There is also the optimistic gloss on this. At least 10,000 people have had this idea. It would make money. And yet no one has done it. There are a lot of opportunities available for those who wish to put in the enormous amounts of work necessary to capitalise on them.
Alternatively, 10,000 people had this idea, tried to build it and then discovered that it's hard to get a matchmaking service off the ground if users' first experience is that there's hardly anyone else on there (as compared to incumbents' endless pool of profiles to swipe through) and then they leave. https://www.reddit.com/r/OkCupid/comments/18jdgzc/comment/kd... Just one of many OkCupid alternatives with this problem.
School is not a place for being creative or productive. It prepares students for tests that they will eventually use to either get a job or go to university. In those places some people will make something people want (be productive) or have the opportunity to do something new (be creative).
This sounds like a dismissal based on a personal anecdote, rather than knowledge of what can be (and increasingly is!) done in a school. Many working in education have encouraged more interactive and project-based learning, such as PLTW[1] in STEM, and others[2] in other areas. Of course, it turns out that designing that while also teaching 6-8 classes a day to a couple hundred students is rather challenging.
I wouldn't disagree that school isn't a place for being productive, if productivity is defined as "making something people want." By that definition all learning is unproductive.
[2] For maths, reference the works of Jo Boaler, Peter Liljedahl, etc.; most standards I have seen in social studies in recent years have inquiry as a key component, and I know several teachers who make use of projects there; there is often agency in choosing projects in art, particularly in upper grades; and so on.
> Seems pretty reasonable actually. Final reports contain -everything- and I really do mean everything.
No it doesn’t. It’s an outrage and a powerful argument against the entire system that produced it. There is no sane way that spending more money on stakeholder consultation for a comparable tunnel than Norway spent on building one can be defended.
British GDP per capita has been flat since 2008 while the US’ has gone from $49K to $81K. The UK has declined in relative terms compared to what used to be a near peer.
It may also be true that there's a national decline, I'm just saying to be very cautious about getting swept up in the idea. For instance, apparently America needs to be Made Great Again, facts notwithstanding.
Real GDP per capita has been flat since 2008 while official population figures show population has increased by 10m. Total failure to grow the economy in 14 years of Tory rule and Labour aren’t exactly showing signs of having ideas to grow either.
The Indian Civil Service was always tiny. There were so few British in India that in 1950 when the Indian government surveyed the populace to try and see if they knew the British had left they discovered the average Indian wasn’t aware there had ever been a British Empire. The British Empire in India and the British Army in India at all but the most rarefied levels were staffed by Indians and there weren’t even that many of them.
> At the time of the partition of India and departure of the British, in 1947, the Indian Civil Service was divided between the new Dominions of India and Pakistan. The part which went to India was named the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), while the part that went to Pakistan was named the "Civil Service of Pakistan" (CSP). In 1947, there were 980 ICS officers. 468 were Europeans, 352 Hindus, 101 Muslims, two depressed classes/Scheduled Castes, five domiciled Europeans and Anglo-Indians, 25 Indian Christians, 13 Parsis, 10 Sikhs and four other communities.
I’m not British, I’m just not ignorant of Indian history. At partition the entire British population of India was about 100,000 including the army, civil service, civilians and family of same.
Even if you round up to 1,000 the number of ICS officers and dectuple to 10,000 you get a trivial number of returnees to the UK. The British Army in India returning would have had nugatory impact considering the British had just fought WW2.
Leaving India was bad for the British upper classes because there were fewer jobs as officers that would keep a man in the store to which he had become accustomed on salary in the army. The ICS was less important than that in terms of numbers and its peak social impact was as an inspiration for the British civil service. The ICS is the only organisation in British India that might plausibly have had a large impact on the culture of the British civil service and it was too small to have had an impact by numbers alone as you originally posited.
> Even if you round up to 1,000 the number of ICS officers and dectuple to 10,000 you get a trivial number of returnees to the UK.
Why are we obsessed with restricting discussion to ICS? The bureaucracy is not just that, but extends throughout the entire service sector these people rely on, such as banking, schooling, transportation, manufacturing management and so on.
There is real denial going on here as to the extent of what happened.
> Why are we obsessed with restricting discussion to ICS? The bureaucracy is not just that, but extends throughout the entire service sector these people rely on, such as banking, schooling, transportation, manufacturing management and
There is no plausible mechanism by which these people could have effected a radical change in the general British culture or the culture of the British civil service. The culture of the British in India was an expatriate one, not one of colonial settlement or intermarriage (certainly not after 1900).
They weren’t different enough from the British population to have any noticeable effect even though in class composition the civilian element was elevated in education and social class compared to the general population.
The pied noirs in Algeria were settlers and they were distinctly different in terms of ethnic composition, being disproportionately Spanish, Maltese and Italian in ancestry compared to French from l’Hexagone and it’s still a matter of debate if their descendants are noticeably different from other French. The British in India were just that. Not a lot more culturally influential in the home country than the British in the UAE. As of 2015 there were A quarter of the million Britons in the UAE. That’s more than twice as many people from Britain in a petrostate then were ever in India.
> There is no plausible mechanism by which these people could have effected a radical change in the general British culture or the culture of the British civil service.
These people were somehow capable of running India and yet at the same time could not cause a change in the UK if they returned en masse?
> They weren’t different enough from the British population to have any noticeable effect
You have a very odd view of life in the UK if you believe this.
>> They weren’t different enough from the British population to have any noticeable effect
>You have a very odd view of life in the UK if you believe this.
If all 250,000 Britons in the UAE returned to the UK in the next three months I would expect it to have no noticeable effect a year from now. By the same token I wouldn’t expect much from 100,000 Brits moving from India to the UK in 1947. West Indian migration starting in the 1960s or Ugandan Indians in the 1970s are movements of people who are genuinely different in important ways.
Those had no great effect on the civil service culture either.
> If all 250,000 Britons in the UAE returned to the UK in the next three months I would expect it to have no noticeable effect a year from now.
Those 250k Britons in the UAE are not state supported colonists, and so do not have the attitudes and culture of state supported colonists.
Edit: specifically the colonial attitude that the inhabitants of a colony exist as a natural resource to be exploited purely for the benefit of the colonists. This is now the attitude that exists throughout the UK state towards the inhabitants of the UK.
The French are richer than the British. They have more stuff and a higher quality of life. It would be good for more British people to have more stuff and a higher quality of life. Building more housing allows both for more people to afford a (better quality of) primary residence, and for more people to have a holiday home. Those are all good. Focussing on utilisation is Green Party, NIMBY, degrowth, pro-poverty thinking. It sees a fixed pie and thinks how to distribute it instead of trying to make everything better for everyone.
More housing. A holiday home should be an utterly normal thing for a middle class family like in Finland or Spain.
Agreed. Thankfully we know what it takes to make housing a crappy investment vehicle. Build more housing. Build so much housing that returns on capital invested are flat, live Tokyo since 2000, or negative, like Seattle over the last five years.
Make building housing legal again.
Also. Renters deserve housing too. Restricting housing to the owner occupied is a great way to hate things by social class but I see no reason to further favour a population that’s richer and more powerful than the rest of the population already.
Greed, combined with a housing shortage, and the housebuilding that is going on being poorly planned (no new infrastructure, as many homes crammed onto small patches of land as possible, usually designed around car ownership but without space for the cars, etc) and focused on maximum profit.
There are more 2nd homes in France because rural housing is relatively cheap and there are lots of land. However the way the employment market works in France has screwed the younger people, I think. It's easy to stay in a job once you have one but hard to get started as a younger person. If I had to guess, France, Italy, Spain etc are in way more decline than the UK as a whole and Germany is spending hard to prop up a lot of the EU.
That's not true. In France you pay both taxe foncière (on any and all property you own) and taxe d'habitation (unless you're renting it for the whole year) on second(and more) homes you own. With some exceptions like newbuilds, newly renovated for better insulation, in very rural places, etc.
Regarding housing (and land ownership) specifically, France is over twice the size of the UK with a similar population. So there are underlying constraints that cannot easily be papered over with policy.
What an ugly, impoverished view of the world. Someone sees that the UK is poorer than it would be if economic policy wasn’t a disaster and wants to publicise that so it can be improved and tens of millions of people’s lives improved and you’re looking for an “angle”.
No one owns it so there’s no team of well paid professionals trying to make it grow.