By the way, if you really want to read how badly the UK is doing, read the two-page essay in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books. The lede:
When we returned to London in 2015, after twelve years in the US, we could not get our son into the local elementary school.
His class in Hackney, the neighborhood where we live, had the maximum of thirty kids in it, and none were leaving. Pretty much all the nonreligious schools in the area were at full capacity, too. He ended up getting a spot at a school two miles away.
When our daughter started kindergarten a couple of years later, her class was also capped at thirty, and full. Today her class has just fifteen kids in it. Next year the school—located, apparently without irony, on the borough’s first “21st Century Street,” with dedicated green space, bicycle parking, electric vehicle charging, and 40 percent “tree canopy cover”—will close. (It is merging with another undersubscribed school across the main road.) So will more than ninety across the country.
Low birth rates and Brexit-induced emigration have forced these changes.
On average, elementary school classes in England are at 88 percent capacity, but in some areas, including my fashionable but still quite poor quarter, the rate is far lower. Not only are the schools shrinking and shutting down—the kids who go to them are getting smaller. After more than a decade of austerity, British five-year-olds are a full centimeter shorter now than they were in 2010, and they are becoming significantly shorter than children in other countries.
I can’t help recalling what Kristian Jensen, the Danish finance minister, said in 2017, not long after the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU: “There are two kinds of European nations. There are small nations and there are countries that have not yet realized they are small nations.”
But this is the zinger:
Britain’s decline is relative, of course (its economy remains the sixth largest in the world), but it is real (it was fifth until the end of 2021, when India, its erstwhile colony, overtook it). Decades ago this diminishment was understood to be gradual and generational. After the Suez Crisis in 1956, there was an attempt to retreat to this smaller position in an orderly manner.
I’m fifty-five, and my generation’s parents grew up in a virtually monoracial country, reliant on heavy industry, with the globe colored pink to mark British territories. I was raised to learn the metric system, the names of new countries—Zimbabwe, Benin, Burkina Faso—in a nation that saw itself as the stable conduit between Europe and America, with postcolonial ties across the globe.
My children’s cohort has adjusted to an economy in which Indian restaurants employ more people than steel, coal, and shipbuilding all put together, and membership in the EU is a fact of history
I remember our four years in Boston, meeting many, many foreign students studying at Harvard or MIT, and dreading having to go back to their home countries. Perhaps one exception: the family we met from Finland.
********************************
Growth
By The Economist, of all things. Link here.
I could be wrong, but it certainly looks like things have picked up nicely since the election of 2021.
And the Fed is yet to make that first cut.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.