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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.
Marginal Revolution linked to this on Britain today. Honestly felt like creating a post on it since I thought it added good points since UK failing is the current thing.
https://www.sambowman.co/p/britain-is-a-developing-country
Honestly a cheaper currency shouldn’t be causing their electricity and home building prices to blow out. Each would seem to have some influences from imports but they probably get a lot of their building products internally or from Europe which also has had its currency cheapen.
His thesis is England is no longer on the technology frontier. Looking at this data does make me thing England is sort of the poors now to be a little hot. They need a lot of reform.
The relative wages shown between England and low end US labor seems appalling. If I was English and rich and wanted to wake up my country I’d start running fake ads advertising cleaning labor jobs in America at relatively high wages. Could be a good political ad. “Come to America and be a janitor so you can send remittance home”.
The same is true for almost all Western Europe, it’s not a UK-specific problem.
And from the article you link:
Clearly this is not a smart man, as AI is vastly more significant than even either of the above.
I want to use this as an opportunity to remember that Paul Krugman quote from the 90s about how the internet will be no more significant than the fax machine, which everyone routinely dunks on him for. Show me where in this chart of GDP growth that the internet was widely adopted.
/images/16899491071105075.webp
It's the part where the growth stays at the level it's at despite there being no other recent transformative breakthroughs in the past 20 years.
Zoom out to a scale of millennia, using human population as a proxy for wealth. Here's a representative chart (ignore the dotted projections for this exercise). We are on the insane upward spike at the very rightmost edge. What sustains that meteoric rise? The answer is periodic transformations, such as the steam engine, indoor plumbing, electricity, the washing machine, commercial air travel, the personal computer, the internet and the smartphone. Your question seems to assume that this rate of improvement is just background radiation, some sort of fundamental base rate against which innovations should provide additional upside, but in fact it is sustained by these breakthroughs.
Krugman deserves all the scorn that he gets for that quote; the fax machine was useful, but nowhere near on the scale of the internet, and not nearly the same economic engine.
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