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Notes -
Scott: Highlights from the comments on British economic decline.
I’m interested particularly as a follow up to my discussion with @FirmWeird. Here we have an economy that struggles, where the citizens recognize it struggles, but the standard indicators look normal. I wanted to see if this would show up in the energy metrics we were discussing, but this data stops too early to say.
I really expect to see its energy per capita tank. Wealth getting swallowed up in housing has to push down energy consumption, at least compared to capital investment. I don’t think the UK has had anything like the shale boom distorting its cost per BTU, either.
The article Scott cites from Foreign Policy is one of the worst I've ever read on the UK, its argument is absurd and it's full of blatant untruths, and it's written by a hardcore pro-EU culture warrior who cheers every failure for the UK from abroad. In general, both the American and continental press have been very down on the UK since 2016 for culture war reasons, and
Some examples:
The UK is much wealthier than it was in the 1970s. The UK's tax rates on high incomes are high for the OECD, it's tax rates on low incomes that are particularly low, and which represent a central cause of the UK's deficit problem. The US, by far the wealthiest country in the world, has higher inequality than the UK. And in by far the most important measure of prosperity (household per capita disposable income), the UK is just below Denmark and Canada and just above Ireland and Japan. It is certainly poorer than America, but it has been poorer for a long, long time. From The Telegraph:
So this isn't a 'new' trend. The UK is fine, and because of the structure of its economy, it goes through comparative periods of outperformance and underperformance vs Europe. It was comparatively wealthier because of a struggling post-dotcom-bust dollar and a surging pound in the 2000-2008 period, and the effects of this make economic growth since 2008 look particularly anaemic in a way that allows people with a political grudge to bear (primarily against Brexit or the Conservative Party) to write narratives like those Scott cites.
Britain had a brief chance to become a more prosperous country after World War Two. But it was the socialist government of Clement Attlee that destroyed this possibility. His Town and County Planning Act destroyed growth in London and Birmingham to prop up failing northern industrial cities that in many cases had not existed for a century, instead of encouraging migration to the booming south (which had always been where the bulk of Britain's population was based). It also hamstrung new construction around those southern cities. Attlee's inheritance tax uniquely destroyed British family owned small-and-medium sized companies. In every continental country (most notably Germany, which obviously has a currently thriving manufacturing sector), postwar inheritance taxes allowed extensive exceptions for family businesses. In the UK, Labour explicitly chose to avoid these exceptions to attack capitalism, ramming through 60%+ tax rates on estates including businesses, and Britain's extraordinary legacy of skilled manufacturing - the legacy of the industrial revolution and its homeland itself - was destroyed as a result.
The UK is still paying the price for its six year folly with socialism (in part because Churchill and the conservatives who succeeded him after 1955 failed to turn back enough of the changes until Thatcher, and by then it was mostly too late). Britain's rare successes since 1945 are in spite of this burden, not because of it.
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Haha, I've corrected it to companies. The Isle of Man actually has a very interesting economic history, it was a hugely successful tourist destination until air travel to Southern Europe became common, then its economy collapsed until it became an offshore financial center and developed the TT/bike racing tourism industry further. Now it's quite prosperous, although Douglas is still kind of a dump (they are trying to improve it).
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