There's no labour shortage -- or rather there is, but it's not the relevant causal factor. There's a lack of housing supply in places with good jobs. People hav

There's no labour shortage -- or rather there is, but it's not the relevant causal factor. There's a lack of housing supply in places with good jobs. People have to dump so much of their hard earned cash into rent that it discourages people from moving there in the first place. Talented people are stuck in shit jobs in the north because the higher wages in the south aren't enough to offset the insane rents. Autobiographical anecdote: due to combinations of good and bad luck I've had three different jobs in three different cities over the past 18 months. My income went from (rounded) ~30k to ~60k to ~90k, up by more than a factor of three. Yet, the rent I was paying remained about the same fraction of my post-tax income in each case, while the objective standard of housing that rent paid for went down: Sheffield: £500/month for a 2br flat in a nice neighbourhood Cardiff: £900/month for a not-as-good 2br flat in an okay neighbourhood Cambridge: £1300/month for a one bedroom flat in an okay neighbourhood. There are almost no <£1200/mo 2br flats on the market at all. Now think how hopeless it is for the other 95% of the country who are not as fortunate as me. A huge chunk of the wage premium for living in a more economically productive city is being slurped up by boomer rentiers because of the inelasticity of the housing supply curve, i.e. the "nimby tax". The price mechanism is just completely broken. Rising prices don't spur anywhere near enough construction. People just learn to make do with less: smaller houses, shittier houses, sharing rooms, or foregoing career opportunities that involve relocation. A whole generation has grown up not knowing what a functioning housing market looks like ... this is all just seen as normal. (PS: once you factor this in, the North is even more economically weak than it appears on paper, because the high house prices in the South partially counteract the brain drain. Few graduates stay there by choice. I have no trouble believing it's de facto poorer than Poland now. Still waiting for the "levelling up" to happen.)