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"It's unsurprising that the UK had better access to vaccines:" Other countries in Europe have pharma industries, most obviously France. And the mRNA vaccines w

"It's unsurprising that the UK had better access to vaccines:" Other countries in Europe have pharma industries, most obviously France. And the mRNA vaccines were partly developed by a German company (BioNTech) so, this doesn't work. It was a surprise and the reason the UK got better access much faster because the EU insisted on doing everything as a single bloc, in a heavily centralized way, and the EU institutions are slow. "The point about inflation and recession is not that it isn't happening elsewhere: it's just that it's worse in the UK." As pointed out by makomk, this isn't true. "The UK has had horrible economic growth for over a decade now, largely driven by a political system that concentrates power in the hands of not particularly competent people" This talking point is also made up. UK growth has been similar to the EU for the last decade - sometimes a bit higher, sometimes a bit lower. See for yourself: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-growth?tab=chart&time=2010..latest&country=GBR~European+Union~FRA~DEU~ITA~ESP https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-growth?tab... If the UK has had "horrible" growth due to "incompetent people" then the same is true of the European Union as a whole. There's a real problem with pro-EU misinformation here. Both your talking points about economics are completely false. It's not even like Europe is the only place with inflation, the whole world has it right now thanks to the massive money printing that went into lockdowns and other attempts to mitigate COVID. I thought everyone knew that.

pasabagi 4y ago
Are we looking at the same graph? Aside from 2012-14, it consistently shows the UK trailing the pack in terms of growth, often by multiple percentage points. Bear in mind, even a single percentage point is quite a big deal: the chinese economy was 'roaring' at an average of 4% growth per year. I loaded up the csv in visidata, and the graph you sent me shows the UK trails the EU growth average by half a percentage point since 2008. Against a relatively well-performing economy like germany, it trails by 0.94% over the same period. I do take your general point that the stats do not make such a dramatic picture as one would expect given the recent coverage. The general picture, though, is of a country generally underperforming, even when compared against an underperforming region. This is, in my eyes, totally in keeping with what you would expect from the haphazard policy-flailing that has characterized the UK government in recent years.
- origin_path 4y ago
  We can certainly agree that the UK has underperformed relative to, say, America. I don't think Chinese GDP stats have ever been accurate and developing countries often have high growth anyway, so am not so interested in comparisons to that. But certainly it can be compared to the US and there we see poor relative performance, and indeed the same is true of Europe in general. Comparing UK growth to the EU average isn't so useful because the EU contains a lot of countries still catching up from decades of Soviet rule. Poland posts 6% GDP growth but that doesn't mean it's a richer country than the USA, obviously. That sort of thing skews the average upwards. That's why I plotted the EU line but also more comparable non-ex-Soviet countries. German GDP was historically boosted by their fixation with subsidizing the rest of the EU with cheap exports, leading to their massive Target2 imbalances. That is nearly a sort of broken windows fallacy style of growth so those figures also have to be taken in context. But these things aren't anything to do with Brexit, and the UK isn't really so different to comparable western European countries. Their growth is all within narrow bands on that graph, especially from 2017. Indeed the poor growth rates inside the EU were one of the arguments made for why leaving is a good idea! EU policy leads to poor growth, so went the argument and therefore by leaving, the UK can change policies to go faster and catch up with the USA. Of course the mere act of leaving doesn't make that automatic - it's necessary but not sufficient, and it's unclear if the other conditions will ever be satisfied (primarily social attitudes towards capitalism are the problem, imo). Brexit actually taking effect happened simultaneous with the appearance of COVID and then the government was dominated by that, so very little of what's theoretically possible has been done, and now of course the economy is trashed due to lockdowns so who knows when or if the a more US style approach can ever be implemented. But it is at least now theoretically possible.
  - pasabagi 4y ago
    > But it is at least now theoretically possible. I have the opposite opinion. I think the UK has been historically hamstrung by its desire to ape the US. The US is a continent-spanning superpower, the dollar is the world's reserve currency, and the US economy is the largest in the world. That means that a lot of the things the US can do, vis-a-vis policy, the UK cannot. Copying a nation that is on basically in a class of its own in every particular is a quixotic project that will never work. With the EU, the UK had at least one US-level advantage: the unfettered access to a gigantic market. Now, there's regulatory doubling, at the very least, if you want to sell or buy things in that market. I think you'd need some spectacular advantages to outbalance that, going forward - and I have no idea where they are supposed to be coming from. From a business perspective, the most perfect regulatory framework is inferior to a bad regulatory framework that allows you access to a much bigger market.

pasabagi 4y ago

Are we looking at the same graph? Aside from 2012-14, it consistently shows the UK trailing the pack in terms of growth, often by multiple percentage points. Bear in mind, even a single percentage point is quite a big deal: the chinese economy was 'roaring' at an average of 4% growth per year. I loaded up the csv in visidata, and the graph you sent me shows the UK trails the EU growth average by half a percentage point since 2008. Against a relatively well-performing economy like germany, it trails by 0.94% over the same period. I do take your general point that the stats do not make such a dramatic picture as one would expect given the recent coverage. The general picture, though, is of a country generally underperforming, even when compared against an underperforming region. This is, in my eyes, totally in keeping with what you would expect from the haphazard policy-flailing that has characterized the UK government in recent years.

origin_path 4y ago
We can certainly agree that the UK has underperformed relative to, say, America. I don't think Chinese GDP stats have ever been accurate and developing countries often have high growth anyway, so am not so interested in comparisons to that. But certainly it can be compared to the US and there we see poor relative performance, and indeed the same is true of Europe in general. Comparing UK growth to the EU average isn't so useful because the EU contains a lot of countries still catching up from decades of Soviet rule. Poland posts 6% GDP growth but that doesn't mean it's a richer country than the USA, obviously. That sort of thing skews the average upwards. That's why I plotted the EU line but also more comparable non-ex-Soviet countries. German GDP was historically boosted by their fixation with subsidizing the rest of the EU with cheap exports, leading to their massive Target2 imbalances. That is nearly a sort of broken windows fallacy style of growth so those figures also have to be taken in context. But these things aren't anything to do with Brexit, and the UK isn't really so different to comparable western European countries. Their growth is all within narrow bands on that graph, especially from 2017. Indeed the poor growth rates inside the EU were one of the arguments made for why leaving is a good idea! EU policy leads to poor growth, so went the argument and therefore by leaving, the UK can change policies to go faster and catch up with the USA. Of course the mere act of leaving doesn't make that automatic - it's necessary but not sufficient, and it's unclear if the other conditions will ever be satisfied (primarily social attitudes towards capitalism are the problem, imo). Brexit actually taking effect happened simultaneous with the appearance of COVID and then the government was dominated by that, so very little of what's theoretically possible has been done, and now of course the economy is trashed due to lockdowns so who knows when or if the a more US style approach can ever be implemented. But it is at least now theoretically possible.
- pasabagi 4y ago
  > But it is at least now theoretically possible. I have the opposite opinion. I think the UK has been historically hamstrung by its desire to ape the US. The US is a continent-spanning superpower, the dollar is the world's reserve currency, and the US economy is the largest in the world. That means that a lot of the things the US can do, vis-a-vis policy, the UK cannot. Copying a nation that is on basically in a class of its own in every particular is a quixotic project that will never work. With the EU, the UK had at least one US-level advantage: the unfettered access to a gigantic market. Now, there's regulatory doubling, at the very least, if you want to sell or buy things in that market. I think you'd need some spectacular advantages to outbalance that, going forward - and I have no idea where they are supposed to be coming from. From a business perspective, the most perfect regulatory framework is inferior to a bad regulatory framework that allows you access to a much bigger market.