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Comment by aljungberg | Hacker News Reader

Sure, the sixth largest economy in the world is “poor” because too much wealth is generated by financial services in the capital and not mom and pops in small towns or whatever. That’s like saying California is poor because most of the wealth isn’t generated by McDonalds employees. You picked some romantic ideal for how money “should” be made and voila now you can complain when it isn’t so.

The article actually wants to make a point about falling living standards, but the author couldn’t resist a clickbait title so nonsensical it overshadows the rest. There’s probably some interesting analysis that could be done about UK PPS, absolute, mean and median incomes, incomes vs average cost of living etc. This is not that article.

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It depends on what you think the point of an economy (or a society) is.

If the purpose is to create a competition and see who can accumulate the most resources and power, then the UK (and US) are doing quite well.

If the purpose is to collectively grow our productivity so that all (for some definition of all) members of society have the opportunity to live better and richer lives, then the UK (and US) are doing rather badly.

Not sure if absolute economy size is really relevant. You could have 20 billion really poor people. You could have 19.9999 really poor people and one really rich one. I would consider both of those poor.

Which goes to my point: the title is explicitly saying the UK is a "poor country" which is what makes it silly. You want to write an article about poor income distribution, that's fine, but your title should say that.

On the same note, the gini index is a kind of inequality measure. If your definition for "poor country" is one with uneven income distribution then the US is one of the poorest countries in the world. Like I don't know, I just don't feel like this definition of "poor" works.

  > too much wealth is generated by financial services in the capital

said slightly differently: too much wealth in the hands of the few at the top?

The article is trying to tie together a bunch of ideas but doesn’t really do a good job of it frankly.

However the underlying theme is definitely something that’s worth digging deeper. An economy that is too reliant on only one sector to generate wealth cannot survive on the long run when all the sectors are being systematically torn down and pushed behind. And as the author correctly pointed out, the left wing idea of creating a world without climate change through de industrialization and the right wing idea of living in the past are both fantasies that do a lot of long term damage that may not be apparent immediately.

I'd say the UK feels like a bifurcated economy. There's Finance, and closely related industries. Then there's everything else - and that is indeed suffering.

I think the article makes a firm, though not very clear, distinction about these things.

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