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Well, Phoebe O’Brien certainly does not feel she is living in paradise. Neither would any representative of historical "left" before about Clinton times.
And neither are paid very much.
And are they spent on anything that benefits Phoebe in any way?
And like in Soviet Union, it does not matter, because the real elite benefits are not things you can buy in shop with pieces of paper or plastic.
Yea, Phoebe O’Brien is angry. And you admit that there are many good reasons to be angry in today's UK and today's world.
Yea, Phoebe's anger is misdirected. Yea, Phoebe is ignorant, badly miseducated and misinformed. Now, instead of laughing at her hair, what would you tell to her? Who is her real enemy, who should she be angry at? If it's not the men, the billionaire class, Keir Starmer, Donald Trump and Israel, who is it?
Or would you tell her to chill, stop GAF about anything and be content with her lot of life?
"Dear Phoebe, you live in the best possible world. Stop crying, stop complaining, be thankful you were not born as slave in ancient Egypt and enjoy your life. Do not forget to thank every day Israel and heroes working in quantitative finance who made it all possible."
Yeschad.jpg
Best possible world? No. But a pretty good world. The opportunity and luxory available to her is incredible if she would get out of her way and not compare herself to the very lucky.
yes, phoebe is given enough food to eat, a roof over her head and healthcare that 99% of all humans who ever lived would have killed for. Her anger is born of a vicious envy.
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I wouldn't say we are heroes but quant finance isn't completely zero sum. It may be almost zero sum on the margins but Phoebe and Co. would notice very quickly if we all disappeared in a poof of smoke.
How big are the margins, though? If somebody arbitrarily limited the tick speed and bumped the fuck out of commission rates to the point that high frequency strategies weren't viable there'd likely be an increase in financial friction but it's not like we didn't have a functional financial system circa 30 years ago with floor traders.
Yeah, the margins are massive, but someone needs to do the work in the end, and we do it the most efficiently.
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What would be the most immediate, noticeable effects for Phoebe if Phoebe isn't a trader who is concerned about market liquidity?
In the UK, the falling pound (and resulting imported inflation) and declining tax revenues (and resulting bond-market enforced cuts to the public services her mother relies on). Finance is an export industry for us, so whether or not it benefits the clients is not a problem for the British to worry about.
I think it'd depend on the exact manifestation. 'All Quant Finance in the UK disappears, still happens elsewhere' and 'poof the field of quant finance gets patched out of reality' are very different
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Yes. Aside from free healthcare, thé heavy subsidization of women being girlbosses enables her lifestyle in a way it doesn’t for men.
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I’d tell her what I think is the truth or at least close to the truth regarding these issues. That her hairstyle is laughable and should be changed (if she looks like a feminist activist who repels normal people with her appearance in itself). Her anger in itself isn’t bad or unwarranted. Some of her problems are caused indirectly by Trump’s and Israel’s policies to a small degree. Other problems of hers are caused by Starmer to a much larger degree. Yet other ones are caused by billionaires. Some of the men she is attracted to are likely to treat her badly. There also men who would do the opposite, but many of them are invisible or unattractive in her eyes. And I wouldn’t bring up Ancient Egypt as it’d just be triggering.
I can understand how UK inflation might be exacerbated by Trump's tariffs from last year. I can understand how part of the reason she feels miserable and angry a lot of the time is because of social media algorithms which were designed by the companies who built them, which you could indirectly say is "problems caused by billionaires". But I'm at a loss as to how the problems of anyone living in the UK can be laid at the feet of policies enacted by Israel.
The Israeli government initiated a Middle Eastern war that is completely disrupting the global trade in crude oil, natural gas, aluminium, helium etc.
There is not a chance in hell that Phoebe O'Brien would say a major reason for her dissatisfaction with her life is a war that began six weeks ago.
There is an absolute racing certainty that she would say this - it is the politically correct thing to say. She would be wrong though, as demonstrated by her dissatisfaction having begun a lot more than six weeks ago.
Yes, you're right. What I meant was that if you asked Phoebe how dissatisfied with her life she was immediately before the war in Iran, she would give the same answer as today.
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I didn't say it was major.
Okay, fair. But if you were to list all the reasons O'Brien is dissatisfied with her life in descending order of importance, I'd be amazed if the war in Iran cracked the top 50, or even the top 100.
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Which of her problems are caused by which billionares?
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Yes. Her education is subsidised, a lot of the jobs she could get are probably a result of legislation passed by the state and subsidised by it, in the unlikely event she has kids that is heavily subsidised, as is her aged pension, her healthcare, of which she will consume a lot more statistically over a lifetime than if she were a male, is subsidised. Taxes overwhelmingly go to the old, women and the infirm. The purpose of the system is partly to take money away from people she hates to people like her.
The real enemy is, well, herself. Pre-2008 the UK had some of the highest growth rates in the developed world. A big reason it's gone to shit and is on managed decline is that its slowly changing into a weird social market economy with pay rates set by fiat at the behest of people that think like her.
I would ask her to think about what exactly makes modern industrial life possible in the first place and how precarious it is.
What does she really want? I am not going to try and psychoanalyse the people that think differently to me as that would just lead to a lot of unfair characterisations. What I can say is that what she wants, would, historically and practically speaking, generally lead to very bad things if fully implemented, if you believe empirical observations about econometrics and history.
This is nonsense. I don't think Phoebe is unhappy because she is a paypig for entitled Boomers (the problem is clearly spiritual and not material), but that is a much more accurate model than Phoebe as ungrateful welfare queen.
Phoebe took out a student loan to pay for tuition fees and living expenses. The fees she (nominally) paid don't cover the full cost of delivering her education as calculated by the Hollywood accountants in the Pro-Vice-Chancellor-for-finance's office, but they are a lot more than the amount of actual instructional and facility spending she got the benefit of. The loan is subsidised, but in a way Phoebe won't see the benefit of until the unpaid balance is written off when she is in her fifties.
Roughly half of female graduates are working in healthcare professions, teaching, or non-graduate retail and food service jobs. Comparing the UK to peer countries suggests that government involvement in healthcare and teaching reduces worker pay (by setting up a monopsony) rather than increasing it. Also, a large percentage of the total compensation in healthcare and teaching is public-sector pensions which are generous in a non-obvious way - i.e. money that Phoebe isn't seeing and would, if she stopped to think, assume she would somehow-or-other be cheated out of by the time she reaches retirement age.
The UK is a big exporter of professional services, so the stereotypical power-suited girlboss is much more likely to be working in a competitive export-focussed firm than her US equivalent.
So the chance that Phoebe is a government-subsidised girlboss in a way which is legible to her is well below 50%. Overall, there is some subsidy to girlbossing, but not enough (definitely in the UK, and almost certainly in other rich countries) to compensate for the cost of the three Bs of grand-scale welfare beneficiaries (Boomers, bastards and babymamas).
If Phoebe is able-bodied, employed, and childless she is going to be a net contributor. The Boomers get so much that there is not much left for deserving working-age cases, and in any case single childless able-bodied white women are pretty close to the bottom of the Progressive Stack.
As you acknowledge, she doesn't. And Phoebe comes from a culture and social class which means she would expect to only have kids with a gainfully employed husband, meaning that the amount of subsidy would not be high, and would not count as a transfer from men to women.
Her mother is subsidised. She may be subsidised in the future if the country doesn't go bankrupt in the interim. (She is even more pessimistic on this point than we are). Right now, she is paying the subsidies.
Taxes go to the old, the infirm, and families with children. (In the UK, now in that order, and increasingly not to families with children where at least one parent has an upper-middle-class income). Not women like Phoebe. The statistics show women as net beneficiaries because subsidies to families disproportionately go to families headed by single mothers, and the payee field on the welfare cheque has the babymama's name on it even though the money is supposed to be for the kids.
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What she wants is Marxism, and the history of attempts at implementing Marxism leaves quite a few industrialized, modern societies. They’re just poor and shitty.
Maybe we're using different meanings for words here, but in my mind modernity (modern cities with gleaming skyscrapers, high speed 5G access everywhere, efficient metro systems, etc.) is directly correlated with wealth. Which modern society is poor?
I mean, China meets all of your criteria while being poor.
It’s quite common for communist countries to have good public transportation, urban infrastructure, etc while having very low PPP.
I can't help but feel like calling China a "poor" country is a bit misleading. The modern parts are wealthy, and the poor parts are backwards. To the extent that China is modern, I would consider it wealthy too, and vice versa.
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A warehouse worker makes £26k a year.
Yes, as outlined in the OP. Feel free to consult the most recent budget if you don't believe it.
The people who design social media algorithms, chiefly.
A quick search seems to show that's not much different than a US warehouse worker. Or cashier; they're overlapping ranges. The UK may be a better place relatively for warehouse workers compared to brain surgeons, but you're likely at least as well off being a warehouse worker in the US.
There are arguments for the UK warehouse worker doing better. British rents are cheaper in dollar terms. Grocery costs are lower. Low income neighborhoods in Britain have much lower crime rates than their American equivalents.
But even if we assume their QoL is merely the same, that’s incredible - America is twice as rich as Britain! British professionals make less than half of their American peers.
Since 1997, British governments of both parties have pursued a policy of cutting material inequality within the wage-and-salary class while trying to increase inequality between low-paid workers and able-bodied dole bludgers* and being broadly relaxed about the increasing wealth of the super-rich. It isn't clear to me how much of this was deliberate, but almost every government economic policy since 1997 is either that agenda or a transfer to pensioners.
* Hence why every marginally employable adult in the UK has found a disability.
The super rich are irrelevant to British politics unless you’re a communist. This is because everyone except Jeremy Corbyn and Zach Polanski types understand that the rich are transient, that they have little money in Britain, that if their businesses are based in Britain they usually derive the majority of their earnings from overseas, and that the exceptions are a few elderly landlord who are mostly politically and economically irrelevant, and whose wealth is itself propped up by the transient international rich (eg the Grosvenor family owning half of central London). You can’t really rinse the Ambanis or the Qatari royal family or Ken Griffin (to name three super rich people who own some of the most expensive ultra prime property in London) because they are ‘British’ the way that I am Maldivian when I go on vacation.
The moderately rich, people at the top end of finance, commercial law, some corporations, insurance etc are similarly transient. The businesses they either work for, ultimately serve, or both, are mostly not based in the UK. That the UK serves as the global or regional center for finance, insurance, consulting, ex-US commercial law etc is a matter of history and convenience and, in a big pinch, could be relocated to any number of other welcoming jurisdictions. This leaves the domestic moderately rich, like the owners of successful chains of car dealerships, large scale fast food franchisees, property developers, medium sized manufacturers, etc. They can probably be squeezed a little but not much.
Domestically wealth in Britain is concentrated in the upper-middle class who did pretty well until 2009 but have been rinsed since then by a combination of tax changes, extreme salary stagnation, a weakening pound, stagnant property values in the southeast and London especially etc.
I agree that this has been a well-intentioned aim, but of course in classic British fashion almost every innovation designed to ‘make work pay’ and ‘increase the percentage of people in work’ (most infamously recent measures like PIP, Motability and UC) have only served to increase the welfare bill with laughably exploitable mechanics that the British underclass and their sponsors quickly figure out.
The problem in British politics is that both main political factions (the Left and the Right) each rely on a welfare-dependent constituency. This is true for both Labour and the Tories and, if they have any hope of government, the Greens and Reform, too - not to mention the regional parties. Under FPTP in the British multiparty system, small swings are enough for a parliamentary majority.
The sum of these effects is that it is impossible for Labour to cut (or slow the growth rate) of any benefits whatsoever (the baseline welfare class plus second generation migrants who are disproportionately welfare reliant are its core voter base, while pensioner swing is necessary for a Labour majority even if most of them vote Tory), and it is impossible for the Tories to cut (or slow the growth of the bill) in net terms, since they can’t do anything about pensions, and while they can slightly trim some benefits they tend to compensate for others by jacking up in-work benefits to buy votes among the poorly paid white working class, who are still far below the ~40k net contribution threshold.
The bizarre salary compression story, where a 19 year old warehouse worker and a 26 year old graduate get paid the same, is a consequence of government policy but, much like the “triple lock” bill, largely unplanned, a simple byproduct of the above political dynamics worsened by the unfortunate fact that Oxford PPE seemingly doesn’t, in fact, teach you as much economics as it should. Raising the minimum wage as significantly as the UK did is essentially a Hail Mary attempt to boost consumption at any cost since the working poor spend everything they make; in a way, it is (kind of) working. Whether ‘it working’ is actually good for the country is questionable.
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American rents are higher, but you do get more for your money- IDK how much it cancels out, but a lot of ways in which America is more expensive(mostly not groceries though) are like that.
Americans get access to ridiculously opulent luxuries, like air conditioning and closets.
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Yes. So I don't buy @Eetan's claim that warehouse workers and cashiers in the UK are both getting shafted.
They may well be, but not by their salary. Rather, by the general economic malaise that's brought about by the policies meant to keep their salaries relatively high.
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Just for context, due to inane minimum wage laws and similar these sort of positions are some of the highest paid in the world in the UK, normalized to median wage and price levels. It's not a great place to be a nuclear engineer or surgeon but it is a pretty good deal if you are a cashier, store clerk, warehouse worker, etc.
Which is, funnily enough, broadly what people like Phoebe O'Brien want. Unfortunately it does have some pretty severe second-order effects.
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