[Nigredo]

https://www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/local-co ... ze-8747468

Loosely related but if London is overburdened with workers, maybe it's time to redistribute employment to other parts of the country?

[Bones McCoy]

Is he a troll appointment?

Pob knows trolls.

[Abernathy]

Did I ever mention my pet theory that the “Levelling up” con-trick was at least in part a grossly inadequate stab at trying to paper over the cracks of yet another key bit of Brexit damage, specifically the brilliant work that used to be done courtesy of the European Regional Development Fund, now gone forever thanks to the Brexit con-trick.

An example is the development of the Heads of the Valleys road in South Wales. If you go there, you’ll see an impressive and extensive new dual carriageway route , in particular the section from Abergavenny to the Vale of Neath, which poignantly still has signage acknowledging the facility’s funding by the European Regional Development Fund, complete with blue & yellow EU flags. The whole thing still isn’t complete. What can be said for certain is that there’ll be no more money for it coming from the European Union. I’m not at all sure that Levelling Up will fill the funding gap.

[Andy McDandy]

Levelling up will be at best a few brownfield sites turned into shopping malls, a bit of glamour for the proles in the sticks.

[davidjay]

As Jess Phillips put it - levelling up means building a leisure centre in Stoke. And levelling up transport means putting a bus stop outside the leisure centre.

[satnav]

I think all the political parties should be honest about levelling up and accept that levelling up will not be achieved in the lifetime of a parliament and can usually take between 15 and 20years. When I was a young child our family was fairly poor because my dad had a low paid job and my mum was at home with three young kids. Things only started to improve when my mum went off to college and trained to be a teacher. I think I was eight when she got her first teaching job and it was probably around 10 years after that before we moved to a bigger house and my parents started going on foreign holidays.

As a result of my mum going to college my older brother, me and my younger sister all went to university and now all our kids have either graduated or still going through university.

[Andy McDandy]

I can't think of a single country where institutions, services, opportunities and general quality of life are even, or evenly distributed throughout the land. Some places are better than others for it, for sure. But it's a pipe dream, if not a con.

[Watchman]

I understand your point Mr McDandy, however I do feel that what should have been “even distribution” has been corrupted, for want of a better word, by ideologies, set in motion by Thatcher, and continued to be espoused by the Tory party ever since

[Yug]

I read in the Grauniad a while ago that the UN are considering downgrading the USA from "rich nation" status to "poor nation with rich people living in it". We needn't point and laugh at the Yanks, because the UK is in danger of being downgraded in the same way. This will place us on a par with what used to be referred to as"third-world" countries.

It couldn't happen without a Tory government.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The US is a wealthy nation if you look at median incomes, which have done much better than Europe for quite a while. Unfortunately it’s a rich nation which can’t be bothered with the very serious social problems it has, which to me is worse.

[Yug]

The UN classification isn't just based on average wages, It takes into account the way the wealth is distributed, public service provision and overall quality of life for the majority of inhabitants . By their reckoning, the USA is sliding rapidly towards "poor country with rich people in it", and the UK isn't far behind. There might be a lot of money in these countries, but the majority of the population have little or no access to it.

[Spoonman]

Perhaps the Gini coefficient is one way to look at it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... e_equality

Certainly the US does not come out of it too well compared to most other OECD nations, and the UK too against most of its European neighbours. The 2019 map in the first link however looks very suspicious, as it seems to suggest inequality has risen in Sweden, Norway & Germany by a shocking amount.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The UN classification isn't just based on average wages, It takes into account the way the wealth is distributed, public service provision and overall quality of life for the majority of inhabitants . By their reckoning, the USA is sliding rapidly towards "poor country with rich people in it", and the UK isn't far behind. There might be a lot of money in these countries, but the majority of the population have little or no access to it.

Median wages do take into account distribution though. They're the middle ranking wage if you list them highest to lowest, or vice versa.

But I actually prefer household medians, as here.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tab ... 15&rid=249

The poorest state, Mississippi, in 2021 was about $46,000 dollars. That's not all that much, but bear in mind it buy a fair bit more there than it would here. But obviously there are lots of households in Mississippi way below that, and if Mississippi were a country, it would be difficult to imagine it being able to afford to solve its social problems. So states like Mississippi, basically the rest of the deep South plus West Virginia could be seen as poor places with some richer people in it.

But I don't think it makes much sense to say that's true of the US as a whole, perhaps not even the South as a whole which has the richer and much more populous) Texas in it) It's much better, I think, to say the US is a rich country that undertaxes itself and has little interest in solving its social problems.

[Bones McCoy]

The UN classification isn't just based on average wages, It takes into account the way the wealth is distributed, public service provision and overall quality of life for the majority of inhabitants . By their reckoning, the USA is sliding rapidly towards "poor country with rich people in it", and the UK isn't far behind. There might be a lot of money in these countries, but the majority of the population have little or no access to it.

Median wages do take into account distribution though. They're the middle ranking wage if you list them highest to lowest, or vice versa.

But I actually prefer household medians, as here.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tab ... 15&rid=249

The poorest state, Mississippi, in 2021 was about $46,000 dollars. That's not all that much, but bear in mind it buy a fair bit more there than it would here. But obviously there are lots of households in Mississippi way below that, and if Mississippi were a country, it would be difficult to imagine it being able to afford to solve its social problems. So states like Mississippi, basically the rest of the deep South plus West Virginia could be seen as poor places with some richer people in it.

But I don't think it makes much sense to say that's true of the US as a whole, perhaps not even the South as a whole which has the richer and much more populous) Texas in it) It's much better, I think, to say the US is a rich country that undertaxes itself and has little interest in solving its social problems.

£46,000 sounds pretty good, a bit over £40,000 here, and who wouldn't want that.

But then your child develops tonsilitis, or need some other routine surgery, and you're $20,000 down.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Yeah, but the US can well afford to fix that situation. In fact the Mississippi governor/ legislature could make it a fair bit better by expanding Medicaid.

I might be overdoing the semantics, but the US is a country where lots of people get an unnecessarily shit deal seems to me a lot different to "poor country with some rich people".

[Tubby Isaacs]

Can we combine the two levelling up threads, maybe?

[Abernathy]

Yep, sorry for creating a new one - I didn’t spot this one.Even though I see that I’ve already contributed to it.