What Britain Earns is one of those Peter and Dan Snow special programmes. A while back they did an hour long programme on who owned what land in the UK; this time they’re investigating how much everybody get paid. One interesting tidbit in the middle of it was the following: 90 percent of people in the UK earn less than 46 thousand pounds a year. That’s something to remember, to keep in the back of your mind. So much of what you see on tv, hear on the radio or read in the newspaper’s financial section is about people who earn more than that, often much more and how some new tax or financial development influences them, yet they’re not just a minority, they’re a very small minority of people…
A similar thing is going on with housing. If you didn’t know better, you’d think that everybody in Britain (or the Netherlands for that matter) is a homeowner, despite vast amounts of people still renting their houses or flats. But all you see on tv is home improvement programmes and property investment shows, howto guides on how to buy the ideal house, little about how to find a non-bastard landlord to rent from. (Not an original observation, but nicked from
ejh in comments over at D-Squared Digest).
UPDATE: no real recognition of how unfair and awful this state of affairs is here of course; that’s not their job. So the usual propaganda of “we have to pay our top talents oodles of millions to keep them creative” went unchallenged.