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Remember the big energy crisis that Europe was supposed to be doomed with for years to come? Yeah, it's pretty much gone. Worth pointing out two things.
First, natural gas demand has been much weaker than anticipated since China is weaker. Indeed, there is now a surplus of gas in the world market.Some people claim that "last winter we got lucky", but this doesn't explain how gas storage is at historically high levels. Germany, Europe's biggest gas consumer, has an excellent position going into the autumn.
Second, renewable energy is beating new records by the day. In Northern Europe, electricity prices are bouncing around zero and occasionally dipping below the line into negative territory.There's also a structural trend of rapidly growing renewable energy, which means that even as gas prices return to historical norms, it is unlikely that consumption will stay the same. The shift now underway to renewable and clean energy (e.g. nuclear) is permanent. Russia had its chance at energy blackmail and it turned out it was a dud.
I think there are a couple of conclusions to draw from this. The most important one is that scaremongering and hysteria rarely pays to listen to. We can broaden this to a discussion about climate change or even immigration. Sure, there will be issues, but the doomsters on both issues were proven wrong historically. So were the doomsters on Europe's supposedly "permanent energy crisis" thesis.Then why do people persist by wallowing in fear? I don't have a clear answer but perhaps there are evolutionary adaptions that were beneficial to those who were erring on the side of caution?
Another important takeaway for me is once a crisis gets going you should never underestimate humanity's capacity for adaption and change. The system we inhabit may look brittle, but it's probably a lot more sturdy than we give it credit for. Some of us still remember the panicked predictions about the food supply chains breaking down when Covid hit, and plenty people stocked up on tons of canned food, often for no good reason. Some even talked of famine.
Perhaps being the optimist just isn't socially profitable. You're taken more seriously by being a "deeply concerned" pessimist. If this is true, then social incentives will be skewed to having the bad take. People who will be aware of this will probably draw the right conclusions in times when most other folks are losing their minds in fear.
On what do you base this? Gini index seems fine.
Correct, however it's worth pointing out that this pattern is universal across the world where we have good data. Even in supposedly egalitarian societies. There simply does not seem to be that much social mobility at the very top. The rate of taxation doesn't appear to make much difference for the elites.
Finance in the UK is very much not the preserve of the tradition "English Upper Class" anymore, you're more likely to hear Chinese accents instead of the King's English. Modern day aristocratic wealth comes from price appreciation of their landholdings, not them holding top positions in the city etc.
Finance wasn't exclusively upper class in the UK even in the past. During the post-WWII years, I have a grandfather who made it pretty far in finance coming from a family of mid-ranking naval officers. Like a lot of people in finance in those days, his main assets were that he was reliable, risk-averse, sceptical, and disciplined in a relaxed, gentle, unambitious way. He worked in London, but lived in a modest cottage in the Shires, and he got a fair number of clients just because of his reputation from "the War". Ironically, he almost never spoke about the War, because he had lost too many friends and family, and killed too many people himself - not an easy thing to do for a gentle giant.
The shift in the 1980s/1990s period, AFAIK, was that UK finance became more open to working class people, women, non-white people, foreigners, and even Irish people^. Most of all, the big money jobs were increasingly for those who were ambitious, risk-loving, optimistic, and disciplined in an intense, obsessive way. And naturally most people entering finance hadn't even been in a serious fist-fight, let alone built up a reputation in war.
^ This comes up in David Lodge's Nice Work, where the middle class academic woman (the book's main character) is finds out that a seemingly ditzy working class London lass (her brother's girlfriend, as I recall) is earning much more than her in the supposedly reactionary world of Thatcher-era finance. The working class woman comes from a family of bookies, and so thinking fast with numbers is to her like waking up early is to a farmer's daughter.
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