And richer people are less likely to move larger distances than poorer ones (Chart 22). 32  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  32  Chart 20: Distribution of house moves by distance in different regions (mortgage-to-mortgage movers in 2018, moving to South-East England and Scotland)  Sources: Product Sales Database and Bank calculations. Chart 21: Distribution of house moves by distance for different ages (mortgage-to-mortgage movers in 2018, upper and lower age quartiles)  Sources: Product Sales Database and Bank calculations. 33  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  33  Chart 23: Distribution of house moves by distance for different (mortgage-and-mortgage moves in 2018, upper and lower income quartiles)  income  groups  Sources: Product Sales Database and Bank calculations. Take Yorkshire and Humberside. A third of all moves are within-region. East, West, Home’s Best. Some do move to the West (around 15%) and some to the East (7%). Although some head South-East for life in the slow lane (7%), a larger number move North to Scotland (around 10%). This only covers moves among those with a mortgage, so will not capture first-time buyers, students, renters or those retiring without a mortgage. It nonetheless offers a new lens on the housing market, locally and nationally. It is not difficult to see how these micro-level flow data could be augmented. Data from payments systems can, and are, being used to track flows of money.
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.