Posted by prawn 4/4/2025
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.
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[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."
But they provide a very good standard of living for their citizens.
I learned about it from watching Coup 53 [1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2WaMdGl0uw&list=PLanJEt7jLo...
> 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.
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.
Trade imbalances like that always lead to war. historically.
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
Ego, corruption, etc are explanatory. The statewide economics just never quite worked.
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. :)
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?
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> ... funding LGBT propaganda overseas ...
> Everything else is more or less a scapegoat for the real issue.
Unintended irony.
- 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.
> 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.
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.
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.