Interesting Links for 23-11-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Nigel Farage Has Praised Keir Starmer's Speech On Immigration

(tags:immigration labour UKIP OhForFucksSake )

2. The Return of James Cameron, Box Office King (and his movie, that will almost certainly not make a profit)

(tags:movies jamescameron space )

3. Red panda eating grapes is terribly cute

(tags:cute panda video )

4. Tesla builds Europe's largest battery near Dogger Bank offshore wind power landfall

(tags:batteries UK windpower Tesla )

5. God of War: Ragnarok contains a tribute to the real life love, and death, of one of their developers

(tags:death love games )

6. The Scottish government cannot hold an independence referendum without UK government's consent, the Supreme Court has ruled

(tags:scotland independence uk law )

7. More relaxed immigration policies could win over UK swing voters

(tags:immigration uk polls GoodNews )

8. Meta researchers create AI that masters Diplomacy, tricking human players

(tags:games diplomacy ai )

9. Brain structure changes during pregnancy, returning to its original state a year after birth

(tags:brain pregnancy )

10. Studies on "good" cholesterol only included white participants, the results don't seem to hold more generally

(tags:race research health heart )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

The Labour Party's immigration policy conundrum is interesting.

There's definately an economic case that the UK (more accurately UK firms) has relied on being able to bus in cheap labour from e.g Eastern Europe and then at a micro-level consistently not invested in improving the UK labour force's productivity - so GDP has grown (or remained flat) and wages have not grown as fast (or fallen).

I'm not sure that that is primarily an immigration policy issue. I think you would "solve" immigration by improving UK productivity so that employment goes down relatively but wages go up.

[andrewducker]

Looking at figure 8 here it looks like the biggest areas for migrant workers are health, retail, and education. Can we make the people in those areas significantly more productive?

I have to admit to a ton of ignorance in this area - are our people really less effective than in other countries, or is the arrangement of our businesses such that it makes more sense for employers to be very effective in some areas to the detriment of others, in a structural way?

[danieldwilliam]

Those area, in particular health and retail, are areas often affected by Baumauls Cost Disease - which is where wages in a service area of the econonomy increase even though productivity is not improving because people employed in that sector *could* get better pay by changing jobs. For example what we're seeing with care home workers and nursery nurses leaving their jobs and becoming Amazon pick and packers.

You could make health more productive by improving the medical outcomes - same number of doctors, nurses and support staff but more people survive surgery. You can improve the productivity of retail by improving the value of what is retailed.

Not sure what is going on with education, whether that includes nursery age eduction where pay is low or the other end of the scale hiring prestigious professors from abroad.

I have to admit to a ton of ignorance in this area - are our people really less effective than in other countries, or is the arrangement of our businesses such that it makes more sense for employers to be very effective in some areas to the detriment of others, in a structural way?

Bit of both I think. Britain is very very good at some things. Banking, *designing* manufactured goods, Arts and Entertainment come to mind. I think part of it is structural, we don't build houses and railway lines and we under invest in education generally and early years specifically. Part of it is a micro-economic habit of UK businesses - why invest in a fancy new robot harvesting machine when you can hire Romania twenty-year olds for minimum wage. Some will be sectoral.

[doubtingmichael]

On 10: given human ethnic groups have huge genetic overlap, one of the implications is that "good" cholesterol will only be beneficial for a certain fraction of white people - enough to generate a real statistical difference, but not universal. So I suppose the next step is to try to find an informative genetic marker, and then maybe even look at what it does.

[melchar]

Reading the GoW:Ragnarok story about the Eternal Campfire made me cry happy tears.