That new place, The Critic:
The usual diagnosis about this number flatlining the past 15 years is that economic policy has been wrong. There are claims of austerity (which there hasn’t been, but whatever), of underinvestment, of Tories simply being bastards. Given that I used to work for Nigel Farage, I’m willing to believe the last of whatever it was that “Call Me Dave” thought he was doing.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, Tim
My front door welcomes a neverending procession of poorly paid foreign delivery drivers dropping off shopping to the wife, and when I drive into town I have my pick of several luxurious Turkish Barbers (never full, but always in business) and several cash-only hand car washes manned by grinning Arabs.
Productivity is booming.
It seems obvious to me that the value in an economy crystalises when someone provides a good or service to someone else. And the utility of that g or s should be greater for the receiver than the provider or they’d be no incentive for the transaction. It’s process of increasing the overall value of all those transactions, a surplus, is how we get wealthier.
But “should” is important there. How is there an increase in value when you’re required to pay half as much again ( that’s half as much again of your own production of goods/services) for an electric car has half the utility of an ICE car? The same will be true of paying four times as much for a domestic heatpump produces half the heat as a gas boiler. Same’s true with “renewables”. More being put into them for the same or less consumable energy coming out. With all these regulations imposed, this is what’s happening right across the economy. People have to provide more of their own goods & services (work) to receive less. Who’s going to have the surplus to buy them, in the end? If you ignore the money & look what’s actually happening, productivity is falling & we’re on the road to getting poorer.
Yes, you can do that trick with the “free stuff” & call it added value. But how much of that added value goes on to create further added value? Sure it’s great that Whatsapp provides all that costless communication. But how much of that communication results in added value for anyone else but the communicators? (From the experience of how much productive time’s lost on Whatsappery…?)
My guess is if you ignore the money & just look at the utility being created through the provision of g & s, we’re on the way to having a contracting economy & getting poorer at an accelerating rate.
Good article, however no mention of any productivity drag from business regulation. Ever increasing regs and barriers to entry would intuitively at least put a downwards pressure on productivity.
Sure, and lots of other stuff too. But I just wanted to make those two points.
Good piece, Tim.
I also feel that mobile phones are responsible for eating up endless hours of office based work. Work from home is even worse: “work” hours still get squandered with phone play but this has to compete or more often supplement time spent completing domestic chores.
We’ve got that weird phenomenon in Perth, Scotland. More luxurious Turkish barbers than you can shake a stick at, probably a dozen in the town centre alone, but Saturday mornings aside, basically empty. Some are always empty with just a single bloke sat their playing with his phone.
Given the rates and rental, I can’t imagine that costs are covered, yet these businesses have been going since before I got here, indefatigable.
I’ve come to the conclusion that they are all just fronts for laundering Turkish drug money and giving the Turkish gang members a job for free housing, welfare and all that Malarky. Just like the Sopranos did with the Barone Sanitation front company.
Re productivity.
Torsten Bell was on the excellent Unherd These Times podcast complaining our productivity is so much worse than the French.
I’ve always wondered how they would compare if we sacked enough young people to raise our youth unemployment figures to theirs.
Articles about productivity that fail to mention immigration are like articles about “the housing supply crisis” that fail to mention the chief cause of increased demand.