I remember working in a deli/cafe in an affluent area. When I started, I really wanted to show my work ethic despite working minimum wage. Then I was put on the closing shift, which included a lot of clean up after closing. After my first closing shift, I noted with my employer that I put in an hour of over time to clean the kitchen but his reponce was "you have set hours and we don't pay overtime". I thought this was rubish reasoning, but though once I got the cleaning routine down I'd be able to finish before my work hours. Nope. In order to clean everything properly, the deli serfaces, wrap the food, clean the coffee machine, hover, mop etc, without cutting corners, I'd have to put in a minimum half-hour of overtime. 4 times a week thats 2 hours of free labour I was doing. 8 hours a month. A whole shift of unpaid labour. Boss didn't give a shit. Pretty shitty but I thought I'd power through. Show the right attitude. After 6 months of this I decided to ask my boss for a raise. Id been there about a year total and explained to my employer that with the aforementioned overtime that I thought my worth was more than what I was being paid. I was refused with a stupid response like "well thats the payment for someone in your position and its not fair on your co-workers blah blah blah". All my coworkers thought this was unfair. Then, the boss decided to open a second location, one town over. And every single regular customer that came in was congratulating him on the new opening and his response was "Yea this place is doing so well that I thought it was time to expand the business". I remember over pressing the coffee grounds in frustration when he said that. We busted our ass keeping the place to a high standard for the lowest wage that he could legally pay us and all so that he could hirer more minimum wage workers to make his more profit, no raise for us. After that, I really didn't give a shit anymore. I did the bare minimum of my job description and went at a more relaxed pace, not slow or unprofessional, just exactly the pace that was asked of me. The boss QUICKLY noticed ask asked why I wasn't as efficient anymore. I explained that I felt no incentive to be as productive as I was before and poninted out that while I wasn't AS efficient I was still meeting my essential requirements for the job. The boss was pissed but I realised that the way he felt about me didn't really matter in the end. After a few more months of this I asked for a nother raise and once again the boss hand-waived it away with "its not fair on anyone else blah blah blah". I handed in my 2 weeks' notice there on the spot. This was before the term "quite quitting" was coined, but talking to my friends and coworkers, Im confident that its been common since the 2008 crash. We feel no incentive to go above and beyond since we know that all we're doing is enriching other people and getting the bare minimum in return. You want more efficient workers? Start properly incentivising them.

The UK is starting to look a lot like Italy :D . Low productivity, high regional inequality, low level of politicians and political instability.

Consistency and predictability are also hugely important. There are bolts of lightning that have stayed in place longer than economic policies in this country.

In light of the ongoing global economic crisis, it is crucial for everyone to prioritize investing in diverse sources of income that are not reliant on the government. This includes exploring opportunities in stocks, gold, silver, and digital currencies. Despite the challenging economic situation, it remains a favorable time to consider these investments.

Tbh the main reason imo for low productivity is the obsession with property. It’s become a commodity and investors know they can get better returns through it compared to other sectors with little effort. To solve this the govt need to disincentivize it whether it be through policies such as LVT to stop speculation. However we know it’s not in MPs interest to do this as many are landlords.

I wonder if the poor productivity is linked to casualisation of the workforce, with more people on short-term or zero-hours contracts. Corporate knowledge has been lost, with companies relying on people magically knowing what to do and how to do it.

This focus on regional inequality only makes me even more angry that HS2 phases 2 and beyond are being cancelled. The UK had the opportunity to provide the backbone for wider economic development and they junked it in favor of "cost savings."

Certainly! I understand that living expenses and taxes can take up a significant portion of one's income in the UK, which can limit how far that income can go. Even 100k doesn't get you very far and the dream of retiring early is starting to seem like a fairy tale. I have roughly $200,000 in 401(k) that I need to grow quickly. Please leave a comment if you can help.

Now all we have to do is figure out how to get TLDR elected into Parliament.

It's quite rare to come across a video actually providing solutions, instead of constantly commenting on the issues. Thank you!

Moral is a big factor too, with house prices unreachable in areas, and markets saturated there is really no reason to do anything more than a 9-5 doing as little as possible. its especially rife in the public sector, the harder you work the more you get put on and no reward in any form. no reason to care when there's no carrot or stick.

Amazing what a decade of austerity does to a country. Basically shooting ourselves in the foot over and over again

For the solution to productivity, we need to look at the ancient Egyptians. The answer is whips, massive whips. Do you realise that, since 2008, the UK has failed to build a single pyramid. Even Queen Elizabeth had to be buried in a small chapel on the flight path into Heathrow.

Getting rid of an incompetent Government will certainly help!

The Tories have been a disaster for us. Please vote and get these wretched creatures out. Tactical voting can make a massive difference.

so we are at the bottom of EU nations for productivity alongside Italy and Greece. Guess what we have in common with those two countries, crippling austerity. Only Italy and Greece had that austerity forced upon them by the EU. Our government chose to impose austerity on us for no reason, other than ideology

Sadly with each passing day we can see the impact this awful policy has had on the UK. Tied up in red tape and tariffs with lower GDP than before the pandemic whilst the others in the G7, including Italy, are above. The lower GDP means we do not have the headroom to pay our way in the world and must resort to borrowing.Whilst there are rich people in the UK; a great many of us are poor and now we are poorer still. What steps can we take to generate more income during quantitative adjustment?

Everyone is missing the key issue which needs to be addressed: wealth inequality. We’re on a runaway train heading to further and further wealth inequality, where the have’s accrue more and more wealth without providing value and the workers of society are worse and worse off. Having our wealth tied up in fewer individuals doesn’t help fix productivity. We need to free up our capital sitting in property speculation or safe investments. If the money was better spread around we’d see more dynamism and risk taking in the economy.

More likely to fix my receding hairline 😂😂😂

9:42 This graph is honestly terrifying. Bear in mind it is truncated cause the U.K. is so startlingly unequal between regions compared to everyone else. The 2015 bar would reach almost to the edge of the player-window if it weren’t truncated!

Hi, I am a viewer from the U.S. and i kinda have a question why does it seem like in English speaking countries right now it is nearly impossible for political parties to work for the benefit of their people and country. I'm genuinely curious. Here in America, our politics are so divisive.

I don't know if it is funny or sad that this situation could have been easily avoided and a large chunk of it is self-inflicted damage. Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall

As an American seeing the UK average post tax household equated to West Virginia and Alabama really put things into context. Thats wild!

London centric government, move the UK Parliament to one of the regional cities and they will start investing outside of London.

Tax wealth, not income. The UK has the potential to raise everyone's living standards.... But a disproportionate amount of wealth is created for a tiny clique.... Not only should they be paying proportionally more on their income but all of their assets including property needs consideration.

I'ma need to create a Baldur's Gate 3 character called "Gorwoth" now

As a kid growing up in the late 90s/2000s I always thought the UK was like the best, richest country in the world, everything was great, yearly holidays to spain/tenerife/other countries around Europe. Getting the newest gameboy / Nintendo ds, and games etc as soon as they came out. Easily making lots of money mowing people's laws, washing cars etc, even at like 10 years old I got like £50 a day which is enough money for like 2 months worth of food. Or a new tracksuit + trainers. And making over £100 every day every December doing Christmas carolling with my friend. I didn't have a "rich" family, my mum was a single mum on benefits living in a council house. But still had the ability to go on holiday to other countries regularly, like in luxury all inclusive resorts in mallorca, ski trips in the alps, going to the eiffel tower, leaning tower in Rome, etc. I could eat whatever I want, buy any games consoles and toys/books/ anything a kid could ever want. I didn't even really realise at the time how good I had it, but I always felt lucky to live in the UK and not life africa or something, and always thought that it's like the richest and best country. Now I feel like I live in extreme poverty in a shit hole country, and even places like Poland are better than the UK now, with higher salaries and growth, even the Ukrainian economy is doing better than the UK right now... And now the uk is like somewhere between 30th-50th place in the list of countries by GDP. It's just crazy how everything has turned to shit

Almost as if a new high speed train infrastructure project between London and the North would help with both productivity and regional inequality...

Somebody told me yesterday that companies can't afford and the economy can't afford to pay people more. Enjoyed watching this showing how that higher wages help.

2:43 “gorwoth” - please hire a proofreader

Major issue with the tories is that they have moved extremely far away from economic reality in favour of holding power by any means necessary that all these reasons could never be addressed. In this next election and future ones we NEED to make sure that they are kept as far away from power for as long as possible.

In terms of productivity growth figures you have to account for the inflated figures from 2000-2007. As you state we had one of the highest productivity growth in the g20 however this was mainly due to how they recorded productivity in banking. As we all know with the subprime mortgage banking did well in this period however this was false growth. This Britain’s figures for productivity growth were inflated beyond their actual level in this period. So you should rly factor that Britain’s productivity gorwth was lower then recorded 2000-2007 and then higher than actually recorded post 2010. Productivity is still a problem but you should factor in this skew.

Also worth mentioning is the chronic underinvestment in infrastructure in the UK. Rail is overpriced & unreliable, roads are full of potholes. That reduces productivity because people spend time & money that they shouldn't have to. They also will avoid jobs that require commuting, so jobs aren't filled as effectively as they could. The old housing stock is another factor, sucking money into energy & repair bills.

I am truly curious to see how the UK will turn that situation around. I know the UK can do it. They still have brilliant people.

Great video! This is essentially exactly the video that I was asking for in your comment section a few weeks ago - this is why I love this channel.

Treat people like crap, pay people crap, you are gonna get crap. Just cross reference productivity with real wage growth since 2008 and gosh it's almost like companies figured when people were desperate in 2008+ they'd take anything wage wise they could get, and it was never reversed. It's exactly as presented but wage growth failure causes lack of productivity increase not the other way around.

A wealth tax rather than income tax would solve some of the inequality, taking money out of the south east and providing a break elsewhere. It would also encourage businesses to have properties and positions outside of London, having regional business rates would help this as well. Having worked in agriculture in the past I agree it is way too focused on cheap labour, it is cheaper to have low paid staff in the short term than it is to buy machines to do the same work. It's not even like it would hurt jobs over here as there were almost no UK nationals working on the farms I worked at, 95% of the labour was imported seasonal staff from a agencies. This was because those staff worked hard and wanted to be there, they were paid the same as a national would have been but local people never applied to do the work.

I feel like we’re all stuck in dead end jobs with no chance to move somewhere with actual opportunity. There’s no jobs with good wages and incentives anymore. The working class is crumbling, especially in the north.

I haven't watched this show for a while as the misspelling was so egregious, glad to see you're keeping up the tradition GORWOTH is so important

When people are healthy, safe, educated, and paid enough, they produce more. The only thing stopping that is sort-term greed.

Invest in skills, training and education (especially for medium skilled jobs), support domestic industries instead of offshoring everything to China or other cheap countries, and stop plugging job shortages with ever-increasing immigration of underpaid workers. That's literally all there is to it. Unfortunately, neither the Tories nor Labour will do this.

Yet house price is still 20% more expensive than pre-pandemic…

Kudos for making such a well presented video, with excellent use of well researched diagrams and data. Your economics videos seem to be the most informative, perhaps because they benefit the greatest from your impartial, objective data analysis. Keep up the good work! 👍 Regarding the lack of UK productivity growth after 2008, this could be due to the financial services sector stalling and being responsible for most of the productivity growth prior to 2008, which was itself largely driven by the introduction of I.T. into the workplace during the 1990s.

A few unimportant sectors.... Food production. Come on guys. Wtf, then you complain how unproductive farming is!

Lot's of highly skilled British workers leaving.

Basically what was happening (according to Peter Zeihan, whose predictions are... interesting) is that the only part of the UK that made money was banking. Because we joined the EU and had the existing banking infrastructure, we could be their banking sector and then distribute that wealth out via services. We're not in the EU anymore, so we need a different way to make money.

Awesome. Brilliant content. Spot on. Well said

Have we all just skip over the bit where everyone was called racist and xenophobic for pointing out cheap migration isn't necessarily beneficial to that having always been true?

How to fix the economy step 1: remove the tories😩

There is no great mystery as to why the UK economy is like it is, it is purposely designed to be this way. Every UK C.E.O./Director/Employer be like: "How can we get more work out of our workers without paying them more?". Every UK employee be like: "It doesn't matter how hard I work, I never get paid any more". The workforce in the UK isn't stupid, even the most dedicated and commited staff, even the most unwitting and ill-informed, all eventually work out that it does not pay to work hard. All that happens is that when you work hard, it is expected all day every day. For no more pay. Or respect. This will never change.

The problem is actually Tory austerity. That and the fact British businesses have always sought to make a quick buck. Neither invesing in new machinery, technology and staff. We need a radical shake up in the economy.

Many polish people who worked in the UK told that they had be encouraged, almost forced by their bosses to work slow.

If someone told me that France would do better than Germany and UK I would have thought it was a joke. 🇨🇵❤️

The problem with focusing on particular metrics is that you can build any picture you want e.g. France has a lower nominal GDP per capita than the poorest US state. The UK economy isn't great but these cherrypicked metrics are not telling the whole story.

TLDRs solution is to spend more money than has existed. Man if only you could do that without destroying the economy like Zimbabwe did.

You've hit the nail on the head. Another point worth mentioning is outsourcing. Employment opportunities are reducing significantly here as large corporations look to outsource work to Asia.. impacting a significant chunk of finance industry, so can only imagine it'll worsen over time as well-paid opportunities disappear.

State-owned accommodation for the poor (Vienna, yes, towers can work unless you want to create artificial scarce that will pump the housing bubble) Nationalisation, the great economic tsunami, worked for very few billions that were transferred from the tax payers to the pockets of shareholders. It's been proven that this model failed, and Thatcher was simply wrong and ideological on quite a few subjects. Also, Cameron's "scrap the green crap" was disastrous; it wasn't only solar panels; it was big on the insulation of the new builds and many more.

Two simple solutions here. Stop voting for Tories, and rejoin the EU. There you go UK, I will accept an honorary title as "Sir" or a castle or sth as a thanks :)

When I still used to watch the BBC I remember hearing a host saying that 'we had no choice but austerity.'

This is very interesting video.. thank you again 🙏🏾😎

It cant get any worse…. Right?

Two important steps: Get rid of a corrupt, self-serving government and get companies to invest in modern machinery to become more productive so that they can pay more to their workers who in turn will become more productive since they are motivated again.

I Think an overlooked item is the massive growth of personal debt in the UK. With high interest rates (thanks truss) and cost of living depleting savings people have resorted to taking out more and more personal debt to survive.

PRODUCTIVITY!?!? lads with the greatest due respect you nailed the problem with the wages not growing in 15 years. You can’t expect morale to improve while they starve for christs sake

Thank you for the video; it may open some people's eyes to the fact that the public discourse on immigration is skewed and dysfunctional. Our media is to blame for allowing Brexit to happen. Immigration was the only topic, and they allowed think tanks to alter the debate.

By the way, as an Irishman abroad, and given our Colonial history, I am deeply hurt and angry at what is being done to the UK as with my own country.

Brazilian here: this all feels like my home country. Even the Brexit part has an analogue here: the discussions around leaving Mercosur.

Hello great video @TLDR News, just wondering if you had a source into the graph at 8:34 I would love to look into it further. (Coming from Hastings)

UK has no political talent anymore

The fact that years on from the Hard Brexit the UK still hasn't hammered out new trade agreements with the United States and Canada is just baffling. It isn't a silver bullet, but ensuring free trade between North America is an easy way to make sure they aren't cut out thanks to things like the Inflation Reduction Act.

So happy UKposts brings me the highest quality news these days.

Even London is NOT ranking as very competetive still sliding among world capitals

I feel an achievable change that can be implemented would be the shorter work week, even if it meant longer work days. Of course this couldn't happen in all job roles, but looking at the studies and countries that have implemented this change shows plenty of positive results.

All investments required to boost uk's economy are going to uk's safe heavens off-shore colonies.

Raising minimum wage does not raise wages. High wages are a consequence of capital investment and productivity increases, not the other way around!

Its ok because most of these areas voted for brexit so they wanted 80million less spent on there areas. Its amazing when people are shocked they got what they voted for. Remember the line brexit at any cost? Well here it is.

The best thing the UK could do to fix the UK economy is also the least likely: Land Reform. Letting people who live or work on land actually own it, rather than a shady network of aristocrats owning most of the country

Some years back someone said that British politicians only see "banking" as interesting as it is "clean". Therefor they do not have a read interest in making sure that there is any production in the UK.

Exceptionally good video on the state of the UK economy.

get rid of the current lot.. both sides and bring in people who actually care about the country.

Who’d have thunk it: costly housing and underinvestment in the NHS has a huge knock-on effect on the economy!

On the physical health issue, better and timely health care, as well as better diets will surely help, but there are large compensations for being sick. They need to be revised.

State of quality of life in UK only REFLECTS the state of affairs that ENTIRE BRITAIN find herself in and that is very worrying

To improve investment we need a progressive cooperation tax(as in increasing tax percentages as profit increases), by doing this you would allow small business to start with little to no tax to pay and take more from larger companies. However you ensure that there are plenty of tax deductions for investment, by doing this businesses are likely to heavily invest profits rather than surendering profits to the government.

It's crazy how the world just never recovered from the 2008 financial crash

When the GDP per Capita graph was on screen - a comment was made about median post-tax incomes. I am not certain that these two things are related. GDP per Capita would be a mean average, not a median one. And GDP per Capita is not directly related to Income within a region either.

british businesses don't invest full stop. also, government policy is to remove all productive manufacturing and rely on services, equally current farm policy is to pay farmers not to farm i.e rewild or just leave fields fallow. there is also a large problem with offshoring where a number of key infrastructure is owned by other governments or people water industry is a good example, and power is another.

When watching this channel one needs to put on the anti-UK, pro-EU filter on. I have friends in Europe and they are experiencing the same problems that we have here and are under more-or-less the same pressures. To assume that if we were still in the EU, that all these problems would go away is naive. Things are possibly slightly better here economically as we are not in full blown recession, and I felt we handled the pandemic better and quicker than most of the EU and America. UK is set to become the last bastion of Progressivism while Europe and America turn Right.

The farming example is an interesting one. If you invest in automation tech, you suddenly find that you don't need as many workers. The rural economy is already pretty poorly paid, often cash in hand and seasonal for the most part - what's the answer to increased unemployment in areas with already high levels of deprivation?

This was a really good content

How do you calculate productivity per employee though? Given the vast difference between jobs...

The bottom line is that people are too selfish for change to happen in this country.

1) Give unions SLIGHTLY more bargaining power than they currently have. 2) Remove some of the current taxes and replace it with a Land Value Tax. This would incentivise both better use of land with more houses being built, but would also stop significant numbers of Oligarchs, Aristocracy and Billionaires from just SITTING on valuable land that could be better used for the people. 3) Fix the issues with Brexit by either joining the Single Market as every major Brexiteers PROMISED during the Referendum Campaign or by re-entering the EU (which I'm personally against). 4) Reform Electoral Laws and bring in Proportional Representation across ALL levels of Government. 5) Further devolve the country. Ideally make both London and Cornwall their own countries due to population and cultural reasons respectively. Maybe move the English parliament to York for historic reasons, which would also help improve the local infrastructure in that region of England as well. 6) Bring back the EU Poverty fund at equivalent or higher levels. 7) Bring strategic national infrastructure under public ownership. Look at the water companies, the electric companies (we're one of 2 countries globally woth this level of privatisation in electric), PUBLIC transit. Any two of these would go some way to actually helping the people of this country.

ive seen too many people taking advantage of mental health time off. it removes the legitimacy of those who actually do need help.

This is a good summary video on the current state of the economy in the UK and how to fix it. The comparison with "levelling-up" in eastern Germany may not be entirely fair though, because in the 1990s the entire economic system in east Germany was changed from socialism to capitalism. During this change many former citizens of the GDR were, unfortunately, left behind (i.e. could not adapt well to the new system), which caused many of the political problems we see today. Thus, the task in the UK to solve regional inequality is probably not quite as huge. 😊

Forcing farmers to buy more tech will make the more productive is an assumption

Can productivity just increase indefinitely? Does the world's economy need to keep growing?

We must pray to NHS (blessed be his name) for guidance

Here in South Wales, we used to receive a lot of funding from the EU. Now we get nothing. I didnt vote for Brexit, and if i had, I would have voted to leave, but I would have regretted it to this day.

A decade of austerity followed by the act of self-harm known as Brexit has led to inevitable stagnation. We need targeted investment, but our Tory government has placed the onus on business and the free market instead of taking the lead. The EU did the heavy lifting on regional funding; and now we have pound shop Tory bandits shifting blame. Labour must cut the crap on fiscal rules, which have been influenced by Tory greed and mismanagement.