The last government intentionally banned the cheapest source of energy, onshore wind, from being built in England, by making it so that a single complaint could stop a project.
I cannot believe this article talks about planning constraints and energy prices and doesn't mention that.
> Similarly, in the U.K., any individual who sues to stop a new project on environmental grounds—say, to oppose a new road or airport—generally has their legal damages capped at £5,000, if they lose in court. “Once you’ve done that,” Bowman said, “you’ve created a one-way system, where people have little incentive to not bring spurious cases to challenge any new development.”
Not directly stated about wind power, but there is this account of why lawsuits might be common, slowing and derailing projects because the damages if you lose in your complaint are capped at a relatively low figure (not low for the average person, but not that expensive either).
due to the screwed up energy pricing system, if there's a single watt of electricity in the grid produced by burning gas, we pay for the entire grid output as if it was gas
That is how literally everything in a market gets priced. When you buy an X, the price of it naturally trends to match the most expensive X that will be sold. In this case X is a watt of energy. But you can substitute any good or service.
> In commodities market, the strike price is between the lowest price seller and the highest buyer.
The lowest seller price is the highest demanded price among all the sellers. All the sellers bar one would typically be willing to sell for a slightly lower price. As it is said; prices are set on the margins.
Imagine that every seller has a secret price they are willing to sell for and that is some statistical distribution. The market price will be the highest price in that distribution that actually gets sold. Most sellers aren't selling for their secretly acceptable price, but for a higher price determined by the seller with the highest demands. The distribution, if it is ever discovered, becomes the supply curve.
Cheapest source is accurate. It may not eliminate the need for expensive LPG, but reducing the amount needed is still a massive benefit to the economy.
It's misleading, and those who use it generally know it's misleading. It's used to persuade the layperson that electricity generated by wind turbines is cheaper to the consumer or industry than electricity generated by thermal sources or hydro turbines, when in fact that is only true if you disregard the requirement for said electricity to be available on demand - a fairly important omission.
This may be true, on a watt basis. It also ignores the physics of a synchronous grid. You need to produce exactly what you use at any given moment. If you fail to do that by a little bit bad things happen. If you fail by a lot, the grid fails. You need to be able to get power when you need it, not when it's convenient to your generation plant. If you want to compare solar or wind to something more dispatchable you should really be using numbers from either a pretty massive distributed overbuild or including storage or both. Otherwise it simply isn't apples to apples. I am an electrical engineer specializing in the design of control systems for renewable generation.
Check out "The Price is Wrong" by Brett Christophers[1]. It explains at length that what matters is not price, but how profitable an investment is. And how wind and PV don't look great without subsidies in various guises.
You distribute pv and wind over large areas and they get destroyed by weather, get dirty, require significant maintenance. If individuals want to have wind turbines or pv installations that's great - but these things are a giant mess at grid scale - absolutely awful.
Yeah of course distributed infrastructure is ... Bad???
Oh no we have no single point of failure, empower people to invest into the grid and have huge redundancies in the grid...
Batteries literally solve most of the problems
We get anything from storms to hail few times a year here. My patio roof got holes in it from the ice balls, but the panels are fine. Are you missing some qualifiers on that one?
> get dirty
You clean them every few months or monitor for issues per group of panels.
> require significant maintenance
Just like every other device out in the real world. Coal, gas, wind, solar, nuclear, thermal generators require maintenance.
What I think the GP is blowing completely out of proportion is:
> they get destroyed by weather
A few of them, every year. It makes a visible dent on their average longevity.
But I don't think distributing them has any impact on this. They just create a risk situation that nobody seems to be insuring and that large farms will self insure without problems. (Anyway, with the price going down the way it is, that will soon become irrelevant.)
> get dirty
Each person stopping to clean their own panels is much less efficient than professional cleaning centralized panels. It does increase your electricity costs.
> require significant maintenance
Home maintenance is an entire other level of inefficiency. That extends to any kind of equipment in your home.
But again, none of those is a big deal. Solar is mostly operation-free, so distribution mostly doesn't matter.
That's not a significant issue. O&M costs are a given and not wildly out of step with traditional generation. If you want to talk about cost effectivness the thing that matters is either a)transmission capacity and interconnects for distributed generation b)storage for centralized generation. As long as you're ok investing in 1 of the 2, distributed generation is great.
This just isn't true, it's just simply not true - it's not true from a numbers perspective and it's not true from the perspective of common sense. It's just a weird self-destructive psyop. Building turbines in the ocean for low capacity factor power is not the cheapest source of electricity. It's also soul-crushingly ugly and remarkably bad for wildlife.
I never heard this term before so I Googled it. Gemini (Google AI) defined it as:
> "Low capacity factor power" refers to a power source that generates electricity at a significantly lower average output compared to its maximum potential, meaning it doesn't operate at full capacity for a large portion of the time, typically due to factors like weather dependence or intermittent availability; examples include solar and wind power, which experience fluctuations based on sunlight and wind speed respectively, resulting in a lower capacity factor compared to more consistent sources like nuclear power.
Ok, sure, makes sense, but what are the alternatives to wind and solar for carbon neutral power sources? (Yes, we all know that nuclear power can do it, but almost no highly developed countries are interested in making large nuclear power investments at this point.) Our power supply structure will need to fundamentally change over the next 30 years. Probably, home- and utility-scale batteries will play a much bigger role.
Another point: Isn't the purpose of building wind turbines on the open ocean to capture more regular winds (compared to land-based wind turbines)? Wouldn't that improve capacity factor power?
About "soul-crushingly ugly": I never once saw a chemical refinery, nor a large-scale, modern hospital, that was anything other than "soul-crushingly ugly", but we need them in a modern society. So we try to carefully plan where/when/how they are built.
Yes it is true, study after study has shown that LCOE for renewables (in particular wind) is the lowest. It is also quite obvious from the fact that wind and solar installations are what investors are actually investing in, in contrast to nuclear which nobody wants to invest in even with large government guarantees.
LCOE omits delivery issues. Energy isn't just about the cost to produce an electron. It's the cost of getting that electron to people when they need it. For things like wind or solar to ever become a major player you need to deal with intermittency and dispatchability.
In other words you need to deal with times when the wind isn't blowing, or when people need more (or less) power than you're producing. The way you'd do this is through excessive production during good times, and then storing the surplus in batteries, artificial hydroelectric, or other such means - and then delivering from those sources as necessary. But doing this sends the real cost per unit much higher. The storage process also entails some (to a significant amount - depending on the type of storage) energy loss as well, so you end up needing to produce more than 1 unit of electricity to get 1 unit.
FWIW I'm a huge advocate for solar, so this isn't some random smear on renewables - it's something that needs to be accounted for and which LCOE fails to do.
I find them much more appealing than the power plant near me that dumps columns of soot into my skyline.
> and remarkably bad for wildlife
This talking point is really exaggerated. It's effectively fossil fuel propaganda. The effect on wildlife is downright cuddly compared to the effects of burning fossil fuels. You might have an argument if you're comparing wind to solar.
This is why the Netherlands builds them out in the sea. Just far enough so that you cannot see them.
Even the biggest reactionary NIMBY has no complaints.As for wildlife come on man who the fuck cares?
Minus the last sentence, this is a great point. Do any downvoters have any issue with everything but the last sentence? If anything, the Netherlands is probably Europe's most intensely developed country. There is hardly a square meter that hasn't been carefully planned out over the last 500 years.
No, I don't have an issue with anything but the last sentence, but the down arrow is all or nothing. We're facing a biodiversity crisis of massive scale (call it the 6th mass extinction if you like). "Fuck wildlife" isn't an appropriate policy position.
Batteries aren't produced at remotely enough scale to be viable for grid storage. To put this in perspective, the world uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. By comparison global lithium ion battery production was 1.1 TWh [1]. Remember, production capacity is distinct from the actual production figures. It's typical for actual production figures to be ~50% of production capacity.
Intermittent sources don't just experience daily fluctuation, but also seasonal fluctuation. Even just 3 days of storage amounts to an impossible amount of batteries to provision, even assuming growing battery production capacity. Not to mention, even modest amounts of battery grid storage would severely hamper EV adoption, which would increase emissions.
There's a reason why most plans for a primarily wind and solar grid assume that there will be some technological breakthrough that solves storage: hydrogen, compressed air, alternative battery chemistries, etc. are really common to see in plans for a primarily renewable grid.
Modelling in Australia with simulations that multiply up current wind and solar (using real-time data of actual renewable generation) [1] showed that well over 99% of demand can be delivered with only about five hours of storage, so we're not really talking about days.
There will likely always be some gas peaking but we're talking less than a percent per year (maybe a few single digit percent in some places where solar isn't as good but still not much).
Nobody, really nobody asks for the whole world consumption to be stored in batteries.
This is such a bullshit argument it really paints the rest of your comment in a bad light.
You can get so far by just storing up to 12 hours OF NIGHT TIME on a local level. Who cares about the 5% of times where we have to burn natural gas to stabilise the grid.
95% renewable is orders of magnitude better than today. Anyone saying different is literally a grifter.
Also battery storage cost prognosis is 50% less in 5-6 years. Batteries are already cost effective and there are a lot of grid storage options build right now.
Get grok to help you run the actual numbers over 100 years. Factor in large storms (or whatever destructive weather is common in the area you wish to build). Ask to factor in enough battery backup to bring it to 90% capacity factor over the life of the project. Compare to nuclear or natural gas. Should be absolutely clear.
Here are high-ball numbers for going off the grid; 2000 sf house in California:
- 30 panels ~ 10kw: $20K
- batteries ~ 10kwh: $8K.
- permits + labor: $20K (California...)
- 100+kwh EV with v2h bidirectional charging: $50K
- comparable ICE car (offset): -$40K
- heat pump water heater $1.5K
- heat pump furnace: $15K
- induction range: $2K
That adds to: $76.5K. Typical PG&E bills are $500-1000 per month. Budget $200 / month for gas. (Again, California prices.). That’s 63-110 months till break even, which is less than the expected lifetime of the panels + battery.
For another $10-20K, you can add propane backup, but I assume extended storms are rare enough to just charge the car and drive the electrons home a few times a year. A fireplace is about $5k installed.
Not going full off-grid is cheaper. So is scaling up to beyond one house.
## Upfront Capital Cost
- *Nuclear*: Very high (£4,000-6,000/kW), with 10+ year construction time
- *Natural Gas (CCGT)*: Low to moderate (£500-1,000/kW), with 2-3 year construction time
- *Wind + Battery*: Moderate for turbines (£1,000-1,500/kW) plus substantial battery costs
- *Solar + Battery*: Moderate for panels (£800-1,200/kW) plus large battery costs, especially for winter
## Plant Lifespan
- *Nuclear*: Typically 60 years, with possible extensions; 2+ builds over 100 years
- *Natural Gas*: 25-30 years; requires 3-4 rebuilds over 100 years
- *Wind + Battery*: 25 years for turbines, 10-15 years for batteries; multiple replacements needed
- *Solar + Battery*: 25-30 years for panels (with declining output), 10-15 years for batteries
## Fuel & Operating Costs
- *Nuclear*: Low fuel cost, high operating cost (staffing, maintenance, safety)
- *Natural Gas*: Major cost is fuel (price volatility), plus potential carbon costs
- *Wind + Battery*: No fuel cost, moderate turbine O&M, plus battery replacement costs
- *Solar + Battery*: No fuel cost, low panel O&M, plus battery replacement costs
## Levelized Cost (No subsidies)
- *Nuclear*: £90-120/MWh
- *Natural Gas*: £50-60/MWh (without carbon cost), £100+/MWh with high carbon prices
- *Wind + Battery*: Base wind £40-50/MWh, potentially exceeding £100-150/MWh with storage for 90% CF
- *Solar + Battery*: Base solar £40-50/MWh, potentially exceeding £150-200/MWh with storage
## Reliability / Capacity Factor
- *Nuclear*: ~90% capacity factor, suited for baseload
- *Natural Gas*: 80-90% if run as baseload, highly flexible
- *Wind + Battery*: 35-50% raw CF for wind alone, requires battery + overbuild for 90% CF
- *Solar + Battery*: 10-15% raw CF in UK, requires massive overbuild and storage for 90% CF
LLMs should not be used as a reliable source of numbers for research like that. You keep saying how obvious this is and trivial to research. Maybe just post a quality research link instead in that case?
Capacity factor is calculated into lcoe, what's your point? Moreover, downtime for wind turbines is much less of an issue for a grid than large power plants (even with a significantly higher capacity factor), because you run into much bigger issues if your GW plant is down, compared to a couple of MW (and no the probabilities of all your renewables mix going down at the same time is very low, unless you're Luxemburg).
Capacity factor is calculated in. But intermittency is not. The issue is that once demand is saturated during periods of peak production, the excess energy is wasted so the effective capacity factor drops as adoption grows. E.g. once you saturate daytime energy demand, further investment in solar energy yields no more useable energy.
Intermittent sources are a good way to supplement dispatchable sources of energy like gas plants or hydroelectricity. But as a primary source of energy, they're not feasible without a massive breakthrough in energy storage.
I hate the large scale turbines. I'm sure small scale or other designs are OK. But screw the large turbines. Where I grew up they outsourced the jobs and then we were left with ugly giants ruining the once beautiful mountains. It's on par with strip mining (aesthetically).
People forget that the natural landscape of Britain is forest. The enclosed fields people think are natural countryside are in fact an entirely human creation.
Yes. The gently rolling fields of grass, sheep, rape and wheat are considered a national symbol of our natural environment in need of protection from dastardly human creations such as wind turbines. This is the 'green and pleasant land' that William Blake wrote about.
The "natural landscape" is a pretty meaningless concept in Britain. Are moors not natural landscapes because they were formed hundreds or thousands of years ago? Is it natural when animals do something but not when humans do it? Or is it natural when hunter gatherers do something but not when agriculturalists do it? Or is it natural when non-industrial people do it, but not when industrialists do it? And why does your chosen definition matter? Is the natural landscape better than human-modified landscapes? Is a change always fine if the starting point was created by humans?
If you replaced the ancient figures carved into the chalk in England with wind farms would that be fine because they arent natural features?
It's unclear what point you're making with reference to the blanket ban on onshore wind. I wouldn't like to see turbines on Cerne Abbas or Dartmoor. Nobody wants that, as far as I'm aware?
I would like to see more of them on the generic grass/wheat/rape fields that cover much of England. That was prevented by the blanket ban.
Lighthouses have only become aesthetic because of their rarity rendering them as quaint or nostalgic. Modern versions and their impacts would be largely protested.
Where do you think coal and oil comes from? It's ok as long as other people's environment is destroyed for non-renewable energy but not your environment for renewable energy?
Lol, they used to mine coal under that very mountain (until it was outsourced). It's not like we have some insular life. The region is economically depressed. People would rather have jobs while destroying the environment than not have jobs while destroying the environment and recreational value simultaneously.
Have they ever used that technique in the UK? I don't think the UK has mountains suitable for mountaintop removal - they are famous for their underground operations.
I've always filed mountaintop removal mining as one of those "weird things Americans do" approaches. Probably associated with unusual geology or something.
I think the UK had the none-mountainous version of strip mining - open pit mines. I think there aren't any in operation currently, and I'm unsure if they were for coal or just other commodities.
Maybe it's a geographical/cultural difference, but there are so, so many mountains in the western US. it's a good part of why the game Oregan Trail was made. Before carving roads around and through mountains it was a truly treacherous journey.
US also jury has so much land to begin with. We can certainly afford to retrofit a few mountains without fundamentally disrupting the ecosystem. We're very bad at moderation, sadly.
Aren't these also massive mass bird slayers ? The last I read, over half a million birds were killed (official under-estimate) by wind turbines in UK alone every year
The real issue seems to be that they might kill protected birds more often than buildings or cats, which seem to kill smaller common species (usually of lesser concern).
That number is a heavy under-estimate and deliberately lowered for public consumption. But, you might want to sit down - The real slaughter is well in the millions annually.
I live in an area where there are a lot of wind mills along a nearby range of hills. There is also another taller hill which allows you to look down on the wind mills. In all the times I've driven up there and stopped to look out at the vista there were no birds at the base of the windmills. None. On any of them.
It's usually the types of birds that are affected that upset people. Many ideal locations for windmills (in particular mountainous regions, dunno about offshore) happen to also be ideal places for threatened or endangered large raptors.
Likewise, there's the (unproven) connection with noise generated by offshore wind farms disturbing wildlife migration and movement, especially among whales.
It'd be nice to know that we're not replacing one disaster with another, though I'm out of date on my personal research as to whether any of these concerns still warrant further investigation.
> Many ideal locations for windmills...happen to also be ideal places for threatened or endangered large raptors.
The person I replied to was making a quantity-of-birds argument. Not an endangered species argument.
> there's the (unproven) connection with noise generated by offshore wind farms disturbing wildlife migration and movement
Do they make a lot more noise than giant cruise ships? Luxury yachts? I don't see much of a movement to ban those. It's almost like people decide the things they want to have for themselves (undisturbed views), then make up whatever noble-sounding reasons (whales, birds) will preserve those things.
I have trouble believing you are being honest. Piling under wind turbines?! I have yet to see a dead bird under a wind turbine myself (but I acknowledge they do kill some). Published estimated averages are 4 to 18 birds per turbine per year [1]. Compare that to buildings (where we also don't pile up either) which kill man estimated 1 billion birds a year [2]
Yes, explicitly piling up under wind turbines. This was in the Western Ghats in India and my mother was sickened - (she used to be a regular trekker before Covid). I didn't initially believe her either. Btw, they were so effective as bird killers that wind-turbines were even acknowledged officially as "top predator". They change ecology drastically within a couple of years.
“Our central discovery is that wind turbines can act as top predators, by reducing the density and activity of birds, their prey are now released from the typical level of predation. This release causes a range of changes in lizards,” explained Dr Maria Thaker of Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science
> so effective as bird killers that wind-turbines were even acknowledged officially as "top predator"
This is using "top" in the sense of "apex", because turbines have no natural predators. The paper says you could imagine them as something at the top of the trophic web. The paper explores the impact on their prey populations.
That's opposed to "top" in the sense of "kills more than other predators" or whatever. I mention it because number-of-kills is what the rest of the discussion seems to be about.
You haven’t, which is why you have no citation just a ridiculous, unproven anecdote. There are literally hundreds of turbines in my area, there are not and have never been “birds piling up under them.”
Your own link further down estimates 4-18 per year. 1 bird per month would be gone before you had a chance to collect it, much less have a chance to “pile up”.
I am honestly surprised - you should see dead birds at-least a couple of times a week. Not annually or monthly, but weekly esp for a full wind-farm like what you are stating.
Which part of the world do you live in ? It is possible that the location of the farm was chosen wisely. Are you also sure someone is not clearing the corpses ? There are laws mandating the collection of corpses in many western nations. My personal anecdotal opinion is that data is more honest in the non-Western nations since nobody cares about bird-deaths all that much and so the deaths are not sanitized.
I doubt that wind turbines are the only power source that kills birds. Marginal bird deaths per unit of power production is the interesting statistic. This MIT post [1] links to a 2009 study [2] which provides that comparison:
4.98 birds/GWh in the fossil fuel estimate comes from unrealized climate change expectations. They also only looked at two coal power plants for the remainder of the study.
The nuclear source bird death estimates are extrapolated from one bad weather incident over two nights from a single plant on the Florida coast.
This is not a serious or rigorous study. Is there anything more recent?
Real number is well above that. Everyone involved in bird conservation agrees this number is a fraction only reported for public consumption - real number is well into the millions. You can ask organizations like ABC birds.
Ugghh. I meant everyone in bird conservation. The ABC article explains why the official numbers are a heavy underestimate. But this was in 2021 - it has gotten worse since then. This is not unique to the US - my personal experience of this was in India.
And the recommendation from those people is: choose the sites more carefully. Not stop or slow down, just:
> Climate change is a critical threat to birds. Recognizing this fact, ABC supports renewable energy, including wind energy, and the transition away from fossil fuels. However, not every wind project is proposed in a suitable location.
> Did you read a Donald Trump tweet? Because no reputable source has ever said wind turbines are a major risk to birds.
I don't care about Donald Trump. (How did this even become about him ?) And your second statement is laughably false as even elementary research would tell you.
Do note that there are ~100 million cats and only ~70k wind turbines, if you use US as a reference. Cats are clearly not the top-predators of birds anymore.
> I don't care about Donald Trump. (How did this even become about him ?)
You said you “read” about turbines killing birds (shockingly with no citation). There is literally nobody else claiming such stupidity.
> Do note that there are ~100 million cats and only ~70k wind turbines, if you use US as a reference. Cats are clearly not the top-predators of birds anymore.
Do note, a tiny fraction of the 100m cats are outdoor cats. And yes, they are absolutely one of the top predators of birds and have been for decades.
Fascinatng that `brexit` isn't mentioned once in that article. Making trading harder with your closest neighbour can't be a great move for the economy.
Yes that’s really funny.
Im not sure how you can write an article like this and never even mention it once.
Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself, and the full effects are just starting to come to the surface now.
I dont think the UK will ever fully recover from it.
> Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself
From an economic standpoint, brexit was indeed a big L, but I dont think brexiteers were largely voting on economic grounds - a point which is lost on most remainers.
Brexit was absolutely about Economic conditions. Anti immigration sentiment was one big factor that everyone talks about, but in reality the sentiment itself was a symptom on display for the underlying condition of people having their living standards drop. The second big factor people kept bringing up was that EU was making decisions for UK, which people thought needed to be reversed. Austerity measures, which EU adopted, were the single biggest reason why people felt they needed more control. They also slowed down the post 2008 recovery, which meant people weren’t doing as well anymore. Anti immigration sentiment also rose once people were unhappy and needed someone to take the blame.
from a non-economic standpoint it was just as stupid, the idea of "taking back control" is predicated on the concept that the UK was forced to accept rules imposed by others and would be free to stop doing that.
But the UK had substantial influence on those, and it no longer does, while still having to follow them to be able to do business with the EU.
And indeed, the UK has not really diverged from the EU in the last 8 years and voted a new government that wants to tighten the relationship.
It was a generic protest vote "I don't like how things are going and I was happier when I was young". I can empathize, but it was still self-inflicted harm.
Brexit is a symptom, not the cause. The people who were most screwed by Britain's prior mistakes voted for it in a vain attempt at fixing the problem by throwing misguided nostalgia at it.
Real GDP per capita growth for US vs UK was almost identical until 2008. The last 3 years have been terrible for the UK, but if you're looking for the start of UK's stagnation you have to go much farther back than Brexit.
The irony about being anti-immigration is that immigration fuels economic growth.
- Most developed countries have below-replacement child rates from citizens
- Without larger younger, working age generations, social safety nets and productivity investments are difficult to finance
- Immigration is the only thing fueling that population growth
The real argument should be about rates of cultural assimilation or acculturation, wealth disparities and concentration of poverty, and structural limits to economic prosperity.
Fighting immigration is just shooting oneself in their demographic foot. (See Japan and Russia)
Why the artificial constraint of assuming technology is constant? In not necessarily one to hope that tech will automatically bail us out, of the growth in the previous decades has been from tech innovations like automation.
Technology has a ceiling for a given time, across the world, which is really what you're competing with in a globalized economy.
Which is to say that more technology isn't a solution out of a demographic hole, when you're competing with a country that has the same technology and better demographics.
> The irony about being anti-immigration is that immigration fuels economic growth.
The UK has had increased (net) immigration for decades, including a huge jump in the past few years[0]. The population grew commensurately, likely mostly due to immigration, since as you accurately point out the birth rate is low; there are roughly 13% more people in the UK now than 20 years ago. Why, then, has the GDP per capita flatlined in the same timeframe? Where is the growth that immigration is supposed to fuel?
> Immigration is the only thing fueling that population growth
This is a core neoliberal claim that smacks of "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".
> The real argument should be about rates of cultural assimilation or acculturation
By all means, let's have that discussion! If immigrants were, by and large, able to acculturate well, there would be much less anti-immigration sentiment.
But the same neoliberalism that supported increased immigration to developed countries on these economic grounds also morphed into a dual prong of claiming that diversity is our greatest strength and that it's racist to expect immigrants to have to conform to their new host culture. Both attitudes are directly at odds with assimilation and acculturation.
Other wealth European nations that took in a lot of immigrants, mostly from grossly incompatible cultures, have seen concerning increases in violent crime and other things deleterious to social cohesion and quality of life.
> (See Japan and Russia)
Japan's population has been shrinking since 2010; its GDP per capita has been treading water for even longer, since the early 90s. Similar story for Russia, whose population has been flip-flopping from growing and shrinking for a few decades, and whose GDP per capita hasn't seen any sustained growth since the late 2000s.
So it's entirely possible to have a stagnant economy, whether or not you receive immigrants.
> Without larger younger, working age generations, social safety nets and productivity investments are difficult to finance
This is about the only unarguably true statement you made. A nation composed of too many nonworking people receiving transfer payments from working people cannot exist in that state for long.
> If immigrants were, by and large, able to acculturate well, there would be much less anti-immigration sentiment.
What? This isn't remotely true. Anti-immigrant sentiment is deliberately induced, because they're an easy target—it has nothing to do with how well they do or don't acculturate. Although, anti-immigrant sentiment does make acculturation more difficult as well—which hey, makes it even easier to inflame anti-immigrant sentiment!
You think the relentless replacement of UK services by unhinged sovereign wealth funds is caused by 'uncontrolled immigration'? I'll have to study this more.
Ah yes the migration boogieman. migrants are simultaneously uneducated and abusing the welfare system, but also take away people's jobs and push up house prices so that "ordinary" people can't afford houses anymore. Never mind that those accusations are contradictory.
UK was the only EU member not part of the Schengen Zone as-in it was the only member you couldn't freely immigrate to. As well as it's an island, nobody hoping a boat from Morocco and landing in London.
Pakistani's aren't taking your job. The economy is just stagnating.
Post-Pandemic is a huge anomaly [1] but the article is talking about stuff pre-2019.
Ireland was also not in Schengen. And still isn't due to being bound to the CTA with the UK in the good Friday agreement. Cyprus also. And Romania and Bulgaria weren't in it until last year.
They're taking large portions of Bradford, Leeds etc.
Also, the boat can go from Morocco to Ceuta, and its cargo can be delivered via lorry across the Channel.
> Only idiots think immigration is uncontrolled. Practically all immigration is from government granted visas.
"Uncontrolled" in this context doesn't mean people hopping the border unbeknownst to the authorities. It means immigration at a rate high enough that it's beyond the capacity of the host nation to integrate the newcomers to its culture.
A village of a thousand people can accept one additional person per year indefinitely with no material change to its way of life. But it cannot accept, say, a hundred a year, especially if the hundred immigrants come from a substantially different culture, without fundamentally changing the entire social fabric.
And when such massive changes to society occur without buy-in from a convincing majority of people?[0] Well, only idiots would wonder why people think it's out of control.
[0]: In the UK, Brexit made it clear that in fact the buy-in was in the other direction.
> It means immigration at a rate high enough that it's beyond the capacity of the host nation to integrate the newcomers to its culture.
This resistance falls away quickly when food price inflation spirals out of control because you cannot find cheap labour for your harvests. (In 2025, there are zero highly developed nations, (yes, including Japan!) that do not heavily depend upon seasonal migrant labour to help with harvests.) Same when sick and elderly people have unreasonably long wait times at clinic or hospital due to doctor/nurse shortage.
yeah, because despite the UK training a huge number of doctors and nurses, the government doesn't want to pay them enough to stop them emigrating the the US or Australia, which have a lot of demand and much higher wages. So then they try to import health workers from elsewhere. Great plan.
Not to take the spotlight away from the UK, but I am pretty sure that all highly developed nations are struggling to find enough nurses amongst their citizens. Even Japan (gasp) has a special programme to help foreigners learn Japanese and immigrate as a skilled nurse.
It's not great, sure, but it's only something like a long-run 2% drag. 2% is a lot, don't get me wrong! But the loss from planning is pretty high double digits, well over 10% in the US, to say nothing about the gains from liberalizing migration
My own [local government] is so stupid its own massive 7-figure park project got blocked by [local government] planning halfway through. For about a year instead of a park we’ve had two massive holes surrounded by fences. Too many taxes, too much nimbyism. This one really is that simple.
This happens everywhere in enterprise and government because policies and processes are designed to avoid mistakes or embarassment at any cost (because those risks are internalised by the bureacracy and therefore "real") but do not account for the cost of not being able to get anything done, because those are externalised and everyone involved in the various committees and review processes gets paid regardless.
I wish there were better ways to align incentives here.
This article is severely tilted nonsense with a weird ideological bent.
The author sneers against regulatory rules to limit suburban sprawl but really none of that has anything to do with a housing shortage.
It is entirely possible to denser and taller buildings, having both compact communities, green space, farms and forest and also addressing housing needs. UK hinders its economy by declining to do so (as do so many other places with housing shortages).
I want to see more discussion from the perspective that the economy and government is not just a process, an institution, but a contest, an arena.
Outcomes which are presented as a failure, are not merely a failure, but like a punch in a boxing match that misses its mark, occurs in a wider context, and against deliberate opposition. A failed project might be a failure for most, but for opponents it may be a victory, or even just collateral damage in a wider fight.
Exactly. I think there's an entire political party that capitalizes on suffering, offering to jump in and rescue the poor victims. Like racketeering: create the problem and sell you the solution "if you just vote for us, we'll fix the devastating problems caused by $BADGUYS". but an absence of problems means you lose your voter base.
Not the OP but look at the difference between what governments can do when there is a sense of urgency (i.e it is wartime or one is in recent memory) vs what they do when it's not.
My lizard brain interprets this in the following way: Elites in response to external competition or in the presence of existential threat experience strong incentives to make "real" progress.
When there's little external competition, leadership are more concerned with maintaining or slightly enhancing their relative status within existing power structures and this leads to stasis as their interest is mainly blocking or slowing any disruption which could change the balance of power.
Projects often fail because the forces of "keep things the same" beat the team that wanted the change to happen.
Yeah I argue that's human nature. When you're in danger (or perceived danger) you will make drastic moves to survive. When you're in a good spot, you are less incensed to rush things. And generally, status quo in not-bad times is the majority.
So on a macro level a progressive or simply sympathetic minority has to fight a conservative majority in order to keep pushing for change.
The only solace here is that the you rarely need a majority to enact change. Apparently movements need a critical capacity of 3.5% in order to start this network effect of people joining in due to popularity bias.
> Not the OP but look at the difference between what governments can do when there is a sense of urgency (i.e it is wartime or one is in recent memory) vs what they do when it's not.
Every example I can think of involved rushing through legislation and policy changes that were not looked upon kindly given a moment of retrospection.
The New Deal, Japanese internment camps, the PATRIOT Act, Zero COVID policies, etc. The one exception might be something like the Space Race, but that also had a lot to do with Operation Paperclip, which had its own ethical dilemmas.
> Every example I can think of involved rushing through legislation and policy changes that were not looked upon kindly given a moment of retrospection.
The New Deal?
> rushing
Really? This was rushed?
Wiki says:
> During Roosevelt's first hundred days in office in 1933 until 1935, he introduced what historians refer to as the "First New Deal", which focused on the "3 R's": relief for the unemployed and for the poor, recovery of the economy back to normal levels, and reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression.
Further:
> From 1935 to 1938, the "Second New Deal" introduced further legislation and additional agencies which focused on job creation and on improving the conditions of the elderly, workers, and the poor.
Next you wrote:
> not looked upon kindly given a moment of retrospection
Really? Read the intro from Wiki about this programme. Its impact was staggering then, and remains today.
These libertarians are mostly an American phenomenon. In Europe it’s “small-government” conservatives who do this. (They are not really about small government, though, and they never reduce deficits; they are just for upwards wealth redistribution).
I have some friends over there and they (or their employers) are cutting back on their business expenditures, staffing and overall outlook. The new payroll taxes (unemployment insurance?) are going to bite both employers and employees alike.
Taxes are too high, there's too much red tape for businesses and successive governments have failed to invest in anything outside of the "south" (e.g. Greater London). I was (half) joking with them that the "north" would be far better off if it seceded and joined Scotland!
I'm in the 45-49 age bracket this year. In BC (Canada), a 95th percentile income for that age is $126,000 (2021 Census). Before any deductions (specifically retirement investments that reduce taxable income) I'd be looking at a 26.85% tax rate, with a marginal rate of 38%. So pretty much the same rate here.
Not to say that Canada's overall economy is particularly any better than the UK's, and especially Trump's tariff threats will do a number on us.
>> especially Trump's tariff threats will do a number on us.
There will be losers certainly, but I'm not 100% sure that tarrifs for Canada are bad in the long run.
Firstly, there are already reports of Canadians buying local over US goods. If that sentiment hrows, and becomes entrenched that's good.
Secondly, at least gor some goods, suppliers are incentivised to explore other export markets. Again, long term, that diversification is good.
Thirdly, for at least some goods, the US cannot simply ramp up production. So they'll still be buying, but their consumers will pay more. Canadian suppliers can simply increase prices as well, since any US consumer increase will be ascribed to the tarrifs. This though is somewhat balanced by Canadian oversupply.
Fourthly it encourages producers to diversify somewhat to reduce over supply. In the long run a varied economy is better than one dependant on any one sector.
Ultimately Canada and Mexico could come out of this stronger. While the US consumer gets used to higher prices. (Which Canada et al can take advantage of whe tarrifs are removed.)
Is this including the use of tax advantaged accounts like HSAs/401Ks/IRAs/etc?
In the US, it should be possible to get a 95th percentile household income ($300k, married filing joint) effective federal income tax rate down to 10% to 15%. Including total health insurance costs (employer + employee) plus some amount of deductible/out of pocket maximum for a family of 4 would bump it up to 20% to 25%. And then on top of that would be state + local tax liabilities like property and sales tax.
All in, I bet total proportion spent on taxes is less than 40%, even in California, at 95th percentile income, and 30% in a state without income tax.
Edit: I’m probably understating my numbers by 5% due to forgetting about social security and Medicare taxes.
> In the US, it should be possible to get a 95th percentile household income ($300k, married filing joint) effective federal income tax rate down to 10% to 15%.
I cannot believe it. Do you have a worked example?
If this is MFJ two similar incomes, then Social security and Medicare is another ~14% (it'll say 7.65% on the tin, but really your wage is lowered to compensate for the 7.65% employer portion, working out to about 14% total). Effective federal income tax on $300k income is 20%+, not including healthcare. State tax is another 8%..
So that's 42%, not including healthcare costs. Which is gonna be easily another 5%+.
American taxes are so complicated. Let's add another 1-2% for the mental cost of having to know all this stuff, or pay someone else to know it. It's just crazy.
It’s incredible the US has any other economic output, considering the effort spent on taxes.
At one of my businesses, we remit 4 separate sales taxes to 4 separate governments, and each has to be itemized, so receipts are multiple pages long for no reason.
Then there are myriad possibilities for being exempt from either all or some of the taxes, and those records have to be kept in case of an audit.
There must be enormous amounts of tax evasion too, the attack surface is so great no one can audit it all. The most tax advantaged account, a Health Savings Account, lets people set money aside today, invest it, and let it grow for however long they want, and then withdraw it for healthcare expenses, all tax free.
But the healthcare expenses can be from any point in time in the past. A 30 year old can save their receipts for purchases ranging from over the counter painkillers to childbirth bills from the hospital, and then reimburse themselves when they are 80 years old.
How can it even be possible to audit someone’s healthcare expenses that happened 50 years ago? The counter party will surely no longer have the records to cross reference, so it’s basically the government taking people’s word for it.
Taxes are a lot higher because the higher brackets kick in at a much lower income while cost of living is similar. A top 5% income is not enough to live a dignified in London where most of those jobs are but it’s high enough that the government won’t let you make more. Very sad situation. Top 5% income in the UK is probably more like top 20% in the USA
>Per capita electricity generation in the U.K. is now roughly one-third that of the United States, and energy use per unit of GDP is the lowest in the G7. By these measures, at least, Britain may be the most energy-starved nation in the developed world.
Yikes. Housing is the big issue that gets everyone’s attention, but this is huge. Cheap energy drives economic growth at all levels. It’s incredible that the various British governments have let it get to this level. Maybe it’s time to import a few Chinese or Soviet technocrats?
I think those are intentionally misleading numbers. The UK is a finance power house, not a manufacturing one, so of course it derives a larger share of GDP from less energy.
Italy has a higher % of GDP from manufacturing but way more expensive energy.
60 years of tories and tory-lites slowly but surely cutting "waste", privatizing, deregulating, pushing for austerity...
Let that be a lesson to the US, seeking government efficiency is a non-goal. Good, well-funded public services make productive citizens and a strong economy. Austerity leads to a dead country.
Can you seriously compare a very wealthy city-state to actual countries? Do you not see why you can't run the UK like you would Monaco?
You really went out of your way to pick the only "country" you could find with both low government spending and high quality of life, despite the data proving a strong correlation between these two in actual countries. Wow.
This is not as crazy as it sounds at first glance. The % is less important than where they are spending that money.
An "economy" is just a measure of the overall movement of money. If the bulk of that spending is internal, then that is contributing to the economy. Govt workers are consumers, local companies are providing goods to govt etc.
USaid for example spent a lot of money on food. And a lot of that was purchased from US farmers. Killing USaid "saves a lot of money" but also costs a lot of producers their income.
As long as the bulk of spending is local, govt spending is an excellent way of keeping money moving.
The core argument - that the state is getting in the way of the private sector fixing everything - is clearly false, at least in the case of the UK.
If that were the case, public transport (which underwent radical privatisation and deregulation across the UK some 40+ years ago), would be the cheapest and most effective in Europe. In fact, it's the most expensive in Europe. It is all currently being wrestled back into public hands through bus and rail fixed franchises, because Stagecoach (they own Greyhound in the US, you might be familiar with their work), have driven public transport into the ground in the name of profits for themselves.
On housing, the Thatcher government in the 1980s gave social housing tenants the right to buy homes, and created laws that prevented local authorities from building new public sector housing projects: the market, after all, would be more effective. That's led to a situation where private developers own land they won't build on until prices rise - they're artificially shortening supply. The houses they do build are small and expensive, and most people actively look for non-new build homes, to the extent that the government had to introduce tax breaks (Lifetime ISA), and incentives (help to buy), for people to buy new builds they didn't really want.
This isn't breaking news. People have been pointing out the problems and obvious drawbacks to the libertarian "private corporations can fix it all" nonsense that drove Thatcherism from the first moments it was conceived in the 1980s, and were hand-waved away as relics of the past by the centre right who took control of the country and destroyed it.
Yes, the public sector has problems too. Nobody is arguing that the right solution is to nationalise everything (except in the case of monopoly markets like public transport and utilities, where the UK is markedly behind the rest of Europe in the sectors which it has left to private sector utilisation). It's about balance. It always was, for many years, and for many years it was successful, as it has continued to be across Europe.
TFA suggests that the real problem is that the private sector has been leashed by red tape, but that's just not true. The government has given the private sector ample opportunity: to build houses, and they've refused to do so; to build nuclear power, and they keep coming back and asking for more money to fix problems of their own making; to run utilities as they wish, and they pollute rivers and raise bill prices.
In most of Europe (with almost identical regulations and rules, thanks to the power of EU frameworks the UK was entirely aligned to until very recently), the public sector has been able to retain a larger part of these critical economic components, and these problems have not arisen to the same extent.
As an aside, it's not lost on most that it is ironic that the French public sector is allowed to invest in UK transport and energy sector companies, but the UK public sector is not, due to EU law that we're still trying to get rid of.
TFA is therefore philosophically, intellectually and factually flawed at every level based on the actual data and lived experiences of the people suffering this - and yes, I am one of those people. I'm sick of this utterly absurd libertarian agenda being pushed like this, claiming that the private sector is somehow a victim. I believe so are most UK citizens who see it for the propaganda it is.
There is an increasing, and deepening sense of unease at private capital in the UK, much of it unfounded. Right-wing libertarian agitprop nonsense like this article doesn't help: it's toxic, and harms the private sector in those areas where it can make a real difference.
So the UK rail network was privatized in the 1990s with tracks and stations remaining under government control and private companies bid for a 'franchise' running train services for whole regions. So basically franchises operate as regional monopolies and meaning passengers don't have any real choice of providers? The competition only existed briefly during the initial bidding process which the gov decided on.
Very similar to Canada's telecom history where they are private corporations on paper but they are state sanctioned local monopolies/oligopolies in functional terms. Or our 'private' highway which was given a 99yr lease for a low one-off payment that charges extremely high tolls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_407
> The competition only existed briefly during the initial bidding process which the gov decided on.
The contracts were periodically retendered (it varied, but typically every 5-10 years). The problem is the competitive process had its own problems because it encourage the bidding companies to be overly optimistic. The East-Coast franchise infamously failed multiple times because the companies kept missing passenger forecasts and going bust.
However the competitive element was only ever for the government (in terms of how much surplus/subsidy would be required to/from the operating company over the contract). Having the branding, pricing (where not a regulated fare) etc. managed by those companies meant that they were at odds with passenger interests a lot of time.
Really privatisation was done from the wrong angle. If passengers don't get a choice in service provider then the concessions model (government pays private operators to run the service) would have made more sense. It would have allowed the government to still gain from competition and outsource management, while taking control of the more important elements. The concessions model has worked reasonably well for transport services in London (Elizabeth Line, DLR, Overground and Buses IIRC)
Also as a side point, originally the tracks and stations (or rather the management of them) was privatised into a private entity, Railtrack, but it had to be renationalised because of a number of massive safety incidents from cost-cutting.
> So the UK rail network was privatised in the 1990s with tracks and stations remaining under government control and private companies bid for a 'franchise' running train services for whole regions.
The tracks and stations were also privatised as "Railtrack" but they subsequently went bankrupt and had to be brought back into public ownership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railtrack
> So basically franchises operate as regional monopolies and meaning passengers don't have any real choice of providers?
You can't have competing companies on rails. Each companies having their own networks would be prohibitively expensive, or they have to share rails between each other which poses significant issues.
You're also left with the issue of unprofitable stations, which is a lot of them.
If you want an example of what a really privatized, deregulated rail system would look like, read about France in the early 20th century. By the 30s, shareholders were begging the state to nationalize their money-burning companies. And it did.
Rail should be a public service. As one, its benefits to society are immense.
You can, Japan does it and they are considered best in the world. There are at least 10 different train companies in Tokyo, (probably more like 20 but I don't know all the smaller ones). Similarly in Osaka, Kyoto, etc....
> Rail should be a public service.
No, it should be run for profit but the system put in place well designed so serving more customers better means the company does better.
Japan accomplishes this AFAIK, by letting the train companies buy/own/build other things. For example, the Tokyu company that runs some of the trains that come into Shibuya station owns the building Google's Japan office is in. They also own the famous 109 building (10 = to, 9 = kyu). And 10 or 15 other buildings in Shibuya. They run grocery stores at probably 50% of their stations. They also build apartments.
If their line gets sucky people spread the word "don't live on that line, it sucks, it's too crowded and the trains are late" and all their business suffer and people start moving out. So they have an incentive to keep their lines better than the other lines.
They also compete on destinations. For example Shibuya to Yokohama. You can take a Tokyu line and you can also take a JR line. They go slightly different routes but end up at the same place. Similarly if you're in Kyoto and want to go to Osaka. You can take JR, or Hankyu, or Hanshin, 3 separate train companies all of which run multiple lines. You'll see ads for the multiple different competing trains to get you from downtown Tokyo to Narita and Hanada airports.
All of that is only possible because of network effects, and a nationalized JR built most of that network.
And honestly, I think you’re overstating the degree of choice you have as a rider. Different lines carved out their corners and companies avoid each other. Service level is generally high, to the point that it’s a non factor. You take whichever train is cheaper/faster, and that’s it.
The problem is that rail has huge positive externalities that are not captured by the operators. You can address that by letting operators speculate on real estate, or you could do it with taxes.
Open access operators have generally not been allowed to directly compete with franchised Train Operating Companies (TOCs).
Many of Britain's railway routes are profitable, but open access operators aren't allowed to compete with franchised TOCs for a slice of those profits. As a prerequisite for approval, the Department of Transport requires open access operators to show that their services would create additional value of their own, not just abstract existing revenue.
Lumo, an open access operator and a part of First group, run trains between London and Edinburgh. They stop at Morpeth for no other reason than to fulfil their requirement to create value, in this case by stopping at a station previously underserved by the DfT franchise of the route. In other words, Lump had to make compromises in return for being allowed to get in on the action on one of the profitable railway lines.
I'd be confident in claiming that there has never been any true free market competition for British passenger rail services since privatization. The existence of private capital doesn't automatically create free markets!
> ...the Thatcher government in the 1980s gave social housing tenants the right to buy homes, and created laws that prevented local authorities from building new public sector housing projects...
Also, with a large discount, so even if new social housing could be built, there wouldn't be the funds to build them. It is effectively a large wealth transfer from the taxpayer to those needing subsidised homes, such that they could later resell that home to release their windfall, sucking the money that could have gone to housing others.
> public transport ... would be the cheapest and most effective in Europe.
While that is generally the argument, I wouldn't expect it to hold when governments remove subsidies as is often the case with regulated transport systems. The argument is actually one of efficiency.
I had a great argument with someone one time on the classic subject of deregulating roads. The interlocutor made a point that I initially struggled with - that without subsidies there probably wouldn't be many roads. After a bit of reflection it became obvious that in a free market where land was worth a lot of money, the market wouldn't put roads on it. Because of government subsidies, roads were being overbuilt beyond what actually makes sense (denser cities where people can walk from place to place are actually pretty livable). So in the case of deregulating transport higher prices isn't the end of it. If you remove a subsidy, there will be less of a thing. The question is why is that bad? If subsidies were good without drawbacks, we'd subsidise everything.
And land is a famous special case; there should be a land tax to weed out people trying to make money from owning undeveloped land.
I enjoyed reading your comment but didn't wholly agree with this bit:
> If subsidies were good without drawbacks, we'd subsidise everything.
Many voters are sensitive to what they perceive as wasteful use of public funds, so your claim only makes sense in a sort of idealized, platonic dictatorship. Admittedly, governments do waste funds occasionally so the concerns are not necessarily baseless. However I can easily see a government choosing not to subsidize a 'perfect' project simply because they want to appear frugal to voters - after all, that is a significant reason why the UK has had so many austerity policies that have slowed public investment.
> And land is a famous special case; there should be a land tax to weed out people trying to make money from owning undeveloped land.
Henry George, is that you? I can certainly get behind that argument!
Careful now, free market absolutism is almost a religion around these parts.
Our societies becoming increasingly more unequal and less functional coincides almost exactly with Raegan's and Thatcher's mandates. Austerity, privatization and deregulation are directly leading us into Gilded Age levels of inequality. And you shouldn't want that, unless you're like in the top 0.01%.
Exactly. Housing is the big cost of living increase. A perfectly unregulated economy with finite land will drive land prices up to the margin of cultivation (the margin at which one would move to a less desirable piece of land). As population and productivity grows this results in ever higher land rents. In the limit rents will be exactly the edge of what people can pay.
Insofar as "socialist politics" make it harder for the supply of housing to rise to match demand, it is not moronic at all. Places in the UK where housing stock grows with population don't have it as bad as places that don't[0], i.e. London.
Thatcher left office in 1990. The population of Greater London has grown by 44% since then. I don't think there has been a single decade since where the growth of housing stock kept up with the growth of people. Why blame Thatcher for this?
Alongside Thatcher's 'Right to Buy' policy that reduced the stock of social housing, there were also restrictions on how much new housing could be bought or built by local councils to replenish the availability of social housing. These restrictions had more or less remained the same until very recently. It was only during the Johnson government that the restrictions started to be lifted. Of course, the current Labour government are attempting to once again build new social housing, but it is easy to see why people look back and see Thatcher as being the cause of those three decades of social housing shortages.
In the UK the energy market is broken, the costs of electricity is based on what the most expensive source is currently on the grid.
The UK has a lot of wind (shallow waters, strong wind blasts from Atlantic etc) and wind is significantly cheaper, but because there's gas still on the grid everyone pays the higher gas based price even if energy is mostly coming from cheaper wind.
Yes, the renewable cleaner energy is actually cheaper than the fossil fuel it's replacing and in a perfect world should reduce bills.
It's based on the most expensive source that is required to meet demand. If there is enough wind to meet demand then gas is not needed or factored in to the price.
All markets (not just energy markets) work in this way.
> because there's gas still on the grid everyone pays the higher gas based price even if energy is mostly coming from cheaper wind
You're describing how a market functions. If the gas plants went offline tomorrow, could the wind turbines produce sufficient energy to power the national grid?
That is a very common and overly simplistic view of the UK's energy market. What you have described is essentially the UK's day-ahead and spot energy markets. The whole point of those markets is to ensure demand is met with near 100% certainty. Setting the price to the last bidder is not unique to the UK for energy pricing, if it were not present then everyone would be speculating what the threshold would be and giving high bids and it would make the market unstable. There are other markets in the UK that behave very differently (such as the ones that green energy companies use to buy 100% renewable energy 6 months ahead of time).
In practice UK electricity prices _are_ much cheaper from wind and solar energy, most of the time, because virtually all of that capacity in the UK was built under what is known as a CFD (contracts for difference) basis. The exact mechanism is a bit subtle [1], but in essence renewables built that way have a fixed price per unit of energy (usually for 20 years after construction). This price is less than what the gas energy producers typically bid in the UK.
The reasons why electricity prices are still on average very high in the UK is because the rest of the energy market is _so_ exposed to gas prices and renewables can't produce electricity a lot of the time (because it's not always windy, and it's not always light outside). Renewable production is highly correlated with itself and not necessarily aligned with demand.
The UK also has other structural problems in the electricity system that have arisen from its exposure to renewables that come with associated costs. For example wind turbines in Scotland often get paid to _turn off_ because their power can't be transmitted to the south of England where it can be used - there are similar constraints with North sea production. Wind turbines and solar panels replacing traditional coal power stations means that the electricity grid has lost a lot of its traditional load balancing and stability mechanisms (conventional power plants provide a lot of stability because large rotational mass synchronised to the grid frequency provides inertia in the entire grid - wind turbine rotation is independent of the grid frequency). ESO now has to have more drastic and expensive mechanisms like demand reduction and rapid response hot reserves in-place. A lot of these issues are transient and will get cheaper over time, but they've become acute in the short-term with the UK's rapid grid decarbonisation.
[1] they get paid directly from the day-ahead, spot, and other markets at the last bidder price. But they either have to refund any amount over their fixed price, or they receive a top-up from the energy companies so that they effectively got the fixed price.
It's higher energy prices yes, but that means higher everything prices. Even if your energy tariff is a 100% renewable one you still pay the dirty gas price because of the way the market is set up.
Combine that with high costs of housing (both to purchase but also to rent) and people are, generally speaking, fucked and living paycheck to paycheck. Renters especially live a precarious life where prices regularly go up 10% per year and you might be legally told to leave with not much more than a month's notice leading to much upheaval and associated costs.
That's a system that benefits mega-corporations running everything. Housing/cost of living is so expensive it cripples most upward mobility as regular people can't take risks investing/starting a business/switching careers/etc or have savings because they can barely afford rent. The only ones building/buying houses are real estate investors who can afford to navigate the complex market rules, so you'll be stuck working for one and renting from another.
great to notice, but the overview falls short.. price signals are supposed to trigger conservation yet somehow, that is not discussed. Also note that energy markets have lifecycles.. it takes investment and infrastructure to make and deliver energy. Fossil fuels have done that in the past.
> signals are supposed to trigger conservation yet somehow, that is not discussed
Energy conservation has been discussed my entire life.
When I was a kid, it was things like double glazing, close windows, wear pullovers indoors, turn off lights when you leave a room, CFLs.
Late teen to young adult, increased loft insulation, cavity wall insulation. Energy efficiency standards for consumer goods. Cars getting taxed based on emissions.
At first, but the last coal plant has been closed, and renewables are ascendent — just past midnight UK time and still 28.5% renewables, average for last week 33.6%, and for last year 36.8%: https://grid.iamkate.com/
Do you not get charged different rates based on usage amounts? This is common across the world - where the first X KWH of usage per month cost a lot less than the next X.
Commercial contracts generally don't work that way, they generally pay the market rate (the current most expensive producer).
It means there is no way for an individual consumers behaviour to drive (or be driven by) the green energy proportion, as if the collective demand is too high then you pay the market rate for coal anyway.
Only high oil and gas prices specifically. And honestly, low gas prices is good if it helps move away from coal.
But unfortunately, even the most liberal political groups have walked back any interest in solving climate change at the margin. You see this with the endless life of the "100 companies cause climate change" misinformation.
China now emits almost 2x the carbon per capita than the UK, and alone emits more than all western countries combined including the US. The UK can't solve climate change at the margin or anywhere else with domestic energy policy.
China is now consuming record amounts of coal (the globe has not actually even reached peak-coal yet despite claims we'd already passed it going back decades and despite western coal consumption taking a nosedive starting about 20 years ago). Which is strange considering that it has also been an enormous producer and exporter of allegedly much cheaper solar and wind generators for many years.
Something doesn't add up here, and further disadvantaging much cleaner domestic industry and driving production offshore to countries with far higher emissions intensity of production (not to mention many other environmental and humanitraian issues) is not the way to solve climate change. It could be making it even worse.
That 100 companies canard is really terrible. It's seeking a villain to blame instead of addressing the system problems and it's second or third order effects such as climate change. I understand it probably motivates some folks but I can't help but roll my eyes.
The deeper problem might be that they gave up on fighting inequality; which would give regular people enough breathing room to make changes on the margin.
Without that, the argument is basically "We know that life is barely worth living, but we aren't going to help with that. Instead we want to make your life even worse to save the environment!"
Not really. We need polluting energy sources to be charged for their pollution, ie stop using the atmosphere and land as a free sewer, which in turn will put renewables on an equal footing.
Though even without that, solar, wind, and batteries are already cheaper.
When a polluting industry poisons the air and the water and people go to the hospital because they are coughing or they have dysentery, who will pay to cleanup the mess? If you frame the discussion as about “price” it is a non-starter.
I would argue it is better to talk about workers and their families. As in let us not shit in the river so our children don’t get sick and can go to school. Let us not poison the air so workers can do their jobs and not go to hospital.
1. You're welcome to argue that, but you haven't here. You've just stated it.
2. You shouldn't supplant one topic with another. High energy prices kill people, because energy drives the cost of everything, and people can direct less value into things that keep them healthy if they're spending a greater proportion of their income on survival. You can say "also air should be clean", fine, but not "Don't think about prices! Look over here instead!"
2. You can have your cake and eat it, if you drop the requirement to buy electricity at the price of the most expensive component in the mix. Spain did just that and they're currently experiencing an industrial revival thanks to comparatively low energy prices.
No, you just need fossil fuel energy to be relatively more expensive, not for energy to be more expensive overall. It's happened already but we're currently being held hostage by the coal burners while they scramble to extract the last bit of rent they can.
There is no way to make fossil fuel more expensive without making energy more expensive overall, because fossil fuel is included in the category of "energy overall." The effect of making fossil fuels more expensive is that energy prices will rise. The point of the GP ("Not really. We need polluting energy sources to be charged for their pollution, ie stop using the atmosphere and land as a free sewer, which in turn will put renewables on an equal footing.") is that the goal is not to raise the cost of energy as a whole (even though this is the inevitable outcome of higher fossil fuel prices), but instead to price in the negative externalities generated by fossil fuels.
Put another way, in a world where fossil fuels are no longer consumed, there isn't any reason to limit energy consumption for its sake, since the whole point was to encourage adoption of cleaner technologies. There is a case to be made that this isn't true, since even the "clean" technologies have an environmental impact, but that is tangential to the discussion.
Energy costs should probably be progressive. If you need more than the poor your cost starts shooting through the roof.
This reminds me of that popular "reality" show where they remodel a family's home and surprise them with what is basically a palace. Afterward the families are shattered by energy costs, and eventually exorbitant property taxes. Off camera they are forced into forclosure and end up in debt.
After the first month or so they are forced to seal off most of the house as they desperately try to stay afloat. Lacking financial savvy, most end up mortgaging the home.
A carbon dividend solves that problem. Put a price on each ton of carbon released in the atmosphere, then redistribute an equal dividend to each citizen.
The wealthiest people will end up paying more than they receive back, while the poorest will receive a boost. All while incentivizing low carbon alternatives in every sector of the economy.
No, if you want to have a stable standard of living, you need higher energy prices for polluting energy sources, and lower energy prices for non-polluting energy sources.
Then, to make killing this political suicide, make sure to mail every man, woman, and dog a check every two weeks called 'CARBON DIVIDEND'.
> Then, to make killing this political suicide, make sure to mail every man, woman, and dog a check every two weeks called 'CARBON DIVIDEND'.
We effectively did this in Canada and it still became a political albatross.
(Though in practice the cheque was done via direct deposit and a lot of people didn't realize where the money was coming from despite it being clearly labelled. I think cheques in the mail would have been more effective.)
Not necessarily. You could argue that you want coal and gas to be expensive so that people build out renewables. But the places with the cheapest electricity generally have hydro, nuclear or wind, which are all zero carbon.
Because climate change will somehow not effect the poor?
1) we need hire energy prices to match the externalities
2) we need subsidies to make the poor more efficient at using the power they can afford. I heard in England they don't have proper insulation in most homes. Building to passive house standards can completely transform an energy bill.
Poor people tend to rent, don't have money to invest in better insulation or higher quality housing.
Good news is the UK government has been increasing, and wants to further increase*, the legal minimum energy efficiency of rental properties.
The bad news is the current* UK requirement is still so low that the 39 m^2 apartment I let out in the UK costs more to heat *badly*, than my 100-ish m^2 new passiv-ish house in Germany costs to be T-shirt temperature inside while watching the snow fall outside. (And that UK apartment is one of the better ones in the building; I used to live in it, one of my requirements when buying was double glazing, not all the apartments in that building had double glazing).
Also bad news is that my agency is telling me to not do anything more than the legal minimum to upgrade it, that I should instead wait for the requirements to get stricter before actually doing anything more.
Of course they absolutely do actually get things upgraded when rules change. In the UK, changing the rules does work.
> I heard in England they don't have proper insulation in most homes.
Almost every house and apartment I've lived in had had some sort of insulation and double/triple glazing fitted on the windows. So I found this quite hard to believe so I looked it up.
Official stats from 12 years ago say that ~70% of properties do have cavity wall and loft insulation as of 2013.
> Building to passive house standards can completely transform an energy bill.
They are plenty of regulations on how new houses are built on how energy efficient they are. However we cannot build enough housing for a number of numerous reasons to meet current demand.
If the IPCC global climate change projections are accurate then poor UK residents will probably experience smaller effects than poor people in many other countries. So they may see it as less of a concern than short-term energy costs.
We can also give money to the poor, if that's the problem, while still maintaining an incentive landscape that prices in externalities of pollution and rewards conserving energy.
Everyone who bought into neoliberalism in the 80s is now experiencing economies that are mysteriously failing to thrive. Correlation isn't cause, except when it is.
Go back to what the western world was doing in the 50’s. High tax and high public spending. In 1950 the US had a top marginal tax rate of 91%. The 50s were great, let’s do that again.
That environment was directly proceeded by WW2, which required massive capital investment to rebuild Europe[1]. In the UK we were still rationing candy and meat during the early 50s[2]. So, I’m not particularly eager to recreate those conditions.
The NTU only goes back to the 1980s and does not actually include any analysis of the 1950s.
Looks like NTU also is positing their stance on the ideology that the 1% are the only ones that create jobs but they are the ones to most likely invest in large corporations. There seems no prospect to help the mom and pop shops or small companies that have stronger solutions beyond what large corporate tunnel vision provides.
My personal taxes keep going up with these "Tax Cuts". I don't expect them to come down with the push for tax cuts for the wealthy. Nor has my income gone up.
Wouldn't buying more local would reduce energy used for transportation of goods and services?
I see less Amazon purchases and deliveries as a net benefit for the majority and a net deficit for the wealthy investors. Wealth that stays more in the community versus being shipped to Wall Street.
The majority definitely benefits from being able to buy cheap Chinese goods and go on cheap Europe trips while $BIGCOMPANY vacuums up money from the rest of the world to prop up the USD. In which other country can a guy cutting hair (out of many examples) afford so many international vacations?
This sounds like you are applying shifting baseline syndrome. [0] [1] [2]
Another way to phrase shifting baseline is when people apply what they experience with an over weighted value. For example, the cost of living has skyrocketed in the USA compared to older generations, with the cost of a home, healthcare, and basic goods and services. Wages have been stagnant while the wealthy keep gaining more and more of economic power. Economic mobility is also quite low compared to 10 or 20 years ago.
Those trips are most likely more cost effective compared to the 1950s because the technology was new and still evolving. Air travel was a luxury and now it is a commodity. Engineers have improved the technology to craft air plains while finding ways to reduce production cost. Cost savings have not be pushed to the working class and are shifted to the wealthy.
If the wage increase of CEOs was linear with your wage. It would be higher and also be less of an economic for burden the masses.
People over value the rare lucky ones as being the average of all. Kind of how a number of Americans are against taxing the wealthy because they believe they are or will become wealthy. It is rare to become wealthy and often those that are lacking in empathy and morals. Just like my Uncle that worked for Arbys, which is a millionaire because he believes and supports the idea that those below him should not be payed a living wage.
At leas I learned from him that those franchises often run on debt because they try and pull out every last dollar into the owner's pockets. He was looking to become the owner but the debt was too great to buy in, as a millionaire.
Is there something intrinsic to the general setup of government spending in the 1950s that makes it incompatible with equal rights for minorities and women? These would seem to be orthogonal issues.
The story of British Leyland is enough to scare anyone w/ even half a brain away from ever allowing British politicians to have even the least bit of influence over a company that competes anywhere near the consumer space.
Nobody paid a 91% tax rate in practice. What a silly thing to focus on, a headline marginal tax rate nobody paid.
The 1950s were great for places like the US, Australia and New Zealand because they were initially fairly unregulated (wartime planning was ended and the market took over) and they weren't destroyed by the war.
The UK had rationing into the mid 50s while its empire crumbled. It was not some heavenly place. Millions left the UK for the new world, including my grandparents, because the UK was in a dire state.
Over the next 20-30 years, the anglosphere became progressively more regulated, more taxed, more controlled, and more unionised. You needed a licence to import a new car. You needed a licence to import magazines. Exchange rates and interest rates were controlled by the government and adjusted for political purposes. Large parts of the economy were run inefficiently by the state as make-work schemes to prop up "full employment" policies that were politically popular but very expensive. The oil shock of the 1970s revealed how bad this scheme of economic management was at responding to changing conditions. When you have thea biggest economy in the world and you were untouched by a war that decimated your competitors it is easy to look good. But the system was not capable of responding to changing conditions because it was largely driven from the top down by bureaucrats and politicians for the sake of implementing their preferred social policies and winning elections respectively.
In the 1980s, this came to a breaking point. This was true everywhere, but the clearest example is not the US or the UK but New Zealand. It nearly went bankrupt trying to maintain completely unsustainable exchange rates for political reasons and there was a small consitutional crisis when the outgoing government refused to implement the incoming government's instructions to lower the exchange rate. The economy was dominated by what were called "Think Big" schemes: government infrastructure projects that made no financial sense but looked good on election posters and "created jobs". Large numbers of businesses did entirely pointless things like assembling Japanese cars from components more expensively than could be done in Japan, because car imports were restricted. Many other examples exist. Agriculture was heavily subsidised by the state.
The new governments in the 1980s (I am talking about the West generally now) did away with much of this rubbish. They lowered trade barriers, reduced or eliminated subsidies, and privatised the elements of the public sector that had no reason to be run by the public sector.
Sometimes when privatised these businesses failed. But that wasn't because they were privatised, it was because they had never made any financial sense in the first place.
The fundamental point is that the 1950s system was the same as the 1960s and 1970s system. If you go back to the 1950s, you also go back to the 1970s. The system was the same, the same incentives would exist, and the result would be similar. Give the economy over to the public sector and in a few years all thought of making what customers want and will pay for is substituted with using economic power to achieve social goals and win elections. We had better make sure we hire more Xs, they deserve more representation, and we better put money into Y, people love to hear about Y, and so on. And before long it is a lumbering inefficient mess.
I mean I think most billionaires would welcome the 1950s tax code. The reduction in their bills would be amazing! The only people paying those number would be our new "middle" class doctors, lawyers, etc people who make a lot of income but limited investments.
I have zero doubts everyone commenting has read the article. That makes me even more surprised, that some people seem to have conclusions that are in direct opposition to what the article says.
Since, as we all know, the article is about how central planning ruined the UK economy, and the later reforms were not enough to fully unblock it. Particularly, it postulates deregulating housing and making it harder for people to oppose new investments (especially related energy and infrastructure)..
I have a lot of issues with the work of Yanis Varoufakis, but he has one idea that I'd like to see tried out - and that is that the workers own 10% of their companies, obviously getting 10% of the profit, etc. At least in Europe it's uncommon to get shares as part of the compensation package, so I'm curious how the Varoufakis' idea would end up working. It's worth giving it a shot.
I'm not opposed to employee ownership but there's no reason to think that mandating a certain minimum level will produce better outcomes. The equity dilution will increase the cost of capital, making it harder to start or expand businesses. Most workers have virtually zero ability to impact shareholder returns. And low skilled workers really need cash today, not the possibility of dividends or capital gains tomorrow.
Why would I want that as a worker? I am already "overexposed" to the fortunes of my employer by virtue of being employed by it. If my employer does well then I get paid better, get a bonus, etc. If my employer does poorly then I risk being laid off.
Why would I want to invest in that risk when I have relatively little control over the success of the business, as opposed to investing the same amount of wealth in the market more generally or in assets that counter some of that risk?
Also, generally, why should employees automatically get some part of the company? What have they done to deserve it?
As a worker, I don't want 10% of my business' volatile profit. I would rather have reliable cash, that I can invest in SP500. Or at least that is the case with employees of most businesses.
Central planning is likely going to be a feature of all manners of world-leading governments, whether we're talking about dictatorships, theocracies, or democratic republics. Imagine, for example, a country that wants to get into the chip game at this point.
As one of those people ... it's not so much that everything is (still) Thatcher's fault. Had she not won in 1979, doubtless the UK would be facing a different mix of problems, some the same, some different. But Thatcher set the ball in motion on the tracks it has been on more or less since her first win, and it is those tracks that are the fundamental source of many of the problems in the UK (not all of them, but the biggest ones).
Turns out Thatcherism only works as long as the state still has assets to sell off. The delusion that assets would stay in the hands of the working and middle class, and not end up with the wealthy inheriting class, has to be one of the biggest political failures of our government on the modern era. It's lead to the possible death of the Conservative Party if they fail to fight off Reform and the Liberal Democrats.
You're surely joking. The IMF isn't bailing out the UK, and there aren't 3 day week debates because of the failing power supply. What's led to the death of the Conservative party is them doing exactly the opposite what a lot of Conservative voters want: bigger economy, and slower immigration.
Regarding the immigration, sure, the Conservative voters maybe want less of it, but rich and influential Tories actually like immigration as it allows their businesses to thrive (even more). The UK has more capital going around than her own people.
We didn't leave the EHCR. So there is an argument that we don't have full control of our laws. IANAL and won't pretend to know the specifics.
> Regarding the immigration, sure, the Conservative voters maybe want less of it, but rich and influential Tories actually like immigration as it allows their businesses to thrive (even more).
Not just Conservative voters. Almost 1 in 5 Labour and Lib Dem voters want to see it reduced.
Generally 52% of the UK want to see it immigration reduced in some capacity according to the migration observatory. This was roughly the Vote Leave percentage.
The ECHR is an international agreement like many, many others. It has special status in UK law only because we chose to: that was the purpose of the Human Rights Act. You can also take complaints of breach to the European Court of Human Rights, but they have no enforcement powers (in particular, Russia often decided not to bother complying, and we've avoided enforcing their ruling on prisoner voting rights with their tacit consent).
It used to be the case that we were also tied into the ECHR (and playing nice with the rulings of the ECtHR) because it's required by EU law even though it's not an EU instrument and the ECtHR isn't an EU court. But as we've left that's no longer an issue.
Finally, I'd just say that there's little objectionable about the Convention, and for the most part it tracks very closely with existing British common law (not surprisingly, as it was a Churchill-supported project in the first place and intended to export what was great about the British tradition of liberty as much as to bind us into Europe). There are a few edge cases where politicians and certain newspapers get into enormous flaps about individual cases, but it's really not that constraining a convention: most of the clauses have get-outs for crime, morality and public order and the margin of appreciation is generally quite broad. It's not perfect any more than, say, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is, but the complaints are mostly grandstanding.
I know. I felt like it needed to be pointed out that even on parties that are seen to be more centre-left/left that there is good portion of voters that are opposition to immigration.
This is because I don't think it is as much of a right/left issue like it is frequently framed.
> The UK has more capital going around than her own people.
Wealth and income are not zero-sum. Generally, people produce more than they consume (or we'd all be living in caves). Reducing people reduces output, growth, and wealth.
Legal immigrants from the EU were not the only source of migrants to the UK. Many come from elsewhere, legally and otherwise. Guess what: we have Brexit but we still have immigrants - impossible?! </sarcasm>
Plus it was never about immigration, it was always - I think - a classic case of misinformation and greed from many places. Sadly many people fell for it.
> it was always - I think - a classic case of misinformation and greed from many places. Sadly many people fell for it.
Why do many people assume that if someone thinks differently about a particular political issue they must have fooled somehow? Considering there is data that partially contradicts your belief that it wasn't about immigration, maybe your assessment about their level of understanding of the issues involved is also incorrect.
> Why do many people assume that if someone thinks differently about a particular political issue they must have fooled somehow?
politicians sometimes lie…?
the £350 million a day bus springs to mind as one example. the amazing trade deals which will unleash our new economy were another.
like, those things sound great. people wanted those promises to become real and believed the people who were saying those things could implement them.
turns out implementation is sometimes a lot harder than waving your hands and making a bunch of promises.
edit —
especially when the advertised numbers are factually wrong, and people know they are wrong — i.e. they lied.
> A study by King's College London and Ipsos MORI, published in October 2018 found that 42 percent of people who had heard of the £350 million claim still believed it was true, whereas 36 percent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.
Most people are quite aware that politicians lie. It is a common trope in movies, tv and media generally. Politicians are quite disliked in the UK generally. So this idea that people blindly believe politicians is nonsense.
> A study by King's College London and Ipsos MORI, published in October 2018 found that 42 percent of people who had heard of the £350 million claim still believed it was true, whereas 36 percent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.
So? People frequently cherry pick information to justify their decisions after they have already made them. I actually looked up the actual report (not the wikipedia summary). While much more people generally believe the 350 million figure voted Leave, there was a decent percentage of people that believed the figure and voted Remain.
People seem to forget that a good portion of the Media and Parliament (including the Prime Minister at the time who won with a majority) were in favour of Remain. What is often ignored is that if you look at UKIP voter percentage before the referendum. It had risen from 3.1% to 12.6%. That was rising well before the bus campaign was a thing.
The Leave Referendum was about many things. It was partly about immigration, it was partly about sticking it to an entitled political class, part of it was about sovereignty. Making it about a figure on the side of the bus is asinine. I also don't believe Dominic Cummings on how effective it was btw.
But in any event this will probably be my last comment on anything political on here because you get downvoted for simply defending half the people in my country that voted a particular way.
There is in the section entitled "Preferences for different types of migrant: origin, similarity, skill level". (There doesn't seem to be a way to directly reference it in a document).
> Country of origin is not the only factor that people take into account when considering preferences on immigration. In the European Social Survey 2014, British respondents reported how many immigrants should be allowed based on a question that specified both the country of origin (Poland or India) and the skill level (professional or unskilled labourer). The results revealed that when migrants are professionals, opposition is low, and when migrants are unskilled, opposition is high (Figure 5). Research has shown that people’s general preference for high-skilled over low-skilled migrants is mainly driven by perceptions of their higher economic contribution
> The preference among the British public for highly skilled migrants aligns with previous research indicating that, when questioned about the criteria for incoming migrants, skills are considered more important than other factors such as race/ethnicity and religion.
My view is there needs to be a version of Godwin's law related to client of supposed 'racism', i.e. the one who claims ${issue} is caused by/related to 'racism' thereby loses the argument unless he comes with solid proof.
I see no proof, spurious claims of 'racism' do not count as such so it actually was about immigration.
It's disingenuous to pretend Brexit wasn't at least partially motivated by in-group preference. Almost as disingenuous as implying that there's anything wrong with having said preference. I don't open up my house to people I don't know regardless of their potential to contribute to it economically. Why is this treated as immoral when the same reasoning is applied to the immigration system?
I am not pretending anything. I've showed some actual evidence to back to back up my view point.
Moreover, time after time the British public are surveyed about their views on immigration and ethnic background is not something that is important to a large portion of the people taking part.
Are there some people that do care? Sure there are, but they are very small minority typically.
> Sure there are, but they are very small minority typically.
From your own data, 25% of respondents agreed with the statement: Allow none/only a few immigrants of a different race/ethnicity to come and live in [the UK]. This isn't a small minority and I can guarantee you the distribution of these attitudes isn't equal between leavers and remainers.
You have to read the analysis below as well as look at the charts. From the articles I linked
> As a further way of characterising countries, we include a second measure based on the percentage of people saying that immigration ‘makes the country a worse place to live’ On this measure, the UK maintains a similar rank position as one of the more positive countries in the sample, and similar to Switzerland at 18%.
> These two measures can be thought of as capturing opinions on future migration flows and current population stocks. In most of these 13 countries, it appears that people are more negative towards the idea of continuing flows than about the immigrants already present. Finland, for example, is a country where 42% of the public would prefer few/no immigrants of another race coming to live there, whilst, at the same time, just 19% think immigrants make the country a worse place to live.
It is still much better than many other countries in Europe.
> This isn't a small minority and I can guarantee you the distribution of these attitudes isn't equal between leavers and remainers.
Ok sure. I probably shouldn't have said minority. Yeah of course the distribution isn't going to be equal. However people pretend it was all about racism when it clearly wasn't.
The UK economy is already pretty small per-capita compared to other first-world countries. I'm certainly not one to argue for growth, but what is it about UK's conservatism that demands degrowth? It strikes me as antithetical to the liberalisation that I would think would form the right flank of the spectrum.
From my perspective, even economic concerns are driven by fear of immigration: it's just the same old "immigrants are taking my jobs but also somehow not growing the economy so I am now economically displaced" trope.
Britons do not, actually, wish to carpet their entire island w/ semidetached housing, so each and every immigrant occupying a flat is one less that a native could be living in.
It works as long as you have an economy and eyes to see it worked with her policies in place and didn't work before she was elected.
The Tories benefited massively from Thatcher because her policies massively benefited Britain. Without them, Britain would be far poorer today. Britain's problems today are not because of too much Thatcherism but because of far too little. The areas of greatest concern are those areas that they didn't manage to do much with, like local planning.
The idea of the market building housing only works if the market is allowed to do so. It isn't. That isn't a problem with the idea of the market building houses - it manages to do everything else in the economy just fine - but with planning laws.
The article is about how bad land and energy policies (essentially central planning)—dating from the post-war period—are holding back the British economy. Is that neoliberalism?
In fairness, whilst the article isn't without merit, it's authored by some of the only people in the UK that actually describe themselves as neoliberal. Which is why it's focusing on "green belt" planning policy and ignoring the fact that local government built 150k houses per annum back when we actually built enough houses, something which "neoliberal" policy introduced by Thatcher essentially made impossible, and why the article treats rail privatization as a success story rather than a service British citizens use in increasing numbers despite sky-high prices (and the government subsidising it more than when they owned it!) not least because markets have moved the jobs into London and the affordable housing out of London.
It is, neoliberalism has been about taking away all the state owned assets and putting everything the country needs into private hands. This is what has stalled the economy and its what is fuelling enormous inequality. Calling for ever more of it falls really flat now after 40 years of the same strategy making things worse for the average person.
https://archive.ph/2025.03.03-161011/https://www.theatlantic...
The last government intentionally banned the cheapest source of energy, onshore wind, from being built in England, by making it so that a single complaint could stop a project.
I cannot believe this article talks about planning constraints and energy prices and doesn't mention that.
> Similarly, in the U.K., any individual who sues to stop a new project on environmental grounds—say, to oppose a new road or airport—generally has their legal damages capped at £5,000, if they lose in court. “Once you’ve done that,” Bowman said, “you’ve created a one-way system, where people have little incentive to not bring spurious cases to challenge any new development.”
Not directly stated about wind power, but there is this account of why lawsuits might be common, slowing and derailing projects because the damages if you lose in your complaint are capped at a relatively low figure (not low for the average person, but not that expensive either).
wouldn't have mattered
due to the screwed up energy pricing system, if there's a single watt of electricity in the grid produced by burning gas, we pay for the entire grid output as if it was gas
That is how literally everything in a market gets priced. When you buy an X, the price of it naturally trends to match the most expensive X that will be sold. In this case X is a watt of energy. But you can substitute any good or service.
Can you explain this?
In commodities market, the strike price is between the lowest price seller and the highest buyer.
In the goods market, individual buyers buy depending on their elasticity of demand unless the good has inelastic demand (rare).
Neither matches what you seem to say.
> In commodities market, the strike price is between the lowest price seller and the highest buyer.
The lowest seller price is the highest demanded price among all the sellers. All the sellers bar one would typically be willing to sell for a slightly lower price. As it is said; prices are set on the margins.
Imagine that every seller has a secret price they are willing to sell for and that is some statistical distribution. The market price will be the highest price in that distribution that actually gets sold. Most sellers aren't selling for their secretly acceptable price, but for a higher price determined by the seller with the highest demands. The distribution, if it is ever discovered, becomes the supply curve.
"The cheapest source of energy" trope again. Intermittent energy (electricity) != on demand electricity.
Cheapest source is accurate. It may not eliminate the need for expensive LPG, but reducing the amount needed is still a massive benefit to the economy.
It's misleading, and those who use it generally know it's misleading. It's used to persuade the layperson that electricity generated by wind turbines is cheaper to the consumer or industry than electricity generated by thermal sources or hydro turbines, when in fact that is only true if you disregard the requirement for said electricity to be available on demand - a fairly important omission.
This may be true, on a watt basis. It also ignores the physics of a synchronous grid. You need to produce exactly what you use at any given moment. If you fail to do that by a little bit bad things happen. If you fail by a lot, the grid fails. You need to be able to get power when you need it, not when it's convenient to your generation plant. If you want to compare solar or wind to something more dispatchable you should really be using numbers from either a pretty massive distributed overbuild or including storage or both. Otherwise it simply isn't apples to apples. I am an electrical engineer specializing in the design of control systems for renewable generation.
Sounds like an excellent reason to use massive numbers of highly distributed sources that ramp up and down predictably.
Check out "The Price is Wrong" by Brett Christophers[1]. It explains at length that what matters is not price, but how profitable an investment is. And how wind and PV don't look great without subsidies in various guises.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Price-Wrong-Capitalism-Wont-Planet/dp...
You distribute pv and wind over large areas and they get destroyed by weather, get dirty, require significant maintenance. If individuals want to have wind turbines or pv installations that's great - but these things are a giant mess at grid scale - absolutely awful.
Yeah of course distributed infrastructure is ... Bad???
Oh no we have no single point of failure, empower people to invest into the grid and have huge redundancies in the grid... Batteries literally solve most of the problems
Don't forget to factor in the possibility of lithium shortages in the next decade. Batteries don't solve anything if you can't build them.
https://themarketbull.com.au/2025/02/07/lithium-remains-a-ke...
> they get destroyed by weather
We get anything from storms to hail few times a year here. My patio roof got holes in it from the ice balls, but the panels are fine. Are you missing some qualifiers on that one?
> get dirty
You clean them every few months or monitor for issues per group of panels.
> require significant maintenance
Just like every other device out in the real world. Coal, gas, wind, solar, nuclear, thermal generators require maintenance.
What I think the GP is blowing completely out of proportion is:
> they get destroyed by weather
A few of them, every year. It makes a visible dent on their average longevity.
But I don't think distributing them has any impact on this. They just create a risk situation that nobody seems to be insuring and that large farms will self insure without problems. (Anyway, with the price going down the way it is, that will soon become irrelevant.)
> get dirty
Each person stopping to clean their own panels is much less efficient than professional cleaning centralized panels. It does increase your electricity costs.
> require significant maintenance
Home maintenance is an entire other level of inefficiency. That extends to any kind of equipment in your home.
But again, none of those is a big deal. Solar is mostly operation-free, so distribution mostly doesn't matter.
That's not a significant issue. O&M costs are a given and not wildly out of step with traditional generation. If you want to talk about cost effectivness the thing that matters is either a)transmission capacity and interconnects for distributed generation b)storage for centralized generation. As long as you're ok investing in 1 of the 2, distributed generation is great.
This just isn't true, it's just simply not true - it's not true from a numbers perspective and it's not true from the perspective of common sense. It's just a weird self-destructive psyop. Building turbines in the ocean for low capacity factor power is not the cheapest source of electricity. It's also soul-crushingly ugly and remarkably bad for wildlife.
Another point: Isn't the purpose of building wind turbines on the open ocean to capture more regular winds (compared to land-based wind turbines)? Wouldn't that improve capacity factor power?
About "soul-crushingly ugly": I never once saw a chemical refinery, nor a large-scale, modern hospital, that was anything other than "soul-crushingly ugly", but we need them in a modern society. So we try to carefully plan where/when/how they are built.
Yes it is true, study after study has shown that LCOE for renewables (in particular wind) is the lowest. It is also quite obvious from the fact that wind and solar installations are what investors are actually investing in, in contrast to nuclear which nobody wants to invest in even with large government guarantees.
E. G. See this article on a Lazarus report. https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-and-solar-power-half-the-co...
LCOE omits delivery issues. Energy isn't just about the cost to produce an electron. It's the cost of getting that electron to people when they need it. For things like wind or solar to ever become a major player you need to deal with intermittency and dispatchability.
In other words you need to deal with times when the wind isn't blowing, or when people need more (or less) power than you're producing. The way you'd do this is through excessive production during good times, and then storing the surplus in batteries, artificial hydroelectric, or other such means - and then delivering from those sources as necessary. But doing this sends the real cost per unit much higher. The storage process also entails some (to a significant amount - depending on the type of storage) energy loss as well, so you end up needing to produce more than 1 unit of electricity to get 1 unit.
FWIW I'm a huge advocate for solar, so this isn't some random smear on renewables - it's something that needs to be accounted for and which LCOE fails to do.
> It's also soul-crushingly ugly
I find them much more appealing than the power plant near me that dumps columns of soot into my skyline.
> and remarkably bad for wildlife
This talking point is really exaggerated. It's effectively fossil fuel propaganda. The effect on wildlife is downright cuddly compared to the effects of burning fossil fuels. You might have an argument if you're comparing wind to solar.
This is why the Netherlands builds them out in the sea. Just far enough so that you cannot see them. Even the biggest reactionary NIMBY has no complaints.As for wildlife come on man who the fuck cares?
Minus the last sentence, this is a great point. Do any downvoters have any issue with everything but the last sentence? If anything, the Netherlands is probably Europe's most intensely developed country. There is hardly a square meter that hasn't been carefully planned out over the last 500 years.
No, I don't have an issue with anything but the last sentence, but the down arrow is all or nothing. We're facing a biodiversity crisis of massive scale (call it the 6th mass extinction if you like). "Fuck wildlife" isn't an appropriate policy position.
Wind Energy, like Solar Energy can be stored in Battery Energy Storage Systems to provide reliability to the grid in the event of shortages.
Batteries aren't produced at remotely enough scale to be viable for grid storage. To put this in perspective, the world uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. By comparison global lithium ion battery production was 1.1 TWh [1]. Remember, production capacity is distinct from the actual production figures. It's typical for actual production figures to be ~50% of production capacity.
Intermittent sources don't just experience daily fluctuation, but also seasonal fluctuation. Even just 3 days of storage amounts to an impossible amount of batteries to provision, even assuming growing battery production capacity. Not to mention, even modest amounts of battery grid storage would severely hamper EV adoption, which would increase emissions.
There's a reason why most plans for a primarily wind and solar grid assume that there will be some technological breakthrough that solves storage: hydrogen, compressed air, alternative battery chemistries, etc. are really common to see in plans for a primarily renewable grid.
1. https://interactanalysis.com/insight/global-li-ion-battery-s...
Modelling in Australia with simulations that multiply up current wind and solar (using real-time data of actual renewable generation) [1] showed that well over 99% of demand can be delivered with only about five hours of storage, so we're not really talking about days.
There will likely always be some gas peaking but we're talking less than a percent per year (maybe a few single digit percent in some places where solar isn't as good but still not much).
1. https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100pct-renewable-grid-for...
Nobody, really nobody asks for the whole world consumption to be stored in batteries.
This is such a bullshit argument it really paints the rest of your comment in a bad light. You can get so far by just storing up to 12 hours OF NIGHT TIME on a local level. Who cares about the 5% of times where we have to burn natural gas to stabilise the grid.
95% renewable is orders of magnitude better than today. Anyone saying different is literally a grifter.
Also battery storage cost prognosis is 50% less in 5-6 years. Batteries are already cost effective and there are a lot of grid storage options build right now.
Get grok to help you run the actual numbers over 100 years. Factor in large storms (or whatever destructive weather is common in the area you wish to build). Ask to factor in enough battery backup to bring it to 90% capacity factor over the life of the project. Compare to nuclear or natural gas. Should be absolutely clear.
I don’t need to ask grok.
Here are high-ball numbers for going off the grid; 2000 sf house in California:
- 30 panels ~ 10kw: $20K
- batteries ~ 10kwh: $8K.
- permits + labor: $20K (California...)
- 100+kwh EV with v2h bidirectional charging: $50K
- comparable ICE car (offset): -$40K
- heat pump water heater $1.5K
- heat pump furnace: $15K
- induction range: $2K
That adds to: $76.5K. Typical PG&E bills are $500-1000 per month. Budget $200 / month for gas. (Again, California prices.). That’s 63-110 months till break even, which is less than the expected lifetime of the panels + battery.
For another $10-20K, you can add propane backup, but I assume extended storms are rare enough to just charge the car and drive the electrons home a few times a year. A fireplace is about $5k installed.
Not going full off-grid is cheaper. So is scaling up to beyond one house.
From o1 pro with deep research
# Comparison of Power Generation Options
## Upfront Capital Cost - *Nuclear*: Very high (£4,000-6,000/kW), with 10+ year construction time - *Natural Gas (CCGT)*: Low to moderate (£500-1,000/kW), with 2-3 year construction time - *Wind + Battery*: Moderate for turbines (£1,000-1,500/kW) plus substantial battery costs - *Solar + Battery*: Moderate for panels (£800-1,200/kW) plus large battery costs, especially for winter
## Plant Lifespan - *Nuclear*: Typically 60 years, with possible extensions; 2+ builds over 100 years - *Natural Gas*: 25-30 years; requires 3-4 rebuilds over 100 years - *Wind + Battery*: 25 years for turbines, 10-15 years for batteries; multiple replacements needed - *Solar + Battery*: 25-30 years for panels (with declining output), 10-15 years for batteries
## Fuel & Operating Costs - *Nuclear*: Low fuel cost, high operating cost (staffing, maintenance, safety) - *Natural Gas*: Major cost is fuel (price volatility), plus potential carbon costs - *Wind + Battery*: No fuel cost, moderate turbine O&M, plus battery replacement costs - *Solar + Battery*: No fuel cost, low panel O&M, plus battery replacement costs
## Levelized Cost (No subsidies) - *Nuclear*: £90-120/MWh - *Natural Gas*: £50-60/MWh (without carbon cost), £100+/MWh with high carbon prices - *Wind + Battery*: Base wind £40-50/MWh, potentially exceeding £100-150/MWh with storage for 90% CF - *Solar + Battery*: Base solar £40-50/MWh, potentially exceeding £150-200/MWh with storage
## Reliability / Capacity Factor - *Nuclear*: ~90% capacity factor, suited for baseload - *Natural Gas*: 80-90% if run as baseload, highly flexible - *Wind + Battery*: 35-50% raw CF for wind alone, requires battery + overbuild for 90% CF - *Solar + Battery*: 10-15% raw CF in UK, requires massive overbuild and storage for 90% CF
## Key Advantages - *Nuclear*: High-capacity 24/7 baseload, low CO₂, stable long-term output - *Natural Gas*: Low upfront capital, flexible/dispatchable, mature technology - *Wind + Battery*: Carbon-free, potentially low marginal wind cost, lower price volatility - *Solar + Battery*: Carbon-free, low operating costs, suitable for distributed generation
## Key Drawbacks - *Nuclear*: Expensive upfront, complex construction, decommissioning burden - *Natural Gas*: Volatile fuel costs, CO₂ emissions unless carbon capture added - *Wind + Battery*: High cost for baseload reliability, weather-dependent, multiple battery replacements - *Solar + Battery*: Very high overbuild and storage needs for 90% CF, seasonal variation
LLMs should not be used as a reliable source of numbers for research like that. You keep saying how obvious this is and trivial to research. Maybe just post a quality research link instead in that case?
the denial of capacity factor makes me want to tear my hair out
Capacity factor is calculated into lcoe, what's your point? Moreover, downtime for wind turbines is much less of an issue for a grid than large power plants (even with a significantly higher capacity factor), because you run into much bigger issues if your GW plant is down, compared to a couple of MW (and no the probabilities of all your renewables mix going down at the same time is very low, unless you're Luxemburg).
Capacity factor is calculated in. But intermittency is not. The issue is that once demand is saturated during periods of peak production, the excess energy is wasted so the effective capacity factor drops as adoption grows. E.g. once you saturate daytime energy demand, further investment in solar energy yields no more useable energy.
Intermittent sources are a good way to supplement dispatchable sources of energy like gas plants or hydroelectricity. But as a primary source of energy, they're not feasible without a massive breakthrough in energy storage.
I hate the large scale turbines. I'm sure small scale or other designs are OK. But screw the large turbines. Where I grew up they outsourced the jobs and then we were left with ugly giants ruining the once beautiful mountains. It's on par with strip mining (aesthetically).
I like em.
People forget that the natural landscape of Britain is forest. The enclosed fields people think are natural countryside are in fact an entirely human creation.
I'm sorry you're saying people think agricultural fields are natural vegetation?
Yes. The gently rolling fields of grass, sheep, rape and wheat are considered a national symbol of our natural environment in need of protection from dastardly human creations such as wind turbines. This is the 'green and pleasant land' that William Blake wrote about.
Ecologically, it is basically barren.
The "natural landscape" is a pretty meaningless concept in Britain. Are moors not natural landscapes because they were formed hundreds or thousands of years ago? Is it natural when animals do something but not when humans do it? Or is it natural when hunter gatherers do something but not when agriculturalists do it? Or is it natural when non-industrial people do it, but not when industrialists do it? And why does your chosen definition matter? Is the natural landscape better than human-modified landscapes? Is a change always fine if the starting point was created by humans?
If you replaced the ancient figures carved into the chalk in England with wind farms would that be fine because they arent natural features?
It's unclear what point you're making with reference to the blanket ban on onshore wind. I wouldn't like to see turbines on Cerne Abbas or Dartmoor. Nobody wants that, as far as I'm aware?
I would like to see more of them on the generic grass/wheat/rape fields that cover much of England. That was prevented by the blanket ban.
They're one of the only pieces of technology that I think often (not always) improve the appearance of a landscape.
Maybe also lighthouses. Sometimes.
Lighthouses have only become aesthetic because of their rarity rendering them as quaint or nostalgic. Modern versions and their impacts would be largely protested.
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Where do you think coal and oil comes from? It's ok as long as other people's environment is destroyed for non-renewable energy but not your environment for renewable energy?
Lol, they used to mine coal under that very mountain (until it was outsourced). It's not like we have some insular life. The region is economically depressed. People would rather have jobs while destroying the environment than not have jobs while destroying the environment and recreational value simultaneously.
> People would rather have jobs
Who do you think puts up windmills and solar panels?
In the case I personally know of, they brought in offshore workers. It also only generates reasonable numbers of jobs during initial construction.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Please stop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountaintop_removal_mining
Have they ever used that technique in the UK? I don't think the UK has mountains suitable for mountaintop removal - they are famous for their underground operations.
I've always filed mountaintop removal mining as one of those "weird things Americans do" approaches. Probably associated with unusual geology or something.
I think the UK had the none-mountainous version of strip mining - open pit mines. I think there aren't any in operation currently, and I'm unsure if they were for coal or just other commodities.
Even if not, the collieries in Wales, built on top of coal shafts, were quite industrial-looking/landscape-runining. https://museum.wales/articles/1260/Nantgarw-Colliery---once-...
We used the technique until we ran out of mountains, hence current lack of mountains.
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and all of them are horrendously bad for the environment, the end.
As are the wind turbines with there non-recyclable blades and bird kills.
Sure why not?
Maybe it's a geographical/cultural difference, but there are so, so many mountains in the western US. it's a good part of why the game Oregan Trail was made. Before carving roads around and through mountains it was a truly treacherous journey.
US also jury has so much land to begin with. We can certainly afford to retrofit a few mountains without fundamentally disrupting the ecosystem. We're very bad at moderation, sadly.
When is that?
Aren't these also massive mass bird slayers ? The last I read, over half a million birds were killed (official under-estimate) by wind turbines in UK alone every year
You are going to freak out when you find out how many birds are killed by buildings generally.
But you might want to sit down before i tell you how many are killed by cats.
And all of those numbers pale in comparison in how we cruelly we treat birds used in the food supply chain (eggs, chicken etc).
The recent kurzsesagt video is a great intro to the topic ( https://youtu.be/5sVfTPaxRwk)
The real issue seems to be that they might kill protected birds more often than buildings or cats, which seem to kill smaller common species (usually of lesser concern).
That number is a heavy under-estimate and deliberately lowered for public consumption. But, you might want to sit down - The real slaughter is well in the millions annually.
Humans in the UK killed and ate over 111,000,000 birds just in January 2025.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/poultry-and-poultry...
I live in an area where there are a lot of wind mills along a nearby range of hills. There is also another taller hill which allows you to look down on the wind mills. In all the times I've driven up there and stopped to look out at the vista there were no birds at the base of the windmills. None. On any of them.
And the Exxon Valdez and the Deepwater Horizon were good for birds?
Bringing up bird welfare to oppose wind turbines is bullshit. If people cared about birds or wildlife we wouldn't be in this mess at all.
It's usually the types of birds that are affected that upset people. Many ideal locations for windmills (in particular mountainous regions, dunno about offshore) happen to also be ideal places for threatened or endangered large raptors.
Likewise, there's the (unproven) connection with noise generated by offshore wind farms disturbing wildlife migration and movement, especially among whales.
It'd be nice to know that we're not replacing one disaster with another, though I'm out of date on my personal research as to whether any of these concerns still warrant further investigation.
> Many ideal locations for windmills...happen to also be ideal places for threatened or endangered large raptors.
The person I replied to was making a quantity-of-birds argument. Not an endangered species argument.
> there's the (unproven) connection with noise generated by offshore wind farms disturbing wildlife migration and movement
Do they make a lot more noise than giant cruise ships? Luxury yachts? I don't see much of a movement to ban those. It's almost like people decide the things they want to have for themselves (undisturbed views), then make up whatever noble-sounding reasons (whales, birds) will preserve those things.
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I have trouble believing you are being honest. Piling under wind turbines?! I have yet to see a dead bird under a wind turbine myself (but I acknowledge they do kill some). Published estimated averages are 4 to 18 birds per turbine per year [1]. Compare that to buildings (where we also don't pile up either) which kill man estimated 1 billion birds a year [2]
[1] https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/wind-power-bird-de... [2] https://abcbirds.org/news/bird-building-collisions-study-202...
Yes, explicitly piling up under wind turbines. This was in the Western Ghats in India and my mother was sickened - (she used to be a regular trekker before Covid). I didn't initially believe her either. Btw, they were so effective as bird killers that wind-turbines were even acknowledged officially as "top predator". They change ecology drastically within a couple of years.
“Our central discovery is that wind turbines can act as top predators, by reducing the density and activity of birds, their prey are now released from the typical level of predation. This release causes a range of changes in lizards,” explained Dr Maria Thaker of Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science
https://iisc.ac.in/wind-farms-are-the-new-top-predator-in-th...
> so effective as bird killers that wind-turbines were even acknowledged officially as "top predator"
This is using "top" in the sense of "apex", because turbines have no natural predators. The paper says you could imagine them as something at the top of the trophic web. The paper explores the impact on their prey populations.
That's opposed to "top" in the sense of "kills more than other predators" or whatever. I mention it because number-of-kills is what the rest of the discussion seems to be about.
You haven’t, which is why you have no citation just a ridiculous, unproven anecdote. There are literally hundreds of turbines in my area, there are not and have never been “birds piling up under them.”
Your own link further down estimates 4-18 per year. 1 bird per month would be gone before you had a chance to collect it, much less have a chance to “pile up”.
I am honestly surprised - you should see dead birds at-least a couple of times a week. Not annually or monthly, but weekly esp for a full wind-farm like what you are stating.
Which part of the world do you live in ? It is possible that the location of the farm was chosen wisely. Are you also sure someone is not clearing the corpses ? There are laws mandating the collection of corpses in many western nations. My personal anecdotal opinion is that data is more honest in the non-Western nations since nobody cares about bird-deaths all that much and so the deaths are not sanitized.
I doubt that wind turbines are the only power source that kills birds. Marginal bird deaths per unit of power production is the interesting statistic. This MIT post [1] links to a 2009 study [2] which provides that comparison:
So if you’re pro bird you’re pro wind power.[1]: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/do-wind-turbines-kill-birds
[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...
4.98 birds/GWh in the fossil fuel estimate comes from unrealized climate change expectations. They also only looked at two coal power plants for the remainder of the study.
The nuclear source bird death estimates are extrapolated from one bad weather incident over two nights from a single plant on the Florida coast.
This is not a serious or rigorous study. Is there anything more recent?
> comes from unrealized climate change expectations
Wow.
So, 500,000 birds out of 250,000,000?
Aka 0.2% of birds.
How many birds do coal power plants or other power sources kill?
Real number is well above that. Everyone involved in bird conservation agrees this number is a fraction only reported for public consumption - real number is well into the millions. You can ask organizations like ABC birds.
I doubt everyone agrees on anything. If you have contrary numbers please just save all of us the time and share them.
Ugghh. I meant everyone in bird conservation. The ABC article explains why the official numbers are a heavy underestimate. But this was in 2021 - it has gotten worse since then. This is not unique to the US - my personal experience of this was in India.
https://abcbirds.org/blog21/wind-turbine-mortality/
And the recommendation from those people is: choose the sites more carefully. Not stop or slow down, just:
> Climate change is a critical threat to birds. Recognizing this fact, ABC supports renewable energy, including wind energy, and the transition away from fossil fuels. However, not every wind project is proposed in a suitable location.
Everyone agrees? I don't agree.
Corrected.
Did you read a Donald Trump tweet? Because no reputable source has ever said wind turbines are a major risk to birds.
If you’re trying to save birds, the first place you should be looking is outdoor cats.
https://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mor...
> Did you read a Donald Trump tweet? Because no reputable source has ever said wind turbines are a major risk to birds.
I don't care about Donald Trump. (How did this even become about him ?) And your second statement is laughably false as even elementary research would tell you.
Do note that there are ~100 million cats and only ~70k wind turbines, if you use US as a reference. Cats are clearly not the top-predators of birds anymore.
> I don't care about Donald Trump. (How did this even become about him ?)
You said you “read” about turbines killing birds (shockingly with no citation). There is literally nobody else claiming such stupidity.
> Do note that there are ~100 million cats and only ~70k wind turbines, if you use US as a reference. Cats are clearly not the top-predators of birds anymore.
Do note, a tiny fraction of the 100m cats are outdoor cats. And yes, they are absolutely one of the top predators of birds and have been for decades.
Fascinatng that `brexit` isn't mentioned once in that article. Making trading harder with your closest neighbour can't be a great move for the economy.
Yes that’s really funny. Im not sure how you can write an article like this and never even mention it once.
Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself, and the full effects are just starting to come to the surface now. I dont think the UK will ever fully recover from it.
> Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself
From an economic standpoint, brexit was indeed a big L, but I dont think brexiteers were largely voting on economic grounds - a point which is lost on most remainers.
Brexit was absolutely about Economic conditions. Anti immigration sentiment was one big factor that everyone talks about, but in reality the sentiment itself was a symptom on display for the underlying condition of people having their living standards drop. The second big factor people kept bringing up was that EU was making decisions for UK, which people thought needed to be reversed. Austerity measures, which EU adopted, were the single biggest reason why people felt they needed more control. They also slowed down the post 2008 recovery, which meant people weren’t doing as well anymore. Anti immigration sentiment also rose once people were unhappy and needed someone to take the blame.
from a non-economic standpoint it was just as stupid, the idea of "taking back control" is predicated on the concept that the UK was forced to accept rules imposed by others and would be free to stop doing that.
But the UK had substantial influence on those, and it no longer does, while still having to follow them to be able to do business with the EU.
And indeed, the UK has not really diverged from the EU in the last 8 years and voted a new government that wants to tighten the relationship.
It was a generic protest vote "I don't like how things are going and I was happier when I was young". I can empathize, but it was still self-inflicted harm.
> Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself
America: Hold my beer...
Brexit is a symptom, not the cause. The people who were most screwed by Britain's prior mistakes voted for it in a vain attempt at fixing the problem by throwing misguided nostalgia at it.
The British economy was doing quite well before Brexit. Now it's absolutely crippled.
Real GDP per capita growth for US vs UK was almost identical until 2008. The last 3 years have been terrible for the UK, but if you're looking for the start of UK's stagnation you have to go much farther back than Brexit.
I wonder how Napoleon would react to finding out that British voted to impose the continental system on themselves.
Not really, growth in the UK has effectively stalled since 2008, quite a few years before Brexit.
I’m sure Brexit hasn’t helped, but it seems that the economic stewardship of the coalition and post-coalition governments was also lacking.
I don’t know what the UK can do about it, but it’s been stuck in a spiral of economic stagnation for over 15 years now.
What were those prior mistakes?
Allowing the concentration of wealth solely amongst the super wealthy.
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The irony about being anti-immigration is that immigration fuels economic growth.
- Most developed countries have below-replacement child rates from citizens
- Without larger younger, working age generations, social safety nets and productivity investments are difficult to finance
- Immigration is the only thing fueling that population growth
The real argument should be about rates of cultural assimilation or acculturation, wealth disparities and concentration of poverty, and structural limits to economic prosperity.
Fighting immigration is just shooting oneself in their demographic foot. (See Japan and Russia)
GDP per capita fell in the UK as immigration expanded.
In capitalism, almost everything generates economic growth if you ignore the externalities.
Fundamentally, only three things generate growth.
Since productivity is generally capped at a given technology level, and resources are finite, it simplifies to people.Why the artificial constraint of assuming technology is constant? In not necessarily one to hope that tech will automatically bail us out, of the growth in the previous decades has been from tech innovations like automation.
Technology has a ceiling for a given time, across the world, which is really what you're competing with in a globalized economy.
Which is to say that more technology isn't a solution out of a demographic hole, when you're competing with a country that has the same technology and better demographics.
The post you're replying to specifically says we should focus on the externalities of immigration, i.e. cultural assimilation.
> The irony about being anti-immigration is that immigration fuels economic growth.
The UK has had increased (net) immigration for decades, including a huge jump in the past few years[0]. The population grew commensurately, likely mostly due to immigration, since as you accurately point out the birth rate is low; there are roughly 13% more people in the UK now than 20 years ago. Why, then, has the GDP per capita flatlined in the same timeframe? Where is the growth that immigration is supposed to fuel?
> Immigration is the only thing fueling that population growth
This is a core neoliberal claim that smacks of "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".
> The real argument should be about rates of cultural assimilation or acculturation
By all means, let's have that discussion! If immigrants were, by and large, able to acculturate well, there would be much less anti-immigration sentiment.
But the same neoliberalism that supported increased immigration to developed countries on these economic grounds also morphed into a dual prong of claiming that diversity is our greatest strength and that it's racist to expect immigrants to have to conform to their new host culture. Both attitudes are directly at odds with assimilation and acculturation.
Other wealth European nations that took in a lot of immigrants, mostly from grossly incompatible cultures, have seen concerning increases in violent crime and other things deleterious to social cohesion and quality of life.
> (See Japan and Russia)
Japan's population has been shrinking since 2010; its GDP per capita has been treading water for even longer, since the early 90s. Similar story for Russia, whose population has been flip-flopping from growing and shrinking for a few decades, and whose GDP per capita hasn't seen any sustained growth since the late 2000s.
So it's entirely possible to have a stagnant economy, whether or not you receive immigrants.
> Without larger younger, working age generations, social safety nets and productivity investments are difficult to finance
This is about the only unarguably true statement you made. A nation composed of too many nonworking people receiving transfer payments from working people cannot exist in that state for long.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/283287/net-migration-fig...
> If immigrants were, by and large, able to acculturate well, there would be much less anti-immigration sentiment.
What? This isn't remotely true. Anti-immigrant sentiment is deliberately induced, because they're an easy target—it has nothing to do with how well they do or don't acculturate. Although, anti-immigrant sentiment does make acculturation more difficult as well—which hey, makes it even easier to inflame anti-immigrant sentiment!
You think the relentless replacement of UK services by unhinged sovereign wealth funds is caused by 'uncontrolled immigration'? I'll have to study this more.
Ah yes the migration boogieman. migrants are simultaneously uneducated and abusing the welfare system, but also take away people's jobs and push up house prices so that "ordinary" people can't afford houses anymore. Never mind that those accusations are contradictory.
Seriously?
UK was the only EU member not part of the Schengen Zone as-in it was the only member you couldn't freely immigrate to. As well as it's an island, nobody hoping a boat from Morocco and landing in London.
Pakistani's aren't taking your job. The economy is just stagnating.
Post-Pandemic is a huge anomaly [1] but the article is talking about stuff pre-2019.
[1]: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06...
Freedom of Movement applies to all EU members, it isn't restricted to the Schengen Zone.
Ireland was also not in Schengen. And still isn't due to being bound to the CTA with the UK in the good Friday agreement. Cyprus also. And Romania and Bulgaria weren't in it until last year.
They're taking large portions of Bradford, Leeds etc. Also, the boat can go from Morocco to Ceuta, and its cargo can be delivered via lorry across the Channel.
Only idiots think immigration is uncontrolled. Practically all immigration is from government granted visas.
> Only idiots think immigration is uncontrolled. Practically all immigration is from government granted visas.
"Uncontrolled" in this context doesn't mean people hopping the border unbeknownst to the authorities. It means immigration at a rate high enough that it's beyond the capacity of the host nation to integrate the newcomers to its culture.
A village of a thousand people can accept one additional person per year indefinitely with no material change to its way of life. But it cannot accept, say, a hundred a year, especially if the hundred immigrants come from a substantially different culture, without fundamentally changing the entire social fabric.
And when such massive changes to society occur without buy-in from a convincing majority of people?[0] Well, only idiots would wonder why people think it's out of control.
[0]: In the UK, Brexit made it clear that in fact the buy-in was in the other direction.
My cousin migrated to UK to work as a nurse because it turns out UK’s hospitals are fucked up. Or, lacking manpower.
yeah, because despite the UK training a huge number of doctors and nurses, the government doesn't want to pay them enough to stop them emigrating the the US or Australia, which have a lot of demand and much higher wages. So then they try to import health workers from elsewhere. Great plan.
Not to take the spotlight away from the UK, but I am pretty sure that all highly developed nations are struggling to find enough nurses amongst their citizens. Even Japan (gasp) has a special programme to help foreigners learn Japanese and immigrate as a skilled nurse.
It's not great, sure, but it's only something like a long-run 2% drag. 2% is a lot, don't get me wrong! But the loss from planning is pretty high double digits, well over 10% in the US, to say nothing about the gains from liberalizing migration
Oh, based on the title I assumed the article was entirely about Brexit.
My own [local government] is so stupid its own massive 7-figure park project got blocked by [local government] planning halfway through. For about a year instead of a park we’ve had two massive holes surrounded by fences. Too many taxes, too much nimbyism. This one really is that simple.
This happens everywhere in enterprise and government because policies and processes are designed to avoid mistakes or embarassment at any cost (because those risks are internalised by the bureacracy and therefore "real") but do not account for the cost of not being able to get anything done, because those are externalised and everyone involved in the various committees and review processes gets paid regardless.
I wish there were better ways to align incentives here.
> I wish there were better ways to align incentives here.
I have a crazy idea that might work to hold organizations accountable if they never get anything done.
This article is severely tilted nonsense with a weird ideological bent.
The author sneers against regulatory rules to limit suburban sprawl but really none of that has anything to do with a housing shortage.
It is entirely possible to denser and taller buildings, having both compact communities, green space, farms and forest and also addressing housing needs. UK hinders its economy by declining to do so (as do so many other places with housing shortages).
I want to see more discussion from the perspective that the economy and government is not just a process, an institution, but a contest, an arena. Outcomes which are presented as a failure, are not merely a failure, but like a punch in a boxing match that misses its mark, occurs in a wider context, and against deliberate opposition. A failed project might be a failure for most, but for opponents it may be a victory, or even just collateral damage in a wider fight.
Exactly. I think there's an entire political party that capitalizes on suffering, offering to jump in and rescue the poor victims. Like racketeering: create the problem and sell you the solution "if you just vote for us, we'll fix the devastating problems caused by $BADGUYS". but an absence of problems means you lose your voter base.
Are you referring to the libertarians who like to see government fail so they have a reason to dismantle it?
Not the OP but look at the difference between what governments can do when there is a sense of urgency (i.e it is wartime or one is in recent memory) vs what they do when it's not.
My lizard brain interprets this in the following way: Elites in response to external competition or in the presence of existential threat experience strong incentives to make "real" progress.
When there's little external competition, leadership are more concerned with maintaining or slightly enhancing their relative status within existing power structures and this leads to stasis as their interest is mainly blocking or slowing any disruption which could change the balance of power.
Projects often fail because the forces of "keep things the same" beat the team that wanted the change to happen.
Yeah I argue that's human nature. When you're in danger (or perceived danger) you will make drastic moves to survive. When you're in a good spot, you are less incensed to rush things. And generally, status quo in not-bad times is the majority.
So on a macro level a progressive or simply sympathetic minority has to fight a conservative majority in order to keep pushing for change.
The only solace here is that the you rarely need a majority to enact change. Apparently movements need a critical capacity of 3.5% in order to start this network effect of people joining in due to popularity bias.
> Not the OP but look at the difference between what governments can do when there is a sense of urgency (i.e it is wartime or one is in recent memory) vs what they do when it's not.
Every example I can think of involved rushing through legislation and policy changes that were not looked upon kindly given a moment of retrospection.
The New Deal, Japanese internment camps, the PATRIOT Act, Zero COVID policies, etc. The one exception might be something like the Space Race, but that also had a lot to do with Operation Paperclip, which had its own ethical dilemmas.
Wiki says:
Further: Next you wrote: Really? Read the intro from Wiki about this programme. Its impact was staggering then, and remains today.These libertarians are mostly an American phenomenon. In Europe it’s “small-government” conservatives who do this. (They are not really about small government, though, and they never reduce deficits; they are just for upwards wealth redistribution).
The source report is a much better read. The article barely adds anything of value to it, outside of quoting it a dozen times.
Wow, this report is savage. Thank you to share. I was no aware of the original report.
I have some friends over there and they (or their employers) are cutting back on their business expenditures, staffing and overall outlook. The new payroll taxes (unemployment insurance?) are going to bite both employers and employees alike.
Taxes are too high, there's too much red tape for businesses and successive governments have failed to invest in anything outside of the "south" (e.g. Greater London). I was (half) joking with them that the "north" would be far better off if it seceded and joined Scotland!
I don't know why you think the north and Scotland would be better off together. The south east would only get richer under such a scenario.
Taxes-too-high is a common refrain but income tax + national insurance takes 26% of my 95th-percentile income. Is that so bad?
I'm in the 45-49 age bracket this year. In BC (Canada), a 95th percentile income for that age is $126,000 (2021 Census). Before any deductions (specifically retirement investments that reduce taxable income) I'd be looking at a 26.85% tax rate, with a marginal rate of 38%. So pretty much the same rate here.
Not to say that Canada's overall economy is particularly any better than the UK's, and especially Trump's tariff threats will do a number on us.
>> especially Trump's tariff threats will do a number on us.
There will be losers certainly, but I'm not 100% sure that tarrifs for Canada are bad in the long run.
Firstly, there are already reports of Canadians buying local over US goods. If that sentiment hrows, and becomes entrenched that's good.
Secondly, at least gor some goods, suppliers are incentivised to explore other export markets. Again, long term, that diversification is good.
Thirdly, for at least some goods, the US cannot simply ramp up production. So they'll still be buying, but their consumers will pay more. Canadian suppliers can simply increase prices as well, since any US consumer increase will be ascribed to the tarrifs. This though is somewhat balanced by Canadian oversupply.
Fourthly it encourages producers to diversify somewhat to reduce over supply. In the long run a varied economy is better than one dependant on any one sector.
Ultimately Canada and Mexico could come out of this stronger. While the US consumer gets used to higher prices. (Which Canada et al can take advantage of whe tarrifs are removed.)
if you are an employee and that is direct compensation (not deferred capital gains) then your taxes are lower than California
Is this including the use of tax advantaged accounts like HSAs/401Ks/IRAs/etc?
In the US, it should be possible to get a 95th percentile household income ($300k, married filing joint) effective federal income tax rate down to 10% to 15%. Including total health insurance costs (employer + employee) plus some amount of deductible/out of pocket maximum for a family of 4 would bump it up to 20% to 25%. And then on top of that would be state + local tax liabilities like property and sales tax.
All in, I bet total proportion spent on taxes is less than 40%, even in California, at 95th percentile income, and 30% in a state without income tax.
Edit: I’m probably understating my numbers by 5% due to forgetting about social security and Medicare taxes.
If this is MFJ two similar incomes, then Social security and Medicare is another ~14% (it'll say 7.65% on the tin, but really your wage is lowered to compensate for the 7.65% employer portion, working out to about 14% total). Effective federal income tax on $300k income is 20%+, not including healthcare. State tax is another 8%..
So that's 42%, not including healthcare costs. Which is gonna be easily another 5%+.
State tax is definitely not 8% for many, many states.
That is fair but we are explicitly talking about California here
> if you are an employee and that is direct compensation (not deferred capital gains) then your taxes are lower than California
Roger that, heard. Had my blinders on.
American taxes are so complicated. Let's add another 1-2% for the mental cost of having to know all this stuff, or pay someone else to know it. It's just crazy.
It’s incredible the US has any other economic output, considering the effort spent on taxes.
At one of my businesses, we remit 4 separate sales taxes to 4 separate governments, and each has to be itemized, so receipts are multiple pages long for no reason.
Then there are myriad possibilities for being exempt from either all or some of the taxes, and those records have to be kept in case of an audit.
There must be enormous amounts of tax evasion too, the attack surface is so great no one can audit it all. The most tax advantaged account, a Health Savings Account, lets people set money aside today, invest it, and let it grow for however long they want, and then withdraw it for healthcare expenses, all tax free.
But the healthcare expenses can be from any point in time in the past. A 30 year old can save their receipts for purchases ranging from over the counter painkillers to childbirth bills from the hospital, and then reimburse themselves when they are 80 years old.
How can it even be possible to audit someone’s healthcare expenses that happened 50 years ago? The counter party will surely no longer have the records to cross reference, so it’s basically the government taking people’s word for it.
And that’s just simple personal taxes.
Taxes are a lot higher because the higher brackets kick in at a much lower income while cost of living is similar. A top 5% income is not enough to live a dignified in London where most of those jobs are but it’s high enough that the government won’t let you make more. Very sad situation. Top 5% income in the UK is probably more like top 20% in the USA
> The new payroll taxes (unemployment insurance?) are going to bite both employers and employees alike.
Increases to employers' National Insurance contributions. It's the equivalent to Social Security in the US. Mostly goes to pensions.
Very derivative of https://ukfoundations.co/ , which is mentioned.
Psst, scroll to the bottom and hit play. Then scroll back up.
Well that is delightful! Especially as I've always really like that song.
The world needs more of that.
>Per capita electricity generation in the U.K. is now roughly one-third that of the United States, and energy use per unit of GDP is the lowest in the G7. By these measures, at least, Britain may be the most energy-starved nation in the developed world.
Yikes. Housing is the big issue that gets everyone’s attention, but this is huge. Cheap energy drives economic growth at all levels. It’s incredible that the various British governments have let it get to this level. Maybe it’s time to import a few Chinese or Soviet technocrats?
I think those are intentionally misleading numbers. The UK is a finance power house, not a manufacturing one, so of course it derives a larger share of GDP from less energy.
Italy has a higher % of GDP from manufacturing but way more expensive energy.
British economic dysfunction is an old, old story. My favorite quip:
"This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time."
- Aneurin Bevan, British Labour politician, in a speech at Blackpool, 24 May 1945
I never heard this one before, and made my day... haha Thank you.
>British economic dysfunction is an old, old story. My favorite quip:
That doesn't mean it's not an existential problem. You can have a growth forever before the cancer gets bad enough to notice.
https://archive.md/DTkz1
At least the weather is great so they got that going for them.
60 years of tories and tory-lites slowly but surely cutting "waste", privatizing, deregulating, pushing for austerity...
Let that be a lesson to the US, seeking government efficiency is a non-goal. Good, well-funded public services make productive citizens and a strong economy. Austerity leads to a dead country.
> Good, well-funded public services make productive citizens and a strong economy. Austerity leads to a dead country.
Most Western European nations have a government expenditure as a percentage of GDP of roughly 50%; half the economy is government.
Singapore, a famously productive country, is around 15%.
Can you seriously compare a very wealthy city-state to actual countries? Do you not see why you can't run the UK like you would Monaco?
You really went out of your way to pick the only "country" you could find with both low government spending and high quality of life, despite the data proving a strong correlation between these two in actual countries. Wow.
Like 44% of your economy is government spending. lol
This is not as crazy as it sounds at first glance. The % is less important than where they are spending that money.
An "economy" is just a measure of the overall movement of money. If the bulk of that spending is internal, then that is contributing to the economy. Govt workers are consumers, local companies are providing goods to govt etc.
USaid for example spent a lot of money on food. And a lot of that was purchased from US farmers. Killing USaid "saves a lot of money" but also costs a lot of producers their income.
As long as the bulk of spending is local, govt spending is an excellent way of keeping money moving.
The core argument - that the state is getting in the way of the private sector fixing everything - is clearly false, at least in the case of the UK.
If that were the case, public transport (which underwent radical privatisation and deregulation across the UK some 40+ years ago), would be the cheapest and most effective in Europe. In fact, it's the most expensive in Europe. It is all currently being wrestled back into public hands through bus and rail fixed franchises, because Stagecoach (they own Greyhound in the US, you might be familiar with their work), have driven public transport into the ground in the name of profits for themselves.
On housing, the Thatcher government in the 1980s gave social housing tenants the right to buy homes, and created laws that prevented local authorities from building new public sector housing projects: the market, after all, would be more effective. That's led to a situation where private developers own land they won't build on until prices rise - they're artificially shortening supply. The houses they do build are small and expensive, and most people actively look for non-new build homes, to the extent that the government had to introduce tax breaks (Lifetime ISA), and incentives (help to buy), for people to buy new builds they didn't really want.
This isn't breaking news. People have been pointing out the problems and obvious drawbacks to the libertarian "private corporations can fix it all" nonsense that drove Thatcherism from the first moments it was conceived in the 1980s, and were hand-waved away as relics of the past by the centre right who took control of the country and destroyed it.
Yes, the public sector has problems too. Nobody is arguing that the right solution is to nationalise everything (except in the case of monopoly markets like public transport and utilities, where the UK is markedly behind the rest of Europe in the sectors which it has left to private sector utilisation). It's about balance. It always was, for many years, and for many years it was successful, as it has continued to be across Europe.
TFA suggests that the real problem is that the private sector has been leashed by red tape, but that's just not true. The government has given the private sector ample opportunity: to build houses, and they've refused to do so; to build nuclear power, and they keep coming back and asking for more money to fix problems of their own making; to run utilities as they wish, and they pollute rivers and raise bill prices.
In most of Europe (with almost identical regulations and rules, thanks to the power of EU frameworks the UK was entirely aligned to until very recently), the public sector has been able to retain a larger part of these critical economic components, and these problems have not arisen to the same extent.
As an aside, it's not lost on most that it is ironic that the French public sector is allowed to invest in UK transport and energy sector companies, but the UK public sector is not, due to EU law that we're still trying to get rid of.
TFA is therefore philosophically, intellectually and factually flawed at every level based on the actual data and lived experiences of the people suffering this - and yes, I am one of those people. I'm sick of this utterly absurd libertarian agenda being pushed like this, claiming that the private sector is somehow a victim. I believe so are most UK citizens who see it for the propaganda it is.
There is an increasing, and deepening sense of unease at private capital in the UK, much of it unfounded. Right-wing libertarian agitprop nonsense like this article doesn't help: it's toxic, and harms the private sector in those areas where it can make a real difference.
I googled the transportation privatization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail
So the UK rail network was privatized in the 1990s with tracks and stations remaining under government control and private companies bid for a 'franchise' running train services for whole regions. So basically franchises operate as regional monopolies and meaning passengers don't have any real choice of providers? The competition only existed briefly during the initial bidding process which the gov decided on.
Very similar to Canada's telecom history where they are private corporations on paper but they are state sanctioned local monopolies/oligopolies in functional terms. Or our 'private' highway which was given a 99yr lease for a low one-off payment that charges extremely high tolls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_407
> The competition only existed briefly during the initial bidding process which the gov decided on.
The contracts were periodically retendered (it varied, but typically every 5-10 years). The problem is the competitive process had its own problems because it encourage the bidding companies to be overly optimistic. The East-Coast franchise infamously failed multiple times because the companies kept missing passenger forecasts and going bust.
However the competitive element was only ever for the government (in terms of how much surplus/subsidy would be required to/from the operating company over the contract). Having the branding, pricing (where not a regulated fare) etc. managed by those companies meant that they were at odds with passenger interests a lot of time.
Really privatisation was done from the wrong angle. If passengers don't get a choice in service provider then the concessions model (government pays private operators to run the service) would have made more sense. It would have allowed the government to still gain from competition and outsource management, while taking control of the more important elements. The concessions model has worked reasonably well for transport services in London (Elizabeth Line, DLR, Overground and Buses IIRC)
Also as a side point, originally the tracks and stations (or rather the management of them) was privatised into a private entity, Railtrack, but it had to be renationalised because of a number of massive safety incidents from cost-cutting.
> So the UK rail network was privatised in the 1990s with tracks and stations remaining under government control and private companies bid for a 'franchise' running train services for whole regions.
The tracks and stations were also privatised as "Railtrack" but they subsequently went bankrupt and had to be brought back into public ownership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railtrack
> So basically franchises operate as regional monopolies and meaning passengers don't have any real choice of providers?
This is inevitable given many routes operate at the limits of capacity. There are a handful of 'open access' operators outside the franchise system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_operating_tr...
You can't have competing companies on rails. Each companies having their own networks would be prohibitively expensive, or they have to share rails between each other which poses significant issues.
You're also left with the issue of unprofitable stations, which is a lot of them.
If you want an example of what a really privatized, deregulated rail system would look like, read about France in the early 20th century. By the 30s, shareholders were begging the state to nationalize their money-burning companies. And it did.
Rail should be a public service. As one, its benefits to society are immense.
You can, Japan does it and they are considered best in the world. There are at least 10 different train companies in Tokyo, (probably more like 20 but I don't know all the smaller ones). Similarly in Osaka, Kyoto, etc....
> Rail should be a public service.
No, it should be run for profit but the system put in place well designed so serving more customers better means the company does better.
Japan accomplishes this AFAIK, by letting the train companies buy/own/build other things. For example, the Tokyu company that runs some of the trains that come into Shibuya station owns the building Google's Japan office is in. They also own the famous 109 building (10 = to, 9 = kyu). And 10 or 15 other buildings in Shibuya. They run grocery stores at probably 50% of their stations. They also build apartments.
If their line gets sucky people spread the word "don't live on that line, it sucks, it's too crowded and the trains are late" and all their business suffer and people start moving out. So they have an incentive to keep their lines better than the other lines.
They also compete on destinations. For example Shibuya to Yokohama. You can take a Tokyu line and you can also take a JR line. They go slightly different routes but end up at the same place. Similarly if you're in Kyoto and want to go to Osaka. You can take JR, or Hankyu, or Hanshin, 3 separate train companies all of which run multiple lines. You'll see ads for the multiple different competing trains to get you from downtown Tokyo to Narita and Hanada airports.
All of that is only possible because of network effects, and a nationalized JR built most of that network.
And honestly, I think you’re overstating the degree of choice you have as a rider. Different lines carved out their corners and companies avoid each other. Service level is generally high, to the point that it’s a non factor. You take whichever train is cheaper/faster, and that’s it.
The problem is that rail has huge positive externalities that are not captured by the operators. You can address that by letting operators speculate on real estate, or you could do it with taxes.
> You can address that by letting operators speculate on real estate, or you could do it with taxes.
One of those has a positive virtuous feedback loop. The other has politicians.
You can, in fact the UK _does_ have competing services via "open access railways".
The issue is they only exist where routes are profitable - which is almost none of them.
Open access operators have generally not been allowed to directly compete with franchised Train Operating Companies (TOCs).
Many of Britain's railway routes are profitable, but open access operators aren't allowed to compete with franchised TOCs for a slice of those profits. As a prerequisite for approval, the Department of Transport requires open access operators to show that their services would create additional value of their own, not just abstract existing revenue.
Lumo, an open access operator and a part of First group, run trains between London and Edinburgh. They stop at Morpeth for no other reason than to fulfil their requirement to create value, in this case by stopping at a station previously underserved by the DfT franchise of the route. In other words, Lump had to make compromises in return for being allowed to get in on the action on one of the profitable railway lines.
I'd be confident in claiming that there has never been any true free market competition for British passenger rail services since privatization. The existence of private capital doesn't automatically create free markets!
> You can't have competing companies on rails.
Just to be a pedant, you can. However, the coordination problems are so immense that it is just a totally stupid thing to do.
So yes, rail should be a public service.
> ...the Thatcher government in the 1980s gave social housing tenants the right to buy homes, and created laws that prevented local authorities from building new public sector housing projects...
Also, with a large discount, so even if new social housing could be built, there wouldn't be the funds to build them. It is effectively a large wealth transfer from the taxpayer to those needing subsidised homes, such that they could later resell that home to release their windfall, sucking the money that could have gone to housing others.
> public transport ... would be the cheapest and most effective in Europe.
While that is generally the argument, I wouldn't expect it to hold when governments remove subsidies as is often the case with regulated transport systems. The argument is actually one of efficiency.
I had a great argument with someone one time on the classic subject of deregulating roads. The interlocutor made a point that I initially struggled with - that without subsidies there probably wouldn't be many roads. After a bit of reflection it became obvious that in a free market where land was worth a lot of money, the market wouldn't put roads on it. Because of government subsidies, roads were being overbuilt beyond what actually makes sense (denser cities where people can walk from place to place are actually pretty livable). So in the case of deregulating transport higher prices isn't the end of it. If you remove a subsidy, there will be less of a thing. The question is why is that bad? If subsidies were good without drawbacks, we'd subsidise everything.
And land is a famous special case; there should be a land tax to weed out people trying to make money from owning undeveloped land.
I enjoyed reading your comment but didn't wholly agree with this bit:
> If subsidies were good without drawbacks, we'd subsidise everything.
Many voters are sensitive to what they perceive as wasteful use of public funds, so your claim only makes sense in a sort of idealized, platonic dictatorship. Admittedly, governments do waste funds occasionally so the concerns are not necessarily baseless. However I can easily see a government choosing not to subsidize a 'perfect' project simply because they want to appear frugal to voters - after all, that is a significant reason why the UK has had so many austerity policies that have slowed public investment.
> And land is a famous special case; there should be a land tax to weed out people trying to make money from owning undeveloped land.
Henry George, is that you? I can certainly get behind that argument!
Careful now, free market absolutism is almost a religion around these parts.
Our societies becoming increasingly more unequal and less functional coincides almost exactly with Raegan's and Thatcher's mandates. Austerity, privatization and deregulation are directly leading us into Gilded Age levels of inequality. And you shouldn't want that, unless you're like in the top 0.01%.
There was plenty of housing before the Thatcherite "right to buy". Pretending it was socialist politics that broke it is moronic.
Exactly. Housing is the big cost of living increase. A perfectly unregulated economy with finite land will drive land prices up to the margin of cultivation (the margin at which one would move to a less desirable piece of land). As population and productivity grows this results in ever higher land rents. In the limit rents will be exactly the edge of what people can pay.
Insofar as "socialist politics" make it harder for the supply of housing to rise to match demand, it is not moronic at all. Places in the UK where housing stock grows with population don't have it as bad as places that don't[0], i.e. London.
Thatcher left office in 1990. The population of Greater London has grown by 44% since then. I don't think there has been a single decade since where the growth of housing stock kept up with the growth of people. Why blame Thatcher for this?
[0]: https://ifs.org.uk/articles/england-has-poor-record-building...
Alongside Thatcher's 'Right to Buy' policy that reduced the stock of social housing, there were also restrictions on how much new housing could be bought or built by local councils to replenish the availability of social housing. These restrictions had more or less remained the same until very recently. It was only during the Johnson government that the restrictions started to be lifted. Of course, the current Labour government are attempting to once again build new social housing, but it is easy to see why people look back and see Thatcher as being the cause of those three decades of social housing shortages.
funny to read this on the day that Trump announces tariffs for... (reasons?)
Aren't higher energy prices exactly what we need to combat climate change though?
In the UK the energy market is broken, the costs of electricity is based on what the most expensive source is currently on the grid.
The UK has a lot of wind (shallow waters, strong wind blasts from Atlantic etc) and wind is significantly cheaper, but because there's gas still on the grid everyone pays the higher gas based price even if energy is mostly coming from cheaper wind.
Yes, the renewable cleaner energy is actually cheaper than the fossil fuel it's replacing and in a perfect world should reduce bills.
It's based on the most expensive source that is required to meet demand. If there is enough wind to meet demand then gas is not needed or factored in to the price.
All markets (not just energy markets) work in this way.
> because there's gas still on the grid everyone pays the higher gas based price even if energy is mostly coming from cheaper wind
You're describing how a market functions. If the gas plants went offline tomorrow, could the wind turbines produce sufficient energy to power the national grid?
That is a very common and overly simplistic view of the UK's energy market. What you have described is essentially the UK's day-ahead and spot energy markets. The whole point of those markets is to ensure demand is met with near 100% certainty. Setting the price to the last bidder is not unique to the UK for energy pricing, if it were not present then everyone would be speculating what the threshold would be and giving high bids and it would make the market unstable. There are other markets in the UK that behave very differently (such as the ones that green energy companies use to buy 100% renewable energy 6 months ahead of time).
In practice UK electricity prices _are_ much cheaper from wind and solar energy, most of the time, because virtually all of that capacity in the UK was built under what is known as a CFD (contracts for difference) basis. The exact mechanism is a bit subtle [1], but in essence renewables built that way have a fixed price per unit of energy (usually for 20 years after construction). This price is less than what the gas energy producers typically bid in the UK.
The reasons why electricity prices are still on average very high in the UK is because the rest of the energy market is _so_ exposed to gas prices and renewables can't produce electricity a lot of the time (because it's not always windy, and it's not always light outside). Renewable production is highly correlated with itself and not necessarily aligned with demand.
The UK also has other structural problems in the electricity system that have arisen from its exposure to renewables that come with associated costs. For example wind turbines in Scotland often get paid to _turn off_ because their power can't be transmitted to the south of England where it can be used - there are similar constraints with North sea production. Wind turbines and solar panels replacing traditional coal power stations means that the electricity grid has lost a lot of its traditional load balancing and stability mechanisms (conventional power plants provide a lot of stability because large rotational mass synchronised to the grid frequency provides inertia in the entire grid - wind turbine rotation is independent of the grid frequency). ESO now has to have more drastic and expensive mechanisms like demand reduction and rapid response hot reserves in-place. A lot of these issues are transient and will get cheaper over time, but they've become acute in the short-term with the UK's rapid grid decarbonisation.
[1] they get paid directly from the day-ahead, spot, and other markets at the last bidder price. But they either have to refund any amount over their fixed price, or they receive a top-up from the energy companies so that they effectively got the fixed price.
It's higher energy prices yes, but that means higher everything prices. Even if your energy tariff is a 100% renewable one you still pay the dirty gas price because of the way the market is set up.
Combine that with high costs of housing (both to purchase but also to rent) and people are, generally speaking, fucked and living paycheck to paycheck. Renters especially live a precarious life where prices regularly go up 10% per year and you might be legally told to leave with not much more than a month's notice leading to much upheaval and associated costs.
That's a system that benefits mega-corporations running everything. Housing/cost of living is so expensive it cripples most upward mobility as regular people can't take risks investing/starting a business/switching careers/etc or have savings because they can barely afford rent. The only ones building/buying houses are real estate investors who can afford to navigate the complex market rules, so you'll be stuck working for one and renting from another.
> Aren't higher energy prices exactly what we need to combat climate change though?
No.
What you need to combat climate change is cheap green energy, and "green" is just a different question entirely to "cost".
If you have expensive energy, regardless of how green it is or isn't, you get poverty.
If you have greenhouse-gas-emitting energy, regardless of how cheap or expensive it is, you get climate change.
20 years ago, all the green energy was expensive; now, green energy is the cheapest around.
I assumed they meant higher prices for non-green energy than green energy.
> now, green energy is the cheapest
great to notice, but the overview falls short.. price signals are supposed to trigger conservation yet somehow, that is not discussed. Also note that energy markets have lifecycles.. it takes investment and infrastructure to make and deliver energy. Fossil fuels have done that in the past.
> signals are supposed to trigger conservation yet somehow, that is not discussed
Energy conservation has been discussed my entire life.
When I was a kid, it was things like double glazing, close windows, wear pullovers indoors, turn off lights when you leave a room, CFLs.
Late teen to young adult, increased loft insulation, cavity wall insulation. Energy efficiency standards for consumer goods. Cars getting taxed based on emissions.
More recently, a campaign group literally called "Insulate Britain": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulate_Britain_protests
> Fossil fuels have one that in the past
At first, but the last coal plant has been closed, and renewables are ascendent — just past midnight UK time and still 28.5% renewables, average for last week 33.6%, and for last year 36.8%: https://grid.iamkate.com/
The issue is there is currently no mechanism for end consumers to moderate their behaviour based on energy related emissions.
Currently if users as a group demand more power than clean can provide, dirty gets turned on and everyone pays the highest cost.
We need a way for a consumer to be able to commit to only clean power, potentially at a lower cost but with limited supply.
Do you not get charged different rates based on usage amounts? This is common across the world - where the first X KWH of usage per month cost a lot less than the next X.
Commercial contracts generally don't work that way, they generally pay the market rate (the current most expensive producer).
It means there is no way for an individual consumers behaviour to drive (or be driven by) the green energy proportion, as if the collective demand is too high then you pay the market rate for coal anyway.
Only high oil and gas prices specifically. And honestly, low gas prices is good if it helps move away from coal.
But unfortunately, even the most liberal political groups have walked back any interest in solving climate change at the margin. You see this with the endless life of the "100 companies cause climate change" misinformation.
China now emits almost 2x the carbon per capita than the UK, and alone emits more than all western countries combined including the US. The UK can't solve climate change at the margin or anywhere else with domestic energy policy.
China is now consuming record amounts of coal (the globe has not actually even reached peak-coal yet despite claims we'd already passed it going back decades and despite western coal consumption taking a nosedive starting about 20 years ago). Which is strange considering that it has also been an enormous producer and exporter of allegedly much cheaper solar and wind generators for many years.
Something doesn't add up here, and further disadvantaging much cleaner domestic industry and driving production offshore to countries with far higher emissions intensity of production (not to mention many other environmental and humanitraian issues) is not the way to solve climate change. It could be making it even worse.
> And honestly, low gas prices is good if it helps move away from coal.
Good news, the UK has completely moved away from coal: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/30/end-of-an-e...
That 100 companies canard is really terrible. It's seeking a villain to blame instead of addressing the system problems and it's second or third order effects such as climate change. I understand it probably motivates some folks but I can't help but roll my eyes.
The deeper problem might be that they gave up on fighting inequality; which would give regular people enough breathing room to make changes on the margin.
Without that, the argument is basically "We know that life is barely worth living, but we aren't going to help with that. Instead we want to make your life even worse to save the environment!"
Not really. We need polluting energy sources to be charged for their pollution, ie stop using the atmosphere and land as a free sewer, which in turn will put renewables on an equal footing.
Though even without that, solar, wind, and batteries are already cheaper.
Isn't that the same? You want to raise the price of energy to make wind etc competitive?
Sound bites drives political discussion.
When a polluting industry poisons the air and the water and people go to the hospital because they are coughing or they have dysentery, who will pay to cleanup the mess? If you frame the discussion as about “price” it is a non-starter.
I would argue it is better to talk about workers and their families. As in let us not shit in the river so our children don’t get sick and can go to school. Let us not poison the air so workers can do their jobs and not go to hospital.
This seems disingenuous twice:
1. You're welcome to argue that, but you haven't here. You've just stated it.
2. You shouldn't supplant one topic with another. High energy prices kill people, because energy drives the cost of everything, and people can direct less value into things that keep them healthy if they're spending a greater proportion of their income on survival. You can say "also air should be clean", fine, but not "Don't think about prices! Look over here instead!"
1. Air pollution kills more.
2. You can have your cake and eat it, if you drop the requirement to buy electricity at the price of the most expensive component in the mix. Spain did just that and they're currently experiencing an industrial revival thanks to comparatively low energy prices.
I think Rawgabbit is trying to get at the point that you need to price in the externalities to find the actual value of something.
They're trying to explain in good faith as far as I can tell.
No, I would argue I am correctly framing externalized costs ie the tragedy of the commons.
No, you just need fossil fuel energy to be relatively more expensive, not for energy to be more expensive overall. It's happened already but we're currently being held hostage by the coal burners while they scramble to extract the last bit of rent they can.
There is no way to make fossil fuel more expensive without making energy more expensive overall, because fossil fuel is included in the category of "energy overall." The effect of making fossil fuels more expensive is that energy prices will rise. The point of the GP ("Not really. We need polluting energy sources to be charged for their pollution, ie stop using the atmosphere and land as a free sewer, which in turn will put renewables on an equal footing.") is that the goal is not to raise the cost of energy as a whole (even though this is the inevitable outcome of higher fossil fuel prices), but instead to price in the negative externalities generated by fossil fuels.
Put another way, in a world where fossil fuels are no longer consumed, there isn't any reason to limit energy consumption for its sake, since the whole point was to encourage adoption of cleaner technologies. There is a case to be made that this isn't true, since even the "clean" technologies have an environmental impact, but that is tangential to the discussion.
I no longer think it's politically possible to charge anybody for climate externalities, since those people own our governments.
We are basically stuck until even those guys realise that coal is a loser just for practical, non carbon priced reasons.
Wind is competitive already… the price of electricity in the UK is set by the gas fired power generators
Wind isn't going to power the grid by itself.
Energy costs should probably be progressive. If you need more than the poor your cost starts shooting through the roof.
This reminds me of that popular "reality" show where they remodel a family's home and surprise them with what is basically a palace. Afterward the families are shattered by energy costs, and eventually exorbitant property taxes. Off camera they are forced into forclosure and end up in debt.
After the first month or so they are forced to seal off most of the house as they desperately try to stay afloat. Lacking financial savvy, most end up mortgaging the home.
A carbon dividend solves that problem. Put a price on each ton of carbon released in the atmosphere, then redistribute an equal dividend to each citizen.
The wealthiest people will end up paying more than they receive back, while the poorest will receive a boost. All while incentivizing low carbon alternatives in every sector of the economy.
No, if you want to have a stable standard of living, you need higher energy prices for polluting energy sources, and lower energy prices for non-polluting energy sources.
Then, to make killing this political suicide, make sure to mail every man, woman, and dog a check every two weeks called 'CARBON DIVIDEND'.
> Then, to make killing this political suicide, make sure to mail every man, woman, and dog a check every two weeks called 'CARBON DIVIDEND'.
We effectively did this in Canada and it still became a political albatross.
(Though in practice the cheque was done via direct deposit and a lot of people didn't realize where the money was coming from despite it being clearly labelled. I think cheques in the mail would have been more effective.)
Not necessarily. You could argue that you want coal and gas to be expensive so that people build out renewables. But the places with the cheapest electricity generally have hydro, nuclear or wind, which are all zero carbon.
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Because climate change will somehow not effect the poor?
1) we need hire energy prices to match the externalities
2) we need subsidies to make the poor more efficient at using the power they can afford. I heard in England they don't have proper insulation in most homes. Building to passive house standards can completely transform an energy bill.
Poor people tend to rent, don't have money to invest in better insulation or higher quality housing.
Good news is the UK government has been increasing, and wants to further increase*, the legal minimum energy efficiency of rental properties.
The bad news is the current* UK requirement is still so low that the 39 m^2 apartment I let out in the UK costs more to heat *badly*, than my 100-ish m^2 new passiv-ish house in Germany costs to be T-shirt temperature inside while watching the snow fall outside. (And that UK apartment is one of the better ones in the building; I used to live in it, one of my requirements when buying was double glazing, not all the apartments in that building had double glazing).
Also bad news is that my agency is telling me to not do anything more than the legal minimum to upgrade it, that I should instead wait for the requirements to get stricter before actually doing anything more.
Of course they absolutely do actually get things upgraded when rules change. In the UK, changing the rules does work.
* https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/improving-the-en...
> we need subsidies to make the poor more efficient at using the power they can afford.
They already have grants and subsidies that people can apply for.
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/find-energy-grants...
> I heard in England they don't have proper insulation in most homes.
Almost every house and apartment I've lived in had had some sort of insulation and double/triple glazing fitted on the windows. So I found this quite hard to believe so I looked it up.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c19d040f0b...
Official stats from 12 years ago say that ~70% of properties do have cavity wall and loft insulation as of 2013.
> Building to passive house standards can completely transform an energy bill.
They are plenty of regulations on how new houses are built on how energy efficient they are. However we cannot build enough housing for a number of numerous reasons to meet current demand.
If the IPCC global climate change projections are accurate then poor UK residents will probably experience smaller effects than poor people in many other countries. So they may see it as less of a concern than short-term energy costs.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar4/wg1/global-climate-projection...
We can also give money to the poor, if that's the problem, while still maintaining an incentive landscape that prices in externalities of pollution and rewards conserving energy.
Of course. How many climate change theory advocates do you know who are poor?
Everyone who bought into neoliberalism in the 80s is now experiencing economies that are mysteriously failing to thrive. Correlation isn't cause, except when it is.
So what was the alternative? Continue with the disaster of central planning. Which is the actual thing that destroyed British industry.
Go back to what the western world was doing in the 50’s. High tax and high public spending. In 1950 the US had a top marginal tax rate of 91%. The 50s were great, let’s do that again.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2021/04/26/taxing...
That environment was directly proceeded by WW2, which required massive capital investment to rebuild Europe[1]. In the UK we were still rationing candy and meat during the early 50s[2]. So, I’m not particularly eager to recreate those conditions.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_King...
Federal receipts as a % of GDP has gone up and down by a few % but is basically unchanged from the 1950’s:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=ockN
Meanwhile the income tax burden, specifically, has gotten considerably more progressive:
https://www.ntu.org/foundation/tax-page/who-pays-income-taxe...
The NTU only goes back to the 1980s and does not actually include any analysis of the 1950s.
Looks like NTU also is positing their stance on the ideology that the 1% are the only ones that create jobs but they are the ones to most likely invest in large corporations. There seems no prospect to help the mom and pop shops or small companies that have stronger solutions beyond what large corporate tunnel vision provides.
My personal taxes keep going up with these "Tax Cuts". I don't expect them to come down with the push for tax cuts for the wealthy. Nor has my income gone up.
Wouldn't buying more local would reduce energy used for transportation of goods and services?
I see less Amazon purchases and deliveries as a net benefit for the majority and a net deficit for the wealthy investors. Wealth that stays more in the community versus being shipped to Wall Street.
The majority definitely benefits from being able to buy cheap Chinese goods and go on cheap Europe trips while $BIGCOMPANY vacuums up money from the rest of the world to prop up the USD. In which other country can a guy cutting hair (out of many examples) afford so many international vacations?
> In which other country can a guy cutting hair (out of many examples) afford so many international vacations?
In Europe? They can just take a train. Young people backpack all over Europe on shoestring budgets.
This sounds like you are applying shifting baseline syndrome. [0] [1] [2]
Another way to phrase shifting baseline is when people apply what they experience with an over weighted value. For example, the cost of living has skyrocketed in the USA compared to older generations, with the cost of a home, healthcare, and basic goods and services. Wages have been stagnant while the wealthy keep gaining more and more of economic power. Economic mobility is also quite low compared to 10 or 20 years ago.
Those trips are most likely more cost effective compared to the 1950s because the technology was new and still evolving. Air travel was a luxury and now it is a commodity. Engineers have improved the technology to craft air plains while finding ways to reduce production cost. Cost savings have not be pushed to the working class and are shifted to the wealthy.
If the wage increase of CEOs was linear with your wage. It would be higher and also be less of an economic for burden the masses.
People over value the rare lucky ones as being the average of all. Kind of how a number of Americans are against taxing the wealthy because they believe they are or will become wealthy. It is rare to become wealthy and often those that are lacking in empathy and morals. Just like my Uncle that worked for Arbys, which is a millionaire because he believes and supports the idea that those below him should not be payed a living wage.
At leas I learned from him that those franchises often run on debt because they try and pull out every last dollar into the owner's pockets. He was looking to become the owner but the debt was too great to buy in, as a millionaire.
[0] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/fee.... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline [2] https://earth.org/shifting-baseline-syndrome/
Is figure 4's legend correct from the NTU link? It would seem that the grey is the top 1%, not bottom 50%.
High tax and high public spending.
Government spending was a slightly lower percentage of GDP than today (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S), and a whole lot of that was defense (https://econofact.org/u-s-defense-spending-in-historical-and...).
The 50s were great, let’s do that again.
Assuming you're not a non-white person, or a woman who wants a career. Although getting rid of Medicare would certainly help the budget.
Is there something intrinsic to the general setup of government spending in the 1950s that makes it incompatible with equal rights for minorities and women? These would seem to be orthogonal issues.
And then what happened to those nationalised industries?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O7PVEaPh6Fw&pp=ygUUYWRhbSBzbWl...
(Link from the Adam Smith Institute, a neoliberal thinktank)
The story of British Leyland is enough to scare anyone w/ even half a brain away from ever allowing British politicians to have even the least bit of influence over a company that competes anywhere near the consumer space.
Nobody paid a 91% tax rate in practice. What a silly thing to focus on, a headline marginal tax rate nobody paid.
The 1950s were great for places like the US, Australia and New Zealand because they were initially fairly unregulated (wartime planning was ended and the market took over) and they weren't destroyed by the war.
The UK had rationing into the mid 50s while its empire crumbled. It was not some heavenly place. Millions left the UK for the new world, including my grandparents, because the UK was in a dire state.
Over the next 20-30 years, the anglosphere became progressively more regulated, more taxed, more controlled, and more unionised. You needed a licence to import a new car. You needed a licence to import magazines. Exchange rates and interest rates were controlled by the government and adjusted for political purposes. Large parts of the economy were run inefficiently by the state as make-work schemes to prop up "full employment" policies that were politically popular but very expensive. The oil shock of the 1970s revealed how bad this scheme of economic management was at responding to changing conditions. When you have thea biggest economy in the world and you were untouched by a war that decimated your competitors it is easy to look good. But the system was not capable of responding to changing conditions because it was largely driven from the top down by bureaucrats and politicians for the sake of implementing their preferred social policies and winning elections respectively.
In the 1980s, this came to a breaking point. This was true everywhere, but the clearest example is not the US or the UK but New Zealand. It nearly went bankrupt trying to maintain completely unsustainable exchange rates for political reasons and there was a small consitutional crisis when the outgoing government refused to implement the incoming government's instructions to lower the exchange rate. The economy was dominated by what were called "Think Big" schemes: government infrastructure projects that made no financial sense but looked good on election posters and "created jobs". Large numbers of businesses did entirely pointless things like assembling Japanese cars from components more expensively than could be done in Japan, because car imports were restricted. Many other examples exist. Agriculture was heavily subsidised by the state.
The new governments in the 1980s (I am talking about the West generally now) did away with much of this rubbish. They lowered trade barriers, reduced or eliminated subsidies, and privatised the elements of the public sector that had no reason to be run by the public sector.
Sometimes when privatised these businesses failed. But that wasn't because they were privatised, it was because they had never made any financial sense in the first place.
The fundamental point is that the 1950s system was the same as the 1960s and 1970s system. If you go back to the 1950s, you also go back to the 1970s. The system was the same, the same incentives would exist, and the result would be similar. Give the economy over to the public sector and in a few years all thought of making what customers want and will pay for is substituted with using economic power to achieve social goals and win elections. We had better make sure we hire more Xs, they deserve more representation, and we better put money into Y, people love to hear about Y, and so on. And before long it is a lumbering inefficient mess.
I mean I think most billionaires would welcome the 1950s tax code. The reduction in their bills would be amazing! The only people paying those number would be our new "middle" class doctors, lawyers, etc people who make a lot of income but limited investments.
I have zero doubts everyone commenting has read the article. That makes me even more surprised, that some people seem to have conclusions that are in direct opposition to what the article says.
Since, as we all know, the article is about how central planning ruined the UK economy, and the later reforms were not enough to fully unblock it. Particularly, it postulates deregulating housing and making it harder for people to oppose new investments (especially related energy and infrastructure)..
I have a lot of issues with the work of Yanis Varoufakis, but he has one idea that I'd like to see tried out - and that is that the workers own 10% of their companies, obviously getting 10% of the profit, etc. At least in Europe it's uncommon to get shares as part of the compensation package, so I'm curious how the Varoufakis' idea would end up working. It's worth giving it a shot.
I'm not opposed to employee ownership but there's no reason to think that mandating a certain minimum level will produce better outcomes. The equity dilution will increase the cost of capital, making it harder to start or expand businesses. Most workers have virtually zero ability to impact shareholder returns. And low skilled workers really need cash today, not the possibility of dividends or capital gains tomorrow.
Why would I want that as a worker? I am already "overexposed" to the fortunes of my employer by virtue of being employed by it. If my employer does well then I get paid better, get a bonus, etc. If my employer does poorly then I risk being laid off.
Why would I want to invest in that risk when I have relatively little control over the success of the business, as opposed to investing the same amount of wealth in the market more generally or in assets that counter some of that risk?
Also, generally, why should employees automatically get some part of the company? What have they done to deserve it?
It doesn't sound like a bad idea. And I really wish the UK was more like the USA with stock options etc
As a worker, I don't want 10% of my business' volatile profit. I would rather have reliable cash, that I can invest in SP500. Or at least that is the case with employees of most businesses.
Central planning is likely going to be a feature of all manners of world-leading governments, whether we're talking about dictatorships, theocracies, or democratic republics. Imagine, for example, a country that wants to get into the chip game at this point.
To some people, everything is still Thatcher's fault, 40 years later.
As one of those people ... it's not so much that everything is (still) Thatcher's fault. Had she not won in 1979, doubtless the UK would be facing a different mix of problems, some the same, some different. But Thatcher set the ball in motion on the tracks it has been on more or less since her first win, and it is those tracks that are the fundamental source of many of the problems in the UK (not all of them, but the biggest ones).
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Turns out Thatcherism only works as long as the state still has assets to sell off. The delusion that assets would stay in the hands of the working and middle class, and not end up with the wealthy inheriting class, has to be one of the biggest political failures of our government on the modern era. It's lead to the possible death of the Conservative Party if they fail to fight off Reform and the Liberal Democrats.
> Turns out Thatcherism only works as long as the state still has assets to sell off.
Thatcherism works as long as there are still people receiving state assistance, since their assistance can be reduced even further.
Also works if you have North Sea oil revenues that you can use to pay for mass unemployment.
You're surely joking. The IMF isn't bailing out the UK, and there aren't 3 day week debates because of the failing power supply. What's led to the death of the Conservative party is them doing exactly the opposite what a lot of Conservative voters want: bigger economy, and slower immigration.
Didn't they get more independence with Brexit?
Regarding the immigration, sure, the Conservative voters maybe want less of it, but rich and influential Tories actually like immigration as it allows their businesses to thrive (even more). The UK has more capital going around than her own people.
> Didn't they get more independence with Brexit?
We didn't leave the EHCR. So there is an argument that we don't have full control of our laws. IANAL and won't pretend to know the specifics.
> Regarding the immigration, sure, the Conservative voters maybe want less of it, but rich and influential Tories actually like immigration as it allows their businesses to thrive (even more).
Not just Conservative voters. Almost 1 in 5 Labour and Lib Dem voters want to see it reduced.
https://public.tableau.com/views/Publicopinion2023/FIGURE9?:...
Generally 52% of the UK want to see it immigration reduced in some capacity according to the migration observatory. This was roughly the Vote Leave percentage.
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/uk...
The ECHR is an international agreement like many, many others. It has special status in UK law only because we chose to: that was the purpose of the Human Rights Act. You can also take complaints of breach to the European Court of Human Rights, but they have no enforcement powers (in particular, Russia often decided not to bother complying, and we've avoided enforcing their ruling on prisoner voting rights with their tacit consent).
It used to be the case that we were also tied into the ECHR (and playing nice with the rulings of the ECtHR) because it's required by EU law even though it's not an EU instrument and the ECtHR isn't an EU court. But as we've left that's no longer an issue.
Finally, I'd just say that there's little objectionable about the Convention, and for the most part it tracks very closely with existing British common law (not surprisingly, as it was a Churchill-supported project in the first place and intended to export what was great about the British tradition of liberty as much as to bind us into Europe). There are a few edge cases where politicians and certain newspapers get into enormous flaps about individual cases, but it's really not that constraining a convention: most of the clauses have get-outs for crime, morality and public order and the margin of appreciation is generally quite broad. It's not perfect any more than, say, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is, but the complaints are mostly grandstanding.
> Not just Conservative voters.
That's also not what I said nor implied. The parent comment discussed Conservatives, so I replied to that.
I know. I felt like it needed to be pointed out that even on parties that are seen to be more centre-left/left that there is good portion of voters that are opposition to immigration.
This is because I don't think it is as much of a right/left issue like it is frequently framed.
> The UK has more capital going around than her own people.
Wealth and income are not zero-sum. Generally, people produce more than they consume (or we'd all be living in caves). Reducing people reduces output, growth, and wealth.
Legal immigrants from the EU were not the only source of migrants to the UK. Many come from elsewhere, legally and otherwise. Guess what: we have Brexit but we still have immigrants - impossible?! </sarcasm>
Plus it was never about immigration, it was always - I think - a classic case of misinformation and greed from many places. Sadly many people fell for it.
> Plus it was never about immigration,
It was partly about immigration. According to these surveys 43% of people that voted leave think immigration should be reduced.
https://public.tableau.com/views/Publicopinion2023/FIGURE9?:...
> it was always - I think - a classic case of misinformation and greed from many places. Sadly many people fell for it.
Why do many people assume that if someone thinks differently about a particular political issue they must have fooled somehow? Considering there is data that partially contradicts your belief that it wasn't about immigration, maybe your assessment about their level of understanding of the issues involved is also incorrect.
> Why do many people assume that if someone thinks differently about a particular political issue they must have fooled somehow?
politicians sometimes lie…?
the £350 million a day bus springs to mind as one example. the amazing trade deals which will unleash our new economy were another.
like, those things sound great. people wanted those promises to become real and believed the people who were saying those things could implement them.
turns out implementation is sometimes a lot harder than waving your hands and making a bunch of promises.
edit —
especially when the advertised numbers are factually wrong, and people know they are wrong — i.e. they lied.
> A study by King's College London and Ipsos MORI, published in October 2018 found that 42 percent of people who had heard of the £350 million claim still believed it was true, whereas 36 percent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_Leave_bus
> politicians sometimes lie…?
Most people are quite aware that politicians lie. It is a common trope in movies, tv and media generally. Politicians are quite disliked in the UK generally. So this idea that people blindly believe politicians is nonsense.
> A study by King's College London and Ipsos MORI, published in October 2018 found that 42 percent of people who had heard of the £350 million claim still believed it was true, whereas 36 percent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.
So? People frequently cherry pick information to justify their decisions after they have already made them. I actually looked up the actual report (not the wikipedia summary). While much more people generally believe the 350 million figure voted Leave, there was a decent percentage of people that believed the figure and voted Remain.
People seem to forget that a good portion of the Media and Parliament (including the Prime Minister at the time who won with a majority) were in favour of Remain. What is often ignored is that if you look at UKIP voter percentage before the referendum. It had risen from 3.1% to 12.6%. That was rising well before the bus campaign was a thing.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/election2010/results/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2015/results
The Leave Referendum was about many things. It was partly about immigration, it was partly about sticking it to an entitled political class, part of it was about sovereignty. Making it about a figure on the side of the bus is asinine. I also don't believe Dominic Cummings on how effective it was btw.
But in any event this will probably be my last comment on anything political on here because you get downvoted for simply defending half the people in my country that voted a particular way.
> It was partly about immigration
My view is it’s actually about people being racist
Well there is no evidence to back that up. In fact there is plenty that indicates the opposite.
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/uk...
There is in the section entitled "Preferences for different types of migrant: origin, similarity, skill level". (There doesn't seem to be a way to directly reference it in a document).
> Country of origin is not the only factor that people take into account when considering preferences on immigration. In the European Social Survey 2014, British respondents reported how many immigrants should be allowed based on a question that specified both the country of origin (Poland or India) and the skill level (professional or unskilled labourer). The results revealed that when migrants are professionals, opposition is low, and when migrants are unskilled, opposition is high (Figure 5). Research has shown that people’s general preference for high-skilled over low-skilled migrants is mainly driven by perceptions of their higher economic contribution
> The preference among the British public for highly skilled migrants aligns with previous research indicating that, when questioned about the criteria for incoming migrants, skills are considered more important than other factors such as race/ethnicity and religion.
Direct link to the stats:
https://public.tableau.com/views/Publicopinion2023/FIGURE5?:...
My view is there needs to be a version of Godwin's law related to client of supposed 'racism', i.e. the one who claims ${issue} is caused by/related to 'racism' thereby loses the argument unless he comes with solid proof.
I see no proof, spurious claims of 'racism' do not count as such so it actually was about immigration.
It's disingenuous to pretend Brexit wasn't at least partially motivated by in-group preference. Almost as disingenuous as implying that there's anything wrong with having said preference. I don't open up my house to people I don't know regardless of their potential to contribute to it economically. Why is this treated as immoral when the same reasoning is applied to the immigration system?
I am not pretending anything. I've showed some actual evidence to back to back up my view point.
Moreover, time after time the British public are surveyed about their views on immigration and ethnic background is not something that is important to a large portion of the people taking part.
Are there some people that do care? Sure there are, but they are very small minority typically.
> Sure there are, but they are very small minority typically.
From your own data, 25% of respondents agreed with the statement: Allow none/only a few immigrants of a different race/ethnicity to come and live in [the UK]. This isn't a small minority and I can guarantee you the distribution of these attitudes isn't equal between leavers and remainers.
You have to read the analysis below as well as look at the charts. From the articles I linked
> As a further way of characterising countries, we include a second measure based on the percentage of people saying that immigration ‘makes the country a worse place to live’ On this measure, the UK maintains a similar rank position as one of the more positive countries in the sample, and similar to Switzerland at 18%.
> These two measures can be thought of as capturing opinions on future migration flows and current population stocks. In most of these 13 countries, it appears that people are more negative towards the idea of continuing flows than about the immigrants already present. Finland, for example, is a country where 42% of the public would prefer few/no immigrants of another race coming to live there, whilst, at the same time, just 19% think immigrants make the country a worse place to live.
It is still much better than many other countries in Europe.
> This isn't a small minority and I can guarantee you the distribution of these attitudes isn't equal between leavers and remainers.
Ok sure. I probably shouldn't have said minority. Yeah of course the distribution isn't going to be equal. However people pretend it was all about racism when it clearly wasn't.
The UK economy is already pretty small per-capita compared to other first-world countries. I'm certainly not one to argue for growth, but what is it about UK's conservatism that demands degrowth? It strikes me as antithetical to the liberalisation that I would think would form the right flank of the spectrum.
From my perspective, even economic concerns are driven by fear of immigration: it's just the same old "immigrants are taking my jobs but also somehow not growing the economy so I am now economically displaced" trope.
There is a finite amount of housing.
Britons do not, actually, wish to carpet their entire island w/ semidetached housing, so each and every immigrant occupying a flat is one less that a native could be living in.
> The UK economy is already pretty small per-capita compared to other first-world countries.
? Where does it rank? What is per capita GDP?
It works as long as you have an economy and eyes to see it worked with her policies in place and didn't work before she was elected.
The Tories benefited massively from Thatcher because her policies massively benefited Britain. Without them, Britain would be far poorer today. Britain's problems today are not because of too much Thatcherism but because of far too little. The areas of greatest concern are those areas that they didn't manage to do much with, like local planning.
The idea of the market building housing only works if the market is allowed to do so. It isn't. That isn't a problem with the idea of the market building houses - it manages to do everything else in the economy just fine - but with planning laws.
>has to be one of the biggest political failures of our government on the modern era
Thatcher/Reagan neoliberalism only has to be a failure if you assume the goal was to best serve the general population. This is a POSIWID moment.
The article is about how bad land and energy policies (essentially central planning)—dating from the post-war period—are holding back the British economy. Is that neoliberalism?
In fairness, whilst the article isn't without merit, it's authored by some of the only people in the UK that actually describe themselves as neoliberal. Which is why it's focusing on "green belt" planning policy and ignoring the fact that local government built 150k houses per annum back when we actually built enough houses, something which "neoliberal" policy introduced by Thatcher essentially made impossible, and why the article treats rail privatization as a success story rather than a service British citizens use in increasing numbers despite sky-high prices (and the government subsidising it more than when they owned it!) not least because markets have moved the jobs into London and the affordable housing out of London.
It is, neoliberalism has been about taking away all the state owned assets and putting everything the country needs into private hands. This is what has stalled the economy and its what is fuelling enormous inequality. Calling for ever more of it falls really flat now after 40 years of the same strategy making things worse for the average person.
neoliberalism is strongly against NIMBYism and other restrictions on land that are a big part of the UK's problems from my understanding
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Thanks Carney! Now you’ve headed back to Canada to further destroy what Trudeau hasn’t screwed up yet!