Comments by "Curious Crow" (@CuriousCrow-mp4cx) on "Economics Help"
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I think you need to look at the trade-offs section. Remember that the vacancies for NHS and Social Care are still in their tens of thousands. A nurse takes 3 years to train. A Doctor takes 7. What do we do in the meantime? Where are the British people willing to spend 3 years training as a nurse with 12 hour shifts, and low pay. What do we do in the meantime? Let's be honest here. All those wonderful tax cuts we had to be paid for by cutting back public spending, which includes the NHS. The UK workforce is shrinking because it is ageing, and the birth rate has been below replacement rate for decades. It is actually too late to be particular where your health and social care staff come from, as they are needed now. Not in 3 years and not in 7, but now. That's why private sector contractors are waiting for the NHS and social care to collapse, whilst they are bleeding it dry. They want it broken enough so people will pay health insurance. You can cut immigration all you like, but it's too late to stop the rot. It's gone on too long. You see, all the problems we have have been created to make wealthy people even more money. That means they want a weaker state, with little or no public services, and to pay little or no tax. And we fell for that. We shortsighted lay agreed to tax cuts, not thinking it would literally come back to bite us. It has. Child poverty has returned with a vengeance. Young people are finding it impossible to start a family in a home of there own without the Bank of Mum and Dad. And intergenerational wealth is shrinking too. So, we need immigration just to clean up the mess left behind by the direction our society took over 4 decades ago. And it will take decades to repair it if we have the luck to do so. And we will need it. And it might mean that we will have to look at our priorities as a society, because our problems in the present come from those priorities we set in the past. And if we don't like dealing with these current problems, we need to take an honest and realistic look at the priorities that created them. The problems were created by immigration. Immigration needs are a symptom, not the cause. The cause is that we believed stuff that wasn't true. Tax cuts were free money. No, they weren't. Every tax cut meant a cut in public services each and every time. And Austerity just accelerated that decline. Now there's a quiet crisis going on because we're being gaslighted each and every day. It's saddening to see how much it's hurting us. We gone backwards in life expectancy. Diseases of deprivation have returned, and medicine and treatment is being rationed. People are having trouble getting their prescriptions filled. And the elderly... With undetmanned social care, there suffering too. We've messed up, by allowing it to happen. And really, we need to decide who we are and what kind of country we want to be. We've got to be honest about it, because there is no perfect solution, and we can't have everything at the same time.
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AI as it is at the moment is no more than an amped up search engine, with tools for processing that information. So, it won't work for replacing jobs where context and judgment are important. Even now, the AI both coming to take customer service jobs, can't exclude humans altogether, as the builders state that a human needs to be in the workflow to deal with complex queries that flummox the AI. And, even Chat GPT has a bias for producing answers with less emphasis on knowing whether those answers are correct or appropriate. So, I suspect more like 10 years. The corporations pushing that narrative, want companies to buy into it, but realistically, AI is anywhere close, especially as prompts have to be carefully engineered to get it to do exactly what you want it to do, without it tending to do other things as well. I found that when asking Chat GPT to check and correct YouTube plain text transcripts for spelling, capitalisation, punctuation, and paragraphing, it would rewrite parts of the text that "did not flow well." Only when I added the word 'only' to the prompt, did it stop trying to improve the text. So... Come back in 10 years, and then we'll see.
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Have you tried to live on £12,000 pa? You can't. So your example is not so useful. Rather look at two single people, with no children, both working 40 hrs a week. One is on the minimum wage - that's £11.44 an hour; the other is earning £57.20 an hour - 5 times the person on minimum wage in 2024. After tax, NI, pension deductions, and a student loan repayment, Person 1 will take home just over £18,748 per year or £360.55 a week. Person 2 will will take home under the same deductions as person 1 £57791.46 or £1111. 37 per week. Person 2 still takes home just over 3× the amount that person 1 does. And as far as benefits are concerned, even with benefits, which are of course tapered downwards if you do get it. If person 1 was supporting even 1 child on that money, he'd still be broke, as childcare is incredibly expensive, and benefits are limited as well. There's a lot of working full time families having to use food and getting universal credit and housing benefit. And they're the lucky ones. And the low pay problem is much more widespread than anyone imagines. All most people want is what the previous generation had. 1 job that could keep them and a family with a roof over their head, and that's becoming nigh impossible due to real wages having fallen so far behind inflation since 2008.
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@CommonPurpose1 That was your experience, which can't be generalised. And to be honest, I'm probably older than you, and I was old enough to see Thatcher in, and see what happened to my town. Deindustrialisation started after the great inflation during the 1970s. Britain had become the Sick Man of Europe. The economic growth of the 1980s was built on bankrupting the state, and wasting gains from north sea oil. Our elites thought Asian competition would undercut British industry, so they let it die. From energy to the car industry, it all was starved of investment, as the banks were making more money from stock market speculation, selling off publics services, and selling mortgages. By selling off social housing, central government destroyed local government's ability to alleviate the effects of the job losses.
British firms were sold off, and the jobs weren't replaced. Unless you were educated and literate, you didn't have much chance in the new knowledge economy.
When the Labour Party came in, the British economy had just got over the hit of crashing out of the ERM, when interest rates went up to 15%. Some people lost their homes, but GDP went up for 16 years after that. The State still had some capacity, and so they tried to use neoliberalism tools to repair the damage to public services. Children weren't going hungry, or suffering from diseases of deprivation then. There were no food banks, and the economy grew enough to finish paying off the debt of World War II owed to the Americans. But Thatcher's revolution meant there was no money to build new hospitals, and so they borrowed on usurous terms to invest in public services. That was welcomed by the financial sector which had replaced industrial production as the largest sector in the British economy. Their mistake was not to understand how unsustainable the financial revolution started by Thatcher was.
Neoliberal economics crashed and burned in 2008, and we've been subsidising the banks ever since. Whatever British manufacturing was left after the early 1980s, gradually eroded.
The loss of a mixed economy which could provide jobs for people of all abilities, is the biggest legacy of the transition to an economy dominated by finance and technology. And a 2 term Labour government and a misled public couldn't change that.
The market-driven ideology led revolution thought markets could solve everything, but it ignored the fact that the humans in them suffer from things like greed and selfishness, and weakened the only real safeguard against it. The state. Britain isn't alone in this folly. Most governments, are reaping the rewards of being owned by the wealthy, and run by the wealthy, for the wealthy. That's why most of them are technically bankrupt, including the UK. We're literally back to where we were in 1945 in terms of the National Debt. That's all down to the greatest wealth transfer in history, and it's not finished yet. In a generation or two, only the kith and kin of the asset wealthy will own homes, and the state will just be an empty shell for corporations kleptocrats, and family landlords to control the population. Unless people listen to voices like Gary Stevenson and wake up to the facts. And not just look to their own circumstances to understand the world they live in. Simply, if you rely on a job for a living, you are vulnerable. And what they do to the least valuable people in society, they will do to you.
Thatcherism made us all frogs in a pot on the stove over low heat over the last 4 decades, and the water is getting warm as the asset wealthy try to gaslight us that everything is ok. It's not. And it won't be for those who follow us unless we get our priorities straight.
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Do you know the definition of "full" employment?
If you think that it is 100%, you'd be wrong. Why? Because a) people change jobs all the time, and this churn in the labour market, means employment is volatile; and b) it is believed that a "tight" labour market - one where there is actually close to full employment increases the risk of Inflation climbing because of a Wage-Price Spiral. This is where the demand for workers outstrips supply, so employers are forced to increase wages to attract staff, by increasing prices. And inflation needs to be kept low, right?
Well, right now, the Unemployment Rate in the UK is only 4.6%. Basically, we have virtually full employment already. And wages are still growing, albeit much, much slower than before. How come? Well, after the 2008 recession hit, the DWP published in December 2009, a paper entitled "Building Britain’s Recovery: Achieving Full Employment". In that paper, Yvette Cooper, then Minister for Work and Pensions, stated:
"This White Paper reiterates our ambition for full employment that eight out of every ten people of working age should be in employment."
That's 80%, which was enough after the greatest recession in history. When the unemployment rate was 7.8%
So... What's going in here?
As for economically inactive people, that includes people who've retired from work before the State Retirement Age, students, stay at home wives of working people, and the independently wealthy, who don't need to work. It also includes people who are off sick on NHS waiting lists of several years in length.
So what's going on here?
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Really? How can they, as they have to pay £3100 a year NHS surcharge? And all migrants aren't poor or dependent on social services. The ones that are usually face discrimination, and get low paid, and sporadic work. That's why your government wants to dump zero hours contracts. Many immigrants now must past health and English checks, and now would be skilled, to fill the tens of thousands of nursing and other vacancies that the UK can't fill itself. An important factor which you ignore. The people on the waiting lists for treatment needs those people. What do you expect them to do, as your objections to immigration would leave them languishing and suffering on the waiting lists? All the people complaining on this don't seem very bothered that British trained doctors, nurses, and other health profession are or have considered migrating from the UK. Perhaps dealing with why they want to leave might be a more constructive step? Likewise, making your country good for families and working parents, would stem your falling birthrate and aging workforce issues too in about 2 decades, but what do you do it until then? You rely on immigration. That's what you do. The majority of British born children go on to university,and want well paid jobs. They are not interested in low paid, arduous and insecure work. So the 500,000 Brits emigrating annually since 2021 have their reasons for leaving. Try fixing those and you wouldn't need much immigration. But, let's be honest, it's easier to scapegoat migrants, than fix that, right?
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Lol. Models are maps, not the territory. Don't confuse the two. We are neither the US nor Denmark. And thinking we can borrow models devised for other economies has brought us to the situation we are now in.
Neoliberalism was devised in America, but it hasn't even worked there. And unfortunately for us, we dived into copying the Americans and ended up with a busted flush. All we got was a huge transfer of wealth to the already asset-wealthy, and a crumbling system brought down by savage underinvestment in education and industry and underfunding of public services. British workers work the longest hours in Europe, but are paid the least to the extent that Polish and Slovenian workers will earn more than the workers of the sixth richest economy in the world, leading to increasing income and wealth inequality. They say one's problems come from one's priorities, and if one doesn't like cleaning up the mess caused by one's problems, then one needs to take a hard look at the priorities that put them there. We've made rich people richer at our own expense. That is not just folly on the part of our short-termist politicians. We've played our part in electing them. So we too are responsible for losing our own way. It is our priorities that are skewed away from reality. Until we look at the truth of who we are without rosy glasses and unicorns, and commit to making the changes needed, we're not going anywhere, because we have to change before it will. We need to stop looking for easy answers to tough problems and commit to change. Because being Denmark is not a quick fix. It is literally changing not just our minds but the way we do things. And not just moaning at governments, scapegoating, and blaming. None of which achieves anything. But getting more involved in how our country is run. Our errors are rooted in how we see the world and ourselves in it. That distorts our relationship to reality. Nice things cost time, effort, and money to produce. Denmark didn't get nice things by thinking their national economy is run like a household. And even though they encourage people to grow wealth, they are not shy in taxing it to pay for the things that make it possible to have nice things. We don't subsidise wealth creation to make a few people rich and nothing else. We do it to ensure that everyone's boat can float to the extent that everyone is able to contribute to making wealth for the country as a whole. We have spectacularly failed for nearly half a century to do what we did after World War Two, when we were 100% worse off than we are now. Why? We followed the American overoptimistic model, and it's hurt us badly. We are now reaping the rewards of that folly. We can do better, but we are too complacent and are deceiving ourselves. We have found out that we need to change. We sat by as whole communities fell to the neoliberal attrition. And then no one can understand why they can't build themselves up, as the whole weight of the Big Con is standing on them.
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I read the new book "Money" by David McWilliams, and he says that monocultures in nature are fragile, and by having financial services dominating our economy, we have an economic monoculture where there is less productive investment than speculation and rentierism, both which put nothing into the real economy. All it does is run the economy on debt, and transfer wealth away from workers and the asset limited, and give to the already asset wealthy. All the increases in GDP have gone to asset owners, and everyone else has been exposed to increasing wealth and income inequality over time, as they turn to debt to maintain their living standards, or to put a roof over their heads. The banking sector just lives to create more debt, and that's drive out productive spending. Unless we actually address that lack of productive investment, things can only get worse.
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These are not on the books because they aren't the national debt. These are private debts. Someone's debt - including the government's - is someone else's savings. The important thing is who owns that debt. If it's your pension fund that owns that debt - and pension funds in the UK are the biggest purchasers of government debt by buying UK Gilts as a way to structure their long term liabilities to pay pensions - would you be happy for them to have less assets to pay your pension from? I would guess not. Indeed, workplace pensions tend to be the only asset almost every worker has, even when they have nothing else. So, don't let confirmation bias mislead you in your critique. The Economy is complicated, because it's made of of people making choices, and people are complicated. So, if your standard of living is going down, it's not because of the "National Debt", it's because of a number of factors that impact your purchasing power, and the national debt isn't one of them. Brexit unfortunately reduced our earning capacity, and depreciated the value of Stirling, as well. It's more expensive since Covid to import from further afield in the world, and we have imposed trade barriers on ourselves. By reducing our earning capacity, the cost of servicing our sovereign debt has increased, because investors view our economy to be more risky now than before Brexit. Plus being very reliant on financial services means we're very exposed to issues in the global financial system, and moving from wage growth to debt to fund living standards, has meant wealth inequality is now embedded, and our children are less well off than we were. And all these major issues create cascading problems on their own, but demography and misinvestment in speculative rather than productive assets that increase real economic growth, i.e. produce Capital, rather than hoarded wealth, means our growth is stagnant. Not only that, but we don't invest in the UK as much as in the US, because returns have been consistently better by doing so. So, UK living standards are unlikely to rise because of these and other issues. And I expect Trump is going to throw shade our way too. He's likely to put tarrifs on UK goods as well, simply because it plays well with his base.
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GIGO. You've have a house and your windows are rotten but you won't repair the damage because you don't care. You're a landlord renting it out. So, the landlord is taken to court and is fined. He sells the house to someone who wants to repair the house, but the previous owner didn't tell him about the damage. Who would you blame? The new owner or the landlord seller? Iwe follow your logic, we would blame the buyer and not the seller, and that doesn't make any sense. Labour are just cleaning up after the Conservatives screwed this country over. They've weakened the economy to the extent it cannot grow. They created an economic monoculture based on debt, which is driving out productive investment that creates real jobs and productivity rather than debt farming and speculation. Monocultures in nature are fragile, because diversity makes it harder for pathogens to do damage to the whole system. . We see that in the Cocoa Industry right now, and our economy dominated by debt farming, asset bubbles, and speculation, is simply too weak to grow. There is simply too much debt, and too little productive investment. And the government of only 7 months cannot undo the harm done of nearly 5 decades. And it may already be too late to do anything, because there's another financial crisis brewing in the synchronised and highly interconnected global financial system. Global trade volumes are down, and the government doesnt have the money to invest to kickatart economic growth.the Conservatives the country loaded up with debt, and spent it on their donors, friends, and families. And you can see the growth of that debt even before the pandemic put the cherry on the cake the Tories were eating. They're asset wealthy, and they don't care. So if you want to complain, at least put the blame where it rightly belongs on the people who made the mess, and not the poor sod trying to clean up after them. And just for the record, Reform. Uk are Tories in Sheep's clothing, and they would make even a bigger mess. So please, there is no Wizard of Oz who can wave his wand and make this better it took 50 years nearly to get here, and because of that it can't be fixed in 5 years, or even 10, because the only money that is available is tax and savings. and until it becomes obvious that there is no way to avoid these, that we can no longer afford to subsidise asset owners gains that allow them to debt farm, speculate and strangle productive investment, just to make them richer, things will only get worse.
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With the greatest of respect, I think your knowledge of British Economic History is scanty, and thus your opinion isn't based on fact. Indeed, if you were familiar with commentary about the UK Economy today, you would realise that our current debt-to-GDP ratio of around 100% isn't as bad as that after World War II, which was 240%. We had rationing as a consequence until the end of the 1950s, but we still managed to rebuild our war-damaged economy. We rebuilt our productive capacity, including the beginnings of the global Eurocurrency Market. We rebuilt our housing stock, and built a welfare state that tackled problems from the previous time austerity was tried in the Interwar years,because it failed then too. And we succeeded, despite difficulties from having to make do with less. And we did it without Austerity. And we repaid all our war debt in the early 2000s. You see, austerity isn't a new idea. And the Economist Mark Blyth wrote the key text about it's history entitled "Austerity: the history of a bad idea." Where in this door stopper 9f a text he relates the the evidence that Austerity is a bad idea, because it has failed to do what people argue it should do, each and every time it has been tried in history, which is grow the economies subjected to it. And sadly, the homespun narrative that a national economy can be run like a household has been debunked time and time again. But the uninformed still pretend its true. Even when there's evidence in the present day that Austerity is like putting an economy on hunger strike, but expecting it to be both heavier and fitter after a prolonged time on starvation rations, ideologues like yourself still trot it out like a dead zombie. Not only are you not informed on the subject, but you deign to patronise a trained economist who has written text books on economics, when you demonstrate by your comment you are blithely ignorant of the subject. You are unfamiliar with the subject, yet you presume to teach a teacher? You are not a serious person. All you have demonstrated in your comment is how very little you do know about Austerity and it's effects. And how little critical thinking you use. Perhaps you did not mean to come across as being patronising, but you really need to temper your own enthusiasm for your own ideas, because people get stiff wrong, especially when they fall for confirmation biases based on ideology. You have to look at the evidence, and judge that. Put aside what you want to believe, and approach serious arguments seriously, looking for the truth. It's people's lives and livelihoods that are in question. It's not a game. People die because of austerity, and families are food insecure. There's nothing to sneer at in this subject.
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Utterly unrealistic. Going to work costs money. And doing that many hours also costs you more, financially, physically and mentally. In my former trade, those who tried that had to leave their money behind, because they usually ended up dying early, living on booze or speed, and being pretty useless parents. The name of the game is simple - choose your priorities carefully, and work smarter not harder, for yourself. Decide how much money you actually want, and then decide what you're going to do with it once you get it. Forget about consumerism. Live simply and quietly, and keep a low profile. Then execute your plan.
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They can't fall because the value of the debt propping up the value of the asset wealthy's portfolios would fall. And we can't have that can we? BTW, the Bank of England does not control Interest Rates. Markets do. And they're not going to settle for less returns, thank you very much. They don't care that you can't afford to buy anything. Even when we are subsidising bank at a cost of £40bn a year to do something they have to do by law anyway. Thats how broken the UK economy is. Perverse incentives go unchecked, and more wealth is transferred from those who depend on a wage to those who survive on the profit from their assets. Unless those perverse incentives and the negative consequences are addressed, by being removed or significantly reduced, this economy will continue being unable to grow. An economy that hoards wealth and speculates instead of making productive investments, loses the ability to grow. We gone past the point where clamoring for the status quo of the past is credible or tenable. We not building a country, we're building economic apartheid, where the few vampirise the lives of the many. It's a cancer. Until people realise that things will not improve if left as they are, we'll keep having these conversations, and nothing will change. The economy is being allowed to bleed out by underinvestment, greed, and folly. And until we start taxing assets at the same rate as wages, and shift tax subsidies from speculative investments to productive ones, and rebuild the things that allow the economy to grow, like infrastructure, housing, and uoskilling workers, the standard of living will fall. The allure of the normal is pretty pointless when things are abnormal, and have been so for decades.
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