That £700 million fish disco is why we’ve no productivity growth
If you’ve not heard of the £700 million fish disco:
More than £700 million is being spent at Hinkley Point C nuclear power station on measures expected to save 0.083 salmon and 0.028 sea trout per year.
The plant in Somerset will have more “fish protection measures” than any other power station in the world when it opens because of strict planning conditions agreed by ministers.
There will be an acoustic fish deterrent, nicknamed a “fish disco”, that hits the animals with noise to keep them away, a “fish recovery and return system” and low velocity water intake heads.
As Paul Krugman has pointed out productivity isn’t everything but in the long run it’s pretty much everything. The point being that the efficiency - the productivity - with which we use things is the determinant of our standard of living. If our total factor productivity - the effieicncy with which we use land, labour, capital, technology and so on - rises then we get more output from however many fctors we started with and we’re all richer. Richer by exactly that amount of output.
It’s also quite the talking point that Britain has had anaemic, at best, growth in productivity in recent decades.
The fish disco is why. Or, if we prefer, an example of why.
Leave aside whether a salmon is actually worth that much, even whether nature is worth protecting. The way we measure productivity is the value, at market prices, of the output. Strobes enabling the piscine prancing do not have a monetary value. Yet we’ve spent real money - £700 million - providing the boogie space. We’ve thus spent £0.7 large without any output at all associated and therefore productivity, as we measure it, has fallen.
This is true of all of the things we’re doing for the environment. There’s no measurable, at market prices, output flowing from rewilding. Or saving jumping spiders in Ebbsfleet. Or banning all building in West Sussex because of a, what was it, gorse bush or something?
It might be - maybe, possibly - that such attention to nature is worth it in some sense. Could be. But the reason we’ve no productivity growth is because that output isn’t part of our measure of productivity. Therefore as we devote vast societal resources to that end our measured productivity number falls - or at best fails to rise. Because we’re spending those vast societal resources on things which do not raise productivity.
If we stopped doing that - say, spent the money on things that do raise productivity - then we’d get closer to Rachel’s sums adding up. Which would be nice, no?
Tim Worstall