Foundations: Why Britain has stagnated
My essay with Samuel Hughes and Sam Bowman
I have written a long essay explaining why I, and my co-authors, Sam Bowman and Samuel Hughes think that the UK’s stagnation is down to our country blocking investment in houses, reservoirs, prisons, roads, railways, tramlines, interconnectors, nuclear power plants, labs, offices, and more.
You can find it here, in full: https://ukfoundations.co/
We show how Britain led the world, and then Europe, and then declined to be a European also-ran, in productivity terms, far behind France and Germany, let alone the USA. We show how this mirrored our decline from being the world’s greatest builder of homes, infrastructure, and energy, between around 1650 and 1940, to becoming the world’s slowest builder, and most energy-starved rich nation.
Investment has been correctly identified as a core reason why Britain is behind. But so many think this is just a case of convincing the Treasury to be ever more profligate, and invest £150 billion in HS2, for example, five or ten times the price it should cost. After all, it all counts as investment.
We explain that it is blocking investments the private sector would like to do – in buildings, railways, roads, and more – that explains decline. Thankfully, that means fixing it, and returning to French and German levels of productivity, or, as in history, higher ones, is quite straightforward. We just need to build.
I know that was then, but it could be again!
I found the Foundations piece to be both illuminating and encouraging. But only to the extent the government of the day finds it similarly so. Can you please share what has become of it since, in terms of your interactions with ministers/the civil service? Have you achieved any traction?
I haven't read your Foundations essay but I have read Ed West's post about it and have to say that this displayed a poor understanding of Britain’s economic history. Its decline as an economic behemoth did not – as the post contended – start after WW2 (although it did accelerate then). It started way back in the late 19th c. – as soon in fact as better adapted nations (particularly USA, Germany and Japan) started to compete with it. The reasons are complex but none of the principal ones were flagged in that post. Principal reasons included: 1) the peculiar resilience of the British class system meant that manufacturing enterprise (‘trade’) was always looked down on and the 2nd generation of its great manufacturing dynasties got out of it as soon as possible. Hence Britain became a place brimful of lawyers and ‘what we would now call ‘creative & media people’ but woefully lacking in technologists and nuts and bolts engineers. 2) The Empire masked (and partly caused) Britain’s uncompetitiveness for many decades because it had a captive market for its lack-lustre products. https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/thinkpieces/the-consequences-of-economic-ignorance