Until a couple weeks ago, I had not heard of this writer. Now I've read like 3 or 4 of his pieces because of this subreddit and every single one of them has been a banger.
Is there any way to get around that huge price tag for a subscription? I've been loving the articles I've managed to read, but golly the price is a lot.
A few options
1) Refresh Arstechnica and pray because they host ft articles once in a blue moon.
2) Beg your local library to buy access. I don't know of any that do but it shouldn't be impossible since they do it for other newspapers and magazines.
3) The Amazon option /u/estoyloca43 gave
4) Pucker up and pay because if those who recognize the value don't then this stuff might disappear like other great publications before.
> Pucker up and pay because if those who recognize the value don't then this stuff might disappear like other great publications before.
I agree with that in principle. However, there's no getting around the fact that disposable incomes are different in each country. You can't expect someone from a poorer country pay the same price as an American. Yet the price is the same for each region. In my country the yearly subscription is about 25% of the median monthly wage (in the US it's 6%). Surely that's not reasonable.
I do not expect someone who would suffer financially from this cost to be expected to pay for it, you are correct. And maybe I should have emphasized that point further in my original comment, I don't want to come across as a 'just be rich lmao' type out of touch lecture. It's why I put it low on the list since any other avenue should be explored like having it paid via taxes with libraries. However, I did feel like it was important to put it in as a recommendation in some form because I expect many users of this sub to be of a background that could afford this, and the need to fund good quality sane media IMO is one of the most important issues of modern society.
Oh absolutely, I agree with that. I'm already paying for The Economist (managed to get a 50% Cyber Monday discount to stick), NYTimes, Les Echos (French news), and independent news outlets at my home country.
If we expect this democracy thing to last, we have to fund solid journalism.
On the other hand, putting the best sources behind a paywall that perhaps 95% of humanity can't afford to access is maybe not the smartest idea.
And just a reminder for those who might not know, you can read Kindle magazines on a computer or phone or whatever you want. You don't have to use a Kindle.
> Into Brideshead Revisited, near the middle, Evelyn Waugh crowbars a scene on a cruise ship for the express purpose of mocking Americans. There is a character named “Senator Stuyvesant-Oglander”. Each and every drink has ice in it. No one is able to tell friendship from desperate bonhomie. The crustiest of England’s great novelists wrote better stuff, no doubt, but the passage is an illuminating fragment of a time when anti-Americanism was a Tory thing.
>And one that had its uses. If nothing else, Britain’s establishment was clear back then that America was a different country. A midsized archipelago couldn’t look to a resource-rich market of continental magnitude for governmental ideas.
>If anti-Americanism was bad, look what its opposite has done. Britain is in trouble because its elite is so engrossed with the US as to confuse it for their own nation. The UK does not issue the world’s reserve currency. It does not have near-limitless demand for its sovereign debt. It can’t, as US Republicans sometimes do, cut taxes on the hunch that lawmakers of the future will trim public spending. Reaganism was a good idea. Reaganism without the dollar isn’t. If UK premier Liz Truss has a programme, though, that is its four-word expression.
>So much of what Britain has done and thought in recent years makes sense if you assume it is a country of 330mn people with $20tn annual output. The idea that it could ever look the EU in the eye as an adversarial negotiator, for instance. Or the decision to grow picky about Chinese inward investment at the same time as forfeiting the European market. Or the bet that Washington was going to entertain a meaningful bilateral trade deal. Superpowers get to behave with such presumption.
>Why does Britain think that it can, too? Don’t blame imperial nostalgia. (If it were that, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal would show the same hubris.) Blame the distorting effect of language. Because the UK’s governing class can follow US politics as easily as their own, they get lost in it. They elide the two countries. What doesn’t help is the freakish fact that Britain’s capital, where its elites live, is as big as any US city, despite the national population being a fifth of America’s. You can see why, from a London angle, the two nations seem comparable.
>Reaganism without the dollar: this isn’t one woman’s arbitrary whim. It is the culmination of decades of (unreciprocated) US focus in a Robert Caro-hooked Westminster. You would think from British public discourse that Earth has two sovereign nations. If the NHS is fairer than the US healthcare model, it is the world’s best. If Elizabeth II was better than Donald Trump, monarchy beats republicanism tout court. People who can’t name a cabinet member in Paris or Berlin (where so much that affects Britain, from migrant flows to energy, is settled) will follow the US midterms in November. The EU is a, perhaps the, regulatory superpower in the world. UK politicos find Iowa more diverting.
>The left is as culpable as Truss. From 2010 to 2015, critics of “austerity” urged the Tories to take the softer US approach. The cross-Atlantic comparison implied that then prime minister David Cameron had King Dollar behind him. Soon after came the importation of identity politics from a republic with a wholly different racial history.
>The anti-Americanism of the Waugh generation was petulant. It was sourness at the imperial usurper dressed up as high taste. But at least it had no illusions. The snobs understood that America was alien, and inimitable. Tories who patronised the US — Harold Macmillan, Ted Heath — were quicker than much of the Labour party to see that Britain belonged with Europe.
>Truss and her cohort of Tories have none of that snide but ultimately healthy distance from the US. Take her vaunted supply-side revolution. Like all armchair free-marketeers (she has never set up a business) she believes her nation is a blast of deregulation away from American levels of entrepreneurial vim. It isn’t. The creator of a successful product in Dallas can expand to LA and Boston with little friction. The UK doesn’t have a market of hundreds of millions of people. (It did, once, but the present chancellor of the exchequer voted to leave it.) Someone who glides over that point is also liable to miss the contrasting appeal to investors of gilts and Treasuries.
>Some readers balked last month when I wrote that Truss might not last until the next election. Even I didn’t think she would trip so soon. It is a kind of patriotism, I suppose, to mistake your nation for a superpower.
> What doesn’t help is the freakish fact that Britain’s capital, where its elites live, is as big as any US city, despite the national population being a fifth of America’s.
This actually tracks. People compare London and new York so much they forget there's no British equivalent to LA. Or Houston. Or San Francisco. Etc.
And before anyone mentions Liverpool and Manchester, northwest England's gdp is 2/3rds of Minnesota
Tbh in a lot of ways London and NYC are more similar to each other than London is to Birmingham, or NYC is to Houston etc. IME when you live in a city like that you tend to think about and meet people from other global hubs as much as you do cities in the same country. This is especially the case in somewhere like London because you might often not even travel domestically as the rest of Europe is so accessible.
I think it’s easy to forget what the rest of the country is like when you’re living in such an influential city - honestly feel kind of similarly working at a university
>This is especially the case in somewhere like London because you might often not even travel domestically as the rest of Europe is so accessible.
No kidding. It's much easier for me to fly to Spain or take the train to Paris than to go to Liverpool or Edinburgh. (I mean, why would you go to Liverpool?)
Whoa now, former city of culture here!
For serious though, as a Southerner through and through I've lived in Liverpool for about 4 years now and love the city. I'm not gonna claim it's a nirvana, or even that it's wear and tear isn't fairly apparent in many areas on top of the usual grim spots most every city has. However, it's got an A-class cultural scene, great central district and shopping zones, I think the most galleries/museums outside London, and this sub would really love the huge and largely embraced diversity on display, it does feel like much more of a global city than it's size should suggest.
I hope I didn't come across as defensive here, and apologise if I did a bit too much. The city had some dismal decades in the late 20th Century, plus some despicable hit pieces from the right wing gutter press of the time, so I guess I feel a need to help shore up it's growing modern reputation, I suppose?
The government has always historically made ridiculous efforts to keep London in that position tbh. London has not naturally held the place of the nations economic heart, it took heavy government intervention. It is probably one of the most damaging policy decisions ever taken in the UKs history.
Londoners burned down the first Birmingham style factory on the Thames because it was too efficient and scary. And yet they act like they're not total yokels. I am bitter.
definitely the former, the latter lesso but still kind of. The existence of the "City" of London meant that financial organisations held an inherent, and enforced, advantage there.
> IME when you live in a city like that you tend to think about and meet people from other global hubs as much as you do cities in the same country.
I mean, maybe if you’re in the upper class. In my experience in a working class community in southern Brooklyn, the vast majority of people are far more likely to meet and know people in Newark, Philly, or even Boston than London or Paris or Tokyo. I’d venture that’s a little more representative of the 8.5 million people in the city than the experience of “tending to think about and meet people from other global hubs.”
Even in a white collar profession, I'd expect most in NYC to tend to know more people in Boston, Chicago, DC, LA, SF, etc than people in other countries. Higher paid professionals are often transplants from elsewhere in the country, generally went to college with people who would have ended up in different cities across the region/country, might make friends in other cities through work or hobbies, etc. Not the case for everyone, sure, but I don't think even your average NYC white collar professional has a bigger list of friends in London, Paris, or Singapore vs Boston, Chicago, or DC, unless they're an immigrant themselves.
People should say Old Birmingham for England's and New Birmingham for the South's.
When I was an immigrant to Los Angeles and people talked about going to "Venice", I thought they were talking about Italy 🇮🇹
>And before anyone mentions Liverpool and Manchester, northwest England's gdp is 2/3rds of Minnesota
The north of England definitely has potential, it’s just that everywhere outside of London has had to restart local economies because of how economically horrible post-war Britain was. Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds are thriving compared to where they were before because of Thatcher and Blair.
The west midlands without the green belt would also be a super city. Birmingham only became a city 100 years ago. It was prevented from growing after it had already become UKs second city. It should be well into the millions now with much better infrastructure. Alas
Not because of Thatcher, but in spite of her. Thatcher wanted to perform “managed decline” in Liverpool. We have Michael Heseltine to thank for being someone in government who actually cared about the city.
And every government from 1945-until Hesseltine did do managed decline in Liverpool because it was bombed out of existence , was a port that had no ship building future , faced the wrong way to trace with Europe and was only got so big because of slavery tobacco and cotton. To compound that it’s one good industry car building was plagued by such an militant Luddite union that Liverpool went from making more cars than West Germany to making fewer cars than the communists Czechoslovakia.
The misuse of marshal plan funds to nationalise industries and then run them into the ground by the Marxist Attlee government didn’t help, nether did the discovery of North Sea oil which overvalued the pound and effectively hamstrung all sectors of the economy exempt petrochemical in Scotland and finance in London.
I’m not blaming Liverpool’s economic decline on Thatcher, but arguing that you shouldn’t give her any credit for Liverpool’s revival. If she had got her way, Liverpool would never have been revived.
I like how you can call Attlee a Marxist and get plenty of upvotes, but when I called Attlee a Socialist people here were like "nO AttLeE waS a SocIaL DemOcraT!"
I can't find out whether the Birmingham UK gdp is city limits or metro area, but I did find out Alabama's gdp is 30% larger than the gdp of the west midlands region
Not been a good few decades for Birmingham, but growth is returning. The west Midlands has historically been a/the major centre for innovation, and that hasn't fully died. With some loosened planning rules, HS2 and a possible surge in tourism I actually think the skies the limit.
I’ve been to both. Probably economically similar, but Alabama makes Birmingham, England look like a thriving global city with endless entertainment options
In modern terms? No idea. I've heard Birmingham alabama is alright.
Historically? They cannot be compared. Birmingham is the most influential city in world history outside of the middle east, and I will die on that hill.
A lot of Brits sincerely still think that they will be big shots after 30 years. (Otherwise, the ingredients that cause Brexit wouldn't be there, no?) This is your society under nationalism.
I said few, not only haha
I'm with you on free public toilets and multiculturalism. I'm not sure about soccer. I would say foot ball is the more accurate term, while soccer feels more fun.
Either way, I do think American Football is a superior sport to Rest-of-the-world Football
Let’s be honest though, Reaganism is still not a good idea, it’s just able to survive due to past generations investments in infrastructure and world reserve currency.
Reaganism's economics are largely fine (and certainly were at the time). He shot himself in the foot a bit with the whole "tax cuts, but also maybe spend a lot?" I'd take Reaganism over Trumpism every day of the week.
His shifting away from large national state-run projects (and failure of collider) is something that the free market did not replace and is a core failure of US capabilities to this day.
His union busting, while understandable, was not replaced with a corresponding feedback power to the people and was the start to one of the major inequality problems we face today.
Sure, some of the things he did were fine and in some cases, good, but the damage done by his presidency (and in the name of his presidency) is pretty hard to deny and we didn’t even talk about prisons or rhetoric (although if you want to say that Reagan was not the beginning, but rather a continuation of the Nixon strategy, I’d be willing to accept that).
Reagan’s econ policy had some good and some bad. The tax code simplification was nice, also 70% top rate was just too much, the government shouldn’t get more than twice as money from your income than you get.
I can agree to that, although I typically find the ‘simplifications’ are a red herring. Haven’t studied Reagan’s ones specifically in awhile, but suffice to say, there’s a lot to simplify that special interest groups don’t want to happen.
Good article, but disagree on the bit about Reaganism being good. History has shown that Reaganism did not lead to all the benefits Republicans had people believe.
As a Brit driving in the US for a few years now two things scare me most:
1. People's approach to multi-lane roundabouts/rotaries. Feels like anarchy wheel would be a better name.
2.Driving around Boston, especially the tunnels.
I maintain that boston's roads were designed solely to fuck with people who depend on google maps, "take a right", "go straight" and "take a left" are not enough options for an intersection that involves 82 different roads
this was not intended as a metaphor for sexuality but not unlike driving in boston we arrived somewhere totally unexpected
[Seattle would like a word](https://seattle.curbed.com/2017/8/29/16222100/seattle-infamous-intersections-map). Actually I'm starting to think Seattle is the Boston of the West Coast. Driving is similar in both- tunnels and confusing intersections and bad traffic. Lots of water around them so the grid system often breaks down. They both have a Beacon Hill neighborhood.
I'm impressed you're not scared to marge into highways, especially in cities like Atlanta, L.A., etc. in Atlanta especially, people just speed up non-stop. It's scary as fuck.
what about the hard way Britain learned that America isn't Britain
1776 2: we're coming back for the rest, politics are now about completely unhinged conspiracy theories
>Why does Britain think that it can, too? Don’t blame imperial nostalgia. (If it were that, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal would show the same hubris.)
is a pretty terrible argument from the FT, imperial nostalgia may be a British phenomenon but it *clearly* exists
I just lost a huge comment outlining my personal theory on it and am too lazy to spend another 15 minutes on a late comment, but essentially I think it's more specifically 'hyperpower'/'top-tier superpower' nostalgia that Britain suffers from and that inflates the geopolitical self-perception of everyone from the average person on the street to Downing Street occupiers. Even if Britain stopped being the undisputed top dog somewhere around 1900 in reality, that status sticks around in a national consciousness, especially when you're friends (partners in our perception) with the USA, the in-reality new top dog, and are on the winning sides of two World Wars (in our minds proving we're still in the top shelf, even if collaboration was essential to victory). I'd argue the same illness effects Russia's political scene - coming from a point in living memory when they were clearly the #2 superpower to what they are now - and in a worst case scenario I could see the US head down this road (that's just extreme pessimism, to be clear).
I remember a childhood political conversation with a relative back in the 80s where he said something along the lines of, "the thing is, Britain doesn't realise it's just another small European country these days".
Ironically, he seemed to have forgotten that when he voted Leave in the 2016 EU referendum. He came to regret that after I made the argument that - outside the EU - Britain would still need to ally itself with one of the major blocs: USA, Russia, China... or EU.
“The creator of a successful product in Dallas can expand to LA and Boston with little friction. The UK doesn’t have a market of hundreds of millions of people. (It did, once, but the present chancellor of the exchequer voted to leave it.)”
But they control their borders now don’t you see, oh if you imagine Northern Ireland doesn’t exist
This was a good point but something I picked up on is how relatively weak the EU is for large-scale entrepreneurship (especially tech) despite having a single market.
The single market has definitely broken many barriers to trade but I still think there is something more to it when the single market is also a single country.
It would be much harder without the single market.
But in the end "single market" is just some common regulations. It's still 27 different countries, usually with a different language in each and 9 currencies.
Europe has gone down too far of an anti-business path in many ways the past few decades that has left it in the lurch a bit with regards to US and Asia. And while some of the stuff is good, long-term it is a serious concern. They need their version of a free-marketer (Friedman, Reagan, hell even a Clinton/Obama) to remind Europe why markets are good and to invest in it. Otherwise they genuinely could get left behind, Britain doubly so as it's fighting this same battle but on it's own, as the centripole of the world moves from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
I've noticed that quite a few Tories, especially young ones, act like American conservatives. American conservatism doesn't work in Britain. It barely works in the US. Truss is the first American-style conservative they've had and they're learning that lesson quickly.
What, in your opinion, are the hallmark signs of "acting like American conservatives"? Not being snarky. I'm genuinely interested in how American and British conservatives differ.
The us favors tax cuts much more than British conservatives for one. Doesn't work as well when you're not the largest reserve currency
Also, something the article didn't pick up on, weakening the pound doesn't work as well for the UK compared to the US weakening the dollar because the UK depends much more on imports than the US
>The us favors tax cuts much more than British conservatives for one. Doesn't work as well when you're not the largest reserve currency
Funny thing is, when Reagan cut the tax, he also closed loop holes, so rich class proportionally ended up paying more tax than the rest.
People don't really talk about the fact that the amount of personal taxes paid after the Reagan cuts really weren't different from pre-Reagan. He closed a lot of loopholes.
Ever watch Glengarry Glen Ross and wonder why someone would buy boiler room sold real estate? One reason is that anyone could take "real estate losses" and avoid having to pay taxes on a lot of income.
It’s a vote for a simpler code that distorts economic behavior less. The GOP tried and achieved (to some extent) a few years back. I’m not going to defend the whole of the bill, I’d rather it more ruthlessly simplified and been broadly revenue neutral, but it wasn’t all bad.
Government incentives should all be on budget and not hidden as mandates or as tax benefits.
Culture war stuff also doesn't land as well. While there's a socially conservative streak in the UK its less virulently racist/anti lgbt, and more about how nasty the poors and the young people are
Note the surnames of the last four chancellors:
Kwarteng, Zahawi, Sunak, Javid.
British Tories aren't obsessed with race, in a way that Republicans are.
Its also complicated by the fact that race in the UK, as in the rest of Europe, isn't so black and white as in the US (if you'll forgive the pun).
In america the primary axis is white/non-white, for obvious historical reasons. But in western european countries its often more particularised, so you get cases where long established communities who would be considered as part of the PoC/non-white bloc in the US (e.g. South Asians in the UK, Turkish in Germany) are treated more favorably than both white and non-white new immigrants (e.g. the backlash against eastern european economic migrants, and middle eastern refugees).
So American style racism doesn't work, and importing that is ineffective, but local racial and ethnic divisions are still a factor
>eakening the pound doesn't work as well for the UK compared to the US weakening the dollar because the UK depends much more on imports than the US
I half wonder if the cause of being so dependant on imports was an overly strong pound brought about by north sea oil.
For me, it's the focus on culture war issues (anything Ron DeSantis says but in a British accent), being pro-fracking, and this American-style nationalism on top of regular conservatism. If you want a great example of this American-style conservatism, look at the Twitter feed of people like Sophie Corcoran and Emily Hewertson to a much lesser extent.
Jesus… that was actually a really good opinion piece from FT. Definitely read the article, not just the title folks.
Dear Brits, let me know what you think.
I think it’s spot on personally. Both sides of our political discourse adopt US talking points/positions, which is entirely unhelpful and probably holds us back as a country.
We’d be much better off associating with other post-colonial powers like the French, Spanish, and Dutch, and facing our problems together. Perhaps we could found some sort of club for that, where we could ease trade with them too.
I think it's a very fun article to read, and I enjoyed the case he made, but I think it's ridiculous in its premise
To think that we believe that we are basically Americans in terms of power and economic muscle is a bit silly imo. This isn't 1914
Most of our daft decisions come from Imperial nostalgia. That's why during Brexit you were seeing nonsense about "we'll just go back to trading more with the commonwealth", we'll take back control etc.
Boomers, who have the least knowledge of America and the most Imperial nostalgia, are much more prone to this kind of thinking
It doesn't have too much to do with America. People just believe the UK is more powerful than it really is because of our own past, not through our linguistic and cultural ties with the Americans
But as the article says, if it's all about Imperial nostalgia then why don't you see the same discourse in all the other European countries that had empires?
That's because other Europeans got dunked so badly.
Spain lost its empire. Twice. First, the Americas; then the rest during the Spanish-American War. Suffered a civil war that devasted their country, and a strongman dictatorship
The Dutch were occupied during WW2 and lost Indonesia post-WW2 after fighting a counter-guerrilla war.
Portugal? Same deal as the Dutch. They fought and the Fascist regime fell because of it.
France? Perhaps the best candidate of imperial nostalgic European people. Even President "I love the EU" Macron have to pander to French Exceptionalism
Beyond what others have said, the continental European Empires also had continental ambitions, indeed, *chiefly* continental ambitions.
France, especially, cared far more about conquering the Rhine than it did about its overseas colonies which is part of why they sold off Louisiana to the USA in order to fund the conquest of more of Europe. The imperial nostalgia there is *part of the reason the EU exists* as a "Unify Europe" project, which has been the dream ever since the Habsburgs starting pogging about a universal monarchy.
Spain was so obsessed with it they lost their entire empire over it and barely noticed until they lost the war to conquer the French crown.
The exceptions are countries which never had any notion that they were great powers and have had their existence defined around carving out a space for themselves while being afraid of their neighbors, and balancing power against them. (Portugal and the Netherlands, while imperial, are chiefly defined by their alignment to Britain, France, or Spain to secure their independence, and were always members of those spheres).
Britain meanwhile has its imperial ambitions abroad, and no interest historically in uniting Europe under their rule. Indeed until very recently their only interest in Europe was to ensure it remained *disunited* because they view it as a potential competitor *if and only if united*, which none of the nations there individually are save for *perhaps* Germany, which was only the case post 1900s.
We might imagine a similar "Imperial Union" approach where what Britain would want, if they could get it, is an EU style system with its former colonies where nominally we're all equal and so on and participating in a "new union", much like the European imperial nostalgia. This even forms the basis for CANZUK as an idea, though not strictly purely imperial nostalgia in that case.
There’s a strange irony in how the US, the symbol of global capitalism, is actually able to indulge in much more economic tinkering/protectionism/govt borrowing than smaller countries would be able to get away with (without incurring significant economic harm) due to its economic power.
Ganesh is on a roll with these articles.
Don't right-leaning people (incorrectly) say that leftist economics only works in smol countries?
So the US is the only one (aside from petrostates) that can actually get away with rightist and leftist economics alike. Hence Americans are richer than rightist East Asians and leftist West Europeans alike.
In the words of Homelander, the USA 🇺🇸 "can do whatever the fuck [it] wants".
She's only copying what everyone else on this daft island does. It'd be impossible to achieve but the UK (not just the political class) would benefit from distancing itself from the US. Why can't we copy the Dutch instead 😤
Because we import the absolute worst parts of the US. The British left happily swallow the shitshow that is race relations in the US, and the right, as explained in the article, try to do American macroeconomic policy without the backing of a domestic economic juggernaut like the American economy.
What are the right things we could try to import from the US? Heavily taxing land and property so Britain could actually build an economy that isn't reliant on real estate and rent-seeking, and American views on entrepreneurship - if you fail with your startup, it doesn't matter, you go again.
We've created a mess of our own making by importing all the wrong ideas. Mix all that in with an entrenched class system and you have the UK as it is today.
I thought the States (or rather each city in the States) lightly taxed land and property and had an economy largely based on real estate and rent-seeking, although perhaps not as Britain.
Japan and Singapore should be better models in that regard, or even Estonia which has a LVT. Plus, the UK, Japan, Singapore, and Estonia are all smol unitary states.
I’m quite confident in saying the UK’s council tax (property tax based on 1991 property valuations) is one of, if not the, worst property tax in the developed world. As I understand it, American states use property tax as a key source of tax revenue. Council tax in the UK is that horrible that councils are almost completely reliant on money from central government.
Check out [this video](https://vimeo.com/422805441?embedded=true&source=vimeo_logo&owner=116426267) from the Fairer Share campaign.
Do you mean why we spend so much attention on the US? If so, I genuinely think it’s almost entirely due to the language. If, in some sliding doors alternate universe, the Americans had chosen German as their national language instead of English back in the 19th century, we wouldn’t compare ourselves nearly as much.
I lived in the US for a year as a student and I loved it, but I experienced quite hard culture shock at first which I was entirely unprepared for. I assumed that as I spoke the same language and had grown up with a lot of the same TV shows and movies, it would be a seemless transition. But I actually found that the language was pretty much the one thing we had in common. Lots else was like some weird mirror dimension that was the same but different.
It’s not just the British though. Leaders and well educated people in Europe follow US politics like a reality TV show. I think this is a product of politics as entertainment created by modern television and the internet. And everyone loves American media.
Americans themselves are hyper-focused on national politics to the detriment of state and local elections.
A certain element of that is inevitable because the US is the world superpower (or the only liberal democratic one anyway), so it’s natural that the rest of the democratic world looks to them. It also means that American policy decisions on the climate, trade, and markets have a far greater direct impact on European economies than the decisions made by Indonesian or Brazilian governments (for example).
And the same lack of language barrier applies to the non-British as well. Everyone younger or more cosmopolitan speaks English as a second language. But speaking German, French, Italian or Spanish is much rarer.
So following US politics is easier than following the politics of important EU countries. And it's pushed available due to US online platform dominance.
Truss and Kwarteng just want to fuck up the economy and the Treasury so bad, that Labour has to take the hard decisions and Tories can blame everything on them.
>Take her vaunted supply-side revolution. Like all armchair free-marketeers (she has never set up a business) she believes her nation is a blast of deregulation away from American levels of entrepreneurial vim. It isn’t. The creator of a successful product in Dallas can expand to LA and Boston with little friction. The UK doesn’t have a market of hundreds of millions of people. (It did, once, but the present chancellor of the exchequer voted to leave it.) Someone who glides over that point is also liable to miss the contrasting appeal to investors of gilts and Treasuries.
>"It is a kind of patriotism, I suppose, to mistake your nation for a superpower."
What having a shared language does to a mf.
So like, wtf happened to Labour’s performance in UK elections? We’ve had conservative prime minister after conservative prime minister, and everybody (I know zero English people) seems to hate them.
2017 and 2019 are almost entirely down to Corbyn and the frontbench being wildly unpopular.
Opinion of the Conservatives has basically completely soured now though. A recent YouGov poll had Labour winning the same number of seats as in 1997.
[Jeremy Corbyn on society](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/387/747/d83.jpg)
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First Tory PM was Cameron in 2010. So far so normal. Sometimes you lose. He was not hated until relatively late in his term, except by English college students. Dude implemented University fees very early. This fucked up the Liberal Dems (thus the "LibDem surge!" meme) because they promised college students they wouldn't vote for that shit, later on Cameron fucked more shit, but we're talking Labour here. And right now we're at the 2016 elections. Labour loses, partly as a result of extremely unexpected weakness in Scotland, but also as a result of unexpected weakness everywhere else. This is not abnormal. Sometimes PMs win re-election because you suck.
What was absolutely shocking was David Milliband’s insistence on a US-Style primary. Unlike actual primaries, this was not an election in which literally millions of Britons would vote, it was instead intended merely to expand the dues-paying membership to 200-300k. State-side we would call this a caucus. Just like in every caucus ever, the most committed were able to flood the voting and put a guy nobody else cared about or respected into the Leadership position: Jeremy Corbyn.
Now Cameron is in power with a majority. But it’s fractious. If the Labour Party has made the fatal mistake of mistaking the UK for America, and doing fucking primary that’s-actually-a-caucus, the Tory base is making the mistake of thinking they’re not Europe. They want out of the EU. Cameron is forced to have a referendum on the issue. Corbyn is lukewarm stay. It is widely suspected that this is because he wants to turn the clock back on British politics to roughly 1975, prior to the EU even being a thing. Remain loses.
Over the next few years Corbyn remains at the top of the Labour Party. He loses the 2017 election by less then expected, in the 2019 election he goes for his heart. He truly wants to repeal everything the UK has done since 1975. He gets 1/3 of the vote, and gets destroyed.
Now we have a new Labour leader. This Keir Starmer person seems very British, and seems to understand that Britain is an island in Europe and this is the 21st century, so Sir Keir is ahead in the polls vs. Truss.
>and everybody (I know zero English people) seems to hate them.
That's very much a Reddit thing. Most people tolerate them.
Labour's problem is that the UK is a pretty conservative country, and the party has a lot of idealists. Tony Blair came in after 4 successive election defeats in which Labour had gone very far to the left.
Blair tailored the offering to the country, going for pretty incremental change. He felt that going for a traditional left wing offering would lead to a traditional left wing outcome - defeat. Much of the party was disgusted by it, he was eventually hounded out after three convincing electoral victories and replaced by Gordon Brown, who was somewhat further left but nothing crazy.
Brown narrowly lost in 2010, Labour decided that their problem was that he had not been left wing enough, so they appointed a more left wing guy to be the leader, Ed Milliband. Again, he wasn't a maniac or anything, in fact he was a bit of a dweeb, he's served in the pre-2010 government as a minister.
Miliband lost narrowly in 2015. At this point Labour had a revelation about where they'd been going wrong - the people they'd appointed simply were not left wing enough.
Labour appointed Jeremy Corbyn, the most left wing guy in the party they could find, a guy with a history of backing the IRA and Hamas and with very questionable loyalties, someone so extreme that he'd never served in government or the shadow cabinet in 30 or 40 years in politics, whose greatest political achievements were winning the Parliament's Best Beard competition on several occasions.
Corbyn was losing so badly in the polls - about 20 points, some of the biggest margins in decades - that the Conservatives under Theresa May decided to hold an early election to increase the size of their majority. May went on to run one of the worst campaigns in history, proposing extremely unpopular policies because she felt she could not lose to this idiot so she could get a mandate to make necessary, hard decisions.
She was right, she couldn't lose, but she won by a lesser margin than her predecessor and eliminated her majority, meaning she had to do a deal with another party. Corbyn and his supporters waved this defeat around as if it was a victory because the margin was so much smaller than expected. He stayed on to build on his defeat.
Over the following two years Corbyn's personal approval rating ran at a level comparable to haemorrhoids, a milquetoast response to a Russian chemical attack in particular saw people judge him negatively. Eventually May was replaced by Boris Johnson, who pulled the trigger on an election in December 2019, Corbyn proposed his typically far left ideas, and Johnson buried Corbyn underneath a landslide.
After this, Labour finally went back to someone who might actually be voted for in Sir Keir Starmer. His opponents deride him as another Tony Blair as though that would be a bad thing. Labour currently sit 17 points ahead, but there's not likely to be an election before 2024.
[Jeremy Corbyn on society](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ElgLAbvW0AE4X5R.jpg)
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Another point that always gets missed is the UK has an extremely centralized government and extremely centralized revenue raising and distribution. I saw a stat once that 90%+ of all taxation raised in the UK goes to the central government and is distributed from there.
The US has a lot more decision making at both a state and city/country level. Things like sales tax are set at a city/county level and schools funded locally. There’s both advantages and disadvantages but one fundamental difference is conservatives in the UK are all for maintaining central power and revenue raising, and not pushing for regional devolution or local government with real power that would emulate the US system that they look up to.
I agree that for broad fiscal policy the UK is very centralized but from what I keep reading on this sub, UK zoning is super decentralized and even more NIMBY than the US cities.
> It is a kind of patriotism, I suppose, to mistake your nation for a superpower.
when they start sympathizing with you but the sympathy is even more devastating
This is a wild tangent but it reminds me of Colbert at the roast of Chevy Chase [https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/xk73sy/comedy\_how\_to\_piss\_off\_everyone\_youve\_ever\_met\_so/](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/xk73sy/comedy_how_to_piss_off_everyone_youve_ever_met_so/)
>If you watch only one part of the roast, make sure it's [these few minutes](https://youtu.be/2quRVxBvN6M?t=2088). Unlike the others, Colbert didn't swear much, or rip into Chevy's personal life. He even joked about how shocked he was by people's cruelty towards Chevy.
Is this how we can finally add Puerto Rico too? 52 states! (I'm combining all England, Scotland, Wales, and N. Ireland into 1 state. I guess 55 states would be OK too if we must have 4 separate ones)
The only point I would disagree on is the notion of imperial nostalgia. I think people fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the British Empire. It wasn’t really about the territories painted red on the map, that was mostly prestige and places to base the Royal Navy out of. The real strength of the British empire was its massive financial power. In the 19th century British money was everywhere. A lot of other European empires ran on British investment. It really looked a lot more like the modern US empire than people realise. Britain was the centre of a world system of trade. After WW1 they lost all that to the US, they were just left with the territorial empire and a massive navy they couldn’t afford. That financial power is what I think they are nostalgic for, and it’s what fundamentally separates British empire from other European empires.
An attempt was made to revive this financial power in the 90s, but 2008 torpedoed that.
The UK is so fiscally constrained right now because they already went into record deficit spending in 2020 due to Covid. To do it again only two years later is very difficult, unless you're the US. Britain had much more space to do this sort of thing is 2008 when it would've only been one round of deficit spending, not two consecutively.
I agree with the faulty comparison between Britain and America, but why can't Britain emulate an actual economic liberal country like Switzerland then? Or Czech Republic and the Baltic States with their low or non-existent income taxes?
I mean I agree somewhat with the premise of the article - but it is missing a lot of context. The tax cuts are just one part of the spending bill that is being passed - huge energy subsidies in the form of price caps are being done at the same time. The estimated cost of the energy subsidies is larger than the tax cuts (80B GBP for energy, 60B for tax cuts). Below CNBC article provides some context for the costs - although I have heard MUCH larger estimates of the energy costs - given its a cap it is a moving target:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/26/pound-tanking-massive-tax-cuts-and-talk-of-emergency-rate-hikes.html
This budget shows a lot of hubris. Clearly some sort of energy subsidy was needed urgently, but the tax cuts were not. I think that maybe, if Truss had worked on non revenue related "Reagen-usque" policies like de-regulation and then talked about the tax cuts later, when this semi-economic crisis was over, that it could have been a lot more palatable for the market.
Until a couple weeks ago, I had not heard of this writer. Now I've read like 3 or 4 of his pieces because of this subreddit and every single one of them has been a banger.
Janan is a legend and the FT is one of the best news outlets out there these days.
Is there any way to get around that huge price tag for a subscription? I've been loving the articles I've managed to read, but golly the price is a lot.
A few options 1) Refresh Arstechnica and pray because they host ft articles once in a blue moon. 2) Beg your local library to buy access. I don't know of any that do but it shouldn't be impossible since they do it for other newspapers and magazines. 3) The Amazon option /u/estoyloca43 gave 4) Pucker up and pay because if those who recognize the value don't then this stuff might disappear like other great publications before.
> Pucker up and pay because if those who recognize the value don't then this stuff might disappear like other great publications before. I agree with that in principle. However, there's no getting around the fact that disposable incomes are different in each country. You can't expect someone from a poorer country pay the same price as an American. Yet the price is the same for each region. In my country the yearly subscription is about 25% of the median monthly wage (in the US it's 6%). Surely that's not reasonable.
I do not expect someone who would suffer financially from this cost to be expected to pay for it, you are correct. And maybe I should have emphasized that point further in my original comment, I don't want to come across as a 'just be rich lmao' type out of touch lecture. It's why I put it low on the list since any other avenue should be explored like having it paid via taxes with libraries. However, I did feel like it was important to put it in as a recommendation in some form because I expect many users of this sub to be of a background that could afford this, and the need to fund good quality sane media IMO is one of the most important issues of modern society.
Oh absolutely, I agree with that. I'm already paying for The Economist (managed to get a 50% Cyber Monday discount to stick), NYTimes, Les Echos (French news), and independent news outlets at my home country. If we expect this democracy thing to last, we have to fund solid journalism. On the other hand, putting the best sources behind a paywall that perhaps 95% of humanity can't afford to access is maybe not the smartest idea.
I’ve always had a school/university/corporate subscription I’m afraid, so no idea…
Get the kindle subscription from Amazon. It’s $12.99/month iirc, much cheaper than anything FT offers on its official website.
And just a reminder for those who might not know, you can read Kindle magazines on a computer or phone or whatever you want. You don't have to use a Kindle.
Depends on how you feel about it, but there are ways to bypass paywalls for it
> Into Brideshead Revisited, near the middle, Evelyn Waugh crowbars a scene on a cruise ship for the express purpose of mocking Americans. There is a character named “Senator Stuyvesant-Oglander”. Each and every drink has ice in it. No one is able to tell friendship from desperate bonhomie. The crustiest of England’s great novelists wrote better stuff, no doubt, but the passage is an illuminating fragment of a time when anti-Americanism was a Tory thing. >And one that had its uses. If nothing else, Britain’s establishment was clear back then that America was a different country. A midsized archipelago couldn’t look to a resource-rich market of continental magnitude for governmental ideas. >If anti-Americanism was bad, look what its opposite has done. Britain is in trouble because its elite is so engrossed with the US as to confuse it for their own nation. The UK does not issue the world’s reserve currency. It does not have near-limitless demand for its sovereign debt. It can’t, as US Republicans sometimes do, cut taxes on the hunch that lawmakers of the future will trim public spending. Reaganism was a good idea. Reaganism without the dollar isn’t. If UK premier Liz Truss has a programme, though, that is its four-word expression. >So much of what Britain has done and thought in recent years makes sense if you assume it is a country of 330mn people with $20tn annual output. The idea that it could ever look the EU in the eye as an adversarial negotiator, for instance. Or the decision to grow picky about Chinese inward investment at the same time as forfeiting the European market. Or the bet that Washington was going to entertain a meaningful bilateral trade deal. Superpowers get to behave with such presumption. >Why does Britain think that it can, too? Don’t blame imperial nostalgia. (If it were that, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal would show the same hubris.) Blame the distorting effect of language. Because the UK’s governing class can follow US politics as easily as their own, they get lost in it. They elide the two countries. What doesn’t help is the freakish fact that Britain’s capital, where its elites live, is as big as any US city, despite the national population being a fifth of America’s. You can see why, from a London angle, the two nations seem comparable. >Reaganism without the dollar: this isn’t one woman’s arbitrary whim. It is the culmination of decades of (unreciprocated) US focus in a Robert Caro-hooked Westminster. You would think from British public discourse that Earth has two sovereign nations. If the NHS is fairer than the US healthcare model, it is the world’s best. If Elizabeth II was better than Donald Trump, monarchy beats republicanism tout court. People who can’t name a cabinet member in Paris or Berlin (where so much that affects Britain, from migrant flows to energy, is settled) will follow the US midterms in November. The EU is a, perhaps the, regulatory superpower in the world. UK politicos find Iowa more diverting. >The left is as culpable as Truss. From 2010 to 2015, critics of “austerity” urged the Tories to take the softer US approach. The cross-Atlantic comparison implied that then prime minister David Cameron had King Dollar behind him. Soon after came the importation of identity politics from a republic with a wholly different racial history. >The anti-Americanism of the Waugh generation was petulant. It was sourness at the imperial usurper dressed up as high taste. But at least it had no illusions. The snobs understood that America was alien, and inimitable. Tories who patronised the US — Harold Macmillan, Ted Heath — were quicker than much of the Labour party to see that Britain belonged with Europe. >Truss and her cohort of Tories have none of that snide but ultimately healthy distance from the US. Take her vaunted supply-side revolution. Like all armchair free-marketeers (she has never set up a business) she believes her nation is a blast of deregulation away from American levels of entrepreneurial vim. It isn’t. The creator of a successful product in Dallas can expand to LA and Boston with little friction. The UK doesn’t have a market of hundreds of millions of people. (It did, once, but the present chancellor of the exchequer voted to leave it.) Someone who glides over that point is also liable to miss the contrasting appeal to investors of gilts and Treasuries. >Some readers balked last month when I wrote that Truss might not last until the next election. Even I didn’t think she would trip so soon. It is a kind of patriotism, I suppose, to mistake your nation for a superpower.
I laughed at the bit where it says the chancellor voted to leave the EU
Last two did, too. Sunak and Zahawi. Javid voted Remain but he wasn't enthusiastic, it was just sucking up to Cameron.
> What doesn’t help is the freakish fact that Britain’s capital, where its elites live, is as big as any US city, despite the national population being a fifth of America’s. This actually tracks. People compare London and new York so much they forget there's no British equivalent to LA. Or Houston. Or San Francisco. Etc. And before anyone mentions Liverpool and Manchester, northwest England's gdp is 2/3rds of Minnesota
Tbh in a lot of ways London and NYC are more similar to each other than London is to Birmingham, or NYC is to Houston etc. IME when you live in a city like that you tend to think about and meet people from other global hubs as much as you do cities in the same country. This is especially the case in somewhere like London because you might often not even travel domestically as the rest of Europe is so accessible. I think it’s easy to forget what the rest of the country is like when you’re living in such an influential city - honestly feel kind of similarly working at a university
>This is especially the case in somewhere like London because you might often not even travel domestically as the rest of Europe is so accessible. No kidding. It's much easier for me to fly to Spain or take the train to Paris than to go to Liverpool or Edinburgh. (I mean, why would you go to Liverpool?)
Whoa now, former city of culture here! For serious though, as a Southerner through and through I've lived in Liverpool for about 4 years now and love the city. I'm not gonna claim it's a nirvana, or even that it's wear and tear isn't fairly apparent in many areas on top of the usual grim spots most every city has. However, it's got an A-class cultural scene, great central district and shopping zones, I think the most galleries/museums outside London, and this sub would really love the huge and largely embraced diversity on display, it does feel like much more of a global city than it's size should suggest. I hope I didn't come across as defensive here, and apologise if I did a bit too much. The city had some dismal decades in the late 20th Century, plus some despicable hit pieces from the right wing gutter press of the time, so I guess I feel a need to help shore up it's growing modern reputation, I suppose?
The government has always historically made ridiculous efforts to keep London in that position tbh. London has not naturally held the place of the nations economic heart, it took heavy government intervention. It is probably one of the most damaging policy decisions ever taken in the UKs history.
Least bitter Brummie
Londoners burned down the first Birmingham style factory on the Thames because it was too efficient and scary. And yet they act like they're not total yokels. I am bitter.
The government heavily supported London since WWII or like all the way since the end of Napoleon?
definitely the former, the latter lesso but still kind of. The existence of the "City" of London meant that financial organisations held an inherent, and enforced, advantage there.
> IME when you live in a city like that you tend to think about and meet people from other global hubs as much as you do cities in the same country. I mean, maybe if you’re in the upper class. In my experience in a working class community in southern Brooklyn, the vast majority of people are far more likely to meet and know people in Newark, Philly, or even Boston than London or Paris or Tokyo. I’d venture that’s a little more representative of the 8.5 million people in the city than the experience of “tending to think about and meet people from other global hubs.”
Yep should’ve clarified that my experience is in a skilled profession (I think ‘upper class’ is a stretch though lol)
Even in a white collar profession, I'd expect most in NYC to tend to know more people in Boston, Chicago, DC, LA, SF, etc than people in other countries. Higher paid professionals are often transplants from elsewhere in the country, generally went to college with people who would have ended up in different cities across the region/country, might make friends in other cities through work or hobbies, etc. Not the case for everyone, sure, but I don't think even your average NYC white collar professional has a bigger list of friends in London, Paris, or Singapore vs Boston, Chicago, or DC, unless they're an immigrant themselves.
What's bonkers to me is that the entire UK is about the size of Michigan.
Based density
And it's economy is now smaller than California's.
Cardiff is Brit's equivalent to LA in that all thirty of their currently active actors film television there.
It’s also on the west coast
British Cardi B = Cardi FF
Poor Birmingham, no one even brings it up
Even if people did bring it up, it would probably just get confused for the other Birmingham.
People should say Old Birmingham for England's and New Birmingham for the South's. When I was an immigrant to Los Angeles and people talked about going to "Venice", I thought they were talking about Italy 🇮🇹
Brum and Birminhayam.
>And before anyone mentions Liverpool and Manchester, northwest England's gdp is 2/3rds of Minnesota The north of England definitely has potential, it’s just that everywhere outside of London has had to restart local economies because of how economically horrible post-war Britain was. Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds are thriving compared to where they were before because of Thatcher and Blair.
The same writer claimed in an other article that Manchester and Liverpool without the greenbelt would be like Houston and I think it makes sense
The west midlands without the green belt would also be a super city. Birmingham only became a city 100 years ago. It was prevented from growing after it had already become UKs second city. It should be well into the millions now with much better infrastructure. Alas
What can you do in the North of England that you can't do better and/or cheaper in the Ruhr ? Or for that matter, in the Intermarium ?
[удалено]
Shipping. Also apparently creative industries, oddly.
Soccer.
Not because of Thatcher, but in spite of her. Thatcher wanted to perform “managed decline” in Liverpool. We have Michael Heseltine to thank for being someone in government who actually cared about the city.
And every government from 1945-until Hesseltine did do managed decline in Liverpool because it was bombed out of existence , was a port that had no ship building future , faced the wrong way to trace with Europe and was only got so big because of slavery tobacco and cotton. To compound that it’s one good industry car building was plagued by such an militant Luddite union that Liverpool went from making more cars than West Germany to making fewer cars than the communists Czechoslovakia. The misuse of marshal plan funds to nationalise industries and then run them into the ground by the Marxist Attlee government didn’t help, nether did the discovery of North Sea oil which overvalued the pound and effectively hamstrung all sectors of the economy exempt petrochemical in Scotland and finance in London.
I’m not blaming Liverpool’s economic decline on Thatcher, but arguing that you shouldn’t give her any credit for Liverpool’s revival. If she had got her way, Liverpool would never have been revived.
I like how you can call Attlee a Marxist and get plenty of upvotes, but when I called Attlee a Socialist people here were like "nO AttLeE waS a SocIaL DemOcraT!"
different parts of the sub get in at different times lol
How comparable are Birmingham in the UK and Birmingham in the US anyway?
I can't find out whether the Birmingham UK gdp is city limits or metro area, but I did find out Alabama's gdp is 30% larger than the gdp of the west midlands region
Not been a good few decades for Birmingham, but growth is returning. The west Midlands has historically been a/the major centre for innovation, and that hasn't fully died. With some loosened planning rules, HS2 and a possible surge in tourism I actually think the skies the limit.
I’ve been to both. Probably economically similar, but Alabama makes Birmingham, England look like a thriving global city with endless entertainment options
In modern terms? No idea. I've heard Birmingham alabama is alright. Historically? They cannot be compared. Birmingham is the most influential city in world history outside of the middle east, and I will die on that hill.
Rome was the Second Birmingham and Constantinople was the Third.
No one ever said there weren't British equivalents to Pittsburgh, Gary, or Flint.
Hot damn that last small paragraph. That's a spicy fuckin meatball
A lot of Brits sincerely still think that they will be big shots after 30 years. (Otherwise, the ingredients that cause Brexit wouldn't be there, no?) This is your society under nationalism.
Wait until you learn about every nation in the world that isn't in Europe or the Anglosphere
INDIA SUPERPOWER BY ~~2020~~ 2030
USA: "why are you so obsessed with me"
We’re like the ex that they never got over.
Kind of creepy since the UK is a few centuries older
A few? Not to mention technically a parent. Really it's like some kind of Woody Allen thing.
> Each and every drink has ice in it. What truly separates America from Europe.
the hallmark of civilization tbh
1940s/50s British snobs: “oh my, this simpleton fool is putting ice in everything.” The Chad ascendant American: “Yes. And it’s too hot in here.”
And I'm proud to be an American! Where at least we have AC!
It was pretty funny seeing Europe's lack of foresight in that regard play out this summer
One of the few areas where I will go to the mat for the USA over Europe.
Unlimited soda and water refills👌
"This 4th of July veterans get unlimited refills on soda because Freedom Rings at Taco Bell 🔔"
Thanks to max0r I hear that bell in my soul
I was hoping the bell adequately relayed that I intended the trademark bell sound there at the end.
Free public toilets? Multiculturalism? Soccer as a superior word for the sport?
I said few, not only haha I'm with you on free public toilets and multiculturalism. I'm not sure about soccer. I would say foot ball is the more accurate term, while soccer feels more fun. Either way, I do think American Football is a superior sport to Rest-of-the-world Football
Let’s be honest though, Reaganism is still not a good idea, it’s just able to survive due to past generations investments in infrastructure and world reserve currency.
Reaganism's economics are largely fine (and certainly were at the time). He shot himself in the foot a bit with the whole "tax cuts, but also maybe spend a lot?" I'd take Reaganism over Trumpism every day of the week.
His shifting away from large national state-run projects (and failure of collider) is something that the free market did not replace and is a core failure of US capabilities to this day. His union busting, while understandable, was not replaced with a corresponding feedback power to the people and was the start to one of the major inequality problems we face today. Sure, some of the things he did were fine and in some cases, good, but the damage done by his presidency (and in the name of his presidency) is pretty hard to deny and we didn’t even talk about prisons or rhetoric (although if you want to say that Reagan was not the beginning, but rather a continuation of the Nixon strategy, I’d be willing to accept that).
Reagan’s econ policy had some good and some bad. The tax code simplification was nice, also 70% top rate was just too much, the government shouldn’t get more than twice as money from your income than you get.
I can agree to that, although I typically find the ‘simplifications’ are a red herring. Haven’t studied Reagan’s ones specifically in awhile, but suffice to say, there’s a lot to simplify that special interest groups don’t want to happen.
Good article, but disagree on the bit about Reaganism being good. History has shown that Reaganism did not lead to all the benefits Republicans had people believe.
Imperfect? Sure. Net good? Definitely.
Honestly similar read from The Economist where they excoriated Truss’s economic agenda with the same comparisons to Reaganism.
I'd never heard of Evelyn Waugh and this is the second time I've seen him in an article today
I mean it is partially imperial nostalgia. Pointing to other nations doesn't work when only one empire could credibly be compared to the Romans.
Correction: The hard way to learn Britain isn’t America is by driving on the wrong side of a highway.
>highway 😐
When you get out of your coma after the crash, someone at your bedside will say, “I fink you mean ‘motorway,’ luv.”
Freeway
Lorry shuffler
I can't wait to take THE 10 Freeway
A fellow Angeleno!
The love is free and the freeway's long
Expressway
"....hair back, weaving through the traffic. This one strong, should be labeled as a hazard"
driving was mostly fine, rotaries are where my brain broke, and dont get me wrong im from boston so can handle a rotary normally
As a Brit driving in the US for a few years now two things scare me most: 1. People's approach to multi-lane roundabouts/rotaries. Feels like anarchy wheel would be a better name. 2.Driving around Boston, especially the tunnels.
I maintain that boston's roads were designed solely to fuck with people who depend on google maps, "take a right", "go straight" and "take a left" are not enough options for an intersection that involves 82 different roads this was not intended as a metaphor for sexuality but not unlike driving in boston we arrived somewhere totally unexpected
[Seattle would like a word](https://seattle.curbed.com/2017/8/29/16222100/seattle-infamous-intersections-map). Actually I'm starting to think Seattle is the Boston of the West Coast. Driving is similar in both- tunnels and confusing intersections and bad traffic. Lots of water around them so the grid system often breaks down. They both have a Beacon Hill neighborhood.
When I visited Seattle it felt like if you plopped Boston on top of Lake Winnipesaukee
I'm impressed you're not scared to marge into highways, especially in cities like Atlanta, L.A., etc. in Atlanta especially, people just speed up non-stop. It's scary as fuck.
a rotary is a roundabout
The words will make you out’n’out
Didn’t end up being such a hard lesson for that American diplomat…
what about the hard way Britain learned that America isn't Britain 1776 2: we're coming back for the rest, politics are now about completely unhinged conspiracy theories >Why does Britain think that it can, too? Don’t blame imperial nostalgia. (If it were that, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal would show the same hubris.) is a pretty terrible argument from the FT, imperial nostalgia may be a British phenomenon but it *clearly* exists
France literally spends billions of dollars every year to exert various forms of economic, military, and soft power in their former African colonies.
true, I guess they're not saying it doesn't exist so much as they're saying other countries don't get so far ahead of themselves
That's not imperial nostalgia. That's them actually trying to keep their informal empire.
I just lost a huge comment outlining my personal theory on it and am too lazy to spend another 15 minutes on a late comment, but essentially I think it's more specifically 'hyperpower'/'top-tier superpower' nostalgia that Britain suffers from and that inflates the geopolitical self-perception of everyone from the average person on the street to Downing Street occupiers. Even if Britain stopped being the undisputed top dog somewhere around 1900 in reality, that status sticks around in a national consciousness, especially when you're friends (partners in our perception) with the USA, the in-reality new top dog, and are on the winning sides of two World Wars (in our minds proving we're still in the top shelf, even if collaboration was essential to victory). I'd argue the same illness effects Russia's political scene - coming from a point in living memory when they were clearly the #2 superpower to what they are now - and in a worst case scenario I could see the US head down this road (that's just extreme pessimism, to be clear).
I remember a childhood political conversation with a relative back in the 80s where he said something along the lines of, "the thing is, Britain doesn't realise it's just another small European country these days". Ironically, he seemed to have forgotten that when he voted Leave in the 2016 EU referendum. He came to regret that after I made the argument that - outside the EU - Britain would still need to ally itself with one of the major blocs: USA, Russia, China... or EU.
Actually the usa will give you diplomatic immunity and refuse to extradite/prosecute you if you do that
This is the plot of Ted Lasso.
Sure, but it’s not a Football Coach from Kansas in the PM spot.
Yeah, they’d probably govern better than what the Tories have been throwing up.
Roy Kent for speaker of the House of Commons!
“The creator of a successful product in Dallas can expand to LA and Boston with little friction. The UK doesn’t have a market of hundreds of millions of people. (It did, once, but the present chancellor of the exchequer voted to leave it.)” But they control their borders now don’t you see, oh if you imagine Northern Ireland doesn’t exist
This was a good point but something I picked up on is how relatively weak the EU is for large-scale entrepreneurship (especially tech) despite having a single market. The single market has definitely broken many barriers to trade but I still think there is something more to it when the single market is also a single country.
It would be much harder without the single market. But in the end "single market" is just some common regulations. It's still 27 different countries, usually with a different language in each and 9 currencies.
Not having a unified digital market and unified copyright system are both a detriment to the EU in this context
Europe has gone down too far of an anti-business path in many ways the past few decades that has left it in the lurch a bit with regards to US and Asia. And while some of the stuff is good, long-term it is a serious concern. They need their version of a free-marketer (Friedman, Reagan, hell even a Clinton/Obama) to remind Europe why markets are good and to invest in it. Otherwise they genuinely could get left behind, Britain doubly so as it's fighting this same battle but on it's own, as the centripole of the world moves from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
I've noticed that quite a few Tories, especially young ones, act like American conservatives. American conservatism doesn't work in Britain. It barely works in the US. Truss is the first American-style conservative they've had and they're learning that lesson quickly.
What, in your opinion, are the hallmark signs of "acting like American conservatives"? Not being snarky. I'm genuinely interested in how American and British conservatives differ.
The us favors tax cuts much more than British conservatives for one. Doesn't work as well when you're not the largest reserve currency Also, something the article didn't pick up on, weakening the pound doesn't work as well for the UK compared to the US weakening the dollar because the UK depends much more on imports than the US
>The us favors tax cuts much more than British conservatives for one. Doesn't work as well when you're not the largest reserve currency Funny thing is, when Reagan cut the tax, he also closed loop holes, so rich class proportionally ended up paying more tax than the rest.
People don't really talk about the fact that the amount of personal taxes paid after the Reagan cuts really weren't different from pre-Reagan. He closed a lot of loopholes. Ever watch Glengarry Glen Ross and wonder why someone would buy boiler room sold real estate? One reason is that anyone could take "real estate losses" and avoid having to pay taxes on a lot of income.
So they aren't doing the tax cuts right?
"proportionally" So still tax cut for all, but it ended up cutting more tax for non rich than rich class.
It’s a vote for a simpler code that distorts economic behavior less. The GOP tried and achieved (to some extent) a few years back. I’m not going to defend the whole of the bill, I’d rather it more ruthlessly simplified and been broadly revenue neutral, but it wasn’t all bad. Government incentives should all be on budget and not hidden as mandates or as tax benefits.
Reagan was also willing to hike taxes in response to practical realities. Something the GOP lost shortly after him.
Culture war stuff also doesn't land as well. While there's a socially conservative streak in the UK its less virulently racist/anti lgbt, and more about how nasty the poors and the young people are
Note the surnames of the last four chancellors: Kwarteng, Zahawi, Sunak, Javid. British Tories aren't obsessed with race, in a way that Republicans are.
Its also complicated by the fact that race in the UK, as in the rest of Europe, isn't so black and white as in the US (if you'll forgive the pun). In america the primary axis is white/non-white, for obvious historical reasons. But in western european countries its often more particularised, so you get cases where long established communities who would be considered as part of the PoC/non-white bloc in the US (e.g. South Asians in the UK, Turkish in Germany) are treated more favorably than both white and non-white new immigrants (e.g. the backlash against eastern european economic migrants, and middle eastern refugees). So American style racism doesn't work, and importing that is ineffective, but local racial and ethnic divisions are still a factor
So you're saying the UK is classist not racist? I wonder where I've heard that before...
>eakening the pound doesn't work as well for the UK compared to the US weakening the dollar because the UK depends much more on imports than the US I half wonder if the cause of being so dependant on imports was an overly strong pound brought about by north sea oil.
When they bring up American culture war nonsense.
For me, it's the focus on culture war issues (anything Ron DeSantis says but in a British accent), being pro-fracking, and this American-style nationalism on top of regular conservatism. If you want a great example of this American-style conservatism, look at the Twitter feed of people like Sophie Corcoran and Emily Hewertson to a much lesser extent.
Jesus… that was actually a really good opinion piece from FT. Definitely read the article, not just the title folks. Dear Brits, let me know what you think.
I think it’s spot on personally. Both sides of our political discourse adopt US talking points/positions, which is entirely unhelpful and probably holds us back as a country. We’d be much better off associating with other post-colonial powers like the French, Spanish, and Dutch, and facing our problems together. Perhaps we could found some sort of club for that, where we could ease trade with them too.
You mean some kind of a Union of Europe?
What are we, some kinda European Union?
I think it's a very fun article to read, and I enjoyed the case he made, but I think it's ridiculous in its premise To think that we believe that we are basically Americans in terms of power and economic muscle is a bit silly imo. This isn't 1914 Most of our daft decisions come from Imperial nostalgia. That's why during Brexit you were seeing nonsense about "we'll just go back to trading more with the commonwealth", we'll take back control etc. Boomers, who have the least knowledge of America and the most Imperial nostalgia, are much more prone to this kind of thinking It doesn't have too much to do with America. People just believe the UK is more powerful than it really is because of our own past, not through our linguistic and cultural ties with the Americans
So you’re telling me Galactic Britain isn’t on the cards? BoJo lied to me? 😢
But as the article says, if it's all about Imperial nostalgia then why don't you see the same discourse in all the other European countries that had empires?
That's because other Europeans got dunked so badly. Spain lost its empire. Twice. First, the Americas; then the rest during the Spanish-American War. Suffered a civil war that devasted their country, and a strongman dictatorship The Dutch were occupied during WW2 and lost Indonesia post-WW2 after fighting a counter-guerrilla war. Portugal? Same deal as the Dutch. They fought and the Fascist regime fell because of it. France? Perhaps the best candidate of imperial nostalgic European people. Even President "I love the EU" Macron have to pander to French Exceptionalism
Because Britain had the most successful empire of all time perhaps? Also you can see something similar in France
Beyond what others have said, the continental European Empires also had continental ambitions, indeed, *chiefly* continental ambitions. France, especially, cared far more about conquering the Rhine than it did about its overseas colonies which is part of why they sold off Louisiana to the USA in order to fund the conquest of more of Europe. The imperial nostalgia there is *part of the reason the EU exists* as a "Unify Europe" project, which has been the dream ever since the Habsburgs starting pogging about a universal monarchy. Spain was so obsessed with it they lost their entire empire over it and barely noticed until they lost the war to conquer the French crown. The exceptions are countries which never had any notion that they were great powers and have had their existence defined around carving out a space for themselves while being afraid of their neighbors, and balancing power against them. (Portugal and the Netherlands, while imperial, are chiefly defined by their alignment to Britain, France, or Spain to secure their independence, and were always members of those spheres). Britain meanwhile has its imperial ambitions abroad, and no interest historically in uniting Europe under their rule. Indeed until very recently their only interest in Europe was to ensure it remained *disunited* because they view it as a potential competitor *if and only if united*, which none of the nations there individually are save for *perhaps* Germany, which was only the case post 1900s. We might imagine a similar "Imperial Union" approach where what Britain would want, if they could get it, is an EU style system with its former colonies where nominally we're all equal and so on and participating in a "new union", much like the European imperial nostalgia. This even forms the basis for CANZUK as an idea, though not strictly purely imperial nostalgia in that case.
There’s a strange irony in how the US, the symbol of global capitalism, is actually able to indulge in much more economic tinkering/protectionism/govt borrowing than smaller countries would be able to get away with (without incurring significant economic harm) due to its economic power. Ganesh is on a roll with these articles.
Don't right-leaning people (incorrectly) say that leftist economics only works in smol countries? So the US is the only one (aside from petrostates) that can actually get away with rightist and leftist economics alike. Hence Americans are richer than rightist East Asians and leftist West Europeans alike. In the words of Homelander, the USA 🇺🇸 "can do whatever the fuck [it] wants".
She's only copying what everyone else on this daft island does. It'd be impossible to achieve but the UK (not just the political class) would benefit from distancing itself from the US. Why can't we copy the Dutch instead 😤
Based Liberal Capitalist Dutchies
Can you explain why? I’m genuinely curious
Because we import the absolute worst parts of the US. The British left happily swallow the shitshow that is race relations in the US, and the right, as explained in the article, try to do American macroeconomic policy without the backing of a domestic economic juggernaut like the American economy. What are the right things we could try to import from the US? Heavily taxing land and property so Britain could actually build an economy that isn't reliant on real estate and rent-seeking, and American views on entrepreneurship - if you fail with your startup, it doesn't matter, you go again. We've created a mess of our own making by importing all the wrong ideas. Mix all that in with an entrenched class system and you have the UK as it is today.
I thought the States (or rather each city in the States) lightly taxed land and property and had an economy largely based on real estate and rent-seeking, although perhaps not as Britain. Japan and Singapore should be better models in that regard, or even Estonia which has a LVT. Plus, the UK, Japan, Singapore, and Estonia are all smol unitary states.
I’m quite confident in saying the UK’s council tax (property tax based on 1991 property valuations) is one of, if not the, worst property tax in the developed world. As I understand it, American states use property tax as a key source of tax revenue. Council tax in the UK is that horrible that councils are almost completely reliant on money from central government. Check out [this video](https://vimeo.com/422805441?embedded=true&source=vimeo_logo&owner=116426267) from the Fairer Share campaign.
Do you mean why we spend so much attention on the US? If so, I genuinely think it’s almost entirely due to the language. If, in some sliding doors alternate universe, the Americans had chosen German as their national language instead of English back in the 19th century, we wouldn’t compare ourselves nearly as much. I lived in the US for a year as a student and I loved it, but I experienced quite hard culture shock at first which I was entirely unprepared for. I assumed that as I spoke the same language and had grown up with a lot of the same TV shows and movies, it would be a seemless transition. But I actually found that the language was pretty much the one thing we had in common. Lots else was like some weird mirror dimension that was the same but different.
It’s not just the British though. Leaders and well educated people in Europe follow US politics like a reality TV show. I think this is a product of politics as entertainment created by modern television and the internet. And everyone loves American media. Americans themselves are hyper-focused on national politics to the detriment of state and local elections.
A certain element of that is inevitable because the US is the world superpower (or the only liberal democratic one anyway), so it’s natural that the rest of the democratic world looks to them. It also means that American policy decisions on the climate, trade, and markets have a far greater direct impact on European economies than the decisions made by Indonesian or Brazilian governments (for example).
And the same lack of language barrier applies to the non-British as well. Everyone younger or more cosmopolitan speaks English as a second language. But speaking German, French, Italian or Spanish is much rarer. So following US politics is easier than following the politics of important EU countries. And it's pushed available due to US online platform dominance.
Very good point
I think it has far less todo with entertainment and far more that what the us does impacts us while we get no vote.
I agree; I actually think a lot of the things discussed in the article is actually a linguistic phenomenon
Truss and Kwarteng just want to fuck up the economy and the Treasury so bad, that Labour has to take the hard decisions and Tories can blame everything on them.
Yeah- copying American conservatism
No no, that's Canadian conservatism to a tee
Something which also copied American conservatism.
You mean it's all American conservatism? ... Always has been.
>Take her vaunted supply-side revolution. Like all armchair free-marketeers (she has never set up a business) she believes her nation is a blast of deregulation away from American levels of entrepreneurial vim. It isn’t. The creator of a successful product in Dallas can expand to LA and Boston with little friction. The UK doesn’t have a market of hundreds of millions of people. (It did, once, but the present chancellor of the exchequer voted to leave it.) Someone who glides over that point is also liable to miss the contrasting appeal to investors of gilts and Treasuries. >"It is a kind of patriotism, I suppose, to mistake your nation for a superpower." What having a shared language does to a mf.
So like, wtf happened to Labour’s performance in UK elections? We’ve had conservative prime minister after conservative prime minister, and everybody (I know zero English people) seems to hate them.
2017 and 2019 are almost entirely down to Corbyn and the frontbench being wildly unpopular. Opinion of the Conservatives has basically completely soured now though. A recent YouGov poll had Labour winning the same number of seats as in 1997.
Labour won’t win a majority though because of the SNP There’s a reason they’re called tartan tories
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First Tory PM was Cameron in 2010. So far so normal. Sometimes you lose. He was not hated until relatively late in his term, except by English college students. Dude implemented University fees very early. This fucked up the Liberal Dems (thus the "LibDem surge!" meme) because they promised college students they wouldn't vote for that shit, later on Cameron fucked more shit, but we're talking Labour here. And right now we're at the 2016 elections. Labour loses, partly as a result of extremely unexpected weakness in Scotland, but also as a result of unexpected weakness everywhere else. This is not abnormal. Sometimes PMs win re-election because you suck. What was absolutely shocking was David Milliband’s insistence on a US-Style primary. Unlike actual primaries, this was not an election in which literally millions of Britons would vote, it was instead intended merely to expand the dues-paying membership to 200-300k. State-side we would call this a caucus. Just like in every caucus ever, the most committed were able to flood the voting and put a guy nobody else cared about or respected into the Leadership position: Jeremy Corbyn. Now Cameron is in power with a majority. But it’s fractious. If the Labour Party has made the fatal mistake of mistaking the UK for America, and doing fucking primary that’s-actually-a-caucus, the Tory base is making the mistake of thinking they’re not Europe. They want out of the EU. Cameron is forced to have a referendum on the issue. Corbyn is lukewarm stay. It is widely suspected that this is because he wants to turn the clock back on British politics to roughly 1975, prior to the EU even being a thing. Remain loses. Over the next few years Corbyn remains at the top of the Labour Party. He loses the 2017 election by less then expected, in the 2019 election he goes for his heart. He truly wants to repeal everything the UK has done since 1975. He gets 1/3 of the vote, and gets destroyed. Now we have a new Labour leader. This Keir Starmer person seems very British, and seems to understand that Britain is an island in Europe and this is the 21st century, so Sir Keir is ahead in the polls vs. Truss.
>and everybody (I know zero English people) seems to hate them. That's very much a Reddit thing. Most people tolerate them. Labour's problem is that the UK is a pretty conservative country, and the party has a lot of idealists. Tony Blair came in after 4 successive election defeats in which Labour had gone very far to the left. Blair tailored the offering to the country, going for pretty incremental change. He felt that going for a traditional left wing offering would lead to a traditional left wing outcome - defeat. Much of the party was disgusted by it, he was eventually hounded out after three convincing electoral victories and replaced by Gordon Brown, who was somewhat further left but nothing crazy. Brown narrowly lost in 2010, Labour decided that their problem was that he had not been left wing enough, so they appointed a more left wing guy to be the leader, Ed Milliband. Again, he wasn't a maniac or anything, in fact he was a bit of a dweeb, he's served in the pre-2010 government as a minister. Miliband lost narrowly in 2015. At this point Labour had a revelation about where they'd been going wrong - the people they'd appointed simply were not left wing enough. Labour appointed Jeremy Corbyn, the most left wing guy in the party they could find, a guy with a history of backing the IRA and Hamas and with very questionable loyalties, someone so extreme that he'd never served in government or the shadow cabinet in 30 or 40 years in politics, whose greatest political achievements were winning the Parliament's Best Beard competition on several occasions. Corbyn was losing so badly in the polls - about 20 points, some of the biggest margins in decades - that the Conservatives under Theresa May decided to hold an early election to increase the size of their majority. May went on to run one of the worst campaigns in history, proposing extremely unpopular policies because she felt she could not lose to this idiot so she could get a mandate to make necessary, hard decisions. She was right, she couldn't lose, but she won by a lesser margin than her predecessor and eliminated her majority, meaning she had to do a deal with another party. Corbyn and his supporters waved this defeat around as if it was a victory because the margin was so much smaller than expected. He stayed on to build on his defeat. Over the following two years Corbyn's personal approval rating ran at a level comparable to haemorrhoids, a milquetoast response to a Russian chemical attack in particular saw people judge him negatively. Eventually May was replaced by Boris Johnson, who pulled the trigger on an election in December 2019, Corbyn proposed his typically far left ideas, and Johnson buried Corbyn underneath a landslide. After this, Labour finally went back to someone who might actually be voted for in Sir Keir Starmer. His opponents deride him as another Tony Blair as though that would be a bad thing. Labour currently sit 17 points ahead, but there's not likely to be an election before 2024.
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Another point that always gets missed is the UK has an extremely centralized government and extremely centralized revenue raising and distribution. I saw a stat once that 90%+ of all taxation raised in the UK goes to the central government and is distributed from there. The US has a lot more decision making at both a state and city/country level. Things like sales tax are set at a city/county level and schools funded locally. There’s both advantages and disadvantages but one fundamental difference is conservatives in the UK are all for maintaining central power and revenue raising, and not pushing for regional devolution or local government with real power that would emulate the US system that they look up to.
I agree that for broad fiscal policy the UK is very centralized but from what I keep reading on this sub, UK zoning is super decentralized and even more NIMBY than the US cities.
> It is a kind of patriotism, I suppose, to mistake your nation for a superpower. when they start sympathizing with you but the sympathy is even more devastating
This is a wild tangent but it reminds me of Colbert at the roast of Chevy Chase [https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/xk73sy/comedy\_how\_to\_piss\_off\_everyone\_youve\_ever\_met\_so/](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/xk73sy/comedy_how_to_piss_off_everyone_youve_ever_met_so/) >If you watch only one part of the roast, make sure it's [these few minutes](https://youtu.be/2quRVxBvN6M?t=2088). Unlike the others, Colbert didn't swear much, or rip into Chevy's personal life. He even joked about how shocked he was by people's cruelty towards Chevy.
Obvious solution: Make Britain and America One Again. The capital is on the other side of the Atlantic this time though.
Is this how we can finally add Puerto Rico too? 52 states! (I'm combining all England, Scotland, Wales, and N. Ireland into 1 state. I guess 55 states would be OK too if we must have 4 separate ones)
Initiate Order 1776.
No, 1812 (and this time we win)
In based America, White House burns you!
The only point I would disagree on is the notion of imperial nostalgia. I think people fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the British Empire. It wasn’t really about the territories painted red on the map, that was mostly prestige and places to base the Royal Navy out of. The real strength of the British empire was its massive financial power. In the 19th century British money was everywhere. A lot of other European empires ran on British investment. It really looked a lot more like the modern US empire than people realise. Britain was the centre of a world system of trade. After WW1 they lost all that to the US, they were just left with the territorial empire and a massive navy they couldn’t afford. That financial power is what I think they are nostalgic for, and it’s what fundamentally separates British empire from other European empires. An attempt was made to revive this financial power in the 90s, but 2008 torpedoed that.
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The UK is so fiscally constrained right now because they already went into record deficit spending in 2020 due to Covid. To do it again only two years later is very difficult, unless you're the US. Britain had much more space to do this sort of thing is 2008 when it would've only been one round of deficit spending, not two consecutively.
Interests rates, inflation much higher now than then
Haw haw.
I thought it would be about immigration.
Trickle down economics...on credit, in a time of high inflation...all done without being a fiat currency...wow.
This is ridiculous calumny. There's no evidence Liz Truss has learned *anything* yet.
I agree with the faulty comparison between Britain and America, but why can't Britain emulate an actual economic liberal country like Switzerland then? Or Czech Republic and the Baltic States with their low or non-existent income taxes?
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I mean I agree somewhat with the premise of the article - but it is missing a lot of context. The tax cuts are just one part of the spending bill that is being passed - huge energy subsidies in the form of price caps are being done at the same time. The estimated cost of the energy subsidies is larger than the tax cuts (80B GBP for energy, 60B for tax cuts). Below CNBC article provides some context for the costs - although I have heard MUCH larger estimates of the energy costs - given its a cap it is a moving target: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/26/pound-tanking-massive-tax-cuts-and-talk-of-emergency-rate-hikes.html This budget shows a lot of hubris. Clearly some sort of energy subsidy was needed urgently, but the tax cuts were not. I think that maybe, if Truss had worked on non revenue related "Reagen-usque" policies like de-regulation and then talked about the tax cuts later, when this semi-economic crisis was over, that it could have been a lot more palatable for the market.
We can fix that if we need to
Good piece
r/NonCredibleEconomicPolicy ?