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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> The UK is not a wealthy country. The UK has a lower GDP per capita than any state in the US except for Mississippi, the poorest US state, and has lower purchasing power than all 50 of them.

That's an odd piece of evidence to cite; Germany also has lower GDP per capita than any state except Mississippi. By PPP, it's ahead of 17 states and behind the other 33.

But Germany is well known to be a wealthy country. England is also a wealthy country. Europe is poor compared to the United States, but that won't make it poor in a global sense.

It does tend to leave the question open of why there's such a large American constituency for "why aren't we more like Europe?".

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To add to that, there was an interesting article in the FT, showing that the UK is essentially a poor country with some very rich elites. If you look at the standard of living for say a "median income family" it is considerably lower than many countries on the continent. And perhaps, the rich too are running out of steam and being outpaces by their peers on the continent.

Basically, inequality in action...

I think that the value of being "rich" is derived from being able to use that money to get other people to do things you can't or don't want to do yourself. This requires a functioning society, infrastructure, and a healthy low & middle class where those people can still afford a decent living to be able and motivated to work, provide services to the rich and consume what the rich' businesses sell (which in turns helps you be rich and remain so).

This is where I see the UK failing more and more - critical infrastructure is falling apart as people outright "check out" from the grind or leave the country for greener pastures - why would you bother working for the "rich" if you'll end up no better off? Thus service quality decreases, "nobody wants to work anymore", every business is short-staffed and failing since patronage is falling due to lack of disposable income. When this starts affecting critical infrastructure such as transportation, healthcare or law enforcement, it becomes a death spiral that's really hard to reverse.

Being "rich" in such a country is an increasingly precarious situation, especially when so much of that "richness" is inherited wealth owned by a generation that is itself aging rapidly and in dire need of good healthcare.

According to figures from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38437011 on a per-capita basis the only polity that is predicted to beat the UK for losing High Net Worth Individuals is — Hong Kong.

Although the reason HNWI's might wish to leave HK is obvious even to the casual observewr, reasons why the UK went from net importer to net exporter of HNWI's in 2017 may be murkier?

Well, they're not poor, they're just not wealthy. They're not Rwanda or Angola, and they've got most of the world beat, but they're not what they once were. Europe peaked during the colonial period, and it turns out, there is no special sauce that makes them more successful than the rest of the world, they're just countries on the planet same as anyone else.

Regardless, the UK in particular and Europe in general can't continue to pretend that they can socially fund every need under the sun.

> It does tend to leave the question open of why there's such a large American constituency for "why aren't we more like Europe?".

because even if the US is very rich and ahead, their public infrastructure feels very run down compared to Germany, Austria, and others in Europe.

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