{"id":6080,"date":"2012-09-30T22:21:32","date_gmt":"2012-09-30T21:21:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.widmann.org.uk\/?p=6080"},"modified":"2012-09-30T22:21:32","modified_gmt":"2012-09-30T21:21:32","slug":"going-south","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/going-south\/","title":{"rendered":"Going South"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe src=\"http:\/\/rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk\/e\/cm?lt1=_blank&#038;bc1=FFFFFF&#038;IS2=1&#038;bg1=FFFFFF&#038;fc1=000000&#038;lc1=0000FF&#038;t=thewidblo-21&#038;o=2&#038;p=8&#038;l=as4&#038;m=amazon&#038;f=ifr&#038;ref=ss_til&#038;asins=0230392547\" style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" align=\"right\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><br \/>\nI recently finished reading <i><a href=\"http:\/\/rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk\/e\/cm?lt1=_blank&#038;bc1=FFFFFF&#038;IS2=1&#038;bg1=FFFFFF&#038;fc1=000000&#038;lc1=0000FF&#038;t=thewidblo-21&#038;o=2&#038;p=8&#038;l=as4&#038;m=amazon&#038;f=ifr&#038;ref=ss_til&#038;asins=0230392547\">Going South: Why Britain Will Have A Third World Economy By 2014<\/a><\/i> by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson.<\/p>\n<p>While I enjoyed parts of the book, I don&#8217;t think I can really recommend it: it reads a bit like some articles strung together with a bit of editorial glue &#8212; there are too many repetitions and a lack of a coherent narrative to make it readable.<\/p>\n<p>I also think they lack a scientific approach.  If I had decided to explore whether Britain was developing a third world economy, I would first define a series of tests to distinguish a first world economy from a third world one, and I would then apply the tests to the British economy.<\/p>\n<p>However, they&#8217;re generally just chatting along, and it&#8217;s not really clear whether they think it&#8217;s London, England, Britain, the EU, the English-speaking countries or all of the first world that is facing relegation to the third world.<\/p>\n<p>They&#8217;re also variously criticising Britain for doing things differently from most EU countries and bemoaning the influence of the EU over the UK.<\/p>\n<p>The over-all impression is basically two Englishmen sitting in a pub, convincing each other that the country is going down the drain and that everything was much better in the old days.<\/p>\n<p>In spite of the shortcomings, there are quite a lot of interesting tidbits in the book, and I did enjoy the historical sections outlining the UK&#8217;s gradual decline since the industrial revolution, so if you&#8217;re a fast reader, it might be worth spending a few hours skimming through this book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently finished reading Going South: Why Britain Will Have A Third World Economy By 2014 by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson. While I enjoyed parts of the book, I don&#8217;t think I can really recommend it: it reads a bit like some articles strung together with a bit of editorial glue &#8212; there are too many repetitions and a lack of a coherent narrative to make it readable. I also think they lack a scientific approach. If I had decided to explore whether Britain was developing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99,159,135],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-en","category-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6080\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}