The Productive Pessimist

  End of the road for economic growth in the UK? The UK government - and most Western European governments - hyperfixate on economic growth  as a measure of political success: If growth is strong, the claim goes, then the government of the day are doing things right, regardless of how popular their policies are with the public.  If growth slows, the government has clearly made the wrong decision, and needs to alter course, and prove that they deserve  to be in charge. This is something that has become a sacred truth in government.  "This will destroy  growth!"  "This risks crashing  UK growth prospects!" have become ever-more aggressive reactions to policy suggestions from opposing parties, or individual politicians.  Initially, I assumed this was deliberate fear-mongering; because the public associates "economic growth" with " my  individual life improving, me as an individual  having more money for less work, and everything gettin...

  The Bank of England is expressing significant concerns about Britain's "ageing and ailing workforce", harmonising to the government's tune of how the long-term sick are responsible for the UK economic challenges, and how "necessary" raising the State pension age is. Those two songs have been a more or less constant refrain from various shades of UK governments since 1997 - almost 30years.  Pretty much my whole life, and the entirety of my life as someone old enough to vote. Of course, work is necessary.  Countries have essential core services which require vast workforces to provide and administrate. Governments should be generating national income by exporting from the manufacturing, STEM, creative, and knowledge economy sectors, all of which require their own skilled and specialist workforces, and the workforce of their respective administrative and marketing functions. Continuous income, to cover the unavoidable payment lags in exports, is necessary fo...

                                            On Friday 20th September 2024, it was revealed that the UK’s national debt was equal to the income the UK was able to generate; in short, debt was at 100% of GDP. This last occurred in the 1960s - and resulted in the following decade, the 1970s, being extremely difficult for ordinary people, with standards of living declining sharply across all demographics, something which, inevitably, hit those who were already experiencing poverty the hardest. The 1970s saw a massive loss of manufacturing in Britain - historically, the one sector that had been able to pull Britain through the downturns of economic cycles, because the UK used to be known, and respected for, exceptional quality of its manufactured goods, and many countries around t...