In all the discussions of immigration, population ageing needs to be front and centre. Looking at the UK labour market data, since the Brexit referendum our population aged 16-49 has gone down by about 500,000 people. Our population aged 50+ has gone up by 1.3 million, including 700,000 over 65. So the fact is, we *are* going to have continued immigration, in sizeable numbers. And in so-called low skill occupations, too. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just deluding themselves. I liked three things about using the EU single market for providing that immigration. First, it was reciprocal, so we got something in return. Second, freedom of movement gave people rights and freedoms. It treated people as citizens, not simply commodities, tied to a specific employer or job. Third, the system was simple, lowering the burden of red tape for both employers and employees. My guess is that we will end up with continued immigration, because of the demand for workers created by our ageing society, but with no reciprocity, loads more red tape, and with workers treated as simply labour inputs, not citizens with rights.
And it had no numerical control, which meant that it biased the system against people from anywhere else, eg the whole of Africa. This was the fatal flaw, both politically and from a humane viewpoint.
That is true. I'm sure that some of the 17.4mn were motivated by a desire to raise immigration from Africa but I struggle to believe it was the majority view.
The discussion of what is right and how many people will vote for what is not one subject but two. You may well be right but it makes no difference to whether my argument is correct.
I don't suppose most of the 48% were voting for an idealistic view of the juridical supremacy of the ECJ and EU law either. At least, it would be fair to say the campaign didn't major on it.
In all the discussions of immigration, population ageing needs to be front and centre. Looking at the UK labour market data, since the Brexit referendum our population aged 16-49 has gone down by about 500,000 people. Our population aged 50+ has gone up by 1.3 million, including 700,000 over 65. So the fact is, we *are* going to have continued immigration, in sizeable numbers. And in so-called low skill occupations, too. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just deluding themselves. I liked three things about using the EU single market for providing that immigration. First, it was reciprocal, so we got something in return. Second, freedom of movement gave people rights and freedoms. It treated people as citizens, not simply commodities, tied to a specific employer or job. Third, the system was simple, lowering the burden of red tape for both employers and employees. My guess is that we will end up with continued immigration, because of the demand for workers created by our ageing society, but with no reciprocity, loads more red tape, and with workers treated as simply labour inputs, not citizens with rights.
And it had no numerical control, which meant that it biased the system against people from anywhere else, eg the whole of Africa. This was the fatal flaw, both politically and from a humane viewpoint.
That is true. I'm sure that some of the 17.4mn were motivated by a desire to raise immigration from Africa but I struggle to believe it was the majority view.
I know where there's a steady stream of fit, enthusiastic Africans who would love to work in the UK that can be tapped in to if those idealistic Brexiteers are up for it? They'll even make their way to the UK under their own steam (or outboard motor more likely).
Absolutely. Plus the "change of neighbourhood" might be far more satisfying to those Brexiters as it may be more apparent than having a family of Polish people living down the road.
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.
An excellent post, getting to the heart of the matter. Whether free movement of people properly belongs to the whole membership of single market in goods and services or properly belongs to the sovereignty of a nation state is exactly the question which divides.
Both views are entirely rational, centrist and moderate. I think the nation state is the natural unit, supporters of the EU think the larger unit is.
For good political and humanist reasons I don't think people can automatically be placed alongside goods and services as interchangeable assets. Similarly I believe a Tanzanian or Korean should have the same opportunity to live in the UK, Ecuador or Belgium as a German or Estonian should have. Which is why I voted for Brexit.
I dispute the concept of there being a "natural" unit. The size and composition of effective political units has changed greatly over time. Technological innovations swell and shrink the size of stable states. For example good roads make long-distance communication and movement of military units efficient, enabling larger states. The castle made controlling larger territories trickier. Then artillery made the castle less effective in turn, enabling larger states again. Similarly political and economic innovations changed the equilibrium. And those equilibria are also affected by geography, language, climate and so on.
None of that makes it easy to decide where the equilibrium should be, but I'd gently guide people away from thinking in terms of what worked in 500AD, 1000AD, or 1500AD being natural for other times.
But the mere existence of the status quo for centuries bends the "natural" unit towards itself. It cements a primary language, it builds up a body of law, it creates a unique political culture, it creates more of a common identity. If the component parts are too different than all that bending isn't enough to get over the original difference, as the Habsburgs and Ottomans found, but the bending happens nevertheless.
The status quo has not existed for that long. If you think about the territorial extent of the country ruled from London, there have been multiple significant changes over the last few hundred year, including the addition and subtraction of (parts of) Ireland, and the addition of Scotland. If you think in terms of the nature of the state since the birth of the modern era, that too has changed radically. From a kingly absolutism, to a kind of oligarchy, to a colonial power, to a nation-state, to a member of the EEC/EU, and then back again to a nation-state. In fact, the nation-state bit in between colonial centre and EEC accession is basically a generation long.
Philip Bobbitt is very good on the concept of the state nation, nation state, et al.
In all the discussions of immigration, population ageing needs to be front and centre. Looking at the UK labour market data, since the Brexit referendum our population aged 16-49 has gone down by about 500,000 people. Our population aged 50+ has gone up by 1.3 million, including 700,000 over 65. So the fact is, we *are* going to have continued immigration, in sizeable numbers. And in so-called low skill occupations, too. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just deluding themselves. I liked three things about using the EU single market for providing that immigration. First, it was reciprocal, so we got something in return. Second, freedom of movement gave people rights and freedoms. It treated people as citizens, not simply commodities, tied to a specific employer or job. Third, the system was simple, lowering the burden of red tape for both employers and employees. My guess is that we will end up with continued immigration, because of the demand for workers created by our ageing society, but with no reciprocity, loads more red tape, and with workers treated as simply labour inputs, not citizens with rights.
And it had no numerical control, which meant that it biased the system against people from anywhere else, eg the whole of Africa. This was the fatal flaw, both politically and from a humane viewpoint.
That is true. I'm sure that some of the 17.4mn were motivated by a desire to raise immigration from Africa but I struggle to believe it was the majority view.
Actually I think that getting easier migration from the rest of the world for skilled migrants who should be able to make it here, by tightening up on unskilled migrants who shouldn't, was a bigger selling point than you imagine. Especially but not just in minority communities.
The current Home Secretary actually made that argument herself. That it would be easier to have rest of the world migration if European migration were controlled.
That was one of the arguments that swung my vote. I'm all in favour of immigration, I just don't want discrimination in the immigration system. So when I saw the pro-Brexit serious MP politicians (as opposed to Farage and his band of twats) making a liberal argument against discrimination instead of an illiberal argument against migrants at all, then I was pleased with that.
I grew up in another country myself before returning to the UK. That country has more British emigrants than the entire European Union (exc Ireland) combined. Yet while in the EU it was far tougher for eg one of my school friends to get a visa and come to the UK, than it was any random unskilled person in Europe, despite their country taking more of our citizens than the entire EU (exc Ireland) combined. There is no justification for that discrimination.
The month before lockdown was a strange old time all round. It dawned on folk at different speeds. I remember being distinctly irritated my religious service being cancelled on March 15. Six days before we'd had c 20 people crammed into a room singing away with no ventilation, with no qualms whatever. A week after that it was pretty obvious what was to come. Someone will write a classic play or movie about that couple of weeks.
I was incredulous when I heard of acquaintances jetting off to Dubai and the French alps in the week before lockdown. I was asking them if they could not see what was about to happen but they didn't really care. If anything their attitude was that they needed to get in a holiday whilst they could. I was very much seen as a doom monger. However, in my opinion it is people carrying on their foreign trips as normal was one of the major drivers of the pandemic in the UK.
For me there were 2 big mistakes which drove everything else. 1. Locking down at least a week too late 2. Letting international arrivals carry on with no quarantine
I believe that if we had locked down 2 weeks earlier and implemented quarantine for arrivals then our initial wave would have been much smaller and would likely have made the subsequent waves smaller.
I do not know what the professional epidemiologists who were advising the government were playing at. It was blindingly obvious to anyone with half a brain that lockdown should have happened earlier. The politicians should have overruled them.
What on earth is going on with England's (presumably mainly teenage) vaccination rollout. Scotland had almost as many 1st doses yesterday !
There's an idiotic limitation of no walk in centre appointments for under 16s, they have to get it at school which is significantly slowing them down as teams need to go to each school individually rather than have parents go to the local vaccine centre on the weekend or after school. They still make these schoolboy errors this far into the programme, it's a shocking indictment of how Whitehall thinks.
The thing is that doing jabs in schools ought to be easy and efficient. You know where the kids are, you have 6 hours a day, 5 days a week to do them and the only place they can hide is behind the bike sheds. It ought to be way better than relying on walk-ins. That's why other schoolchild vaccinations are done in school.
But for some reason, it's not happening and I haven't had any indication on when Schoolchild in Romford is getting their jab.
Someone needs to be saying "Action This Day" in a booming voice (Geoffrey Cox, maybe?) until action is enacted. Yeah, right.
My sense of it is that schools are making life difficult because they don't want to attract the attentions of their local loony bin anti-vaxxers that the government hasn't acted on to prevent them from harassing teachers, headteachers and kids.
Even then, the walk in option should be made available, they're sitting around doing nothing at the moment anyway.
Could well be that; I've heard some horrible things on the teacher grapevine.
In which case, do something about it. The thread running though all of BoJo's failures (not just on The Virus) is not doing stuff that will upset people until he has no choice. By which time, it's suboptimally late. Say stuff, but not do stuff.
Yes absolutely, the inaction here is an issue. Not protecting teachers and kids from loony anti-vaxxers outside the school gates is negligent and not prosecuting those who send death threats to headteachers has created a hostile environment for school vaccinations. The government is letting the anti-vaxxers win, which is troubling. Worse still is that they will start applying these same tactics against roll-outs of other school vaccines soon as well and we may end up in a position where the UK can no longer easily vaccinate children against TB, polio and all kinds of other diseases.
Florida is a huge warning shot to any country that gives these loonies the time of day.
R4 WATO had "Victims of COVID" spokesperson "blaming No.10 for death of her father". Aged 98.
Yes, I heard that. It was absurd. Surely they ('Victims of Covid', or the BBC) could have found somebody whose father had died prematurely in their 50s or 60s if they'd looked properly. If not, they should have just dropped the item. 98, ffs.
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?
Bit in Bold: And this is why such research should not be applied to 'free movement'. Because the USA doesn't have free movement.
For legal migration with a green card in the USA there are hoops to jump through that didn't apply in the UK for someone to come here, work in a hand car wash, and get benefits. So if you take that evidence, then apply it to free movement, you are entirely misapplying and misrepresenting the work.
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.
Clearer, and if women without cervixes occasionally turn up, better to explain the situation than miss a diagnosis. The trouble is it relies on a letter from a GP and if a self-identified man (who happens to have a cervix) is not recorded as such some invitations may not be sent.
In all the discussions of immigration, population ageing needs to be front and centre. Looking at the UK labour market data, since the Brexit referendum our population aged 16-49 has gone down by about 500,000 people. Our population aged 50+ has gone up by 1.3 million, including 700,000 over 65. So the fact is, we *are* going to have continued immigration, in sizeable numbers. And in so-called low skill occupations, too. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just deluding themselves. I liked three things about using the EU single market for providing that immigration. First, it was reciprocal, so we got something in return. Second, freedom of movement gave people rights and freedoms. It treated people as citizens, not simply commodities, tied to a specific employer or job. Third, the system was simple, lowering the burden of red tape for both employers and employees. My guess is that we will end up with continued immigration, because of the demand for workers created by our ageing society, but with no reciprocity, loads more red tape, and with workers treated as simply labour inputs, not citizens with rights.
And it had no numerical control, which meant that it biased the system against people from anywhere else, eg the whole of Africa. This was the fatal flaw, both politically and from a humane viewpoint.
That is true. I'm sure that some of the 17.4mn were motivated by a desire to raise immigration from Africa but I struggle to believe it was the majority view.
The discussion of what is right and how many people will vote for what is not one subject but two. You may well be right but it makes no difference to whether my argument is correct.
I don't suppose most of the 48% were voting for an idealistic view of the juridical supremacy of the ECJ and EU law either. At least, it would be fair to say the campaign didn't major on it.
You will get no praise for the Remain campaign from me!
R4 WATO had "Victims of COVID" spokesperson "blaming No.10 for death of her father". Aged 98.
Yes, I heard that. It was absurd. Surely they could have found somebody whose father had died prematurely in their 50s or 60s if they'd looked properly. If not, they should have just dropped the item. 98, ffs.
It's tricky because that they were already on their way out thinking lead to no one giving a f**k about the care homes fiasco.
In all the discussions of immigration, population ageing needs to be front and centre. Looking at the UK labour market data, since the Brexit referendum our population aged 16-49 has gone down by about 500,000 people. Our population aged 50+ has gone up by 1.3 million, including 700,000 over 65. So the fact is, we *are* going to have continued immigration, in sizeable numbers. And in so-called low skill occupations, too. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just deluding themselves. I liked three things about using the EU single market for providing that immigration. First, it was reciprocal, so we got something in return. Second, freedom of movement gave people rights and freedoms. It treated people as citizens, not simply commodities, tied to a specific employer or job. Third, the system was simple, lowering the burden of red tape for both employers and employees. My guess is that we will end up with continued immigration, because of the demand for workers created by our ageing society, but with no reciprocity, loads more red tape, and with workers treated as simply labour inputs, not citizens with rights.
And it had no numerical control, which meant that it biased the system against people from anywhere else, eg the whole of Africa. This was the fatal flaw, both politically and from a humane viewpoint.
That is true. I'm sure that some of the 17.4mn were motivated by a desire to raise immigration from Africa but I struggle to believe it was the majority view.
I know where there's a steady stream of fit, enthusiastic Africans who would love to work in the UK that can be tapped in to if those idealistic Brexiteers are up for it? They'll even make their way to the UK under their own steam (or outboard motor more likely).
Indeed. I'm sure I recall that one of the Leave campaigns had a prominent poster extolling the virtues of immigration from outside of the EU.
Poor kid. The story (and backstory) is tragic. I simply don’t understand how people can be so cruel to an innocent child.
Just part of the backstory as far as I can make out: the boy's parents split up and (as far as I can tell), the boy goes to live with his dad at his grandparents. His mother has a drink problem, and meets another man on an alcohol awareness course. They start going out, then in early 2019 she murders him in a drink- and drug-fuelled rage.
In August/September 2019, the dad meets another woman. In March 2020 they move in together with the child. The abuse allegedly started immediately.
Looking at the various text messages, it seems to be a tale of a little boy trapped between three borken people.
The month before lockdown was a strange old time all round. It dawned on folk at different speeds. I remember being distinctly irritated my religious service being cancelled on March 15. Six days before we'd had c 20 people crammed into a room singing away with no ventilation, with no qualms whatever. A week after that it was pretty obvious what was to come. Someone will write a classic play or movie about that couple of weeks.
I was incredulous when I heard of acquaintances jetting off to Dubai and the French alps in the week before lockdown. I was asking them if they could not see what was about to happen but they didn't really care. If anything their attitude was that they needed to get in a holiday whilst they could. I was very much seen as a doom monger. However, in my opinion it is people carrying on their foreign trips as normal was one of the major drivers of the pandemic in the UK.
For me there were 2 big mistakes which drove everything else. 1. Locking down at least a week too late 2. Letting international arrivals carry on with no quarantine
I believe that if we had locked down 2 weeks earlier and implemented quarantine for arrivals then our initial wave would have been much smaller and would likely have made the subsequent waves smaller.
I do not know what the professional epidemiologists who were advising the government were playing at. It was blindingly obvious to anyone with half a brain that lockdown should have happened earlier. The politicians should have overruled them.
This "need" for a holiday is peculiar all round. I mean. It's a want isn't it? We still seem squeamish about making this distinction.
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 issue with your argument above is that it only looks at the aggregate GDP model. Look at a GDP per capita model and importing low skilled labour would reduces it.
Indeed. One other issue that we have with misapplied "analysis" is that it shows that immigration is good overall without breaking down the issue of how or why it is good. Since there is nobody sane proposing no immigration, just a debate about how it gets controlled.
Importing higher skills absolutely is good* but then people extrapolate from that "if a little is good, more must be better." Getting some dentists, doctors and other qualified people coming boosts our skills and our economy but that doesn't mean that supplementing them with getting hand car wash workers does the same.
Almost every country around the globe has immigrants arriving who have been filtered via some form of points-based system to ensure the people arriving are those who are wanted. Countries cherrypick from potential applicants who they want to receive. So of course once filtered the migrants who arrive tend to be disproportionately beneficial. That's not necessarily the same if those who are arriving are utterly unfiltered and are coming to work in a hand car wash while claiming housing allowance and universal credit.
Plus given that practically speaking we can only handle a certain proportion of migration per annum, the looser we are with migration for unskilled hand car wash employees the tighter we have to be on the other end of the spectrum for skilled worker. We face an Opportunity Cost of missing out on more skilled migrants.
Drinking water is good for you. There is plenty of scientific evidence showing the benefits of hydration. If you take that evidence, go on a boat and into the ocean and drink a few litres of unfiltered ocean water on the basis of "the evidence says water is good for you" then that's not good for you. You have to be careful in how you apply your evidence.
* Though not a reason or excuse not to invest in skills ourselves.
Of course you take your pick from the studies, but Manning, Manacorda, Wadsworth do find some UK research on the subject.
The month before lockdown was a strange old time all round. It dawned on folk at different speeds. I remember being distinctly irritated my religious service being cancelled on March 15. Six days before we'd had c 20 people crammed into a room singing away with no ventilation, with no qualms whatever. A week after that it was pretty obvious what was to come. Someone will write a classic play or movie about that couple of weeks.
I was incredulous when I heard of acquaintances jetting off to Dubai and the French alps in the week before lockdown. I was asking them if they could not see what was about to happen but they didn't really care. If anything their attitude was that they needed to get in a holiday whilst they could. I was very much seen as a doom monger. However, in my opinion it is people carrying on their foreign trips as normal was one of the major drivers of the pandemic in the UK.
For me there were 2 big mistakes which drove everything else. 1. Locking down at least a week too late 2. Letting international arrivals carry on with no quarantine
I believe that if we had locked down 2 weeks earlier and implemented quarantine for arrivals then our initial wave would have been much smaller and would likely have made the subsequent waves smaller.
I do not know what the professional epidemiologists who were advising the government were playing at. It was blindingly obvious to anyone with half a brain that lockdown should have happened earlier. The politicians should have overruled them.
This "need" for a holiday is peculiar all round. I mean. It's a want isn't it? We still seem squeamish about making this distinction.
No, it's a need
Most humans require variety of scenery to be happy: perhaps because we evolved as wandering hunter gatherers. That's why prison, or internal exile, is a punishment
I remember the feeling when I first went abroad after the horrors of lockdown 3. Spain, and then, even better, Athens
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 issue with your argument above is that it only looks at the aggregate GDP model. Look at a GDP per capita model and importing low skilled labour would reduces it.
Indeed. One other issue that we have with misapplied "analysis" is that it shows that immigration is good overall without breaking down the issue of how or why it is good. Since there is nobody sane proposing no immigration, just a debate about how it gets controlled.
Importing higher skills absolutely is good* but then people extrapolate from that "if a little is good, more must be better." Getting some dentists, doctors and other qualified people coming boosts our skills and our economy but that doesn't mean that supplementing them with getting hand car wash workers does the same.
Almost every country around the globe has immigrants arriving who have been filtered via some form of points-based system to ensure the people arriving are those who are wanted. Countries cherrypick from potential applicants who they want to receive. So of course once filtered the migrants who arrive tend to be disproportionately beneficial. That's not necessarily the same if those who are arriving are utterly unfiltered and are coming to work in a hand car wash while claiming housing allowance and universal credit.
Plus given that practically speaking we can only handle a certain proportion of migration per annum, the looser we are with migration for unskilled hand car wash employees the tighter we have to be on the other end of the spectrum for skilled worker. We face an Opportunity Cost of missing out on more skilled migrants.
Drinking water is good for you. There is plenty of scientific evidence showing the benefits of hydration. If you take that evidence, go on a boat and into the ocean and drink a few litres of unfiltered ocean water on the basis of "the evidence says water is good for you" then that's not good for you. You have to be careful in how you apply your evidence.
* Though not a reason or excuse not to invest in skills ourselves.
Of course you take your pick from the studies, but Manning, Manacorda, Wadsworth do find some UK research on the subject.
Absolutely and most UK research on the subject I've seen shows that overall immigration has been boosting GDP but the price for that has been paid by the lowest-paid.
What I've not seen any solid research on is maintaining immigration at a similar rate but boosting skilled non-European migration and dropping unskilled European migration. Some solid research on that would be useful, but most of it at this point is frankly intuition and guesswork. Or theoretical.
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.
A political leader of any calibre ALWAYS keeps abreast of facts with an eye for detail and an attention to their brief. It's their job. They are SUPPOSED to lead.
Can anyone really tell me that Margaret Thatcher or even Tony Blair would have been so shockingly inept as Johnson was in spring 2019? Permitting events like the Cheltenham Festival to continue when Italy had already gone into lockdown has nothing to do with us using hindsighting.
It was, and is, the most shocking example of an inept useless buffoon who never should have been elected Prime Minister and who is totally unfit for the office.
Spot on. What we have learnt is that Johnson is a chancer, a buffoon, a liar, wings it, out of his depth etc.
Have you? I’m genuinely surprised. How come you hadn’t noticed that before? All the evidence has been available for years.
I have brother - known for years. The problem is the deluded right-wing halfwits who live on this blog who continually praise the disingenuous fat fornicator.
On the flip side, the report concludes that the vaccination programme has been one of the most effective initiatives in history. From development to rollout it concludes that the UK’s vaccine response will save millions of lives not just here but across the world.
That was largely because we were lucky enough to have a company with best in the world sequencing technology. Though government deserves some credit for paying for its use.
That’s simplistic. Sanger deserves more credit than Nanopore IMHO
Sure - but also an entity independent of government, which we were lucky to have.
The month before lockdown was a strange old time all round. It dawned on folk at different speeds. I remember being distinctly irritated my religious service being cancelled on March 15. Six days before we'd had c 20 people crammed into a room singing away with no ventilation, with no qualms whatever. A week after that it was pretty obvious what was to come. Someone will write a classic play or movie about that couple of weeks.
I was incredulous when I heard of acquaintances jetting off to Dubai and the French alps in the week before lockdown. I was asking them if they could not see what was about to happen but they didn't really care. If anything their attitude was that they needed to get in a holiday whilst they could. I was very much seen as a doom monger. However, in my opinion it is people carrying on their foreign trips as normal was one of the major drivers of the pandemic in the UK.
For me there were 2 big mistakes which drove everything else. 1. Locking down at least a week too late 2. Letting international arrivals carry on with no quarantine
I believe that if we had locked down 2 weeks earlier and implemented quarantine for arrivals then our initial wave would have been much smaller and would likely have made the subsequent waves smaller.
I do not know what the professional epidemiologists who were advising the government were playing at. It was blindingly obvious to anyone with half a brain that lockdown should have happened earlier. The politicians should have overruled them.
This "need" for a holiday is peculiar all round. I mean. It's a want isn't it? We still seem squeamish about making this distinction.
No, it's a need
Most humans require variety of scenery to be happy: perhaps because we evolved as wandering hunter gatherers. That's why prison, or internal exile, is a punishment
I remember the feeling when I first went abroad after the horrors of lockdown 3. Spain, and then, even better, Athens
That vile man seems to be getting a lot of money from Remainers 'trolling' him. Considering everyone who does this is directly paying him, and he seems to have no qualms taking money from them, why give him the oxygen of publicity?
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 issue with your argument above is that it only looks at the aggregate GDP model. Look at a GDP per capita model and importing low skilled labour would reduces it.
Indeed. One other issue that we have with misapplied "analysis" is that it shows that immigration is good overall without breaking down the issue of how or why it is good. Since there is nobody sane proposing no immigration, just a debate about how it gets controlled.
Importing higher skills absolutely is good* but then people extrapolate from that "if a little is good, more must be better." Getting some dentists, doctors and other qualified people coming boosts our skills and our economy but that doesn't mean that supplementing them with getting hand car wash workers does the same.
Almost every country around the globe has immigrants arriving who have been filtered via some form of points-based system to ensure the people arriving are those who are wanted. Countries cherrypick from potential applicants who they want to receive. So of course once filtered the migrants who arrive tend to be disproportionately beneficial. That's not necessarily the same if those who are arriving are utterly unfiltered and are coming to work in a hand car wash while claiming housing allowance and universal credit.
Plus given that practically speaking we can only handle a certain proportion of migration per annum, the looser we are with migration for unskilled hand car wash employees the tighter we have to be on the other end of the spectrum for skilled worker. We face an Opportunity Cost of missing out on more skilled migrants.
Drinking water is good for you. There is plenty of scientific evidence showing the benefits of hydration. If you take that evidence, go on a boat and into the ocean and drink a few litres of unfiltered ocean water on the basis of "the evidence says water is good for you" then that's not good for you. You have to be careful in how you apply your evidence.
* Though not a reason or excuse not to invest in skills ourselves.
Of course you take your pick from the studies, but Manning, Manacorda, Wadsworth do find some UK research on the subject.
Tbf, it's significantly less clear cut than pro-free movement people like to pretend. Almost all UK research on the subject recognises (but also puts aside) that people on lower incomes were made worse off relatively to people on higher incomes. The conclusions are similar in that on a macro level GDP is higher with migration than without (I mean it's stupid to say otherwise) but that the spread of income and wealth is increased by low wage migration because it creates a trickle up effect where goods and services become relatively cheaper but spending by higher income people doesn't increase enough to offset that. The end result is what we have witnessed in the UK - the rich got richer and the poor pretty much stayed where they were.
You think having that overall higher GDP is worth the inequality it creates, which is fine and a perfectly valid perspective. What you're trying to do is invalidate the other side of the coin and it's a little bit tiresome to have to go through this over and over again. Few people deny that immigration increases GDP, it very likely increases GDP per capita as well because the top decile (people like us) really does benefit a lot from it. To pretend that there are no downsides to it is ridiculous.
The month before lockdown was a strange old time all round. It dawned on folk at different speeds. I remember being distinctly irritated my religious service being cancelled on March 15. Six days before we'd had c 20 people crammed into a room singing away with no ventilation, with no qualms whatever. A week after that it was pretty obvious what was to come. Someone will write a classic play or movie about that couple of weeks.
I was incredulous when I heard of acquaintances jetting off to Dubai and the French alps in the week before lockdown. I was asking them if they could not see what was about to happen but they didn't really care. If anything their attitude was that they needed to get in a holiday whilst they could. I was very much seen as a doom monger. However, in my opinion it is people carrying on their foreign trips as normal was one of the major drivers of the pandemic in the UK.
For me there were 2 big mistakes which drove everything else. 1. Locking down at least a week too late 2. Letting international arrivals carry on with no quarantine
I believe that if we had locked down 2 weeks earlier and implemented quarantine for arrivals then our initial wave would have been much smaller and would likely have made the subsequent waves smaller.
I do not know what the professional epidemiologists who were advising the government were playing at. It was blindingly obvious to anyone with half a brain that lockdown should have happened earlier. The politicians should have overruled them.
It was an extraordinary time. On the same weekend in March 2020 someone I know was hopping off to Rome for the weekend with his family, while at a meeting I was at someone objected strongly and firmly to people shaking hands with each other.
And the extraordinary combinations hasn't stopped. I know several people who have avoided any voluntary gathering or meeting in the UK since lockdown but have been abroad, by air, for holidays in the last few months.
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 issue with your argument above is that it only looks at the aggregate GDP model. Look at a GDP per capita model and importing low skilled labour would reduces it.
Indeed. One other issue that we have with misapplied "analysis" is that it shows that immigration is good overall without breaking down the issue of how or why it is good. Since there is nobody sane proposing no immigration, just a debate about how it gets controlled.
Importing higher skills absolutely is good* but then people extrapolate from that "if a little is good, more must be better." Getting some dentists, doctors and other qualified people coming boosts our skills and our economy but that doesn't mean that supplementing them with getting hand car wash workers does the same.
Almost every country around the globe has immigrants arriving who have been filtered via some form of points-based system to ensure the people arriving are those who are wanted. Countries cherrypick from potential applicants who they want to receive. So of course once filtered the migrants who arrive tend to be disproportionately beneficial. That's not necessarily the same if those who are arriving are utterly unfiltered and are coming to work in a hand car wash while claiming housing allowance and universal credit.
Plus given that practically speaking we can only handle a certain proportion of migration per annum, the looser we are with migration for unskilled hand car wash employees the tighter we have to be on the other end of the spectrum for skilled worker. We face an Opportunity Cost of missing out on more skilled migrants.
Drinking water is good for you. There is plenty of scientific evidence showing the benefits of hydration. If you take that evidence, go on a boat and into the ocean and drink a few litres of unfiltered ocean water on the basis of "the evidence says water is good for you" then that's not good for you. You have to be careful in how you apply your evidence.
* Though not a reason or excuse not to invest in skills ourselves.
Of course you take your pick from the studies, but Manning, Manacorda, Wadsworth do find some UK research on the subject.
Absolutely and most UK research on the subject I've seen shows that overall immigration has been boosting GDP but the price for that has been paid by the lowest-paid.
What I've not seen any solid research on is maintaining immigration at a similar rate but boosting skilled non-European migration and dropping unskilled European migration. Some solid research on that would be useful, but most of it at this point is frankly intuition and guesswork. Or theoretical.
"One notable UK study by Dustmann, Fabbri and Preston. (2005) uses variation in the composition of immigrants relative to natives by skill and region, concluding that immigration has no discernible effect on the average level of native wages. A similar conclusion is reached by Dustmann, Frattini and Preston. (2008), although they find some negative effect of immigration among native wages at the bottom of the distribution and a positive effect among those at the top."
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 issue with your argument above is that it only looks at the aggregate GDP model. Look at a GDP per capita model and importing low skilled labour would reduces it.
Indeed. One other issue that we have with misapplied "analysis" is that it shows that immigration is good overall without breaking down the issue of how or why it is good. Since there is nobody sane proposing no immigration, just a debate about how it gets controlled.
Importing higher skills absolutely is good* but then people extrapolate from that "if a little is good, more must be better." Getting some dentists, doctors and other qualified people coming boosts our skills and our economy but that doesn't mean that supplementing them with getting hand car wash workers does the same.
Almost every country around the globe has immigrants arriving who have been filtered via some form of points-based system to ensure the people arriving are those who are wanted. Countries cherrypick from potential applicants who they want to receive. So of course once filtered the migrants who arrive tend to be disproportionately beneficial. That's not necessarily the same if those who are arriving are utterly unfiltered and are coming to work in a hand car wash while claiming housing allowance and universal credit.
Plus given that practically speaking we can only handle a certain proportion of migration per annum, the looser we are with migration for unskilled hand car wash employees the tighter we have to be on the other end of the spectrum for skilled worker. We face an Opportunity Cost of missing out on more skilled migrants.
Drinking water is good for you. There is plenty of scientific evidence showing the benefits of hydration. If you take that evidence, go on a boat and into the ocean and drink a few litres of unfiltered ocean water on the basis of "the evidence says water is good for you" then that's not good for you. You have to be careful in how you apply your evidence.
* Though not a reason or excuse not to invest in skills ourselves.
Of course you take your pick from the studies, but Manning, Manacorda, Wadsworth do find some UK research on the subject.
Absolutely and most UK research on the subject I've seen shows that overall immigration has been boosting GDP but the price for that has been paid by the lowest-paid.
What I've not seen any solid research on is maintaining immigration at a similar rate but boosting skilled non-European migration and dropping unskilled European migration. Some solid research on that would be useful, but most of it at this point is frankly intuition and guesswork. Or theoretical.
"One notable UK study by Dustmann, Fabbri and Preston. (2005) uses variation in the composition of immigrants relative to natives by skill and region, concluding that immigration has no discernible effect on the average level of native wages. A similar conclusion is reached by Dustmann, Frattini and Preston. (2008), although they find some negative effect of immigration among native wages at the bottom of the distribution and a positive effect among those at the top."
Do we know who's paying for Johnson's Spanish holiday yet?
He is staying at the private Villa of Zack Goldsmith, who he made a peer last year. One favour deserves another...
TBF I believe Goldsmith is a genuine friend (doesn’t his half brother employ Carrie?) so it’s not quite as simple as you maliciously pretend
Phew, BJ exonerated cos his missus is employed by Zac’s bro. Move along folks, nothing to see here!
I will not believe someone is a genuine friend of BJ unless it comes out that he’s offered to get journalists beaten up on their behalf.
It means that Foxy is barking up the wrong tree.
Goldsmith is a former MP and current minister. To continue as the latter he needs a seat in the Lords (although you might have a case that the electorate sacked him… albeit as an MP not as a minister)
The villa is related to friendship not pay back for the peerage (again there is a case that the whole damn knot of relationships is far too incestuous)
The issue is that @Foxy went for the cheap shot and missed… but obscured the more important points in the process
The month before lockdown was a strange old time all round. It dawned on folk at different speeds. I remember being distinctly irritated my religious service being cancelled on March 15. Six days before we'd had c 20 people crammed into a room singing away with no ventilation, with no qualms whatever. A week after that it was pretty obvious what was to come. Someone will write a classic play or movie about that couple of weeks.
I was incredulous when I heard of acquaintances jetting off to Dubai and the French alps in the week before lockdown. I was asking them if they could not see what was about to happen but they didn't really care. If anything their attitude was that they needed to get in a holiday whilst they could. I was very much seen as a doom monger. However, in my opinion it is people carrying on their foreign trips as normal was one of the major drivers of the pandemic in the UK.
For me there were 2 big mistakes which drove everything else. 1. Locking down at least a week too late 2. Letting international arrivals carry on with no quarantine
I believe that if we had locked down 2 weeks earlier and implemented quarantine for arrivals then our initial wave would have been much smaller and would likely have made the subsequent waves smaller.
I do not know what the professional epidemiologists who were advising the government were playing at. It was blindingly obvious to anyone with half a brain that lockdown should have happened earlier. The politicians should have overruled them.
So if we had locked down on the same day as Italy and before every other nation on earth? And this was so blindingly obvious that no government in the world took the decision that day apart from one where hospitals were completely overwhelmed already......
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 issue with your argument above is that it only looks at the aggregate GDP model. Look at a GDP per capita model and importing low skilled labour would reduces it.
Indeed. One other issue that we have with misapplied "analysis" is that it shows that immigration is good overall without breaking down the issue of how or why it is good. Since there is nobody sane proposing no immigration, just a debate about how it gets controlled.
Importing higher skills absolutely is good* but then people extrapolate from that "if a little is good, more must be better." Getting some dentists, doctors and other qualified people coming boosts our skills and our economy but that doesn't mean that supplementing them with getting hand car wash workers does the same.
Almost every country around the globe has immigrants arriving who have been filtered via some form of points-based system to ensure the people arriving are those who are wanted. Countries cherrypick from potential applicants who they want to receive. So of course once filtered the migrants who arrive tend to be disproportionately beneficial. That's not necessarily the same if those who are arriving are utterly unfiltered and are coming to work in a hand car wash while claiming housing allowance and universal credit.
Plus given that practically speaking we can only handle a certain proportion of migration per annum, the looser we are with migration for unskilled hand car wash employees the tighter we have to be on the other end of the spectrum for skilled worker. We face an Opportunity Cost of missing out on more skilled migrants.
Drinking water is good for you. There is plenty of scientific evidence showing the benefits of hydration. If you take that evidence, go on a boat and into the ocean and drink a few litres of unfiltered ocean water on the basis of "the evidence says water is good for you" then that's not good for you. You have to be careful in how you apply your evidence.
* Though not a reason or excuse not to invest in skills ourselves.
Of course you take your pick from the studies, but Manning, Manacorda, Wadsworth do find some UK research on the subject.
Absolutely and most UK research on the subject I've seen shows that overall immigration has been boosting GDP but the price for that has been paid by the lowest-paid.
What I've not seen any solid research on is maintaining immigration at a similar rate but boosting skilled non-European migration and dropping unskilled European migration. Some solid research on that would be useful, but most of it at this point is frankly intuition and guesswork. Or theoretical.
"One notable UK study by Dustmann, Fabbri and Preston. (2005) uses variation in the composition of immigrants relative to natives by skill and region, concluding that immigration has no discernible effect on the average level of native wages. A similar conclusion is reached by Dustmann, Frattini and Preston. (2008), although they find some negative effect of immigration among native wages at the bottom of the distribution and a positive effect among those at the top."
With so many vacancies what's the reason that virtually anyone on UC couldn't get a much better job?
Childcare? Skills? Unemployable?
We need to be much more innovative in supporting people into work here.
It's far far better for you and everyone else if you work.
It's normal in career progression to get cumulative steps of slightly better pay rather than much better in a single step.
For those working on UC anyone who gets a better pay rise they know they'll have to work harder but the reality is that the state will effectively tax them 75% of every extra penny they earn.
If you were facing a real tax rate of 75% would that incentivise you to look for a slightly better paid job?
No, and it needs sorting.
Nevertheless, if that £20 extra a week was critical to me and I could get, say, £50 a week more net by working then I'd do it.
Absolutely. I wholeheartedly agree that's what should happen.
But £50 a week more net by working means £200 more gross. That's £5.33 per hour extra (at 37.5h per week full time work). For someone on minimum wage that's a more than 50% pay rise.
The system is stacked against them doing as we both want.
A lot of the cases I have seen in papers recently it has been childcare arrangements that have been the barrier.
That wouldn't surprise me at all. And that would come ON TOP or the tax barrier I already mentioned.
Any childcare costs that the employee has to shoulder personally come out of the 25% of their gross wages that they're actually able to keep themselves.
Is there any wonder that some people think why bother?
It's a horrible attitude, but its also a tragically logical one. The system is broken and needs fixing. I will vote for any party that fixes it, as opposed to just raising or lowering benefits.
IDS came up with a good structure… but George Osborne fucked it up to save a few pennies
The student loan system was a reasonable attempt.., but George Osborne fucked it up to increase the value of the loans so he could sell them
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 issue with your argument above is that it only looks at the aggregate GDP model. Look at a GDP per capita model and importing low skilled labour would reduces it.
Indeed. One other issue that we have with misapplied "analysis" is that it shows that immigration is good overall without breaking down the issue of how or why it is good. Since there is nobody sane proposing no immigration, just a debate about how it gets controlled.
Importing higher skills absolutely is good* but then people extrapolate from that "if a little is good, more must be better." Getting some dentists, doctors and other qualified people coming boosts our skills and our economy but that doesn't mean that supplementing them with getting hand car wash workers does the same.
Almost every country around the globe has immigrants arriving who have been filtered via some form of points-based system to ensure the people arriving are those who are wanted. Countries cherrypick from potential applicants who they want to receive. So of course once filtered the migrants who arrive tend to be disproportionately beneficial. That's not necessarily the same if those who are arriving are utterly unfiltered and are coming to work in a hand car wash while claiming housing allowance and universal credit.
Plus given that practically speaking we can only handle a certain proportion of migration per annum, the looser we are with migration for unskilled hand car wash employees the tighter we have to be on the other end of the spectrum for skilled worker. We face an Opportunity Cost of missing out on more skilled migrants.
Drinking water is good for you. There is plenty of scientific evidence showing the benefits of hydration. If you take that evidence, go on a boat and into the ocean and drink a few litres of unfiltered ocean water on the basis of "the evidence says water is good for you" then that's not good for you. You have to be careful in how you apply your evidence.
* Though not a reason or excuse not to invest in skills ourselves.
Of course you take your pick from the studies, but Manning, Manacorda, Wadsworth do find some UK research on the subject.
Tbf, it's significantly less clear cut than pro-free movement people like to pretend. Almost all UK research on the subject recognises (but also puts aside) that people on lower incomes were made worse off relatively to people on higher incomes. The conclusions are similar in that on a macro level GDP is higher with migration than without (I mean it's stupid to say otherwise) but that the spread of income and wealth is increased by low wage migration because it creates a trickle up effect where goods and services become relatively cheaper but spending by higher income people doesn't increase enough to offset that. The end result is what we have witnessed in the UK - the rich got richer and the poor pretty much stayed where they were.
You think having that overall higher GDP is worth the inequality it creates, which is fine and a perfectly valid perspective. What you're trying to do is invalidate the other side of the coin and it's a little bit tiresome to have to go through this over and over again. Few people deny that immigration increases GDP, it very likely increases GDP per capita as well because the top decile (people like us) really does benefit a lot from it. To pretend that there are no downsides to it is ridiculous.
Not at all. I have never once disputed that as I read those studies some time ago and why would I post that excerpt now - I thought we were discussing this rationally.
This past day or two I was responding to the idea that the foreigners going home would see a sustainable and real wage rise for the "natives" (who they?) as the study calls them.
Do we know who's paying for Johnson's Spanish holiday yet?
He is staying at the private Villa of Zack Goldsmith, who he made a peer last year. One favour deserves another...
TBF I believe Goldsmith is a genuine friend (doesn’t his half brother employ Carrie?) so it’s not quite as simple as you maliciously pretend
Phew, BJ exonerated cos his missus is employed by Zac’s bro. Move along folks, nothing to see here!
I will not believe someone is a genuine friend of BJ unless it comes out that he’s offered to get journalists beaten up on their behalf.
It means that Foxy is barking up the wrong tree.
Goldsmith is a former MP and current minister. To continue as the latter he needs a seat in the Lords (although you might have a case that the electorate sacked him… albeit as an MP not as a minister)
The villa is related to friendship not pay back for the peerage (again there is a case that the whole damn knot of relationships is far too incestuous)
The issue is that @Foxy went for the cheap shot and missed… but obscured the more important points in the process
What's a few favours between friends?
We live in a chumocracy, ruled by these metropolitan elites with their villas abroad, and their mates in government. Nice work if you can get it...
"I believe that if we had locked down 2 weeks earlier and implemented quarantine for arrivals then our initial wave would have been much smaller and would likely have made the subsequent waves smaller."
R4 WATO had "Victims of COVID" spokesperson "blaming No.10 for death of her father". Aged 98.
Yes, I heard that. It was absurd. Surely they ('Victims of Covid', or the BBC) could have found somebody whose father had died prematurely in their 50s or 60s if they'd looked properly. If not, they should have just dropped the item. 98, ffs.
Remember when accurately quoting medical statistics was "facism. Pure, simple, no ifs, no buts."
Another rules update which means vaccine mandates for people working in care homes settles this for yes.
This is bad form, I think - last one on vaccine passports was arguable, but this is hard to put in the original definition of restrictions on social contact, imho.
I'm green either way on this market (traded out some of my no position after the last clarification) but biased towards no.
Edit: for example, it was made clear that the TfL mask mandate did not settle this market for yes - seems inconsistent with respect to vaccine mandates for care home staff?
I agree and was going to post the same but you beat me to it!
It never occurred to me for a second that compulsory vaccination for care workers would immediately settle the market for Yes. Maybe this is my fault but I would argue that the care home worker mandate was known weeks before Smarkets even put up this market. If they were going to settle it in this way I would have gone the other way because the result was obviously Yes. In fact we would all have been on Yes.
Before this rule clarification No was trading at approx 1.45 and Yes 2.2. Now we have 1.09 No and 8.6 Yes. This dramatic change is purely due to the clarification and therefore it must have been widely understood that vaccines for care workers does not constitute a reintroduction of restrictions before the end of 2021.
The month before lockdown was a strange old time all round. It dawned on folk at different speeds. I remember being distinctly irritated my religious service being cancelled on March 15. Six days before we'd had c 20 people crammed into a room singing away with no ventilation, with no qualms whatever. A week after that it was pretty obvious what was to come. Someone will write a classic play or movie about that couple of weeks.
I was incredulous when I heard of acquaintances jetting off to Dubai and the French alps in the week before lockdown. I was asking them if they could not see what was about to happen but they didn't really care. If anything their attitude was that they needed to get in a holiday whilst they could. I was very much seen as a doom monger. However, in my opinion it is people carrying on their foreign trips as normal was one of the major drivers of the pandemic in the UK.
For me there were 2 big mistakes which drove everything else. 1. Locking down at least a week too late 2. Letting international arrivals carry on with no quarantine
I believe that if we had locked down 2 weeks earlier and implemented quarantine for arrivals then our initial wave would have been much smaller and would likely have made the subsequent waves smaller.
I do not know what the professional epidemiologists who were advising the government were playing at. It was blindingly obvious to anyone with half a brain that lockdown should have happened earlier. The politicians should have overruled them.
This "need" for a holiday is peculiar all round. I mean. It's a want isn't it? We still seem squeamish about making this distinction.
No, it's a need
Most humans require variety of scenery to be happy: perhaps because we evolved as wandering hunter gatherers. That's why prison, or internal exile, is a punishment
I remember the feeling when I first went abroad after the horrors of lockdown 3. Spain, and then, even better, Athens
Joyous liberation
Plenty of folk seem to manage without.
People vary. But for many people the need to see and be "somewhere else" is very much that: a human need
I know people who have happily stayed in the same small town all their lives, and if they go on holiday it's usually to the same place. They don't have this need. This wanderlust. They are homebodies
I am one of those that HAS to get away or I become, eventually, severely depressed
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 issue with your argument above is that it only looks at the aggregate GDP model. Look at a GDP per capita model and importing low skilled labour would reduces it.
Indeed. One other issue that we have with misapplied "analysis" is that it shows that immigration is good overall without breaking down the issue of how or why it is good. Since there is nobody sane proposing no immigration, just a debate about how it gets controlled.
Importing higher skills absolutely is good* but then people extrapolate from that "if a little is good, more must be better." Getting some dentists, doctors and other qualified people coming boosts our skills and our economy but that doesn't mean that supplementing them with getting hand car wash workers does the same.
Almost every country around the globe has immigrants arriving who have been filtered via some form of points-based system to ensure the people arriving are those who are wanted. Countries cherrypick from potential applicants who they want to receive. So of course once filtered the migrants who arrive tend to be disproportionately beneficial. That's not necessarily the same if those who are arriving are utterly unfiltered and are coming to work in a hand car wash while claiming housing allowance and universal credit.
Plus given that practically speaking we can only handle a certain proportion of migration per annum, the looser we are with migration for unskilled hand car wash employees the tighter we have to be on the other end of the spectrum for skilled worker. We face an Opportunity Cost of missing out on more skilled migrants.
Drinking water is good for you. There is plenty of scientific evidence showing the benefits of hydration. If you take that evidence, go on a boat and into the ocean and drink a few litres of unfiltered ocean water on the basis of "the evidence says water is good for you" then that's not good for you. You have to be careful in how you apply your evidence.
* Though not a reason or excuse not to invest in skills ourselves.
Of course you take your pick from the studies, but Manning, Manacorda, Wadsworth do find some UK research on the subject.
Absolutely and most UK research on the subject I've seen shows that overall immigration has been boosting GDP but the price for that has been paid by the lowest-paid.
What I've not seen any solid research on is maintaining immigration at a similar rate but boosting skilled non-European migration and dropping unskilled European migration. Some solid research on that would be useful, but most of it at this point is frankly intuition and guesswork. Or theoretical.
"One notable UK study by Dustmann, Fabbri and Preston. (2005) uses variation in the composition of immigrants relative to natives by skill and region, concluding that immigration has no discernible effect on the average level of native wages. A similar conclusion is reached by Dustmann, Frattini and Preston. (2008), although they find some negative effect of immigration among native wages at the bottom of the distribution and a positive effect among those at the top."
Negative effect for those at the bottom and a positive effect for those at the top.
Exactly what we've been saying. Are you happy to accept that now?
I have from the very beginning said that this was an observed effect.
My point with you yesterday was that wage rises as a result of the foreigners going home are illusory.
FFS! Wage rises are not the result of foreigners going home nor are they illusory.
The wage rises are real.
Wages rises are the result of the supply of available labour being curtailed going forwards restoring the wages back to equilibrium levels and reversing the deflation in wages that had occurred for the previous few decades. The migration cancels out, the ending of infinite supply does not.
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 issue with your argument above is that it only looks at the aggregate GDP model. Look at a GDP per capita model and importing low skilled labour would reduces it.
Indeed. One other issue that we have with misapplied "analysis" is that it shows that immigration is good overall without breaking down the issue of how or why it is good. Since there is nobody sane proposing no immigration, just a debate about how it gets controlled.
Importing higher skills absolutely is good* but then people extrapolate from that "if a little is good, more must be better." Getting some dentists, doctors and other qualified people coming boosts our skills and our economy but that doesn't mean that supplementing them with getting hand car wash workers does the same.
Almost every country around the globe has immigrants arriving who have been filtered via some form of points-based system to ensure the people arriving are those who are wanted. Countries cherrypick from potential applicants who they want to receive. So of course once filtered the migrants who arrive tend to be disproportionately beneficial. That's not necessarily the same if those who are arriving are utterly unfiltered and are coming to work in a hand car wash while claiming housing allowance and universal credit.
Plus given that practically speaking we can only handle a certain proportion of migration per annum, the looser we are with migration for unskilled hand car wash employees the tighter we have to be on the other end of the spectrum for skilled worker. We face an Opportunity Cost of missing out on more skilled migrants.
Drinking water is good for you. There is plenty of scientific evidence showing the benefits of hydration. If you take that evidence, go on a boat and into the ocean and drink a few litres of unfiltered ocean water on the basis of "the evidence says water is good for you" then that's not good for you. You have to be careful in how you apply your evidence.
* Though not a reason or excuse not to invest in skills ourselves.
Of course you take your pick from the studies, but Manning, Manacorda, Wadsworth do find some UK research on the subject.
Absolutely and most UK research on the subject I've seen shows that overall immigration has been boosting GDP but the price for that has been paid by the lowest-paid.
What I've not seen any solid research on is maintaining immigration at a similar rate but boosting skilled non-European migration and dropping unskilled European migration. Some solid research on that would be useful, but most of it at this point is frankly intuition and guesswork. Or theoretical.
"One notable UK study by Dustmann, Fabbri and Preston. (2005) uses variation in the composition of immigrants relative to natives by skill and region, concluding that immigration has no discernible effect on the average level of native wages. A similar conclusion is reached by Dustmann, Frattini and Preston. (2008), although they find some negative effect of immigration among native wages at the bottom of the distribution and a positive effect among those at the top."
Negative effect for those at the bottom and a positive effect for those at the top.
Exactly what we've been saying. Are you happy to accept that now?
I have from the very beginning said that this was an observed effect.
My point with you yesterday was that wage rises as a result from emigration are illusory.
I think what we're going to find is that the UK labour market is horribly inefficient because automation and mechanisation has been ignored in key industries for the better part of 20 years. The reason there are a million vacancies is because no one has bothered to invest in automation of simple tasks. A labour shortage exists because we have, as a nation, become hooked on low productivity, high near term profits. As you say, immigration, on aggregate, creates more demand so if we filled half of the available vacancies with immigrant labour it would create, on aggregate, 1.05-1.2x the number of vacancies.
Ultimately you're arguing for an unregulated free market for labour, which is fine. I have no issues with it, what I do take issue with is the complete dismissal of the distortions that we know come with unregulated free markets. Applying immigration controls is a regulation of the free market, at the moment we're probably doing it badly and there's a case to be made for not doing it at all vs doing it badly for sure. However, the ideal scenario is regulating markets properly and having businesses work within that new framework and invest in productivity gains rather than simply throw cheap labour at the issue, which you and I both agree does little to solve any underlying supply shortage.
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.
Do we need teen vaccinations?
Data also missed on booster shoJt
On "Do we need teen vaccinations"? Well, if we reduce infections in this age group by a factor of five (as per vaccination levels) and reduce the infectivity of those with breakthrough infections by half, then the spread both within schools and from teens to parents would be curtailed by a factor of 10 or so. That would help a lot.
In addition, in England, from 6th August to 5th September, we had 614 age 6-17 hospitalised (and indications from earlier data indicated a fairly even spread of those per year of age). Accordingly, as well as curtailing spread, we'd avoid over 50 teens becoming so ill as to be hospitalised in that month alone, and the rate of infection amongst teens skyrocketed in September.
In addition, if only 2% of teens get long-term symptoms, that would imply tens of thousands with long-term issues that could be avoided. Worth doing, I'd suggest.
With so many vacancies what's the reason that virtually anyone on UC couldn't get a much better job?
Childcare? Skills? Unemployable?
We need to be much more innovative in supporting people into work here.
It's far far better for you and everyone else if you work.
It's normal in career progression to get cumulative steps of slightly better pay rather than much better in a single step.
For those working on UC anyone who gets a better pay rise they know they'll have to work harder but the reality is that the state will effectively tax them 75% of every extra penny they earn.
If you were facing a real tax rate of 75% would that incentivise you to look for a slightly better paid job?
No, and it needs sorting.
Nevertheless, if that £20 extra a week was critical to me and I could get, say, £50 a week more net by working then I'd do it.
Absolutely. I wholeheartedly agree that's what should happen.
But £50 a week more net by working means £200 more gross. That's £5.33 per hour extra (at 37.5h per week full time work). For someone on minimum wage that's a more than 50% pay rise.
The system is stacked against them doing as we both want.
A lot of the cases I have seen in papers recently it has been childcare arrangements that have been the barrier.
That wouldn't surprise me at all. And that would come ON TOP or the tax barrier I already mentioned.
Any childcare costs that the employee has to shoulder personally come out of the 25% of their gross wages that they're actually able to keep themselves.
Is there any wonder that some people think why bother?
It's a horrible attitude, but its also a tragically logical one. The system is broken and needs fixing. I will vote for any party that fixes it, as opposed to just raising or lowering benefits.
IDS came up with a good structure… but George Osborne fucked it up to save a few pennies
The student loan system was a reasonable attempt.., but George Osborne fucked it up to increase the value of the loans so he could sell them
I think I’m seeing a pattern here…
Childcare has another issue. A lot of nurseries just can't get the figures to add up since the Government changed the free entitlements from 15 to (I think) 30 hours a week.
Previously it was possible to cross subsidise the 15 free hours by charging extra for any additional hours. That just isn't possible when the free entitlement is 30 hours because people usually want 35 hours maximum and you can't charge enough with those 5 hours to make the rest of it up.
Of course the Government have a plan to fix this - by increasing the child staff ratio so each staff member can look after more children (even then I suspect the figures won't work).
In all the discussions of immigration, population ageing needs to be front and centre. Looking at the UK labour market data, since the Brexit referendum our population aged 16-49 has gone down by about 500,000 people. Our population aged 50+ has gone up by 1.3 million, including 700,000 over 65. So the fact is, we *are* going to have continued immigration, in sizeable numbers. And in so-called low skill occupations, too. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just deluding themselves. I liked three things about using the EU single market for providing that immigration. First, it was reciprocal, so we got something in return. Second, freedom of movement gave people rights and freedoms. It treated people as citizens, not simply commodities, tied to a specific employer or job. Third, the system was simple, lowering the burden of red tape for both employers and employees. My guess is that we will end up with continued immigration, because of the demand for workers created by our ageing society, but with no reciprocity, loads more red tape, and with workers treated as simply labour inputs, not citizens with rights.
And it had no numerical control, which meant that it biased the system against people from anywhere else, eg the whole of Africa. This was the fatal flaw, both politically and from a humane viewpoint.
That is true. I'm sure that some of the 17.4mn were motivated by a desire to raise immigration from Africa but I struggle to believe it was the majority view.
Actually I think that getting easier migration from the rest of the world for skilled migrants who should be able to make it here, by tightening up on unskilled migrants who shouldn't, was a bigger selling point than you imagine. Especially but not just in minority communities.
The current Home Secretary actually made that argument herself. That it would be easier to have rest of the world migration if European migration were controlled.
That was one of the arguments that swung my vote. I'm all in favour of immigration, I just don't want discrimination in the immigration system. So when I saw the pro-Brexit serious MP politicians (as opposed to Farage and his band of twats) making a liberal argument against discrimination instead of an illiberal argument against migrants at all, then I was pleased with that.
I grew up in another country myself before returning to the UK. That country has more British emigrants than the entire European Union (exc Ireland) combined. Yet while in the EU it was far tougher for eg one of my school friends to get a visa and come to the UK, than it was any random unskilled person in Europe, despite their country taking more of our citizens than the entire EU (exc Ireland) combined. There is no justification for that discrimination.
There are justifications for that distinction, and using the word "discrimination" begs the question. You already know this, but you continue to use words like "discrimination" because you are a sophist. Have some honour.
There is no good justification for the discrimination.
If you are discriminating against potential migrants based on country of origin as opposed to their own skills and what they have to offer then what would you call that other than discrimination?
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
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 issue with your argument above is that it only looks at the aggregate GDP model. Look at a GDP per capita model and importing low skilled labour would reduces it.
Indeed. One other issue that we have with misapplied "analysis" is that it shows that immigration is good overall without breaking down the issue of how or why it is good. Since there is nobody sane proposing no immigration, just a debate about how it gets controlled.
Importing higher skills absolutely is good* but then people extrapolate from that "if a little is good, more must be better." Getting some dentists, doctors and other qualified people coming boosts our skills and our economy but that doesn't mean that supplementing them with getting hand car wash workers does the same.
Almost every country around the globe has immigrants arriving who have been filtered via some form of points-based system to ensure the people arriving are those who are wanted. Countries cherrypick from potential applicants who they want to receive. So of course once filtered the migrants who arrive tend to be disproportionately beneficial. That's not necessarily the same if those who are arriving are utterly unfiltered and are coming to work in a hand car wash while claiming housing allowance and universal credit.
Plus given that practically speaking we can only handle a certain proportion of migration per annum, the looser we are with migration for unskilled hand car wash employees the tighter we have to be on the other end of the spectrum for skilled worker. We face an Opportunity Cost of missing out on more skilled migrants.
Drinking water is good for you. There is plenty of scientific evidence showing the benefits of hydration. If you take that evidence, go on a boat and into the ocean and drink a few litres of unfiltered ocean water on the basis of "the evidence says water is good for you" then that's not good for you. You have to be careful in how you apply your evidence.
* Though not a reason or excuse not to invest in skills ourselves.
Of course you take your pick from the studies, but Manning, Manacorda, Wadsworth do find some UK research on the subject.
Absolutely and most UK research on the subject I've seen shows that overall immigration has been boosting GDP but the price for that has been paid by the lowest-paid.
What I've not seen any solid research on is maintaining immigration at a similar rate but boosting skilled non-European migration and dropping unskilled European migration. Some solid research on that would be useful, but most of it at this point is frankly intuition and guesswork. Or theoretical.
"One notable UK study by Dustmann, Fabbri and Preston. (2005) uses variation in the composition of immigrants relative to natives by skill and region, concluding that immigration has no discernible effect on the average level of native wages. A similar conclusion is reached by Dustmann, Frattini and Preston. (2008), although they find some negative effect of immigration among native wages at the bottom of the distribution and a positive effect among those at the top."
Negative effect for those at the bottom and a positive effect for those at the top.
Exactly what we've been saying. Are you happy to accept that now?
I have from the very beginning said that this was an observed effect.
My point with you yesterday was that wage rises as a result of the foreigners going home are illusory.
FFS! Wage rises are not the result of foreigners going home nor are they illusory.
The wage rises are real.
Wages rises are the result of the supply of available labour being curtailed going forwards restoring the wages back to equilibrium levels and reversing the deflation in wages that had occurred for the previous few decades. The migration cancels out, the ending of infinite supply does not.
Your example was wage rises of 4.1% and inflation of 4%.
You were happy at that. But first that is no sort of real wage rise, secondly it is temporary as the price and wage level will decrease as demand shrinks, and thirdly it will hit our export competitiveness.
But sadly I must dash now so go for your life with the diagrams.
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.
from their sums the installation of the heat pump cost £6k more than a gas boiler would have. and the running costs were almost identical. but an £11k taxpayer bung has made it a winner for them.
Dominic Cummings said today that the leaders of both the government and the Labour party are both "jokes" and therefore "we" "obviously" need a new political system. This line of thought makes sense if you believe that super-performing leadership that doesn't muck about can save the world from what will otherwise be inevitable Armageddon, which has long been the Cummings mantra.
I wonder when he thinks the last time was that the two main parties both had leaders who weren't jokes? Churchill-Attlee maybe, long before he was born?*
For that matter, when does he think the last time was that at least one of the leaders wasn't a joke? Blair? As for the Tories, going backwards he would presumably start with Thatcher and then perhaps he'd jump straight to Churchill. And actually I'm not too sure he'd even say Churchill.
Funny how the political system has lasted so long. First meteorite that comes along, it'll bite the dust. But...wait...the Oxford history graduate is tearing off his t-shirt... We're going to be saved after all!
You gotta admit, Dave may have had a point...
Meanwhile, the minister that Cummings never criticises must be feeling great about getting reshuffled before the report came out.
(*) As Cummings must be aware, there have long been some on the far right who openly favour war as a good thing because it puts a premium on leadership.
The month before lockdown was a strange old time all round. It dawned on folk at different speeds. I remember being distinctly irritated my religious service being cancelled on March 15. Six days before we'd had c 20 people crammed into a room singing away with no ventilation, with no qualms whatever. A week after that it was pretty obvious what was to come. Someone will write a classic play or movie about that couple of weeks.
I was incredulous when I heard of acquaintances jetting off to Dubai and the French alps in the week before lockdown. I was asking them if they could not see what was about to happen but they didn't really care. If anything their attitude was that they needed to get in a holiday whilst they could. I was very much seen as a doom monger. However, in my opinion it is people carrying on their foreign trips as normal was one of the major drivers of the pandemic in the UK.
For me there were 2 big mistakes which drove everything else. 1. Locking down at least a week too late 2. Letting international arrivals carry on with no quarantine
I believe that if we had locked down 2 weeks earlier and implemented quarantine for arrivals then our initial wave would have been much smaller and would likely have made the subsequent waves smaller.
I do not know what the professional epidemiologists who were advising the government were playing at. It was blindingly obvious to anyone with half a brain that lockdown should have happened earlier. The politicians should have overruled them.
It was an extraordinary time. On the same weekend in March 2020 someone I know was hopping off to Rome for the weekend with his family, while at a meeting I was at someone objected strongly and firmly to people shaking hands with each other.
And the extraordinary combinations hasn't stopped. I know several people who have avoided any voluntary gathering or meeting in the UK since lockdown but have been abroad, by air, for holidays in the last few months.
It was an extraordinary 2 weeks, where it was obvious what was coming.
9th of March, I was at a full stadium watching the last PL match with a crowd of 2020. Saturday 14th I went for dinner with friends, with increased edginess. Some of the table had covid the following week. On Sunday my church had half its usual congregation.
Clinics started getting cancellations/DNAs of 50% or more from Monday 16th. Streets were getting quiet. On 19th I shot down to London to scoop and scoot Fox jr2 from his lodgings as his course had all gone on-line. The streets were empty, and his neighbours were coughing over the balcony and blue lights zipping by.
It had that apocalyptic feel of the early stages of a zombie movie. Places were locking down spontaneously.
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 issue with your argument above is that it only looks at the aggregate GDP model. Look at a GDP per capita model and importing low skilled labour would reduces it.
Indeed. One other issue that we have with misapplied "analysis" is that it shows that immigration is good overall without breaking down the issue of how or why it is good. Since there is nobody sane proposing no immigration, just a debate about how it gets controlled.
Importing higher skills absolutely is good* but then people extrapolate from that "if a little is good, more must be better." Getting some dentists, doctors and other qualified people coming boosts our skills and our economy but that doesn't mean that supplementing them with getting hand car wash workers does the same.
Almost every country around the globe has immigrants arriving who have been filtered via some form of points-based system to ensure the people arriving are those who are wanted. Countries cherrypick from potential applicants who they want to receive. So of course once filtered the migrants who arrive tend to be disproportionately beneficial. That's not necessarily the same if those who are arriving are utterly unfiltered and are coming to work in a hand car wash while claiming housing allowance and universal credit.
Plus given that practically speaking we can only handle a certain proportion of migration per annum, the looser we are with migration for unskilled hand car wash employees the tighter we have to be on the other end of the spectrum for skilled worker. We face an Opportunity Cost of missing out on more skilled migrants.
Drinking water is good for you. There is plenty of scientific evidence showing the benefits of hydration. If you take that evidence, go on a boat and into the ocean and drink a few litres of unfiltered ocean water on the basis of "the evidence says water is good for you" then that's not good for you. You have to be careful in how you apply your evidence.
* Though not a reason or excuse not to invest in skills ourselves.
Of course you take your pick from the studies, but Manning, Manacorda, Wadsworth do find some UK research on the subject.
Absolutely and most UK research on the subject I've seen shows that overall immigration has been boosting GDP but the price for that has been paid by the lowest-paid.
What I've not seen any solid research on is maintaining immigration at a similar rate but boosting skilled non-European migration and dropping unskilled European migration. Some solid research on that would be useful, but most of it at this point is frankly intuition and guesswork. Or theoretical.
"One notable UK study by Dustmann, Fabbri and Preston. (2005) uses variation in the composition of immigrants relative to natives by skill and region, concluding that immigration has no discernible effect on the average level of native wages. A similar conclusion is reached by Dustmann, Frattini and Preston. (2008), although they find some negative effect of immigration among native wages at the bottom of the distribution and a positive effect among those at the top."
Negative effect for those at the bottom and a positive effect for those at the top.
Exactly what we've been saying. Are you happy to accept that now?
I have from the very beginning said that this was an observed effect.
My point with you yesterday was that wage rises as a result of the foreigners going home are illusory.
FFS! Wage rises are not the result of foreigners going home nor are they illusory.
The wage rises are real.
Wages rises are the result of the supply of available labour being curtailed going forwards restoring the wages back to equilibrium levels and reversing the deflation in wages that had occurred for the previous few decades. The migration cancels out, the ending of infinite supply does not.
Your example was wage rises of 4.1% and inflation of 4%.
You were happy at that. But first that is no sort of real wage rise, secondly it is temporary as the price and wage level will decrease as demand shrinks, and thirdly it will hit our export competitiveness.
But sadly I must dash now so go for your life with the diagrams.
No you're wrong again and it was explained to you again, but since you're off and I need to go too enjoy your day. When we're next online together I'll be happy to patiently explain to you again why you are categorically wrong.
PS the 4.1%/4.0% vs 3.9%/4.0% thing was a joke and a paraphrased quote, not an actual prediction.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
Worst bit: The researchers in Unit 731 were secretly given immunity by the United States in exchange for the data which they gathered during their human experimentation.
I see Superman's son is bisexual. Where will it all end?
Reminds me of this discussion.
It’s impossible! Lois Lane could never have Superman’s baby. Do you think her fallopian tubes could handle his sperm? I guarantee you that when he cums during sex, he probably blows a load like a shotgun blast… right through her back! And if by chance Lois does get pregnant, what about her womb? Do you think it’s strong enough to carry his child?...
...He’s an alien, for Christ sake. His Kryptonian biological makeup is enhanced by Earth’s yellow sun. If Lois gets a tan, the kid could kick right through her stomach. Only someone like Wonder Woman has a strong enough uterus to carry his kid. The only way Superman could bang regular chicks is if he does it with a kryptonite condom, but that would probably kill him!
Did Leon write that?
Kevin Smith wrote that, in the Mallrats script.
The original was Larry Niven’s essay “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex”
Dominic Cummings said today that the leaders of both the government and the Labour party are both "jokes" and therefore "we" "obviously" need a new political system. This line of thought makes sense if you believe that super-performing leadership that doesn't muck about can save the world from what will otherwise be inevitable Armageddon, which has long been the Cummings mantra.
I wonder when he thinks the last time was that the two main parties both had leaders who weren't jokes? Churchill-Attlee maybe, long before he was born?
For that matter, when does he think the last time was that at least one of the leaders wasn't a joke? Blair? As for the Tories, going backwards he would presumably start with Thatcher and then perhaps he'd jump straight to Churchill. And actually I'm not too sure he'd even say Churchill.
Funny how the political system has lasted so long. First meteorite that comes along, it'll bite the dust. But...wait...the Oxford history graduate is tearing off his t-shirt... We're going to be saved after all!
You gotta admit, Dave may have had a point...
Meanwhile, the minister that Cummings never criticises must be feeling great about getting reshuffled before the report came out.
Welcome.
Cummings big thing is that MPs are not bright enough to qualify them as leaders. He's been making this point for years and has referred to the 2012 survey below as part of his evidence for this (the Royal Statistical Society's test of the ability (or not) of MPs answering a relatively simple maths question). His time in government has only served to amplify his belief.
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.
An excellent post, getting to the heart of the matter. Whether free movement of people properly belongs to the whole membership of single market in goods and services or properly belongs to the sovereignty of a nation state is exactly the question which divides.
Both views are entirely rational, centrist and moderate. I think the nation state is the natural unit, supporters of the EU think the larger unit is.
For good political and humanist reasons I don't think people can automatically be placed alongside goods and services as interchangeable assets. Similarly I believe a Tanzanian or Korean should have the same opportunity to live in the UK, Ecuador or Belgium as a German or Estonian should have. Which is why I voted for Brexit
How do you feel about Irish people still having FoM to the UK?
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
The Chinese distaste for Japan knows few bounds. It isn't overt, as it is a humiliating period of their history. But it is there.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
Worst bit: The researchers in Unit 731 were secretly given immunity by the United States in exchange for the data which they gathered during their human experimentation.
Yes, I read that too. Numbingly evil
The "doctors" at Unit 731 should all be as infamous as Mengele. If not worse. The Japanese "experiments" were an order of magnitude larger, and probably more psychotic
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.
An excellent post, getting to the heart of the matter. Whether free movement of people properly belongs to the whole membership of single market in goods and services or properly belongs to the sovereignty of a nation state is exactly the question which divides.
Both views are entirely rational, centrist and moderate. I think the nation state is the natural unit, supporters of the EU think the larger unit is.
For good political and humanist reasons I don't think people can automatically be placed alongside goods and services as interchangeable assets. Similarly I believe a Tanzanian or Korean should have the same opportunity to live in the UK, Ecuador or Belgium as a German or Estonian should have. Which is why I voted for Brexit
How do you feel about Irish people still having FoM to the UK?
Personally I have no issue with it. Quite frankly Ireland is small enough for it to be an inconsequential rounding error as to who moves where. We have bigger issues to debate.
What works for a population of 4 million and a population of 450 million may not be the same thing.
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 issue with your argument above is that it only looks at the aggregate GDP model. Look at a GDP per capita model and importing low skilled labour would reduces it.
Indeed. One other issue that we have with misapplied "analysis" is that it shows that immigration is good overall without breaking down the issue of how or why it is good. Since there is nobody sane proposing no immigration, just a debate about how it gets controlled.
Importing higher skills absolutely is good* but then people extrapolate from that "if a little is good, more must be better." Getting some dentists, doctors and other qualified people coming boosts our skills and our economy but that doesn't mean that supplementing them with getting hand car wash workers does the same.
Almost every country around the globe has immigrants arriving who have been filtered via some form of points-based system to ensure the people arriving are those who are wanted. Countries cherrypick from potential applicants who they want to receive. So of course once filtered the migrants who arrive tend to be disproportionately beneficial. That's not necessarily the same if those who are arriving are utterly unfiltered and are coming to work in a hand car wash while claiming housing allowance and universal credit.
Plus given that practically speaking we can only handle a certain proportion of migration per annum, the looser we are with migration for unskilled hand car wash employees the tighter we have to be on the other end of the spectrum for skilled worker. We face an Opportunity Cost of missing out on more skilled migrants.
Drinking water is good for you. There is plenty of scientific evidence showing the benefits of hydration. If you take that evidence, go on a boat and into the ocean and drink a few litres of unfiltered ocean water on the basis of "the evidence says water is good for you" then that's not good for you. You have to be careful in how you apply your evidence.
* Though not a reason or excuse not to invest in skills ourselves.
Of course you take your pick from the studies, but Manning, Manacorda, Wadsworth do find some UK research on the subject.
Absolutely and most UK research on the subject I've seen shows that overall immigration has been boosting GDP but the price for that has been paid by the lowest-paid.
What I've not seen any solid research on is maintaining immigration at a similar rate but boosting skilled non-European migration and dropping unskilled European migration. Some solid research on that would be useful, but most of it at this point is frankly intuition and guesswork. Or theoretical.
The month before lockdown was a strange old time all round. It dawned on folk at different speeds. I remember being distinctly irritated my religious service being cancelled on March 15. Six days before we'd had c 20 people crammed into a room singing away with no ventilation, with no qualms whatever. A week after that it was pretty obvious what was to come. Someone will write a classic play or movie about that couple of weeks.
I was incredulous when I heard of acquaintances jetting off to Dubai and the French alps in the week before lockdown. I was asking them if they could not see what was about to happen but they didn't really care. If anything their attitude was that they needed to get in a holiday whilst they could. I was very much seen as a doom monger. However, in my opinion it is people carrying on their foreign trips as normal was one of the major drivers of the pandemic in the UK.
For me there were 2 big mistakes which drove everything else. 1. Locking down at least a week too late 2. Letting international arrivals carry on with no quarantine
I believe that if we had locked down 2 weeks earlier and implemented quarantine for arrivals then our initial wave would have been much smaller and would likely have made the subsequent waves smaller.
I do not know what the professional epidemiologists who were advising the government were playing at. It was blindingly obvious to anyone with half a brain that lockdown should have happened earlier. The politicians should have overruled them.
This "need" for a holiday is peculiar all round. I mean. It's a want isn't it? We still seem squeamish about making this distinction.
No, it's a need
Most humans require variety of scenery to be happy: perhaps because we evolved as wandering hunter gatherers. That's why prison, or internal exile, is a punishment
I remember the feeling when I first went abroad after the horrors of lockdown 3. Spain, and then, even better, Athens
Joyous liberation
Plenty of folk seem to manage without.
People vary. But for many people the need to see and be "somewhere else" is very much that: a human need
I know people who have happily stayed in the same small town all their lives, and if they go on holiday it's usually to the same place. They don't have this need. This wanderlust. They are homebodies
I am one of those that HAS to get away or I become, eventually, severely depressed
Mmm. That seems fair enough. Hadn't really thought of it in evolutionary terms. You need someone who always wants to discover what is over the next hill, or you would never expand. But you can't have everyone gallivanting off, or nowt would get done at home, and they might all get killed.
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?
Bit in Bold: And this is why such research should not be applied to 'free movement'. Because the USA doesn't have free movement.
For legal migration with a green card in the USA there are hoops to jump through that didn't apply in the UK for someone to come here, work in a hand car wash, and get benefits. So if you take that evidence, then apply it to free movement, you are entirely misapplying and misrepresenting the work.
The US has a lot of working visa types that aren't as difficult to get as a green card (and some offer a route to GC once in the US). Canadians with the requisite skills can get a TN visa at the border.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
I'm honestly surprised that you hadn't heard of us bad ass Brits blowing up København and now Unit 731. SeanT would have known this stuff.
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.
from their sums the installation of the heat pump cost £6k more than a gas boiler would have. and the running costs were almost identical. but an £11k taxpayer bung has made it a winner for them.
Indeed - sometimes pump (sorry) priming is needed.
That's why we had FITs for solar, which were then withdrawn, and now you get 5.5p per exported unit under the present Smart Export Guarantee regime. One good thing about the Tories doing the solar scheme is that they reduced the subsidies from a level that encouraged profiteering whilst the Greens were screaming for public money to be tipped away unnecessarily.
That gave more bang for the buck.
In my view, I am not sure about grants for ASHPs for owner occupiers, as they already have huge tax breaks (averaging at about £1500-2000 per year tax subsidy per OO house - £35bn across approx 20m houses) driving the price of their houses, and I really think it should come out of that in the form of an equity share charge by the Govt realisable on sale.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
The Chinese distaste for Japan knows few bounds. It isn't overt, as it is a humiliating period of their history. But it is there.
The Koreans are not exactly fans, either. For similar reasons. Japan is surrounded by nations with a cause to dislike it
On the other hand, many nations in the region are equally fearful or loathing: of the Chinese. The Vietnamese, for a start
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 issue with your argument above is that it only looks at the aggregate GDP model. Look at a GDP per capita model and importing low skilled labour would reduces it.
Indeed. One other issue that we have with misapplied "analysis" is that it shows that immigration is good overall without breaking down the issue of how or why it is good. Since there is nobody sane proposing no immigration, just a debate about how it gets controlled.
Importing higher skills absolutely is good* but then people extrapolate from that "if a little is good, more must be better." Getting some dentists, doctors and other qualified people coming boosts our skills and our economy but that doesn't mean that supplementing them with getting hand car wash workers does the same.
Almost every country around the globe has immigrants arriving who have been filtered via some form of points-based system to ensure the people arriving are those who are wanted. Countries cherrypick from potential applicants who they want to receive. So of course once filtered the migrants who arrive tend to be disproportionately beneficial. That's not necessarily the same if those who are arriving are utterly unfiltered and are coming to work in a hand car wash while claiming housing allowance and universal credit.
Plus given that practically speaking we can only handle a certain proportion of migration per annum, the looser we are with migration for unskilled hand car wash employees the tighter we have to be on the other end of the spectrum for skilled worker. We face an Opportunity Cost of missing out on more skilled migrants.
Drinking water is good for you. There is plenty of scientific evidence showing the benefits of hydration. If you take that evidence, go on a boat and into the ocean and drink a few litres of unfiltered ocean water on the basis of "the evidence says water is good for you" then that's not good for you. You have to be careful in how you apply your evidence.
* Though not a reason or excuse not to invest in skills ourselves.
Of course you take your pick from the studies, but Manning, Manacorda, Wadsworth do find some UK research on the subject.
Absolutely and most UK research on the subject I've seen shows that overall immigration has been boosting GDP but the price for that has been paid by the lowest-paid.
What I've not seen any solid research on is maintaining immigration at a similar rate but boosting skilled non-European migration and dropping unskilled European migration. Some solid research on that would be useful, but most of it at this point is frankly intuition and guesswork. Or theoretical.
Is the boost of GDP per head?
That's an excellent question that is less clearly answered.
Overall yes for immigration in general - but that's not the case necessarily for all immigration is the best short answer available I think.
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.
A political leader of any calibre ALWAYS keeps abreast of facts with an eye for detail and an attention to their brief. It's their job. They are SUPPOSED to lead.
Can anyone really tell me that Margaret Thatcher or even Tony Blair would have been so shockingly inept as Johnson was in spring 2019? Permitting events like the Cheltenham Festival to continue when Italy had already gone into lockdown has nothing to do with us using hindsighting.
It was, and is, the most shocking example of an inept useless buffoon who never should have been elected Prime Minister and who is totally unfit for the office.
"Permitting events like Cheltenham to continue" ... this entire line of thinking is outrageously authoritarian.
The onus is on the state to have an extremely good reason for sweeping away our civil liberties, not the other way around, and we should never lose sight of that.
The more this gets spoken about like this the more I think I may have been wrong to back lockdown and the Swedish option may have been better.
Because it's one thing saying this is needed to stop the NHS from collapsing but now it's been normalised as it should have been done for other reasons.
I had an interesting couple of meetings yesterday about the “no jab no job” policy in the care homes sector
People increasingly recognising it was a mistake but very difficult to walk back from.
As a data point one care home CEO mentioned to me they had had 1,800 fatalities since (I think) March. 1% of them were “with COVID” (not even of COVID). His view is no jab no job is a massive over-reaction which will exacerbate staff shortages and hence reduce the quality of care.
More to the point the government is now pushing for mandatory flu vaccines for care home staff despite 50% efficacy… the principle of mandatory vaccines has been established and the government is pushing for further and ongoing intervention
Next it might be all NHS staff, all schoolteachers, perhaps even visitors to patients in care homes and hospitals.
I take it 1800 is not significantly larger than figures for previous years?
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.
from their sums the installation of the heat pump cost £6k more than a gas boiler would have. and the running costs were almost identical. but an £11k taxpayer bung has made it a winner for them.
You can buy a terraced house not far from me for way less than £50k. Brighton it isn't.
I'm not sure how you persuade someone buying a house for £30k to spend £10k installing a heating system.
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.
Do we need teen vaccinations?
Data also missed on booster shoJt
On "Do we need teen vaccinations"? Well, if we reduce infections in this age group by a factor of five (as per vaccination levels) and reduce the infectivity of those with breakthrough infections by half, then the spread both within schools and from teens to parents would be curtailed by a factor of 10 or so. That would help a lot.
In addition, in England, from 6th August to 5th September, we had 614 age 6-17 hospitalised (and indications from earlier data indicated a fairly even spread of those per year of age). Accordingly, as well as curtailing spread, we'd avoid over 50 teens becoming so ill as to be hospitalised in that month alone, and the rate of infection amongst teens skyrocketed in September.
In addition, if only 2% of teens get long-term symptoms, that would imply tens of thousands with long-term issues that could be avoided. Worth doing, I'd suggest.
This is the graph of the reduction levels in infections per age group (with error bars):
The measured uptick in antibody levels also looks pretty significant
Figure 2. The fold reduction in the rate of confirmed infections in the booster group compared to the nonbooster group as a function of the number of days following the booster dose (day 0 = day receiving the booster dose), for the different age groups. The dashed line represents no added protection by the booster dose. Error bars are 95% confidence intervals not corrected for multiplicity.
This caption to the figure is helpful to understand the very large effects of booster vaccines: a 10- to 20-fold reduction in infections compared to those without a booster! Also noteworthy is the fact that it is the youngest and oldest groups that benefit most from the booster.
The month before lockdown was a strange old time all round. It dawned on folk at different speeds. I remember being distinctly irritated my religious service being cancelled on March 15. Six days before we'd had c 20 people crammed into a room singing away with no ventilation, with no qualms whatever. A week after that it was pretty obvious what was to come. Someone will write a classic play or movie about that couple of weeks.
I was incredulous when I heard of acquaintances jetting off to Dubai and the French alps in the week before lockdown. I was asking them if they could not see what was about to happen but they didn't really care. If anything their attitude was that they needed to get in a holiday whilst they could. I was very much seen as a doom monger. However, in my opinion it is people carrying on their foreign trips as normal was one of the major drivers of the pandemic in the UK.
For me there were 2 big mistakes which drove everything else. 1. Locking down at least a week too late 2. Letting international arrivals carry on with no quarantine
I believe that if we had locked down 2 weeks earlier and implemented quarantine for arrivals then our initial wave would have been much smaller and would likely have made the subsequent waves smaller.
I do not know what the professional epidemiologists who were advising the government were playing at. It was blindingly obvious to anyone with half a brain that lockdown should have happened earlier. The politicians should have overruled them.
This "need" for a holiday is peculiar all round. I mean. It's a want isn't it? We still seem squeamish about making this distinction.
No, it's a need
Most humans require variety of scenery to be happy: perhaps because we evolved as wandering hunter gatherers. That's why prison, or internal exile, is a punishment
I remember the feeling when I first went abroad after the horrors of lockdown 3. Spain, and then, even better, Athens
Joyous liberation
Plenty of folk seem to manage without.
People vary. But for many people the need to see and be "somewhere else" is very much that: a human need
I know people who have happily stayed in the same small town all their lives, and if they go on holiday it's usually to the same place. They don't have this need. This wanderlust. They are homebodies
I am one of those that HAS to get away or I become, eventually, severely depressed
Mmm. That seems fair enough. Hadn't really thought of it in evolutionary terms. You need someone who always wants to discover what is over the next hill, or you would never expand. But you can't have everyone gallivanting off, or nowt would get done at home, and they might all get killed.
Bruce Chatwin (especially in his marvellous book Songlines) posits a theory that many of the ills of civilisation come from the suppression of our innate desire to wander. To walk and walk, and hunt, and walk
This is what we did for 100,000s of years in Africa, then we were suddenly imprisoned by the need to farm, and then live in towns, and have jobs
Some of us are like those mad polar bears you used to see in zoos, with their endless tragic parading, trapped in their tiny, terrible compounds
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
The Chinese distaste for Japan knows few bounds. It isn't overt, as it is a humiliating period of their history. But it is there.
The Koreans are not exactly fans, either. For similar reasons. Japan is surrounded by nations with a cause to dislike it
On the other hand, many nations in the region are equally fearful or loathing: of the Chinese. The Vietnamese, for a start
A somewhat stupid friend thought that anti-Japanese sentiment was all American WWII racism. She even bought into the "Japanese were throwing out the colonisers of East Asia" line......
I managed to persuade her, before a trip to South Korea, to be very, very careful where she said stuff like that.
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.
Do we need teen vaccinations?
Data also missed on booster shoJt
On "Do we need teen vaccinations"? Well, if we reduce infections in this age group by a factor of five (as per vaccination levels) and reduce the infectivity of those with breakthrough infections by half, then the spread both within schools and from teens to parents would be curtailed by a factor of 10 or so. That would help a lot.
In addition, in England, from 6th August to 5th September, we had 614 age 6-17 hospitalised (and indications from earlier data indicated a fairly even spread of those per year of age). Accordingly, as well as curtailing spread, we'd avoid over 50 teens becoming so ill as to be hospitalised in that month alone, and the rate of infection amongst teens skyrocketed in September.
In addition, if only 2% of teens get long-term symptoms, that would imply tens of thousands with long-term issues that could be avoided. Worth doing, I'd suggest.
The month before lockdown was a strange old time all round. It dawned on folk at different speeds. I remember being distinctly irritated my religious service being cancelled on March 15. Six days before we'd had c 20 people crammed into a room singing away with no ventilation, with no qualms whatever. A week after that it was pretty obvious what was to come. Someone will write a classic play or movie about that couple of weeks.
I was incredulous when I heard of acquaintances jetting off to Dubai and the French alps in the week before lockdown. I was asking them if they could not see what was about to happen but they didn't really care. If anything their attitude was that they needed to get in a holiday whilst they could. I was very much seen as a doom monger. However, in my opinion it is people carrying on their foreign trips as normal was one of the major drivers of the pandemic in the UK.
For me there were 2 big mistakes which drove everything else. 1. Locking down at least a week too late 2. Letting international arrivals carry on with no quarantine
I believe that if we had locked down 2 weeks earlier and implemented quarantine for arrivals then our initial wave would have been much smaller and would likely have made the subsequent waves smaller.
I do not know what the professional epidemiologists who were advising the government were playing at. It was blindingly obvious to anyone with half a brain that lockdown should have happened earlier. The politicians should have overruled them.
This "need" for a holiday is peculiar all round. I mean. It's a want isn't it? We still seem squeamish about making this distinction.
You're fighting against the whole advertising industry there. Some would argue that they're at the root of many of our evils.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
The Chinese distaste for Japan knows few bounds. It isn't overt, as it is a humiliating period of their history. But it is there.
The Koreans are not exactly fans, either. For similar reasons. Japan is surrounded by nations with a cause to dislike it
On the other hand, many nations in the region are equally fearful or loathing: of the Chinese. The Vietnamese, for a start
A somewhat stupid friend thought that anti-Japanese sentiment was all American WWII racism. She even bought into the "Japanese were throwing out the colonisers of East Asia" line......
I managed to persuade her, before a trip to South Korea, to be very, very careful where she said stuff like that.
Reading an account of the role of the Japanese at the conferences leading up to the Versailles treaty, and the reactions of the Americans to them, is instructive, and an under-studied corner of history. There’s an argument that Versailles sowed the seeds of the Pacific WWII almost as much as it did in Europe.
That vile man seems to be getting a lot of money from Remainers 'trolling' him. Considering everyone who does this is directly paying him, and he seems to have no qualms taking money from them, why give him the oxygen of publicity?
This vile man formed a political party recently as a vehicle for his ambition. In the European elections he urged all those who shared his vision and objectives to vote for him and millions did.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
The Chinese distaste for Japan knows few bounds. It isn't overt, as it is a humiliating period of their history. But it is there.
The Koreans are not exactly fans, either. For similar reasons. Japan is surrounded by nations with a cause to dislike it
On the other hand, many nations in the region are equally fearful or loathing: of the Chinese. The Vietnamese, for a start
A somewhat stupid friend thought that anti-Japanese sentiment was all American WWII racism. She even bought into the "Japanese were throwing out the colonisers of East Asia" line......
I managed to persuade her, before a trip to South Korea, to be very, very careful where she said stuff like that.
Reading an account of the role of the Japanese at the conferences leading up to the Versailles treaty, and the reactions of the Americans to them, is instructive, and an under-studied corner of history. There’s an argument that Versailles sowed the seeds of the Pacific WWII almost as much as it did in Europe.
Also resentment (argued. however, by some Japanese to be misplaced) at the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 which limited them to 60% of capital ship tonnage compared with the USN or RN.
In all the discussions of immigration, population ageing needs to be front and centre. Looking at the UK labour market data, since the Brexit referendum our population aged 16-49 has gone down by about 500,000 people. Our population aged 50+ has gone up by 1.3 million, including 700,000 over 65. So the fact is, we *are* going to have continued immigration, in sizeable numbers. And in so-called low skill occupations, too. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just deluding themselves. I liked three things about using the EU single market for providing that immigration. First, it was reciprocal, so we got something in return. Second, freedom of movement gave people rights and freedoms. It treated people as citizens, not simply commodities, tied to a specific employer or job. Third, the system was simple, lowering the burden of red tape for both employers and employees. My guess is that we will end up with continued immigration, because of the demand for workers created by our ageing society, but with no reciprocity, loads more red tape, and with workers treated as simply labour inputs, not citizens with rights.
And it had no numerical control, which meant that it biased the system against people from anywhere else, eg the whole of Africa. This was the fatal flaw, both politically and from a humane viewpoint.
That is true. I'm sure that some of the 17.4mn were motivated by a desire to raise immigration from Africa but I struggle to believe it was the majority view.
Actually I think that getting easier migration from the rest of the world for skilled migrants who should be able to make it here, by tightening up on unskilled migrants who shouldn't, was a bigger selling point than you imagine. Especially but not just in minority communities.
The current Home Secretary actually made that argument herself. That it would be easier to have rest of the world migration if European migration were controlled.
That was one of the arguments that swung my vote. I'm all in favour of immigration, I just don't want discrimination in the immigration system. So when I saw the pro-Brexit serious MP politicians (as opposed to Farage and his band of twats) making a liberal argument against discrimination instead of an illiberal argument against migrants at all, then I was pleased with that.
I grew up in another country myself before returning to the UK. That country has more British emigrants than the entire European Union (exc Ireland) combined. Yet while in the EU it was far tougher for eg one of my school friends to get a visa and come to the UK, than it was any random unskilled person in Europe, despite their country taking more of our citizens than the entire EU (exc Ireland) combined. There is no justification for that discrimination.
There are justifications for that distinction, and using the word "discrimination" begs the question. You already know this, but you continue to use words like "discrimination" because you are a sophist. Have some honour.
There is no good justification for the discrimination.
If you are discriminating against potential migrants based on country of origin as opposed to their own skills and what they have to offer then what would you call that other than discrimination?
You've already had the answer to this, you know the argument, so your feigning ignorance is just a part of your dishonest approach to this whole question.
Here it is, once again. Freedom of movement is part of a free market, and having freedoms of movement of goods, services, and labour within that market is a sensible package of reforms that ought be done at the same time.
That's the proposition. You may not agree with it, but the idea that the geographical distinction is based on "discrimination" is not one that is at all a part of the argument in favour. If you cannot argue against it in its own terms and instead have to slay straw men, you are a fool. Other people are able to better take on the debate and address that point with greater or lesser degrees of success, because they are better than you at this.
Examples of good counter arguments are 1. We aren't as constrained by geography as we used to be (I don't agree we're there yet) 2. Other countries are willing and able to enter into this sort of thing (true, more should be done) 3. The penalties of the free market outweigh the benefits, so we shouldn't seek market integration (I strongly disagree)
Examples of bad counter arguments are 1. Having a stronger trading relationship with our neighbours is racist!!!1!
You can have the last word on the subject, I don't intend to reply to you on this again because it's a waste of everyone's time.
That's total bullshit. So your argument is that free movement is sensible because free movement is sensible. Why?
Simply saying that it is "a sensible package of reforms that ought to be done at the same time" doesn't answer the question as to WHY you think it is a sensible package, you are merely restating your opinion.
Saying you support free movement because free movement is sensible is like saying "I believe in God because I believe in God". That's just faith, that's not an argument.
People are not commodities, indeed as I said more people from the UK go abroad to Australia than to the entire EU combined (exc Ireland) so the idea of "gravity" or "neighbours" affecting people is complete poppycock.
If you want an argument as to why this discrimination is OK then you need a stronger argument than "it is sensible", you need a reason WHY it is sensible. That you haven't given. Until then, its pure discrimination.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
The Chinese distaste for Japan knows few bounds. It isn't overt, as it is a humiliating period of their history. But it is there.
The Koreans are not exactly fans, either. For similar reasons. Japan is surrounded by nations with a cause to dislike it
On the other hand, many nations in the region are equally fearful or loathing: of the Chinese. The Vietnamese, for a start
A somewhat stupid friend thought that anti-Japanese sentiment was all American WWII racism. She even bought into the "Japanese were throwing out the colonisers of East Asia" line......
I managed to persuade her, before a trip to South Korea, to be very, very careful where she said stuff like that.
Reading an account of the role of the Japanese at the conferences leading up to the Versailles treaty, and the reactions of the Americans to them, is instructive, and an under-studied corner of history. There’s an argument that Versailles sowed the seeds of the Pacific WWII almost as much as it did in Europe.
Is there a link to that account, or a book title. Sounds fascinating.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
I'm honestly surprised that you hadn't heard of us bad ass Brits blowing up København and now Unit 731. SeanT would have known this stuff.
Each successive reincarnation has watered down the essence of SeanT such that all we see nowadays is a pale shadow. Which isn’t entirely bad news.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
I'm honestly surprised that you hadn't heard of us bad ass Brits blowing up København and now Unit 731. SeanT would have known this stuff.
Each successive reincarnation has watered down the essence of SeanT such that all we see nowadays is a pale shadow. Which isn’t entirely bad news.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
The Chinese distaste for Japan knows few bounds. It isn't overt, as it is a humiliating period of their history. But it is there.
The Koreans are not exactly fans, either. For similar reasons. Japan is surrounded by nations with a cause to dislike it
On the other hand, many nations in the region are equally fearful or loathing: of the Chinese. The Vietnamese, for a start
A somewhat stupid friend thought that anti-Japanese sentiment was all American WWII racism. She even bought into the "Japanese were throwing out the colonisers of East Asia" line......
I managed to persuade her, before a trip to South Korea, to be very, very careful where she said stuff like that.
Reading an account of the role of the Japanese at the conferences leading up to the Versailles treaty, and the reactions of the Americans to them, is instructive, and an under-studied corner of history. There’s an argument that Versailles sowed the seeds of the Pacific WWII almost as much as it did in Europe.
Reacting badly to racism didn't necessarily involve a genocidal Facist* rampage across Asia that was fundamentally going to fail. Said failure was forecast by some of the architects of said rampage.....
If the Japanese had accepted the various treaties they had signed, they would have been prosperous, powerful and secure against attack.
The problem was that the Japanese government wanted stuff that belonged to other people. A lot of stuff.
*Anyone who buys into the bullshit about Japanese culture being the reason for all the atrocities needs to explain their behaviour in the Russo-Japanese war and in WWI. When, apparently it wasn't necessary to cut prisoners of war up, alive.
What on earth is going on with England's (presumably mainly teenage) vaccination rollout. Scotland had almost as many 1st doses yesterday !
There's an idiotic limitation of no walk in centre appointments for under 16s, they have to get it at school which is significantly slowing them down as teams need to go to each school individually rather than have parents go to the local vaccine centre on the weekend or after school. They still make these schoolboy errors this far into the programme, it's a shocking indictment of how Whitehall thinks.
The thing is that doing jabs in schools ought to be easy and efficient. You know where the kids are, you have 6 hours a day, 5 days a week to do them and the only place they can hide is behind the bike sheds. It ought to be way better than relying on walk-ins. That's why other schoolchild vaccinations are done in school.
But for some reason, it's not happening and I haven't had any indication on when Schoolchild in Romford is getting their jab.
Someone needs to be saying "Action This Day" in a booming voice (Geoffrey Cox, maybe?) until action is enacted. Yeah, right.
My sense of it is that schools are making life difficult because they don't want to attract the attentions of their local loony bin anti-vaxxers that the government hasn't acted on to prevent them from harassing teachers, headteachers and kids.
Even then, the walk in option should be made available, they're sitting around doing nothing at the moment anyway.
Could well be that; I've heard some horrible things on the teacher grapevine.
In which case, do something about it. The thread running though all of BoJo's failures (not just on The Virus) is not doing stuff that will upset people until he has no choice. By which time, it's suboptimally late. Say stuff, but not do stuff.
We have a weekly protest in Warminster about vaccinating children. They stand along the high street with placards such as "Why vaccinate children?" and all other kinds of nutty stuff. Usually I'm in my car which is a blessing as I think I might get quite angry if I was on foot.
Of course, they have a right to protest, but they are the classic ill informed, 'I read it on Facebook' bullshit artists. Last week they protested about the same time that the news of the poor 15 year old who had died of covid came out. They have no shame.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
The Chinese distaste for Japan knows few bounds. It isn't overt, as it is a humiliating period of their history. But it is there.
The Koreans are not exactly fans, either. For similar reasons. Japan is surrounded by nations with a cause to dislike it
On the other hand, many nations in the region are equally fearful or loathing: of the Chinese. The Vietnamese, for a start
A somewhat stupid friend thought that anti-Japanese sentiment was all American WWII racism. She even bought into the "Japanese were throwing out the colonisers of East Asia" line......
I managed to persuade her, before a trip to South Korea, to be very, very careful where she said stuff like that.
Reading an account of the role of the Japanese at the conferences leading up to the Versailles treaty, and the reactions of the Americans to them, is instructive, and an under-studied corner of history. There’s an argument that Versailles sowed the seeds of the Pacific WWII almost as much as it did in Europe.
Is there a link to that account, or a book title. Sounds fascinating.
The MacMillan book on the negotiations contains some interesting chapters on the subject. The Japanese were desperately keen for a racial equality statement within the treaty - based upon Wilson’s ultimately hypocritical obsession with self-determination - which the US effectively vetoed for fear of stirring up discontent in its southern states. And, as with Germany, the results of the territorial aspects of the treaty gifted Japan sufficient grievances to pursue into the next war.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
The Chinese distaste for Japan knows few bounds. It isn't overt, as it is a humiliating period of their history. But it is there.
The Koreans are not exactly fans, either. For similar reasons. Japan is surrounded by nations with a cause to dislike it
On the other hand, many nations in the region are equally fearful or loathing: of the Chinese. The Vietnamese, for a start
A somewhat stupid friend thought that anti-Japanese sentiment was all American WWII racism. She even bought into the "Japanese were throwing out the colonisers of East Asia" line......
I managed to persuade her, before a trip to South Korea, to be very, very careful where she said stuff like that.
Reading an account of the role of the Japanese at the conferences leading up to the Versailles treaty, and the reactions of the Americans to them, is instructive, and an under-studied corner of history. There’s an argument that Versailles sowed the seeds of the Pacific WWII almost as much as it did in Europe.
Reacting badly to racism didn't necessarily involve a genocidal Facist* rampage across Asia that was fundamentally going to fail. Said failure was forecast by some of the architects of said rampage.....
If the Japanese had accepted the various treaties they had signed, they would have been prosperous, powerful and secure against attack.
The problem was that the Japanese government wanted stuff that belonged to other people. A lot of stuff.
*Anyone who buys into the bullshit about Japanese culture being the reason for all the atrocities needs to explain their behaviour in the Russo-Japanese war and in WWI. When, apparently it wasn't necessary to cut prisoners of war up, alive.
Extreme nationalism seems to go hand in hand with psychotic cruelty, or deranged hatred. Germany wasn't a notoriously cruel country until Hitler. And look at MacolmG
I imagine the elevation of the nation as supreme and the dehumanizing of all others as inferior, and worthless, has something to do with any attendant atrocities
But then you have to explain Cambodia, which was not really nationalism at all, more a kind of nihilistic self-hating Maoism that consumed its own
And how about the Aztecs, who ended up buying children from their own poor people, just to be sacrificed
Maybe Chatwin is right. We are just a crazy species, trapped in a zoo of our own making
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
The Chinese distaste for Japan knows few bounds. It isn't overt, as it is a humiliating period of their history. But it is there.
The Koreans are not exactly fans, either. For similar reasons. Japan is surrounded by nations with a cause to dislike it
On the other hand, many nations in the region are equally fearful or loathing: of the Chinese. The Vietnamese, for a start
A somewhat stupid friend thought that anti-Japanese sentiment was all American WWII racism. She even bought into the "Japanese were throwing out the colonisers of East Asia" line......
I managed to persuade her, before a trip to South Korea, to be very, very careful where she said stuff like that.
Reading an account of the role of the Japanese at the conferences leading up to the Versailles treaty, and the reactions of the Americans to them, is instructive, and an under-studied corner of history. There’s an argument that Versailles sowed the seeds of the Pacific WWII almost as much as it did in Europe.
Also resentment (argued. however, by some Japanese to be misplaced) at the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 which limited them to 60% of capital ship tonnage compared with the USN or RN.
The Washington treaty was actually the following ratio in capital ships -
5 US 5 UK 3 Japan 1.67 Italy 1.67 France
Strangely, those who sell the racism story about the treaty lead out the fact that the Japanese were allotted a tonnage almost as great as Italy and France combined.
The reason for the numbers was simple - UK and US were multi-ocean navies. The Japanese were interested in the Pacific alone.
As Yamamoto observed, the Japanese economy could barely sustain their allocation. So the treaty, from the Japanese perspective really restricted others.
As seen during WWI. If the Japanese Navy had sunk every single row boat in the US Navy, the US Navy would have been bigger than the Japanese Navy by 1944 at the latest....
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
The Chinese distaste for Japan knows few bounds. It isn't overt, as it is a humiliating period of their history. But it is there.
The Koreans are not exactly fans, either. For similar reasons. Japan is surrounded by nations with a cause to dislike it
On the other hand, many nations in the region are equally fearful or loathing: of the Chinese. The Vietnamese, for a start
A somewhat stupid friend thought that anti-Japanese sentiment was all American WWII racism. She even bought into the "Japanese were throwing out the colonisers of East Asia" line......
I managed to persuade her, before a trip to South Korea, to be very, very careful where she said stuff like that.
Reading an account of the role of the Japanese at the conferences leading up to the Versailles treaty, and the reactions of the Americans to them, is instructive, and an under-studied corner of history. There’s an argument that Versailles sowed the seeds of the Pacific WWII almost as much as it did in Europe.
Reacting badly to racism didn't necessarily involve a genocidal Facist* rampage across Asia that was fundamentally going to fail. Said failure was forecast by some of the architects of said rampage.....
If the Japanese had accepted the various treaties they had signed, they would have been prosperous, powerful and secure against attack.
The problem was that the Japanese government wanted stuff that belonged to other people. A lot of stuff.
*Anyone who buys into the bullshit about Japanese culture being the reason for all the atrocities needs to explain their behaviour in the Russo-Japanese war and in WWI. When, apparently it wasn't necessary to cut prisoners of war up, alive.
You misunderstand. I am not for a moment excusing Japan’s appalling behaviour towards its neighbours or its conduct during WWII, I am simply pointing out that there is an argument that its demands at Versailles were essentially reasonable - and suffered simply for being ahead of their time.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
The Chinese distaste for Japan knows few bounds. It isn't overt, as it is a humiliating period of their history. But it is there.
The Koreans are not exactly fans, either. For similar reasons. Japan is surrounded by nations with a cause to dislike it
On the other hand, many nations in the region are equally fearful or loathing: of the Chinese. The Vietnamese, for a start
A somewhat stupid friend thought that anti-Japanese sentiment was all American WWII racism. She even bought into the "Japanese were throwing out the colonisers of East Asia" line......
I managed to persuade her, before a trip to South Korea, to be very, very careful where she said stuff like that.
Reading an account of the role of the Japanese at the conferences leading up to the Versailles treaty, and the reactions of the Americans to them, is instructive, and an under-studied corner of history. There’s an argument that Versailles sowed the seeds of the Pacific WWII almost as much as it did in Europe.
Is there a link to that account, or a book title. Sounds fascinating.
The MacMillan book on the negotiations contains some interesting chapters on the subject. The Japanese were desperately keen for a racial equality statement within the treaty - based upon Wilson’s ultimately hypocritical obsession with self-determination - which the US effectively vetoed for fear of stirring up discontent in its southern states. And, as with Germany, the results of the territorial aspects of the treaty gifted Japan sufficient grievances to pursue into the next war.
If there is one lesson globally from the past 100 years, it’s never let the States take the running when it comes to geopolitics. They are shit. Fucked it up post WW1 with Wilson, fucked it up 1948 in China when Mao Tse Tung was on the ropes and again in 1971 / 1989 when it came to China, fucked it up with Russia in the 90s and then the Middle East and Afghanistan. They truly are useless when it comes to deals.
One of the reasons I liked Trump. He had a bit of the old school British Empire way of dealing with geopolitical topics.
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.
from their sums the installation of the heat pump cost £6k more than a gas boiler would have. and the running costs were almost identical. but an £11k taxpayer bung has made it a winner for them.
Indeed - sometimes pump (sorry) priming is needed.
That's why we had FITs for solar, which were then withdrawn, and now you get 5.5p per exported unit under the present Smart Export Guarantee regime. One good thing about the Tories doing the solar scheme is that they reduced the subsidies from a level that encouraged profiteering whilst the Greens were screaming for public money to be tipped away unnecessarily.
That gave more bang for the buck.
In my view, I am not sure about grants for ASHPs for owner occupiers, as they already have huge tax breaks (averaging at about £1500-2000 per year tax subsidy per OO house - £35bn across approx 20m houses) driving the price of their houses, and I really think it should come out of that in the form of an equity share charge by the Govt realisable on sale.
yes is that really the best way for £11k of taxpayers money to be spent on emission reduction? admittedly it would take a lot of £11k's to build a tidal scheme but I'd see that as a better aim than paying to increase the value of the houses of those who can take advantage.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
The Chinese distaste for Japan knows few bounds. It isn't overt, as it is a humiliating period of their history. But it is there.
The Koreans are not exactly fans, either. For similar reasons. Japan is surrounded by nations with a cause to dislike it
On the other hand, many nations in the region are equally fearful or loathing: of the Chinese. The Vietnamese, for a start
A somewhat stupid friend thought that anti-Japanese sentiment was all American WWII racism. She even bought into the "Japanese were throwing out the colonisers of East Asia" line......
I managed to persuade her, before a trip to South Korea, to be very, very careful where she said stuff like that.
Reading an account of the role of the Japanese at the conferences leading up to the Versailles treaty, and the reactions of the Americans to them, is instructive, and an under-studied corner of history. There’s an argument that Versailles sowed the seeds of the Pacific WWII almost as much as it did in Europe.
Reacting badly to racism didn't necessarily involve a genocidal Facist* rampage across Asia that was fundamentally going to fail. Said failure was forecast by some of the architects of said rampage.....
If the Japanese had accepted the various treaties they had signed, they would have been prosperous, powerful and secure against attack.
The problem was that the Japanese government wanted stuff that belonged to other people. A lot of stuff.
*Anyone who buys into the bullshit about Japanese culture being the reason for all the atrocities needs to explain their behaviour in the Russo-Japanese war and in WWI. When, apparently it wasn't necessary to cut prisoners of war up, alive.
Extreme nationalism seems to go hand in hand with psychotic cruelty, or deranged hatred. Germany wasn't a notoriously cruel country until Hitler. And look at MacolmG
I imagine the elevation of the nation as supreme and the dehumanizing of all others as inferior, and worthless, has something to do with any attendant atrocities
But then you have to explain Cambodia, which was not really nationalism at all, more a kind of nihilistic self-hating Maoism that consumed its own
And how about the Aztecs, who ended up buying children from their own poor people, just to be sacrificed
Maybe Chatwin is right. We are just a crazy species, trapped in a zoo of our own making
The Japanese militarists practically worshiped the Hagakure.
If you read it, you understand where they were coming from. The main points are
1) Thinking is bad if it stops you acting 2) Trying to win is bad - a real Samurai charges like a crazy man, without thought of victory. 3) The act is everything. Winning in an uncool way is loosing.
Written by a fanatic, long after the actual Samurai were out of business......
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.
They really have. And there is plenty of evidence (see the three papers I linked with for a start, using Card-like methdologies) and also persuasive theory and common sense.
So I don't think PB Tories are the ones who need to give this up.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
The Chinese distaste for Japan knows few bounds. It isn't overt, as it is a humiliating period of their history. But it is there.
The Koreans are not exactly fans, either. For similar reasons. Japan is surrounded by nations with a cause to dislike it
On the other hand, many nations in the region are equally fearful or loathing: of the Chinese. The Vietnamese, for a start
A somewhat stupid friend thought that anti-Japanese sentiment was all American WWII racism. She even bought into the "Japanese were throwing out the colonisers of East Asia" line......
I managed to persuade her, before a trip to South Korea, to be very, very careful where she said stuff like that.
Reading an account of the role of the Japanese at the conferences leading up to the Versailles treaty, and the reactions of the Americans to them, is instructive, and an under-studied corner of history. There’s an argument that Versailles sowed the seeds of the Pacific WWII almost as much as it did in Europe.
Reacting badly to racism didn't necessarily involve a genocidal Facist* rampage across Asia that was fundamentally going to fail. Said failure was forecast by some of the architects of said rampage.....
If the Japanese had accepted the various treaties they had signed, they would have been prosperous, powerful and secure against attack.
The problem was that the Japanese government wanted stuff that belonged to other people. A lot of stuff.
*Anyone who buys into the bullshit about Japanese culture being the reason for all the atrocities needs to explain their behaviour in the Russo-Japanese war and in WWI. When, apparently it wasn't necessary to cut prisoners of war up, alive.
Extreme nationalism seems to go hand in hand with psychotic cruelty, or deranged hatred. Germany wasn't a notoriously cruel country until Hitler. And look at MacolmG
I imagine the elevation of the nation as supreme and the dehumanizing of all others as inferior, and worthless, has something to do with any attendant atrocities
But then you have to explain Cambodia, which was not really nationalism at all, more a kind of nihilistic self-hating Maoism that consumed its own
And how about the Aztecs, who ended up buying children from their own poor people, just to be sacrificed
Maybe Chatwin is right. We are just a crazy species, trapped in a zoo of our own making
It has its upsides @Leon. No one would be buying artisanal flint dildos for a high price if we were truly a rationale species.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
I'm honestly surprised that you hadn't heard of us bad ass Brits blowing up København and now Unit 731. SeanT would have known this stuff.
Each successive reincarnation has watered down the essence of SeanT such that all we see nowadays is a pale shadow. Which isn’t entirely bad news.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
The Chinese distaste for Japan knows few bounds. It isn't overt, as it is a humiliating period of their history. But it is there.
The Koreans are not exactly fans, either. For similar reasons. Japan is surrounded by nations with a cause to dislike it
On the other hand, many nations in the region are equally fearful or loathing: of the Chinese. The Vietnamese, for a start
A somewhat stupid friend thought that anti-Japanese sentiment was all American WWII racism. She even bought into the "Japanese were throwing out the colonisers of East Asia" line......
I managed to persuade her, before a trip to South Korea, to be very, very careful where she said stuff like that.
Reading an account of the role of the Japanese at the conferences leading up to the Versailles treaty, and the reactions of the Americans to them, is instructive, and an under-studied corner of history. There’s an argument that Versailles sowed the seeds of the Pacific WWII almost as much as it did in Europe.
Also resentment (argued. however, by some Japanese to be misplaced) at the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 which limited them to 60% of capital ship tonnage compared with the USN or RN.
The Washington treaty was actually the following ratio in capital ships -
5 US 5 UK 3 Japan 1.67 Italy 1.67 France
Strangely, those who sell the racism story about the treaty lead out the fact that the Japanese were allotted a tonnage almost as great as Italy and France combined.
The reason for the numbers was simple - UK and US were multi-ocean navies. The Japanese were interested in the Pacific alone.
As Yamamoto observed, the Japanese economy could barely sustain their allocation. So the treaty, from the Japanese perspective really restricted others.
As seen during WWI. If the Japanese Navy had sunk every single row boat in the US Navy, the US Navy would have been bigger than the Japanese Navy by 1944 at the latest....
Oh yes, some of the Japanese at the time fully realised they were being done well by. But a lot didn't.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
The Chinese distaste for Japan knows few bounds. It isn't overt, as it is a humiliating period of their history. But it is there.
The Koreans are not exactly fans, either. For similar reasons. Japan is surrounded by nations with a cause to dislike it
On the other hand, many nations in the region are equally fearful or loathing: of the Chinese. The Vietnamese, for a start
A somewhat stupid friend thought that anti-Japanese sentiment was all American WWII racism. She even bought into the "Japanese were throwing out the colonisers of East Asia" line......
I managed to persuade her, before a trip to South Korea, to be very, very careful where she said stuff like that.
Reading an account of the role of the Japanese at the conferences leading up to the Versailles treaty, and the reactions of the Americans to them, is instructive, and an under-studied corner of history. There’s an argument that Versailles sowed the seeds of the Pacific WWII almost as much as it did in Europe.
Is there a link to that account, or a book title. Sounds fascinating.
The MacMillan book on the negotiations contains some interesting chapters on the subject. The Japanese were desperately keen for a racial equality statement within the treaty - based upon Wilson’s ultimately hypocritical obsession with self-determination - which the US effectively vetoed for fear of stirring up discontent in its southern states. And, as with Germany, the results of the territorial aspects of the treaty gifted Japan sufficient grievances to pursue into the next war.
If there is one lesson globally from the past 100 years, it’s never let the States take the running when it comes to geopolitics. They are shit. Fucked it up post WW1 with Wilson, fucked it up 1948 in China when Mao Tse Tung was on the ropes and again in 1971 / 1989 when it came to China, fucked it up with Russia in the 90s and then the Middle East and Afghanistan. They truly are useless when it comes to deals.
One of the reasons I liked Trump. He had a bit of the old school British Empire way of dealing with geopolitical topics.
Yes, but the essential problem with Americans is that they don’t travel often enough to the rest of the world (and when they do generally turn out to be utterly clueless), and consequently view everything from the perspective of people for whom a trip into the adjacent state is an adventure into a world of ‘here be dragons’. Trump wasn’t a good example in this respect.
One of my favourite memories is sitting at a dining table on the Queen Mary Two, telling my American dining companions that I was about to make a road trip out to South Dakota, and having them (who were from New York, Chicago, or lived in gated communities on the Georgia coast) tell me that the population of the state was only a few tens of thousands and that I would drive for hours without seeing another car. Of course, none of them had ever been there themselves.
People who don’t even know their own country certainly don’t understand the world.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
The Chinese distaste for Japan knows few bounds. It isn't overt, as it is a humiliating period of their history. But it is there.
The Koreans are not exactly fans, either. For similar reasons. Japan is surrounded by nations with a cause to dislike it
On the other hand, many nations in the region are equally fearful or loathing: of the Chinese. The Vietnamese, for a start
A somewhat stupid friend thought that anti-Japanese sentiment was all American WWII racism. She even bought into the "Japanese were throwing out the colonisers of East Asia" line......
I managed to persuade her, before a trip to South Korea, to be very, very careful where she said stuff like that.
Reading an account of the role of the Japanese at the conferences leading up to the Versailles treaty, and the reactions of the Americans to them, is instructive, and an under-studied corner of history. There’s an argument that Versailles sowed the seeds of the Pacific WWII almost as much as it did in Europe.
Reacting badly to racism didn't necessarily involve a genocidal Facist* rampage across Asia that was fundamentally going to fail. Said failure was forecast by some of the architects of said rampage.....
If the Japanese had accepted the various treaties they had signed, they would have been prosperous, powerful and secure against attack.
The problem was that the Japanese government wanted stuff that belonged to other people. A lot of stuff.
*Anyone who buys into the bullshit about Japanese culture being the reason for all the atrocities needs to explain their behaviour in the Russo-Japanese war and in WWI. When, apparently it wasn't necessary to cut prisoners of war up, alive.
You misunderstand. I am not for a moment excusing Japan’s appalling behaviour towards its neighbours or its conduct during WWII, I am simply pointing out that there is an argument that its demands at Versailles were essentially reasonable - and suffered simply for being ahead of their time.
Lots of people got screwed at Versailles. It was inevitable since it involved dividing up a bunch of empires. Until we can figure out how to give the same real estate to multiple people....
As it was, the Japanese came out ahead from WWI. The regional power in SEA. Just not a super power.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
The Chinese distaste for Japan knows few bounds. It isn't overt, as it is a humiliating period of their history. But it is there.
The Koreans are not exactly fans, either. For similar reasons. Japan is surrounded by nations with a cause to dislike it
On the other hand, many nations in the region are equally fearful or loathing: of the Chinese. The Vietnamese, for a start
A somewhat stupid friend thought that anti-Japanese sentiment was all American WWII racism. She even bought into the "Japanese were throwing out the colonisers of East Asia" line......
I managed to persuade her, before a trip to South Korea, to be very, very careful where she said stuff like that.
Reading an account of the role of the Japanese at the conferences leading up to the Versailles treaty, and the reactions of the Americans to them, is instructive, and an under-studied corner of history. There’s an argument that Versailles sowed the seeds of the Pacific WWII almost as much as it did in Europe.
Is there a link to that account, or a book title. Sounds fascinating.
The MacMillan book on the negotiations contains some interesting chapters on the subject. The Japanese were desperately keen for a racial equality statement within the treaty - based upon Wilson’s ultimately hypocritical obsession with self-determination - which the US effectively vetoed for fear of stirring up discontent in its southern states. And, as with Germany, the results of the territorial aspects of the treaty gifted Japan sufficient grievances to pursue into the next war.
If there is one lesson globally from the past 100 years, it’s never let the States take the running when it comes to geopolitics. They are shit. Fucked it up post WW1 with Wilson, fucked it up 1948 in China when Mao Tse Tung was on the ropes and again in 1971 / 1989 when it came to China, fucked it up with Russia in the 90s and then the Middle East and Afghanistan. They truly are useless when it comes to deals.
One of the reasons I liked Trump. He had a bit of the old school British Empire way of dealing with geopolitical topics.
Yes, but the essential problem with Americans is that they don’t travel often enough to the rest of the world (and when they do generally turn out to be utterly clueless), and consequently view everything from the perspective of people for whom a trip into the adjacent state is an adventure into a world of ‘here be dragons’. Trump wasn’t a good example in this respect.
There is an element of that. I’d argue that it is more Americans tend to take a black and white view of the world whereas Europeans (historically) take it as grey - there is no totally good or bad, you do what it takes so things work out. Which is why I make the comment about Trump.
Jesus, I just discovered Unit 731, run by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
The Chinese distaste for Japan knows few bounds. It isn't overt, as it is a humiliating period of their history. But it is there.
The Koreans are not exactly fans, either. For similar reasons. Japan is surrounded by nations with a cause to dislike it
On the other hand, many nations in the region are equally fearful or loathing: of the Chinese. The Vietnamese, for a start
A somewhat stupid friend thought that anti-Japanese sentiment was all American WWII racism. She even bought into the "Japanese were throwing out the colonisers of East Asia" line......
I managed to persuade her, before a trip to South Korea, to be very, very careful where she said stuff like that.
Reading an account of the role of the Japanese at the conferences leading up to the Versailles treaty, and the reactions of the Americans to them, is instructive, and an under-studied corner of history. There’s an argument that Versailles sowed the seeds of the Pacific WWII almost as much as it did in Europe.
Also resentment (argued. however, by some Japanese to be misplaced) at the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 which limited them to 60% of capital ship tonnage compared with the USN or RN.
The Washington treaty was actually the following ratio in capital ships -
5 US 5 UK 3 Japan 1.67 Italy 1.67 France
Strangely, those who sell the racism story about the treaty lead out the fact that the Japanese were allotted a tonnage almost as great as Italy and France combined.
The reason for the numbers was simple - UK and US were multi-ocean navies. The Japanese were interested in the Pacific alone.
As Yamamoto observed, the Japanese economy could barely sustain their allocation. So the treaty, from the Japanese perspective really restricted others.
As seen during WWI. If the Japanese Navy had sunk every single row boat in the US Navy, the US Navy would have been bigger than the Japanese Navy by 1944 at the latest....
Oh yes, some of the Japanese at the time fully realised they were being done well by. But a lot didn't.
Because the leadership were, according to rational standards, insane.
"We must go to war. With everyone. To rule the World! We don't have the military capacity to fight everyone. So we will lose. But that is better than not fighting and settling for merely being the premier power in SEA."
Comments
I don't suppose most of the 48% were voting for an idealistic view of the juridical supremacy of the ECJ and EU law either. At least, it would be fair to say the campaign didn't major on it.
The current Home Secretary actually made that argument herself. That it would be easier to have rest of the world migration if European migration were controlled.
That was one of the arguments that swung my vote. I'm all in favour of immigration, I just don't want discrimination in the immigration system. So when I saw the pro-Brexit serious MP politicians (as opposed to Farage and his band of twats) making a liberal argument against discrimination instead of an illiberal argument against migrants at all, then I was pleased with that.
I grew up in another country myself before returning to the UK. That country has more British emigrants than the entire European Union (exc Ireland) combined. Yet while in the EU it was far tougher for eg one of my school friends to get a visa and come to the UK, than it was any random unskilled person in Europe, despite their country taking more of our citizens than the entire EU (exc Ireland) combined. There is no justification for that discrimination.
For me there were 2 big mistakes which drove everything else.
1. Locking down at least a week too late
2. Letting international arrivals carry on with no quarantine
I believe that if we had locked down 2 weeks earlier and implemented quarantine for arrivals then our initial wave would have been much smaller and would likely have made the subsequent waves smaller.
I do not know what the professional epidemiologists who were advising the government were playing at. It was blindingly obvious to anyone with half a brain that lockdown should have happened earlier. The politicians should have overruled them.
Florida is a huge warning shot to any country that gives these loonies the time of day.
For legal migration with a green card in the USA there are hoops to jump through that didn't apply in the UK for someone to come here, work in a hand car wash, and get benefits. So if you take that evidence, then apply it to free movement, you are entirely misapplying and misrepresenting the work.
In August/September 2019, the dad meets another woman. In March 2020 they move in together with the child. The abuse allegedly started immediately.
Looking at the various text messages, it seems to be a tale of a little boy trapped between three borken people.
Tragic doesn't really seem to sum it up.
https://twitter.com/NaomiOhReally/status/1447898544887697408?s=20
I mean. It's a want isn't it? We still seem squeamish about making this distinction.
Most humans require variety of scenery to be happy: perhaps because we evolved as wandering hunter gatherers. That's why prison, or internal exile, is a punishment
I remember the feeling when I first went abroad after the horrors of lockdown 3. Spain, and then, even better, Athens
Joyous liberation
What I've not seen any solid research on is maintaining immigration at a similar rate but boosting skilled non-European migration and dropping unskilled European migration. Some solid research on that would be useful, but most of it at this point is frankly intuition and guesswork. Or theoretical.
You think having that overall higher GDP is worth the inequality it creates, which is fine and a perfectly valid perspective. What you're trying to do is invalidate the other side of the coin and it's a little bit tiresome to have to go through this over and over again. Few people deny that immigration increases GDP, it very likely increases GDP per capita as well because the top decile (people like us) really does benefit a lot from it. To pretend that there are no downsides to it is ridiculous.
And the extraordinary combinations hasn't stopped. I know several people who have avoided any voluntary gathering or meeting in the UK since lockdown but have been abroad, by air, for holidays in the last few months.
https://personal.lse.ac.uk/manacorm/manacorda_manning_wadsworth.pdf
Exactly what we've been saying. Are you happy to accept that now?
Goldsmith is a former MP and current minister. To continue as the latter he needs a seat in the Lords (although you might have a case that the electorate sacked him… albeit as an MP not as a minister)
The villa is related to friendship not pay back for the peerage (again there is a case that the whole damn knot of relationships is far too incestuous)
The issue is that @Foxy went for the cheap shot and missed… but obscured the more important points in the process
My point with you yesterday was that wage rises as a result of the foreigners going home are illusory.
The student loan system was a reasonable attempt.., but George Osborne fucked it up to increase the value of the loans so he could sell them
I think I’m seeing a pattern here…
This past day or two I was responding to the idea that the foreigners going home would see a sustainable and real wage rise for the "natives" (who they?) as the study calls them.
We live in a chumocracy, ruled by these metropolitan elites with their villas abroad, and their mates in government. Nice work if you can get it...
The exact opposite happened in m Remember when accurately quoting medical statistics was "facism. Pure, simple, no ifs, no buts."
Ah, December 2020. Good times.
I agree and was going to post the same but you beat me to it!
It never occurred to me for a second that compulsory vaccination for care workers would immediately settle the market for Yes. Maybe this is my fault but I would argue that the care home worker mandate was known weeks before Smarkets even put up this market. If they were going to settle it in this way I would have gone the other way because the result was obviously Yes. In fact we would all have been on Yes.
Before this rule clarification No was trading at approx 1.45 and Yes 2.2. Now we have 1.09 No and 8.6 Yes. This dramatic change is purely due to the clarification and therefore it must have been widely understood that vaccines for care workers does not constitute a reintroduction of restrictions before the end of 2021.
Ridiculous decision.
I know people who have happily stayed in the same small town all their lives, and if they go on holiday it's usually to the same place. They don't have this need. This wanderlust. They are homebodies
I am one of those that HAS to get away or I become, eventually, severely depressed
The wage rises are real.
Wages rises are the result of the supply of available labour being curtailed going forwards restoring the wages back to equilibrium levels and reversing the deflation in wages that had occurred for the previous few decades. The migration cancels out, the ending of infinite supply does not.
Ultimately you're arguing for an unregulated free market for labour, which is fine. I have no issues with it, what I do take issue with is the complete dismissal of the distortions that we know come with unregulated free markets. Applying immigration controls is a regulation of the free market, at the moment we're probably doing it badly and there's a case to be made for not doing it at all vs doing it badly for sure. However, the ideal scenario is regulating markets properly and having businesses work within that new framework and invest in productivity gains rather than simply throw cheap labour at the issue, which you and I both agree does little to solve any underlying supply shortage.
In addition, in England, from 6th August to 5th September, we had 614 age 6-17 hospitalised (and indications from earlier data indicated a fairly even spread of those per year of age). Accordingly, as well as curtailing spread, we'd avoid over 50 teens becoming so ill as to be hospitalised in that month alone, and the rate of infection amongst teens skyrocketed in September.
In addition, if only 2% of teens get long-term symptoms, that would imply tens of thousands with long-term issues that could be avoided. Worth doing, I'd suggest.
On boosters, data from Israel's programme to date indicates a big reduction in both infections and hospitalisations following a third dose: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.07.21264626v1
(NB - not yet peer-reviewed).
This is the graph of the reduction levels in infections per age group (with error bars):
The measured uptick in antibody levels also looks pretty significant
Previously it was possible to cross subsidise the 15 free hours by charging extra for any additional hours. That just isn't possible when the free entitlement is 30 hours because people usually want 35 hours maximum and you can't charge enough with those 5 hours to make the rest of it up.
Of course the Government have a plan to fix this - by increasing the child staff ratio so each staff member can look after more children (even then I suspect the figures won't work).
That would be heartless enough, but at least Arthur would still be living and loved by someone.
If you are discriminating against potential migrants based on country of origin as opposed to their own skills and what they have to offer then what would you call that other than discrimination?
I was aware the Japanese empire did some terrible things to China in that time - I've read the Rape of Nanjing - but this is on a different level of cruelty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
In terms of pointless sadism, it is possibly worse than the Nazis. One of the greatest crimes in history. Never truly addressed. The Japanese must fondly hope the newly super-powerful Chinese don't ever gain a taste for revenge
You were happy at that. But first that is no sort of real wage rise, secondly it is temporary as the price and wage level will decrease as demand shrinks, and thirdly it will hit our export competitiveness.
But sadly I must dash now so go for your life with the diagrams.
I wonder when he thinks the last time was that the two main parties both had leaders who weren't jokes? Churchill-Attlee maybe, long before he was born?*
For that matter, when does he think the last time was that at least one of the leaders wasn't a joke? Blair? As for the Tories, going backwards he would presumably start with Thatcher and then perhaps he'd jump straight to Churchill. And actually I'm not too sure he'd even say Churchill.
Funny how the political system has lasted so long. First meteorite that comes along, it'll bite the dust. But...wait...the Oxford history graduate is tearing off his t-shirt... We're going to be saved after all!
You gotta admit, Dave may have had a point...
Meanwhile, the minister that Cummings never criticises must be feeling great about getting reshuffled before the report came out.
(*) As Cummings must be aware, there have long been some on the far right who openly favour war as a good thing because it puts a premium on leadership.
9th of March, I was at a full stadium watching the last PL match with a crowd of 2020. Saturday 14th I went for dinner with friends, with increased edginess. Some of the table had covid the following week. On Sunday my church had half its usual congregation.
Clinics started getting cancellations/DNAs of 50% or more from Monday 16th. Streets were getting quiet. On 19th I shot down to London to scoop and scoot Fox jr2 from his lodgings as his course had all gone on-line. The streets were empty, and his neighbours were coughing over the balcony and blue lights zipping by.
It had that apocalyptic feel of the early stages of a zombie movie. Places were locking down spontaneously.
PS the 4.1%/4.0% vs 3.9%/4.0% thing was a joke and a paraphrased quote, not an actual prediction.
I guess I WAS vaguely aware, I've read about live vivisections, bomb tests on living victims, etc
But the huge scale and organisation of it, and the depth of the depravity. No, that is new to me. And horrifiyng
Possibly half a million people were killed. Mind-boggling
Cummings big thing is that MPs are not bright enough to qualify them as leaders. He's been making this point for years and has referred to the 2012 survey below as part of his evidence for this (the Royal Statistical Society's test of the ability (or not) of MPs answering a relatively simple maths question). His time in government has only served to amplify his belief.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19801666
But it is there.
The "doctors" at Unit 731 should all be as infamous as Mengele. If not worse. The Japanese "experiments" were an order of magnitude larger, and probably more psychotic
What works for a population of 4 million and a population of 450 million may not be the same thing.
That seems fair enough. Hadn't really thought of it in evolutionary terms. You need someone who always wants to discover what is over the next hill, or you would never expand. But you can't have everyone gallivanting off, or nowt would get done at home, and they might all get killed.
SeanT would have known this stuff.
That's why we had FITs for solar, which were then withdrawn, and now you get 5.5p per exported unit under the present Smart Export Guarantee regime. One good thing about the Tories doing the solar scheme is that they reduced the subsidies from a level that encouraged profiteering whilst the Greens were screaming for public money to be tipped away unnecessarily.
That gave more bang for the buck.
In my view, I am not sure about grants for ASHPs for owner occupiers, as they already have huge tax breaks (averaging at about £1500-2000 per year tax subsidy per OO house - £35bn across approx 20m houses) driving the price of their houses, and I really think it should come out of that in the form of an equity share charge by the Govt realisable on sale.
On the other hand, many nations in the region are equally fearful or loathing: of the Chinese. The Vietnamese, for a start
Overall yes for immigration in general - but that's not the case necessarily for all immigration is the best short answer available I think.
I take it 1800 is not significantly larger than figures for previous years?
I'm not sure how you persuade someone buying a house for £30k to spend £10k installing a heating system.
https://twitter.com/LizWebsterLD/status/1447647801056374790?s=20
This caption to the figure is helpful to understand the very large effects of booster vaccines: a 10- to 20-fold reduction in infections compared to those without a booster! Also noteworthy is the fact that it is the youngest and oldest groups that benefit most from the booster.
This is what we did for 100,000s of years in Africa, then we were suddenly imprisoned by the need to farm, and then live in towns, and have jobs
Some of us are like those mad polar bears you used to see in zoos, with their endless tragic parading, trapped in their tiny, terrible compounds
https://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/impact-of-keeping-polar-bears-in-zoos/
No large mammal like that should ever be in a zoo. And maybe no humans should ever be put in lockdown for more than a few weeks.....
I managed to persuade her, before a trip to South Korea, to be very, very careful where she said stuff like that.
makes the case that doing something about 10-14 cases might be of interest.
Admissions -
Simply saying that it is "a sensible package of reforms that ought to be done at the same time" doesn't answer the question as to WHY you think it is a sensible package, you are merely restating your opinion.
Saying you support free movement because free movement is sensible is like saying "I believe in God because I believe in God". That's just faith, that's not an argument.
People are not commodities, indeed as I said more people from the UK go abroad to Australia than to the entire EU combined (exc Ireland) so the idea of "gravity" or "neighbours" affecting people is complete poppycock.
If you want an argument as to why this discrimination is OK then you need a stronger argument than "it is sensible", you need a reason WHY it is sensible. That you haven't given. Until then, its pure discrimination.
If the Japanese had accepted the various treaties they had signed, they would have been prosperous, powerful and secure against attack.
The problem was that the Japanese government wanted stuff that belonged to other people. A lot of stuff.
*Anyone who buys into the bullshit about Japanese culture being the reason for all the atrocities needs to explain their behaviour in the Russo-Japanese war and in WWI. When, apparently it wasn't necessary to cut prisoners of war up, alive.
Of course, they have a right to protest, but they are the classic ill informed, 'I read it on Facebook' bullshit artists. Last week they protested about the same time that the news of the poor 15 year old who had died of covid came out. They have no shame.
I imagine the elevation of the nation as supreme and the dehumanizing of all others as inferior, and worthless, has something to do with any attendant atrocities
But then you have to explain Cambodia, which was not really nationalism at all, more a kind of nihilistic self-hating Maoism that consumed its own
And how about the Aztecs, who ended up buying children from their own poor people, just to be sacrificed
Maybe Chatwin is right. We are just a crazy species, trapped in a zoo of our own making
5 US
5 UK
3 Japan
1.67 Italy
1.67 France
Strangely, those who sell the racism story about the treaty lead out the fact that the Japanese were allotted a tonnage almost as great as Italy and France combined.
The reason for the numbers was simple - UK and US were multi-ocean navies. The Japanese were interested in the Pacific alone.
As Yamamoto observed, the Japanese economy could barely sustain their allocation. So the treaty, from the Japanese perspective really restricted others.
As seen during WWI. If the Japanese Navy had sunk every single row boat in the US Navy, the US Navy would have been bigger than the Japanese Navy by 1944 at the latest....
One of the reasons I liked Trump. He had a bit of the old school British Empire way of dealing with geopolitical topics.
If you read it, you understand where they were coming from. The main points are
1) Thinking is bad if it stops you acting
2) Trying to win is bad - a real Samurai charges like a crazy man, without thought of victory.
3) The act is everything. Winning in an uncool way is loosing.
Written by a fanatic, long after the actual Samurai were out of business......
So I don't think PB Tories are the ones who need to give this up.
One of my favourite memories is sitting at a dining table on the Queen Mary Two, telling my American dining companions that I was about to make a road trip out to South Dakota, and having them (who were from New York, Chicago, or lived in gated communities on the Georgia coast) tell me that the population of the state was only a few tens of thousands and that I would drive for hours without seeing another car. Of course, none of them had ever been there themselves.
People who don’t even know their own country certainly don’t understand the world.
As it was, the Japanese came out ahead from WWI. The regional power in SEA. Just not a super power.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-58882822
"We must go to war. With everyone. To rule the World! We don't have the military capacity to fight everyone. So we will lose. But that is better than not fighting and settling for merely being the premier power in SEA."