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Idiots, damned idiots

The labour shortage has finally started to raise low end wages. So, people are going to start importing low end labout to lower low end wages again.

Absolute damned idiots:

Thousands of young European waiters, baristas and au pairs could be allowed to come to the UK for two years under plans to plug gaps in the British workforce.

Jesu, the foolishness.

57 thoughts on “Idiots, damned idiots”

  1. Importing foreigners is easier for politicians that telling lazy natives to get off their arses and do a job of work.

  2. Sure. Which is why we only want those higher wages caused by higher productivity pf labour. Which is exactly what we get by restricting low end labour. All that screen ordering – higher productivity. see?

  3. BG, the problem is that as we have our own homegrown pool of world class talent sitting on their arses claiming benefits (approx 5.3 million by one estimate), importing a load of forriners to do the work the locals could do but aren’t, effectively costs us twice.

  4. Jesu, the foolishness.

    If the aim is to push low end wages up then, yes, it’s a silly thing to do. But if the aim is to get things done efficiently and cheaply then, no, it’s a sensible thing to do.

    You’ve said on this blog that the proper response to foreign governments subsidising their industry to make stuff cheaper than we can domestically is something to encourage more of. Because we get stuff cheaper and more stuff is what makes us richer, yay? So how is this any different? In this case we get cheaper, and probably better, service. We’re richer.

  5. Can someone explain why we would only open this up to European countries? If we do want to import such labour, which I’m not taking for granted, won’t you get better results (eg more qualified individuals for the price paid) by widening the pool? Some country-specific visa schemes like with Australia are done tit for tat often as part of a wider trade deal but what would the exchange be with eg Poland? Letting a few thousand young Brits go the opposite way to be hotel cleaners or baristas in Zawadzkie would clearly be pointless so what’s the trade? If it’s just opened up unilaterally why not do it globally?

  6. That European baristas, waiters and au pairs are preferred over home-grown ‘talent’?
    It was something I noticed during my enforced sojourn in the UK. Generally Brits just don’t do service.
    I had a French couple staying with me for a few days. Since we were in deepest Sussex, most places we were eating in were Brit staffed. The utter indifference to providing a service. You feel like you’re intruding on their time. The worst was a pub lunch in place that supposed to be recommended. Asked at the bar & was pointed in the general direction of the restaurant section. No tables laid or menus set out. Sat for 20 minutes & then went in search of someone. Food then arrived over a period of half an hour. Why I don’t know. It was all microwaved up shit. They only got the one? Couldn’t have been lack staff. They seem to have had ample standing around chatting. Needless to say, the bill was startling. Best was a pizza place in Haywards Heath. (Mmm… My benchmark’s New York. So…) Service was matey rather than friendly. Intrusively so. All in all their visit was a bit of an embarrassment for all. Apologising & being apologised to.

  7. Pizza reminds me of taking a Brooklyn Italian-American to the Pizza Express off Oxford Street. Mainly to catch the jazz. She asked for a regular, which tuned up on what was basically a bread & butter plate. Her comment to the waitress: “Gee that’s novel. You bring a taster before we order. How cute!”

  8. One of my nephews in Hong Kong is training to be a carpenter in Australia because he couldn’t get a visa to the UK. At the same time I can’t get a carpenter to repair my window.

  9. Genuine refugees are *not allowed* to work for pay while waiting for the Home Office to consider their application to stay here [meanwhile they are expected to survive on half the value of the benefits of unemployed “citizens”, likewise thanks to the abominable Gordon Brown].
    We have a labour shortage.
    FYI 2+2=4

  10. “Genuine refugees are *not allowed* to work for pay while waiting for the Home Office to consider their application to stay here [meanwhile they are expected to survive on half the value of the benefits of unemployed “citizens”, likewise thanks to the abominable Gordon Brown].
    We have a labour shortage.
    FYI 2+2=4”

    Yeah, coz the inhabitants of the refugee hotels are nothing but well trained plumbers, electricians, doctors, dentists etc etc. And are definitely the type to take jobs waiting on tables, cleaning hotel rooms or working in old people’s homes……….

  11. @ Jim
    The genuine refugees have a wide variety of talents: their only common factor is that various nasty regimes wanted to kill/rape/hurt them. Some of them are trained doctors or dentists or electricians, some of them are willing to wait on tables, some of them are trained nurses, willing to work in old people’s homes under less well qualified staff, some of them will work as cleaners rather than leave their children hungry.
    We are ALL descended from immigrants [there are no pure Neanderthals left, and it is very doubtful that even they were here before the last Ice Age]; my most recent immigrant ancestor moved from one realm of the Elector of Hanover to another two centuries ago, most of them came over before the Roman invasion or shortly after the Romans left. I think that we have massively benefited from immigrants (excluding the junk that came over in 1066) – the first immigrants I met were both Poles who had helped save us from Hitler after we failed to save the from Hitler.
    I am not arguing for economic migrants paying despicable “people traffickers”, but complaining about the TUC-inspired maltreatment of genuine refugees.

  12. “The genuine refugees have a wide variety of talents: their only common factor is that various nasty regimes wanted to kill/rape/hurt them. ”

    Odd then that so many of them want to rape and murder the citizens of the country that is providing a safe haven from such fates.

    “Some of them are trained doctors or dentists or electricians, some of them are willing to wait on tables, some of them are trained nurses, willing to work in old people’s homes under less well qualified staff, some of them will work as cleaners rather than leave their children hungry.”

    Yeah, right. I know people who actually work in hotels that house these people – I know from their first hand experiences that these ‘refugees’ are nasty pieces of work. Ungrateful, entitled, arrogant, sexist, racist and violent to boot. Great employees and top class human beings they are not.

  13. @john77/Jim
    One would have to ask why genuine, talented, hard working refugees would choose the UK as a place for asylum? The food? The weather? From what I last saw of it, it was becoming the land of lack of opportunity. B7y the sound of things, it’s now succeeded.

  14. There are no ‘refugees’ entering the UK from France, only economic migrants. The ‘people traffikers’ are not ‘preying’ on these people, merely providing a service the people are willing to pay for.
    If the migrants weren’t buying, the sellers wouldn’t be selling.

    Like Ryanair or Easyjet, except the difference is that those arriving by LearyJet will have had to provide proof of who they are and be deemed acceptable to come to the UK before boarding.

  15. @ Jim
    I’ve met some refugees none of whom are anything like your description. Several of them were volunteers at my sister’s church near Glasgow; many refugees were housed in a block of flats near there that the locals refused to live in at rents equal to half the going rate, until it was demolished because it could not be brought up to modern standards (presumably that meant that it would cost more to bring it up to modern standards than it would cost to blow it down and build a new block.)
    The first refugee I met was a Polish Battle of Britain Pilot. I’ve met dozens since then, not all of whom I knew at the time to be refugees (one was the MD of a FTSE-250 company that designed and made medical appliances, founded by his father after fleeing the Nazis).
    I thought that I had made clear my distinction between refugees and economic migrants.

  16. Anon – “Can someone explain why we would only open this up to European countries?”

    I’ll take a couple++ of guesses:

    Convenience; There’s a number of UK employers who, over the years, have become used to integrating European staff into their workforce. They already know they can do it successfully, for certain values of “success”. There was research done using the UN’s ComTrade database – it showed that regardless of various trade barriers coming and going, existing trade relationships could persist for very long times. I see no reason to assume that this would be wildly different for labour.

    The convenience angle cuts the other way – there’s probably some number of Europeans, no longer young, who have already done it and gone back, they might be in a position to offer advice/encouragement; the existing number of Europeans already here who can also offer support, and the fact that a fair number of Europeans already speak English pretty well. And some number of furrin recruitment agencies.

    Risk; Europe is relatively close, geographically and culturally. For the Home Office, the risk of a young European suddenly going AWOL and breaching their visa terms is relatively low. It also means that if doesn’t work out, the lad/lass can get home easily/cheaply. There’s less chance of them ending up undocumented in Great Uncle Rangit’s Takeaway Restaurant Empire.

    GDP; Scales with the size of the labour force. The Treasury would be quite pleased about this, as the growth rate might be nice and smooth – making it easier to borrow and maintain deficit spending, rather than having to face the political downsides of raising taxes (all else being equal). Basically, they’re gaming the calculation. It’ll also help keep some element of the inflation basket under control. Same thing.

    Pathway; low value add now – high later. I have no idea about how the Home Office/Border Farce might go about checking up on visas – whether they’ll actually bother to check that the barista isn’t suddenly on the bins, or whether they’d care if that counted as a breach. But, yer Young European might come over as a barista, but immediately start searching for a role higher up the value chain. The second visa application would be a lot simpler once the laddie/lassie is already Over Here. Potentially, this mechanism would also tend to suppress wage growth higher up, with a lag, almost by stealth. Given that most of the whining is around state employees, this itself would be A Good Thing as far as expenditure goes.

    State Capacity or capability; European states would be more highly trusted in the sense that documentation issued by them would be accurate and easily verifiable, which would be particularly important for the sponsors, with regard to educational attainment.

    First random punt; political embarrassment – if a scheme were to fail, then… yeah, it’s not a good look. The above factors would at least provide some sort of mitigation against that.

    Second random punt; depends on the migrant as to why they’re moving, but the economics are that the wages work in their favour once they swap PPP. Gov.UK would appear to be betting that UK wages/furrin PPP would remain advantageous for the migrants, and there are at least two things going on right now that might support that view.

  17. Is There a Link Between Refugees and U.S. Crime Rates?

    Examining Crime Data for the U.S. Cities Most Impacted by Resettlement from 2006-2015

    When a large number of refugees arrive in a given city, does crime rise in subsequent years? It’s a question obviously relevant to many current debates, both in the United States and in Europe. And one many policymakers are focused on now.

    To examine this issue, we used refugee resettlement data from the U.S. Department of State’s Worldwide Refugee Processing System to calculate the 10 cities in the US that received the most refugees relative to the size of their population between 2006 and 2015. We then looked at what happened to both their overall crime rates over the same time period using detailed data available from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This revealed a telling pattern: Rather than crime increasing, nine out of 10 of the communities actually became considerably safer, both in terms of their levels of violent and property crime. This included places like Southfield, Michigan, a community just outside of Detroit, where violent crime dropped by 77.1 percent. Decatur, Georgia, a community outside Atlanta, experienced a 62.2 percent decline in violent crime.

    https://research.newamericaneconomy.org/report/is-there-a-link-between-refugees-and-u-s-crime-rates/

  18. Because we are a nation of immigrants and less racist than most other nations.
    And this is good or bad? One could say more fool you.

  19. Very nice cherry picking of the data p-r. That is old enough to be a non sequitur for the current data. Most of the asylum seekers today admit that they are economic, not political refugees. It’s hard to separate the current rise in crime in the blue cities between Democrat policies and illegal immigration. Why not the both? The behavior of those “refugees” when we put them up leans the data towards lawlessness.

  20. Somehow I don’t think that research from an organisation whose About page reads
    New American Economy is a bipartisan research and advocacy organization fighting for smart federal, state, and local immigration policies that help grow our economy and create jobs for all Americans
    can really be trusted as an independent source of information on the merits(or not) of immigration.

  21. @ bis
    Over the last 900 years, we’ve massively benefited from immigrants. So it doesn’t matter you say.

  22. @ducky
    Makes sense, I saw the persistence of trade relationships research when it came out too and there’s got to be some truth in it

    @j77
    Allowing asylum seekers to work while their claim is processed is seen as high risk since it creates a shortcut for people to come and work here without a visa, hence making UK more attractive to people whose asylum claim would likely be turned down. At present some of EU neighbours get a much bigger per capita inflow of asylum seekers so there’s a definite upside risk in terms of a surprising number of people turning up (particularly a political risk, I suppose you may view the economic risk of that happening as actually a good thing…) if we incentivise more of them to come here instead. If you think refugees should be allowed to work to keep their skills sharp and benefit the economy, an alternative solution is to massively cut the time it takes to process their claims…

  23. Bloke in the Fourth Reich

    “Service was matey rather than friendly. Intrusively so.”

    Try renting a car at Manchester airport. Probably any airport.

    I’ve taking to answering “my mum’s funeral” when they ask why I’m here, knowing there will be another 16 fake chummy questions read from a script. Goes down better than “none of your business” or “Do I look American?”

  24. “Over the last 900 years, we’ve massively benefited from immigrants. So it doesn’t matter you say.”

    I’ve always benefitted from putting a pinch of salt on my food. The whole salt cellar, not so much.

  25. Anyone who thinks the UK has benefitted from the MASS immigration that has been (purposely and with malice aforethought) visited upon the British people since 1947 is mental.

    From somewhere else:
    “The US UK right now is a perfect example of what can happen to a prosperous business when you hire all the wrong people”.

  26. “ Because it’s the general aim of having an economy – so that people get richer.”

    Throwing rocks in our own harbours makes everyone poorer though

    By your logic if the nations of the world were to rise up and offer to do our general odd jobs for free we should say no, instead of the correct answer which is “thank you very much!”

    You can still give locals your own spare money if you want to make them richer… but I don’t see why the rest of us need to be involved

  27. “By your logic if the nations of the world were to rise up and offer to do our general odd jobs for free we should say no, instead of the correct answer which is “thank you very much!””

    Except when they suddenly decide to stop working for us for free we end up in the sh*t, because none of us knows how anything works any more, and have got used to sitting on our arses. In which case they’ve got us by the short and curlies. The Eloi needed the Morlocks more than vice versa.

  28. Jim

    “ Except when they suddenly decide to stop working for us for free we end up in the sh*t, because none of us knows how anything works any more”

    None of us know how to do almost everything now, we never did and we never will.

    It’s called specialisation of labour and free trade and it’s worked out splendidly. I’m in favour of it continuing but by all means you can try building your own car and herding your own cattle etc and let us know how you get on

  29. Jim’s entirely correct. Good example’s the building trade. UK took advantage of all those Polish plumbers etc. Except. Things changed. Brexit. And Poland’s domestic economy grew so there was good work in Poland for Polish plumbers. So they went home. And the UK found it didn’t have enough Brit plumbers. Unfortunately bearded 14 year old Channel sailors don’t seem to know much about plumbing, & are not bothered about learning.
    John77’s view about immigration is pretty well all myth. The largest wave of immigrants before modern times was the Huguenots in Lizzie 1’s day. And they were largely skilled craftsmen. Modern immigration has been a great deal unskilled. Even the Asian-African entrepreneurial influx didn’t provide much of value. The Pateleries just displaced existing retail businesses by ignoring things like restrictions/conventions on opening hours/days & what shops sold. Would have happened anyway, eventually. Same was true of the other sectors they went into. Richi’s family got their dough because Brits went bust.
    But surely the important point is all of this immigration has happened against the wishes of the indigenous population. Right back to the Jews & Irish in the C19th. Apparently, when it comes to immigration, perpetual gas-lighting is always in fashion.

  30. “ And the UK found it didn’t have enough Brit plumbers”

    If indeed that’s true, hardly surprising it hadn’t enough plumbers if it sent the ones it had home and wouldn’t let any more in?

    Don’t shoot yourself in the foot and then complain your foots missing

  31. “None of us know how to do almost everything now, we never did and we never will.”

    Speak for yourself. I can do plumbing, electrics, welding, lathe turning and milling, carpentry, machinery maintenance, engine servicing, basic mechanics, drive a tractor, operate a telehandler, also a wheeled digger, and a tracked excavator, make hay, grow wheat,barley, oats, OSR, beans and linseed. Build a barn, repair a roof, use a chainsaw (incl tree felling), lay concrete, put up a fence. Operate a crop sprayer, a baler, a mower, a tedder, a rake, a log processor, a circular saw, a rack bench, a hedge flail. I sleep in a bed I made myself from timber that was trees on my farm, I sawed the logs into lumber and I constructed it myself, using my own machinery. Ditto my dining room table. I do all my own book keeping and VAT returns.

    And I’m not even that skilled a person, more a jack of all trades, master of none. People I know and work with can do all that stuff and far more to a far better standard than ever I can.

    I was however not talking about the individual, I was talking about the collective. If we as nation don’t keep basic skills and capacities working then we will lose them. Look at the nuclear industry – gone. We, the country who invented domestic nuclear power can’t build nuclear power stations now without getting the French in, because we no longer have the skills, we’ve let those go abroad. If steel making goes, those skills will be lost. What happens if we can’t get steel from abroad for some reason? We won’t be able to make it because no-one will know how any more. If we become reliant on getting stuff from abroad all the intellectual capital that used to direct making such things here will disappear slowly and eventually be lost. And if the SHTF then what do we do? Its all very well de-industrialising and thinking we can all make a living being HR consultants or creating tech start-ups while drinking coffee in Starbucks, what happens if we need to re-industrialise? Bit difficult to start a steel industry in just a year or so or a farming industry inside a few weeks.

  32. Jim,

    “Speak for yourself. I can do plumbing, electrics, welding, lathe turning and milling, carpentry, machinery maintenance, engine servicing, basic mechanics, drive a tractor, operate a telehandler, also a wheeled digger, and a tracked excavator, make hay, grow wheat,barley, oats, OSR, beans and linseed. Build a barn, repair a roof, use a chainsaw (incl tree felling), lay concrete, put up a fence. Operate a crop sprayer, a baler, a mower, a tedder, a rake, a log processor, a circular saw, a rack bench, a hedge flail. I sleep in a bed I made myself from timber that was trees on my farm, I sawed the logs into lumber and I constructed it myself, using my own machinery. Ditto my dining room table. I do all my own book keeping and VAT returns.”

    That’s still almost all of the modern economy that you can’t do. Who made all the tools you mention? Who made the tractor and the digger and all the components of them? And pretty much everything you mention is something that pretty much everybody else hasn’t needed to do in generations. And it’s been fine.

    “ What happens if we can’t get steel from abroad for some reason?”

    Some reason like restricting imports of it so that we have a shortage, like we did with labour? Is that the kind of reason you mean?

  33. @Buffalo Gil – “Why would you want other people’s wages to be higher?”
    @Tim Worstall – “Because it’s the general aim of having an economy – so that people get richer.”

    Be careful not to confuse cause and effect between wealth and wages. Merely increasing wages does not increase overall wealth. For example, if you want a barista to have an extra 1p that they can spend (i.e. after tax), that costs you 1.845p (income tax, employer’s NI, and employee’s NI). and if that cost must be recovered from the price of a coffee, then that price must go up by 2.214p (VAT is 20%). And that merely moves money from customer to employee. Since taxes usually destroy value, such a change is likely to make society worse off as a whole.

    I assume Tim is thinking of second-order effects, whereby the barista is sacked because they are replaced by a robot, but it’s not at all obvious that this is a good idea. It will use resources to provide the robot, which are diverted from something else, so in a world where there is plentiful cheap labour, it is much more likely that the resources are better spent on something else. Optimising resource allocation is what free markets do much better than planned ones. So we should not be planning the market in labour.

  34. “Some reason like restricting imports of it so that we have a shortage, like we did with labour? Is that the kind of reason you mean?”

    No I mean when those lovely friendly foreigners who’ve been sending it here for a cheap price suddenly say ‘Sorry no more steel for you. We don’t want your bits of paper with pound signs on them any more, all we can do is wipe our arses with them’. A bit like when we wanted PPE at the start of covid and the UK government was reduced to begging the Turks for it. The Turks FFS! A so called nuclear power reduced to begging foreigners to please send us some face nappies, we can’t make our own.

  35. That’s still almost all of the modern economy that you can’t do. Who made all the tools you mention?
    Someone like Jim, with the skills he’s mentioned, could make the tools. Even if he had to design them from first principles. That’s something one gains from having a wide set of skills. A Breadth of knowledge. Rare these days & getting rarer.
    A car is not built by raising the paperwork. It’s done over there in that building with the uncouth men who get their hands dirty & use the other canteen.

  36. Something I was pondering. It’s not actually research or invention that create wealth. It’s innovation. And much of that is spotting that something being used in one application would have uses in another. Often far greater. Look at computing. Originally developed to crunch difficult numbers. But the innovation was turning all manner of things into crunchable numbers could be crunched very fast & accurately by computers.
    You get this sort of thing from breadth of knowledge across different fields. The more you specialise, the less innovation.

  37. @bis

    This is correct and economists do actually measure innovation for productivity purposes more in terms of the application of ideas than by raw numbers of inventions or patents. They also have a very flexible definition of “technology”, e.g. the way the ancient Roman religion allowed two businessmen to ritualise a contractual agreement counts as a technology because it enabled more sophisticated business practices. The idea that know-how can move between industries is studied in e.g. the Jacobs model of knowledge spillover.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_spillover

  38. @bloke in spain – “Someone like Jim, with the skills he’s mentioned, could make the tools.”

    That depends on what you mean by “could”. With an infinite lifespan, the skills may be sufficient, but within the span of a normal human lifetime, there’s just far, far too much to do. Imagine starting with a map of mineral resources and a spade. Then digging up and processing ore to make iron, aluminium etc. Digging up coal or oil, or chopping down trees to power furnaces. Building those furnaces. Making tools from the processed metals. But in many cases to make tools you need to make the tools to make them. – for example a lathe is needed for lots of parts.
    Then we have things like processing trees into paper. Making pencils from wood and graphite. Growing flax for linen or cotton and making it into threads and making them into garments. Similarly, consider the processes for making dye for clothing, bricks for housing, etc.

    Modern society hugely reduces the average effort required to make things by exploiting two principles: division of labour, whereby each person can specialise so that they get more efficient at a narrow selection of tasks, and economy of scale, which allows the average effort to be greatly reduced by spreading fixed overheads across a large number of instances.

  39. “Modern society hugely reduces the average effort required to make things by exploiting two principles: division of labour, whereby each person can specialise so that they get more efficient at a narrow selection of tasks, and economy of scale, which allows the average effort to be greatly reduced by spreading fixed overheads across a large number of instances.”

    And no-one is saying otherwise. The question is to what extent an nation, or even an entire global region, allows the skills and capacities that underpin the very existence of their civilisation to disappear from within that political sphere, and to rely entirely on people from outside it to supply them.

    A nation of 70m needs to be able to feed, house and keep warm those people. If it can’t do that from its own resources and relies entirely on others to do so then it places itself in a very vulnerable position. Should for whatever reason the supplies stop arriving from abroad, what happens?

    It appears to me that Western societies have decided that nothing nasty will ever happen to them again, that 1945 represents the end of history as far as they are concerned. Never again will conflicts ravage the globe and they are free to offload energy supply, food supply and industrial capacity onto far off places, while they allow their populations to live lives of service industry leisure. Hammering metal is so passe darling, let some peasant do it somewhere else and have a latté!

    Well reality has a way of catching up with attitudes like that – covid and the Ukraine war should be acting as wake up calls that not everything will always be at the end of a global supply chain. But it appears no-one is taking the hints, so the gilded West continues to live its life of leisure, provisioned by others naturally. And continues to wager its future on the idea that the last 80 Goldilocks years will continue forever.

  40. Matt Ridley’s take is good infotainment:
    Ted Talk: When Ideas Have Sex
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLHh9E5ilZ4

    All good for peacetime and healthytime, of course.

    I wonder what the minimum combination of population, culture and regional resources is for a nation or people to go it alone in a modern sense, such that they might continue and develop without too much interruption if the rest of the world became inaccessible. My guess is the something like the USA, or North America. There’s enough energy, enough materials, enough people, enough nouse and enough gumption. Maybe not right now with the amount of offshoring, but they seem intent on bringing most of it back. And I think the cultural wankery is a passing fashion.

    I don’t think the UK is capable of self sufficiency. But we could do a lot better and trade from a position of strength, like we used to.

  41. @Jim – “A nation of 70m needs to be able to feed, house and keep warm those people.”

    Industrial activities, such as manufacturing steel, do not feed, house, or warm people. If it’s acceptable for us to trade steel for food, it should be acceptable to trade something else for food. David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage says we should do what we are good at.

    In more pragmatic terms, a sufficiently complex international network of trade is an excellent protection. Russia might be able to tolerate international sanctions, but China certainly couldn’t. As long as we are heavily dependent on Chinese goods, and China is heavily dependent on us as customers, war would be just another form of mutually assured destruction.

    @PJF

    It’s not about a minimum, because from a tribe of hunter-gatherers to the full extent of modern civilisation we see that the more people and resources who participate in mutual trade the richer we all are. The UK could achieve self-sufficiency by being overall poorer, but that would be a stupid goal. We should instead aim to make ourselves indispensible.

  42. “Industrial activities, such as manufacturing steel, do not feed, house, or warm people.”

    Yeah, right. Coz dwellings, power stations, farm machinery, lorries, warehouses, factories, oil rigs, and all the machinery that creates and services them are never made of steel………

    “David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage says we should do what we are good at.”

    F*ck all these days. Universities producing woke arseholes mainly it seems.

  43. @ Jim
    The almost-universally condemned City of London is pretty good at financial services generating several £billion of net surplus from its services to the Rest of the World. But that is not enough on its own to support the other 99.8+% of the population.

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