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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.
I think so. When a country is replacing automatic car washes with immigrants holding buckets, it's clear that immigration affects productivity.
https://theconversation.com/the-return-of-the-hand-car-wash-and-the-uks-productivity-puzzle-39594
Yeah, the reason for that is that the "high tech cleaner at the garage" is pretty much a set of revolving brushes that blow soapy water over the car as it drives through where you have to remove aerials, fold in the wing mirrors, and so on yourself. Car valeting services (the hand car wash) offer a 'premium' service - they promise to get the car clean in all the nooks and crannies the car wash misses, they'll clean the inside as well, do detailing etc. as you require:
So if you're going to get your car cleaned, you might decide that instead of a quick automated wash, you'll hand it in for the full service and get a shiny, new-smelling car back without having to lift a finger yourself.
We're living in a service economy now, you have the choice between quick automatic wash or full service wash. Does the author of that piece complain that "nowadays, perversely, instead of getting the high-tech vending machine instant coffee people go to special shops that have humans making hot and cold beverages by hand!"
Presumably the argument is that, in a country running hot, there would be many high-paying jobs in growing areas. The people now hand-washing cars would be doing those jobs and tempting them back would require larger salaries than most people can afford. In other words, the author is complaining about the absence of Baumol's cost disease.
https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/5/4/15547364/baumol-cost-disease-explained
On the other hand: in Scott's post he discusses how the PPP GDP is the metric which has suffered, as opposed to the market-exchange GDP. That is to say—the recent decline seems to be one of purchasing parity, where your money doesn't buy as much.
For easily-transportable goods, which could just as well be sold in any country, this doesn't apply much: you get pretty much the market exchange rate. It is the non-transportables, like services, which are cheaper in some countries than others, leading to a PPP adjustment.
That is: the complaint that PPP hasn't caught up is a complaint that labor is particularly expensive, that services are affected by Baumol's cost disease or the like. Developing countries typically have favorable PPP exchange rates, because they have plenty of cheap labor; people who don't have better things to do with their time than to work for cheap.
If we accept the difference between PPP GDP and market-exchange GDP as describing the issue, that seems to imply that the problem is that there is too much cost disease (or other reasons why labor is generally expensive), not too little.
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