With a POD of 1957, have Britain be more economically developed, its postwar development far better than IOTL
With a POD of 1957, have Britain be more economically developed, its postwar development far better than IOTL
One way, just have the UK get lucky and discover the North Sea oil fields about ten years earlier.
With a POD of 1957, have Britain be more economically developed, its postwar development far better than IOTL
I'm a Keynesian. You don't have to be, but perhaps you should.
One smart way is to build Keynesian features into the system, for example, through progressive income rates.
So, as the economy heats up, people get more income and move into higher rates, and that serves to cool and moderate an overheated economy.
And on the flip side during a recession, people's income fall and they find themselves in lower tax rates, and this additional spendable income serves to give a much needed shot in the arm to the economy.
*****
This idea of built in features I got from the book The Instant Economist by Timothy Taylor.
Alright, so a more valuable Pound Sterling made British exports more expensive. Yes, very much something to this, and then we'd need to run the numbers.But there is an argument that North Sea oil did more harm than good to the British economy.
That is, it turned Sterling into a petro currency and the high exchange rates in 1980-81 did more damage to British industry in than the global recession and Mrs Thatcher's economic policies put together.
Well with two of the best universities in the world and an active defense industry, I cant think of why they couldnt have built a tech ecosystem to compete with Silicon Valley or a booming pharma/biotech industry.
The big industry that was ruined since 1957 is the British aviation industry, dispute the MoD being a major aircraft customer and Britain having a couple of major airlines. If the 1957 Defence White Paper hadn't declared manned aircraft obsolete then Britain could have developed a new generation of military aircraft and with strong government support and a robust military market to leverage from the airlines could have supported a new generation of airliners. A strong aviation industry has all sorts of sub industries such as electronics and engineering, so could help perk the British economy up.
With a POD of 1957, have Britain be more economically developed, its postwar development far better than IOTL
Alright, so a more valuable Pound Sterling made British exports more expensive. Yes, very much something to this, and then we'd need to run the numbers.
Ideally, like to see graph of Pound Sterling as compared to market basket of major other currencies, and graph of British exports as percent of British GDP?
Dear god, yes. The Marshall Plan was the biggest missed opportunity in this country ever. All too often manufacturing companies ate the seed corn instead of using the money to revamp their machinery. I remember that the Financial Times was still using printing presses from before the First World War in its old HQ, Bracken House, in the 1970’s.
Kill the unions and be done with it.