We don't talk enough about how Scotland went from having lower wages/productivity than the UK average to being second only to the South East and London on both
Japanization of the American centre left
A handful of counties have literally 0 car free households in the 2024 5-Year ACS
The counties with highest proportion of car free households in the US are all major cities, remote parts of Alaska, or predominantly Amish
Congrats!
Peak rent un-affordability being 2016 makes more sense in light of the trends in supply
London had the highest number of dwellings per 1,000 residents of all regions in Great Britain in 1990, but 25 years of population growth and slow building reduced it to a distant last by 2015.
Numbeo's crowdsourced cost of living indices line up surprisingly well with ICP and OECD PPP benchmarks
Every time I have had to move in the last 3 years, rental inflation in the meantime has meant that I have to settle for something worse than I thought I could attain at that budget the previous time and I sincerely regret not getting a tech job when I finished undergrad in 2021
I initially thought it was ridiculous to predict Poland overtaking the UK on GDP by 2030, but a simple state space model fit on quarterly GDP per capita data from the OECD puts the chances at almost 1 in 3.
'Across all OECD countries, single homeowners who have just lost their jobs retain 55% of their previous in-work incomes on average, falling to 22% if they are still unemployed after five years. In the UK, the “replacement rate” is just 12 per cent in both cases.' 👀 @sarahoconnorft.ft.com
Scotland's wages are also as high as South East England while having rents ~25% lower than the UK as a whole so I think it's kind of underrated
bsky.app/profile/jwha...
Scotland seems to do a lot more house building relative to population since the 1990s
If the data are comparable, then that would put Scotland closer to the blue "developed European countries" group than the red "Anglophone countries" group in @jburnmurdoch.ft.com's chart from a couple years ago
TIL Scotland has 12% more dwellings per capita than England
and then they were bragging about the "biggest positive score ever" from the OBR on planning reform when the impact was like 1/20th the size of their estimate of the cost of leaving the single market + customs union
It's not reflected in the OBR forecasts yet, but if they just left the immigration system as they inherited it from the Tories then net migration would have fallen back to ~300k a year and they'd get a couple £10s of billions from it
I didn't get into it in the blog post, but one of the things that is the most frustrating to me about how they are acting is that they are leaving a bunch of actual "hard choices" that would give them a bunch more money by 2029 on the table
That stuff is weird, but Labour already does stuff like using pictures of Tories meeting with Modi for campaign material so I don't think it's completely out of the ordinary. (I also just don't care; I was so happy to see Labour lose to someone on their left it didn't matter to me how it happened)
Yeah everything I've heard from Polanski about how to fund the extra public spending boils down to (1) wealth tax and (2) MMT-adjacent "we can borrow as much as we want until inflation becomes a constraint" (which, lol)
Another fun angle is the annual wage percentile needed to be able to afford the rent on a one bedroom flat using the 30% of gross income rule. More than 90% of full-time employees can afford that in the North East and Yorkshire; only 30% can in London
Adjusted for the cost of living, purchasing power for the median Scot is basically the same as the median Londoner. Probably even higher if you rent privately and therefore spend more of your income on housing
Hearne and Bailey (2025) doi.org/10.1080/2168... estimated regional price levels including housing for the UK and put London 23% higher than the national average, but if you have a higher expenditure share on housing then it's even more. 1/3 rent, 2/3 everything else would be 28% higher
The London wage premium is only 27% for the median employee now (45% for the mean), but rents are 68% higher than the national average.
I keep thinking rental affordability couldn't possibly be any worse in London, but the data shows it was somehow much worse from 2014 to 2020
We're running out of sky.
If Saudi or Azerbaijan airspace shuts, Europe will be cut off from Asia.
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which then shows up in incredibly vague '5 missions', '6 milestones', "change" + a very policy light manifesto and then lots of floundering and u-turns once actually in power
Tbh I think talking about toy growth models kind of misses the point. They also don't seem to have thought deeply about what they want to achieve, what concrete policy changes will take to achieve it, and what kind of coalition they can build to support it
@lappypercival.bsky.social @maxwelch-pls.bsky.social keen to hear your thoughts on this (hopefully it's not too self-indulgent)
I decided to do a soft reset on my Substack. The first new post is reflections on @adamprz.bsky.social's lecture at the LSE from a few years ago about the future of social democracy and how it connects to Labour's two years in government. Please do give it a read! open.substack.com/pub/johnhand...
