Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
I believe there were even distinguished PBers berating Sturgeon for not opening up Edinburgh’s bars and restaurants for Crimbo the way gracious King Boris was south of the border. Mea culpas came there none, neither from BJ or his acolytes.
Of course, one unknowable is whether the Kent variant would have emerged if overall infection numbers in the UK had been kept lower. Obviously other variants would have got here in the end (though another question is to what extent they could have been delayed by stricter controls on travel). But in terms of having the most vulnerable vaccinated, the arrival of a variant in the Spring would have been far less damaging than the one we had in the Autumn/Winter of last year.
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
So the wokeists that gave Obama his Nobel Prize For Fuck Knows What has now extended to Economics.
(that sound you just heard was Gardenwalker's head exploding....)
I'm not happy that the phrasing is entirely about whether our liberties were swept away soon enough. Especially since the NHS didn't collapse which was the excuse to take away our civil liberties.
I haven't read the report yet but the baffling thing watching this from Japan at the time was that the British government spent weeks refusing to do the simple things that Japan had already used to contain the virus without compulsion or any loss of civil liberties. They didn't ask organizers to cancel events, they didn't ask businesses to get people working from home, they didn't ask people to open windows and avoid closed spaces. If they'd done these sensible, moderate things early on it's not obvious that they'd have needed the compulsion at all.
The Tories - and the PB Tories - tend not to like examples from outside the U.K.
We’re different, apparently.
Hunt was a notable exception, he called it right over and over again.
As set out in the Report (but which was already evident from SAGE), the UK relied on its flu pandemic policy which assumed that any sufficiently transmissible virus would become endemic within the population and efforts to prevent or reduce transmission would not materially assist.
This was a fundamentally wrong assumption and quite frankly we should be pleased that the government abandoned that view when it did. For every argument that it should have come a week earlier, which it should, it could have easily been a week later.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
This is utterly bad news, this means the Indian commentary we received at the start of the year during England's tour on India won't be the worst and biased commentary we hear this year.
England fans planning to watch the Ashes on television will have to make do with Australian commentary when the series begins next month.
As Sportsmail revealed in August, BT Sport have bought the live TV rights for the five Tests, but are not planning to send a commentary team to Australia, and will instead rely on a feed provided by host broadcasters Fox and Channel Seven.
Michael Vaughan will be the lone Englishman we hear.
Who in their right mind wouldn't mute the telly whilst listening to TMS?
Because the extra hop(s) the satellite signal and streaming takes then TMS can be anywhere from 5 seconds to 90 seconds ahead of the TV pictures.
Always allows me to watch the wickets fall 'live' as I run in from the kitchen/garden etc when i hear it first on TMS...
Mark Waugh is my favourite cricket commentator, so I’m quite pleased. It also gives more of a feeling of adventure when it’s the other teams comms on a winter tour I think.
I am normally a sporting optimist, but we are going to get slaughtered! The team looks seriously bad for Aussie conditions. To be fair the batsmen, or batters for the easily offended, look bad for any Test match conditions.
Just hope they give Lawrence a fair go. England has sometimes taken players on tours and ruined their careers by just using them as drinks waiters. Essex Ashley Cowan is an example.
I remember watching him as a lad and wondering why he didn't get much of a go for England. Stuart Law was another mystery (although, when he was playing, Australia at least had an embarrassment of riches).
How are you and your wife doing, OKC? Hope you're both recovering well.
Cowan was always a bit of a lad for the high-life though; didn't train as much as might or probably should have. Which was the chicken and which was the egg of course could be another matter. Bit of encouragement and all that.
Thank you Mr S; I'm not doing too badly, although a bit spaced out. Mrs C is 'coughing well' and a bit more spaced out. Another day or two are needed at least. Test and trace wants us locked for another 8 days, so that should be more than enough.
Good to hear you're doing ok.
Re Cowan, yep - Wikipedia even tells me (backed up by a link to ESPN) that his benefit year was sponsored by the Cave, which is/was apparently* a lap dancing club.
*Actually, I know this - we ended up outside it on my brother's stag party. We didn't go in, in the end.
If things had gone well no 10 would be basking in the glory . You can’t have it both ways . The bigger failing IMO is what happened last autumn and in the early part of the winter rather than in March 2020.
Things did go well.
We got through a global pandemic without the NHS collapsing, got a vaccine, had a vaccine rollout.
Job done. The vaccine is the element the government is most responsible for and they did it.
We can't and shouldn't prevent everyone from ever dying. What we can and have done is ensure the NHS is there for those who get sick and a vaccine is there for anyone who isn't a brainwashed idiot.
The government have made plenty of mistakes. They locked down too long and too hard, not too late or too softly.
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
So the wokeists that gave Obama his Nobel Prize For Fuck Knows What has now extended to Economics.
(that sound you just heard was Gardenwalker's head exploding....)
I’ll wait of course for your devastating takedown of Card’s work.
One of the common themes of COVID around the world is that people change their behaviour when things get really bad.
That never happened here. The changes to behaviour only ever came after the government changed the rules.
Now, that's a small positive, but I wonder to what extent behaviour didn't change because the bad stuff was well hidden from us?
I'm not sure about that. I kept a record. On March 8 2020 I went to the pub, but was nervous about doing so. I didn't go again until after lockdown had ended - I normally go 2-3 times a week. The pubs were closed by the government on March 21, I think. Most people I knew were similar - they started changing their behaviour from the beginning of March, three weeks before the government changed the rules.
Yeah, but Cheltenham.
I was anxious twice during COVID. Once at the start when my employer insisted on us being in the office (good luck getting me back, now) and the run up to Christmas. My mum was determined that we should have a "proper" Christmas. It took a lot of convincing her and other people I knew that it was a bad idea.
IIRC my work let us WFH the week before the official lockdown, and I was anxious to avoid the commute one or two weeks before that. I had been tracking the virus since early January and it was obvious to me that it was going to explode here. I found the government’s complacent attitude at the time deeply worrying. The whole Christmas obsession was insane, too. The government is just pretty crap. It is led by a deeply unserious man, a fantasist and narcisist, a liar. It's hard to imagine a worse person to lead the country through a pandemic. But I wouldn't hold him wholly responsible by any means. There seems to have been multiple failures across all levels of government, a lack of preparedness especially. I hope that lessons will be learnt but am not holding my breath.
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
I believe there were even distinguished PBers berating Sturgeon for not opening up Edinburgh’s bars and restaurants for Crimbo the way gracious King Boris was south of the border. Mea culpas came there none, neither from BJ or his acolytes.
Of course, one unknowable is whether the Kent variant would have emerged if overall infection numbers in the UK had been kept lower. Obviously other variants would have got here in the end (though another question is to what extent they could have been delayed by stricter controls on travel). But in terms of having the most vulnerable vaccinated, the arrival of a variant in the Spring would have been far less damaging than the one we had in the Autumn/Winter of last year.
That's assuming that the Kent variant emerged in Kent.
The Belgian infection pattern with a huge surge in October but not during the winter looks very much like they were hit by a highly infections variant:
I'm not happy that the phrasing is entirely about whether our liberties were swept away soon enough. Especially since the NHS didn't collapse which was the excuse to take away our civil liberties.
I haven't read the report yet but the baffling thing watching this from Japan at the time was that the British government spent weeks refusing to do the simple things that Japan had already used to contain the virus without compulsion or any loss of civil liberties. They didn't ask organizers to cancel events, they didn't ask businesses to get people working from home, they didn't ask people to open windows and avoid closed spaces. If they'd done these sensible, moderate things early on it's not obvious that they'd have needed the compulsion at all.
The Tories - and the PB Tories - tend not to like examples from outside the U.K.
We’re different, apparently.
Hunt was a notable exception, he called it right over and over again.
As set out in the Report (but which was already evident from SAGE), the UK relied on its flu pandemic policy which assumed that any sufficiently transmissible virus would become endemic within the population and efforts to prevent or reduce transmission would not materially assist.
This was a fundamentally wrong assumption and quite frankly we should be pleased that the government abandoned that view when it did. For every argument that it should have come a week earlier, which it should, it could have easily been a week later.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
It has long been known. Just that it is quite inconvenient to the send 'em home brigade.
Mistakes will always be made and hindsight is no use save to plan for the future. Hence I am reluctant to "blame" anyone even that tosser Johnson.
What I will blame him or his government or the NHS for is for shipping ill people to care homes to free up beds. There could have been a zillion other ways (isolating hospitals or requisitioning other spaces or, I don't know, building whole new facilities) which could have avoided the literal cross-contamination of ill people being moved into care homes when the disease ran rampantly.
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
So the wokeists that gave Obama his Nobel Prize For Fuck Knows What has now extended to Economics.
(that sound you just heard was Gardenwalker's head exploding....)
David Card's work in labour economics with the late Alan Kreuger is exceptionally careful and brilliantly executed empirical analysis. I am very happy to see it being honoured in this way. I wouldn't imagine there is much overlap between the decision-making bodies awarding the Economics and Peace prizes, not least as the Economics one isn't a 'proper' Nobel prize, as non-economists never tire of pointing out. I'm afraid that your comment simply demonstrates (a) your ignorance of the field and (b) that 'woke' has come to mean 'anything that reactionaries don't like or can't understand.'
Bernard has been somewhat overshadowed by the cavalcade of charlatans, liars and space cadets that constitutes the current Tory party, but he’s back with a bang.
There seems to have been multiple failures across all levels of government, a lack of preparedness especially.
As far as I can make out the preparedness seems to be the problem. They'd had a plan to deal with the next epidemic ever since the Spanish Flu, and they'd worked very hard on it and it was a jolly good plan, and they weren't going to be distracted from following it just because the current epidemic was a totally different disease.
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
It has long been known. Just that it is quite inconvenient to the send 'em home brigade.
As a non economist, neutral on the question, the question I would ask the economics community is whether this demonstration is universally acclaimed as true by all expert opinion or whether there are any other opinions or analyses around to compare it with.
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
I believe there were even distinguished PBers berating Sturgeon for not opening up Edinburgh’s bars and restaurants for Crimbo the way gracious King Boris was south of the border. Mea culpas came there none, neither from BJ or his acolytes.
Of course, one unknowable is whether the Kent variant would have emerged if overall infection numbers in the UK had been kept lower. Obviously other variants would have got here in the end (though another question is to what extent they could have been delayed by stricter controls on travel). But in terms of having the most vulnerable vaccinated, the arrival of a variant in the Spring would have been far less damaging than the one we had in the Autumn/Winter of last year.
That's assuming that the Kent variant emerged in Kent.
The Belgian infection pattern with a huge surge in October but not during the winter looks very much like they were hit by a highly infections variant:
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
It has long been known. Just that it is quite inconvenient to the send 'em home brigade.
I'm not familiar with the work, but I'm sure it's on the money.
But, as has been explained many times, the issue is that business gets the benefit and society gets the costs. Yes, low wage immigration is a left wing issue. The Labour Party are just too fucking dumb to understand it.
One annoying error that seems to be occurring right now is the slow booster rollout and teen vaccinations.
We were really good at this in the first half of the year. But these vaccinations are going on far far slower than the original rollout, and it doesn't seem to be supply constrained.
Yes, both the volume of vaccinations and the communications around them seem to have slowed to a crawl. In my area, I've no idea where or how vaccinations are available now, nor does anyone I know, and the daily numbers are small - all in sharp contrast to phase 1 of the rollout. I'm due my booster jab (6 months since dose 2), but haven't heard anything yet. It was really easy to book second jabs, but the information on boosters is simply "wait till you hear from someone", which is slightly disconcerting.
Edited update: I posted the above an hour ago, and I've just received a text inviting me to book a booster jab - at a vaccination centre rather than GP. I take it all back!
If things had gone well no 10 would be basking in the glory . You can’t have it both ways . The bigger failing IMO is what happened last autumn and in the early part of the winter rather than in March 2020.
There were big mistakes at the start, as winter turned to spring in 2020, decisive action then, lockdown and a grip on testing inc around care homes, would have saved tens of thousands of lives, probably also a great deal of money, this is clear to everybody now and was clear to many at the time; then there were more big mistakes in the summer of that year, the nonsense of 'eat out to help out', a mood of 'phew it's over' complacency rife and encouraged, and this was followed by perhaps the biggest and least forgivable mistakes of all in the autumn and winter, the PM dithering, giving house & head space to Covid deniers, again no grip, that's a theme here, culminating in the omnishambles of Christmas, full steam ahead and on, off, sort of on, ok if you must, the schools told to open then closed again in a blind panic a couple of days later, a vicious 2nd wave of the disease given a flying start for no better reason than Johnson's desire to play politics with a situation he still, after almost a year in the thick of it, failed to comprehend beyond the level of bright enough and quite interested layman.
Is that an attempt to write the longest single sentence ever posted on PB? HYUFD will have to try to beat it.
Bernard has been somewhat overshadowed by the cavalcade of charlatans, liars and space cadets that constitutes the current Tory party, but he’s back with a bang.
SCOTTISH Labour has demanded that Holyrood launches its own detailed inquiry into the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic after a damning report from MPs criticised the UK Government’s slow response at the start of the crisis.
One of the common themes of COVID around the world is that people change their behaviour when things get really bad.
That never happened here. The changes to behaviour only ever came after the government changed the rules.
Now, that's a small positive, but I wonder to what extent behaviour didn't change because the bad stuff was well hidden from us?
I'm not sure about that. I kept a record. On March 8 2020 I went to the pub, but was nervous about doing so. I didn't go again until after lockdown had ended - I normally go 2-3 times a week. The pubs were closed by the government on March 21, I think. Most people I knew were similar - they started changing their behaviour from the beginning of March, three weeks before the government changed the rules.
Yeah, but Cheltenham.
I was anxious twice during COVID. Once at the start when my employer insisted on us being in the office (good luck getting me back, now) and the run up to Christmas. My mum was determined that we should have a "proper" Christmas. It took a lot of convincing her and other people I knew that it was a bad idea.
IIRC my work let us WFH the week before the official lockdown, and I was anxious to avoid the commute one or two weeks before that. I had been tracking the virus since early January and it was obvious to me that it was going to explode here. I found the government’s complacent attitude at the time deeply worrying. The whole Christmas obsession was insane, too. The government is just pretty crap. It is led by a deeply unserious man, a fantasist and narcisist, a liar. It's hard to imagine a worse person to lead the country through a pandemic. But I wouldn't hold him wholly responsible by any means. There seems to have been multiple failures across all levels of government, a lack of preparedness especially. I hope that lessons will be learnt but am not holding my breath.
I've been watching the Blair/Brown doc. Enjoyable trip down memory lane. Although one has to tbf and acknowledge the size of the Covid challenge it's hard not to think they'd have handled it much much better. In fact the same goes imo for any previous administration I can recall, Tory or Labour. We've been unlucky to have Boris Johnson in charge at this time. The problem isn't just the nature of the man himself, it's the quality of his cabinet, including its senior members. Perhaps because he knows he's a lightweight he seems to have an aversion to being around anyone who isn't.
Beginning this academic year, officials have pledged to instill obedience through mainland-China-style “patriotic education.” Subjects as varied as geography and biology must incorporate material on national security. Kindergartners will learn the offenses under the security law. Teachers accused of sharing subversive ideas can be fired.
Anne Sze, a teaching assistant at a school, learned about those changes in March, during a staff meeting. The principal described how all subjects going forward would include lessons on loving China, Ms. Sze, 46, said.
Until then, Ms. Sze, who had grown disillusioned with the political atmosphere in Hong Kong, had taken preliminary steps toward emigration but had no concrete plans. But after that meeting, she imagined her own sons, 8 and 11, going through similar “brainwashing,” as she called it.
She and her husband hurriedly applied for special visas that Britain is offering to Hong Kongers in response to the security law. In August, they left.
Each month a large number of polls (about 20 in September) give us the essentially meaningless information about VI when we are miles away from an election. These are basically an exercise in setting a share price for a share that is untradeable except on one day every four or five years
Largely the Tories have done much better than you might have expected given the disasters of every sort of the last couple of years.
Would it not be more use, and much more interesting, to have fewer polls, but to have polls which drill down more deeply into why an individual's VI is as it is?
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
So the wokeists that gave Obama his Nobel Prize For Fuck Knows What has now extended to Economics.
(that sound you just heard was Gardenwalker's head exploding....)
David Card's work in labour economics with the late Alan Kreuger is exceptionally careful and brilliantly executed empirical analysis. I am very happy to see it being honoured in this way. I wouldn't imagine there is much overlap between the decision-making bodies awarding the Economics and Peace prizes, not least as the Economics one isn't a 'proper' Nobel prize, as non-economists never tire of pointing out. I'm afraid that your comment simply demonstrates (a) your ignorance of the field and (b) that 'woke' has come to mean 'anything that reactionaries don't like or can't understand.'
That's brilliant, I think we are now moving towards a working definition of woke.
Woke* = people or ideas that reactionaries don't like or can't understand.
* in everyday usage, often used to shut down or pre-empt discussion/debate about such ideas and the people who propound them.
Beginning this academic year, officials have pledged to instill obedience through mainland-China-style “patriotic education.” Subjects as varied as geography and biology must incorporate material on national security. Kindergartners will learn the offenses under the security law. Teachers accused of sharing subversive ideas can be fired.
Anne Sze, a teaching assistant at a school, learned about those changes in March, during a staff meeting. The principal described how all subjects going forward would include lessons on loving China, Ms. Sze, 46, said.
Until then, Ms. Sze, who had grown disillusioned with the political atmosphere in Hong Kong, had taken preliminary steps toward emigration but had no concrete plans. But after that meeting, she imagined her own sons, 8 and 11, going through similar “brainwashing,” as she called it.
She and her husband hurriedly applied for special visas that Britain is offering to Hong Kongers in response to the security law. In August, they left.
Welcome to England.
From frying pan of patriotic education to fire of war on woke. Shame.
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
It has long been known. Just that it is quite inconvenient to the send 'em home brigade.
As a non economist, neutral on the question, the question I would ask the economics community is whether this demonstration is universally acclaimed as true by all expert opinion or whether there are any other opinions or analyses around to compare it with.
That's how enquiry and research works normally.
As an economist but not an expert in the field my understanding is that the available research in the UK and elsewhere suggests that immigration has either no effect on wages or small negative effects in small parts of the labour market. The preponderance of evidence favours the former. It's extremely difficult to do really good applied work because it's hard to separate out the different factors and so it's difficult to have a definitive answer. For instance, immigration could be responding to rising labour demand that is pushing up wages - so we could be biased towards finding a positive impact on wages. Certainly,at the macro level periods of high immigration into the UK correspond to periods of high wage growth. Or sectors with low wages and poor working conditions might actively seek immigrant workers because they might be easier to exploit - so we would be biased to finding a negative effect. But Card and Kreuger's work is the gold standard in terms of this area, because they used clever identification strategies to try to isolate cleanly the impact of immigration. In my opinion economic theory is wrongly elevated over applied work which is why I think the Nobel this year was a good choice.
One annoying error that seems to be occurring right now is the slow booster rollout and teen vaccinations.
We were really good at this in the first half of the year. But these vaccinations are going on far far slower than the original rollout, and it doesn't seem to be supply constrained.
Yes, both the volume of vaccinations and the communications around them seem to have slowed to a crawl. In my area, I've no idea where or how vaccinations are available now, nor does anyone I know, and the daily numbers are small - all in sharp contrast to phase 1 of the rollout. I'm due my booster jab (6 months since dose 2), but haven't heard anything yet. It was really easy to book second jabs, but the information on boosters is simply "wait till you hear from someone", which is slightly disconcerting.
I have mine on Friday taking my 91 year old mum and 96 year old uncle with me.
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
So the wokeists that gave Obama his Nobel Prize For Fuck Knows What has now extended to Economics.
(that sound you just heard was Gardenwalker's head exploding....)
I’ll wait of course for your devastating takedown of Card’s work.
Take your time.
Card's work is controversial, and his findings are heavily disputed. On the whole, I agree with him on employment and disagree on wages.
See for example the finding that a 1 percentage point increase in the ratio of migrants to non-migrants leads to a 0.6% decrease in wages for workers at the 5th earnings percentile and a 0.5% decrease at the 10th percentile (Dustmann et al (2013)). Or, from Nickell and Salaheen 2015, in the unskilled and semi-skilled service sector, a 1 percentage point rise in the share of migrants reduced average wages in that occupation by about 0.2%.
Or another study in 2018 estimated that an increase in the number of EU migrants corresponding to 1% of the UK-born working-age population resulted in a 0.8% decrease in UK-born wages at the 5th and 10th percentiles (i.e. people in the bottom 5-10% of earners), and a 0.6% increase at the 90th percentile (i.e. high earners). In practice, this means that between 1993 and 2017, the total effect of EU migration on the wages of UK-born workers was estimated to be a 4.9% reduction in wages for those at the 10th earnings percentile, a 1.6% reduction at the 25th percentile, a 1.6% increase at the 50th percentile, and a 4.4% increase at the 90th percentile.
Ministers at Holyrood have been warned that they risk the effectiveness of a public health campaign if they urge “anyone with a cervix” to take a smear test rather than refer directly to women.
In a press release issued yesterday to promote smear tests, the Scottish government pushed “people” to go for a check-up, with the message that “two people” die from cervical cancer each day.
Mistakes will always be made and hindsight is no use save to plan for the future. Hence I am reluctant to "blame" anyone even that tosser Johnson.
What I will blame him or his government or the NHS for is for shipping ill people to care homes to free up beds. There could have been a zillion other ways (isolating hospitals or requisitioning other spaces or, I don't know, building whole new facilities) which could have avoided the literal cross-contamination of ill people being moved into care homes when the disease ran rampantly.
That is imo the unforgiveable part.
Public Health England had a big input into that decision as well. Initial govt guidance came from them.
Of course the govt has to take its share of the blame as does the NHS but PHE, now gone, made some horrendous errors.
I'm not happy that the phrasing is entirely about whether our liberties were swept away soon enough. Especially since the NHS didn't collapse which was the excuse to take away our civil liberties.
I haven't read the report yet but the baffling thing watching this from Japan at the time was that the British government spent weeks refusing to do the simple things that Japan had already used to contain the virus without compulsion or any loss of civil liberties. They didn't ask organizers to cancel events, they didn't ask businesses to get people working from home, they didn't ask people to open windows and avoid closed spaces. If they'd done these sensible, moderate things early on it's not obvious that they'd have needed the compulsion at all.
The Tories - and the PB Tories - tend not to like examples from outside the U.K.
We’re different, apparently.
Hunt was a notable exception, he called it right over and over again.
As set out in the Report (but which was already evident from SAGE), the UK relied on its flu pandemic policy which assumed that any sufficiently transmissible virus would become endemic within the population and efforts to prevent or reduce transmission would not materially assist.
This was a fundamentally wrong assumption and quite frankly we should be pleased that the government abandoned that view when it did. For every argument that it should have come a week earlier, which it should, it could have easily been a week later.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
September and November was a failure to properly learn the lessons from March.
To my eternal frustration nobody stood up and said, our failures from March were based on planning failures. Instead we got "follow the science" over and over.
Low and behold Twitter's making the same mistake over again. I can only hope the new national pandemic people aren't listening.
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
It has long been known. Just that it is quite inconvenient to the send 'em home brigade.
As a non economist, neutral on the question, the question I would ask the economics community is whether this demonstration is universally acclaimed as true by all expert opinion or whether there are any other opinions or analyses around to compare it with.
That's how enquiry and research works normally.
As an economist but not an expert in the field my understanding is that the available research in the UK and elsewhere suggests that immigration has either no effect on wages or small negative effects in small parts of the labour market. The preponderance of evidence favours the former. It's extremely difficult to do really good applied work because it's hard to separate out the different factors and so it's difficult to have a definitive answer. For instance, immigration could be responding to rising labour demand that is pushing up wages - so we could be biased towards finding a positive impact on wages. Certainly,at the macro level periods of high immigration into the UK correspond to periods of high wage growth. Or sectors with low wages and poor working conditions might actively seek immigrant workers because they might be easier to exploit - so we would be biased to finding a negative effect. But Card and Kreuger's work is the gold standard in terms of this area, because they used clever identification strategies to try to isolate cleanly the impact of immigration. In my opinion economic theory is wrongly elevated over applied work which is why I think the Nobel this year was a good choice.
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
It has long been known. Just that it is quite inconvenient to the send 'em home brigade.
As a non economist, neutral on the question, the question I would ask the economics community is whether this demonstration is universally acclaimed as true by all expert opinion or whether there are any other opinions or analyses around to compare it with.
That's how enquiry and research works normally.
Absolutely it does.
There is plenty of research, take your pick. It has been observed for example that the biggest displacement/replacement is immigrant => immigrant ie immigrants displace other immigrants in the workforce and that there is a small negative effect on the lowest paid, again usually immigrants.
But yes absolutely - the more research the better.
One annoying error that seems to be occurring right now is the slow booster rollout and teen vaccinations.
We were really good at this in the first half of the year. But these vaccinations are going on far far slower than the original rollout, and it doesn't seem to be supply constrained.
Yes, both the volume of vaccinations and the communications around them seem to have slowed to a crawl. In my area, I've no idea where or how vaccinations are available now, nor does anyone I know, and the daily numbers are small - all in sharp contrast to phase 1 of the rollout. I'm due my booster jab (6 months since dose 2), but haven't heard anything yet. It was really easy to book second jabs, but the information on boosters is simply "wait till you hear from someone", which is slightly disconcerting.
Edited update: I posted the above an hour ago, and I've just received a text inviting me to book a booster jab - at a vaccination centre rather than GP. I take it all back!
I have my booster jab booked at my GP for early November on a Saturday (Diabetes, cancer treatment last year).
They are doing appointments (not sure how many tracks) on a 1 appointment per minute granularity.
If things had gone well no 10 would be basking in the glory . You can’t have it both ways . The bigger failing IMO is what happened last autumn and in the early part of the winter rather than in March 2020.
Things did go well.
We got through a global pandemic without the NHS collapsing, got a vaccine, had a vaccine rollout.
Job done. The vaccine is the element the government is most responsible for and they did it.
We can't and shouldn't prevent everyone from ever dying. What we can and have done is ensure the NHS is there for those who get sick and a vaccine is there for anyone who isn't a brainwashed idiot.
The government have made plenty of mistakes. They locked down too long and too hard, not too late or too softly.
On lockdown the government had Peter Hitchens castigating them for locking down too much and Piers Morgan castigating them for not locking down enough.
On the basis of that I'd guess they got it about right to be honest...
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
That's bollocks about Starmer. He wanted a one week firebreak. What was required was hard lockdown from October (government went November, just about okay) through to May.
The bit I'm thinking of is the unlocking in early December and the flailing around before and after Christmas. Avoid that spike and you don't need a hard lockdown, because you're only seeking to keep cases roughly flat rather than driving them down.
Absolutely Johnson got it wrong. But so did Drakeford. And you are so wrong about not needing a hard lockdown. Just look at New Zealand and Australia these last few weeks.
I don't have a problem with people calling out the government for not doing enough to stop the spread of the virus and saving lives. I do have a problem with people who pretend that there was a magic solution that did that and meant we didn't have to have a hard lockdown.
They couldn't handle Delta without lockdowns and/or vaccines but they got through the previous variants without recourse to magic, as did Japan.
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
So the wokeists that gave Obama his Nobel Prize For Fuck Knows What has now extended to Economics.
(that sound you just heard was Gardenwalker's head exploding....)
David Card's work in labour economics with the late Alan Kreuger is exceptionally careful and brilliantly executed empirical analysis. I am very happy to see it being honoured in this way. I wouldn't imagine there is much overlap between the decision-making bodies awarding the Economics and Peace prizes, not least as the Economics one isn't a 'proper' Nobel prize, as non-economists never tire of pointing out. I'm afraid that your comment simply demonstrates (a) your ignorance of the field and (b) that 'woke' has come to mean 'anything that reactionaries don't like or can't understand.'
That's brilliant, I think we are now moving towards a working definition of woke.
Woke* = people or ideas that reactionaries don't like or can't understand.
* in everyday usage, often used to shut down or pre-empt discussion/debate about such ideas and the people who propound them.
Fortunately the woke will have the Free Speech Union to protect them from the reactionaries shutting them down......
If things had gone well no 10 would be basking in the glory . You can’t have it both ways . The bigger failing IMO is what happened last autumn and in the early part of the winter rather than in March 2020.
There were big mistakes at the start, as winter turned to spring in 2020, decisive action then, lockdown and a grip on testing inc around care homes, would have saved tens of thousands of lives, probably also a great deal of money, this is clear to everybody now and was clear to many at the time; then there were more big mistakes in the summer of that year, the nonsense of 'eat out to help out', a mood of 'phew it's over' complacency rife and encouraged, and this was followed by perhaps the biggest and least forgivable mistakes of all in the autumn and winter, the PM dithering, giving house & head space to Covid deniers, again no grip, that's a theme here, culminating in the omnishambles of Christmas, full steam ahead and on, off, sort of on, ok if you must, the schools told to open then closed again in a blind panic a couple of days later, a vicious 2nd wave of the disease given a flying start for no better reason than Johnson's desire to play politics with a situation he still, after almost a year in the thick of it, failed to comprehend beyond the level of bright enough and quite interested layman.
Is that an attempt to write the longest single sentence ever posted on PB? HYUFD will have to try to beat it.
It was! Good spot. I'm experimenting with the semi-colon. It's clunky atm but once I've honed it we'll be looking at a whole new style of PB punditry that people will lap up and be keen to copy. I'm thinking.
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
It has long been known. Just that it is quite inconvenient to the send 'em home brigade.
As a non economist, neutral on the question, the question I would ask the economics community is whether this demonstration is universally acclaimed as true by all expert opinion or whether there are any other opinions or analyses around to compare it with.
That's how enquiry and research works normally.
Absolutely it does.
There is plenty of research, take your pick. It has been observed for example that the biggest displacement/replacement is immigrant => immigrant ie immigrants displace other immigrants in the workforce and that there is a small negative effect on the lowest paid, again usually immigrants.
But yes absolutely - the more research the better.
I'm not sure that negative effect is that small when other factors are taken into account.
Remember the original research was done in America where minimum wages are so low that most people are paid more than that.
The problem with economics is that multiple factors are always in work, regardless of the methods used to separate them.
But also if immigration doesn't significantly reduce wages, why has the lack of immigration resulted in them increasing rapidly?
Being entirely selfish it will not effect my wife and I
As it happens this policy will, I predict, be dropped by a shameless Johnson days after COP21 ends and the whole circus has moved out of Glasgow.
I thought it was COP26 but I just think it is unworkable
My house is fully insulated but @Gallowgate said that only houses built in the last 20 years would qualify for the degree of insulation required and he is an expert on the subject
I think the distinction is between fully insulated (in the sense of as much insulation as you can sensibly put on an older house), which is less than the amount of insulation you need to allow a heat pump to make your house reliably comfortable.
Design the building right ("Passivhaus") and you can cut the heating requirements by 75% or so, which is handily the sort of carbon dioxide reduction we're looking for.
I don't see why it should be thought of as unworkable.
A ban on new installs of gas boilers from 2035 gives us until about 2045-2050 to replace all of them - which is well over 20 years - since they all have a lifecycle.
The Scottish Government policy announced today (I posted a link earlier) is 5 years earlier:
Their net zero target date is 2045 (vs 2050).
Ban on installing fossil fuel boilers from 2025 for off-gas properties Ban on installing fossil fuel boilers from 2030 for all properties
The suggestion for England is 5 years behind the Scottish proposals. If it all fails @malcolmg and @Theuniondivvie will be donning their knitted popsocks 5 years before @TSE and @Leon .
It's important to ignore the Greens, just as we ignore Extinction Rebellion, as they have marketed their position as essentially broadcasting the fictional claim that "nothing has been done".
A huge amount has been done.
I just can't see how it will work.
Are we really going to force someone to demolish a house just because their boiler has packed in? Because that's effectively what you are doing if you require everyone to use a heat pump in all circumstances.
My 1920s bungalow doesn't have a full cavity, so it would have to go. There's no space to clad it externally.
Or are we going to end up forcing people to go back to direct electrical heating of the kind you still find in places off the gas network?
The government will end up having to make exceptions. Many of them.
That's not right.
It's perfectly possible properly to insulate / improve solid walled houses. I have done a whole series of them myself. It doesn't need a full cavity - which as you say weren't a regular thing until perhaps 1925-1930.
You can internally insulate it (which will take around 3-4" off each external wall done well), or externally insulate it. In either case you can easily take it up to a decent standard (say a C or even a B on the EPC scale). Those approaches are even routinely used under the ECO programme for people who qualify for support, and have been for many years. Perhaps there are slightly more wrinkles and PM needed, but it is a normal thing to do.
Today building without a cavity is also a normal thing to do in many technologies / types of build.
Personally I have done an 1850s cottage, several pre WW1, and a couple more from the 1920s - all solid walled.
Yes there will be exceptions, but a very small proportion.
If you're house is very well insulated (not difficult, just lots) direct electrical heating can be fine and is coming back for new houses. One option is to have essentially Willis Heaters (like immersion heaters) installed directly in the slab, and run them on Economy-7. A quality house will take days to leak the heat out, so that approach can work fine running overnight.
These days many do not bother with heating upstairs, except perhaps an electric towel rail and a fan heater in the cupboard for once a year when a boost is needed or something breaks.
(Though that highlights that for well-insulated, airtight houses, controlled cooling is as important as controlled heating.)
How do you install a heat pump in a terraced house?
One of the common themes of COVID around the world is that people change their behaviour when things get really bad.
That never happened here. The changes to behaviour only ever came after the government changed the rules.
Now, that's a small positive, but I wonder to what extent behaviour didn't change because the bad stuff was well hidden from us?
I'm not sure about that. I kept a record. On March 8 2020 I went to the pub, but was nervous about doing so. I didn't go again until after lockdown had ended - I normally go 2-3 times a week. The pubs were closed by the government on March 21, I think. Most people I knew were similar - they started changing their behaviour from the beginning of March, three weeks before the government changed the rules.
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
That's bollocks about Starmer. He wanted a one week firebreak. What was required was hard lockdown from October (government went November, just about okay) through to May.
The bit I'm thinking of is the unlocking in early December and the flailing around before and after Christmas. Avoid that spike and you don't need a hard lockdown, because you're only seeking to keep cases roughly flat rather than driving them down.
Absolutely Johnson got it wrong. But so did Drakeford. And you are so wrong about not needing a hard lockdown. Just look at New Zealand and Australia these last few weeks.
I don't have a problem with people calling out the government for not doing enough to stop the spread of the virus and saving lives. I do have a problem with people who pretend that there was a magic solution that did that and meant we didn't have to have a hard lockdown.
They couldn't handle Delta without lockdowns and/or vaccines but they got through the previous variants without recourse to magic, as did Japan.
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
That's bollocks about Starmer. He wanted a one week firebreak. What was required was hard lockdown from October (government went November, just about okay) through to May.
The bit I'm thinking of is the unlocking in early December and the flailing around before and after Christmas. Avoid that spike and you don't need a hard lockdown, because you're only seeking to keep cases roughly flat rather than driving them down.
Absolutely Johnson got it wrong. But so did Drakeford. And you are so wrong about not needing a hard lockdown. Just look at New Zealand and Australia these last few weeks.
I don't have a problem with people calling out the government for not doing enough to stop the spread of the virus and saving lives. I do have a problem with people who pretend that there was a magic solution that did that and meant we didn't have to have a hard lockdown.
They couldn't handle Delta without lockdowns and/or vaccines but they got through the previous variants without recourse to magic, as did Japan.
Did they get the Kent variant?
Oh, and they did shut their borders...
The advice from the World Health Organisation, Public Health England and other experts, at the time, was not to shut the borders.
The govt are continually criticised for this but they followed the advice.
If things had gone well no 10 would be basking in the glory . You can’t have it both ways . The bigger failing IMO is what happened last autumn and in the early part of the winter rather than in March 2020.
There were big mistakes at the start, as winter turned to spring in 2020, decisive action then, lockdown and a grip on testing inc around care homes, would have saved tens of thousands of lives, probably also a great deal of money, this is clear to everybody now and was clear to many at the time; then there were more big mistakes in the summer of that year, the nonsense of 'eat out to help out', a mood of 'phew it's over' complacency rife and encouraged, and this was followed by perhaps the biggest and least forgivable mistakes of all in the autumn and winter, the PM dithering, giving house & head space to Covid deniers, again no grip, that's a theme here, culminating in the omnishambles of Christmas, full steam ahead and on, off, sort of on, ok if you must, the schools told to open then closed again in a blind panic a couple of days later, a vicious 2nd wave of the disease given a flying start for no better reason than Johnson's desire to play politics with a situation he still, after almost a year in the thick of it, failed to comprehend beyond the level of bright enough and quite interested layman.
Is that an attempt to write the longest single sentence ever posted on PB? HYUFD will have to try to beat it.
It was! Good spot. I'm experimenting with the semi-colon. It's clunky atm but once I've honed it we'll be looking at a whole new style of PB punditry that people will lap up and be keen to copy. I'm thinking.
Writing novels in a single sentence is the fashion. They win prizes. Roll over John Milton and James Joyce:
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
It has long been known. Just that it is quite inconvenient to the send 'em home brigade.
As a non economist, neutral on the question, the question I would ask the economics community is whether this demonstration is universally acclaimed as true by all expert opinion or whether there are any other opinions or analyses around to compare it with.
That's how enquiry and research works normally.
Absolutely it does.
There is plenty of research, take your pick. It has been observed for example that the biggest displacement/replacement is immigrant => immigrant ie immigrants displace other immigrants in the workforce and that there is a small negative effect on the lowest paid, again usually immigrants.
But yes absolutely - the more research the better.
I'm not sure that negative effect is that small when other factors are taken into account.
Remember the original research was done in America where minimum wages are so low that most people are paid more than that.
The problem with economics is that multiple factors are always in work, regardless of the methods used to separate them.
But also if immigration doesn't significantly reduce wages, why has the lack of immigration resulted in them increasing rapidly?
As you say ceteris is never paribus so it is difficult to tell. As @rcs1000 noted yesterday a post-Covid bounce might well account for much of the current rise.
But with a minor effect as @MaxPB pointed out about possible lower per capita consumption from lower paid workers, evened out by the likely demand multiplier it is, at least at the macro level, and accepting the "it's not my GDP" premise, likely the case that immigration doesn't significantly lower wages and conversely lower immigration doesn't significantly increase them.
The biggest failure is and has always been our failure to shut the border in early March and offer managed quarantine to all arrivals at no cost for anyone who had left before that date and paid managed quarantine to everyone who left after it.
I am glad we have collectively decided that locking down as soon as someone sneezes in far-east Asia, given how early we would have to have acted to make the virus magically go away, is a sustainable way to run society. I predict this will have no negative consequences whatsoever …..
Central Europe offers a counterfactual. They locked down before seeding and fared better than western Europe at first, but their winter was even nastier than ours and their overall death rate is similar/worse. Did the UK suffer materially worse outcomes for dithering longer?
Obviously the events of March 2020 were awful in western Europe, but if the question is purely "did locking down a couple of weeks too late make a difference in the long term", I can't see how. Immunity doesn't appear magically out of thin air with no vaccine guaranteed
This is exactly the point I was making earlier. The game changer was vaccines. Until then the only thing to manage in deaths was the timing and the peaks. We did that.
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
That's bollocks about Starmer. He wanted a one week firebreak. What was required was hard lockdown from October (government went November, just about okay) through to May.
The bit I'm thinking of is the unlocking in early December and the flailing around before and after Christmas. Avoid that spike and you don't need a hard lockdown, because you're only seeking to keep cases roughly flat rather than driving them down.
Absolutely Johnson got it wrong. But so did Drakeford. And you are so wrong about not needing a hard lockdown. Just look at New Zealand and Australia these last few weeks.
I don't have a problem with people calling out the government for not doing enough to stop the spread of the virus and saving lives. I do have a problem with people who pretend that there was a magic solution that did that and meant we didn't have to have a hard lockdown.
They couldn't handle Delta without lockdowns and/or vaccines but they got through the previous variants without recourse to magic, as did Japan.
Did they get the Kent variant?
Oh, and they did shut their borders...
Yes, weirdly the borders were open at that point, the Japanese were pretty dozy about closing them compared to how fast they were to give useful and somewhat disruptive advice. But the Kent variant only had a chance to be born in the first place because the British let the previous variants run amok.
Who would be a scientist, eh? Job description presumably didn't include bearing the brunt of blame for sincerely arrived at views and advice. In the middle of a black swan event.
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
That's bollocks about Starmer. He wanted a one week firebreak. What was required was hard lockdown from October (government went November, just about okay) through to May.
The bit I'm thinking of is the unlocking in early December and the flailing around before and after Christmas. Avoid that spike and you don't need a hard lockdown, because you're only seeking to keep cases roughly flat rather than driving them down.
Absolutely Johnson got it wrong. But so did Drakeford. And you are so wrong about not needing a hard lockdown. Just look at New Zealand and Australia these last few weeks.
I don't have a problem with people calling out the government for not doing enough to stop the spread of the virus and saving lives. I do have a problem with people who pretend that there was a magic solution that did that and meant we didn't have to have a hard lockdown.
They couldn't handle Delta without lockdowns and/or vaccines but they got through the previous variants without recourse to magic, as did Japan.
Did they get the Kent variant?
Oh, and they did shut their borders...
Yes, weirdly the borders were open at that point, the Japanese were pretty dozy about closing them compared to how fast they were to give useful and somewhat disruptive advice. But the Kent variant only had a chance to be born in the first place because the British let the previous variants run amok.
As has been pointed out, we don't know where the Kent variant originated, only where it was first detected.
Being entirely selfish it will not effect my wife and I
As it happens this policy will, I predict, be dropped by a shameless Johnson days after COP21 ends and the whole circus has moved out of Glasgow.
I thought it was COP26 but I just think it is unworkable
My house is fully insulated but @Gallowgate said that only houses built in the last 20 years would qualify for the degree of insulation required and he is an expert on the subject
I think the distinction is between fully insulated (in the sense of as much insulation as you can sensibly put on an older house), which is less than the amount of insulation you need to allow a heat pump to make your house reliably comfortable.
Design the building right ("Passivhaus") and you can cut the heating requirements by 75% or so, which is handily the sort of carbon dioxide reduction we're looking for.
I don't see why it should be thought of as unworkable.
A ban on new installs of gas boilers from 2035 gives us until about 2045-2050 to replace all of them - which is well over 20 years - since they all have a lifecycle.
The Scottish Government policy announced today (I posted a link earlier) is 5 years earlier:
Their net zero target date is 2045 (vs 2050).
Ban on installing fossil fuel boilers from 2025 for off-gas properties Ban on installing fossil fuel boilers from 2030 for all properties
The suggestion for England is 5 years behind the Scottish proposals. If it all fails @malcolmg and @Theuniondivvie will be donning their knitted popsocks 5 years before @TSE and @Leon .
It's important to ignore the Greens, just as we ignore Extinction Rebellion, as they have marketed their position as essentially broadcasting the fictional claim that "nothing has been done".
A huge amount has been done.
I just can't see how it will work.
Are we really going to force someone to demolish a house just because their boiler has packed in? Because that's effectively what you are doing if you require everyone to use a heat pump in all circumstances.
My 1920s bungalow doesn't have a full cavity, so it would have to go. There's no space to clad it externally.
Or are we going to end up forcing people to go back to direct electrical heating of the kind you still find in places off the gas network?
The government will end up having to make exceptions. Many of them.
That's not right.
It's perfectly possible properly to insulate / improve solid walled houses. I have done a whole series of them myself. It doesn't need a full cavity - which as you say weren't a regular thing until perhaps 1925-1930.
You can internally insulate it (which will take around 3-4" off each external wall done well), or externally insulate it. In either case you can easily take it up to a decent standard (say a C or even a B on the EPC scale). Those approaches are even routinely used under the ECO programme for people who qualify for support, and have been for many years. Perhaps there are slightly more wrinkles and PM needed, but it is a normal thing to do.
Today building without a cavity is also a normal thing to do in many technologies / types of build.
Personally I have done an 1850s cottage, several pre WW1, and a couple more from the 1920s - all solid walled.
Yes there will be exceptions, but a very small proportion.
If you're house is very well insulated (not difficult, just lots) direct electrical heating can be fine and is coming back for new houses. One option is to have essentially Willis Heaters (like immersion heaters) installed directly in the slab, and run them on Economy-7. A quality house will take days to leak the heat out, so that approach can work fine running overnight.
These days many do not bother with heating upstairs, except perhaps an electric towel rail and a fan heater in the cupboard for once a year when a boost is needed or something breaks.
(Though that highlights that for well-insulated, airtight houses, controlled cooling is as important as controlled heating.)
How do you install a heat pump in a terraced house?
Air source heat pump to the front or rear of the property.
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
That's bollocks about Starmer. He wanted a one week firebreak. What was required was hard lockdown from October (government went November, just about okay) through to May.
The bit I'm thinking of is the unlocking in early December and the flailing around before and after Christmas. Avoid that spike and you don't need a hard lockdown, because you're only seeking to keep cases roughly flat rather than driving them down.
Absolutely Johnson got it wrong. But so did Drakeford. And you are so wrong about not needing a hard lockdown. Just look at New Zealand and Australia these last few weeks.
I don't have a problem with people calling out the government for not doing enough to stop the spread of the virus and saving lives. I do have a problem with people who pretend that there was a magic solution that did that and meant we didn't have to have a hard lockdown.
They couldn't handle Delta without lockdowns and/or vaccines but they got through the previous variants without recourse to magic, as did Japan.
Did they get the Kent variant?
Oh, and they did shut their borders...
Yes, weirdly the borders were open at that point, the Japanese were pretty dozy about closing them compared to how fast they were to give useful and somewhat disruptive advice. But the Kent variant only had a chance to be born in the first place because the British let the previous variants run amok.
Do we know if the Kent variant was born in the UK or did we import it?
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
So the wokeists that gave Obama his Nobel Prize For Fuck Knows What has now extended to Economics.
(that sound you just heard was Gardenwalker's head exploding....)
Looking at global vaccinations, the problem now is definitely not a lack of raw vaccines - we've gone from about 40 million/day to ~ 25 million now. I can't think manufacturing has particularly slowed - Nigeria has over 200 million people and yet vaccination there looks utterly dire. It's as if the richer world has vaccinated itself and is now playing variant roulette with the third world ! This is not an anti booster jab post, I think there is clearly capacity to do both.
We should be investigating why we spent so long in lockdown while Sweden and others largely coped without it, not why we didn't have our liberties taken away for longer.
This seems like an interesting paper. Have only skimmed it, but the conclusion that "small changes in the timing or effectiveness of interventions have disproportionately large effects on total mortality" would not speak well of Johnson's dithering before each UK lockdown (when SAGE, Cummings, etc. were urging immediate action).
Nice counterfactuals with the UK/Denmark/Sweden though. See what you make of it. It's always good to bat for civil liberties.
From frying pan of patriotic education to fire of war on woke. Shame.
What evidence do you have that she gives the slightest monkey's about the latter?
You would have to address that to someone who suggested that she gives the slightest monkey’s about the latter. I’d hazard a guess that it’s an issue close to your heart though, there’s seems to be not a PB reactionary that isn’t obsessed with it afaics.
SCOTTISH Labour has demanded that Holyrood launches its own detailed inquiry into the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic after a damning report from MPs criticised the UK Government’s slow response at the start of the crisis.
If things had gone well no 10 would be basking in the glory . You can’t have it both ways . The bigger failing IMO is what happened last autumn and in the early part of the winter rather than in March 2020.
Things did go well.
We got through a global pandemic without the NHS collapsing, got a vaccine, had a vaccine rollout.
Job done. The vaccine is the element the government is most responsible for and they did it.
We can't and shouldn't prevent everyone from ever dying. What we can and have done is ensure the NHS is there for those who get sick and a vaccine is there for anyone who isn't a brainwashed idiot.
The government have made plenty of mistakes. They locked down too long and too hard, not too late or too softly.
On lockdown the government had Peter Hitchens castigating them for locking down too much and Piers Morgan castigating them for not locking down enough.
On the basis of that I'd guess they got it about right to be honest...
The average of two idiots' opinions is not common sense, let alone intelligence....
Being entirely selfish it will not effect my wife and I
As it happens this policy will, I predict, be dropped by a shameless Johnson days after COP21 ends and the whole circus has moved out of Glasgow.
I thought it was COP26 but I just think it is unworkable
My house is fully insulated but @Gallowgate said that only houses built in the last 20 years would qualify for the degree of insulation required and he is an expert on the subject
I think the distinction is between fully insulated (in the sense of as much insulation as you can sensibly put on an older house), which is less than the amount of insulation you need to allow a heat pump to make your house reliably comfortable.
Design the building right ("Passivhaus") and you can cut the heating requirements by 75% or so, which is handily the sort of carbon dioxide reduction we're looking for.
I don't see why it should be thought of as unworkable.
A ban on new installs of gas boilers from 2035 gives us until about 2045-2050 to replace all of them - which is well over 20 years - since they all have a lifecycle.
The Scottish Government policy announced today (I posted a link earlier) is 5 years earlier:
Their net zero target date is 2045 (vs 2050).
Ban on installing fossil fuel boilers from 2025 for off-gas properties Ban on installing fossil fuel boilers from 2030 for all properties
The suggestion for England is 5 years behind the Scottish proposals. If it all fails @malcolmg and @Theuniondivvie will be donning their knitted popsocks 5 years before @TSE and @Leon .
It's important to ignore the Greens, just as we ignore Extinction Rebellion, as they have marketed their position as essentially broadcasting the fictional claim that "nothing has been done".
A huge amount has been done.
I just can't see how it will work.
Are we really going to force someone to demolish a house just because their boiler has packed in? Because that's effectively what you are doing if you require everyone to use a heat pump in all circumstances.
My 1920s bungalow doesn't have a full cavity, so it would have to go. There's no space to clad it externally.
Or are we going to end up forcing people to go back to direct electrical heating of the kind you still find in places off the gas network?
The government will end up having to make exceptions. Many of them.
That's not right.
It's perfectly possible properly to insulate / improve solid walled houses. I have done a whole series of them myself. It doesn't need a full cavity - which as you say weren't a regular thing until perhaps 1925-1930.
You can internally insulate it (which will take around 3-4" off each external wall done well), or externally insulate it. In either case you can easily take it up to a decent standard (say a C or even a B on the EPC scale). Those approaches are even routinely used under the ECO programme for people who qualify for support, and have been for many years. Perhaps there are slightly more wrinkles and PM needed, but it is a normal thing to do.
Today building without a cavity is also a normal thing to do in many technologies / types of build.
Personally I have done an 1850s cottage, several pre WW1, and a couple more from the 1920s - all solid walled.
Yes there will be exceptions, but a very small proportion.
If you're house is very well insulated (not difficult, just lots) direct electrical heating can be fine and is coming back for new houses. One option is to have essentially Willis Heaters (like immersion heaters) installed directly in the slab, and run them on Economy-7. A quality house will take days to leak the heat out, so that approach can work fine running overnight.
These days many do not bother with heating upstairs, except perhaps an electric towel rail and a fan heater in the cupboard for once a year when a boost is needed or something breaks.
(Though that highlights that for well-insulated, airtight houses, controlled cooling is as important as controlled heating.)
How do you install a heat pump in a terraced house?
I'm not sure how the British usually do it but you can install a heat pump anywhere you can get a pipe to an outer wall or roof and mount a box on the outside.
One of the common themes of COVID around the world is that people change their behaviour when things get really bad.
That never happened here. The changes to behaviour only ever came after the government changed the rules.
Now, that's a small positive, but I wonder to what extent behaviour didn't change because the bad stuff was well hidden from us?
behaviour didn't change because the bad stuff was well hidden from us?
Was it ?
I definitely remember pre vaccine covid being something I went out of my way to avoid.
Some did, some didn't.
To me a lot of oldies seemed to be on a suicide mission.
My Dad went grocery shopping in the poky small supermarket on their local London high street on every day of the pandemic, because changing his routine to have food delivered was not a viable option.
He's somehow managed to evade catching the virus, or at least didn't experience any symptoms when he did so.
He was fastidious about checking the rules, but completely missed the spirit of them.
I only hope his luck continues to hold in other respects of his life.
One of the common themes of COVID around the world is that people change their behaviour when things get really bad.
That never happened here. The changes to behaviour only ever came after the government changed the rules.
Now, that's a small positive, but I wonder to what extent behaviour didn't change because the bad stuff was well hidden from us?
behaviour didn't change because the bad stuff was well hidden from us?
Was it ?
I definitely remember pre vaccine covid being something I went out of my way to avoid.
Some did, some didn't.
To me a lot of oldies seemed to be on a suicide mission.
My Dad went grocery shopping in the poky small supermarket on their local London high street on every day of the pandemic, because changing his routine to have food delivered was not a viable option.
He's somehow managed to evade catching the virus, or at least didn't experience any symptoms when he did so.
He was fastidious about checking the rules, but completely missed the spirit of them.
I only hope his luck continues to hold in other respects of his life.
Do you know what? I reckon we could have allowed quite a lot of social and commercial stuff (especially outdoors) to continue as normal. What should have been banned throughout was going into other people's homes.
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
So the wokeists that gave Obama his Nobel Prize For Fuck Knows What has now extended to Economics.
(that sound you just heard was Gardenwalker's head exploding....)
I’ll wait of course for your devastating takedown of Card’s work.
Take your time.
Card's work is controversial, and his findings are heavily disputed. On the whole, I agree with him on employment and disagree on wages.
See for example the finding that a 1 percentage point increase in the ratio of migrants to non-migrants leads to a 0.6% decrease in wages for workers at the 5th earnings percentile and a 0.5% decrease at the 10th percentile (Dustmann et al (2013)). Or, from Nickell and Salaheen 2015, in the unskilled and semi-skilled service sector, a 1 percentage point rise in the share of migrants reduced average wages in that occupation by about 0.2%.
Or another study in 2018 estimated that an increase in the number of EU migrants corresponding to 1% of the UK-born working-age population resulted in a 0.8% decrease in UK-born wages at the 5th and 10th percentiles (i.e. people in the bottom 5-10% of earners), and a 0.6% increase at the 90th percentile (i.e. high earners). In practice, this means that between 1993 and 2017, the total effect of EU migration on the wages of UK-born workers was estimated to be a 4.9% reduction in wages for those at the 10th earnings percentile, a 1.6% reduction at the 25th percentile, a 1.6% increase at the 50th percentile, and a 4.4% increase at the 90th percentile.
When you take the gamut of their empirical work you can find aspects that support various political positions as indeed you show. A bit like the Bible. But Card's award (earned with the late Alan Krueger) is for their methodological advances in teasing out causation. This is not easy in a subject like economics where there are multiple feedback processes. It relies on the econometric concepts of 'identification' and exogeneity. Unlike experimental sciences, controlled experiments are not possible in economics, so it takes imagination and careful specification to use 'natural experiments' to tease out causal patterns.
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
It has long been known. Just that it is quite inconvenient to the send 'em home brigade.
As a non economist, neutral on the question, the question I would ask the economics community is whether this demonstration is universally acclaimed as true by all expert opinion or whether there are any other opinions or analyses around to compare it with.
That's how enquiry and research works normally.
Absolutely it does.
There is plenty of research, take your pick. It has been observed for example that the biggest displacement/replacement is immigrant => immigrant ie immigrants displace other immigrants in the workforce and that there is a small negative effect on the lowest paid, again usually immigrants.
But yes absolutely - the more research the better.
I'm not sure that negative effect is that small when other factors are taken into account.
Remember the original research was done in America where minimum wages are so low that most people are paid more than that.
The problem with economics is that multiple factors are always in work, regardless of the methods used to separate them.
But also if immigration doesn't significantly reduce wages, why has the lack of immigration resulted in them increasing rapidly?
As you say ceteris is never paribus so it is difficult to tell. As @rcs1000 noted yesterday a post-Covid bounce might well account for much of the current rise.
But with a minor effect as @MaxPB pointed out about possible lower per capita consumption from lower paid workers, evened out by the likely demand multiplier it is, at least at the macro level, and accepting the "it's not my GDP" premise, likely the case that immigration doesn't significantly lower wages and conversely lower immigration doesn't significantly increase them.
I think it does level out on the macro level, but it also creates winners and losers. The winners are people like us in higher wage brackets who benefit from lower priced services and the losers (and their research also identifies this) are people in lower wage brackets who have their wage growth stunted. The overall picture is of higher GDP, but increasing inequality with the rich benefitting from most of the increase.
Simply put, unrestricted immigration is an unregulated free market. I think everyone agrees that unregulated free markets create problems, to deny that is to deny basic fact. Having an unlimited pool of labour supply distorted the market in favour of middle and higher income people at the expense of lower income people. Again, we can see that effect with the top decile having a significantly higher proportion of overall earnings than they had 20 years ago.
Once again, I'm not and have never disputed that immigration increases aggregate GDP. Importing working people will tend to do that. My issue is that by doing so we've created an unequal society. It's rich people pulling the ladder up, and it's never going to be something I'm in favour of, everyone deserves their chance.
A less researched issue lies within a welfare state, the aggregate GDP increase may not actually be large enough to absorb the cost increase of having low wage immigrants within a universal welfare state. Even without COVID the UK was heading to highest level of taxation during peace time and this is a direct result of the quality of GDP being imported. A £15-20k worker is highly likely to be a net recipient of welfare (in work tax credits, NHS, education for their kids, housing benefit against about £2-4k in tax generated) in the UK which means the welfare burden is increased by each low wage worker imported.
I'm yet to be convinced that the deleterious effects of low wage migration for low wage Brits is outweighed by the net increase in aggregate GDP. In fact I'd say that most of the data supports my view that creating winners at the top does nothing to help the losers at the bottom, the money doesn't trickle down fast enough.
My question about such a report: hoe much hindsightism is involved? It seems reasonable to say that locking down a week earlier in March would have saved thousands of lives. With hindsight.
But what advice were the government getting at the time?
Additionally, we had never done a lockdown before in this manner. The entire apparatus of state had to be turned around to face this issue - and the leviathan of state is never good at responding quickly at scale to novel situations.
I have a great deal of sympathy with the politicians who had to deal with this back in March 2020 - especially as the plans we had prepared targeted the wrong sort of disease. What's more problematic for me are the events of November / December 2020.
But we must also bring China into this: if China had been truthful about the scale of the problem they faced back in early 2020, then the world might have been a little more prepared. Their lies and denials could well have led to the loss of countless lives.
All they needed to say to the world was: "This is really, really bad, people." Instead they said: "Move along; nothing to see here."
I recall very clearly the scientists arguing that it would be wrong to lockdown too early because they were worried about "lockdown fatigue" resulting in lockdown breaking down as the pandemic peaked - resulting in more deaths. As it turned out the British public were more willing to accept limitations on their liberty than had been modelled. Ultimate responsibility rests with the politicians and I think they could have been more rigorous in probing why other countries were doing things differently, but going against scientific advice would have been "brave".
The R4 commentary on the report just now saying that anyone looking for "the guilty men" will be disappointed - it looks at systemic failures rather than bad actors.
I look forward to similarly robust reports from Edinburgh, Cardiff & Belfast....
Forgive my cynicism (esp. as I like their housing heating policy from yesterday), but presumably Sturgeon will submit hundreds of pages of evidence one hour before the hearing after sitting on it for months, then claim that she has been exonerated.
It is rather unfortunate that the header uses the only technically accurate "highest death toll in Europe" trope, which is very misleading.
However, Mike, thanks for the article.
Another unionist halfwitted whiner trying to deflect from Boris's disaster
If immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor lead to lower wages even when including “low skilled” immigrants, why don't we remove all immigration controls?
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
That's bollocks about Starmer. He wanted a one week firebreak. What was required was hard lockdown from October (government went November, just about okay) through to May.
The bit I'm thinking of is the unlocking in early December and the flailing around before and after Christmas. Avoid that spike and you don't need a hard lockdown, because you're only seeking to keep cases roughly flat rather than driving them down.
Absolutely Johnson got it wrong. But so did Drakeford. And you are so wrong about not needing a hard lockdown. Just look at New Zealand and Australia these last few weeks.
I don't have a problem with people calling out the government for not doing enough to stop the spread of the virus and saving lives. I do have a problem with people who pretend that there was a magic solution that did that and meant we didn't have to have a hard lockdown.
They couldn't handle Delta without lockdowns and/or vaccines but they got through the previous variants without recourse to magic, as did Japan.
Did they get the Kent variant?
Oh, and they did shut their borders...
Yes, weirdly the borders were open at that point, the Japanese were pretty dozy about closing them compared to how fast they were to give useful and somewhat disruptive advice. But the Kent variant only had a chance to be born in the first place because the British let the previous variants run amok.
Do we know if the Kent variant was born in the UK or did we import it?
I don't think there's any way to know that for sure, since you'd have to prove the negative of non-existence in every other country. We know the British incubated it and spread it though.
Being entirely selfish it will not effect my wife and I
As it happens this policy will, I predict, be dropped by a shameless Johnson days after COP21 ends and the whole circus has moved out of Glasgow.
I thought it was COP26 but I just think it is unworkable
My house is fully insulated but @Gallowgate said that only houses built in the last 20 years would qualify for the degree of insulation required and he is an expert on the subject
I think the distinction is between fully insulated (in the sense of as much insulation as you can sensibly put on an older house), which is less than the amount of insulation you need to allow a heat pump to make your house reliably comfortable.
Design the building right ("Passivhaus") and you can cut the heating requirements by 75% or so, which is handily the sort of carbon dioxide reduction we're looking for.
I don't see why it should be thought of as unworkable.
A ban on new installs of gas boilers from 2035 gives us until about 2045-2050 to replace all of them - which is well over 20 years - since they all have a lifecycle.
The Scottish Government policy announced today (I posted a link earlier) is 5 years earlier:
Their net zero target date is 2045 (vs 2050).
Ban on installing fossil fuel boilers from 2025 for off-gas properties Ban on installing fossil fuel boilers from 2030 for all properties
The suggestion for England is 5 years behind the Scottish proposals. If it all fails @malcolmg and @Theuniondivvie will be donning their knitted popsocks 5 years before @TSE and @Leon .
It's important to ignore the Greens, just as we ignore Extinction Rebellion, as they have marketed their position as essentially broadcasting the fictional claim that "nothing has been done".
A huge amount has been done.
I just can't see how it will work.
Are we really going to force someone to demolish a house just because their boiler has packed in? Because that's effectively what you are doing if you require everyone to use a heat pump in all circumstances.
My 1920s bungalow doesn't have a full cavity, so it would have to go. There's no space to clad it externally.
Or are we going to end up forcing people to go back to direct electrical heating of the kind you still find in places off the gas network?
The government will end up having to make exceptions. Many of them.
That's not right.
It's perfectly possible properly to insulate / improve solid walled houses. I have done a whole series of them myself. It doesn't need a full cavity - which as you say weren't a regular thing until perhaps 1925-1930.
You can internally insulate it (which will take around 3-4" off each external wall done well), or externally insulate it. In either case you can easily take it up to a decent standard (say a C or even a B on the EPC scale). Those approaches are even routinely used under the ECO programme for people who qualify for support, and have been for many years. Perhaps there are slightly more wrinkles and PM needed, but it is a normal thing to do.
Today building without a cavity is also a normal thing to do in many technologies / types of build.
Personally I have done an 1850s cottage, several pre WW1, and a couple more from the 1920s - all solid walled.
Yes there will be exceptions, but a very small proportion.
If you're house is very well insulated (not difficult, just lots) direct electrical heating can be fine and is coming back for new houses. One option is to have essentially Willis Heaters (like immersion heaters) installed directly in the slab, and run them on Economy-7. A quality house will take days to leak the heat out, so that approach can work fine running overnight.
These days many do not bother with heating upstairs, except perhaps an electric towel rail and a fan heater in the cupboard for once a year when a boost is needed or something breaks.
(Though that highlights that for well-insulated, airtight houses, controlled cooling is as important as controlled heating.)
How do you install a heat pump in a terraced house?
Pretty much the same as you do anywhere else, with somewhat different constraints and opportuinties (eg fewer walls to insulate, but more challenged for space outside).
Here's a case study of someone doing it in a Victorian terraced house in Brighton, and a one year later experience report.
That is a conventional one, but there are also (usually smaller) models available now that sit inside your house / flat and just have airpipe connections through the outside wall.
It's worth an observation that they renovated their house fabric first, and that afaics they therefore did not need to upsize their radiators. Also that - as with all our parents / grandparents learning how to use their new gas boilers in 1970-1975 - it is a different system that is used differently in some ways.
I am glad we have collectively decided that locking down as soon as someone sneezes in far-east Asia, given how early we would have to have acted to make the virus magically go away, is a sustainable way to run society. I predict this will have no negative consequences whatsoever …..
Central Europe offers a counterfactual. They locked down before seeding and fared better than western Europe at first, but their winter was even nastier than ours and their overall death rate is similar/worse. Did the UK suffer materially worse outcomes for dithering longer?
Obviously the events of March 2020 were awful in western Europe, but if the question is purely "did locking down a couple of weeks too late make a difference in the long term", I can't see how. Immunity doesn't appear magically out of thin air with no vaccine guaranteed
This is exactly the point I was making earlier. The game changer was vaccines. Until then the only thing to manage in deaths was the timing and the peaks. We did that.
We did, sort of, and if the metric for success is the NHS did not collapse the overall response (just) gets a tick. However the death toll would have been lower, and significantly so, with different decisions made at the start of the pandemic and in the autumn/winter. Neither the 1st nor the 2nd wave needed to have been as bad as they were. That vaccines were on the horizon accentuates this point rather than negates it. Without vaccines, or the reasonable expectation of vaccines, the case for long term managing of the virus close to but under NHS capacity to cope would have been stronger. With vaccines coming the better approach would have been to minimize spread as far as practical within the constraints of money and civil liberties. For me, we didn't do this. Many more died than should have done.
I would suggest that the front pages are really terrible for SAGE whose advice the government largely followed in the opning months of the pandemic.
On the main point of needing to lock down earlier, with estimates presented for a week earlier, was that not what SAGE advised, as per the minutes of meetings? - i.e. they called for lockdown a week or more before it happened? Still arguably late, of course.
(Also want to make the point that, like some others, I don't view the government too harshly over the first lockdown. It was at the end of 2020 that they really missed up and - I believe - diverged from the scientific advice).
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
So the wokeists that gave Obama his Nobel Prize For Fuck Knows What has now extended to Economics.
(that sound you just heard was Gardenwalker's head exploding....)
I’ll wait of course for your devastating takedown of Card’s work.
Take your time.
Card's work is controversial, and his findings are heavily disputed. On the whole, I agree with him on employment and disagree on wages.
See for example the finding that a 1 percentage point increase in the ratio of migrants to non-migrants leads to a 0.6% decrease in wages for workers at the 5th earnings percentile and a 0.5% decrease at the 10th percentile (Dustmann et al (2013)). Or, from Nickell and Salaheen 2015, in the unskilled and semi-skilled service sector, a 1 percentage point rise in the share of migrants reduced average wages in that occupation by about 0.2%.
Or another study in 2018 estimated that an increase in the number of EU migrants corresponding to 1% of the UK-born working-age population resulted in a 0.8% decrease in UK-born wages at the 5th and 10th percentiles (i.e. people in the bottom 5-10% of earners), and a 0.6% increase at the 90th percentile (i.e. high earners). In practice, this means that between 1993 and 2017, the total effect of EU migration on the wages of UK-born workers was estimated to be a 4.9% reduction in wages for those at the 10th earnings percentile, a 1.6% reduction at the 25th percentile, a 1.6% increase at the 50th percentile, and a 4.4% increase at the 90th percentile.
When you take the gamut of their empirical work you can find aspects that support various political positions as indeed you show. A bit like the Bible. But Card's award (earned with the late Alan Krueger) is for their methodological advances in teasing out causation. This is not easy in a subject like economics where there are multiple feedback processes. It relies on the econometric concepts of 'identification' and exogeneity. Unlike experimental sciences, controlled experiments are not possible in economics, so it takes imagination and careful specification to use 'natural experiments' to tease out causal patterns.
Yes, of course. Card did excellent work in improving methodology. The Nobel Prize was definitely deserved. I remember reading his famous paper on fast food wages in Pennsylvania and New Jersey when it came out. But my point was that other studies using methodologies developed from his have led to completely opposite conclusions. So those that try to use his award to promote their political ideologies are simply wrong to do so.
SCOTTISH Labour has demanded that Holyrood launches its own detailed inquiry into the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic after a damning report from MPs criticised the UK Government’s slow response at the start of the crisis.
If immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor lead to lower wages even when including “low skilled” immigrants, why don't we remove all immigration controls?
Surely we'd be the richest country in the world
It's not really meant to be a political point, nor is it replicable, but isn't that pretty much the experience of the USA?
Being entirely selfish it will not effect my wife and I
As it happens this policy will, I predict, be dropped by a shameless Johnson days after COP21 ends and the whole circus has moved out of Glasgow.
I thought it was COP26 but I just think it is unworkable
My house is fully insulated but @Gallowgate said that only houses built in the last 20 years would qualify for the degree of insulation required and he is an expert on the subject
I think the distinction is between fully insulated (in the sense of as much insulation as you can sensibly put on an older house), which is less than the amount of insulation you need to allow a heat pump to make your house reliably comfortable.
Design the building right ("Passivhaus") and you can cut the heating requirements by 75% or so, which is handily the sort of carbon dioxide reduction we're looking for.
I don't see why it should be thought of as unworkable.
A ban on new installs of gas boilers from 2035 gives us until about 2045-2050 to replace all of them - which is well over 20 years - since they all have a lifecycle.
The Scottish Government policy announced today (I posted a link earlier) is 5 years earlier:
Their net zero target date is 2045 (vs 2050).
Ban on installing fossil fuel boilers from 2025 for off-gas properties Ban on installing fossil fuel boilers from 2030 for all properties
The suggestion for England is 5 years behind the Scottish proposals. If it all fails @malcolmg and @Theuniondivvie will be donning their knitted popsocks 5 years before @TSE and @Leon .
It's important to ignore the Greens, just as we ignore Extinction Rebellion, as they have marketed their position as essentially broadcasting the fictional claim that "nothing has been done".
A huge amount has been done.
I just can't see how it will work.
Are we really going to force someone to demolish a house just because their boiler has packed in? Because that's effectively what you are doing if you require everyone to use a heat pump in all circumstances.
My 1920s bungalow doesn't have a full cavity, so it would have to go. There's no space to clad it externally.
Or are we going to end up forcing people to go back to direct electrical heating of the kind you still find in places off the gas network?
The government will end up having to make exceptions. Many of them.
That's not right.
It's perfectly possible properly to insulate / improve solid walled houses. I have done a whole series of them myself. It doesn't need a full cavity - which as you say weren't a regular thing until perhaps 1925-1930.
You can internally insulate it (which will take around 3-4" off each external wall done well), or externally insulate it. In either case you can easily take it up to a decent standard (say a C or even a B on the EPC scale). Those approaches are even routinely used under the ECO programme for people who qualify for support, and have been for many years. Perhaps there are slightly more wrinkles and PM needed, but it is a normal thing to do.
Today building without a cavity is also a normal thing to do in many technologies / types of build.
Personally I have done an 1850s cottage, several pre WW1, and a couple more from the 1920s - all solid walled.
Yes there will be exceptions, but a very small proportion.
If you're house is very well insulated (not difficult, just lots) direct electrical heating can be fine and is coming back for new houses. One option is to have essentially Willis Heaters (like immersion heaters) installed directly in the slab, and run them on Economy-7. A quality house will take days to leak the heat out, so that approach can work fine running overnight.
These days many do not bother with heating upstairs, except perhaps an electric towel rail and a fan heater in the cupboard for once a year when a boost is needed or something breaks.
(Though that highlights that for well-insulated, airtight houses, controlled cooling is as important as controlled heating.)
How do you install a heat pump in a terraced house?
I'm not sure how the British usually do it but you can install a heat pump anywhere you can get a pipe to an outer wall or roof and mount a box on the outside.
Yep, I don't really get the question. Terraced/semi/detached doesn't necessarily make that much differene for air source. What you need is good insulation and (ideally) building (or at least gutting) the house at the same time as then you just install the right pipes/radiators/underfloor heating etc.
For ground source, you obviously need a big outside space or deep hole.
I don't really see heat pump being a great retro-fit in many cases.
Wonder if there's evidence of Johnson ignoring scientific advice, like Sturgeon:
NICOLA Sturgeon has been urged to “come clean” after it was reported she overruled advisors who suggested telling the public about a coronavirus outbreak at a major conference.
Tories throwing squirrels out like confetti, their top PR Lady Haw Haw having kittens at the bad press for Boris, tries valiantly to point to it all being Sturgeon's fault. How pathetic can you cretins get. LOL it was a wee lassie did it and then ran away.
So Sturgeon ignoring advice is absolutely fine, while Johnson following it is dreadful? Got it.
Nobody said that, Sturgeon blindly followed Bozo , she was just sly enough to preempt some of his utterance's to pretend she was actually making any decisions rather than just slavishly following UK lead. I was pointing to the fact that as ever you tried to deflect from your Heroes in Westminster, you did not even try to pretend you were comparing others to their standard. As ever your hatred of all things Scottish that make you strive to prove your Englishness by always decrying Scotland as worse than England etc is pathetic. Tory off.
This is utterly bad news, this means the Indian commentary we received at the start of the year during England's tour on India won't be the worst and biased commentary we hear this year.
England fans planning to watch the Ashes on television will have to make do with Australian commentary when the series begins next month.
As Sportsmail revealed in August, BT Sport have bought the live TV rights for the five Tests, but are not planning to send a commentary team to Australia, and will instead rely on a feed provided by host broadcasters Fox and Channel Seven.
Michael Vaughan will be the lone Englishman we hear.
Who in their right mind wouldn't mute the telly whilst listening to TMS?
Because the extra hop(s) the satellite signal and streaming takes then TMS can be anywhere from 5 seconds to 90 seconds ahead of the TV pictures.
Always allows me to watch the wickets fall 'live' as I run in from the kitchen/garden etc when i hear it first on TMS...
Mark Waugh is my favourite cricket commentator, so I’m quite pleased. It also gives more of a feeling of adventure when it’s the other teams comms on a winter tour I think.
I am normally a sporting optimist, but we are going to get slaughtered! The team looks seriously bad for Aussie conditions. To be fair the batsmen, or batters for the easily offended, look bad for any Test match conditions.
This could be the equivalent of the England rugby tour to hell of 1998...
Who would be a scientist, eh? Job description presumably didn't include bearing the brunt of blame for sincerely arrived at views and advice. In the middle of a black swan event.
Well .... an interesting question is why the scientifically advanced countries did so badly?
New Zealand or Norway or Finland do not have the wealth of scientific or epidemiological expertise available to the UK, US, France or Germany.
I would suggest that the front pages are really terrible for SAGE whose advice the government largely followed in the opning months of the pandemic.
Why did a competent government not challenge SAGE and query why other countries were acting far more quickly ?
There was no single science to follow, those made choices about which model they wanted, ignoring the evidence flowing in from abroad.
A bad boy made me do it and ran away-ism is rampant in this government and its supporters. See also Frost and his 'excellent' deal which is apparently now down to the Tories with their 80 seat majority being weak. No argument with BJ & co being described as weak btw,
Being entirely selfish it will not effect my wife and I
As it happens this policy will, I predict, be dropped by a shameless Johnson days after COP21 ends and the whole circus has moved out of Glasgow.
I thought it was COP26 but I just think it is unworkable
My house is fully insulated but @Gallowgate said that only houses built in the last 20 years would qualify for the degree of insulation required and he is an expert on the subject
I think the distinction is between fully insulated (in the sense of as much insulation as you can sensibly put on an older house), which is less than the amount of insulation you need to allow a heat pump to make your house reliably comfortable.
Design the building right ("Passivhaus") and you can cut the heating requirements by 75% or so, which is handily the sort of carbon dioxide reduction we're looking for.
I don't see why it should be thought of as unworkable.
A ban on new installs of gas boilers from 2035 gives us until about 2045-2050 to replace all of them - which is well over 20 years - since they all have a lifecycle.
The Scottish Government policy announced today (I posted a link earlier) is 5 years earlier:
Their net zero target date is 2045 (vs 2050).
Ban on installing fossil fuel boilers from 2025 for off-gas properties Ban on installing fossil fuel boilers from 2030 for all properties
The suggestion for England is 5 years behind the Scottish proposals. If it all fails @malcolmg and @Theuniondivvie will be donning their knitted popsocks 5 years before @TSE and @Leon .
It's important to ignore the Greens, just as we ignore Extinction Rebellion, as they have marketed their position as essentially broadcasting the fictional claim that "nothing has been done".
A huge amount has been done.
I just can't see how it will work.
Are we really going to force someone to demolish a house just because their boiler has packed in? Because that's effectively what you are doing if you require everyone to use a heat pump in all circumstances.
My 1920s bungalow doesn't have a full cavity, so it would have to go. There's no space to clad it externally.
Or are we going to end up forcing people to go back to direct electrical heating of the kind you still find in places off the gas network?
The government will end up having to make exceptions. Many of them.
That's not right.
It's perfectly possible properly to insulate / improve solid walled houses. I have done a whole series of them myself. It doesn't need a full cavity - which as you say weren't a regular thing until perhaps 1925-1930.
You can internally insulate it (which will take around 3-4" off each external wall done well), or externally insulate it. In either case you can easily take it up to a decent standard (say a C or even a B on the EPC scale). Those approaches are even routinely used under the ECO programme for people who qualify for support, and have been for many years. Perhaps there are slightly more wrinkles and PM needed, but it is a normal thing to do.
Today building without a cavity is also a normal thing to do in many technologies / types of build.
Personally I have done an 1850s cottage, several pre WW1, and a couple more from the 1920s - all solid walled.
Yes there will be exceptions, but a very small proportion.
If you're house is very well insulated (not difficult, just lots) direct electrical heating can be fine and is coming back for new houses. One option is to have essentially Willis Heaters (like immersion heaters) installed directly in the slab, and run them on Economy-7. A quality house will take days to leak the heat out, so that approach can work fine running overnight.
These days many do not bother with heating upstairs, except perhaps an electric towel rail and a fan heater in the cupboard for once a year when a boost is needed or something breaks.
(Though that highlights that for well-insulated, airtight houses, controlled cooling is as important as controlled heating.)
How do you install a heat pump in a terraced house?
Air source heat pump to the front or rear of the property.
Have you seen all the equipment required to make an ASHP work, you need a plant room in your house.
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
That's bollocks about Starmer. He wanted a one week firebreak. What was required was hard lockdown from October (government went November, just about okay) through to May.
The bit I'm thinking of is the unlocking in early December and the flailing around before and after Christmas. Avoid that spike and you don't need a hard lockdown, because you're only seeking to keep cases roughly flat rather than driving them down.
I don't see how you could not unlock in early December with cases having fallen in November.
The mistake, in retrospect, was having the November lockdown for only four instead of six weeks.
Perhaps they should have brought together a lockdown extension with the vaccination program and foreign travel restrictions into a public grand strategy:
"Now that vaccination has started I'm asking for just a little more sacrifice."
Let's be honest, the government prioritised Christmas shopping and socialising over Christmas itself.
I said on here at the time that it was odd that the vaccine success wasn't met with a change in strategy.
The media reporting of Christmas was bizarre.
Everyone I knew was planning on having a quiet week off work whereas to the media Christmas involved a continuous stream of dinner parties for a different dozen people each day.
Rather grumpy of me and my wife, but the horribleness of covid aside, Christmas 2020 was one of the best ever, time off together, no socializing, limited abilty to get together with family...
If immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor lead to lower wages even when including “low skilled” immigrants, why don't we remove all immigration controls?
Surely we'd be the richest country in the world
Pretty much how the US became the richest country in the world. Obviously amount of land spare is important though, so would not work in 21st century UK.
It was a once in a century calamity. Short of world war you basically couldn't get a bigger disaster than the one we've just lived through.
I would have been astounded is mistakes hadn't been made.
Gin , trying to justify those lying cheating wasters is not a good thing. No matter what , you could have got anyone off the street that would have done as good or better job of it and would NOT have enriched them , their friends and families to the same levels whilst doing it. Ordinary people would be in jails for far less.
If immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor lead to lower wages even when including “low skilled” immigrants, why don't we remove all immigration controls?
Surely we'd be the richest country in the world
It's not really meant to be a political point, nor is it replicable, but isn't that pretty much the experience of the USA?
Didn't work out too well for the "native workers" though, did it?
If immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor lead to lower wages even when including “low skilled” immigrants, why don't we remove all immigration controls?
Surely we'd be the richest country in the world
Pretty much how the US became the richest country in the world. Obviously amount of land spare is important though, so would not work in 21st century UK.
Or within a welfare state. The US is nothing like the UK in that regard. If a migrant worker comes here and breaks their leg the NHS will treat them the same as someone who has been paying tax for 30 years. In the US that isn't the case. Unlimited immigration works best where there are few to no safety nets, but that also then creates an underclass of people who don't qualify for the same lifestyle as native people which is why welfare state nations don't do it.
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
So the wokeists that gave Obama his Nobel Prize For Fuck Knows What has now extended to Economics.
(that sound you just heard was Gardenwalker's head exploding....)
I’ll wait of course for your devastating takedown of Card’s work.
Take your time.
Card's work is controversial, and his findings are heavily disputed. On the whole, I agree with him on employment and disagree on wages.
See for example the finding that a 1 percentage point increase in the ratio of migrants to non-migrants leads to a 0.6% decrease in wages for workers at the 5th earnings percentile and a 0.5% decrease at the 10th percentile (Dustmann et al (2013)). Or, from Nickell and Salaheen 2015, in the unskilled and semi-skilled service sector, a 1 percentage point rise in the share of migrants reduced average wages in that occupation by about 0.2%.
Or another study in 2018 estimated that an increase in the number of EU migrants corresponding to 1% of the UK-born working-age population resulted in a 0.8% decrease in UK-born wages at the 5th and 10th percentiles (i.e. people in the bottom 5-10% of earners), and a 0.6% increase at the 90th percentile (i.e. high earners). In practice, this means that between 1993 and 2017, the total effect of EU migration on the wages of UK-born workers was estimated to be a 4.9% reduction in wages for those at the 10th earnings percentile, a 1.6% reduction at the 25th percentile, a 1.6% increase at the 50th percentile, and a 4.4% increase at the 90th percentile.
When you take the gamut of their empirical work you can find aspects that support various political positions as indeed you show. A bit like the Bible. But Card's award (earned with the late Alan Krueger) is for their methodological advances in teasing out causation. This is not easy in a subject like economics where there are multiple feedback processes. It relies on the econometric concepts of 'identification' and exogeneity. Unlike experimental sciences, controlled experiments are not possible in economics, so it takes imagination and careful specification to use 'natural experiments' to tease out causal patterns.
Yes, of course. Card did excellent work in improving methodology. The Nobel Prize was definitely deserved. I remember reading his famous paper on fast food wages in Pennsylvania and New Jersey when it came out. But my point was that other studies using methodologies developed from his have led to completely opposite conclusions. So those that try to use his award to promote their political ideologies are simply wrong to do so.
They really haven’t.
And even in the local context, there’s very little evidence to support the idea of repression of lower decile or lower skill native wages.
PB Tories need to give this one up.
One suspects they won’t though, as perpetuating this nonsense allows Brexiters to claim they have egalitarian reasons for supporting economic decrepitude.
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
So the wokeists that gave Obama his Nobel Prize For Fuck Knows What has now extended to Economics.
(that sound you just heard was Gardenwalker's head exploding....)
I’ll wait of course for your devastating takedown of Card’s work.
Take your time.
Card's work is controversial, and his findings are heavily disputed. On the whole, I agree with him on employment and disagree on wages.
See for example the finding that a 1 percentage point increase in the ratio of migrants to non-migrants leads to a 0.6% decrease in wages for workers at the 5th earnings percentile and a 0.5% decrease at the 10th percentile (Dustmann et al (2013)). Or, from Nickell and Salaheen 2015, in the unskilled and semi-skilled service sector, a 1 percentage point rise in the share of migrants reduced average wages in that occupation by about 0.2%.
Or another study in 2018 estimated that an increase in the number of EU migrants corresponding to 1% of the UK-born working-age population resulted in a 0.8% decrease in UK-born wages at the 5th and 10th percentiles (i.e. people in the bottom 5-10% of earners), and a 0.6% increase at the 90th percentile (i.e. high earners). In practice, this means that between 1993 and 2017, the total effect of EU migration on the wages of UK-born workers was estimated to be a 4.9% reduction in wages for those at the 10th earnings percentile, a 1.6% reduction at the 25th percentile, a 1.6% increase at the 50th percentile, and a 4.4% increase at the 90th percentile.
When you take the gamut of their empirical work you can find aspects that support various political positions as indeed you show. A bit like the Bible. But Card's award (earned with the late Alan Krueger) is for their methodological advances in teasing out causation. This is not easy in a subject like economics where there are multiple feedback processes. It relies on the econometric concepts of 'identification' and exogeneity. Unlike experimental sciences, controlled experiments are not possible in economics, so it takes imagination and careful specification to use 'natural experiments' to tease out causal patterns.
Yes, of course. Card did excellent work in improving methodology. The Nobel Prize was definitely deserved. I remember reading his famous paper on fast food wages in Pennsylvania and New Jersey when it came out. But my point was that other studies using methodologies developed from his have led to completely opposite conclusions. So those that try to use his award to promote their political ideologies are simply wrong to do so.
I think that is fair. However, prior to his work, and some of the advances in behavioural economics, the fashion was very much to use theory, based on logic and mathematics, to simply say free market good, any regulations whatsoever, bad. Largely without any reference to real world evidence. The key advance is really that it is all a little more questionable and fuzzy than bare equations might suggest. Which, in the context of the time, was quite political, if not deliberately or overtly so.
If immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor lead to lower wages even when including “low skilled” immigrants, why don't we remove all immigration controls?
Surely we'd be the richest country in the world
Because outside the EU there are some extremely troubled places where literally millions of people want to flee to safety. Such huge sudden changes are not desirable, and would have a detrimental effect on other countries doing their duty and accepting refugees.
Free movement is a concept that makes sense when there's a rational choice available. For example, there's no country in Central or Western Europe where you can't get a decent standard of living. Not many of us would choose to go and live in Syria.
Further, free movement of labour is part of a free market. Free movement of goods, capital, and people ought to come hand in hand. Giving other countries the freedom to sell into our market creates jobs in those countries and reduces the outward migration pressure over time. That enriches their markets and gives us richer export markets. Trade is a virtuous circle, and free movement of people is part of trade. But it needs to come about incrementally to prevent system shocks.
This egregious attempt to let Boris off the hook by lazy appeal to 'hindsighting' needs to be called out and ground down. It's utter nonsense.
I presume your criticism extends to Sturgeon & Drakeford who implemented virtually identical policies?
Or just to Johnson?
I had it at about evens on which poster would whatabout Sturgeon and Drakeford first. Actually not true, I had Big G as marginal favourite, so I’ll have to strike that down as a loss in the wee betting record my head.
TUD , you should know Lady Haw Haw will always be first on the Scotland bad wagon, she is full time whereas Big G is sometimes off.
Comments
https://twitter.com/chriscurtis94/status/1404812084882415626?s=21
(that sound you just heard was Gardenwalker's head exploding....)
Re Cowan, yep - Wikipedia even tells me (backed up by a link to ESPN) that his benefit year was sponsored by the Cave, which is/was apparently* a lap dancing club.
*Actually, I know this - we ended up outside it on my brother's stag party. We didn't go in, in the end.
We got through a global pandemic without the NHS collapsing, got a vaccine, had a vaccine rollout.
Job done. The vaccine is the element the government is most responsible for and they did it.
We can't and shouldn't prevent everyone from ever dying. What we can and have done is ensure the NHS is there for those who get sick and a vaccine is there for anyone who isn't a brainwashed idiot.
The government have made plenty of mistakes. They locked down too long and too hard, not too late or too softly.
It was known almost from the start that obesity was a huge contributing factor to covid yet there was sod all encouragement to take action about it.
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-9333/CBP-9333.pdf
Take your time.
The government is just pretty crap. It is led by a deeply unserious man, a fantasist and narcisist, a liar. It's hard to imagine a worse person to lead the country through a pandemic. But I wouldn't hold him wholly responsible by any means. There seems to have been multiple failures across all levels of government, a lack of preparedness especially. I hope that lessons will be learnt but am not holding my breath.
The Belgian infection pattern with a huge surge in October but not during the winter looks very much like they were hit by a highly infections variant:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/belgium/
It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
What I will blame him or his government or the NHS for is for shipping ill people to care homes to free up beds. There could have been a zillion other ways (isolating hospitals or requisitioning other spaces or, I don't know, building whole new facilities) which could have avoided the literal cross-contamination of ill people being moved into care homes when the disease ran rampantly.
That is imo the unforgiveable part.
I wouldn't imagine there is much overlap between the decision-making bodies awarding the Economics and Peace prizes, not least as the Economics one isn't a 'proper' Nobel prize, as non-economists never tire of pointing out.
I'm afraid that your comment simply demonstrates (a) your ignorance of the field and (b) that 'woke' has come to mean 'anything that reactionaries don't like or can't understand.'
https://twitter.com/deirdreheenan/status/1447686244964655104?s=21
That's how enquiry and research works normally.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-completes-over-one-million-sars-cov-2-whole-genome-sequences
But, as has been explained many times, the issue is that business gets the benefit and society gets the costs. Yes, low wage immigration is a left wing issue. The Labour Party are just too fucking dumb to understand it.
https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/19641000.demand-holyrood-covid-inquiry-damning-report-uk-pandemic-response/?ref=twtrec
Welcome to England.
Largely the Tories have done much better than you might have expected given the disasters of every sort of the last couple of years.
Would it not be more use, and much more interesting, to have fewer polls, but to have polls which drill down more deeply into why an individual's VI is as it is?
Woke* = people or ideas that reactionaries don't like or can't understand.
* in everyday usage, often used to shut down or pre-empt discussion/debate about such ideas and the people who propound them.
From frying pan of patriotic education to fire of war on woke. Shame.
It's extremely difficult to do really good applied work because it's hard to separate out the different factors and so it's difficult to have a definitive answer. For instance, immigration could be responding to rising labour demand that is pushing up wages - so we could be biased towards finding a positive impact on wages. Certainly,at the macro level periods of high immigration into the UK correspond to periods of high wage growth. Or sectors with low wages and poor working conditions might actively seek immigrant workers because they might be easier to exploit - so we would be biased to finding a negative effect. But Card and Kreuger's work is the gold standard in terms of this area, because they used clever identification strategies to try to isolate cleanly the impact of immigration. In my opinion economic theory is wrongly elevated over applied work which is why I think the Nobel this year was a good choice.
See for example the finding that a 1 percentage point increase in the ratio of migrants to non-migrants leads to a 0.6% decrease in wages for workers at the 5th earnings percentile and a 0.5% decrease at the 10th percentile (Dustmann et al (2013)). Or, from Nickell and Salaheen 2015, in the unskilled and semi-skilled service sector, a 1 percentage point rise in the share of migrants reduced average wages in that occupation by about 0.2%.
Or another study in 2018 estimated that an increase in the number of EU migrants corresponding to 1% of the UK-born working-age population resulted in a 0.8% decrease in UK-born wages at the 5th and 10th percentiles (i.e. people in the bottom 5-10% of earners), and a 0.6% increase at the 90th percentile (i.e. high earners). In practice, this means that between 1993 and 2017, the total effect of EU migration on the wages of UK-born workers was estimated to be a 4.9% reduction in wages for those at the 10th earnings percentile, a 1.6% reduction at the 25th percentile, a 1.6% increase at the 50th percentile, and a 4.4% increase at the 90th percentile.
In a press release issued yesterday to promote smear tests, the Scottish government pushed “people” to go for a check-up, with the message that “two people” die from cervical cancer each day.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/anyone-with-a-cervix-in-cancer-screening-campaign-puts-women-at-risk-bbs776drw
Of course the govt has to take its share of the blame as does the NHS but PHE, now gone, made some horrendous errors.
To my eternal frustration nobody stood up and said, our failures from March were based on planning failures. Instead we got "follow the science" over and over.
Low and behold Twitter's making the same mistake over again. I can only hope the new national pandemic people aren't listening.
There is plenty of research, take your pick. It has been observed for example that the biggest displacement/replacement is immigrant => immigrant ie immigrants displace other immigrants in the workforce and that there is a small negative effect on the lowest paid, again usually immigrants.
But yes absolutely - the more research the better.
They are doing appointments (not sure how many tracks) on a 1 appointment per minute granularity.
On the basis of that I'd guess they got it about right to be honest...
Remember the original research was done in America where minimum wages are so low that most people are paid more than that.
The problem with economics is that multiple factors are always in work, regardless of the methods used to separate them.
But also if immigration doesn't significantly reduce wages, why has the lack of immigration resulted in them increasing rapidly?
Oh, and they did shut their borders...
You have 12 months from death date to get probate in. Which we just missed (small 'fine').
Then for us is has taken since Feb for things to work through the various government processes.
The govt are continually criticised for this but they followed the advice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3Zn3M-WMzM
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/09/single-sentence-novel-mike-mccormack-solar-bones-wins-goldsmiths-prize-books
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/13/eight-sentences-over-1000-pages-lucy-ellmann-masterpiece-wins-goldsmiths-prize
But with a minor effect as @MaxPB pointed out about possible lower per capita consumption from lower paid workers, evened out by the likely demand multiplier it is, at least at the macro level, and accepting the "it's not my GDP" premise, likely the case that immigration doesn't significantly lower wages and conversely lower immigration doesn't significantly increase them.
She spells it out quite well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJX5XHnONTI
Everything else is a side show.
Empiricists, not 'wokeists' (whatever your understanding of that might be).
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/10/the-credibility-revolution-1.html
It's as if the richer world has vaccinated itself and is now playing variant roulette with the third world !
This is not an anti booster jab post, I think there is clearly capacity to do both.
This seems like an interesting paper. Have only skimmed it, but the conclusion that "small changes in the timing or effectiveness of interventions have disproportionately large effects on total mortality" would not speak well of Johnson's dithering before each UK lockdown (when SAGE, Cummings, etc. were urging immediate action).
Nice counterfactuals with the UK/Denmark/Sweden though. See what you make of it. It's always good to bat for civil liberties.
Follow this account to bless your stream with glorious examples from a bygone era:
https://www.twitter.com/AIRCON_INVERTER
He's somehow managed to evade catching the virus, or at least didn't experience any symptoms when he did so.
He was fastidious about checking the rules, but completely missed the spirit of them.
I only hope his luck continues to hold in other respects of his life.
Simply put, unrestricted immigration is an unregulated free market. I think everyone agrees that unregulated free markets create problems, to deny that is to deny basic fact. Having an unlimited pool of labour supply distorted the market in favour of middle and higher income people at the expense of lower income people. Again, we can see that effect with the top decile having a significantly higher proportion of overall earnings than they had 20 years ago.
Once again, I'm not and have never disputed that immigration increases aggregate GDP. Importing working people will tend to do that. My issue is that by doing so we've created an unequal society. It's rich people pulling the ladder up, and it's never going to be something I'm in favour of, everyone deserves their chance.
A less researched issue lies within a welfare state, the aggregate GDP increase may not actually be large enough to absorb the cost increase of having low wage immigrants within a universal welfare state. Even without COVID the UK was heading to highest level of taxation during peace time and this is a direct result of the quality of GDP being imported. A £15-20k worker is highly likely to be a net recipient of welfare (in work tax credits, NHS, education for their kids, housing benefit against about £2-4k in tax generated) in the UK which means the welfare burden is increased by each low wage worker imported.
I'm yet to be convinced that the deleterious effects of low wage migration for low wage Brits is outweighed by the net increase in aggregate GDP. In fact I'd say that most of the data supports my view that creating winners at the top does nothing to help the losers at the bottom, the money doesn't trickle down fast enough.
Surely we'd be the richest country in the world
Here's a case study of someone doing it in a Victorian terraced house in Brighton, and a one year later experience report.
https://tomkiss.net/life/going_fossil_free_in_a_terraced_victorian_house
https://tomkiss.net/life/one_year_with_an_air-source_heat-pump
That is a conventional one, but there are also (usually smaller) models available now that sit inside your house / flat and just have airpipe connections through the outside wall.
It's worth an observation that they renovated their house fabric first, and that afaics they therefore did not need to upsize their radiators. Also that - as with all our parents / grandparents learning how to use their new gas boilers in 1970-1975 - it is a different system that is used differently in some ways.
(Also want to make the point that, like some others, I don't view the government too harshly over the first lockdown. It was at the end of 2020 that they really missed up and - I believe - diverged from the scientific advice).
There was no single science to follow, those made choices about which model they wanted, ignoring the evidence flowing in from abroad.
https://www.gov.scot/publications/covid-19-inquiry/
For ground source, you obviously need a big outside space or deep hole.
I don't really see heat pump being a great retro-fit in many cases.
I was pointing to the fact that as ever you tried to deflect from your Heroes in Westminster, you did not even try to pretend you were comparing others to their standard. As ever your hatred of all things Scottish that make you strive to prove your Englishness by always decrying Scotland as worse than England etc is pathetic.
Tory off.
New Zealand or Norway or Finland do not have the wealth of scientific or epidemiological expertise available to the UK, US, France or Germany.
And even in the local context, there’s very little evidence to support the idea of repression of lower decile or lower skill native wages.
PB Tories need to give this one up.
One suspects they won’t though, as perpetuating this nonsense allows Brexiters to claim they have egalitarian reasons for supporting economic decrepitude.
However, prior to his work, and some of the advances in behavioural economics, the fashion was very much to use theory, based on logic and mathematics, to simply say free market good, any regulations whatsoever, bad.
Largely without any reference to real world evidence.
The key advance is really that it is all a little more questionable and fuzzy than bare equations might suggest.
Which, in the context of the time, was quite political, if not deliberately or overtly so.
Free movement is a concept that makes sense when there's a rational choice available. For example, there's no country in Central or Western Europe where you can't get a decent standard of living. Not many of us would choose to go and live in Syria.
Further, free movement of labour is part of a free market. Free movement of goods, capital, and people ought to come hand in hand. Giving other countries the freedom to sell into our market creates jobs in those countries and reduces the outward migration pressure over time. That enriches their markets and gives us richer export markets. Trade is a virtuous circle, and free movement of people is part of trade. But it needs to come about incrementally to prevent system shocks.