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Comment by loeg | Hacker News Reader

The UK is really, really poor compared to the US.

The UK is poor because they decided to financialize the economy in the 90s and stop making things. It's like canada where the GDP per capita goes down every year. I'm amazed there hasn't been a revolution.

> canada where the GDP per capita goes down every year

Couldn't this largely be explained by their importing huge amounts of low-income people?

Of course. Canadians are still getting poorer every year and that's the salient point.

Sure, but expanding the definition of “Canadian” to include people who were already poor is a bit different from people who were already Canadian becoming poorer.

I don't think the average migrant salary is much different from the average UK citizen salary. Then again, I also don't find the "financialisation" argument very compelling. Plus, the GDP per capita visibly does not go down every year.

> GDP per capita does not go down

It does in Canada, I think that’s what he meant

It doesn't go down every year in Canada either.

GDP per capita has not gone down every year in Canada or in the UK:

https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/gdp-per-capita#:~:text=T...

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-per-capita

(Click the button to check the 25 year view.)

According to Stats Canada, “Real GDP per capita has now declined in five of the past six quarters”, so fair to say it’s currently declining. This was news to me.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2024004/artic...

OP’s post clearly suggested a long term trend of declining GDP per capita (“every year”), which is not the case.

The UK is poorer than the US, but US software engineering salaries are an outlier. The difference is not as big as that comparison would suggest.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/03/britai...

"another respected data journalist, John Burn-Murdoch, calculated that without London, the UK would be poorer, in terms of GDP per capita, than even the poorest US state, Mississippi."

Yes, it's true that the UK economy is very London-centric, but the original poster was talking about the UK as a whole vs the US as a whole. (The flip side of this is that the figures would look better if you compared London to a major US city.)

None of this changes the fact that US software engineering salaries are a poor comparison to use to illustrate wealth disparities between the US and other countries, as they are an outlier.

The above comparison was actually aerospace engineering, not software.

Regardless, Americans are not five times richer than Brits by any reasonable measure. The salaries in the comparison upthread are outliers. The exact figure obviously depends on which stat you look at, but Americans are around 50% richer by most measures.

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