Well let’s see. Right now they’re working on a new anti-encryption bill to chase tech industry away from Britain. That’s right after they withdrew from a huge trading bloc.
Make Britain Great Again is going so well… Nationalist views are a nostalgia for “the good ol days” prior to globalization of the economy. Problem is, you can’t go back. If you do, you do what psychologists call “regression”. You’re witnessing this first hand with Britain.
No, you are confusing things together, because you believe in Whig Historiography.
In reality, most of the west is declining due to bad ideas and the rejection of good ideas that our people once held.
To return to ideas and traditions would not be to go back in time - noone can do that, rather to reinvent, to rejuvenate, and revive the good ideas of the past in the context of the present.
No, what you just said is confusing. You can’t take good ideas from the past and apply them to the present. Times have changed. The situation is different now. We need new ideas, new philosophies, new approaches, to the new problems we face today. To return to whatever golden years you are referring to is a return to the dark ages, no matter how noble your intent. What we need is for people to stop wishing for golden years and make these years golden. You aren’t going to do that with 1950s thinking. We need 2050 thinking.
Well a positive vision for the future would be some new ideological synthesis for Britain. It would involve remixing the good parts of 1950s thinking and learning the lessons from the things that have gone wrong in more recent decades.
For example, in the 1950s people would have been appalled by the idea of mass immigration. In 2023, it is at the root of many of the UK's most significant problems: the housing crisis, the collapsing NHS, the destruction of the high trust society, the shattering of British identity into dozens of cultural enclaves.
There is no honourable way to undo the mass immigration that has already happened. However, we can radically reduce it.
At the current immigration rate, it is simply impossible for the rate of cultural integration to keep pace with the the rate of influx. At vastly reduced rates of immigration, our society would have space amd time to forge a new British identity.
We have made choices that have proven themselves destructive, but it's not too late to revisit those mistakes, and then build anew from the ashes of the current decade.
It’s not just a British problem. Climate change, war, population growth, all play a factor. America and “The Wall”. Britain and the “mass refugee immigration”. Italy and theirs, Greece, the list goes on. People want to live, in security, and prosperity for their children and in some places of the world that’s not possible. So they migrate, immigrate, or become refugees of a war that only makes sense in the nonsensical. I’m not saying there aren’t problems, there are, but to put up walls and restrict humans and deny empathy is not the answer.
This is an article of faith on your part. None of the immigrants are relocating directly because of climate changes, and a minority are moving because they are refugees from an active war zone. Many are fighting age men, adventurers and opportunists.
Refugee laws were written a hundred years ago when there were frequent wars in Europe that would displace non-combattent women and children. They didn't have much option to go far beyond a neighbouring country and would likely go back home after the war was over.
Our current system of laws requires us to host any refugee or immigrant from anywhere in the world on a permanent basis.
There is no way this is sustainable economically, and much less so culturally.
The government could fix this instantly, but they choose not to.
Refugee laws were written in 1951 after people felt total shame at having kept out so many victims of the Nazis during World War 2. And the immigrants are not causing the burden on the NHS but the staffing of the NHS. Just check how many of the nurses in any London hospital are Filipino. Finally, house prices are not high because of immigrants but because governments keeps inflating the house price bubble. Any politician who tried a policy of "let's radically drop house prices" would find his career tanked by Boomer voters. Any other non-truths you want to drop to blame us immigrants for everything?
So the supply and demand economy of the housing market, how would the government reduce prices? Remember the indigenous population has sub-replacement level birthrates. Homes should be becoming more available not less- and they would be if the nations children were not being disinherited by the boomers
How would the government reduce house prices? Easy:
1) Massively build out social housing
2) Stop tax incentives, part ownership and other house buying incentives
3) Tax empty houses like in Switzerland, Germany etc etc
4) Crackdown on use of house purchases for money laundering by Saudi princes,
Russian oligarchs, corrupt Chinese Communist Party officials,
South American drug cartel bosses etc etc
The sub-replacement birthrate is a reason Britain sucks in immigrants like a vacuum cleaner. The English don't make babies, and when they do, they murder them in the womb. The immigration is the only thing stopping Britain turning into one big ghost town.
However all those migrants were basically a free source of human skill - i.e. another country poured their resources into nurturing and educating them, now the country they immigrate to gets to reap all the rewards. So it's hard to see how you couldn't pay an economic price for keeping out migrants.
I also wonder how you'd feel if the economic/political situation in your own country deteriorated so much that you felt you had no choice but to migrate elsewhere - but were no longer able to because anti-migration policies had become the norm everywhere.
> However all those migrants were basically a free source of human skill - i.e. another country poured their resources into nurturing and educating them, now the country they immigrate to gets to reap all the rewards.
A huge segment of the migrant flow comes with basically no skills, and is immediately dependant of the welfare system. The migration we are currently experiencing is a net negative for the UK
From what I've read, in most countries with strong levels of migration, the level of underemployment is almost always lower among migrants than the native born. I'd be pretty astounded if the UK was an exception.
Even just having reached adulthood and attained secondary-school level education makes you a capable worker that the country they migrate to has had to do nothing to support until that point. Any small amount of extra investment to ensure they learn the language and obtain employable-skills on top of that is virtually always going to pay off.
I'm not advocating anything - as it happens I do think it's unfair for some countries to cream off the best talent developed in other countries. But if those countries have failed to provide an environment their citizens can thrive in, they have every right to look elsewhere. And as a citizen of a country of migrants (*) I'm more than happy to have them come here. I recognise the UK doesn't really qualify the way Australia does but none of the concerns you've expressed make sense to me as a reason your nation's economy might be suffering.
(*) including my Dad, who came here as a 10 pound pom!
This is one of the few articles that seems to do a good job of summarizing why the UK is in its position. It never solved its creeping energy costs, it didn't build enough housing, then it gambled (and lost) on austerity and Brexit, which makes digging itself out of the hole more difficult. But what really hurts is this: the UK knows exactly what ails it but all solutions are politically untenable.
The British media, The Times included, have had a big part to play in all of this. For them to behave with their usual convenient amnesia of their past reporting is a bit too much for me, at least, to accept. It just isn't fit for purpose any more. (I tried subscribing to The Times not long ago on a special offer and cancelled my subscription long before it was over. It is immensely pro-Tory and obediently unquestioning of the government. Just today I saw on their front page an article implicitly shilling for the government against encryption).
Don't forget the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Daily Star. Then, take a look at how the composition of the BBC's board changed starting under Cameron's administration. Until recently, their Chairman was Richard Sharp, who donated more than 400k to the tories, and was forced to resign for helping Boris secure a 800k loan. The Director General is Tim Davie, who ran for a seat as a Tory councillor once. Check out the others on the board, many have had positions with some relationship to the tories. Also, what about Ofcom, the regulatory body? Their chairman is Michael Grade, a Conservative life peer. And now we have GB News emerging (aka KGB news), backed by gulf money but also some major tory donors. This isn't healthy, the UK cannot afford an implicit one-party system. Democracy cannot function like this.
It skirts away from the “why” of those, however, looking at first order effects as causes.
The “why” is conceit and arrogance - an unshakeable belief in British superiority, that it can never happen here, and that there will be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover.
That, I see little sign of changing. I write this as a Briton who has turned his back on the U.K., rather than hold out hope for change.
Lack of housing in the US is almost entirely confined to select urban areas. There's no shortage of land or legal ability to build housing across most of the country but if you want to build an eight-story condo in San Francisco, you're in for an exhausting battle. Try the same in downtown Des Moines or Omaha, and you're probably going to get the red carpet rolled out for you. Try to build a single-family house in a rural area and most counties will primarily just care that you have a way to treat sewage and that you're following basic building codes (and in some places, they don't even care about the latter).
Cities are where the jobs are, though, and at least in my (American) city of residence, most of the single family homes sold in the last year were bought by property management companies to become rentals or flipped.
> most of the single family homes sold in the last year were bought by property management companies
What's your source on this? I see similar claims, never cited.
Even if true, that would be a symptom of under-production. Build more and there isn't the incentive to invest in an asset with government-boosted appreciation.
Currently the UK vote is based on trying to get about 1/3rd of the country, in specific places, to vote for you, not 50%. It's a flawed democracy that has gradually evolved from an even more flawed democracy but now lags the state of the art by some margin.
I would say that it's not an absence of democracy but a population skew. The Boomer demographic has been a majority stakeholder in UK elections for a long time, but it's changing naturally every year. Now you are starting to see more policies aimed at the next marginal voter group. However, it's true, we're in a mess, and none of the major political parties seem to have a viable strategy.
You're going to get downvoted for that not by me though.)
It's a serious point though, but unfortunately one that has copius evidence that the outcome of that approach is worse, not better.
The problems with democracy are evident (brexit being a poster child.) The democratic successes are equally good (South Africa, Northern Ireland).
The primary problem with alternate systems is that there's no way out. Once you have an authoritarian approach, if you don't like the authority you SOL.
Basically it's all the worst bits of democracy without any of the up sides.
Ultimately people vote, (or don't care) and get to live with the consequences.
Yeah, I generally agree with all of that. At the same time, if you reach a point where breaking democracy becomes the only way to survive an existential threat, then it’s do or die.
So considering how severe those consequences are, something would need to be done to prevent that outcome if that’s the trajectory you’re on.
Britain's democracy is in need of reform, not further damage.
The electoral system is unrepresentative (the more representative system used to elect the mayor of London was recently changed to FPTP). The upper house is composed of people nominated by the government, children of nobles and bishops.
In the last few years, the traditional behaviour expected in Parliament — not to lie — has been lost.
As the most recent example, when Johnson resigned the election[1] for his replacement was heralded as a win for the Conservative party. The campaign centred around green policies. The Conservative party has fewer votes than Labour + Green, but still takes all the power.
There are a lot of people who don't believe in local control or the concept of an independent nation state. They imagine that in their preferred future all governments are merged into one, and regional differences are reduced to food, drink and local dances. Up until Brexit they imagined this future as glorious, popular and inevitable. After they realized it wasn't all that popular nor inevitable, and have been on a rear guard action to blame everything on it ever since. They hope that if they lie big enough, often enough, the lies will stick and one day this horrific aberration can be reversed. Hence why Brexit is often described as the cause of every problem the UK has even if those problems existed before then, or if no change is visible on the data, etc.
> The democratic successes are equally good - South Africa
I'm not sure how rampant official corruption, cronyism, a skyrocketing murder rate [1], crumbling infrastructure, dwindling regional influence, and a deeply polarized civil society can be considered a democratic "success".
But Apartheid was a problem several magnitudes larger. World pariah status, 80% of the population subjugated, colonialism at its worst. Democracy (the White vote in 1990), the national vote in 1994, lead to a revolution without a civil war.
Of course it has not lead to utopia, and democracy has challenges there, as it does elsewhere, but the authoritarian regimes before were far, far worse.
You really have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to call it a great success. I'd say it's actually a curious example of democracy failing miserably, and worth studying how to avoid that.
It's an alignment problem. Any ruler has to keep the right people happy to stay in power. An autocracy has a couple choices how to do that. You can use military and police, you can use religion, you can make the population richer with great economy or great social programs, you can bring law and order to a previously crime-torn country, etc. Each of these gives someone the power to dethrone you, and the state typically has to spend large amounts of resources to keep those people happy.
The "genius" of democracy is that it guarantees that at least half the population is in that group, because a popular vote can dethrone the government. That doesn't mean they are the only group the government is paying off to stay in power, but better to be in than to be out.
One of the problems we have currently is that the population is aging, meaning it's more rational to cater to old people who on average dislike change. This eventually leads to stagnation or even regression.
Or perhaps improving the health of that democracy. It’s probably not a coincidence, for example, that countries with strong Murdoch media presences are better for the ultra rich but worse for everyone else.
Yes, but what's the alternative? "Democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried." - Churchill. Yes, Democracy has lots of faults, but there aren't any better alternatives.
Churchill was one of the strongest defenders of democracy in the 20th century. Read his speech in its entirety. He definitely did not believe that there were any better alternatives to Democracy, tried or untried. At the time he gave his speech Communism was seen by many as much more successful than Democracy.
The data doesn’t support your assertion about austerity and Brexit. Since 2008, the per capita GDP of the UK, France, Italy, and Spain follow almost the exact same curves. They didn’t have Brexit or austerity in those countries. Germany is really the only large country in the EU that has a higher per capita GDP now than it did in 2008.
Wait, that doesn’t track. Until 2020, Britain had one of the most open and trade dependent economies. And austerity dates only back to 2010 or so. It’s doubtful that Britain’s current situation can be explained by policies that are barely a decade old.
In terms of per-capita GDP, the UK was behind France from 1985 to 1998. It jumped to parity with the US from 1998 to 2008. But that jump seems to be a product of the very financialization that the Atlantic article complains of. That evaporated after the 2007 recession. And since then, the UK hasn’t done any worse than France or Italy: https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+per+capita+gdp&client=saf...
But the asserted poverty of the U.K. does not. In reality, the U.K. peaked in the mid 20th century. Its per-capita GDP lagged behind France from 1975 to 1998. There was a brief finance-driven rally from the late 1990s to the 2008 recession. But the overall pattern seems to be the U.K. having become a has-been European country, just like France, Italy, Spain, etc., since the mid 20th century.
That Britian was at the forefront of the industrial revolution also means that it endured some of the worst horrors on the labor that powered it. Also being a smallish island, such impacts were more difficult to hide and diffuse as would be possible in a larger land mass. I wonder if that impacted their willingness to offshore their industry instead of reforming or evolving it into something more humane.
Finance is also much easier to move: all of the companies which shifted from CoL to their offices in finance hubs which are still in the EU just need offices, computers, and relocation bonuses for their employees. The lawyers are going to get small fortunes dealing with details but that’s still much lower inertia than something like a heavy industrial plant and its supply chain.
The UK doubled per capita GDP in six years (2001-2007)? That seems implausible. That’s got to be a function of exchange rates, or an artifact of PPP (is that chart PPP adjusted?), or - as you said - somehow related to financialization.
If the data is good and illustrative, then so be it - that’s an incredible increase of economic output in a developed economy (and the UK should go back to whatever they were doing during that decade). But that metric just seems disconnected from any actual improvement in the standard of living.
Yup, that makes perfect sense. Going from a fairly weak pound to a fairly strong one, coupled with a subset of strong growth years, can most definitely make per capita GDP appear to have doubled in a surprisingly short period. Thanks for digging up the numbers.
Is looking at house prices in USD a sensible measure for the UK? It seems slightly perverse to me, but maybe it makes sense in the context of financialization, foreign investors putting money into UK real estate and/or immigration? Or whatever other factors may be relevant.
> Is looking at house prices in USD a sensible measure for the UK?
My gut feeling is yes, but only if you're trying to answer a wider question than "can I afford a house?" I'm not smart enough to articulate it in economic language, but I think of it like a physics model. Are houses getting more expensive, or is the country getting poorer? If you've only got two particles, you can tell the gap between them is widening, but you can't tell which is moving because you don't have a frame of reference. Comparing with the global reserve currency builds that frame of reference. If most of the house price increase disappears, the prices aren't really going up, our wages are shrinking (relative to the rest of the world).
Lack of natural resources, meaningful industry moved overseas, and a surplus of labor. As the rest of the world develops, they don't need British loans and engineer knowledge. Over the next 20 years, they'll revert to being a tiny agricultural state.
As a Brit that left a long time ago, the problem is the British long since stopped valuing people that actually do anything, and want the entire economy to be gambling/speculation on if others will succeed at what they are doing. They have now been learning, surprisingly slowly, that eventually others that used to fund this speculation start to wonder about the value of a middle man to do it when they can do it themselves.
On top of this the absolute waste of talent in the UK is prodigious. The education system has been a wreck for decades, to the point it simply has to be a deliberate ploy to reduce social mobility.
> The Lower Thames Crossing, a tunnel project to connect Kent with Essex under the Thames estuary, has held five consultations since 2017 and still does not have permission to build. To date, more than a quarter of a billion pounds have been spent on the planning application — more, Dumitriu tells me, than it cost to build the Laerdal tunnel in Norway, the longest road tunnel in the world.
"Our politicians are rarely serious about anything except managing public opinion; they have let every trivial concern take priority over the biggest one of all, economic growth."
Could be said about any country that has allowed their yellow newspapers to take over the discourse (and I include most US broadsheets in this category).
I'd like to underscore that this issue persists also here in the United States. I know it is true in California and San Francisco (I presume other regions across the country are similarly afflicted).
A federal system mitigates this somewhat in the US where one region screwing up can suddenly see their neighbors thriving and hopefully lead them to wonder what they’re doing wrong.
That’s the gist of the whole “American experiment” thing, however history has shown that people are far more likely to double down, continue with what they’re doing, and just blame “the other” (immigrants, minorities, liberals, etc.) as the reason it’s not working.
Social issues are a gimmie since most of them don’t have a legitimate harm to the people who are most vocally against progress in the first place. They’re drummed-up issues to turn out votes, like the endless parade of wars on LGBTQ folks (first anti homosexual laws, then DADT, gay marriage, adoption, now trans issues, etc). And those have always been the kinds of sops that rulers love to throw out to the public since they don’t affect anything.
The real issues are mostly financial, economic, or environmental justice issues that can’t be addressed by individual states. Even in the cases where it can be, like California air quality regs, it’s being eroded and rolled back anyway. But stuff like containing medical costs or single-payer medical/educational systems are not issues that can really be done by a state. The most you get is things like sales/property/income tax being shuffled around a bit, or californias bizarre prop 13.
> Even in the cases where it can be, like California air quality regs, it’s being eroded and rolled back anyway.
That's a matter of timing. When they were enacted, they weren't being rolled back, they were being rolled out. Maybe it will catch on in 100 years. Hard to say it has no impact, when historians are able to point to the effects, when informing the future.
The thinking that everything must be solved/corrected immediately is misplaced despair, rather than a philosophical flaw in the system.
When I think of the phrase "trickle down economics" I always think of the mighty Colorado river in the Rockies and by the time it gets to Mexico you're left with a cup of water.
I'm filled with anger that it was so easy to gull the people into going along with so much self harming but here we are.
Until the people start making smarter decisions this country will race further and further into the morass it finds itself in.
I despise the establishment. I despise the generally spineless main stream media who are strangely unable to ask the right questions and dig deeper for the truth. I despise right wing voters. I despise people who conflates socialism with communism.
You've described my tremulous feelings on the whole situation very well.
I blame mostly the Murdoch media. The government was always full of Tory pyschophants, but the media kept the masses informed enough to keep the damage in check. People used to resign in disgrace if they failed their post.
After the phone hacking scandal in 2007, the Leveson Inquiry[1], and the resulting lack of action that passed after it, Murdoch media has only been emboldened to act and report disgracefully. As much as I hate the Tory's, I blame the Blair-Murdoch relationship for kicking it off.
A real shame they didn't put into law the findings of the Leveson inquiry. Shadowy figures in the establishment clearly didn't like the implications of the inquiry and sat on it. Eventually they will have to - look at what's happened already.
There needs to be far more transparent accountability for wayward ministers and prime ministers - otherwise what's the point?
"conflates" - confuses socialism and communism. Socialism, when done well, is an enormous force for good, for example the NHS. I cannot understand how people can be against socialism when the benefits clearly outweighs the downsides.
When I read these sorts of articles were clearly there a govt for the NIMBYs, by the NIMBYS, so that everyone gets off my lawn, I start to wonder if we need a maximum voting age.
If you're not going to be around in 20 years, don’t understand the issues that will impact working people today and into the next generation, maybe you shouldn’t be voting.
If you can't vote, you shouldn't be obligated to participate in society through taxes, laws, and other requirements. I doubt you could sell anyone on that though.
You could make voting compulsory for everyone under retirement age. Which in Australia translates to making it voluntary for everyone over said age, an idea I think you could sell pretty well - however most here have been used to voting all their life and probably wouldn't stop just because they no long risked being fined for not turning up to the polls.
Yep, experience of life, love of family, desire to help steer the country you’ve contributed your whole life to… nah, you’re right, fuck the old they have nothing to offer.
I’m not sure I could fully express how foul I consider this recent memeplex that older people shouldn’t be allowed to participate in democracy.
Having no stake in the long term future is not the same thing as having nothing to offer. We also don’t generally allow other “transient” populations like non-citizen immigrants to vote either, despite them having a lot to offer too. If you’re not going to be here in 10 years you don’t get a say.
We also have lower age limits on voting and there’s very good reasons for that too.
People try to raise the voting age limits all the time to curb the political influence of the younger voters. It’s a situation like class wars where one side is playing hardball and the other side isn’t even aware they were playing.
Point out the nature of the game you’ll be pounced (just as you did here) for “ageism” despite ageism already being written into the rules, and despite the elderly here (in the US) are continually trying to shift those rules even further in their own favor.
The hand of the dead should not bind the living, nor should the hand of transient populations bind those with a long-term stake in the society. And there will inevitably be some edge-cases where people slip around the edges of the rules (citizens with deadly illnesses, immigrants who own homes and settle, etc) but those are just the guiding principles society has agreed upon, except when it comes to the elderly.
> We also don’t generally allow other “transient” populations like non-citizen immigrants to vote either
This is not why we don't allow migrants who have not yet become citizens the ability to vote. They have not (yet) been granted a place in society because they have not yet demonstrated commitment to the country, nor contributed, and the country has not yet decided they are valuable enough to allow into the society.
> We also have lower age limits on voting and there’s very good reasons for that too.
Yes, due to inexperience of life, ignorance of politics and the wider world, and brains which are not yet fully formed, reasons that people below these ages are denied full autonomy in a number of areas. These reasons are not applicable to most older people.
> People try to raise the voting age limits all the time
In the context of the UK, which this discussion is about, this has literally never happened, not once. The elections are comparatively well run, you seldom have to wait more than a few minutes to vote there because polling stations and staff are not limited, gerrymandering doesn't exist, voter suppression is pretty universally regarded as evil. You seem to be in the US, one of your political parties appears to have effectively become cancerous and is trying to kill US democracy, I wish you luck in dealing with it but inter-generational hate is unlikely to help.
> It’s a situation like class wars where one side ... Point out the nature of the game you’ll be pounced (just as you did here) ... those are just the guiding principles ...
There are no sides here. There is no war between the young and the old. These are not principles that society has agreed on at all. It's hard to see how you could be more wrong. I 'pounced' upon these views because they are gross.
At what age do you think people have no stake in the long term future? Do you only have a stake or guidance to give if you personally will be affected? Do you not get to vote on the short term matters that do personally affect you? Should people in general only be able to vote on things that affect them personally and directly? I don't have kids, should I be denied a vote because we might be deciding eduction policy and school funding?
Besides naked prejudice, you seem to have a very transactional view of democracy - you assume people will obviously only vote in their own short-term self interest, not use their knowledge and morality to guide their choices for their own good and that of others.
I wish you luck in fixing the US, but don't project its flaws onto everyone else. And don't just blame old people for your woes. Those steering the ship over there are not all ancient and there are plenty of young people involved in all sorts of terrible stuff.
entire countries have been built on the concept of no taxation without representation.
Moreover, you can be 18, not be around in 20 years and don't understand the issues that will impact working people today.
Or you can be 40 and never have worked a single day.
Or you can be 80 and have a lot of experience and understand plenty about history repeating and see things coming before anyone else.
Age is one of the worst proxies for human intelligence
A lot of the rhetoric around "old people not getting it" sounds to me a lot like that classmate that never studied, but blamed the professore for the bad votes, "he hates me" they usually say.
> Age is one of the worst proxies for human intelligence
Whoever suggested it was a good one?
I would never support any attempt to block older voters from participating in democracy, but it can be an issue if a particular demographic, particularly one that might have the least direct motivation to vote for policies aimed at long-term system wide improvements, has outsized representation. Interestingly we allow that governments are determined currently by the number of seats (representing a particular area) they can win, maybe it's not so crazy to consider the number of age brackets they can win...that way the fact that there might be many more 65-70yos vs 20-25yos wouldn't affect the outcome.
> but it can be an issue if a particular demographic, particularly one that might have the least direct motivation to vote for policies aimed at long-term system wide improvements, has outsized representation
that's democracy working as intendend.
Besides: don't underestimate the fact that older people have much more motivation than adults, because they are at rest, they can think about the past, they actually have a past to think about and can draw conclusions on what their generation did and what the results were and how that affects the people they love and are worried about, particularly their nephews, who represent the real "new hope" for them. Most elderly were too busy working and taking care of their families when they were younger to focus on the long term results of their actions.
While younger people lack either the motivation, the experience or the tools to make such an analysis.
> that way the fact that there might be many more 65-70yos vs 20-25yos wouldn't affect the outcome
You are assuming that all the old people vote against the interests of the 20-25 years old people and vice versa, but actually it's very far from the truth.
The tension between equal representation and fairness of the outcome has been studied for a long time.
> You are assuming that all the old people vote against the interests of the 20-25 years old people
Not at all - but we already accept that the fact there are so many more voters in concentrated in a few cities that a pure one-person-one-vote system would lead to virtually no representation of voters in sparsely populated areas. If the age pyramid were even more extreme (e.g. 5 or 6 times as many voters between 60 and 65 than there were between 20 and 25) I'd say we'd have little choice but to consider some sort of age-bracket based voting system.
As it happens apparently the historical trend of voters becoming significantly more conservative as they age seems like it might be breaking down anyway, and the concentration of voters in the "boomer" bracket is a somewhat temporary thing, so there's probably not enough justification for overhauling our electoral systems simply to counter the current demographic distribution, however I do think we're unnecessarily reluctant to at least seriously debate and ideally trial different electoral systems rather than assume what was put in place hundreds of years ago is still the best we can do in this day and age.
> Not at all - but we already accept that the fact there are so many more voters in concentrated in a few cities that a pure one-person-one-vote system would lead to virtually no representation of voters in sparsely populated areas.
We do not accept the pure one-person-one-vote system because we live in representative democracies, were the elected represent a community. We solve the problem by designing dynamic voting areas of varying dimenions containing more or less the same population, so any representative is the spokeperson of the same amount of people (more or less). At least that's what we do here in Europe AFAIK.
> If the age pyramid were even more extreme (e.g. 5 or 6 times as many voters between 60 and 65 than there were between 20 and 25) I'd say we'd have little choice but to consider some sort of age-bracket based voting system.
You are saying that you don't like democracy then.
Which is an argument, we can discuss about it, but, for the sake of the argument, in Russia there are 86 men every 100 women. In that case what should we do? Limit the representation of women? What about people with disabilities, should we create a "people with no disabilities bracket"? How should we address the fact that the majority of the population has received no form of higher education, they are ill-educated if not uneducated hence they lack the tools to make an informed decision to the detriment of the entire society? etc. etc.
> As it happens apparently the historical trend of voters becoming significantly more conservative as they age
That's a cool quote, but it's never been proven. The word you're looking for is not conservative, but prudent.
Anyway, if we look at the voters now in Europe, where I am from, we can clearly see that the far right is very popular among young people, they are having good if not extremely good outcomes in many countries (Germany, Sweden, Italy, Finland, Hungary, Poland). It never happened before the last generation had the right to vote. In my country, Italy, the far right is the preferred choice among people < 25 years old and women, while people over 65 have voted in majority for the left and are progressive.
> You are saying that you don't like democracy then
"Democracy" says nothing about ensuring every single vote counts equally. While I am inherently skeptical of systems that decide some votes are worth more than others, personally, the idea that my vote should count for more when I'm part of a smaller but younger demographic bracket and less when I'm older and part of a bigger bracket doesn't bother me too much. Whether it would actually produce a better result is almost impossible to know.
> In my country, Italy, the far right is the preferred choice among people < 25 years old and women, while people over 65 have voted in majority for the left and are progressive.
That's certainly quite interesting, and different from the pattern I'm aware of occurring elsewhere, and it would be fascinating to do a deeper dive into why that might be. It certainly suggests to me that whatever the "left" in your country is offering, younger voters are not seeing it as representing the policies they feel the country needs over the coming decades. Though I did just come across an article that suggested this trend is possibly because younger voters in Europe have no first-hand knowledge of how awful things became under far-right leaders in the early 20th century. Or perhaps because they've seen first hand that welfare-state-type policies associated with left have benefited older generations far more than themselves.
democracy is all about a way to organize communities where the people have some power to influence the government.
we found that casting a vote is the best way to make that possible.
In that system everyone is an island, everyone should think about their personal interest, because there are more differences intra-group than extra-group.
If some demographic group is more numerous than others it also mean that that group will have statistically the most variations
There are more poor old people, marginalized old people, frustrated old people and unhappy old people than younger ones. Most of all old people have literally no future, they have no time to recover from mistakes, they simply have gained enough experience to not risk everything for the sake of trying something new.
Doesn't mean their interest do not align with the interests of younger generations, it's just that younger generations can afford to lose everything and come back from the consequences.
One explanation of what is happening in my country is that the far right can sell themselves as outcasts that for a long time haven't participated in the decay we are experiencing and can look to the untrained and unexperienced eye as "revolutionaries' that fight against the establishment, while the people who have known them their whole life can see through the facade.
But in the end the real problem is that last time the elections were won by a movement supported in majority by young people that wanted to flip tables and disrupt the status quo and, guess what, the elected members were such incompetents that 5 years later even the far right seemed a better option to many.
I can’t think of anything that the Brits actually make. All they have going for them are a bunch of iconic brands that have mostly been taken over by Chinese/Indian/American corporations.
This! Many of the prosperous economies now have few industries/brands that the world depends on. It's been outsourced, replaced by cheaper or better brands in upcoming economies. All that's left is banking and other such nonsense.
It’s telling that the biggest European business (by market cap) is a luxury goods company (LVMH).
Europe mostly survives by selling its identity, legacy and history to the world.
MG, Jaguar, Land Rover - all owned and operated by Chinese/Indian businesses make a big deal of the “British heritage”, when that heritage is just a branding ruse.
There are some specialized industries left - aerospace & pharmaceuticals are fairly prominent, but the days of the UK being a manufacturing power are long gone.
The poverty rate (i.e. proportion people who lack sufficient income for basic needs) of the UK is 18.6%. Still lower than Spain and Italy where it is over 20%.
(Edit: the numbers are from 2017 and 2018, so it is possible that things have changed. For example, it's possible that the UK was hit harder by rising energy costs. I don't know.)
It had vestiges of an empire until the mid-1960s, lost its status as an imperial power, it had industrialised much earlier than other European countries like France so didn’t have an equivalent of “Les Trente Glorieuses”, deindustrialised earlier than other countries and has basically cast about looking for a new purpose ever since.
The UK didn't have a "Trente Glorieuses” because it didnt ever succeed in implementing the mass production system, while France, Italy and Germany did. The main blocker was the class system.
It happened a hundred years earlier, just in different industries.
Fabric, lace, clothing, etc... you just need to walk around most post-industrial cities and look at all the things that were pioneered in Britain for mass production.
Britain isn’t really poor as a country if we look at all the money/wealth in it. The distribution of the wealth is very one sided though. Recent decades of law making favouring the top few percent. Giving more to the wealthiest few doesn’t seem to trickle down apparently.. eroding middle class and diminishing purchasing power is what bothers me most. Privatised energy, water, public transport aren’t serving the public’s interest anymore but the shareholder’s. Housing prices getting out of reach of the average workers is rubbing salt on the wound. These are mostly symptoms.
If that wealth wants to be used to do business in the US, there’s ways to tax it. If it sits in a cayman bank account somewhere fine but that’s not doing the owner any good, and its value will be eroded over time. Even if it’s used to do business elsewhere, we have ways of getting at that (see: FINRA) if the place you’re trying to use it wants to do business with any of our banks.
Maybe it’s different for the UK but they’ve always framed themselves as an economic mover, fundamentally not believing that there is something in the UK that business wants to access is a refutation of this idea of there being any domestic economic value in the UK as an institution.
> Poland is a remarkable success story. But it is not alone in catching up with Britain. South Korea and Slovenia are both set to overtake us in terms of GDP per capita too, as early as next year.
This hold only true when looking at PPP per capita. Looking at GDP in US$ per capita, tells a very different story:
UK $45,850.43
South Korea $32,254.63
Slovenia $29,457.40
Poland $18,321.28
(2) Take whatever you don't like about the UK, ignore the rest, and write an article with no scientific causal inferences whatsoever about how the things you don't like caused (1).
(3) Let everyone argue about how "no no no, it was the things I don't like that caused it--not the things you don't like."
I have a friendly reminder that life and society are very complicated. Even with ample data and decades of scientific inquiry, for example, we only have dubious theories as to why crime declined in the 90's so much, and the most plausible ones were not evident until a decade after the fact. Anyone simplifying the UK's economic decline with convenient political talking points is a charlatan.
My opinion (which partially matches what the article says).
* The country chose austerity at the time of negligible interest rates. They should have used that to make infrastructure reforms.
* The austerity not only prevented infrastructure improvements, but also actively made the country less prepared for things like covid and Ukraine war shock.
* Brexit. The idiocy of this act of self-harm is becoming clear to a large fraction of the population now.
* Overspending during covid. Because we had BJ as PM during that, Covid was managed pretty badly, with significant debt accumulation that we now have repay at high rates (because a lot of this debt was created in form of inflation indexed gilts)
* Series of bad governments over last 5 years. While Cameron was pretty bad, what we had since was really terrible. May, BJ, Truss, Sunak...
* Bad housing policy. Not enough housing and allowing extensive usage of housing as an investment vehicle (i.e. promoting Buy to Let).
Brexit had literally no impact on this, and will likely help significantly. Remember that the eurozone has been an economic disaster for most of Western Europe outside of Germany, and now Germany is sputtering out too. The UK was "allowed" to not adopt the euro for legacy reasons but the EU would likely have demanded entry and many other harmful policies had the British accepted the argument that they couldn't leave even if they wanted to (which was the core of the remain argument).
> the EU would likely have demanded entry and many other harmful policies
That's not how it works. The UK and EU were bound to one another by various treaties. There was no mechanism for the EU to make such a demand, whereas an exit from the EU is a defined path.
If the UK wanted to rejoin then the EU would be able to make such a demand.
152 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadIn reality, most of the west is declining due to bad ideas and the rejection of good ideas that our people once held.
To return to ideas and traditions would not be to go back in time - noone can do that, rather to reinvent, to rejuvenate, and revive the good ideas of the past in the context of the present.
For example, in the 1950s people would have been appalled by the idea of mass immigration. In 2023, it is at the root of many of the UK's most significant problems: the housing crisis, the collapsing NHS, the destruction of the high trust society, the shattering of British identity into dozens of cultural enclaves.
There is no honourable way to undo the mass immigration that has already happened. However, we can radically reduce it.
At the current immigration rate, it is simply impossible for the rate of cultural integration to keep pace with the the rate of influx. At vastly reduced rates of immigration, our society would have space amd time to forge a new British identity.
We have made choices that have proven themselves destructive, but it's not too late to revisit those mistakes, and then build anew from the ashes of the current decade.
Refugee laws were written a hundred years ago when there were frequent wars in Europe that would displace non-combattent women and children. They didn't have much option to go far beyond a neighbouring country and would likely go back home after the war was over.
Our current system of laws requires us to host any refugee or immigrant from anywhere in the world on a permanent basis.
There is no way this is sustainable economically, and much less so culturally.
The government could fix this instantly, but they choose not to.
1) Massively build out social housing
2) Stop tax incentives, part ownership and other house buying incentives
3) Tax empty houses like in Switzerland, Germany etc etc
4) Crackdown on use of house purchases for money laundering by Saudi princes, Russian oligarchs, corrupt Chinese Communist Party officials, South American drug cartel bosses etc etc
The sub-replacement birthrate is a reason Britain sucks in immigrants like a vacuum cleaner. The English don't make babies, and when they do, they murder them in the womb. The immigration is the only thing stopping Britain turning into one big ghost town.
A huge segment of the migrant flow comes with basically no skills, and is immediately dependant of the welfare system. The migration we are currently experiencing is a net negative for the UK
Even just having reached adulthood and attained secondary-school level education makes you a capable worker that the country they migrate to has had to do nothing to support until that point. Any small amount of extra investment to ensure they learn the language and obtain employable-skills on top of that is virtually always going to pay off.
(*) including my Dad, who came here as a 10 pound pom!
The “why” is conceit and arrogance - an unshakeable belief in British superiority, that it can never happen here, and that there will be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover.
That, I see little sign of changing. I write this as a Briton who has turned his back on the U.K., rather than hold out hope for change.
And housing may just be a subset of the problem of not really being able to build anything anymore that's shared with the US.
What's your source on this? I see similar claims, never cited.
Even if true, that would be a symptom of under-production. Build more and there isn't the incentive to invest in an asset with government-boosted appreciation.
- How so?
- What can be done to fix it?
- Is there a viable path to getting there?
the parent comment to me sounded like democracy as it exists in the UK basically led them down this path and now has them stuck in a death spiral
Currently the UK vote is based on trying to get about 1/3rd of the country, in specific places, to vote for you, not 50%. It's a flawed democracy that has gradually evolved from an even more flawed democracy but now lags the state of the art by some margin.
It's a serious point though, but unfortunately one that has copius evidence that the outcome of that approach is worse, not better.
The problems with democracy are evident (brexit being a poster child.) The democratic successes are equally good (South Africa, Northern Ireland).
The primary problem with alternate systems is that there's no way out. Once you have an authoritarian approach, if you don't like the authority you SOL.
Basically it's all the worst bits of democracy without any of the up sides.
Ultimately people vote, (or don't care) and get to live with the consequences.
So considering how severe those consequences are, something would need to be done to prevent that outcome if that’s the trajectory you’re on.
The electoral system is unrepresentative (the more representative system used to elect the mayor of London was recently changed to FPTP). The upper house is composed of people nominated by the government, children of nobles and bishops.
In the last few years, the traditional behaviour expected in Parliament — not to lie — has been lost.
As the most recent example, when Johnson resigned the election[1] for his replacement was heralded as a win for the Conservative party. The campaign centred around green policies. The Conservative party has fewer votes than Labour + Green, but still takes all the power.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Uxbridge_and_South_Ruisli...
This whole thread and story has folks explaining how this has been a slow creep over 30+ years.
I'm not sure how rampant official corruption, cronyism, a skyrocketing murder rate [1], crumbling infrastructure, dwindling regional influence, and a deeply polarized civil society can be considered a democratic "success".
[1] - https://www.groundup.org.za/article/how-bad-murder-in-south-...
At 46 murders per 100k per year, it might just be the worst intentional murder rate in the world right now.
But Apartheid was a problem several magnitudes larger. World pariah status, 80% of the population subjugated, colonialism at its worst. Democracy (the White vote in 1990), the national vote in 1994, lead to a revolution without a civil war.
Of course it has not lead to utopia, and democracy has challenges there, as it does elsewhere, but the authoritarian regimes before were far, far worse.
The "genius" of democracy is that it guarantees that at least half the population is in that group, because a popular vote can dethrone the government. That doesn't mean they are the only group the government is paying off to stay in power, but better to be in than to be out.
One of the problems we have currently is that the population is aging, meaning it's more rational to cater to old people who on average dislike change. This eventually leads to stagnation or even regression.
That's a twist on the Churchill quote.
Churchill didn't say there are no better alternatives. Just no better that we've tried.
Those countries are total basket cases, where the population are either sleeping all day or burning their own cities in protest.
Its unfair to compare the UK against them.
> How the U.K. Became One of the Poorest Countries in Western Europe
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/uk-e...
The subtitle says it all:
> Britain chose finance over industry, austerity over investment, and a closed economy over openness to the world.
In terms of per-capita GDP, the UK was behind France from 1985 to 1998. It jumped to parity with the US from 1998 to 2008. But that jump seems to be a product of the very financialization that the Atlantic article complains of. That evaporated after the 2007 recession. And since then, the UK hasn’t done any worse than France or Italy: https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+per+capita+gdp&client=saf...
That does track. The finance industry required an open economy. The actual "makes things" industries? Not so much.
Of the two the finance industry is much more vulnerable to deglobalization. Paper wealth can evaporate overnight.
If the data is good and illustrative, then so be it - that’s an incredible increase of economic output in a developed economy (and the UK should go back to whatever they were doing during that decade). But that metric just seems disconnected from any actual improvement in the standard of living.
Interesting data point though!
Is looking at house prices in USD a sensible measure for the UK? It seems slightly perverse to me, but maybe it makes sense in the context of financialization, foreign investors putting money into UK real estate and/or immigration? Or whatever other factors may be relevant.
My gut feeling is yes, but only if you're trying to answer a wider question than "can I afford a house?" I'm not smart enough to articulate it in economic language, but I think of it like a physics model. Are houses getting more expensive, or is the country getting poorer? If you've only got two particles, you can tell the gap between them is widening, but you can't tell which is moving because you don't have a frame of reference. Comparing with the global reserve currency builds that frame of reference. If most of the house price increase disappears, the prices aren't really going up, our wages are shrinking (relative to the rest of the world).
With 4.0% unemployment rate I would disagree with surplus of labor
> Even eastern Europe is catching up with our sluggish GDP. Our politicians have been slow to act, but economists say there’s still reason for hope.
Our finest journalists can't even get through the subheading without failing. Our politicians have been acting - thats the problem.
On top of this the absolute waste of talent in the UK is prodigious. The education system has been a wreck for decades, to the point it simply has to be a deliberate ploy to reduce social mobility.
I remember when regions were smaller than nations...
> The Lower Thames Crossing, a tunnel project to connect Kent with Essex under the Thames estuary, has held five consultations since 2017 and still does not have permission to build. To date, more than a quarter of a billion pounds have been spent on the planning application — more, Dumitriu tells me, than it cost to build the Laerdal tunnel in Norway, the longest road tunnel in the world.
> serious about anything except
> managing public opinion
I'd like to underscore that this issue persists also here in the United States. I know it is true in California and San Francisco (I presume other regions across the country are similarly afflicted).
The real issues are mostly financial, economic, or environmental justice issues that can’t be addressed by individual states. Even in the cases where it can be, like California air quality regs, it’s being eroded and rolled back anyway. But stuff like containing medical costs or single-payer medical/educational systems are not issues that can really be done by a state. The most you get is things like sales/property/income tax being shuffled around a bit, or californias bizarre prop 13.
That's a matter of timing. When they were enacted, they weren't being rolled back, they were being rolled out. Maybe it will catch on in 100 years. Hard to say it has no impact, when historians are able to point to the effects, when informing the future.
The thinking that everything must be solved/corrected immediately is misplaced despair, rather than a philosophical flaw in the system.
Politicians have none. Only popularity and polling. And donors, of course.
What behavior would anyone expect?
Until the people start making smarter decisions this country will race further and further into the morass it finds itself in.
I despise the establishment. I despise the generally spineless main stream media who are strangely unable to ask the right questions and dig deeper for the truth. I despise right wing voters. I despise people who conflates socialism with communism.
Pretty much sums up the country.
I blame mostly the Murdoch media. The government was always full of Tory pyschophants, but the media kept the masses informed enough to keep the damage in check. People used to resign in disgrace if they failed their post.
After the phone hacking scandal in 2007, the Leveson Inquiry[1], and the resulting lack of action that passed after it, Murdoch media has only been emboldened to act and report disgracefully. As much as I hate the Tory's, I blame the Blair-Murdoch relationship for kicking it off.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveson_Inquiry
There needs to be far more transparent accountability for wayward ministers and prime ministers - otherwise what's the point?
You despise me then, I can live with that. Having grew up in both, I despise them both equally.
If you're not going to be around in 20 years, don’t understand the issues that will impact working people today and into the next generation, maybe you shouldn’t be voting.
It's the exact opposite.
When you are retired you paid all of your life for those things trough taxes.
It's the youngsters that are getting them for free, having contributed a lot less if not zero.
I’m not sure I could fully express how foul I consider this recent memeplex that older people shouldn’t be allowed to participate in democracy.
We also have lower age limits on voting and there’s very good reasons for that too.
People try to raise the voting age limits all the time to curb the political influence of the younger voters. It’s a situation like class wars where one side is playing hardball and the other side isn’t even aware they were playing.
Point out the nature of the game you’ll be pounced (just as you did here) for “ageism” despite ageism already being written into the rules, and despite the elderly here (in the US) are continually trying to shift those rules even further in their own favor.
The hand of the dead should not bind the living, nor should the hand of transient populations bind those with a long-term stake in the society. And there will inevitably be some edge-cases where people slip around the edges of the rules (citizens with deadly illnesses, immigrants who own homes and settle, etc) but those are just the guiding principles society has agreed upon, except when it comes to the elderly.
This is not why we don't allow migrants who have not yet become citizens the ability to vote. They have not (yet) been granted a place in society because they have not yet demonstrated commitment to the country, nor contributed, and the country has not yet decided they are valuable enough to allow into the society.
> We also have lower age limits on voting and there’s very good reasons for that too.
Yes, due to inexperience of life, ignorance of politics and the wider world, and brains which are not yet fully formed, reasons that people below these ages are denied full autonomy in a number of areas. These reasons are not applicable to most older people.
> People try to raise the voting age limits all the time
In the context of the UK, which this discussion is about, this has literally never happened, not once. The elections are comparatively well run, you seldom have to wait more than a few minutes to vote there because polling stations and staff are not limited, gerrymandering doesn't exist, voter suppression is pretty universally regarded as evil. You seem to be in the US, one of your political parties appears to have effectively become cancerous and is trying to kill US democracy, I wish you luck in dealing with it but inter-generational hate is unlikely to help.
> It’s a situation like class wars where one side ... Point out the nature of the game you’ll be pounced (just as you did here) ... those are just the guiding principles ...
There are no sides here. There is no war between the young and the old. These are not principles that society has agreed on at all. It's hard to see how you could be more wrong. I 'pounced' upon these views because they are gross.
At what age do you think people have no stake in the long term future? Do you only have a stake or guidance to give if you personally will be affected? Do you not get to vote on the short term matters that do personally affect you? Should people in general only be able to vote on things that affect them personally and directly? I don't have kids, should I be denied a vote because we might be deciding eduction policy and school funding?
Besides naked prejudice, you seem to have a very transactional view of democracy - you assume people will obviously only vote in their own short-term self interest, not use their knowledge and morality to guide their choices for their own good and that of others.
I wish you luck in fixing the US, but don't project its flaws onto everyone else. And don't just blame old people for your woes. Those steering the ship over there are not all ancient and there are plenty of young people involved in all sorts of terrible stuff.
Moreover, you can be 18, not be around in 20 years and don't understand the issues that will impact working people today.
Or you can be 40 and never have worked a single day.
Or you can be 80 and have a lot of experience and understand plenty about history repeating and see things coming before anyone else.
Age is one of the worst proxies for human intelligence
A lot of the rhetoric around "old people not getting it" sounds to me a lot like that classmate that never studied, but blamed the professore for the bad votes, "he hates me" they usually say.
Whoever suggested it was a good one? I would never support any attempt to block older voters from participating in democracy, but it can be an issue if a particular demographic, particularly one that might have the least direct motivation to vote for policies aimed at long-term system wide improvements, has outsized representation. Interestingly we allow that governments are determined currently by the number of seats (representing a particular area) they can win, maybe it's not so crazy to consider the number of age brackets they can win...that way the fact that there might be many more 65-70yos vs 20-25yos wouldn't affect the outcome.
that's democracy working as intendend.
Besides: don't underestimate the fact that older people have much more motivation than adults, because they are at rest, they can think about the past, they actually have a past to think about and can draw conclusions on what their generation did and what the results were and how that affects the people they love and are worried about, particularly their nephews, who represent the real "new hope" for them. Most elderly were too busy working and taking care of their families when they were younger to focus on the long term results of their actions.
While younger people lack either the motivation, the experience or the tools to make such an analysis.
> that way the fact that there might be many more 65-70yos vs 20-25yos wouldn't affect the outcome
You are assuming that all the old people vote against the interests of the 20-25 years old people and vice versa, but actually it's very far from the truth.
The tension between equal representation and fairness of the outcome has been studied for a long time.
See the Arrow impossibility theorem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
Not at all - but we already accept that the fact there are so many more voters in concentrated in a few cities that a pure one-person-one-vote system would lead to virtually no representation of voters in sparsely populated areas. If the age pyramid were even more extreme (e.g. 5 or 6 times as many voters between 60 and 65 than there were between 20 and 25) I'd say we'd have little choice but to consider some sort of age-bracket based voting system.
As it happens apparently the historical trend of voters becoming significantly more conservative as they age seems like it might be breaking down anyway, and the concentration of voters in the "boomer" bracket is a somewhat temporary thing, so there's probably not enough justification for overhauling our electoral systems simply to counter the current demographic distribution, however I do think we're unnecessarily reluctant to at least seriously debate and ideally trial different electoral systems rather than assume what was put in place hundreds of years ago is still the best we can do in this day and age.
We do not accept the pure one-person-one-vote system because we live in representative democracies, were the elected represent a community. We solve the problem by designing dynamic voting areas of varying dimenions containing more or less the same population, so any representative is the spokeperson of the same amount of people (more or less). At least that's what we do here in Europe AFAIK.
> If the age pyramid were even more extreme (e.g. 5 or 6 times as many voters between 60 and 65 than there were between 20 and 25) I'd say we'd have little choice but to consider some sort of age-bracket based voting system.
You are saying that you don't like democracy then.
Which is an argument, we can discuss about it, but, for the sake of the argument, in Russia there are 86 men every 100 women. In that case what should we do? Limit the representation of women? What about people with disabilities, should we create a "people with no disabilities bracket"? How should we address the fact that the majority of the population has received no form of higher education, they are ill-educated if not uneducated hence they lack the tools to make an informed decision to the detriment of the entire society? etc. etc.
> As it happens apparently the historical trend of voters becoming significantly more conservative as they age
That's a cool quote, but it's never been proven. The word you're looking for is not conservative, but prudent.
Anyway, if we look at the voters now in Europe, where I am from, we can clearly see that the far right is very popular among young people, they are having good if not extremely good outcomes in many countries (Germany, Sweden, Italy, Finland, Hungary, Poland). It never happened before the last generation had the right to vote. In my country, Italy, the far right is the preferred choice among people < 25 years old and women, while people over 65 have voted in majority for the left and are progressive.
What should we do about it in your opinion?
"Democracy" says nothing about ensuring every single vote counts equally. While I am inherently skeptical of systems that decide some votes are worth more than others, personally, the idea that my vote should count for more when I'm part of a smaller but younger demographic bracket and less when I'm older and part of a bigger bracket doesn't bother me too much. Whether it would actually produce a better result is almost impossible to know.
> In my country, Italy, the far right is the preferred choice among people < 25 years old and women, while people over 65 have voted in majority for the left and are progressive.
That's certainly quite interesting, and different from the pattern I'm aware of occurring elsewhere, and it would be fascinating to do a deeper dive into why that might be. It certainly suggests to me that whatever the "left" in your country is offering, younger voters are not seeing it as representing the policies they feel the country needs over the coming decades. Though I did just come across an article that suggested this trend is possibly because younger voters in Europe have no first-hand knowledge of how awful things became under far-right leaders in the early 20th century. Or perhaps because they've seen first hand that welfare-state-type policies associated with left have benefited older generations far more than themselves.
we found that casting a vote is the best way to make that possible.
In that system everyone is an island, everyone should think about their personal interest, because there are more differences intra-group than extra-group.
If some demographic group is more numerous than others it also mean that that group will have statistically the most variations
There are more poor old people, marginalized old people, frustrated old people and unhappy old people than younger ones. Most of all old people have literally no future, they have no time to recover from mistakes, they simply have gained enough experience to not risk everything for the sake of trying something new.
Doesn't mean their interest do not align with the interests of younger generations, it's just that younger generations can afford to lose everything and come back from the consequences.
One explanation of what is happening in my country is that the far right can sell themselves as outcasts that for a long time haven't participated in the decay we are experiencing and can look to the untrained and unexperienced eye as "revolutionaries' that fight against the establishment, while the people who have known them their whole life can see through the facade.
But in the end the real problem is that last time the elections were won by a movement supported in majority by young people that wanted to flip tables and disrupt the status quo and, guess what, the elected members were such incompetents that 5 years later even the far right seemed a better option to many.
on the contrary, they have acted far too fast and too mindlesly - for instance brexit.
Europe mostly survives by selling its identity, legacy and history to the world.
MG, Jaguar, Land Rover - all owned and operated by Chinese/Indian businesses make a big deal of the “British heritage”, when that heritage is just a branding ruse.
The second largest company is pharmaceuticals, the third microprocessor manufacture.
If anything, it shows the European economy is more balanced than the American one.
Four of the top 10 are luxury/makeup brands - LVMH, L'Oreal, Hermes, Dior.
(including Blair and Brown)
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/poverty-r...
(Edit: the numbers are from 2017 and 2018, so it is possible that things have changed. For example, it's possible that the UK was hit harder by rising energy costs. I don't know.)
Fabric, lace, clothing, etc... you just need to walk around most post-industrial cities and look at all the things that were pioneered in Britain for mass production.
Maybe it’s different for the UK but they’ve always framed themselves as an economic mover, fundamentally not believing that there is something in the UK that business wants to access is a refutation of this idea of there being any domestic economic value in the UK as an institution.
> Poland is a remarkable success story. But it is not alone in catching up with Britain. South Korea and Slovenia are both set to overtake us in terms of GDP per capita too, as early as next year.
This hold only true when looking at PPP per capita. Looking at GDP in US$ per capita, tells a very different story:
Source: https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/GDP_per_capita_cur...vs. https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/GDP_per_capita_PPP...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD?end=2...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
(2) Take whatever you don't like about the UK, ignore the rest, and write an article with no scientific causal inferences whatsoever about how the things you don't like caused (1).
(3) Let everyone argue about how "no no no, it was the things I don't like that caused it--not the things you don't like."
I have a friendly reminder that life and society are very complicated. Even with ample data and decades of scientific inquiry, for example, we only have dubious theories as to why crime declined in the 90's so much, and the most plausible ones were not evident until a decade after the fact. Anyone simplifying the UK's economic decline with convenient political talking points is a charlatan.
* The country chose austerity at the time of negligible interest rates. They should have used that to make infrastructure reforms.
* The austerity not only prevented infrastructure improvements, but also actively made the country less prepared for things like covid and Ukraine war shock.
* Brexit. The idiocy of this act of self-harm is becoming clear to a large fraction of the population now.
* Overspending during covid. Because we had BJ as PM during that, Covid was managed pretty badly, with significant debt accumulation that we now have repay at high rates (because a lot of this debt was created in form of inflation indexed gilts)
* Series of bad governments over last 5 years. While Cameron was pretty bad, what we had since was really terrible. May, BJ, Truss, Sunak...
* Bad housing policy. Not enough housing and allowing extensive usage of housing as an investment vehicle (i.e. promoting Buy to Let).
That's not how it works. The UK and EU were bound to one another by various treaties. There was no mechanism for the EU to make such a demand, whereas an exit from the EU is a defined path.
If the UK wanted to rejoin then the EU would be able to make such a demand.