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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

Growing up I assumed the UK was pretty rich. But then when you look at the stats, the UK is about as wealthy as Mississippi, one of the poorest states. Learning that people with college degrees in the UK make 25k GBP, and that is considered good, sure isn't that bad when GBP was worth 2x USD. But people are living in London for those salaries. The big expensive cities in the US, like NYC pay you much more to compensate for the high cost of living.

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.

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The money is there it's just that ordinary people don't have it.

> Learning that people with college degrees in the UK make 25k GBP,

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.

Annual mean wage for construction (skilled and unskilled) nationally in the US in 2022 is around $60,000 [0] so around £45,000, compared to £28,500 [1] for the same time period in the UK for skilled construction (in the US, there isn't a difference between construction worker and bricklayer). The US and UK are both large so there will be significant regional variation (eg. earning $100-130k in construction in Philly is realistic, as is £40-50k for a similar role in Greater London)

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...

25k is not a good salary in London at all.

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.

> In the US I know people

“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.

£25k/year isn't good, most social science grads from lower-ranked unis will make more than this. The only exceptions tend to be jobs that select heavily from groups with inherited wealth (journalism, PR, politics, etc.).

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).

Was your source of those £300k “salaries” the Daily Mail and Express “articles” that came out just before the then company owner announced a bid to become mayor of London in 2021?

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 comes from living in Pimlico, and knowing how much these people are making.

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.

Ah ok your source is “trust me bro”. Though I admit with it being salary information, it’s not the easiest to cite.

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?

You are joking right? £300k for a plumber? I looked around and typical salaries are more like £30k-£50k. And I looked at Pimlico Plumbers.

Nobody I know in the UK considers £25k "good" salary. That's an entry level salary for most industry and profession.

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.

Important to keep in mind that it has a per capita income similar to Mississippi, not wealth.

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.

A college degree in what? 18 years ago I started graduate life in London on £21k. I assume it's far higher these days.

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.

> Growing up I assumed the UK was pretty rich. But then when you look at the stats, the UK is about as wealthy as Mississippi, one of the poorest states.

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.

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