17  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  17  Chart 13: Heat maps of health in Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Inner London  Sources: 2011 Census. Notes: Data show percentage of respondents declaring themselves to be in bad or very bad health at electoral ward level. I draw two conclusions from these micro-level visualisations. First, however striking the regional differences in economic and societal health across the UK relative to historical and international standards, these conceal even more striking differences in levels of health, wealth and happiness within regions. To the extent there is an inequality issue in the UK, it is as much or more a local rather than regional one. 18  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  18  A second, nerdier, point is what this means for our understanding the economy. Many systems – social, natural and physical – exhibit a pattern in which the distribution of outcomes does not converge at higher resolutions; it remains constant or even expands. These systems have a fractal property with patterns that are self-similar at different levels of resolution. Snowflakes and shorelines are the best-known examples. The violins charts suggest economic systems may also exhibit some of these properties, with distributions which do not converge at higher resolutions and may even expand. Outcomes in these systems are not distributed like a bell-shaped, Normal distribution.
15  12  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  12  While simple, these maps suggest there is important information on economies and societies to be found by peering through different lenses: lenses that operate at different resolutions, as the striking UK regional differences in income, wealth and health demonstrate;  and lenses that focus on different economic  attributes, as the striking differences between the UK’s regional income and well-being maps demonstrate. Chart 8: Cartogram of UK well-being  Sources: ONS Annual Population Survey (APS) and Bank calculations. Notes: Responses to the question, “overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?” where 0 is ‘not at all satisfied’ and 10 is ‘completely satisfied’ for 2016/17. UK NUTS 1 regions re-sized and coloured by mean response. (b)  Differences within regions  Given these striking regional differences in health, wealth and happiness across the UK, an interesting supplementary question is how those differences compare within-regions. As we alter the resolution at which we view the economy, do these differences narrow? Do economic patterns look different when 13  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  13  comparing them within and between regions? Or are these patterns self-similar at different resolutions, as when we use a microscope to study the shoreline? Chart 9 provides one visualisation of these patterns at different resolutions. These “violin” plots compare the distribution of income per head at the regional (NUTS 1) level with the distribution at NUTS 2 and NUTS 3 level.