Britain Is a Developing Country
sambowman.co
sambowman.co
Public services and government that used to work well now don’t, and opportunities that everyday folk used to have they now don’t.
It’s still a nice place if you’re in a good career, but the long term prospects don’t look good.
There's so much research on developing countries, but I find deteriorating countries more interesting. There are many countries that used to be first world, and simply are not anymore. Argentina is the classic example, South Africa is the most heated example.
[0] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/GDP-...
America won’t try to coup that part of the world. (As far as I know.)
The world in 2023 is different from the world in the 1970s which is different from the world in the 1940s.
2. The institutional changes that caused Venezuela's dramatic slide only really began to take hold in the 2000s, and were exacerbated by the global collapse in commodity prices in the 2012-15 period.
3. Plenty of petro-states across South and Central America have in 2023 reached a state of development comparable to eastern members of the EU (ie. In the 0.7 or high development range).
4. GDP per capita is a crummy metric to compare economic development. GDP (and ergo per capita GDP) are metrics to benchmark production, not social development, which are better measured when looking at metrics such as HDI, Life Expectancy, Literacy Rate, Median Income, Childhood Mortality Rate, etc.
Even though Venezuela had a very high GDP per capita in the late 1970s/early 1980s, it was extremely unevenly distributed. In fact, in the time period that Venezeula had the 4th highest GDP per capita, it's Gini Coefficient (the metric for wealth inequality) was 0.500 [0]. This is in line with Angola and Zimbabwe today, and was much worse than other nations across South America.
By that time period, the kind of interventions you saw in Chile, Guatemala, etc were not as vogue, with the Iran-Contra Scandal acting as the final nail in the coffin for any direct clandestine intervention.
Venezuela's problems today are caused by Venezuela's leaders mismanaging the economic dividend in the 2000s and elites on both sides of the aisle in Venezeula working to undermine institutions to their benefit.
[0] - https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-05147-2_...
Which was a policy suggested by an Iraqi (Farouk al-Kasim) to the Norwegian government. [0]
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feab...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-scale-of-gl...
[1] > The United States war in Afghanistan continues destroying lives due to the war-induced breakdown of the economy, public health, security, and infrastructure. Afghans have been massively improverished by the conflict. 92% of the population faces some level of food insecurity and 3 million children are at risk of acute malnutrition. Some regions are currently facing famine. At least half the population is living on less than $1.90 per day.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/af...
[2] https://theintercept.com/2021/08/26/afghanistan-america-fail...
The whole point, as I understand it, is to research what happens in the (still) rich and advanced nations which (slowly) lose their riches and advancements.
Results are similar if you ignore PPP. [2]
I’m not really sure where your numbers came from but I assume the ranking is a bit sensitive to the time boundaries (ie recovery from gfc and pandemic) so I don’t know how relevant it would be even if I had found the same results as you.
I found the uk looks a bit better for growth from 2010 to 2019, which ignores some pandemic recovery failures mentioned in the OP and Germany’s larger 2009-2010 growth.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/national-gdp-wb?tab=chart...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/national-gdp-constant-usd...
The peers are Germany, Spain, Italy, France. Ie other large countries.
If all that GDP growth is going into the hands of just a few players what's the point?
How are you including war crimes in this calculus? I'd rather be mugged than have a fascist rocket kill my entire family.
Wonderful city otherwise though, coffee and chocolate shops across historical center especially.
It's a large-ish, English speaking country, with plenty of other countries nearby, that isn't North America.
If you really meant the G8, well, the UK for all it's faults is still somewhere I'd rather live than Russia.
(I didn't feel this way 5 years ago. My views on the current state and future trajectories of both the UK and Russia have changed significantly over the past few years.)
Russia’s government has been very stable for the last couple decades, with little change in substantive authority even in the inter-Putin period when Medvedev was nominally President; certainly much less substantive change than in the UK.
(One might reasonably suspect its the kind of stability produced by a brittle regime that does not bend and is thus more likely to catastrophically break, though.)
A failed coup attempt is not a coup.
I certainly wouldn't have wanted to live in Russia in the 90s, as it was a horrible time for the country. But Russia is vastly improved now, while I see the UK as going, quite quickly, in the opposite direction.
And as I also said, this is a fairly new sentiment for me. I have become very disappointed with where the UK is heading and frankly sickened by the actions of its governments, most prominently, in the last 18 months, its warmongering and peace-breaking in Ukraine but of course, it was also a prime instigator of the warmongering in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan and many other prior examples. But also, which is important for living there, the negative actions of its governments on its own people.
I still have a great affinity and regard for the British people and British culture but the country itself is sadly now in a very sorry state, thanks to its quite awful 'establishment' (governments, banks, intelligence agencies, media, etc).
The one thing that I am unsure about with living in Russia is living so deep inside a continent. I live on the coast of Australia (like most Australians) and my affinity is generally for coastal living or island countries. So the UK has appeal to me there. If I did have to live in the UK its west coast would be the most appealing prospect for me.
For me, a gay man, living in Russia is a real risk to my life with it's rampant violent homophobia, in a way that I feel pretty safe living in UK (or Australia, where I am from).
But sure, I guess the Russian economy is on the way up? The private military market is booming!
Fair enough, although I would only add a mildly sceptical note that perhaps the 'violent homophobia' is less rampant than is reported in Western media. We are fed a huge diet of anti Russian propaganda in the West. I haven't looked into this matter personally but I would imagine that it would be good to try to find out what ordinary gay men in Russia say about how the situation actually is on the ground (versus what is said in the western press). But certainly, Russia is a more 'socially conservative' country. Although, as you probably know, being gay and being socially conservative are not necessarily antagonistic positions (cf. the great number of gay men in the clergy).
> Australia, where I am from
I'd wondered if you might also be. Partly because I saw your comment elsewhere about not wanting to live in North America & not liking its aesthetic. I feel the same way and it's probably quite common for those who leave Australia and choose the UK over the US out of English speaking countries.
> But sure, I guess the Russian economy is on the way up?
Yes, and I could make quite a case for why that's true. Let me know if you want me to assemble such a case.
Where you live is heavily loaded towards your personal preference, rather than any sort of objective economical measure. Personally, I only want to live in an English speaking country (I don't want to be a language-guest in a country). I want to live somewhere where there's "lots" going on - plenty of work opportunities and fun things to do outside of work. I don't want to live in North America because I just don't like the aesthetic.
Military importance is a big one. Part of the reason Japan and Korea industrialized so quickly after 1950 was because the West supported them economically as they were needed as a reliable bulwark against Communist expansion. The US also tolerates dictatorships worldwide (incl S Korea until 1988) if the regime is friendly to the US.
That said, even when I was a kid on Vancouver Island (the 2000s), we always had plenty of UK transplants working at VIHA, schools, corporate jobs, and blue collar jobs, and I've heard similar stories from coworkers of mine in Australia and NZ (eg. our head of Sales for ANZ was a First Class Honours LLB grad from a Russell's Group uni, but felt the wages and opportunity working for a Magic Circle firm were less than that if he went to Australia)
This is a regression though, university used to be free from 1976-1998.
It has problems for sure, but other EU countries have the same problems.
Seeing the continental Europe is currently being baked dry, I'm kind of glad that the weather in Scotland is miserable.
But they missed their window after Brexit to strike the trade deals they needed, and now any trade deal they make will probably be under quite unfavorable terms.
That was always going to be the case. Brexit fantasists thought they were going to recreate the empire with UK at its center. They also thought they could do a deal with USA. What does UK offer USA if they're not in Europe?
Trade deals are multi-year projects and the terms you can get depends on how much leverage you have. Its noy the kind of thing you jump into after leaving a bigger trade bloc. The UK wasn't going to be able to negotiate anything without the bargaining chip of duty-free access to 500m customers.
It's unclear that there ever was such a window, given the _sort_ of Brexit they did. By far the most important trade goal for Britain would have been maintaining access to the European market on similar terms to previously (or at least similar terms to, say, Switzerland); everything else paled in comparison. But the form of Brexit chosen made that impossible.
Why would the UKs living standards increase? Because the world continues to get richer.
Is the UK going to regress to developing world status? That's a heck of a claim. Has any country that was among the richest in the world regressed to developing nation status? This is supposed to happen on the basis of being marginally disadvantaged in trade negotiations?
Get real. This is sentiment because people are mad that the UK rejected their political beliefs. Could the UK suffer negative consequences versus the counterfactual as a result of Brexit? Sure. Is it going to regress to being the equivalent of, like, Peru? Obviously no.
Lexically, tats an oxymoron, if you are regressing you are clearly not developing.
Empirically, living standards have been falling in UK for a decade, while developing countries are developing. Clearly, eventually they will intersect.
Logically, you seem to claim that a developed economy cannot collapse no matter how badly it's mismanaged?
I don't think that "being out of the EU" is in the same category.
1 - for the past 7 years, the government was doing nothing except infighting around brexit. Things like economic policy have been neglected. Straighforward non-political ssues, like the fact that wind farms wait for 10 years to be connected to the grid, are unaddressed.
2 - the current leadership is braindead. They have spent the past few months discussing how they will get rid of all EU laws in one fell swoop, without replacing them or analysing impact.
But they cannot answer basic questions - what happens in areas of economy that rely on EU law?
Like logically, what happens when you repeal EU law about ebikes? Do ebikes become illegal? Do all ebikes, even with 10 horsepower become legal? I hate the EU ebike law but you cant just delete it.
Good, good, so now that you have deleted 50 years of law from UK, what are those things you've just legalised?
Certainly some types of Money laundering, probably a few types of financial fraud, carcinogens in food, and driving high-powered electric motorbikes without any kind of training or licence?
> Most people somehow managed so survive
Most people survived World War 2, and in Nagasaki most people survived getting nuked. In fact at least 50% of the population manages to survive almost anything.
On the other hand, in Victorian Britain 1/3 of kids never reached age 5, so there is that. Also many didn't survive child labour in the coal mines.
Thing is though, lots of politicians have shared similar sentiments, and completely failed to achieve this in office. That makes me think it's harder than it sounds to avoid undesirable consequences — figuring out which laws are in the set of "some" that won't increase child (or indeed adult) mortality, for example.
Generally, existing laws either superseded pre-existing laws (which may well have been repealed by the same process) or regulatory frameworks (which may or may not be still operable).
Although in this context, common law is more like an interpreted language like JavaScript, so the app will keep running and then randomly just stop because of the missing lines.
For e-scooters, or whatever? Might be fine, might be nobody will insure them, which means they can't be legally on the road, which might be fine (because the police just assume it is) right until someone has an accident and it gets to a court case for driving without insurance…
It doesn’t take a lot for a country to go down the tubes.
This is party independent as this collapse was seen in all states.
Based on HDI (both Niti Aayog and UNDP calculated), India regressed to the same developmental indicators as in 2015.
Silver lining is that institutions still exist, and if managed correctly in the next decade, could ensure rapid economic development. That said, if this is mismanaged, we'd be in a similar boat to the Philippines - strong fundamentals and institutions but horrible execution leading to it lagging well behind it's peers.
The next 10 years are crucial for India's development.
I don't see how you propose to maintain the same level of prosperity when fewer productive workers need to support more unproductive seniors.
Immigration may or may not help the current shortage of labour in the UK in various aspects of the economy that's likely to get worse as the population ages (more pensioners) with insufficient replacements (making the things and doing the services the pensioners might buy), given that's already a weird combination — not sure how the UK is managing to get both of these wrong at the same time, but, somehow, it is.
UK definitely needs more homes though, whatever else. Too much as a faction of income going to landlords like me…
> counterfactuals about how they "should have" grown
No, they were growing a lot and extremely wealthy, then they chose to go down a low growth path. Growth is not some magical thing, as if they just stopped growing for no reason as you appear to be suggesting. The point is their growth trajectory changed for very particular reasons, which were mostly things in their control.
I mean if in 100 years time the USA was the poorest country in the world but still richer than it is today in real terms, would you really go "yep, yep, nothing to see here, stop dealing in counterfactuals"? Obviously not.
One of the most important assets of british people used to be their national brand; it was never an accurate image of who they were as people, but the public relations carefully orchestrated by their government was effective on the international stage. Perhaps the big favour Farage did to the world was to encourage british people to speak up and show everyone what was really behind the so called exceptionalism and the superficial veneer of manners. However, it was also the irreversible deterioration of their image; and I’m not sure british people should celebrate the fact that they shocked and offended the international audience with their beliefs and values.
No shit we're not going to have the same standard of living as the past.
Sweden had an empire, Austria-Hungary was an empire up till the end of WWI. Also, there was extreme poverty in Norway and Sweden not that long ago (the 19th century), leading many to emigrate to the US. The same with German emigration.
It was _called_ an empire, but it wasn't an empire in the same sense as the British empire; if Britain had been feeling particularly grandiose they could have called Queen Anne the Empress of England and Scotland as part of the Act of Union on a similar basis. Sweden's was also not a modern colonial empire; it economically did not work at all the same way.
> Also, there was extreme poverty in Norway and Sweden not that long ago (the 19th century), leading many to emigrate to the US.
I mean... there was in the UK, too. For the most dramatic example see the Great Famine in Ireland, but there was extreme poverty all over the UK.
The UK has always been a merchant, trading economy - partly why Brexit was so stupid regardless of the EU's flaws, but nonetheless London is still an extremely attractive legal proposition and so on.
Yes, the libel laws have been especially helpful in allowing despots and oligarchs to move their wealth into the country and build contacts with No. 10 while suing journalists reporting on it. Chelsea FC, major football club, was owned by a Putin pal for 20 years. He was forced to sell only in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine.
Prigozhin, Wagner CEO, was able to hire a UK law firm to sue a journalist for reporting on his link to Wagner. This was after sanctions were placed on him by the UK government [0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jan/31/russia-ukraine-w...
This article is valid for UK-sans-London, but we shouldn't pretend that London is suddenly Warsaw
UK has become like USA with yawning gaps between the have and have nots.
Most people are ignorant about businesses that are not international consumer brands. However this only represents a tiny fraction of the total number of businesses out there.
This visibility problem goes back to even Napolean's time, when he dismissed England as a "nation of shopkeepers". In a way he was correct, but he failed to appreciate what such a nation was and is capable of.
AIUI, American citizens must eat broken glass once a year under the name "filling taxes".
Many nations in Europe require businesses to eat broken glass just to do basic business functions - Spain is astonishingly non-functional.
By contrast, most British citizens have very little red tape to contend with, and what form-filling does exist can be done easily online.
Creating a company takes an hour and has a very light annual burden.
> Americans could stop working each year on September 20th and they’d still be richer than Britons working for the whole year.
...and yet the average American almost never stops working. That car wash manager in Alabama gets three weeks of PTO per year, and probably earns every cent of their $125k -- Buc-ee's is a pretty demanding employer, I think?
Of course I would like to see the UK import the average GDP of the US, but I'm not sure I want the social structures that go along with it. I would rather be importing those from our former friends in the EU, with whom we actually have a lot more in common with culturally than we like to admit.
> Or reading about the 70s, with stories of 20-somethings leavings their jobs to go hitchhike through California.
> In France — with a 20%+ youth unemployment rate and incessant, neurotic talk about it — one does not quit their jobs to “figure things out”
The author goes on to never support this thesis, and instead complains about British politics and that UK growth isn't quite as fast as the US.
The UK has a higher GDP per capita than France. They are in no way a "developing" country.
Does the UK need more tractors? Is there high unemployment (labor underutilized)? It does not seem so. What are the inputs and technology that the UK needs to improve?
But don't try to claim that the UK's economy is structured more like Bangladesh than the US. Or, if you do, at least directly support that claim with some facts.
Much of world is currently in an economic contraction. Britain has its fair share of issues that need to be addressed. Pretending like it's anywhere close to places like Bangladesh or Cambodia is actually insane. That's not to say it can't fall to that level of destitution, or that it won't if action isn't taken. Brexit was always going to be a great economic shakeup, and it had the disastrous misfortune of occurring right before COVID drove a bulldozer through everybody's economy. I'm just certain that hyperbole like this ends up being harmful in the long-run, because people begin to associate the extant problems with overblown panic and then minimize and underestimate them.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_...
UK median household income £29.4K https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom
There are no US states as poor as the UK, Alabama included.
I know of a number of US companies that have started hiring UK employees because you can get principal engineers for £80k.
It's really hard in this country to find anyone who is willing to break that 6 digit ceiling, our regressive tax policies keep it that way.
"The estimated total pay for a Food Service Manager at Buc-ee's is $47,378 per year."
and
"The highest-paying job at Buc-ee's is a General Manager with a salary of $69,776 per year."
which are far off the numbers in the poster which claims a General Manager is earning $150k-$220k/yr.
If we take the Glassdoor data instead, then their Food Service Manager estimated total pay is £36,206.98 which is only slightly higher than the equivalent for McDonalds UK [1]. But I never heard of Buc-Ees before. Are they famous for paying their staff well or something?
[1] https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salary/McDonald-s-Restaurant-Man...
* Annual energy use per person in the US is 77,000 kWh; in the UK it’s 30,000 kWh.
* Annual electricity generation per person is 12,700 kWh; in the UK it’s 4,800 kWh.
Many will blame Brexit, but the writing has been on the wall for decades. Most of my friends in Britain have been either biding their time for retirement, trying to go literally anywhere else, or in a deep sort of quiet depression, usually aided by alcohol. These are well to do, white collar workers.
It will be interesting to watch the country decline. Will we see the rise of extremists in Parliament? Will Parliament even matter? Will Britain become a proxy for reverse colonialism in the way that Italy has? Can the financial might of London persist, or will there be an exodus?
The UK is nothing like a “failed state” (the monopoly on legitimate violence is not seriously in doubt.) It may be experiencing decline in relative economic condition, but that’s hardly novel.
The UK has a lot of these. The railways are notoriously expensive and inadequate because they're over a century old, and we're designed for a different society with different traffic patterns. The housing stock wasn't affected that much but The War, and many of the larger older houses were built with the assumption that they're would be servants living there too. Heavy industry was reliant on a lot of manual labour, and didn't mechanise when the opportunity arose.
The biggest problem is that democracy arose in the age of the humanities, when the sciences were idle curiosities for eccentrics. The revolutions in England - which negatively affected the rest of the archipelago - happened in the seventeenth century, too early for an urban middle class to have its say. The political establishment still has too many landowners - too much power is feels by the descendents of warlords. Most of the power is held by former members of Oxbridge debating societies, who've never had to do anything than throw ideas about. The Civil Service is run by a core of 'generalists' with humanities degrees, with subordinate groups of 'specialists' who can never rise to the top.
The same problem afflicts business: the country is run by people who are barely competent in arithmetic. US politicians are accused of insider trading and gerrymandering; British politicians don't have the skills needed to commit these crimes. Boris Johnson needed epidemiologists to explain percentages to him; the water companies have debts that are almost equal to the dividends they've paid out since privatisation.
The solution is not political, but rather economic. Many of these businesses can be undercut by the use of industry knowledge. Software startups are cheap to run if the founders have a deep understanding of the problem, can build much of the solution themselves, and know who their customers are. In manufacturing, the Midlands and the North have long histories and community cultures surrounding these industries, and are desperate for someone to bring the factories back.
Once technical people have money, the politicians can be bought. They're surprisingly cheap.
In a mathematical sense, the problem is solved. We just need to stop waiting for the lawyers and classical philologists to do technical work, and do it ourselves. We're not getting value out of our elites, so we should get better ones.
The sheer lack of respect that Brits have for techncial and scientific education is insane. It seems everyone in the UK is trying to target some sort of Finance or Consulting adjacent role or some sort of Government role.
Almost every decisionmaker that I interacted with there appears to be some kind of an Econ, Classics, or Law grad, while similar roles in the US or Canada would have someone with a STEM degree or military service experience.
The thing that is most interesting to me, and also because I think it's a warning to the US, is the impact of housing costs. GDP per capita at PPP is 39% more in the US than the UK, yet UK housing prices are nearly twice (!) as much as the US on a per-square-foot basis. And I thought US housing prices were nuts!
There is a good book, "Who Owns Britain", that points out that just 6000 landowners (mainly the Dukes, Earls and Barons a la Downton Abbey, but also large institutions and the Crown) own over half the land in Britain. That gross concentration of land wealth is basically strangling their economic dynamism.
I'm curious, how can people in the UK with "normal" jobs ever afford home ownership? I mean, say I'm a senior software engineer with say 8 years experience - based on UK average salaries and housing prices I don't see how I'd ever afford a flat in a decent sized city if I wasn't already wealthy.
All of these things make people better off somehow.
Uh... Having more money?
Country A is richer than Country B if and only if Country A has more money. Country B may have a great QOL, low obesity, low inequality, etc etc. But its not richer unless it has more money. That's kinda what the word means.
Not just elites - ordinary british people too. I've been saying for 10 years that britain is falling behing the rest fo Europe.
I give real examples from my life, "In Czech republic I/anyone has access to Proton therapy and housing is better built, but in Britain protin therapy is missing (was first built last year, ex-communist CZ has it for like 20 years) and quality housing is only accessible to millionairs."
And if I am taling to a british person, there is like a 50% chance they will get offended and respond like "well then why are you here". I had similar responce on this very forum.
And when "locals" bring this up publically, they get accused of 'talking britain down'. Kind of came up in the brexit debate under 'project fear'.
I feel it will get a lot worse before people will finally get their sputnic moment and realise they are in a hole.
So it is true, places like the Czech Republic have done well versus the UK...they have good policies in place, they are doing sensible things. For some reason though, the comparison is never made with places like Spain or Italy, most East European countries are now ahead of them and Britain is still ahead of them too. Even more strangely, no-one is suggesting that we should be more like these countries either...that we should be friendly to business, that we should limit immigration...strange, isn't it?
People outside the UK talk a lot about Brexit, the reason why it isn't really mentioned outside Westminster in the UK is because it isn't that important. We don't export much to the EU (we consume far more), it isn't a huge consumer market, it is shrinking, and there has been no real noticeable impact...even in industries that were going to be "decimated" (such as meat processing)...it isn't happened. There has just been no real impact to speak of. The only exception was NI, which was a situation designed by the EU in order to place pressure on voters ahead of the 2019 election...which didn't work, and which has largely been unwound now that the EU has seen sense (and after several terrorist attacks in NI largely due to, well justified, fears that the EU was motivated by Ireland's desire to seize their country). After 2019, all the rhetoric basically disappeared because all the people pushing for a second referendum discovered they didn't have a job anymore (and everyone else who kept their job, said they never really supported a second referendum at all).
I've run a startup in UK and my family has a company in CZ, Britain is so much more friendly to business from my experience.
> there has been no real noticeable impact...even in industries that were going to be "decimated" [by brexit]
What is the basis for your opinion?
I have been unable to get goods from EU because of customs. I cannot post thing back to my family because now you get charged VAT for sending gifts by post to EU. I have never met a person that deals with import or export who was not dismayed by this.
...what? Stop for a second and think about what you are saying. Do you believe that one of the largest export markets for the EU was suddenly shut down overnight?
The rules with VAT are unrelated to Brexit, and were largely due to the staggering levels of VAT fraud occurring with imports from China. If you are sending things to relatives, you do not pay VAT...that isn't what it is for.
Baffling. I don't even know what to say at this point. You don't understand how any of this stuff works, why rules were change, these points should be obviously wrong to you with even the slightest application of logic.
Okay, you claim your weird points...look at the results of any public company that trades with Europe. You have companies that run cross-border meat processing, something that was supposed to be impossible after Brexit...none reported any impact (because they prepared their documents, and this was something that most of these companies were already doing because...surprise, surprise...the EU does not encompass the whole world, and they traded in and outside of the EU already).
> something that was supposed to be impossible after Brexit
Checks on food products coming into the UK from the EU haven't even started yet, but will soon. So yeah, pretty bad for you to not know that.
I am working for a large mutinational right now
> It is almost impossible to build anything anywhere
ye the british planning system for real estate is insane.
But if you want to build motorcycles, certify them as roadworthy and sell them, it's really easy.
> you have the government telling private banks to bail out mortgage-holders...
Let me ask you a question, if those. mortgage holder go under en masse, and yhe housing market starts collapsing, will the banks be calling the government?
> The rules with VAT are unrelated to Brexit,
You are charged VAT on all imports. When we qyit customs union, podt from my family became imports. This has nothing to do with China.
> You don't understand how any of this stuff works
eh..
> Or, as Mike Bird pointed out, a car wash manager at an Alabama Buc-ees, a chain of gas stations and grocery stores, earns more ($125k/year) than THREE median UK salaries.
Buc-ee's has a hardcore conservative Christian workplace culture (bested by Chick-Fil-A), but they pay their people well. They also give their employees a 401(k) and (terrible, compared to the UK) vacation time!
Also, everyone loves to dunk on Mississippi, Alabama, and WV (and it is deserved), but Mississippi is a moderately large oil state, Alabama has a sizable military industry and WV is still big on coal and energy.
(For example, through it I discovered that Ireland's nearest twin in both land and population is South Carolina.)
Looking at the UK specifically, it's the GDP of California but with almost 2x the population, which comes out to a GDP per capita comparable to Mississippi.
It is baffling how bad everything is, from public services (8 months of average waiting time in the NHS for something as benign as a lumbar puncture) to worker's rights (it's literally worse than the US). And now they of course committed economic suicide with the Brexit.
I simply do not understand how anyone can think that the UK is a first-world country if they have ever lived in a real one before.
This seems very incorrect given that the UK has stricter laws around dismissal (the bar for losing your job is much higher), better minimum wage laws, more legally mandated holidays per year, paid time off for sickness, parental pay etc. - very basic things that the US doesn't have, at least not uniformly across states and industries.
However, the social benefits around leave etc are definitely better but this is perhaps because of a more homogeneous culture than the US where some states like to work their fingers to the bone, and some states are more relaxed. The UK is definitely work hard, play hard and the only national variation seems to be the work getting done (blue vs white collar in US terms)
That you can just wave a magic legal wand and go from zero to workers paradise in 25, 50, 100 years?
For what it's worth, Sweden and Denmark do not have minimum wages even today. So no, it's not a hugely useful proxy, otherwise according to you the US may have better worker's rights than Denmark (trivially false).
https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/what-to-do-if-youre-dismissed#:...
The rest is true, but a absolutely major one that is missing in the UK is unemployment benefits. If you lose your job you basically have no income at all.
Not only that, they are not available to visa holders, contrarily to most first world countries.
Lastly, the amount is still laughable. In Luxembourg I would have had 80% of my salary for a year, without conditions. The UK is not a first world country at all.
Because Luxembourg has a contribution-based welfare state. The money you are being paid is your own money that is being returned to you by the state when certain conditions are met (and yes, if you look at any contribution-based system, there is heavily conditionality, universal systems are the only ones without conditionality). The UK annual benefit bill just for people of working age is larger than Luxembourg's GDP.
The UK has a universal system that everyone can access regardless of circumstances. You just don't understand how it works at all (this is quite typical, Brits do not understand contribution-based systems either because they are used to a system where the state pays out massive amounts of cash to people in excess of the amount they paid in).
You also have only laughable unemployment benefits (£85 per week), that don't depend on your contributions.
You've already been corrected by someone else on the unemployment benefits so I'll not waste time repeating that.
The UK has a lot of problems, but downplaying workers rights in comparison to the states is a strange hill to die on.
1) https://www.tribunalclaim.com/unfair-dismissal/automatic-unf...
While I am fully on board with the sentiment that we are circling the drain, can you be more specific about where is actually better? I'm interested both from the perspective of potential emigration, but also trying to be rational rather than sensationalist - if I'm stuck here, I want a clearer picture of what "good" looks like.
My current sense is that a country like Switzerland is probably what most Brits would be happiest with (myself included), but that is not compatible with our national self-identity as a "major player" which is falling behind. Sometimes I think we'd be better off giving up the nukes and handing out UN security council seat to India, but that is not exactly an easy sell for a politician.
I didn't experience much of the social services in the US so I won't expand on them, but in Luxembourg and France you get world class healthcare for free or very cheap (even for foreigners) in a timely manner, you get years of unemployment benefits, public transportation is better and cheaper (free in LU), transportation overall is better and cheaper (UK trains are notoriously horrible), etc.
The Tories are, for obvious reasons, totally unable to reform it. Labour are willing to do so but are inhibited by the fact that the vast majority of funding comes from unions who oppose any reform.
Worker's rights aren't "worse" than the US. It also depends what you mean, worker's rights in Denmark are "worse" than the US too...that isn't necessarily a bad thing if the system works. One of the biggest issues in the UK is that businesses are nervous about hiring people at all because firing people opens you up to virtually unlimited liability...I don't think this is a good thing, 20% of the UK's adult population are economically inactive.
Private Eye on "24 Hours to Save the NHS" <https://twitter.com/KulganofCrydee/status/833654730849136641>
Both Blair and Cameron said that the BMA are, by far, the most powerful lobbying group in the UK (the savaging that Blair got from the BMA in 2000/01 when the spending increases were being planned caused him massive issues, and the resulting spending increases ended up creating quite a few problems because of this).
In the US I know people with GEDs working Plumbing, HVAC, Electrical, Diesel Mechanics, etc. making $100k-150k in areas where a house in the nice neighborhood cost $200k. So the fact that you have people making so little in London where it costs a million to buy a house really shows how bad the UK has it.
Tradespeople can earn fortunes anywhere. I can recall Ireland during the 'Celtic Tiger' phase bricklayers were absolutely milking it. I actually regret I don't have a trade under my belt.
There are plumbers in the UK who don't work full-time and make £300k/year (Pimlico Plumbers, notoriously, pay massive salaries because they do a lot of on-call work in central London). It doesn't cost a million to buy a house in most of London, they just built the Elizabeth line which goes fairly deep outside central London so you can live outside and work inside quite easily.
This is not to say that there aren't issues with wages, with house prices but they are significantly more complex than people outside the UK think...who will often compare tech salaries outside London with those in SF, as if people working in tech in WV are earning the same as in SF (this is particularly strange because most of the companies in SF have offices in London where they pay the same amounts).
I heard that is turnover for the “employee”, not a salary, and you have to account for VAT, paying the company for admin/ marketing and other business expenses etc which are no small sums
No, it isn't. Again, this comes from knowing what these people are actually making rather than Googling furiously to prove someone wrong online. You can find endless articles about this though, emergency plumbers make a lot of money, Pimlico Plumbers have been paying these kind of salaries for decades.
I was trying to find sources, not prove you wrong. I was genuinely curious and very very skeptical at those are huge sums even for a plumber in central London.
Here’s a source of £89k for a plumber doing 60 hours a week and the MD £100k https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/751087/what-happened-when-piml...
Shrug…
I guess if there are endless articles citing £300k you can easily reply with a link?
Wealth can mean many things, but it is often associated with your savings more than your income. If you go by median wealth per adult, the UK is still wealthier than the US as a whole (#11 globally vs #21). The mean is another story, but that is no doubt influenced by the fact that there are many extremely wealthy people in the US.
From that, I conclude that Mississippi isn’t one of the poorest, but one of the least rich states of the US, not that the UK isn’t pretty rich.
Some engineering graduates get paid astonishingly low amounts of money but they are also typically the kind of dime-a-dozen grads with no particularly interesting skills.
“I know people” on such a upper-middle class board is bound to give a skewed picture if you compare your anecdotes with the median of whatever the other side is.
They mostly don't; if you annualize the UK median weekly earnings with a degree from 2016-2017, you get GBP 30,524. (Unfortunately, this isn’t a regularly-published breakdown.)
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
> In the US I know people with GEDs working Plumbing, HVAC, Electrical, Diesel Mechanics, etc. making $100k-150k in areas where a house in the nice neighborhood cost $200k.
The people you know aren’t a representative sample.
For college educated people, the median wage in the US (in 2022) is around $71,000/£54,000 [2] compared to (in 2019) £34,000 in the UK [3]
Note that almost all Americans get health insurance from either their employer or via Medicaid with around 8% of Americans lacking any sort of insurance [4], but even then in most cases they would most likely be covered by subsidized prices [5], so it would be a wash comparing with the NHS or using that as a justification when even Australia, Canada, and NZ have much higher salaries compared to the UK despite having a similar healthcare system.
Big picture, it appears that if you are skilled or semi-skilled, you can earn significantly more in the US than the UK.
[0] - https://www.bls.gov/oes/2022/may/construction2.htm
[1] - https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
[2] - https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2023/data-on-display/educa...
[3] - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/graduates-continue-to-ben...
[4] - https://www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/key-facts-about-th...
[5] - https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2023/study-finds-hospitals-cash...
Hell, the legal minimum wage annualizes to £20k
Also you can't compare industry the way you are. There are LOTS of individual plumbers,electricians,... in the UK making £100k-£200k+ ... I know a few of them. It is a running joke how much the trades get paid. I know a window cleaner that makes £500k running a window cleaning business.
That's the same everywhere.
I'm also sure there are people in New York, NY struggling to afford a tiny one bed apartment ... just like London.
I'm not defending the UK, I am attacking your poor reasoning.
Even if it is, the UK has a history of fumbling such things. There was a time when the UK was fairly clearly the world leader in civil nuclear energy (MAGNOX, AGR), airliners (in particular the Comet), and civilian computers (LEO-1), more or less all at the same time. This... didn't last.
Considering that computing makes increasing use of neural networks, and that the new phase in capitalism will arguably be based almost entirely on this type of infrastructure, it seems to me, in fact, that the statement is contradictory in itself, paradoxical.