Thursday, January 01, 2004
Tiny Island for sale. Buy now!
When economists and statisticians are jobless, they really get profoundly useful. A bunch of them wasted someone's hard-earned money and figured out that the United Kingdom was worth a lot of money -- $8.8 trillion to be precise. And I thought even the British empire at its peak wasn't worth that kind of money.
The United Kingdom — that is, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland — is officially valued at $8.8 trillion, a sum that includes all of its property and buildings, machinery, roads, bridges, planes, trains and automobiles. It also includes all the money deposited in its banks and other financial institutions. Plus everything on the shelves at Harrods.
According to their numbers, if Britain's 58.8 million people decided to cash in on their country's estimated worth, they would each receive the comfortable sum of more than $150,000. (Although they then might be asked to bail out the government, which, the statisticians determined, has a negative net worth of $222 billion, after the national debt and other obligations have been deducted.)
More than half of the $8.8 trillion figure comes from the value of people's homes, a total that has more than doubled in the last 10 years. Commercial and public property accounted for about $1 trillion, and the country's roads, bridges, pipelines and other infrastructure were valued at $961 billion.
Why, you ask, does all this matter?
The agency said that devising a price tag for the United Kingdom would help economists develop economic models and use the data to make financial predictions. "It includes everything that is tangible," said John Hallmark, a spokesman for the Office for National Statistics. "Things in factories, airplanes, private cars, houses, etc. We do surveys and get the value."
*Cough, Cough* Since this is the U.K. though, all of this good news has to have some dark clouds hovering over.
The journalist Max Hastings, writing a two-page column in The Daily Mail on Wednesday, said he could picture Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown sitting "with their pocket calculators" trying to work out exactly how much of that £5 trillion they could tax and squander.
"A proper nation is not a place but an idea, compounded of an amalgam of past, present and future," Mr. Hastings wrote. "The secret of happiness for any society is to cherish its identity rather than seek to suppress it, or worse still reduce us to the mere cash value we all represent at the bank."
And more importantly.....
The $8.8 trillion price tag does not include data from 2003, which, with the departure of the soccer superstar David Beckham and his wife, Victoria, to Madrid — along with their vast net worth — could be expected to alter considerably any future calculations.
The United Kingdom — that is, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland — is officially valued at $8.8 trillion, a sum that includes all of its property and buildings, machinery, roads, bridges, planes, trains and automobiles. It also includes all the money deposited in its banks and other financial institutions. Plus everything on the shelves at Harrods.
According to their numbers, if Britain's 58.8 million people decided to cash in on their country's estimated worth, they would each receive the comfortable sum of more than $150,000. (Although they then might be asked to bail out the government, which, the statisticians determined, has a negative net worth of $222 billion, after the national debt and other obligations have been deducted.)
More than half of the $8.8 trillion figure comes from the value of people's homes, a total that has more than doubled in the last 10 years. Commercial and public property accounted for about $1 trillion, and the country's roads, bridges, pipelines and other infrastructure were valued at $961 billion.
Why, you ask, does all this matter?
The agency said that devising a price tag for the United Kingdom would help economists develop economic models and use the data to make financial predictions. "It includes everything that is tangible," said John Hallmark, a spokesman for the Office for National Statistics. "Things in factories, airplanes, private cars, houses, etc. We do surveys and get the value."
*Cough, Cough* Since this is the U.K. though, all of this good news has to have some dark clouds hovering over.
The journalist Max Hastings, writing a two-page column in The Daily Mail on Wednesday, said he could picture Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown sitting "with their pocket calculators" trying to work out exactly how much of that £5 trillion they could tax and squander.
"A proper nation is not a place but an idea, compounded of an amalgam of past, present and future," Mr. Hastings wrote. "The secret of happiness for any society is to cherish its identity rather than seek to suppress it, or worse still reduce us to the mere cash value we all represent at the bank."
And more importantly.....
The $8.8 trillion price tag does not include data from 2003, which, with the departure of the soccer superstar David Beckham and his wife, Victoria, to Madrid — along with their vast net worth — could be expected to alter considerably any future calculations.
