UK decline and stylised empirical facts

It is beyond dispute that the UK economy is suffering from a second lost decade, by which I mean a sustained period of poor or non-existent growth far below comparable countries. When something has been going on for so long, it is tempting for many to write as if it has been happening forever, or at least for our collective living memory. That in turn allows people to write their own accounts of the reasons for this decline, and if you wanted to be cynical you could say they choose reasons for this decline to fit their own political prejudices. Was it the advent of Thatcherism, or more generally neoliberalism, that started the rot? Was it and is it the outsize influence of the City and finance? The problem that I have with a lot of this writing is in the empirical evidence it tends to use. So this post is mainly about establishing the stylised facts that any account of what has gone wrong needs to explain. In my view there are two key points that need to be made here, and two more…