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diordiderot 14 days ago

> lowest rate of investment

High costs of

1. Energy 2. Transport 3. Housing

Are the cause of low private and public investment.

The author treats the lack of public productivity growth as separate from the lack of public investment but the latter causes the former

Excellent piece about it here.

https://ukfoundations.co/

TLDR: "it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere. This prevents investment, increases energy costs, and makes it harder for productive economic clusters to expand. This, in turn, lowers our productivity, incomes, and tax revenues."

Housing is probably the biggest culprit. More on that here.

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...

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pjc50 14 days ago | parent | next [-]

Funny, because the high costs of energy and transport are .. due to lack of investment. A vicious circle.

Blocking green energy investment is the biggest area of frustration. You cannot demand to never see a pylon and then turn round and complain about your electricity bills. The press/public are fundamentally unserious about this. I got mildly radicalized when I read that someone was trying to block an offshore connection using the presence of "grade 2 listed concrete anti-tank cubes" on the beach.

Edit: example of listed cubes https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1...

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arp242 14 days ago | parent | next [-]

IMO the way Britain deals with listed buildings is excessively over-protective in general; sometimes it seems like every other building is a listed building. That alone wouldn't be so bad, but the number of restrictions that are placed are then often too much: preventing things like double glazing or other common sense modern improvements.

I'm not against protecting historical heritage, of course, but society should serve the people currently living there. Just because something is over a few decades old doesn't mean it's worth bending over backwards to protect 100% intact without any changes. Would it really be so bad if a building from 1910 gets some double glazing, changing the appearance slightly? I'd say it's not.

	▲	pjc50 14 days ago \| parent [-]
		My pet crank proposal for this would be that listed buildings should require somebody from the public to pay to keep them on the list. Nowhere near the full cost, something in the region of £100. Add a crowdfunding frontend. Put the sponsor's name on the website next to the building. Have a little thing promoting all the unsponsored buildings. Run a lottery which pays back some of the collected fees to privately-held listed building owners to help pay for upkeep. But if nobody cares enough to reach into their pocket and spend the equivalent of a mildly expensive restaurant dinner on keeping this building listed? Maybe it's not actually important or significant at all. Fewer, better-maintained historic buildings, rather than just having them with the owner quietly waiting for them to burn down so something useful can be built.

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diordiderot 14 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Beyond parody

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HPsquared 14 days ago | parent | prev [-]

These high costs are attractive to investors in those fields though. The question is, WHY is there still a lack of investment despite those attractive high returns?