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Comment by hippari | Hacker News Reader

I believe the comparison isn't adequate here since the British got massive advantages after WW2.

Britain came out of WW2 deeply fcuk'd. We'd lost the Empire, owed the US a crapton in loans, and then were economically smothered under a nationalisation programme that wiped out UK manufacturing competitiveness. At least we got the NHS (no small thing) and a passable social security system out of it. The economy we have today is the one Maggie re-engineered in the 1980s. Even the Blair government had the good sense to not dare touch it.

Britain subsequently benefited from transforming itself from an imperial power to a financial power. Good documentary on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uM2cdhfAGA

This is the reason that there's so many rich Russians knocking about e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/p83ljc/offshore_adv...

They were a financial power long before. It kinda came with the territory, being a global empire.

They did well to hold on to it, though.

How can you look at the history of the British trade companies and not see how intertwined imperialism and what we today call 'finance' are?

> Britain came out of WW2 deeply fcuk'd. We'd lost the Empire, owed the US a crapton in loans, and then were economically smothered under a nationalisation programme that wiped out UK manufacturing competitiveness.

.. and on all those metrics China came out much worse (the civil war, no marshall plan, proxy war with the US, communism), as well as not having the massive advantage of having been an industrial power long before the war.

This article dates the takeoff to 1978 (Deng), which seems reasonable: https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/a...

Perhaps the question should be "at what date in the future do we expect the cost of a taxi in London and one in Beijing to equalize"?

Beijing? Maybe 2050, maybe sooner. 200 km away in countryside outside Beijing vs 200 km away countryside outside London? Probably much longer.

People underestimate just how bad Britain was financially after WW2. The one thing that hit home for me was Britain still had a good ration system in place until the early 1950’s (obviously fewer and few items as time went by).

Sorry, I was comparing that to the like China, India, and also many SEA countries. If you are comparing to the USA, everyone is deeply fooked.

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