Rand

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The care worker pay premium collapsing can also be traced back to the Tory obsession with hiking the minimum wage to record high levels, faster than productivity growth. Why work a much harder job when the pay premium for an easier job has collapsed by fiat? From the FT today:

I often see Americans deny that, keeping income constant, Europeans enjoy a higher quality of life and to be honest that's just baffling to me. Where exactly you draw the line between GDP per capita and quality of life is ultimately subjective, but if you don't think that being able to have drinks in a place like this after work is worth having a lower GDP per capita to some extent and that it's just cope, I really don't know what to tell you. I'm not even saying that Europeans have made a conscious choice to draw the line where they have, neither have Americans for that matter, since that's largely the result of a series of historical accidents. Thus, when I say that we enjoy a higher quality of life, there is no implication that we have any merit for it. But the idea that it's not true seems completely demented to me unless you have a narrowly materialistic outlook on life, which again I find kind of sad.

This is bleak. Not a single new home was started in two-thirds of London's 33 boroughs. We need an urgent rewrite of the London Plan.

Here's a map of the the median individual income after taxes and transfers for some European countries, adjusted for cost of living, in euros. Remember this is everyone, including the elderly. Not just full-time workers. Also, the UK is starting to fall noticeably behind France