humans would've had the ability to deal with both the implied and imprecise or ambiguous. I view mode of thought that disregards them as rather the more limited and incorrect one, as they ultimately form the basis of the notion of codified and explicit, via mechanisms such as implicit beliefs like "we can make a cooperative explicit system and abide by it", and so forth.
A lot of the UK's legal system itself rests on convention, tradition, and precedent, and isn't written, and moreso going back in time as evidence of this.
Enforcement has historically sometimes taken the form of kings' heads on pikes, when the explicit law is that the king does what he wants and suffers no consequences. The implied contract of just rule takes precedence.
I think you've misunderstood - the social contract is a fiction, that's why it's purposely undefined in my opinion. It's just something we're told exists so we can feel like the fox watching the henhouse is a good arrangement. I prefer not to believe in very many things simply because belief's the end of the logical process.
> I prefer not to believe in very many things simply because belief's the end of the logical process.
I think it's worth acknowledging that belief in some types of things makes them real - "self fulfilling", if you will. The social contract is one such thing, Santa Claus is another. As such, belief isn't limited to being just a mental reflection of truth - it can also be a statement of intent about what you want the world to be. When I say "I believe in you", I am not simply stating my assessment of your capabilities, I am trying to help you. It is an action. Likewise when I say "I believe in the rule of law", or "I believe causing pain is wrong" - I am trying to make them true.
Counterpoint: the social contract (or treaty, or whatever term you want to use) protects both sides. It says that people or institutions that could otherwise crush you won't, in return for you following a set of basic rules and conventions. You seem very focused (to use the polite word) on how it's less freedom than you wish for, but it's also more freedom than you might have had otherwise. There's endless room to debate what those rules are or should be, but in general the social order thus created is better for everyone - including you. Cooperation brings benefits, and structured cooperation avoids the losses of endless bickering about the boundaries. The alternative to a social contract is "might is right" and it would be absurd for you to assume you'd be on the winning side of that.
There are informal contracts and their enforcement occurs through extra-legal means. For example, there is a general compact not to murder in any society. So when revenge happens after murder, there's an informal moral understanding and cushion of social sympathy and forgiveness for vengeance, even if vengeance is typically illegal. In other words, if you break the agreement of peace then you should expect payment in violence.
For entities as large as the state, I think there is an informal contract for people not to engage in anarchistic or revolutionary violence until their living circumstances becomes untenable. The degree to which their circumstances are understood as unjust will interact with the response they get from society.
IMO such agreements must be informal and fuzzy, and a lot of peace is maintained through these extra-legal structures.
It would help if you recognized that it's a philosophical concept, not a legal one. Maybe you've noticed that lawyers and other people often use the same words with sharply different (and often counter-intuitive) meanings. Thus, legal requirements for what constitutes a contract do not apply. Neither do legal standards about specificity, enforcement, etc. You could argue that it's a bad term, but to argue that the thing itself is deficient because it doesn't meet legal standards is a bit sophomoric.
The "social contract" is a parlor trick where those in power say "Give me more power and we'll take care of you" and once they receive the power they no longer have any incentive to follow through on their side of the bargain.
> Almost like a trick to convince the masses that they're owed something by the "leaders."
It is a trick. It's to trick me, or you, or maybe even our leaders, into believing we have obligations to each other. Legalism is indeed a fiction. A useful one. That impartial processes and rules can bring order to social interaction. One of legalisms more useful fictions is the contract. A way of thinking about social interaction - regulated by law. As another commenter notes, this may not be literal law. It may be quite unenforceable. Think "international law" which is similarly arbitrary. Just vague principles. Still, it gives us a way of thinking about the issue - how should we treat each other? One way to approach it is, as if a mutually binding contract existed. It's a legalistic approach towards the Golden Rule, with a game-theoretic justification thereof. Do we treat each other as we should?
I started to fast to cut down on food cost. I think the last time I went to the shops, I had spend £10 on stuff that I was used to paying a little over £3 for. It's crazy times.
There's a lot to be said about this— I want to bring up the conversation around exports. I'm no expert, but I was having a look at these.
The primary export of the UK are services, making almost half (~48%) of their total [1]. I can't help but compare this with France at ~34% [2], and Germany at ~19% [3].
As the rest of the world rises, how defensible is this sector for the UK? Germany exports a lot of industrial machinery, pharmaceutical products and vehicles, which means factories, a complex supply chain, brand recognition, patents, etc. Overall, things that are hard to move or replicate abroad.
- 28% of the UKs exports are Information Communications Technology. It has IMO a weirdly broad definition (including "marketing, manufacturing, assembling, servicing, installing, maintaining and/or repairing systems, software, equipment, machines, devices and apparatus" [4]), but it sounds to me like it's in large part knowledge-based, digital work.
What prevents an industry that doesn't involve machinery, factories, and supply chains from moving to India, for example? Net (exports minus imports), the UK accounted for 24.3% of ICT worldwide in 2003, and India for 3.3%. Now India is 16.3% net and the UK 13% [6].
- 13% of the UKs exports are Insurance and Finance. In 2003 the UK, net, was %40.7 worldwide. now it's 28%, mostly to the gain of the USA [7].
The UK has been running a trade deficit of about ~1.5% of GDP every year since 1998 [5][8], without the USA's capacity to print USD. I'm no expert. I just wonder if the UK is betting too much of its economy on industries where it'll have a hard time remaining as competitive as it currently is.
I'm not sure that selling physical goods provides much of a moat in itself, you can see that from how much manufacturing has moved to China.
I suspect Germany has been able to buck the trend in Europe because it is particularly well run and the UK has been struggling because it is so poorly governed.
It is not going to be better. At least not anytime soon and not without significant mindset shift.
People are not getting more intelligent, but the jobs evolve to require more and more intelligent and versatile people to be productive.
For example, in the past you could spend a lot of time training to do a job, which you then performed for the rest of your life. This lets less intelligent people be productive in jobs they normally would not be able to do (intelligence defined as ability to handle novel problems). This is no longer an option.
Another problem is that companies become better at detecting who is and who is not productive. There is still a lot of possibility of improvement and this should be scary to people, because in my understanding most people in most organisations are unproductive.
Given that we can't stop the progress, I think it is important to start thinking how to deal with masses of people that will never be able to find place in the new market. In the past, they would be used as peasants and slaves to do marginally profitable jobs but this is no longer available except for special cases (like cab or delivery drivers) that are going to be vanishing soon.
For some reason people call this socialism and put a negative stigma on it. I like to think it is a necessary for the future of our civilisation.
I like to think it's necesarry for future of our civilisation to leave them behind. That's the sacrifice we need to make to progress a lot. Spending trillions just so they can breed is not a smart way to progress.
elections have consequences
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