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Bob c's avatar

This article reminds me of the book "the moral consequences of growth" by Ben Friedman. Its thesis is that when growth stops societies become harder crueler (and crazier ) as people start to scramble for piece of the stagnant economic pie. The silent economic collapse of Britain described in this piece helps me understand how what I have always thought of as a fundamentally sensible people have turned into a morass of political nut cases

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Kouros's avatar

I was lucky to have for quite a few years the opportunity to work with David Godfrey, the British physicist that discovered the hexagonal big spot on Saturn's North Pole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn%27s_hexagon). He did his PhD in the meteorology of Saturn. However, when I met him, he didn't work in the field any longer.

But one of the reasons why he emigrated to Canada, besides family ones (maybe that was an opportunity), was the appalling stratification of British society, stratification that had no base on merit. (he did work for some years for the Home Office on the Statistics realm) but seem to rely entirely of the ability of turds from certain gene pools to come floating on top.

That, and the destruction of the Grammar Schools in Britain, which Godfrey said were able to give a nobody like him an opportunity and a solid education (solid enough to make astrophysical discoveries and study Saturn meteorology).

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