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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31891 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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Scott: Highlights from the comments on British economic decline.

Britain is suffering a decline in productivity and income which isn’t fully reflected in nominal GDP statistics.

This could be because it’s expressed in a declining pound, rather than in declining nominal wages/profits. I don’t know enough economics to feel like I have good intuitions about declining currency values.

It could also be partly because post-recession economic growth happened more in new employment than in higher wages for the already-employed.

Potential causes are Brexit, a dysfunctional real estate market, and underinvestment in R&D - but low confidence in all of these.

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.

So all the graphs and quantitative data show there's no UK economic decline... and the response is that people write articles wondering how the economic decline has managed to hide itself from statistics?

Hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras. Maybe there's just no economic decline? Hell, if we're trying to be rationalists, the decline's absence from the statistics means that DEFINITIONALLY there is no decline.

As many of the commenters on Scott's site speculate: one gets the feeling that "UK Economic Decline" is something that europhilic economists want to be able to talk about (and blame on Brexit), therefore they assume it exists as an article of faith and spend their time conjuring up epicyclic reasons for how those dastardly Tories managed to hide it from every single graph in the world by gaming the metrics.

Hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras.

This logic only holds true if you're NOT currently in Southern Africa, however.

Which is to say, surrounding context matters a lot.

It is possible for metrics to hide important factors. For example, there could be an increase in inequality, which means that most people are worse off while a few people are much better off. This seems to be the opposite of what has actually happened, though. One that seems more likely to me is an increase in prices swallowing more income, so people are worse off. Given what I've heard about housing costs, it rings true, although I can't seem to easily find great data. The US could easily be in a similar position, but being wealthier to begin with masks it.

So all the graphs and quantitative data show there's no UK economic decline

I wonder. I know the UK has put a lot of its eggs into the basket of having London be a major financial services centre, and I don't know how much that distorts statistics. I know for Ireland, the way we set up our economy, we need two metrics: the on paper one, and the real one. Because we put so much effort into luring in American multinationals who use Dublin as the convenient hub to move profits around, there's a lot of "Wow the GDP is so high, the Irish are so rich" which doesn't reflect reality:

Ireland's reliance on large multinational intellectual property has resulted in GDP for 2022 exceeding the EU average by over 130%.

Preliminary figures released by statistics agency, Eurostat reported Ireland as having the second-highest GDP in the EU last year, which, along with Luxembourg has far outpaced all other EU countries.

...Multinationals including Apple, Facebook, Pfizer, and Google, among others alone accounted for almost 56% of the so-called total value added to the economy, up from 53% in 2021, the CSO said. Sectors dominated by multinationals, including information and communications, expanded greatly.

However, the CSO found that an alternative measure of economic activity known as Modified Domestic Demand, or MDD, which more accurately reflects the activities for Irish households and businesses in the domestic economy, contracted a second time in Q4 of 2022 by 1.3%.

With MDD falling by 1.1% in Q3, its consecutive decline fulfilled the criteria for a technical recession.

There's even a name for this. I don't know if the UK has the same thing going on, but I do think it's fair to say that there are pockets of very thriving economy, and other swathes of what would be the rust-belt in the USA which have declined and never replaced their former activity with something new.

That might be overselling it a little.

Like everyone else, the UK really did decline in 2008 and 2020. Did they rebound more or less than the EU? Than comparable countries? Did they ever actually recover from 2008? Did anyone?

Economists and pundits like poking at questions like these. They’re just not necessarily answerable.

The real problem is that every economic metric is like reading tea leaves. Fifty different proxies for “can I afford my rock and roll lifestyle?” and/or “will that be true in X years?”

I don’t think no data is true. From the article I posted here.

https://twitter.com/Birdyword/status/1639536708059533313

I think it’s starting to be real.

https://www.sambowman.co/p/britain-is-a-developing-country

UK salaries are low but after discussing this on Reddit last week I learned that UK income statistics are often disposable income (after tax). That doesn't fully explain the gap but it does narrow a little apples to apples.

Yes, by household disposable income the UK is still much lower than the US (by far the world’s number one), but very close to peer countries like France, Denmark, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand and so on.

$125k is still an insane salary for someone working at a car wash in the US. Median personal income is just over $40k. Median household income is like $75k. In this case the Reddit thread about it when it was posted suggested this was a big place and the ‘manager’ was actually a relatively senior employee with a large staff.

Bucees are massive gas stations, they can be remote so it might be hard to find staff and they've been opening up a ton of new locations so they need to hire quickly. That said even the cashier is making $17/hr which is incredible to me, I made $6/hr as a cashier in 2005. A married couple working as cashiers at a gas station would have a household income of $68k which is not bad at all with rural Alabama COL.

That said even the cashier is making $17/hr which is incredible to me, I made $6/hr as a cashier in 2005.

I saw something on Twitter recently showing that the highest wage growth in recent years has been to people making under twenty dollars an hour. That matches my anecdotal evidence well enough. I saw a McDonalds offering $17.50 an hour a few days ago. Ten years ago that would have been a literal minimum wage job.

You have to understand the Bucee’s business model to make sense of that sign. Every point on a major interstate highway has thousands of people who pass by every day. Those people all need to stop for food, gas, and restrooms somewhere. The marginal return on reputation in a market like that is huge. The Bucee’s model is to earn and maintain a reputation for elite service, especially when expanding into new areas like Alabama, where people have heard the hype, but may not have personally experienced it before. You will never see an “out of order” sign at Bucee’s. You will never see shit stains on your toilet at Bucee’s. You will always have toilet paper in your stall at Bucee’s.

These signs themselves are part of the aura. They are displayed prominently at the entrance to the store. Everyone entering the store knows that the workers are professionals and that this is a quality establishment. They have to be to deal with this.

That's a very good point. I think their strategy is working because they do have a good reputation and get a lot of buzz which is weird for a gas station. I know people who have driven over an hour just to go to a newly opened Bucees.

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