Why are the British stagnating? This is the question that has agitated the tech community in recent days. Three independent researchers, Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes and Sam Bowman, published a very notable report on the subject which has accumulated more than 5 million views on the social network X. Marc Andreessen, founder of the venture capital giant in his name , Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, Matthew Clifford, co-founder of the Entrepreneur First incubator and sherpa of the Bletchley Park AI summit or even the economist Tyler Cowen, very popular in Silicon Valley, shared and commented on it . The report is remarkable in form, already, because it shows that the production of influential content is increasingly done by individuals outside the traditional institutional framework of think tanks, political parties or research laboratories.
Basically, it begins with a reminder of some fairly spectacular facts. With almost identical population sizes, the UK has fewer than 30 million households, while France has around 37 million. Only 800,000 British families own a second home, compared to 3.4 million French families, a gap revealing a glaring lack of housing. Electricity production per capita represents barely two thirds of that of France – 4,800 kilowatt hours per year compared to 7,300 here – and barely more than a third of that of the United States, which brings our neighbor closer to developing countries like Brazil or South Africa.
Advantage for France on energy and transport
The report also highlights that there are only 7 tram networks and 3 underground metro systems in Britain, compared to 29 and 6 respectively in France. Since 1980, France has opened 2,700 kilometers of high-speed lines, compared to only 108 in Great Britain. Finally, France has nearly 12,000 kilometers of motorways, compared to around 4,000 among our British friends.
The regular comparison with France is not trivial. Despite their specificities, which the two countries like to emphasize, they are very close in their centralization of power, the historical strength of their social protection system and their public services, and the disproportionate weight of their political elite. According to the authors, it is because France has largely developed its housing, transport and energy infrastructures that it can afford to maintain high labor productivity, and therefore a lower volume of hours. worked.
Regulation, a curse
The response that this report has received in the tech sphere is indicative of an underlying trend: entrepreneurs and investors are increasingly adhering to the idea that bureaucracy and microdemocracy are obstacles to the construction of essential infrastructure. , which end up hindering technological development. We already felt this concern in the essay It’s Time to Build by Marc Andreessen, published in 2020. The fear of overtaking Asia, with China in the lead, because America has stopped building comes up very often.
This reading grid helps to understand the Republicans’ attraction to these technological leaders. Donald Trump has already promised, if elected, to entrust Elon Musk with the reins of a commission on the efficiency of the federal government, with a focus on environmental deregulation and labor law. His daughter, Ivanka Trump, recently retweeted the work by Leopold Aschenbrenner, a young fund manager, formerly at OpenAI, who warns that the United States must invest massively in its energy infrastructure to support the general race towards artificial intelligence. A position also promoted by Sam Altman during his meeting with Joe Biden in September.
The head of OpenAI requested authorization to build data centers of 5 gigawatts, or the consumption of 3 million households. Hours later, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro demanded an accelerated exemption procedure for the reopening of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in order to supply a data center from Microsoft. The United States seems determined to ward off the British fate.
.