Our dependence on vast, corrosive levels of immigration is particularly asinine and harmful given what AI is about to do to 50% of jobs
I remember when you said that there would be no lorry drivers within ten years, because of autonomous cars. That was what, about ten years ago?
There is a good chance that this new tech, *if* it plays out as you suggest, actually increases potential employment. In the same way (say) the industrial revolution did. Or the Internet revolution of the 1990s and 2000s. Jobs and roles change, but overall employment increases.
But that's not as dramatic as WE'RE ALL DOOMED !!!!!, so you don't care.
Autonomous cars are, finally, here
“sitting at a coffee shop, watching cars fail at the 4 way stop for 2 hours…
when a fully driverless @Waymo came by driving 100x better than all of them
It’s taken longer than expected, there are still multiple problems to be overcome, but driverless vehicles are now a fact and they are being deployed, commercially
“Driverless Taxi Downtown Las Vegas. Do you wanna ride? #LasVegas #Halo #SelfDrivingCars”
“Waymo’s driverless robotaxis are now doing airport trips in Phoenix / The Alphabet company is getting more confident in its autonomous capabilities, deploying fully driverless cars to Phoenix’s airport to handle the trickiest types of pickups.”
I reckon this would have accrued much wider attention in normal times - driverless cars! - but unfortunately we don’t lack for major, distracting news
There is a *vast* amount of difference between these drastically geolocated schemes and true autonomous driving. But as I said, ten years have pretty much passed since your 'prediction', and the UK is short of tens of thousands of HGV drivers.
Smoke and mirrors mate, smoke and mirrors.
(BTW, I'm not the person hitting the off-topic button on your posts)
Yes, aren't they just glorified trams?
No
“On my ride home I saw more driverless cars than regular ones”
May I just suggest you look at the picture of the car at 3 seconds into the second video, look at the hardware on its roof, and think of how much all of that costs. Then work out why it is not currently a goer - even if it worked outside very small geofenced areas.
As I've said passim, the test of an uatonmous car for me would be to go from our carport to my sister's house, two hours' drive away. The vast majority of which is along the A14, M1 and A50. But it would have to reverse out of my carport and go through my sister's gate and down her drive, without command, preconnoitre of the route, or driver interference. IMO that's a vey fair test, especially as the vast majority of the journey (A14, M1 and A50) is dual carriageway and motorway, and the tech is mostly already there. It's the first ten yards and the final fifty yards that'll break it.
And there are far worse journies than that, even within cities.
Also, using immigration to solve age dependency issues often doesn't make sense. The aging problem is that you have an increasing number of net taker old people compared to net contributor working age people. For this to be solved by immigration, you need the people coming in to be net contributors. Working age people who are net takers worsen the problem, even if they are on the positive side of the ledger from an age perspective.
Again, it's people that don't have an intuitive grasp for mathematical effects and connecting them to real meaning that miss this stuff.
At least in the British context, migrants were and presumably still are net givers.
So you’re railing against a hypothetical of your own construct.
No they aren't, the UK has seen a drop in GDP per capita because of immigration. Immigration has resulted in lower overall living standards. That is undeniable.
It’s only undeniable by certain posters on here, which you have sadly joined.
No, it's just numbers. UK GDP per capita has grown at significantly slower rate than overall GDP. Economic theory is almost certainly bullshit and anyone calling themselves an expert in it should be ignored because it isn't a science.
We’ve had this before.
At the end of the day, either put up evidence, or accept that what you are saying is just another opinion. We can then decide whether to take your beliefs on face value or not.
Per capita GDP 2004 - $40k, 2021 - $47k - 17.5% growth Nominal GDP 2004 - $2.4tn, 2021 - $3.2tn - 33% growth
Immigration is halving the per capita growth rate and the ultimate source of low productivity in the UK economy.
All you are saying is that per capita GDP has slowed down. That’s pretty well attested and discussed on here pretty much every day.
The contribution of immigration is your own inference.
You may as well say that smartphones, or Uber, or the career of Dua Lipa has caused GDP per capita slowdown.
Per capita GDP 1990 - $19k, 2004 - $40k - 110% growth Nominal GDP 1990 - $1.1tn, 2004 - $2.4tn - 118% growth
Please, stop. You're embarrassing yourself.
It’s Max’s “Dua Lipa” theory of growth. Laughable.
GDP per capita has declined. Tell us something we don’t know?
Before mass immigration GDP per capita growth broadly in line with nominal growth, after mass immigration GDP per capita half the rate of nominal growth. You need to turn off the computer for the weekend because it's just embarrassing. The numbers don't lie.
That's like the "Pirates prevent global warming" fallacy. Strip out dependency ratio and people choosing to work fewer hours and you might be onto something.
Did you get your lessons in statistics in Epping?
Hours worked are up though, at least last time I looked at the ONS data. I don't understand why it's controversial to suggest that importing people to low wage jobs rather than invest in capital and automation has lowered the per capita growth rate. I'm hardly suggesting that the sky is green or that water is red.
I’m at work, and my phone just died. I’m on another phone. But as far as I know, the following things are relatively uncontroversial:
Immigration doesn’t suppress native wages. Immigration improves productivity growth via increased aggregate demand and better skill sorting. EU migration tended to higher skills than the level of the native population. EU migrants were on average fiscal net contributors.
I don’t deny you can cut the data down and find specific groups or places or whatever.
But it is worth recalling too that almost wealthy countries have experienced high migration in recent years, yet Britain’s stagnation is exceptional. Also, several economies - like Switzerland - have built economic models on even higher migration.
Portes, who I personally find annoying, and is undoubtedly a “liberal”, albeit weirdly Brexity, seems pretty balanced and comprehensive here:
Also, using immigration to solve age dependency issues often doesn't make sense. The aging problem is that you have an increasing number of net taker old people compared to net contributor working age people. For this to be solved by immigration, you need the people coming in to be net contributors. Working age people who are net takers worsen the problem, even if they are on the positive side of the ledger from an age perspective.
Again, it's people that don't have an intuitive grasp for mathematical effects and connecting them to real meaning that miss this stuff.
At least in the British context, migrants were and presumably still are net givers.
So you’re railing against a hypothetical of your own construct.
No they aren't, the UK has seen a drop in GDP per capita because of immigration. Immigration has resulted in lower overall living standards. That is undeniable.
It’s only undeniable by certain posters on here, which you have sadly joined.
No, it's just numbers. UK GDP per capita has grown at significantly slower rate than overall GDP. Economic theory is almost certainly bullshit and anyone calling themselves an expert in it should be ignored because it isn't a science.
We’ve had this before.
At the end of the day, either put up evidence, or accept that what you are saying is just another opinion. We can then decide whether to take your beliefs on face value or not.
Per capita GDP 2004 - $40k, 2021 - $47k - 17.5% growth Nominal GDP 2004 - $2.4tn, 2021 - $3.2tn - 33% growth
Immigration is halving the per capita growth rate and the ultimate source of low productivity in the UK economy.
All you are saying is that per capita GDP has slowed down. That’s pretty well attested and discussed on here pretty much every day.
The contribution of immigration is your own inference.
You may as well say that smartphones, or Uber, or the career of Dua Lipa has caused GDP per capita slowdown.
Per capita GDP 1990 - $19k, 2004 - $40k - 110% growth Nominal GDP 1990 - $1.1tn, 2004 - $2.4tn - 118% growth
Please, stop. You're embarrassing yourself.
It’s Max’s “Dua Lipa” theory of growth. Laughable.
GDP per capita has declined. Tell us something we don’t know?
Before mass immigration GDP per capita growth broadly in line with nominal growth, after mass immigration GDP per capita half the rate of nominal growth. You need to turn off the computer for the weekend because it's just embarrassing. The numbers don't lie.
The issue is that those countries without significant immigration (like Japan) haven't done very well either.
Also, using immigration to solve age dependency issues often doesn't make sense. The aging problem is that you have an increasing number of net taker old people compared to net contributor working age people. For this to be solved by immigration, you need the people coming in to be net contributors. Working age people who are net takers worsen the problem, even if they are on the positive side of the ledger from an age perspective.
Again, it's people that don't have an intuitive grasp for mathematical effects and connecting them to real meaning that miss this stuff.
At least in the British context, migrants were and presumably still are net givers.
So you’re railing against a hypothetical of your own construct.
No they aren't, the UK has seen a drop in GDP per capita because of immigration. Immigration has resulted in lower overall living standards. That is undeniable.
It’s only undeniable by certain posters on here, which you have sadly joined.
No, it's just numbers. UK GDP per capita has grown at significantly slower rate than overall GDP. Economic theory is almost certainly bullshit and anyone calling themselves an expert in it should be ignored because it isn't a science.
We’ve had this before.
At the end of the day, either put up evidence, or accept that what you are saying is just another opinion. We can then decide whether to take your beliefs on face value or not.
Per capita GDP 2004 - $40k, 2021 - $47k - 17.5% growth Nominal GDP 2004 - $2.4tn, 2021 - $3.2tn - 33% growth
Immigration is halving the per capita growth rate and the ultimate source of low productivity in the UK economy.
All you are saying is that per capita GDP has slowed down. That’s pretty well attested and discussed on here pretty much every day.
The contribution of immigration is your own inference.
You may as well say that smartphones, or Uber, or the career of Dua Lipa has caused GDP per capita slowdown.
Per capita GDP 1990 - $19k, 2004 - $40k - 110% growth Nominal GDP 1990 - $1.1tn, 2004 - $2.4tn - 118% growth
Please, stop. You're embarrassing yourself.
It’s Max’s “Dua Lipa” theory of growth. Laughable.
GDP per capita has declined. Tell us something we don’t know?
Before mass immigration GDP per capita growth broadly in line with nominal growth, after mass immigration GDP per capita half the rate of nominal growth. You need to turn off the computer for the weekend because it's just embarrassing. The numbers don't lie.
But you have no causation. Didn’t you learn that in high school?
I assume most PBers, being geeky and mathy, are familiar with the concept.
Saying the “numbers don’t lie” and ranting about liberal social scientists make you sound like a complete berk.
Aww, you rattled? You've still provided absolutely zero evidence in favour of what you're saying. You asked for evidence, I gave it to you. You haven't done that. Evidence please, or I think a period of silence from you about this subject is due because you clearly don't know what you're talking about.
Is there really any hard evidence (except by the right wing versions of those economic theorists that you say should be ignored) that net immigration is a bad thing? A huge number of people in this country have immigrant ancestry in the last couple of generations. Mine is Irish, how about yours? The reality is that the immigration debate is far more complicated than most people who want to take a position want to admit that it is.
You'll note that I haven't made any assertions about immigration being a net good or bad for the country. Just that on the whole our immigration policy has resulted in reduced per capita growth and lower living standards.
Also, using immigration to solve age dependency issues often doesn't make sense. The aging problem is that you have an increasing number of net taker old people compared to net contributor working age people. For this to be solved by immigration, you need the people coming in to be net contributors. Working age people who are net takers worsen the problem, even if they are on the positive side of the ledger from an age perspective.
Again, it's people that don't have an intuitive grasp for mathematical effects and connecting them to real meaning that miss this stuff.
Net Takers as opposed to Net Contributors is hard to assess. Eg the notion that it's all about how much tax you pay is very Simple Simon.
Of course. You need to factor things in like impact on housing cost and transport congestion, which raise the bar higher for a migrant to qualify as a net benefit.
And things like real value added vs remuneration extracted. The upshot is most low paid people are net contributors and many highly paid people are net takers. Counterintuitive yet true.
Me1 is an astute spotter of underpriced assets. I buy and sell them - not changing them in any way - and make £50m in a year, paying £10m tax, netting £40m.
Me2 is a low wage toiler in a factory earning £25k, paying £3k tax, netting £22k.
Me2 (low skill, low pay) is a Net Contributor, Me1 (high skill, high pay) is a Net Taker.
The contribution of Me1 is moving a ton of stuff from people who don't use it effectively to people who do. If anyone could do it, there'd be no money in it for Me1. If Me1 created 100 million pounds of extra value by moving assets from bad to good uses, even if Me1 gets half the proceeds, it's still a massive net contribution to society.
Our dependence on vast, corrosive levels of immigration is particularly asinine and harmful given what AI is about to do to 50% of jobs
I remember when you said that there would be no lorry drivers within ten years, because of autonomous cars. That was what, about ten years ago?
There is a good chance that this new tech, *if* it plays out as you suggest, actually increases potential employment. In the same way (say) the industrial revolution did. Or the Internet revolution of the 1990s and 2000s. Jobs and roles change, but overall employment increases.
But that's not as dramatic as WE'RE ALL DOOMED !!!!!, so you don't care.
Autonomous cars are, finally, here
“sitting at a coffee shop, watching cars fail at the 4 way stop for 2 hours…
when a fully driverless @Waymo came by driving 100x better than all of them
It’s taken longer than expected, there are still multiple problems to be overcome, but driverless vehicles are now a fact and they are being deployed, commercially
“Driverless Taxi Downtown Las Vegas. Do you wanna ride? #LasVegas #Halo #SelfDrivingCars”
“Waymo’s driverless robotaxis are now doing airport trips in Phoenix / The Alphabet company is getting more confident in its autonomous capabilities, deploying fully driverless cars to Phoenix’s airport to handle the trickiest types of pickups.”
I reckon this would have accrued much wider attention in normal times - driverless cars! - but unfortunately we don’t lack for major, distracting news
Self driving is like speech recognition. It's easy to get 99% of the way there, but the last 1% is fiendishly hard.
Waymo's vehicles are sensor machine, are created by a money-no-object organization, and have remote drivers sitting in a warehouse ready to take over the moment there is a problem.
And despite this, are stuck in a small part of metro Phoenix.
Yep, they'll get there, but they are doing 99.9% fewer trips than their forecasts from just a few years ago.
I’m not arguing that. All true. I’m just pointing out that driverless cars are now a fact in some American and Chinese cities, and elsewhere
They remind me of accounts of the very first original cars. They had people walking in front of them carrying flags to warn pedestrians, and make sure the cars didn’t go over 6mph or whatever
Driverless cars are at that stage. The flag guy is the remote driver. The cars are weird enough to attract attention and some primitive, grunting hostility from the low-watt likes of @JosiasJessop. That will change
And I would point out they are not truly self driving yet, because there is a warehouse full of drivers ready to take over if the vehicles get into any kind of trouble.
Also, using immigration to solve age dependency issues often doesn't make sense. The aging problem is that you have an increasing number of net taker old people compared to net contributor working age people. For this to be solved by immigration, you need the people coming in to be net contributors. Working age people who are net takers worsen the problem, even if they are on the positive side of the ledger from an age perspective.
Again, it's people that don't have an intuitive grasp for mathematical effects and connecting them to real meaning that miss this stuff.
At least in the British context, migrants were and presumably still are net givers.
So you’re railing against a hypothetical of your own construct.
No they aren't, the UK has seen a drop in GDP per capita because of immigration. Immigration has resulted in lower overall living standards. That is undeniable.
It’s only undeniable by certain posters on here, which you have sadly joined.
No, it's just numbers. UK GDP per capita has grown at significantly slower rate than overall GDP. Economic theory is almost certainly bullshit and anyone calling themselves an expert in it should be ignored because it isn't a science.
We’ve had this before.
At the end of the day, either put up evidence, or accept that what you are saying is just another opinion. We can then decide whether to take your beliefs on face value or not.
Per capita GDP 2004 - $40k, 2021 - $47k - 17.5% growth Nominal GDP 2004 - $2.4tn, 2021 - $3.2tn - 33% growth
Immigration is halving the per capita growth rate and the ultimate source of low productivity in the UK economy.
All you are saying is that per capita GDP has slowed down. That’s pretty well attested and discussed on here pretty much every day.
The contribution of immigration is your own inference.
You may as well say that smartphones, or Uber, or the career of Dua Lipa has caused GDP per capita slowdown.
Per capita GDP 1990 - $19k, 2004 - $40k - 110% growth Nominal GDP 1990 - $1.1tn, 2004 - $2.4tn - 118% growth
Please, stop. You're embarrassing yourself.
It’s Max’s “Dua Lipa” theory of growth. Laughable.
GDP per capita has declined. Tell us something we don’t know?
Before mass immigration GDP per capita growth broadly in line with nominal growth, after mass immigration GDP per capita half the rate of nominal growth. You need to turn off the computer for the weekend because it's just embarrassing. The numbers don't lie.
The issue is that those countries without significant immigration (like Japan) haven't done very well either.
Indeed, I'm not suggesting a no immigration policy though. I never have.
Also, using immigration to solve age dependency issues often doesn't make sense. The aging problem is that you have an increasing number of net taker old people compared to net contributor working age people. For this to be solved by immigration, you need the people coming in to be net contributors. Working age people who are net takers worsen the problem, even if they are on the positive side of the ledger from an age perspective.
Again, it's people that don't have an intuitive grasp for mathematical effects and connecting them to real meaning that miss this stuff.
At least in the British context, migrants were and presumably still are net givers.
So you’re railing against a hypothetical of your own construct.
No they aren't, the UK has seen a drop in GDP per capita because of immigration. Immigration has resulted in lower overall living standards. That is undeniable.
It’s only undeniable by certain posters on here, which you have sadly joined.
No, it's just numbers. UK GDP per capita has grown at significantly slower rate than overall GDP. Economic theory is almost certainly bullshit and anyone calling themselves an expert in it should be ignored because it isn't a science.
We’ve had this before.
At the end of the day, either put up evidence, or accept that what you are saying is just another opinion. We can then decide whether to take your beliefs on face value or not.
Per capita GDP 2004 - $40k, 2021 - $47k - 17.5% growth Nominal GDP 2004 - $2.4tn, 2021 - $3.2tn - 33% growth
Immigration is halving the per capita growth rate and the ultimate source of low productivity in the UK economy.
All you are saying is that per capita GDP has slowed down. That’s pretty well attested and discussed on here pretty much every day.
The contribution of immigration is your own inference.
You may as well say that smartphones, or Uber, or the career of Dua Lipa has caused GDP per capita slowdown.
Per capita GDP 1990 - $19k, 2004 - $40k - 110% growth Nominal GDP 1990 - $1.1tn, 2004 - $2.4tn - 118% growth
Please, stop. You're embarrassing yourself.
It’s Max’s “Dua Lipa” theory of growth. Laughable.
GDP per capita has declined. Tell us something we don’t know?
Before mass immigration GDP per capita growth broadly in line with nominal growth, after mass immigration GDP per capita half the rate of nominal growth. You need to turn off the computer for the weekend because it's just embarrassing. The numbers don't lie.
That's like the "Pirates prevent global warming" fallacy. Strip out dependency ratio and people choosing to work fewer hours and you might be onto something.
Did you get your lessons in statistics in Epping?
Hours worked are up though, at least last time I looked at the ONS data. I don't understand why it's controversial to suggest that importing people to low wage jobs rather than invest in capital and automation has lowered the per capita growth rate. I'm hardly suggesting that the sky is green or that water is red.
The problem is that you haven’t established a connection. And this trade-off between immigration and capital investment that you are keen to assert is not seen in other countries.
Please take a look at the Portes article, there’s plenty to be picked at and even some counter-suggestions to what I am claiming.
Our dependence on vast, corrosive levels of immigration is particularly asinine and harmful given what AI is about to do to 50% of jobs
I remember when you said that there would be no lorry drivers within ten years, because of autonomous cars. That was what, about ten years ago?
There is a good chance that this new tech, *if* it plays out as you suggest, actually increases potential employment. In the same way (say) the industrial revolution did. Or the Internet revolution of the 1990s and 2000s. Jobs and roles change, but overall employment increases.
But that's not as dramatic as WE'RE ALL DOOMED !!!!!, so you don't care.
Autonomous cars are, finally, here
“sitting at a coffee shop, watching cars fail at the 4 way stop for 2 hours…
when a fully driverless @Waymo came by driving 100x better than all of them
It’s taken longer than expected, there are still multiple problems to be overcome, but driverless vehicles are now a fact and they are being deployed, commercially
“Driverless Taxi Downtown Las Vegas. Do you wanna ride? #LasVegas #Halo #SelfDrivingCars”
“Waymo’s driverless robotaxis are now doing airport trips in Phoenix / The Alphabet company is getting more confident in its autonomous capabilities, deploying fully driverless cars to Phoenix’s airport to handle the trickiest types of pickups.”
I reckon this would have accrued much wider attention in normal times - driverless cars! - but unfortunately we don’t lack for major, distracting news
There is a *vast* amount of difference between these drastically geolocated schemes and true autonomous driving. But as I said, ten years have pretty much passed since your 'prediction', and the UK is short of tens of thousands of HGV drivers.
Smoke and mirrors mate, smoke and mirrors.
(BTW, I'm not the person hitting the off-topic button on your posts)
Yes, aren't they just glorified trams?
No
“On my ride home I saw more driverless cars than regular ones”
May I just suggest you look at the picture of the car at 3 seconds into the second video, look at the hardware on its roof, and think of how much all of that costs. Then work out why it is not currently a goer - even if it worked outside very small geofenced areas.
As I've said passim, the test of an uatonmous car for me would be to go from our carport to my sister's house, two hours' drive away. The vast majority of which is along the A14, M1 and A50. But it would have to reverse out of my carport and go through my sister's gate and down her drive, without command, preconnoitre of the route, or driver interference. IMO that's a vey fair test, especially as the vast majority of the journey (A14, M1 and A50) is dual carriageway and motorway, and the tech is mostly already there. It's the first ten yards and the final fifty yards that'll break it.
And there are far worse journies than that, even within cities.
Yes, driverless cars will only be a fact when they can carry a dribbling provincial weirdo like you along the M fucking 50 and then on to the A357 and finally to your sister’s house where, yet again, she will look out the window, see you girning in your Waymo, and desperately crush herself in the wheelie bin to pretend she’s not in
Also, using immigration to solve age dependency issues often doesn't make sense. The aging problem is that you have an increasing number of net taker old people compared to net contributor working age people. For this to be solved by immigration, you need the people coming in to be net contributors. Working age people who are net takers worsen the problem, even if they are on the positive side of the ledger from an age perspective.
Again, it's people that don't have an intuitive grasp for mathematical effects and connecting them to real meaning that miss this stuff.
At least in the British context, migrants were and presumably still are net givers.
So you’re railing against a hypothetical of your own construct.
No they aren't, the UK has seen a drop in GDP per capita because of immigration. Immigration has resulted in lower overall living standards. That is undeniable.
It’s only undeniable by certain posters on here, which you have sadly joined.
No, it's just numbers. UK GDP per capita has grown at significantly slower rate than overall GDP. Economic theory is almost certainly bullshit and anyone calling themselves an expert in it should be ignored because it isn't a science.
We’ve had this before.
At the end of the day, either put up evidence, or accept that what you are saying is just another opinion. We can then decide whether to take your beliefs on face value or not.
Per capita GDP 2004 - $40k, 2021 - $47k - 17.5% growth Nominal GDP 2004 - $2.4tn, 2021 - $3.2tn - 33% growth
Immigration is halving the per capita growth rate and the ultimate source of low productivity in the UK economy.
All you are saying is that per capita GDP has slowed down. That’s pretty well attested and discussed on here pretty much every day.
The contribution of immigration is your own inference.
You may as well say that smartphones, or Uber, or the career of Dua Lipa has caused GDP per capita slowdown.
Per capita GDP 1990 - $19k, 2004 - $40k - 110% growth Nominal GDP 1990 - $1.1tn, 2004 - $2.4tn - 118% growth
Please, stop. You're embarrassing yourself.
It’s Max’s “Dua Lipa” theory of growth. Laughable.
GDP per capita has declined. Tell us something we don’t know?
Before mass immigration GDP per capita growth broadly in line with nominal growth, after mass immigration GDP per capita half the rate of nominal growth. You need to turn off the computer for the weekend because it's just embarrassing. The numbers don't lie.
That's like the "Pirates prevent global warming" fallacy. Strip out dependency ratio and people choosing to work fewer hours and you might be onto something.
Did you get your lessons in statistics in Epping?
Hours worked are up though, at least last time I looked at the ONS data. I don't understand why it's controversial to suggest that importing people to low wage jobs rather than invest in capital and automation has lowered the per capita growth rate. I'm hardly suggesting that the sky is green or that water is red.
The problem is that you haven’t established a connection. And this trade-off between immigration and capital investment that you are keen to assert is not seen in other countries.
Please take a look at the Portes article, there’s plenty to be picked at and even some counter-suggestions to what I am claiming.
Because the UK has got singularly shite short termist management and government. That's a very easy answer.
Also, using immigration to solve age dependency issues often doesn't make sense. The aging problem is that you have an increasing number of net taker old people compared to net contributor working age people. For this to be solved by immigration, you need the people coming in to be net contributors. Working age people who are net takers worsen the problem, even if they are on the positive side of the ledger from an age perspective.
Again, it's people that don't have an intuitive grasp for mathematical effects and connecting them to real meaning that miss this stuff.
At least in the British context, migrants were and presumably still are net givers.
So you’re railing against a hypothetical of your own construct.
No they aren't, the UK has seen a drop in GDP per capita because of immigration. Immigration has resulted in lower overall living standards. That is undeniable.
It’s only undeniable by certain posters on here, which you have sadly joined.
No, it's just numbers. UK GDP per capita has grown at significantly slower rate than overall GDP. Economic theory is almost certainly bullshit and anyone calling themselves an expert in it should be ignored because it isn't a science.
We’ve had this before.
At the end of the day, either put up evidence, or accept that what you are saying is just another opinion. We can then decide whether to take your beliefs on face value or not.
Per capita GDP 2004 - $40k, 2021 - $47k - 17.5% growth Nominal GDP 2004 - $2.4tn, 2021 - $3.2tn - 33% growth
Immigration is halving the per capita growth rate and the ultimate source of low productivity in the UK economy.
All you are saying is that per capita GDP has slowed down. That’s pretty well attested and discussed on here pretty much every day.
The contribution of immigration is your own inference.
You may as well say that smartphones, or Uber, or the career of Dua Lipa has caused GDP per capita slowdown.
Per capita GDP 1990 - $19k, 2004 - $40k - 110% growth Nominal GDP 1990 - $1.1tn, 2004 - $2.4tn - 118% growth
Please, stop. You're embarrassing yourself.
It’s Max’s “Dua Lipa” theory of growth. Laughable.
GDP per capita has declined. Tell us something we don’t know?
Before mass immigration GDP per capita growth broadly in line with nominal growth, after mass immigration GDP per capita half the rate of nominal growth. You need to turn off the computer for the weekend because it's just embarrassing. The numbers don't lie.
The issue is that those countries without significant immigration (like Japan) haven't done very well either.
Indeed, I'm not suggesting a no immigration policy though. I never have.
No, but it rather puts a bomb under your hobbyhorse, doesn’t it?
Our dependence on vast, corrosive levels of immigration is particularly asinine and harmful given what AI is about to do to 50% of jobs
I remember when you said that there would be no lorry drivers within ten years, because of autonomous cars. That was what, about ten years ago?
There is a good chance that this new tech, *if* it plays out as you suggest, actually increases potential employment. In the same way (say) the industrial revolution did. Or the Internet revolution of the 1990s and 2000s. Jobs and roles change, but overall employment increases.
But that's not as dramatic as WE'RE ALL DOOMED !!!!!, so you don't care.
Autonomous cars are, finally, here
“sitting at a coffee shop, watching cars fail at the 4 way stop for 2 hours…
when a fully driverless @Waymo came by driving 100x better than all of them
It’s taken longer than expected, there are still multiple problems to be overcome, but driverless vehicles are now a fact and they are being deployed, commercially
“Driverless Taxi Downtown Las Vegas. Do you wanna ride? #LasVegas #Halo #SelfDrivingCars”
“Waymo’s driverless robotaxis are now doing airport trips in Phoenix / The Alphabet company is getting more confident in its autonomous capabilities, deploying fully driverless cars to Phoenix’s airport to handle the trickiest types of pickups.”
I reckon this would have accrued much wider attention in normal times - driverless cars! - but unfortunately we don’t lack for major, distracting news
Self driving is like speech recognition. It's easy to get 99% of the way there, but the last 1% is fiendishly hard.
Waymo's vehicles are sensor machine, are created by a money-no-object organization, and have remote drivers sitting in a warehouse ready to take over the moment there is a problem.
And despite this, are stuck in a small part of metro Phoenix.
Yep, they'll get there, but they are doing 99.9% fewer trips than their forecasts from just a few years ago.
I’m not arguing that. All true. I’m just pointing out that driverless cars are now a fact in some American and Chinese cities, and elsewhere
They remind me of accounts of the very first original cars. They had people walking in front of them carrying flags to warn pedestrians, and make sure the cars didn’t go over 6mph or whatever
Driverless cars are at that stage. The flag guy is the remote driver. The cars are weird enough to attract attention and some primitive, grunting hostility from the low-watt likes of @JosiasJessop. That will change
LOL. They're tech. I love tech. My wife works in cutting-edge tech. I take technical progress with a mixture of awe and hope.
I also want self-driving cars - reliable and safe self-driving cars would change my hobbies and life. They'd be brilliant. But we're miles away from that. People know how transformative the tech would be, and therefore investors are willing to pour billions into the tech. And that means people want to overpromote their progress (ala Musk). Which is why Waymo are nowhere near where they said they'd be. Worse, no-one else is, either.
And there's a chance - a small chance - it may happen next year. But there's also a small chance it will never happen.
Also, using immigration to solve age dependency issues often doesn't make sense. The aging problem is that you have an increasing number of net taker old people compared to net contributor working age people. For this to be solved by immigration, you need the people coming in to be net contributors. Working age people who are net takers worsen the problem, even if they are on the positive side of the ledger from an age perspective.
Again, it's people that don't have an intuitive grasp for mathematical effects and connecting them to real meaning that miss this stuff.
At least in the British context, migrants were and presumably still are net givers.
So you’re railing against a hypothetical of your own construct.
No they aren't, the UK has seen a drop in GDP per capita because of immigration. Immigration has resulted in lower overall living standards. That is undeniable.
It’s only undeniable by certain posters on here, which you have sadly joined.
No, it's just numbers. UK GDP per capita has grown at significantly slower rate than overall GDP. Economic theory is almost certainly bullshit and anyone calling themselves an expert in it should be ignored because it isn't a science.
We’ve had this before.
At the end of the day, either put up evidence, or accept that what you are saying is just another opinion. We can then decide whether to take your beliefs on face value or not.
Per capita GDP 2004 - $40k, 2021 - $47k - 17.5% growth Nominal GDP 2004 - $2.4tn, 2021 - $3.2tn - 33% growth
Immigration is halving the per capita growth rate and the ultimate source of low productivity in the UK economy.
All you are saying is that per capita GDP has slowed down. That’s pretty well attested and discussed on here pretty much every day.
The contribution of immigration is your own inference.
You may as well say that smartphones, or Uber, or the career of Dua Lipa has caused GDP per capita slowdown.
Per capita GDP 1990 - $19k, 2004 - $40k - 110% growth Nominal GDP 1990 - $1.1tn, 2004 - $2.4tn - 118% growth
Please, stop. You're embarrassing yourself.
It’s Max’s “Dua Lipa” theory of growth. Laughable.
GDP per capita has declined. Tell us something we don’t know?
Before mass immigration GDP per capita growth broadly in line with nominal growth, after mass immigration GDP per capita half the rate of nominal growth. You need to turn off the computer for the weekend because it's just embarrassing. The numbers don't lie.
That's like the "Pirates prevent global warming" fallacy. Strip out dependency ratio and people choosing to work fewer hours and you might be onto something.
Did you get your lessons in statistics in Epping?
Hours worked are up though, at least last time I looked at the ONS data. I don't understand why it's controversial to suggest that importing people to low wage jobs rather than invest in capital and automation has lowered the per capita growth rate. I'm hardly suggesting that the sky is green or that water is red.
The problem is that you haven’t established a connection. And this trade-off between immigration and capital investment that you are keen to assert is not seen in other countries.
Please take a look at the Portes article, there’s plenty to be picked at and even some counter-suggestions to what I am claiming.
Because the UK has got singularly shite short termist management and government. That's a very easy answer.
Our dependence on vast, corrosive levels of immigration is particularly asinine and harmful given what AI is about to do to 50% of jobs
I remember when you said that there would be no lorry drivers within ten years, because of autonomous cars. That was what, about ten years ago?
There is a good chance that this new tech, *if* it plays out as you suggest, actually increases potential employment. In the same way (say) the industrial revolution did. Or the Internet revolution of the 1990s and 2000s. Jobs and roles change, but overall employment increases.
But that's not as dramatic as WE'RE ALL DOOMED !!!!!, so you don't care.
Autonomous cars are, finally, here
“sitting at a coffee shop, watching cars fail at the 4 way stop for 2 hours…
when a fully driverless @Waymo came by driving 100x better than all of them
It’s taken longer than expected, there are still multiple problems to be overcome, but driverless vehicles are now a fact and they are being deployed, commercially
“Driverless Taxi Downtown Las Vegas. Do you wanna ride? #LasVegas #Halo #SelfDrivingCars”
“Waymo’s driverless robotaxis are now doing airport trips in Phoenix / The Alphabet company is getting more confident in its autonomous capabilities, deploying fully driverless cars to Phoenix’s airport to handle the trickiest types of pickups.”
I reckon this would have accrued much wider attention in normal times - driverless cars! - but unfortunately we don’t lack for major, distracting news
Self driving is like speech recognition. It's easy to get 99% of the way there, but the last 1% is fiendishly hard.
Waymo's vehicles are sensor machine, are created by a money-no-object organization, and have remote drivers sitting in a warehouse ready to take over the moment there is a problem.
And despite this, are stuck in a small part of metro Phoenix.
Yep, they'll get there, but they are doing 99.9% fewer trips than their forecasts from just a few years ago.
I’m not arguing that. All true. I’m just pointing out that driverless cars are now a fact in some American and Chinese cities, and elsewhere
They remind me of accounts of the very first original cars. They had people walking in front of them carrying flags to warn pedestrians, and make sure the cars didn’t go over 6mph or whatever
Driverless cars are at that stage. The flag guy is the remote driver. The cars are weird enough to attract attention and some primitive, grunting hostility from the low-watt likes of @JosiasJessop. That will change
And I would point out they are not truly self driving yet, because there is a warehouse full of drivers ready to take over if the vehicles get into any kind of trouble.
Hmm. Driverless trains are also closely monitored. Planes get ATC
Everything you say is true but the trajectory is clear. It’s been slow and stumbling and harder than many expected, but driverless cars HAVE arrived and they’re not going away
Inter alia, in a time of gloom this is potentially wonderful news. Private car ownership will become unnecessary, freeing up our cities. Greening them. Rural areas will be revived. The old, the fat and the drunk will become mobile again. Road accidents will be a thing of the past. A genuinely great evolution
Also, using immigration to solve age dependency issues often doesn't make sense. The aging problem is that you have an increasing number of net taker old people compared to net contributor working age people. For this to be solved by immigration, you need the people coming in to be net contributors. Working age people who are net takers worsen the problem, even if they are on the positive side of the ledger from an age perspective.
Again, it's people that don't have an intuitive grasp for mathematical effects and connecting them to real meaning that miss this stuff.
Net Takers as opposed to Net Contributors is hard to assess. Eg the notion that it's all about how much tax you pay is very Simple Simon.
Of course. You need to factor things in like impact on housing cost and transport congestion, which raise the bar higher for a migrant to qualify as a net benefit.
And things like real value added vs remuneration extracted. The upshot is most low paid people are net contributors and many highly paid people are net takers. Counterintuitive yet true.
Me1 is an astute spotter of underpriced assets. I buy and sell them - not changing them in any way - and make £50m in a year, paying £10m tax, netting £40m.
Me2 is a low wage toiler in a factory earning £25k, paying £3k tax, netting £22k.
Me2 (low skill, low pay) is a Net Contributor, Me1 (high skill, high pay) is a Net Taker.
Haven't you just generalised bond, currency, share etc trading?
To a large extent, yes. My background, for my sins. But the general point I'm tossing into the pot is that the notion of high tax paying people as large net contributors to the economy is incorrect. Many of them are, yes, but plenty are net takers.
BTW, some PBers may remember that I was exceptionally bearish on the 'Hyperloop', and even called it a big con. Yet others - even some who were tech-literate - were calling for a Heathrow-Gatwick Hyperloop.
What have we got? A ludicrous short tunnel in Las Vegas.
Interesting that the rest of the table shows that UK-born people are more negative in contributions than the migrants.
Of course, we can assume Migration Watch UK might well have skewed the figures (or, at least, taken the least positive interpretation), but the others do show, consistently that:
1 - EEA immigrants are the most positive (as you said) 2 - UK-born (ie non-immigrants) are consistently negative. 3 - The most recent migrants (ie since 2001, the era of mass immigration) are the most positive.
I'm sure everyone can pull out what they'd prefer to focus on, but the overall picture does seem to point to those three rules.
And that without the more recent immigrants (since 2001), especially those from the EEA, we'd be considerably poorer.
One of the big problems with arguing about the effects of migration on the economy is that the data is absolutely terrible. Just look at the EU settlement scheme, the numbers applying were about double what was expected because we don't have a good idea of how many people are resident in the UK.
There could be a lot of low economic benefit migration to the UK and it wouldn't even turn up in the official statistics, as such people would be the least likely to end up recorded by the various proxy methods that estimate residency.
Also, using immigration to solve age dependency issues often doesn't make sense. The aging problem is that you have an increasing number of net taker old people compared to net contributor working age people. For this to be solved by immigration, you need the people coming in to be net contributors. Working age people who are net takers worsen the problem, even if they are on the positive side of the ledger from an age perspective.
Again, it's people that don't have an intuitive grasp for mathematical effects and connecting them to real meaning that miss this stuff.
At least in the British context, migrants were and presumably still are net givers.
So you’re railing against a hypothetical of your own construct.
No they aren't, the UK has seen a drop in GDP per capita because of immigration. Immigration has resulted in lower overall living standards. That is undeniable.
It’s only undeniable by certain posters on here, which you have sadly joined.
No, it's just numbers. UK GDP per capita has grown at significantly slower rate than overall GDP. Economic theory is almost certainly bullshit and anyone calling themselves an expert in it should be ignored because it isn't a science.
We’ve had this before.
At the end of the day, either put up evidence, or accept that what you are saying is just another opinion. We can then decide whether to take your beliefs on face value or not.
Per capita GDP 2004 - $40k, 2021 - $47k - 17.5% growth Nominal GDP 2004 - $2.4tn, 2021 - $3.2tn - 33% growth
Immigration is halving the per capita growth rate and the ultimate source of low productivity in the UK economy.
All you are saying is that per capita GDP has slowed down. That’s pretty well attested and discussed on here pretty much every day.
The contribution of immigration is your own inference.
You may as well say that smartphones, or Uber, or the career of Dua Lipa has caused GDP per capita slowdown.
Per capita GDP 1990 - $19k, 2004 - $40k - 110% growth Nominal GDP 1990 - $1.1tn, 2004 - $2.4tn - 118% growth
Please, stop. You're embarrassing yourself.
It’s Max’s “Dua Lipa” theory of growth. Laughable.
GDP per capita has declined. Tell us something we don’t know?
Before mass immigration GDP per capita growth broadly in line with nominal growth, after mass immigration GDP per capita half the rate of nominal growth. You need to turn off the computer for the weekend because it's just embarrassing. The numbers don't lie.
That's like the "Pirates prevent global warming" fallacy. Strip out dependency ratio and people choosing to work fewer hours and you might be onto something.
Did you get your lessons in statistics in Epping?
Hours worked are up though, at least last time I looked at the ONS data. I don't understand why it's controversial to suggest that importing people to low wage jobs rather than invest in capital and automation has lowered the per capita growth rate. I'm hardly suggesting that the sky is green or that water is red.
At system-wide level, the amount of "automation capital" required to replace a few million workers would not be trivial, and would crowd out many other investments. So increased growth rates are not guaranteed if that capital would have been doing something worthwhile. Plus it is not guaranteed that employers would sack workers / taxpayers rather than creating cheap low-productivity roles - and mass layoffs would absolutely be required to increase average productivity, and these would almost by definition be mainly indigenous British workers.
Japan is the example of an aging society which prefers robots to immigrants, and their productivity growth _per worker_ has not been high relative to the West - their overall productivity has really lagged, but that's because of aging. Tour Japan and you will see a lot of people standing around shops greeting and pushing buttons on the automated systems. It's not a guaranteed outcome but suggests that in some societal arrangements you won't get the mass unemployment required to boost "productivity".
BTW, some PBers may remember that I was exceptionally bearish on the 'Hyperloop', and even called it a big con. Yet others - even some who were tech-literate - were calling for a Heathrow-Gatwick Hyperloop.
What have we got? A ludicrous short tunnel in Las Vegas.
Beware tech hype.
Fair enough. I can also remember when you correctly predicted that the intra-galactic wormo-drive, seamlessly and instantaneously connecting central Newent and the major exoplanets of the Andromeda Cluster, would not be in operation by autumn 2009
Interesting that the rest of the table shows that UK-born people are more negative in contributions than the migrants.
Of course, we can assume Migration Watch UK might well have skewed the figures (or, at least, taken the least positive interpretation), but the others do show, consistently that:
1 - EEA immigrants are the most positive (as you said) 2 - UK-born (ie non-immigrants) are consistently negative. 3 - The most recent migrants (ie since 2001, the era of mass immigration) are the most positive.
I'm sure everyone can pull out what they'd prefer to focus on, but the overall picture does seem to point to those three rules.
And that without the more recent immigrants (since 2001), especially those from the EEA, we'd be considerably poorer.
Thanks for clarifying. And note too that these are fiscal numbers, ie contribution to taxation rather than GDP although we might assume the two are closely related.
Our dependence on vast, corrosive levels of immigration is particularly asinine and harmful given what AI is about to do to 50% of jobs
I remember when you said that there would be no lorry drivers within ten years, because of autonomous cars. That was what, about ten years ago?
There is a good chance that this new tech, *if* it plays out as you suggest, actually increases potential employment. In the same way (say) the industrial revolution did. Or the Internet revolution of the 1990s and 2000s. Jobs and roles change, but overall employment increases.
But that's not as dramatic as WE'RE ALL DOOMED !!!!!, so you don't care.
Autonomous cars are, finally, here
“sitting at a coffee shop, watching cars fail at the 4 way stop for 2 hours…
when a fully driverless @Waymo came by driving 100x better than all of them
It’s taken longer than expected, there are still multiple problems to be overcome, but driverless vehicles are now a fact and they are being deployed, commercially
“Driverless Taxi Downtown Las Vegas. Do you wanna ride? #LasVegas #Halo #SelfDrivingCars”
“Waymo’s driverless robotaxis are now doing airport trips in Phoenix / The Alphabet company is getting more confident in its autonomous capabilities, deploying fully driverless cars to Phoenix’s airport to handle the trickiest types of pickups.”
I reckon this would have accrued much wider attention in normal times - driverless cars! - but unfortunately we don’t lack for major, distracting news
There is a *vast* amount of difference between these drastically geolocated schemes and true autonomous driving. But as I said, ten years have pretty much passed since your 'prediction', and the UK is short of tens of thousands of HGV drivers.
Smoke and mirrors mate, smoke and mirrors.
(BTW, I'm not the person hitting the off-topic button on your posts)
Yes, aren't they just glorified trams?
No
“On my ride home I saw more driverless cars than regular ones”
May I just suggest you look at the picture of the car at 3 seconds into the second video, look at the hardware on its roof, and think of how much all of that costs. Then work out why it is not currently a goer - even if it worked outside very small geofenced areas.
As I've said passim, the test of an uatonmous car for me would be to go from our carport to my sister's house, two hours' drive away. The vast majority of which is along the A14, M1 and A50. But it would have to reverse out of my carport and go through my sister's gate and down her drive, without command, preconnoitre of the route, or driver interference. IMO that's a vey fair test, especially as the vast majority of the journey (A14, M1 and A50) is dual carriageway and motorway, and the tech is mostly already there. It's the first ten yards and the final fifty yards that'll break it.
And there are far worse journies than that, even within cities.
Yes, driverless cars will only be a fact when they can carry a dribbling provincial weirdo like you along the M fucking 50 and then on to the A357 and finally to your sister’s house where, yet again, she will look out the window, see you girning in your Waymo, and desperately crush herself in the wheelie bin to pretend she’s not in
I take it you don't actually have an argument, then? Because that is a journey I do every so often, and a fair one (I could think of much worse ones). And if you think of that as 'provincial', then you're even more of a drug-addled syphilitic fool than you appear.
Anyway, great quote from that FT article: “The data is clear that millennials are not simply going to age into conservatism. To reverse a cohort effect, you have to do something for that cohort.”
Almost everything 'Conservative' is antithetical to the voting young. The faces of UK 'Conservatism' are angry newspapers, Richard Littlejohn, GB news, Nigel and the grumpy retired wankers from provincial vox pops.
Fuck the Conservative party. They imported a culture war for short term electioneering.
OTOH older voters are more likely to approve of democracy and free speech than younger ones.
Which therefore is the more “progressive” age cohort.
Only because democracy has worked for their generation!
This comment from btl sums my views on how well our democracy has economically benefited the young
'The article argues that is was a cohort effect (the GFC) rather than a period effect (the declining quality of the Tories) that caused the shift in the UK. I think this let's the Tories off the hook far too easily.
Different cohorts experienced the Story decline differently. Boomers got tax cuts, triple locked pensions, inflated assets, and an end to those pesky foreigners. Millenials got expensive education, zero real wage growth, unaffordable, housing, and the loss of their cosmopolitan identity. This was not the random result of an exogenous recession but an orchestrated programme of intergenerational expropriation.
There are plenty of conservative young Britons but the only conservative party is busy robbing them blind.'
Democracy beats the alternatives.
True. But democracy does rely upon the consent of the loser. If every right leaning government rubs your face in their victory and has little thought to your livelihood you begin to question the system.
Neil Kinnock saying that Gordon Brown would "grind the Tory bastards into dust" comes to mind.
Also, using immigration to solve age dependency issues often doesn't make sense. The aging problem is that you have an increasing number of net taker old people compared to net contributor working age people. For this to be solved by immigration, you need the people coming in to be net contributors. Working age people who are net takers worsen the problem, even if they are on the positive side of the ledger from an age perspective.
Again, it's people that don't have an intuitive grasp for mathematical effects and connecting them to real meaning that miss this stuff.
At least in the British context, migrants were and presumably still are net givers.
So you’re railing against a hypothetical of your own construct.
No they aren't, the UK has seen a drop in GDP per capita because of immigration. Immigration has resulted in lower overall living standards. That is undeniable.
It’s only undeniable by certain posters on here, which you have sadly joined.
No, it's just numbers. UK GDP per capita has grown at significantly slower rate than overall GDP. Economic theory is almost certainly bullshit and anyone calling themselves an expert in it should be ignored because it isn't a science.
We’ve had this before.
At the end of the day, either put up evidence, or accept that what you are saying is just another opinion. We can then decide whether to take your beliefs on face value or not.
Per capita GDP 2004 - $40k, 2021 - $47k - 17.5% growth Nominal GDP 2004 - $2.4tn, 2021 - $3.2tn - 33% growth
Immigration is halving the per capita growth rate and the ultimate source of low productivity in the UK economy.
All you are saying is that per capita GDP has slowed down. That’s pretty well attested and discussed on here pretty much every day.
The contribution of immigration is your own inference.
You may as well say that smartphones, or Uber, or the career of Dua Lipa has caused GDP per capita slowdown.
Per capita GDP 1990 - $19k, 2004 - $40k - 110% growth Nominal GDP 1990 - $1.1tn, 2004 - $2.4tn - 118% growth
Please, stop. You're embarrassing yourself.
It’s Max’s “Dua Lipa” theory of growth. Laughable.
GDP per capita has declined. Tell us something we don’t know?
Before mass immigration GDP per capita growth broadly in line with nominal growth, after mass immigration GDP per capita half the rate of nominal growth. You need to turn off the computer for the weekend because it's just embarrassing. The numbers don't lie.
The issue is that those countries without significant immigration (like Japan) haven't done very well either.
Indeed, I'm not suggesting a no immigration policy though. I never have.
No, but it rather puts a bomb under your hobbyhorse, doesn’t it?
Not really, no immigration is a stupid policy. All I've ever said is that suggesting that mass immigration is cost free is ridiculous and I don't mean cost on a societal basis, I also mean from a monetary basis.
Interesting that the rest of the table shows that UK-born people are more negative in contributions than the migrants.
Of course, we can assume Migration Watch UK might well have skewed the figures (or, at least, taken the least positive interpretation), but the others do show, consistently that:
1 - EEA immigrants are the most positive (as you said) 2 - UK-born (ie non-immigrants) are consistently negative. 3 - The most recent migrants (ie since 2001, the era of mass immigration) are the most positive.
I'm sure everyone can pull out what they'd prefer to focus on, but the overall picture does seem to point to those three rules.
And that without the more recent immigrants (since 2001), especially those from the EEA, we'd be considerably poorer.
Hardly that surprising given immigrants have to meet strict skills criteria to enter the country and workforce, including EEA immigrants now
Interesting that the rest of the table shows that UK-born people are more negative in contributions than the migrants.
Of course, we can assume Migration Watch UK might well have skewed the figures (or, at least, taken the least positive interpretation), but the others do show, consistently that:
1 - EEA immigrants are the most positive (as you said) 2 - UK-born (ie non-immigrants) are consistently negative. 3 - The most recent migrants (ie since 2001, the era of mass immigration) are the most positive.
I'm sure everyone can pull out what they'd prefer to focus on, but the overall picture does seem to point to those three rules.
And that without the more recent immigrants (since 2001), especially those from the EEA, we'd be considerably poorer.
And you’re putting your own positive spin on it!
Tbf the data is monumentally opaque. Presumably because this is so hard to work out. This table is about as good as it gets and it begs a million questions
My point in citing it was to counter the glibness of @Gardenwalker - “migrants are net givers”. It’s much more complicated than that
But common sense tells me Max is right. GDP per cap stopped growing in tandem with GDP when immigration went mad under Blair. That feels at least partly causal, to me
Politico.com - Battleground Republicans say they'll only vote for McCarthy for speaker More than a dozen GOP lawmakers, including members-elect, wrote in a letter that they would not back any "so-called shadow 'consensus candidate.'"
Battleground Republicans have made their strategy on the speakership vote clear: Forget a consensus candidate, they’re supporting Kevin McCarthy no matter how long it takes.
More than a dozen House Republicans who were elected in districts that President Joe Biden won in 2020 said in a letter to their colleagues Thursday that they’ll support the GOP leader for as many ballots as it takes. Rep.-elect Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), who led the letter, specifically said they would not support any consensus candidate who could emerge in the fray.
eanwhile, it’s only five days before the body will begin voting on who will take the gavel in the new majority, and five GOP lawmakers are still threatening to oppose McCarthy for speaker come Jan. 3. That’s enough to block him from receiving the needed 218 votes.
“Let us be clear: we are not only supporting Kevin McCarthy for Speaker, but are not open to any so-called shadow ‘consensus candidate’ — regardless of how many votes it takes to elect Speaker-designate McCarthy,” they wrote in the letter, first obtained by POLITICO. “There is no other conservative candidate that can garner the support of 218 Republicans for Speaker — period.” . . .
I am going to start naming and shaming persistent off topic and flag button users.
Because I get to see all that.
I got a full house (flag, OT and like) on a post earlier! Had that been done before?
Yes.
Someone did that to a RCS1000 post a few years ago.
But you are in exalted company.
Genuinely chuffed!
My high point was when someone emailed OGH to complain about my Islamophobia.
Back in 2013/14 Nigel Farage said he didn't want to live next door to Romanians and I said I understood, for example I wouldn't want to live next door to some Muslims.
Some lurker emailed OGH saying it was outrageous that his deputy editor was an unabashed Islamophobe.
We had a chuckle at that.
In case anyone who reads this post and wishes to complain I only didn't want to live next door to Muslims is because I'm such a devout and pious Muslim, I didn't want any Muslim neighbours feeling bad that they weren't as devout and pious as me.
BTW, some PBers may remember that I was exceptionally bearish on the 'Hyperloop', and even called it a big con. Yet others - even some who were tech-literate - were calling for a Heathrow-Gatwick Hyperloop.
What have we got? A ludicrous short tunnel in Las Vegas.
Beware tech hype.
Fair enough. I can also remember when you correctly predicted that the intra-galactic wormo-drive, seamlessly and instantaneously connecting central Newent and the major exoplanets of the Andromeda Cluster, would not be in operation by autumn 2009
Again, I take it you don't actually have an argument to make.
I'll put it again: billions of dollars are being invested in this tech. Development teams want their slice of that money, and to promote what they've done with their investments so far. And the results are paltry, to say the least. Therefore you get lots of PR, but that is always very cherry-picked. It's cool, but always look at what they're not saying.
As an example (and I'm afraid it's another Musk one): at his launch of the Tesla Semi (lorry), he was keen to promote the 500-mile range and acceleration (the latter being something haulage companies are obviously obsessed with...).
He did not mention the payload weight, which is something haulage companies have absolutely zero interest in. Why?
I am going to start naming and shaming persistent off topic and flag button users.
Because I get to see all that.
I got a full house (flag, OT and like) on a post earlier! Had that been done before?
Yes.
Someone did that to a RCS1000 post a few years ago.
But you are in exalted company.
Genuinely chuffed!
My high point was when someone emailed OGH to complain about my Islamophobia.
Back in 2013/14 Nigel Farage said he didn't want to live next door to Romanians and I said I understood, for example I wouldn't want to live next door to some Muslims.
Some lurker emailed OGH saying it was outrageous that his deputy editor was an unabashed Islamophobe.
We had a chuckle at that.
In case anyone who reads this post and wishes to complain I only didn't want to live next door to Muslims is because I'm such a devout and pious Muslim, I didn't want any Muslim neighbours feeling bad that they weren't as devout and pious as me.
I have an unusually high turnover of next door neighbours myself
Also, using immigration to solve age dependency issues often doesn't make sense. The aging problem is that you have an increasing number of net taker old people compared to net contributor working age people. For this to be solved by immigration, you need the people coming in to be net contributors. Working age people who are net takers worsen the problem, even if they are on the positive side of the ledger from an age perspective.
Again, it's people that don't have an intuitive grasp for mathematical effects and connecting them to real meaning that miss this stuff.
Net Takers as opposed to Net Contributors is hard to assess. Eg the notion that it's all about how much tax you pay is very Simple Simon.
Of course. You need to factor things in like impact on housing cost and transport congestion, which raise the bar higher for a migrant to qualify as a net benefit.
And things like real value added vs remuneration extracted. The upshot is most low paid people are net contributors and many highly paid people are net takers. Counterintuitive yet true.
Me1 is an astute spotter of underpriced assets. I buy and sell them - not changing them in any way - and make £50m in a year, paying £10m tax, netting £40m.
Me2 is a low wage toiler in a factory earning £25k, paying £3k tax, netting £22k.
Me2 (low skill, low pay) is a Net Contributor, Me1 (high skill, high pay) is a Net Taker.
The contribution of Me1 is moving a ton of stuff from people who don't use it effectively to people who do. If anyone could do it, there'd be no money in it for Me1. If Me1 created 100 million pounds of extra value by moving assets from bad to good uses, even if Me1 gets half the proceeds, it's still a massive net contribution to society.
It depends on what I'm doing. If I "earn" a shedload for trading, with no asset improvement, my contribution is probably negative. Not to say anyone could do it. What I do could be highly skilled. It might or might not be. It could be more of a 'face fits' or a 'luck, right time right place' type thing.
Whatever. Neither profit nor tax paid maps to contribution. Eg say we privatize Health 100% so it now makes profits as a private business and pays tax instead of absorbing it via government spend. Does the sector, by dint of this, become a Contributor instead of a Drain? Surely not. The fundamentals are the same. If it was a Drain before, it still is. If it was a Contributor before, it still is. We've done an accounting trick.
One of the key drivers of productivity, which doesn't get enough attention, is that it depends enormously on what sectors a country employs people in. You want to maximise your competitive advantage. So, in the UK, financial services and other business services generally (aka as 'the City') show extremely high productivity. Steel production, small scale manufacturing, etc: not so much, given worldwide competition from countries better placed to do these things.
Bizarrely, the lesson voters take from this is that we should discourage the good bits and encourage the not-so-good bits. That is not a very smart strategy.
Britain is too big to be dependent on financial services alone, and we have an unenviable record of abandoning sectors we used to be quite good at.
There's a benefit to diversifying the economy, too.
I find it simplest to think of Britain as two economies.
The first, let’s call it London, makes money via financial services, at which it is a global leader. It is highly open to foreign investment and talent, and enjoys high productivity and very high wages. However it was severely dented in 2009 to the extent that it lost global market share, and living standards are badly affected by housing costs.
The second, let’s call it not-London, no longer makes any money apart from government benefits. It used to have global-beating sectors, but they have withered away. No investment - either government or private - is available to encourage new growth.
Economy 1 likely needs different policies than Economy 2.
It is absurdly ridiculous to say non-London no longer makes money apart from government benefits. The sort of ridiculous nonsense this London-dominated site tends to exaggerate in.
There are plenty of productive non-London firms all over the country, just as plenty of migrants can be productive - old EU15, EU12 and non-EU. And there are plenty of non-productive native people too, just as there are non-productive migrants.
Anyone claiming something so broadbrush as "no longer makes any money apart from government benefits" is preposterous and you know it too.
The intent was to simplify in order to show that a single policy mix is likely not appropriate.
I would have thought you’d have appreciated extreme simplification.
Economics is very much a science....the science of explaining why the predictions you made last year didn't come true
Interesting that the rest of the table shows that UK-born people are more negative in contributions than the migrants.
Of course, we can assume Migration Watch UK might well have skewed the figures (or, at least, taken the least positive interpretation), but the others do show, consistently that:
1 - EEA immigrants are the most positive (as you said) 2 - UK-born (ie non-immigrants) are consistently negative. 3 - The most recent migrants (ie since 2001, the era of mass immigration) are the most positive.
I'm sure everyone can pull out what they'd prefer to focus on, but the overall picture does seem to point to those three rules.
And that without the more recent immigrants (since 2001), especially those from the EEA, we'd be considerably poorer.
And you’re putting your own positive spin on it!
Tbf the data is monumentally opaque. Presumably because this is so hard to work out. This table is about as good as it gets and it begs a million questions
My point in citing it was to counter the glibness of @Gardenwalker - “migrants are net givers”. It’s much more complicated than that
But common sense tells me Max is right. GDP per cap stopped growing in tandem with GDP when immigration went mad under Blair. That feels at least partly causal, to me
It's not just common sense, immigrants make up a much higher proportion of low salary and low skill jobs than British people. They also do at the very top, which is why immigration isn't a black and white discussion. We need policies that encourage high skilled, high wage migrants and block low wage and low salary ones to force companies to invest in automation rather than throw cheap labour at it.
Interesting that the rest of the table shows that UK-born people are more negative in contributions than the migrants.
Of course, we can assume Migration Watch UK might well have skewed the figures (or, at least, taken the least positive interpretation), but the others do show, consistently that:
1 - EEA immigrants are the most positive (as you said) 2 - UK-born (ie non-immigrants) are consistently negative. 3 - The most recent migrants (ie since 2001, the era of mass immigration) are the most positive.
I'm sure everyone can pull out what they'd prefer to focus on, but the overall picture does seem to point to those three rules.
And that without the more recent immigrants (since 2001), especially those from the EEA, we'd be considerably poorer.
And you’re putting your own positive spin on it!
Tbf the data is monumentally opaque. Presumably because this is so hard to work out. This table is about as good as it gets and it begs a million questions
My point in citing it was to counter the glibness of @Gardenwalker - “migrants are net givers”. It’s much more complicated than that
But common sense tells me Max is right. GDP per cap stopped growing in tandem with GDP when immigration went mad under Blair. That feels at least partly causal, to me
Plus nobody was worried about Western European migration, it was Eastern European migration post 2004 which was the issue as average wages in Poland and Romania were so much less than here (albeit the gap narrowing now) and so more came and particularly that undercut the lower skilled here.
Blair also failed to introduce transition controls after EU enlargement unlike say Germany.
It depends on what I'm doing. If I "earn" a shedload for trading, with no asset improvement, my contribution is probably negative. Not to say anyone could do it. What I do could be highly skilled. It might or might not be. It could be more of a 'face fits' or a 'luck, right time right place' type thing.
Whatever. Neither profit nor tax paid maps to contribution. Eg say we privatize Health 100% so it now makes profits as a private business and pays tax instead of absorbing it via government spend. Does the sector, by dint of this, become a Contributor instead of a Drain? Surely not. The fundamentals are the same. If it was a Drain before, it still is. If it was a Contributor before, it still is. We've done an accounting trick.
I'm puzzled as to why you think trading - buying from someone who wants to sell, but hasn't found a buyer, and selling to someone who wants to buy, but hasn't found a seller - doesn't contribute anything.
So? The debate was not about what the government would do, it’s about the need for it. Lots of high profile scientists I’ve heard over the last couple of days say it’s not needed - for instance Callum Semple. What you are seeing is herd behaviour from governments.
I know some Labour supporters on here doubt any majority, let alone a majority of that size, but it would be really bad for the country IMO.
Time to give the Lib Dems a leg up.
No, a big Labour majority would be good for the country. It would mean the government actually being in charge for once, instead of the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph establishment.
Actually I disagree with that I think a huge labour majority would be disastrous for the country and that is not a comment on how labour would govern. Simply because I think whatever any political party tries things are going to continue to get worse during the next parliament. I don't really expect living standards to start rising again till early 2030's at least.
So we are then in the position tory sub 200, labour huge majority and voters thinking come 2029.....well things were shit....they are even shitter now. We have tried tories, labour haven't improved things in fact I am paying even more tax for less services.
I can't help thinking might decide to decamp from centrist parties altogether and try a roll of the dice like they did for brexit. Who knows what the hell we might end up with (hint it wont be the lib dems as they are largely in most voters minds the crevice between the buttocks of labour and tories).
Wouldn't at all surprise me to see green mps and refuk mps and a farage vehicle coming to the fore.
Yes, I think you are very close to the mark there. In the medium-term there is going to be a significant and lasting move both to the far left and the far right in England. It could end very badly indeed. I’m hoping that Scotland might escape that fate and remain fairly centrist. Obviously, independence makes that more likely.
I am quite sure it is not possible to be a centrist and at the same time be a racist Anglophobe bigot such as yourself. Centrists do not engage in racist hatred, whether for the English or anyone else.
I very much hope that you (and some of the other frothing Nat bigots who post on here) are not representative of the rest of the Scottish people, any more than the far right and far left are representative of that very diverse group of people that you hold such hatred for, collectively known as the English.
I know some Labour supporters on here doubt any majority, let alone a majority of that size, but it would be really bad for the country IMO.
Time to give the Lib Dems a leg up.
No, a big Labour majority would be good for the country. It would mean the government actually being in charge for once, instead of the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph establishment.
Actually I disagree with that I think a huge labour majority would be disastrous for the country and that is not a comment on how labour would govern. Simply because I think whatever any political party tries things are going to continue to get worse during the next parliament. I don't really expect living standards to start rising again till early 2030's at least.
So we are then in the position tory sub 200, labour huge majority and voters thinking come 2029.....well things were shit....they are even shitter now. We have tried tories, labour haven't improved things in fact I am paying even more tax for less services.
I can't help thinking might decide to decamp from centrist parties altogether and try a roll of the dice like they did for brexit. Who knows what the hell we might end up with (hint it wont be the lib dems as they are largely in most voters minds the crevice between the buttocks of labour and tories).
Wouldn't at all surprise me to see green mps and refuk mps and a farage vehicle coming to the fore.
Yes, I think you are very close to the mark there. In the medium-term there is going to be a significant and lasting move both to the far left and the far right in England. It could end very badly indeed. I’m hoping that Scotland might escape that fate and remain fairly centrist. Obviously, independence makes that more likely.
Centrists do not engage in racist hatred
Just as an aside comment, I think that is unlikely to be true, anymore than all those famous 'anti-racists' who people on the left insisted could not have done racist things because they are anti-racists.
Racism would not seem to make much sense to the kind moderate, middle of the spectrum views I would expect of centrists, but there are bound to be at least some people of impeccable centrist opinions who also happen to be incredibly stupid and thus racist.
Racism in the modern world is an intrinsically extremist position. @StuartDickson makes little attempt to cover his hatred for "the English" and is ergo an extremist, not a centrist, whatever his other views may be.
It always seems strange to me that the 'captains of industry', along with directors and highly-paid senior managers, who do very well out of running businesses, never get any flak on here for their failure to improve productivity in recent times.
I guess migrants (and trades unionists, come to that) are an easier and more visible target.
I know some Labour supporters on here doubt any majority, let alone a majority of that size, but it would be really bad for the country IMO.
Time to give the Lib Dems a leg up.
No, a big Labour majority would be good for the country. It would mean the government actually being in charge for once, instead of the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph establishment.
Actually I disagree with that I think a huge labour majority would be disastrous for the country and that is not a comment on how labour would govern. Simply because I think whatever any political party tries things are going to continue to get worse during the next parliament. I don't really expect living standards to start rising again till early 2030's at least.
So we are then in the position tory sub 200, labour huge majority and voters thinking come 2029.....well things were shit....they are even shitter now. We have tried tories, labour haven't improved things in fact I am paying even more tax for less services.
I can't help thinking might decide to decamp from centrist parties altogether and try a roll of the dice like they did for brexit. Who knows what the hell we might end up with (hint it wont be the lib dems as they are largely in most voters minds the crevice between the buttocks of labour and tories).
Wouldn't at all surprise me to see green mps and refuk mps and a farage vehicle coming to the fore.
Yes, I think you are very close to the mark there. In the medium-term there is going to be a significant and lasting move both to the far left and the far right in England. It could end very badly indeed. I’m hoping that Scotland might escape that fate and remain fairly centrist. Obviously, independence makes that more likely.
Much less likely, given the dislocation and economic hardship that would result.
I would say Scotland is already becoming quite an extreme country (or at least, is voting for extremist parties) and if 20% was wiped off its GDP that would only get worse.
That doesn’t show that a hypothetical Truss lead in Dec 2022 would not be at least 4 figures
If Truss had remained Tory leader the Tories would have got their lowest voteshare in history and got fewer than 50 seats
There has not been an election yet. And when there is I think the PM Truss (as she will be again) will easily record a record number of seats. I think a 500 seat majority not out of the question, Take off your blinkers man!
Interesting that the rest of the table shows that UK-born people are more negative in contributions than the migrants.
Of course, we can assume Migration Watch UK might well have skewed the figures (or, at least, taken the least positive interpretation), but the others do show, consistently that:
1 - EEA immigrants are the most positive (as you said) 2 - UK-born (ie non-immigrants) are consistently negative. 3 - The most recent migrants (ie since 2001, the era of mass immigration) are the most positive.
I'm sure everyone can pull out what they'd prefer to focus on, but the overall picture does seem to point to those three rules.
And that without the more recent immigrants (since 2001), especially those from the EEA, we'd be considerably poorer.
And you’re putting your own positive spin on it!
Tbf the data is monumentally opaque. Presumably because this is so hard to work out. This table is about as good as it gets and it begs a million questions
My point in citing it was to counter the glibness of @Gardenwalker - “migrants are net givers”. It’s much more complicated than that
But common sense tells me Max is right. GDP per cap stopped growing in tandem with GDP when immigration went mad under Blair. That feels at least partly causal, to me
It's not just common sense, immigrants make up a much higher proportion of low salary and low skill jobs than British people. They also do at the very top, which is why immigration isn't a black and white discussion. We need policies that encourage high skilled, high wage migrants and block low wage and low salary ones to force companies to invest in automation rather than throw cheap labour at it.
One intriguing example is the Albanian hand car wash, replacing a machine. Five people do the job of one robot. Massively unproductive. Regressive
Interesting that the rest of the table shows that UK-born people are more negative in contributions than the migrants.
Of course, we can assume Migration Watch UK might well have skewed the figures (or, at least, taken the least positive interpretation), but the others do show, consistently that:
1 - EEA immigrants are the most positive (as you said) 2 - UK-born (ie non-immigrants) are consistently negative. 3 - The most recent migrants (ie since 2001, the era of mass immigration) are the most positive.
I'm sure everyone can pull out what they'd prefer to focus on, but the overall picture does seem to point to those three rules.
And that without the more recent immigrants (since 2001), especially those from the EEA, we'd be considerably poorer.
And you’re putting your own positive spin on it!
Tbf the data is monumentally opaque. Presumably because this is so hard to work out. This table is about as good as it gets and it begs a million questions
My point in citing it was to counter the glibness of @Gardenwalker - “migrants are net givers”. It’s much more complicated than that
But common sense tells me Max is right. GDP per cap stopped growing in tandem with GDP when immigration went mad under Blair. That feels at least partly causal, to me
Plus nobody was worried about western European migration, it was Eastern European migration post 2004 which was the issue as average wages in Poland and Romania were so much less than here (albeit the gap narrowing now) and so more came and particularly that undercut the lower skilled here.
Blair also failed to introduce transition controls after EU enlargement unlike say Germany.
The problem was the Civil Service convinced the Government there would not be large numbers of Poles coming to the UK because it was too far and there were better opportunities to be had closer to Poland.
We simply failed to anticipate the volume of Poles who opted for economic reasons to come to the UK and in the belief there wouldn't be many, we didn't seek transition controls.
Also, using immigration to solve age dependency issues often doesn't make sense. The aging problem is that you have an increasing number of net taker old people compared to net contributor working age people. For this to be solved by immigration, you need the people coming in to be net contributors. Working age people who are net takers worsen the problem, even if they are on the positive side of the ledger from an age perspective.
Again, it's people that don't have an intuitive grasp for mathematical effects and connecting them to real meaning that miss this stuff.
At least in the British context, migrants were and presumably still are net givers.
So you’re railing against a hypothetical of your own construct.
No they aren't, the UK has seen a drop in GDP per capita because of immigration. Immigration has resulted in lower overall living standards. That is undeniable.
It’s only undeniable by certain posters on here, which you have sadly joined.
No, it's just numbers. UK GDP per capita has grown at significantly slower rate than overall GDP. Economic theory is almost certainly bullshit and anyone calling themselves an expert in it should be ignored because it isn't a science.
We’ve had this before.
At the end of the day, either put up evidence, or accept that what you are saying is just another opinion. We can then decide whether to take your beliefs on face value or not.
Per capita GDP 2004 - $40k, 2021 - $47k - 17.5% growth Nominal GDP 2004 - $2.4tn, 2021 - $3.2tn - 33% growth
Immigration is halving the per capita growth rate and the ultimate source of low productivity in the UK economy.
All you are saying is that per capita GDP has slowed down. That’s pretty well attested and discussed on here pretty much every day.
The contribution of immigration is your own inference.
You may as well say that smartphones, or Uber, or the career of Dua Lipa has caused GDP per capita slowdown.
Per capita GDP 1990 - $19k, 2004 - $40k - 110% growth Nominal GDP 1990 - $1.1tn, 2004 - $2.4tn - 118% growth
Please, stop. You're embarrassing yourself.
It’s Max’s “Dua Lipa” theory of growth. Laughable.
GDP per capita has declined. Tell us something we don’t know?
Before mass immigration GDP per capita growth broadly in line with nominal growth, after mass immigration GDP per capita half the rate of nominal growth. You need to turn off the computer for the weekend because it's just embarrassing. The numbers don't lie.
The issue is that those countries without significant immigration (like Japan) haven't done very well either.
Indeed, I'm not suggesting a no immigration policy though. I never have.
No, but it rather puts a bomb under your hobbyhorse, doesn’t it?
Not really, no immigration is a stupid policy. All I've ever said is that suggesting that mass immigration is cost free is ridiculous and I don't mean cost on a societal basis, I also mean from a monetary basis.
Interesting that the rest of the table shows that UK-born people are more negative in contributions than the migrants.
Of course, we can assume Migration Watch UK might well have skewed the figures (or, at least, taken the least positive interpretation), but the others do show, consistently that:
1 - EEA immigrants are the most positive (as you said) 2 - UK-born (ie non-immigrants) are consistently negative. 3 - The most recent migrants (ie since 2001, the era of mass immigration) are the most positive.
I'm sure everyone can pull out what they'd prefer to focus on, but the overall picture does seem to point to those three rules.
And that without the more recent immigrants (since 2001), especially those from the EEA, we'd be considerably poorer.
And you’re putting your own positive spin on it!
Tbf the data is monumentally opaque. Presumably because this is so hard to work out. This table is about as good as it gets and it begs a million questions
My point in citing it was to counter the glibness of @Gardenwalker - “migrants are net givers”. It’s much more complicated than that
But common sense tells me Max is right. GDP per cap stopped growing in tandem with GDP when immigration went mad under Blair. That feels at least partly causal, to me
It's not just common sense, immigrants make up a much higher proportion of low salary and low skill jobs than British people. They also do at the very top, which is why immigration isn't a black and white discussion. We need policies that encourage high skilled, high wage migrants and block low wage and low salary ones to force companies to invest in automation rather than throw cheap labour at it.
If it’s so obvious you’d expect to find some supporting data.
No, I don't have Netflix. I haven't seen Knives Out, either, so I'd be unlikely to watch a sequel without watching the former. It's about tech-billionaire bros, isn't it?
It always seems strange to me that the 'captains of industry', along with directors and highly-paid senior managers, who do very well out of running businesses, never get any flak on here for their failure to improve productivity in recent times.
I guess migrants (and trades unionists, come to that) are an easier and more visible target.
Maybe they're just not very productive. I'm sure it would be considerably cheaper to outsource them to India, plenty of MBAs there.
I am going to start naming and shaming persistent off topic and flag button users.
Because I get to see all that.
I got a full house (flag, OT and like) on a post earlier! Had that been done before?
Yes.
Someone did that to a RCS1000 post a few years ago.
But you are in exalted company.
Genuinely chuffed!
My high point was when someone emailed OGH to complain about my Islamophobia.
Back in 2013/14 Nigel Farage said he didn't want to live next door to Romanians and I said I understood, for example I wouldn't want to live next door to some Muslims.
Some lurker emailed OGH saying it was outrageous that his deputy editor was an unabashed Islamophobe.
We had a chuckle at that.
In case anyone who reads this post and wishes to complain I only didn't want to live next door to Muslims is because I'm such a devout and pious Muslim, I didn't want any Muslim neighbours feeling bad that they weren't as devout and pious as me.
But what would you do to next neighbours who took their pizzas with pineapple?
Interesting that the rest of the table shows that UK-born people are more negative in contributions than the migrants.
Of course, we can assume Migration Watch UK might well have skewed the figures (or, at least, taken the least positive interpretation), but the others do show, consistently that:
1 - EEA immigrants are the most positive (as you said) 2 - UK-born (ie non-immigrants) are consistently negative. 3 - The most recent migrants (ie since 2001, the era of mass immigration) are the most positive.
I'm sure everyone can pull out what they'd prefer to focus on, but the overall picture does seem to point to those three rules.
And that without the more recent immigrants (since 2001), especially those from the EEA, we'd be considerably poorer.
And you’re putting your own positive spin on it!
Tbf the data is monumentally opaque. Presumably because this is so hard to work out. This table is about as good as it gets and it begs a million questions
My point in citing it was to counter the glibness of @Gardenwalker - “migrants are net givers”. It’s much more complicated than that
But common sense tells me Max is right. GDP per cap stopped growing in tandem with GDP when immigration went mad under Blair. That feels at least partly causal, to me
It's not just common sense, immigrants make up a much higher proportion of low salary and low skill jobs than British people. They also do at the very top, which is why immigration isn't a black and white discussion. We need policies that encourage high skilled, high wage migrants and block low wage and low salary ones to force companies to invest in automation rather than throw cheap labour at it.
One intriguing example is the Albanian hand car wash, replacing a machine. Five people do the job of one robot. Massively unproductive. Regressive
And yet the wash is palpably better…
Eventually it always comes back to the Albanian car wash.
You can’t argue with the Albanian car wash!
Soon someone will mention ten to a room slums in Barking, and how house prices would be lower without all the migrants.
Part of the British malaise, it seems to me, is this willingness to continue to spout what are presumably comforting “truthy” nostra.
It always seems strange to me that the 'captains of industry', along with directors and highly-paid senior managers, who do very well out of running businesses, never get any flak on here for their failure to improve productivity in recent times.
I guess migrants (and trades unionists, come to that) are an easier and more visible target.
I just did - "Because the UK has got singularly shite short termist management and government. That's a very easy answer."
This isn't an uncommon view either, but businesses and managers are rational. If it's easier and cheaper to throw cheap labour at problem than to invest capital they will do the former. That's what's been happening for the last 20 or so years ever since Labour turned the UK into a high immigration economy. They'd ultimately rather pay themselves bigger bonuses and dividends than invest and hiring low wage people is an easy way to save money to enable those higher bonus and dividend payments.
One of the key drivers of productivity, which doesn't get enough attention, is that it depends enormously on what sectors a country employs people in. You want to maximise your competitive advantage. So, in the UK, financial services and other business services generally (aka as 'the City') show extremely high productivity. Steel production, small scale manufacturing, etc: not so much, given worldwide competition from countries better placed to do these things.
Bizarrely, the lesson voters take from this is that we should discourage the good bits and encourage the not-so-good bits. That is not a very smart strategy.
Britain is too big to be dependent on financial services alone, and we have an unenviable record of abandoning sectors we used to be quite good at.
There's a benefit to diversifying the economy, too.
I find it simplest to think of Britain as two economies.
The first, let’s call it London, makes money via financial services, at which it is a global leader. It is highly open to foreign investment and talent, and enjoys high productivity and very high wages. However it was severely dented in 2009 to the extent that it lost global market share, and living standards are badly affected by housing costs.
The second, let’s call it not-London, no longer makes any money apart from government benefits. It used to have global-beating sectors, but they have withered away. No investment - either government or private - is available to encourage new growth.
Economy 1 likely needs different policies than Economy 2.
It is absurdly ridiculous to say non-London no longer makes money apart from government benefits. The sort of ridiculous nonsense this London-dominated site tends to exaggerate in.
There are plenty of productive non-London firms all over the country, just as plenty of migrants can be productive - old EU15, EU12 and non-EU. And there are plenty of non-productive native people too, just as there are non-productive migrants.
Anyone claiming something so broadbrush as "no longer makes any money apart from government benefits" is preposterous and you know it too.
The intent was to simplify in order to show that a single policy mix is likely not appropriate.
I would have thought you’d have appreciated extreme simplification.
Economics is very much a science....the science of explaining why the predictions you made last year didn't come true
Economics is a social science like politics and sociology, just with a few more figures and graphs.
One of the key drivers of productivity, which doesn't get enough attention, is that it depends enormously on what sectors a country employs people in. You want to maximise your competitive advantage. So, in the UK, financial services and other business services generally (aka as 'the City') show extremely high productivity. Steel production, small scale manufacturing, etc: not so much, given worldwide competition from countries better placed to do these things.
Bizarrely, the lesson voters take from this is that we should discourage the good bits and encourage the not-so-good bits. That is not a very smart strategy.
But if you look at countries which have developed entirely new industrial sectors, that argument really doesn’t stand up. It’s an argument for stagnation.
It always seems strange to me that the 'captains of industry', along with directors and highly-paid senior managers, who do very well out of running businesses, never get any flak on here for their failure to improve productivity in recent times.
I guess migrants (and trades unionists, come to that) are an easier and more visible target.
Maybe they're just not very productive. I'm sure it would be considerably cheaper to outsource them to India, plenty of MBAs there.
I was thinking more of the productivity of the businesses that they run, rather than their personal productivity.
So? The debate was not about what the government would do, it’s about the need for it. Lots of high profile scientists I’ve heard over the last couple of days say it’s not needed - for instance Callum Semple. What you are seeing is herd behaviour from governments.
I’m merely pointing out that I said this would happen. “The dominos will fall”. Some on here were skeptical
I agree the science is contentious - however my opinion is this is justified by basic politics alone: western governments need to get tough on Beijing. They freely and wilfully exported their fucking bug around the world in early 2020. Not again
And we should sequence the shit out of them. Watch for variants
It always seems strange to me that the 'captains of industry', along with directors and highly-paid senior managers, who do very well out of running businesses, never get any flak on here for their failure to improve productivity in recent times.
I guess migrants (and trades unionists, come to that) are an easier and more visible target.
Maybe they're just not very productive. I'm sure it would be considerably cheaper to outsource them to India, plenty of MBAs there.
Also, using immigration to solve age dependency issues often doesn't make sense. The aging problem is that you have an increasing number of net taker old people compared to net contributor working age people. For this to be solved by immigration, you need the people coming in to be net contributors. Working age people who are net takers worsen the problem, even if they are on the positive side of the ledger from an age perspective.
Again, it's people that don't have an intuitive grasp for mathematical effects and connecting them to real meaning that miss this stuff.
At least in the British context, migrants were and presumably still are net givers.
So you’re railing against a hypothetical of your own construct.
No they aren't, the UK has seen a drop in GDP per capita because of immigration. Immigration has resulted in lower overall living standards. That is undeniable.
It’s only undeniable by certain posters on here, which you have sadly joined.
No, it's just numbers. UK GDP per capita has grown at significantly slower rate than overall GDP. Economic theory is almost certainly bullshit and anyone calling themselves an expert in it should be ignored because it isn't a science.
We’ve had this before.
At the end of the day, either put up evidence, or accept that what you are saying is just another opinion. We can then decide whether to take your beliefs on face value or not.
Per capita GDP 2004 - $40k, 2021 - $47k - 17.5% growth Nominal GDP 2004 - $2.4tn, 2021 - $3.2tn - 33% growth
Immigration is halving the per capita growth rate and the ultimate source of low productivity in the UK economy.
All you are saying is that per capita GDP has slowed down. That’s pretty well attested and discussed on here pretty much every day.
The contribution of immigration is your own inference.
You may as well say that smartphones, or Uber, or the career of Dua Lipa has caused GDP per capita slowdown.
Per capita GDP 1990 - $19k, 2004 - $40k - 110% growth Nominal GDP 1990 - $1.1tn, 2004 - $2.4tn - 118% growth
Please, stop. You're embarrassing yourself.
It’s Max’s “Dua Lipa” theory of growth. Laughable.
GDP per capita has declined. Tell us something we don’t know?
Before mass immigration GDP per capita growth broadly in line with nominal growth, after mass immigration GDP per capita half the rate of nominal growth. You need to turn off the computer for the weekend because it's just embarrassing. The numbers don't lie.
you think the population is in a steady state other than immigration?????
One of the key drivers of productivity, which doesn't get enough attention, is that it depends enormously on what sectors a country employs people in. You want to maximise your competitive advantage. So, in the UK, financial services and other business services generally (aka as 'the City') show extremely high productivity. Steel production, small scale manufacturing, etc: not so much, given worldwide competition from countries better placed to do these things.
Bizarrely, the lesson voters take from this is that we should discourage the good bits and encourage the not-so-good bits. That is not a very smart strategy.
But if you look at countries which have developed entirely new industrial sectors, that argument really doesn’t stand up. It’s an argument for stagnation.
South Korea presumably should have stuck to their undeniable strength in rice production.
I am going to start naming and shaming persistent off topic and flag button users.
Because I get to see all that.
I got a full house (flag, OT and like) on a post earlier! Had that been done before?
Yes.
Someone did that to a RCS1000 post a few years ago.
But you are in exalted company.
Genuinely chuffed!
My high point was when someone emailed OGH to complain about my Islamophobia.
Back in 2013/14 Nigel Farage said he didn't want to live next door to Romanians and I said I understood, for example I wouldn't want to live next door to some Muslims.
Some lurker emailed OGH saying it was outrageous that his deputy editor was an unabashed Islamophobe.
We had a chuckle at that.
In case anyone who reads this post and wishes to complain I only didn't want to live next door to Muslims is because I'm such a devout and pious Muslim, I didn't want any Muslim neighbours feeling bad that they weren't as devout and pious as me.
But what would you do to next neighbours who took their pizzas with pineapple?
I know some Labour supporters on here doubt any majority, let alone a majority of that size, but it would be really bad for the country IMO.
Time to give the Lib Dems a leg up.
No, a big Labour majority would be good for the country. It would mean the government actually being in charge for once, instead of the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph establishment.
Actually I disagree with that I think a huge labour majority would be disastrous for the country and that is not a comment on how labour would govern. Simply because I think whatever any political party tries things are going to continue to get worse during the next parliament. I don't really expect living standards to start rising again till early 2030's at least.
So we are then in the position tory sub 200, labour huge majority and voters thinking come 2029.....well things were shit....they are even shitter now. We have tried tories, labour haven't improved things in fact I am paying even more tax for less services.
I can't help thinking might decide to decamp from centrist parties altogether and try a roll of the dice like they did for brexit. Who knows what the hell we might end up with (hint it wont be the lib dems as they are largely in most voters minds the crevice between the buttocks of labour and tories).
Wouldn't at all surprise me to see green mps and refuk mps and a farage vehicle coming to the fore.
Yes, I think you are very close to the mark there. In the medium-term there is going to be a significant and lasting move both to the far left and the far right in England. It could end very badly indeed. I’m hoping that Scotland might escape that fate and remain fairly centrist. Obviously, independence makes that more likely.
Much less likely, given the dislocation and economic hardship that would result.
I would say Scotland is already becoming quite an extreme country (or at least, is voting for extremist parties) and if 20% was wiped off its GDP that would only get worse.
It always seems strange to me that the 'captains of industry', along with directors and highly-paid senior managers, who do very well out of running businesses, never get any flak on here for their failure to improve productivity in recent times.
I guess migrants (and trades unionists, come to that) are an easier and more visible target.
Maybe they're just not very productive. I'm sure it would be considerably cheaper to outsource them to India, plenty of MBAs there.
Half the FTSE 100 CEOs now are foreign anyway
Send them home. Along with the CEOs of Microsoft, Google etc etc etc
I am going to start naming and shaming persistent off topic and flag button users.
Because I get to see all that.
I got a full house (flag, OT and like) on a post earlier! Had that been done before?
Yes.
Someone did that to a RCS1000 post a few years ago.
But you are in exalted company.
Genuinely chuffed!
My high point was when someone emailed OGH to complain about my Islamophobia.
Back in 2013/14 Nigel Farage said he didn't want to live next door to Romanians and I said I understood, for example I wouldn't want to live next door to some Muslims.
Some lurker emailed OGH saying it was outrageous that his deputy editor was an unabashed Islamophobe.
We had a chuckle at that.
In case anyone who reads this post and wishes to complain I only didn't want to live next door to Muslims is because I'm such a devout and pious Muslim, I didn't want any Muslim neighbours feeling bad that they weren't as devout and pious as me.
But what would you do to next neighbours who took their pizzas with pineapple?
I'd throw them a housewarming party.
Although the police might call it arson.
I should have known you'd find a way to burn them.
Interesting that the rest of the table shows that UK-born people are more negative in contributions than the migrants.
Of course, we can assume Migration Watch UK might well have skewed the figures (or, at least, taken the least positive interpretation), but the others do show, consistently that:
1 - EEA immigrants are the most positive (as you said) 2 - UK-born (ie non-immigrants) are consistently negative. 3 - The most recent migrants (ie since 2001, the era of mass immigration) are the most positive.
I'm sure everyone can pull out what they'd prefer to focus on, but the overall picture does seem to point to those three rules.
And that without the more recent immigrants (since 2001), especially those from the EEA, we'd be considerably poorer.
And you’re putting your own positive spin on it!
Tbf the data is monumentally opaque. Presumably because this is so hard to work out. This table is about as good as it gets and it begs a million questions
My point in citing it was to counter the glibness of @Gardenwalker - “migrants are net givers”. It’s much more complicated than that
But common sense tells me Max is right. GDP per cap stopped growing in tandem with GDP when immigration went mad under Blair. That feels at least partly causal, to me
It's not just common sense, immigrants make up a much higher proportion of low salary and low skill jobs than British people. They also do at the very top, which is why immigration isn't a black and white discussion. We need policies that encourage high skilled, high wage migrants and block low wage and low salary ones to force companies to invest in automation rather than throw cheap labour at it.
One intriguing example is the Albanian hand car wash, replacing a machine. Five people do the job of one robot. Massively unproductive. Regressive
And yet the wash is palpably better…
Eventually it always comes back to the Albanian car wash.
You can’t argue with the Albanian car wash!
Soon someone will mention ten to a room slums in Barking, and how house prices would be lower without all the migrants.
Part of the British malaise, it seems to me, is this willingness to continue to spout what are presumably comforting “truthy” nostra.
But the Albanian car wash is a true, obvious, real-life example that we have all encountered. That’s it’s value as evidence (I know you don’t like to offer evidence, but some of us are old fashioned)
It is also interestingly nuanced. These car washes incrementally improve life for many by providing an excellent cheap wash. Yet they are regressive. Complex
Our dependence on vast, corrosive levels of immigration is particularly asinine and harmful given what AI is about to do to 50% of jobs
I remember when you said that there would be no lorry drivers within ten years, because of autonomous cars. That was what, about ten years ago?
There is a good chance that this new tech, *if* it plays out as you suggest, actually increases potential employment. In the same way (say) the industrial revolution did. Or the Internet revolution of the 1990s and 2000s. Jobs and roles change, but overall employment increases.
But that's not as dramatic as WE'RE ALL DOOMED !!!!!, so you don't care.
Autonomous cars are, finally, here
“sitting at a coffee shop, watching cars fail at the 4 way stop for 2 hours…
when a fully driverless @Waymo came by driving 100x better than all of them
It’s taken longer than expected, there are still multiple problems to be overcome, but driverless vehicles are now a fact and they are being deployed, commercially
“Driverless Taxi Downtown Las Vegas. Do you wanna ride? #LasVegas #Halo #SelfDrivingCars”
“Waymo’s driverless robotaxis are now doing airport trips in Phoenix / The Alphabet company is getting more confident in its autonomous capabilities, deploying fully driverless cars to Phoenix’s airport to handle the trickiest types of pickups.”
I reckon this would have accrued much wider attention in normal times - driverless cars! - but unfortunately we don’t lack for major, distracting news
There is a *vast* amount of difference between these drastically geolocated schemes and true autonomous driving. But as I said, ten years have pretty much passed since your 'prediction', and the UK is short of tens of thousands of HGV drivers.
Smoke and mirrors mate, smoke and mirrors.
(BTW, I'm not the person hitting the off-topic button on your posts)
Yes, aren't they just glorified trams?
No
“On my ride home I saw more driverless cars than regular ones”
May I just suggest you look at the picture of the car at 3 seconds into the second video, look at the hardware on its roof, and think of how much all of that costs. Then work out why it is not currently a goer...
“Currently”. The cost argument against potentially disruptive technologies is pretty well always fallacious. Once in use, however niche, they just get cheaper.
One of the key drivers of productivity, which doesn't get enough attention, is that it depends enormously on what sectors a country employs people in. You want to maximise your competitive advantage. So, in the UK, financial services and other business services generally (aka as 'the City') show extremely high productivity. Steel production, small scale manufacturing, etc: not so much, given worldwide competition from countries better placed to do these things.
Bizarrely, the lesson voters take from this is that we should discourage the good bits and encourage the not-so-good bits. That is not a very smart strategy.
But if you look at countries which have developed entirely new industrial sectors, that argument really doesn’t stand up. It’s an argument for stagnation.
It's the Treasury view of the world. It's why HS2 was cancelled where it would probably have made the biggest difference rather than the London to Birmingham section which won't.
So? The debate was not about what the government would do, it’s about the need for it. Lots of high profile scientists I’ve heard over the last couple of days say it’s not needed - for instance Callum Semple. What you are seeing is herd behaviour from governments.
I’m merely pointing out that I said this would happen. “The dominos will fall”. Some on here were skeptical
I agree the science is contentious - however my opinion is this is justified by basic politics alone: western governments need to get tough on Beijing. They freely and wilfully exported their fucking bug around the world in early 2020. Not again
And we should sequence the shit out of them. Watch for variants
Happily we are getting plenty of sequence info from China. Assuming those involved are honest, the variants causing the outbreak in China are closely similar to those everywhere else. As expected, they are havin* the exit wave to end all exit waves, just like we did to some extent in 2020. Except we had vaccinated over 90% of people ( and certainly of the most vulnerable) using decent vaccines by then, and our exit wasn’t that bad. Theirs is awful.
Interesting that the rest of the table shows that UK-born people are more negative in contributions than the migrants.
Of course, we can assume Migration Watch UK might well have skewed the figures (or, at least, taken the least positive interpretation), but the others do show, consistently that:
1 - EEA immigrants are the most positive (as you said) 2 - UK-born (ie non-immigrants) are consistently negative. 3 - The most recent migrants (ie since 2001, the era of mass immigration) are the most positive.
I'm sure everyone can pull out what they'd prefer to focus on, but the overall picture does seem to point to those three rules.
And that without the more recent immigrants (since 2001), especially those from the EEA, we'd be considerably poorer.
And you’re putting your own positive spin on it!
Tbf the data is monumentally opaque. Presumably because this is so hard to work out. This table is about as good as it gets and it begs a million questions
My point in citing it was to counter the glibness of @Gardenwalker - “migrants are net givers”. It’s much more complicated than that
But common sense tells me Max is right. GDP per cap stopped growing in tandem with GDP when immigration went mad under Blair. That feels at least partly causal, to me
It's not just common sense, immigrants make up a much higher proportion of low salary and low skill jobs than British people. They also do at the very top, which is why immigration isn't a black and white discussion. We need policies that encourage high skilled, high wage migrants and block low wage and low salary ones to force companies to invest in automation rather than throw cheap labour at it.
One intriguing example is the Albanian hand car wash, replacing a machine. Five people do the job of one robot. Massively unproductive. Regressive
And yet the wash is palpably better…
Eventually it always comes back to the Albanian car wash.
You can’t argue with the Albanian car wash!
Soon someone will mention ten to a room slums in Barking, and how house prices would be lower without all the migrants.
Part of the British malaise, it seems to me, is this willingness to continue to spout what are presumably comforting “truthy” nostra.
But the Albanian car wash is a true, obvious, real-life example that we have all encountered. That’s it’s value as evidence (I know you don’t like to offer evidence, but some of us are old fashioned)
It is also interestingly nuanced. These car washes incrementally improve life for many by providing an excellent cheap wash. Yet they are regressive. Complex
Interesting that the rest of the table shows that UK-born people are more negative in contributions than the migrants.
Of course, we can assume Migration Watch UK might well have skewed the figures (or, at least, taken the least positive interpretation), but the others do show, consistently that:
1 - EEA immigrants are the most positive (as you said) 2 - UK-born (ie non-immigrants) are consistently negative. 3 - The most recent migrants (ie since 2001, the era of mass immigration) are the most positive.
I'm sure everyone can pull out what they'd prefer to focus on, but the overall picture does seem to point to those three rules.
And that without the more recent immigrants (since 2001), especially those from the EEA, we'd be considerably poorer.
And you’re putting your own positive spin on it!
Tbf the data is monumentally opaque. Presumably because this is so hard to work out. This table is about as good as it gets and it begs a million questions
My point in citing it was to counter the glibness of @Gardenwalker - “migrants are net givers”. It’s much more complicated than that
But common sense tells me Max is right. GDP per cap stopped growing in tandem with GDP when immigration went mad under Blair. That feels at least partly causal, to me
It's not just common sense, immigrants make up a much higher proportion of low salary and low skill jobs than British people. They also do at the very top, which is why immigration isn't a black and white discussion. We need policies that encourage high skilled, high wage migrants and block low wage and low salary ones to force companies to invest in automation rather than throw cheap labour at it.
One intriguing example is the Albanian hand car wash, replacing a machine. Five people do the job of one robot. Massively unproductive. Regressive
And yet the wash is palpably better…
Eventually it always comes back to the Albanian car wash.
You can’t argue with the Albanian car wash!
Soon someone will mention ten to a room slums in Barking, and how house prices would be lower without all the migrants.
Part of the British malaise, it seems to me, is this willingness to continue to spout what are presumably comforting “truthy” nostra.
But the Albanian car wash is a true, obvious, real-life example that we have all encountered. That’s it’s value as evidence (I know you don’t like to offer evidence, but some of us are old fashioned)
It is also interestingly nuanced. These car washes incrementally improve life for many by providing an excellent cheap wash. Yet they are regressive. Complex
Our dependence on vast, corrosive levels of immigration is particularly asinine and harmful given what AI is about to do to 50% of jobs
I remember when you said that there would be no lorry drivers within ten years, because of autonomous cars. That was what, about ten years ago?
There is a good chance that this new tech, *if* it plays out as you suggest, actually increases potential employment. In the same way (say) the industrial revolution did. Or the Internet revolution of the 1990s and 2000s. Jobs and roles change, but overall employment increases.
But that's not as dramatic as WE'RE ALL DOOMED !!!!!, so you don't care.
Autonomous cars are, finally, here
“sitting at a coffee shop, watching cars fail at the 4 way stop for 2 hours…
when a fully driverless @Waymo came by driving 100x better than all of them
It’s taken longer than expected, there are still multiple problems to be overcome, but driverless vehicles are now a fact and they are being deployed, commercially
“Driverless Taxi Downtown Las Vegas. Do you wanna ride? #LasVegas #Halo #SelfDrivingCars”
“Waymo’s driverless robotaxis are now doing airport trips in Phoenix / The Alphabet company is getting more confident in its autonomous capabilities, deploying fully driverless cars to Phoenix’s airport to handle the trickiest types of pickups.”
I reckon this would have accrued much wider attention in normal times - driverless cars! - but unfortunately we don’t lack for major, distracting news
There is a *vast* amount of difference between these drastically geolocated schemes and true autonomous driving. But as I said, ten years have pretty much passed since your 'prediction', and the UK is short of tens of thousands of HGV drivers.
Smoke and mirrors mate, smoke and mirrors.
(BTW, I'm not the person hitting the off-topic button on your posts)
Yes, aren't they just glorified trams?
No
“On my ride home I saw more driverless cars than regular ones”
May I just suggest you look at the picture of the car at 3 seconds into the second video, look at the hardware on its roof, and think of how much all of that costs. Then work out why it is not currently a goer...
“Currently”. The cost argument against potentially disruptive technologies is pretty well always fallacious. Once in use, however niche, they just get cheaper.
Indeed, within limits. Even lidar costs are slowly reducing. But they have not got the tech working well enough yet, and Musk/Tesla's gamble that only a limited number/type of sensors are required might prove fallacious for both him and others. And there is always a minimum cost for this cost, and it is well above zero.
Interesting that the rest of the table shows that UK-born people are more negative in contributions than the migrants.
Of course, we can assume Migration Watch UK might well have skewed the figures (or, at least, taken the least positive interpretation), but the others do show, consistently that:
1 - EEA immigrants are the most positive (as you said) 2 - UK-born (ie non-immigrants) are consistently negative. 3 - The most recent migrants (ie since 2001, the era of mass immigration) are the most positive.
I'm sure everyone can pull out what they'd prefer to focus on, but the overall picture does seem to point to those three rules.
And that without the more recent immigrants (since 2001), especially those from the EEA, we'd be considerably poorer.
And you’re putting your own positive spin on it!
Tbf the data is monumentally opaque. Presumably because this is so hard to work out. This table is about as good as it gets and it begs a million questions
My point in citing it was to counter the glibness of @Gardenwalker - “migrants are net givers”. It’s much more complicated than that
But common sense tells me Max is right. GDP per cap stopped growing in tandem with GDP when immigration went mad under Blair. That feels at least partly causal, to me
It's not just common sense, immigrants make up a much higher proportion of low salary and low skill jobs than British people. They also do at the very top, which is why immigration isn't a black and white discussion. We need policies that encourage high skilled, high wage migrants and block low wage and low salary ones to force companies to invest in automation rather than throw cheap labour at it.
One intriguing example is the Albanian hand car wash, replacing a machine. Five people do the job of one robot. Massively unproductive. Regressive
And yet the wash is palpably better…
Eventually it always comes back to the Albanian car wash.
You can’t argue with the Albanian car wash!
Soon someone will mention ten to a room slums in Barking, and how house prices would be lower without all the migrants.
Part of the British malaise, it seems to me, is this willingness to continue to spout what are presumably comforting “truthy” nostra.
But the Albanian car wash is a true, obvious, real-life example that we have all encountered. That’s it’s value as evidence (I know you don’t like to offer evidence, but some of us are old fashioned)
It is also interestingly nuanced. These car washes incrementally improve life for many by providing an excellent cheap wash. Yet they are regressive. Complex
A cheap wash? They cost £20+ round my way.
£20?!
£10 in Gospel Oak, and it’s way better than the premium £12 jobbie from my nearest machine
They are also unfailingly polite and I’ve got to know the Albanian boss. We chat. He’s insightful on a number of topics
So? The debate was not about what the government would do, it’s about the need for it. Lots of high profile scientists I’ve heard over the last couple of days say it’s not needed - for instance Callum Semple. What you are seeing is herd behaviour from governments.
On the other hand, the cost and inconvenience of lateral flow tests prior to boarding ought not to be massive. And the massive wave of cases in China probably won’t last all that long.
But by the time everyone’s argued about what would be the most effective system, let alone put it into practice, the debate might be irrelevant anyway.
Interesting that the rest of the table shows that UK-born people are more negative in contributions than the migrants.
Of course, we can assume Migration Watch UK might well have skewed the figures (or, at least, taken the least positive interpretation), but the others do show, consistently that:
1 - EEA immigrants are the most positive (as you said) 2 - UK-born (ie non-immigrants) are consistently negative. 3 - The most recent migrants (ie since 2001, the era of mass immigration) are the most positive.
I'm sure everyone can pull out what they'd prefer to focus on, but the overall picture does seem to point to those three rules.
And that without the more recent immigrants (since 2001), especially those from the EEA, we'd be considerably poorer.
And you’re putting your own positive spin on it!
Tbf the data is monumentally opaque. Presumably because this is so hard to work out. This table is about as good as it gets and it begs a million questions
My point in citing it was to counter the glibness of @Gardenwalker - “migrants are net givers”. It’s much more complicated than that
But common sense tells me Max is right. GDP per cap stopped growing in tandem with GDP when immigration went mad under Blair. That feels at least partly causal, to me
It's not just common sense, immigrants make up a much higher proportion of low salary and low skill jobs than British people. They also do at the very top, which is why immigration isn't a black and white discussion. We need policies that encourage high skilled, high wage migrants and block low wage and low salary ones to force companies to invest in automation rather than throw cheap labour at it.
Fine as far as it goes, and I'm not qualified to say how far that is.
But there are an awful lot of jobs where their worth isn't and can't be captured in their salary. Care workers, teaching assistants. And they can't really be automated... Not yet, anyway. Who is doing those jobs in the glorious future?
And if a business can't or won't automate, what's to stop it moving somewhere where it can get cheap staff? That happens a lot already.
I’d like to put to bed the arguments about he benefits of multiculturalism by showcasing the young lady in this link who is opening a bar with an “Essex vibe” in…..Kent! Truly hands across the seas.
The government should adopt this approach and issue compulsory purchase orders for land upon which to build at least 200,000 bling cocktail bars up and down the land, coupled with a network of “Essex information centres” to allow people the knowledge required to open one. There would be free brochures at such venues and a network of volunteer “Romford Rangers” to answer questions, in the spirit of the 2012 Olympic volunteers.
It depends on what I'm doing. If I "earn" a shedload for trading, with no asset improvement, my contribution is probably negative. Not to say anyone could do it. What I do could be highly skilled. It might or might not be. It could be more of a 'face fits' or a 'luck, right time right place' type thing.
Whatever. Neither profit nor tax paid maps to contribution. Eg say we privatize Health 100% so it now makes profits as a private business and pays tax instead of absorbing it via government spend. Does the sector, by dint of this, become a Contributor instead of a Drain? Surely not. The fundamentals are the same. If it was a Drain before, it still is. If it was a Contributor before, it still is. We've done an accounting trick.
I'm puzzled as to why you think trading - buying from someone who wants to sell, but hasn't found a buyer, and selling to someone who wants to buy, but hasn't found a seller - doesn't contribute anything.
I'm not saying any particular activities are always of zero value. My point is to rebut the idea that highly remunerated people who pay lots of tax are by definition making a big financial contribution to the economy. I hear this all the time but it doesn't follow. It's often not true. You have to look at the real value added of what they are doing vs the amount they are extracting in net remuneration for doing it. Their net contribution is then the 1st minus the 2nd. Course, how to measure 'real value added' - if not by accounting profit or loss - is a hell of a question. But you can get my drift conceptually, I think, without needing to crack that.
Interesting that the rest of the table shows that UK-born people are more negative in contributions than the migrants.
Of course, we can assume Migration Watch UK might well have skewed the figures (or, at least, taken the least positive interpretation), but the others do show, consistently that:
1 - EEA immigrants are the most positive (as you said) 2 - UK-born (ie non-immigrants) are consistently negative. 3 - The most recent migrants (ie since 2001, the era of mass immigration) are the most positive.
I'm sure everyone can pull out what they'd prefer to focus on, but the overall picture does seem to point to those three rules.
And that without the more recent immigrants (since 2001), especially those from the EEA, we'd be considerably poorer.
And you’re putting your own positive spin on it!
Tbf the data is monumentally opaque. Presumably because this is so hard to work out. This table is about as good as it gets and it begs a million questions
My point in citing it was to counter the glibness of @Gardenwalker - “migrants are net givers”. It’s much more complicated than that
But common sense tells me Max is right. GDP per cap stopped growing in tandem with GDP when immigration went mad under Blair. That feels at least partly causal, to me
It's not just common sense, immigrants make up a much higher proportion of low salary and low skill jobs than British people. They also do at the very top, which is why immigration isn't a black and white discussion. We need policies that encourage high skilled, high wage migrants and block low wage and low salary ones to force companies to invest in automation rather than throw cheap labour at it.
One intriguing example is the Albanian hand car wash, replacing a machine. Five people do the job of one robot. Massively unproductive. Regressive
And yet the wash is palpably better…
Eventually it always comes back to the Albanian car wash.
You can’t argue with the Albanian car wash!
Soon someone will mention ten to a room slums in Barking, and how house prices would be lower without all the migrants.
Part of the British malaise, it seems to me, is this willingness to continue to spout what are presumably comforting “truthy” nostra.
But the Albanian car wash is a true, obvious, real-life example that we have all encountered. That’s it’s value as evidence (I know you don’t like to offer evidence, but some of us are old fashioned)
It is also interestingly nuanced. These car washes incrementally improve life for many by providing an excellent cheap wash. Yet they are regressive. Complex
A cheap wash? They cost £20+ round my way.
Do you not have kids you can pay a fiver too?
Have you ever tried to prise a kid away from their Playstations/iPads?
I could yell 'Fire' and they wouldn't move, these days I just pull the ethernet cable out of the ONT.
Comments
As I've said passim, the test of an uatonmous car for me would be to go from our carport to my sister's house, two hours' drive away. The vast majority of which is along the A14, M1 and A50. But it would have to reverse out of my carport and go through my sister's gate and down her drive, without command, preconnoitre of the route, or driver interference. IMO that's a vey fair test, especially as the vast majority of the journey (A14, M1 and A50) is dual carriageway and motorway, and the tech is mostly already there. It's the first ten yards and the final fifty yards that'll break it.
And there are far worse journies than that, even within cities.
I hereby pronounce you a Net Contributor to the Blog.
I see from your edit that it was. But had it been edited?
We’re going to stop Freedom Of Movement which means less EU nationals but also that means all Brits lose their FOM to the rest of the EU .
Then we’re going to replace those EU nationals with non EU ones who cost the country money and overall net migration will go up , not down .
Unless you’re in total denial as a lower immigration Leaver it must be hard to stomach that you’ve been totally had .
Please take a look at the Portes article, there’s plenty to be picked at and even some counter-suggestions to what I am claiming.
I remember a little argument about it on Twitter between that Levelling Up Minister Neil whatsizname and some academic, possibly even Portes.
No don’t ask me for the details, I have a day job.
I also want self-driving cars - reliable and safe self-driving cars would change my hobbies and life. They'd be brilliant. But we're miles away from that. People know how transformative the tech would be, and therefore investors are willing to pour billions into the tech. And that means people want to overpromote their progress (ala Musk). Which is why Waymo are nowhere near where they said they'd be. Worse, no-one else is, either.
And there's a chance - a small chance - it may happen next year. But there's also a small chance it will never happen.
Hearing it is now likely UK will demand that all people coming from China have a negative covid test result
There's been discussions between ministers and officials all day - sounds like UK will now follow US and other nations
https://twitter.com/Steven_Swinford/status/1608871250075549697
Everything you say is true but the trajectory is clear. It’s been slow and stumbling and harder than many expected, but driverless cars HAVE arrived and they’re not going away
Inter alia, in a time of gloom this is potentially wonderful news. Private car ownership will become unnecessary, freeing up our cities. Greening them. Rural areas will be revived. The old, the fat and the drunk will become mobile again. Road accidents will be a thing of the past. A genuinely great evolution
Because I get to see all that.
What have we got? A ludicrous short tunnel in Las Vegas.
Beware tech hype.
Of course, we can assume Migration Watch UK might well have skewed the figures (or, at least, taken the least positive interpretation), but the others do show, consistently that:
1 - EEA immigrants are the most positive (as you said)
2 - UK-born (ie non-immigrants) are consistently negative.
3 - The most recent migrants (ie since 2001, the era of mass immigration) are the most positive.
I'm sure everyone can pull out what they'd prefer to focus on, but the overall picture does seem to point to those three rules.
And that without the more recent immigrants (since 2001), especially those from the EEA, we'd be considerably poorer.
There could be a lot of low economic benefit migration to the UK and it wouldn't even turn up in the official statistics, as such people would be the least likely to end up recorded by the various proxy methods that estimate residency.
Japan is the example of an aging society which prefers robots to immigrants, and their productivity growth _per worker_ has not been high relative to the West - their overall productivity has really lagged, but that's because of aging. Tour Japan and you will see a lot of people standing around shops greeting and pushing buttons on the automated systems. It's not a guaranteed outcome but suggests that in some societal arrangements you won't get the mass unemployment required to boost "productivity".
Someone did that to a RCS1000 post a few years ago.
But you are in exalted company.
And note too that these are fiscal numbers, ie contribution to taxation rather than GDP although we might assume the two are closely related.
I'm going for the repeat offenders.
OGH has better things to worry about today (and most days) than Vanilla sending him emails that somebody is flagging posts/flagging them off topic.
Tbf the data is monumentally opaque. Presumably because this is so hard to work out. This table is about as good as it gets and it begs a million questions
My point in citing it was to counter the glibness of @Gardenwalker - “migrants are net givers”. It’s much more complicated than that
But common sense tells me Max is right. GDP per cap stopped growing in tandem with GDP when immigration went mad under Blair. That feels at least partly causal, to me
Politico.com - Battleground Republicans say they'll only vote for McCarthy for speaker
More than a dozen GOP lawmakers, including members-elect, wrote in a letter that they would not back any "so-called shadow 'consensus candidate.'"
Battleground Republicans have made their strategy on the speakership vote clear: Forget a consensus candidate, they’re supporting Kevin McCarthy no matter how long it takes.
More than a dozen House Republicans who were elected in districts that President Joe Biden won in 2020 said in a letter to their colleagues Thursday that they’ll support the GOP leader for as many ballots as it takes. Rep.-elect Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), who led the letter, specifically said they would not support any consensus candidate who could emerge in the fray.
eanwhile, it’s only five days before the body will begin voting on who will take the gavel in the new majority, and five GOP lawmakers are still threatening to oppose McCarthy for speaker come Jan. 3. That’s enough to block him from receiving the needed 218 votes.
“Let us be clear: we are not only supporting Kevin McCarthy for Speaker, but are not open to any so-called shadow ‘consensus candidate’ — regardless of how many votes it takes to elect Speaker-designate McCarthy,” they wrote in the letter, first obtained by POLITICO. “There is no other conservative candidate that can garner the support of 218 Republicans for Speaker — period.” . . .
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/29/battleground-republicans-vote-mccarthy-speaker-00075846
SSI - here is link to The Letter with signers
https://twitter.com/Olivia_Beavers/status/1608587122017193986
The Tories are now on 29% with Opinium under Sunak
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election#Graphical_summary
Back in 2013/14 Nigel Farage said he didn't want to live next door to Romanians and I said I understood, for example I wouldn't want to live next door to some Muslims.
Some lurker emailed OGH saying it was outrageous that his deputy editor was an unabashed Islamophobe.
We had a chuckle at that.
In case anyone who reads this post and wishes to complain I only didn't want to live next door to Muslims is because I'm such a devout and pious Muslim, I didn't want any Muslim neighbours feeling bad that they weren't as devout and pious as me.
I'll put it again: billions of dollars are being invested in this tech. Development teams want their slice of that money, and to promote what they've done with their investments so far. And the results are paltry, to say the least. Therefore you get lots of PR, but that is always very cherry-picked. It's cool, but always look at what they're not saying.
As an example (and I'm afraid it's another Musk one): at his launch of the Tesla Semi (lorry), he was keen to promote the 500-mile range and acceleration (the latter being something haulage companies are obviously obsessed with...).
He did not mention the payload weight, which is something haulage companies have absolutely zero interest in. Why?
(/sarcasm)
Whatever. Neither profit nor tax paid maps to contribution. Eg say we privatize Health 100% so it now makes profits as a private business and pays tax instead of absorbing it via government spend. Does the sector, by dint of this, become a Contributor instead of a Drain? Surely not. The fundamentals are the same. If it was a Drain before, it still is. If it was a Contributor before, it still is. We've done an accounting trick.
Blair also failed to introduce transition controls after EU enlargement unlike say Germany.
What you are seeing is herd behaviour from governments.
I guess migrants (and trades unionists, come to that) are an easier and more visible target.
I would say Scotland is already becoming quite an extreme country (or at least, is voting for extremist parties) and if 20% was wiped off its GDP that would only get worse.
And yet the wash is palpably better…
We simply failed to anticipate the volume of Poles who opted for economic reasons to come to the UK and in the belief there wouldn't be many, we didn't seek transition controls.
You can’t argue with the Albanian car wash!
Soon someone will mention ten to a room slums in Barking, and how house prices would be lower without all the migrants.
Part of the British malaise, it seems to me, is this willingness to continue to spout what are presumably comforting “truthy” nostra.
This isn't an uncommon view either, but businesses and managers are rational. If it's easier and cheaper to throw cheap labour at problem than to invest capital they will do the former. That's what's been happening for the last 20 or so years ever since Labour turned the UK into a high immigration economy. They'd ultimately rather pay themselves bigger bonuses and dividends than invest and hiring low wage people is an easy way to save money to enable those higher bonus and dividend payments.
It is not a pure science
It’s an argument for stagnation.
I agree the science is contentious - however my opinion is this is justified by basic politics alone: western governments need to get tough on Beijing. They freely and wilfully exported their fucking bug around the world in early 2020. Not again
And we should sequence the shit out of them. Watch for variants
https://heidrick.mediaroom.com/2017-04-20-FTSE-100-CEOs-Younger-and-More-International-than-CEOs-in-the-U-S-France-and-Germany#:~:text=Four out of 10 (40,and 17 percent in Germany.
Although the police might call it arson.
Along with the CEOs of Microsoft, Google etc etc etc
It is also interestingly nuanced. These car washes incrementally improve life for many by providing an excellent cheap wash. Yet they are regressive. Complex
The cost argument against potentially disruptive technologies is pretty well always fallacious. Once in use, however niche, they just get cheaper.
NEW: conservatives have a Millennials problem.
In both UK & US, it’s not just that Millennials aren’t voting conservative because they’re young.
Every previous generation grew more conservative with age, but Millennials are not playing ball.
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1608746369505976323
I had to admire his courage. Not his sense of self-preservation.
Although actually RCS is quite sparing with the ban hammer. He's even let TSE get away with dissing Radiohead.
£10 in Gospel Oak, and it’s way better than the premium £12 jobbie from my nearest machine
They are also unfailingly polite and I’ve got to know the Albanian boss. We chat. He’s insightful on a number of topics
And the massive wave of cases in China probably won’t last all that long.
But by the time everyone’s argued about what would be the most effective system, let alone put it into practice, the debate might be irrelevant anyway.
But there are an awful lot of jobs where their worth isn't and can't be captured in their salary. Care workers, teaching assistants. And they can't really be automated... Not yet, anyway.
Who is doing those jobs in the glorious future?
And if a business can't or won't automate, what's to stop it moving somewhere where it can get cheap staff? That happens a lot already.
https://www.kentonline.co.uk/thanet/news/is-this-kents-blingiest-bar-279649/
The government should adopt this approach and issue compulsory purchase orders for land upon which to build at least 200,000 bling cocktail bars up and down the land, coupled with a network of “Essex information centres” to allow people the knowledge required to open one. There would be free brochures at such venues and a network of volunteer “Romford Rangers” to answer questions, in the spirit of the 2012 Olympic volunteers.
I could yell 'Fire' and they wouldn't move, these days I just pull the ethernet cable out of the ONT.