Samuel McIlhagga had a Palladium article a couple months ago that I missed, but Razib picked up on, Britain is Dead. It is worse than sobering, it is depressing. It describes a Britain that will continue to have some elite dominance because of how things are structured in favor of the few, but is already hollowed out and outside of London, dipping into the level of Eastern Europe in terms of standards of living.
Because of its status as an initially advantaged first mover, the UK now has a fortified elite content to live on the rents of bygone ages. Its social order is constituted by the cultural legacy of the old aristocracy, underwritten by London financial brokers, and serviced by a shrinking middle class. Its administrative and political classes developed a culture of amateurism, uninterested in either the business of classically informed generalism or that of deep technical specialism. The modern result is a system that incentivizes speculative, consultative, and financial service work over manufacturing, research, and production.
I have been suggesting for years that Americans visit Europe now, while most of it is still recognisably Europe, and this goes double for the UK. It is becoming a succession of museums. We will be going to Ireland and Orkney next year to bookend our trip to Norway. I don't know when we shall go again.
8 comments:
"Things go well enough for the people that matter and there are plenty of distractions for those who don’t."
Do you want to travel to visit the USA before it's too late too?
Ouch. Maybe that should be my new fallback.
See 'English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit,' an interesting if depressing (and overpriced) book.
https://www.amazon.com/English-Culture-Decline-Industrial-1850-1980/dp/0521843766/ref=sr_1_1?crid=363FRLCMX31EA&keywords=english+culture+and+the+decline+of+the+industrial+spirit&qid=1688512999&s=books&sprefix=english+culture+and+the+decline+of+the+industrial+spirit%2Cstripbooks%2C80&sr=1-1&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.006c50ae-5d4c-4777-9bc0-4513d670b6bc
Reporting from the Financial Times has claimed that at current levels, the UK will be poorer than Poland in a decade, and will have a lower median real income than Slovenia by 2024. Many provincial areas already have lower GDPs than Eastern Europe.
Nice to see the Financial Times acting as stenographer for the Labour party leader's framing of the data. One would think that the UK was becoming poorer -- rather than cruising along at low-growth while the Eastern European countries have seen explosive economic growth. I guess it is galling to see the neighbors one considers to be poor have such financial success that they've overtaken you.
2010-21, average annual economic growth:
• United Kingdom 0.5 percent
• Poland 3.6 percent
GDP per capita in 2021:
• USD $44,979 in the U.K. vs USD $34,915 in Poland
Draw some lines on the per-capita GDP graph to predict linear no-change in growth and they intersect around 2030. Will there be linear no-change in growth for both?
The pre-accession-to-the-EU analysis by the Centrum Analiz Społeczno-Ekonomicznych predicted that Poland would see an increase in GDP of 3.4% annually in Poland in this time, while the 'old' EU-15 would only see 0.3% increase attributable to the expansion. This because of reduction of technical barriers to trade, the conversion of Poland with the other former eastern-block states to market economies, and EU rules that stopped governments from propping up failing industries, etc..
I think it's quite fair to say that in spite of several notable actions by the UK in recent history that had the effect of slowing their economy and lowering their trade, they are performing as expected, as is Poland.
It would be wonderful if the UK could find something to do that would be as energizing for their economy as the changes in Poland since the fall of the iron curtain.
A lot of this has to do with cultural self-confidence and lack of same.
Douglas2 - Thank you for twisting the kaleidescope another quarter turn.
Or maybe an analogy with a camera lens focus would be better.
Others disagreed: Kane, for example, thought that education patterns were likely responsible for the broader decline. “There is a real question as to why Germany has this persistent 20 percent lead over Britain and France,” he said. “[I attribute this] to stronger investment in skills over the long-term. German education is much less elite-focused than the British and French, so you have a much more skilled industrial workforce.
I would atrribute this to Germany having 20% more people. But don’t worry; according to Wikipedia, the UK’s population is growing (.53%) Germany’s is growing by only 0.1%.
I find it odd, this naive belief in the power of technical education to make citizens more useful to their leaders. This passage from Tom Wolfe’s _I am Charlotte Simmons_ has stayed with me: Charlotte looked at him in a teacherly fashion. “You know what ‘liberal arts’ means?” Pause. Rumination. “ … No.” “It’s from Latin?” Charlotte was the very picture of kind patience. “In Latin, liber means free? It also means book, but that’s just a coincidence, I think. Anyway, the Romans had slaves from all over the world, and some of the slaves were very bright, like the Greeks. The Romans would let the slaves get educated in all sorts of practical subjects, like math, like engineering so they could build things, like music so they could be entertainers? But only Roman citizens, the free people?—liber?—could take things like rhetoric and literature and history and theology and philosophy? Because they were the arts of persuasion—and they didn’t want the slaves to learn how to present arguments that might inspire them to unite and rise up or something? So the ‘liberal’ arts are the arts of persuasion, and they didn’t want anybody but free citizens knowing how to persuade people.”
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