John Burn-Murdoch

The second factor, I would say, is an over-centralization of how things are done in the country.

So one of the things I think the U.S.

does pretty well is state and local governments can raise their own taxes.

That gives them strong incentives to build.

to innovate, to try and run things better than the neighboring states.

In the UK, we by and large don't have that.

Overwhelmingly, things even at the local level are effectively run by the central government.

That discourages one city to try to do things differently from another.

Most of the tax-raising mechanisms, again, happen in a similar way.

So local governments in the UK are similarly not incentivized to build housing to raise revenue in the way they are in the US.

So I think...

Permitting and centralization are probably the biggest two I would point to.

I will just say as a Brit here, it's interesting that at least for a large number of Americans, they are invested in the stock market.

So if SpaceX is a huge success, they're going to share to that, sharing that to an extent.

Whereas in the UK, that is much less true.

And so if Elon Musk and SpaceX make a huge amount of money, that is going to be much less shared via the stock market for people in the UK and Europe.

but yeah it's a really tricky one like the the rhetorical impact of the existence of a trillionaire is obviously enormous and i can understand why there has been such a reaction to that number and that uh event as crossing that line um but at the same time my general view on things like inequality and wealth is that if people do share in the proceeds

i don't think it should matter that a small number of individuals hold a large amount of that wealth um now i said i don't think the concentration that the the amount hold held by that small number should keep going up uh but my general view is that if

innovation, wealth, and the incentives of creating innovation, wealth, lead everyone to get richer.

And I'm broadly agnostic about that.