They didn’t learn better. They lost their aspirations and decided to give up as a nation.
A lot of the UK seems to be struggling with their loss of Empire even 80 years later.
They ran out of money, 2 world wars bankrupted them.
With the second war destroying a lot of the country and calling to rebuild at home. This is a fundamental difference with the US. I don't blame the UK for focusing at home for a while to rebuild.
WW2 did not 'destroy' the UK. It wasn't subjected to any of the horrors of ground warfare, and the Blitz failed to inflict any meaningful damage on it.
What WW2 did destroy was the UK government's ability and will to finance the sort of repression that was necessary to maintain a globe-spanning empire. Churchill in his pigheaded hubris could scream from the rooftops about India forever remaining British, but Clement wasn't going to kill people over it.
(In contrast, France lost the ability, but not the will, which is why it fought a few wars in Vietnam and Algiers, instead of letting their colonial subjects have self-rule and independence sans bloodshed.)
c. 40,000[1]–43,000 civilians killed[2]
c. 46,000–139,000 injured[2] Two million houses damaged or destroyed (60 percent of these in London)
Sure.. Okay.. France was worse, France is also no longer a world influence it was once.
> Sure.. Okay.. France was worse,
Don't look at Metropolitan France, two thirds of it got to sit the war out as a puppet state.
Look further east. How many houses were 'damaged or destroyed' in Germany, Poland, the USSR..?
This isn't a suffering Olympics, but compared to war expenditures, the cost of rebuilding the damage inflicted to the Isles was a rounding error. Those expenditures (and their associated debts) were what crippled Britain's ability to maintain an empire, not the cost of rebuilding.
---
[1] That sort of thing was a normal day over there. A normal one - not even a bad one.
My point is the UK decided to rebuild at home after significant damages in their capital city, and I agree with them.
A lot of EU was destroyed and had to rebuild, the US wasn't and was able to boom.
Most of Europe has lower GDP per capita than the poorest states of the US, yet the lifestyle of European citizens in those countries is much better than the lifestyle of the poorest Americans. American growth is built on the backs of piss-poor healthcare, shoddy education and an overinflated perception of the tech sector which holds the rest of the world hostage (but not for long).
Cost inflation isn't unique to the United States.
Europe isn't a single country.
> yet the lifestyle of European citizens in those countries is much better than the lifestyle of the poorest Americans
Does this include the Romani people? Does this include the Ukranians being attacked by Russia?
Greece's housing cost burden is higher than 30 US states. Not all regions in the USA have faced serious property cost pressures. [1] [2]
"Day to day stuff" is a very broad category, and that includes items that are flat or decreasing in cost. In that sense I will point out that VAT is much higher in the EU than sales tax in most US states, with VAT rates of >20% being very common while the highest combined sales tax in the USA is just over 10%. Sales tax/VAT is a very regressive tax that harms the poor the most. For someone on the poor end of the spectrum in Europe, buying something like a computer or television is a greater burden than someone in the US.
I'm reminded of the natural gas price spikes in 2022 in Europe, and of how the EU's average electricity price is about 2-3x higher than it is in the US. The US has an extremely stable supply of basic needs like energy and food.
Education costs have been flat or lower than the rate of inflation in the US since roughly 2016, so for the last 10 years the idea that education is becoming more expensive in the USA has been squarely false. [3]
Healthcare, I'll give you that one, the US is not faring well. But we can look at some systems in Europe having their own difficulties like the UK and Spain and it's not like healthcare isn't a challenge elsewhere. I will also point out that the US does have public healthcare for the poorest (Medicaid) and for all people over 65 years old (Medicare), and Medicare is a standout in quality among public healthcare systems in some outcome categories.
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/europes-housing-cost-burden...
[2] https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/measures/cost...
[3] https://educationdata.org/college-tuition-inflation-rate
Really? Because IIRC, Britain has been steadily declining for over a century.
> The US recoevered from the 2008 crisis way better than everyone else, and nobody really understands why yet.
And Poland avoided the recession entirely.
The UK had a framework to liquidate financial institutions that was similar to the US, and this was deployed in early 2008 with Northern Rock and B&B. The end result was a multi-billion pound profit to the government.
Gordon Brown then decided that he needed to lead the global economy (and he has written, at the last count, two books which explain in significant detail that he was a thought leader and economic visionary through this period) by bailing out banks that were large employers in his constituency. With RBS, this involved investing at a very high valuation and then shutting down all the profitable parts of the bank, the loss was £20-30bn. With HBOS, he forced the only safe bank to acquire them, this resulted in the safe bank going bankrupt a year after the financial crisis ended in the US, and another multi-billion pound loss.
The US benefitted massively from having one of the most successful financial executives of the period, Hank Paulson, running the economy rather than (essentially) a random man from Edinburgh who have never had a job in the private sector (apart from law, obv) but held a seat with a huge number of constituents working at the banks he should have been shutting down (Brown himself had never worked in the private sector at all, parachuted into a safe seat after his doctorate). Geithner nearly suffered from that same fault, but did well with TARP (again though, iirc, this was Paulson's plan).
A country with a business friendly, low regulatory environment, coupled with a high work ethic and poor work/life balance, if nothing else, is not going to be a country that falls behind.
Americans complain a lot, and the system isn't that comfortable or respectful, but they aren't facing existential economic irrelevance.
Quite the opposite. The US quickly recovered from 2008 thanks to tech. Tech that the rest of the world wasn't able to keep up with thanks to it being a heavily regulated environment (patents, copyright, etc.).
I don't see how that's relevant to much post-2008 in the tech sector, which is primarily software driven and where China has very intentionally built their own walled garden.
Every techie with skill and an idea in the EU said "F-this, I'm going to the US to start my company" which lead to others saying "F-this, I'm going to the US for tech work". There is no one to point the finger at, because even today, this is exactly what Europeans want. They just haven't put the pieces together to link "heavy regulation and very worker/consumer friendly environment" with "Nobody wants to plant their seeds here". Instead it seems the EUs plan is to just continually fine foreign tech companies to make up for the barren infertile business lands they cultivated.
Germany is a borderline shrinking economy with workers averaging 400 hours less time at work per year than their American counterparts. And this is celebrated like it's some kind of triumph. Everyday I wish I could violently shake Europeans and beg them to open their eyes. Economic strain will fracture all of Europe.
The EU has chosen stagnation, which seems fine at first but looks worse and worse as all the people (or nations in this case) who didn't make that choice continue to grow. Unless you have a closed, close knit community like the Amish, stagnation does not end well.
If true (seems dubious to me), that's a ~20% difference. The difference in wages is a lot larger than that though, at least for tech workers. So that doesn't really explain why German tech can't compete against US tech.
Also, there's quite a bit of evidence that a better work/life balance improves productivity.
I think vacation time is a red herring. My guess is that the various forms of worker protection, making it impossible or very laborious+expensive to get rid of disfunctional team members, are a much larger factor.
But also, let's not forget that the major difference between the state of the economy in the US and the EU is Silicon Valley. Without its tech companies, the US doesn't amount to all that much anymore. This could also be explained as a historical fluke with lots of momentum.
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html
1805 for the US (slightly more than the OECD average) vs. 1335 for Germany, which works the least.
Germany can't compete with US wages in tech because their companies don't generate as much revenue or profit, either per employee or in total.
> Also, there's quite a bit of evidence that a better work/life balance improves productivity.
There is, and the US is more productive per hour worked than the EU. Maybe that work/life balance in the US isn't as bad as reddit would have you believe.
> I think vacation time is a red herring. My guess is that the various forms of worker protection, making it impossible or very laborious+expensive to get rid of disfunctional team members, are a much larger factor.
An emphasis on regulation over productivity is the core issue IMO, including mandates for paid time off. By incentivizing leisure and bureaucracy designed to stifle change (both for the better and for the worse), you're effectively punishing highly productive individuals.
> But also, let's not forget that the major difference between the state of the economy in the US and the EU is Silicon Valley. Without its tech companies, the US doesn't amount to all that much anymore. This could also be explained as a historical fluke with lots of momentum.
No, productivity in the US is higher than the EU in nearly every sector: https://eei-institute.eu/publications/understanding-the-eu-u...
It's not a fluke. Like every other organization, the EU is getting what it encourages, which is stagnation and a lack of productivity. They will have to adapt at some point, the only question is how painful that process will be.
Right, because, thanks to heavy regulation driven by the USA, it is illegal to compete on a direct basis. The only hope Germany could have is to compete on being more innovative, but how do you out-innovate when you don't have much of a revenue basis to use to fund innovation and are trying to challenge businesses in the USA that have secured the moat that gives an effectively unlimited money printer? Not going to happen.
Like was pointed out earlier, you cannot successfully operate in a highly regulated environment (well, except where those regulations are to your favour, as is the case for Silicon Valley tech). While Europe tends to want more balance in IP laws, what practical choice does Germany have but to comply to the USA's demands? There is no benefit to Germany in allowing Dinsey nearly endless copyright terms, but the USA has a lot of leverage that it isn't afraid to use and that is something everyone else does have to concern themselves with.
Given that virtually no one else on Earth agrees with that claim on its surface, do you care to explain what you mean, or are you just going to repeat it and move on each time?
And to be clear, pointing at copyright extensions for IP like Mickey Mouse is not a compelling argument, because it in no way prevents a German company from producing a product like Instagram, Claude, AWS, or virtually anything else that was launched in the US in the last 20+ years, both because its irrelevant and because the companies responsible for those products also had to operate under the same regulatory regime you're talking about.
So? I know what I mean.
> because it in no way prevents a German company from producing a product like Instagram, Claude, AWS, or virtually anything else that was launched in the US in the last 20+ years
Aside from all the patents, trademarks, copyright, etc. that would make it impossible to reproduce. You could create something that kind of like sort of the same to a squinting onlooker, but the users are going to know that they are nothing alike.
In theory you can innovate to provide something that is actually better, not just the same, but can you actually when you are up against moat-ed money printers?
No one else who has responded to you does, so you'd think you'd care, but I guess that makes the chances of a meaningful dialogue very clear.
> Aside from all the patents, trademarks, copyright, etc. that would make it impossible to reproduce. You could create something that kind of like sort of the same to a squinting onlooker, but the users are going to know that they are nothing alike.
Again, what specifically are you talking about? Not only does all of that regulation exist in the EU (plus many others, which is what makes your claim about heavy regulation in the US so bizarre), but there are numerous alternatives to each product I mentioned in the US (I specifically picked ones that did not create a new product category for this reason).
What is it about the regulatory policies in the US that allows US competitors to exist, but not EU ones?
For what reason? Not my problem. It makes no difference to me.
> What is it about the regulatory policies in the US that allows US competitors to exist, but not EU ones?
Where do you think these competitors are, even if based in the USA? I'd much rather support my neighbour, but I have no idea how to find the Instagram not owned by Zuckerberg and friends and, quite frankly, despite your insistence, I am quite certain it doesn't exist. There is really no chance of it existing as if anyone tried to complete on a direct basis, the law would see that they be shut down immediately.
I can find photo sharing services with different usage models, but you would be hard-pressed to think of those as being direct competitors. Perhaps that is where things break down here, though? Not noticing the usage of "direct" in the earlier comment?
While a direct competitor can just straight up copy other parties, indirect competition requires innovation. That brings us back to the question of how do you innovate when you don't have revenues to support investing in innovation?
In fact tech isn't even the largest sector of the US economy, finance is.
For a more relatable example, it's kind of like how agriculture manufacturing (machinery, fertilizer, etc) is a larger sector of the economy than agriculture itself. All well and good when everything is functioning, but if agriculture collapsed, it becomes pretty obvious that said manufacturing would go down with it. It is no help that it is a larger sector.
In modern economies supporting sectors will almost always be larger than the "core" industries they support.
The UK choosing to shut down most of its native financial sector is a good example. With RBS it was particularly mad because the government ended up being a massive shareholder and then they chose to shut down all the profitable parts of the business, and double-down on the worst parts. Natwest rates franchise was probably worth £5bn, they basically shut the unit down in entirety (and a lot of those people went to large hedge funds and just went back to generating hundreds in millions in revenue) meaning that the taxpayer lost tens of billions AND the economy was knee-capped for decades.
This is taken as an example to show that even when the incentives were there, the government took a decision for nakedly political reasons. In the opposite direction, they folded HBOS into Lloyds, this was done to protect Scotland (both the PM and the Chancellor had a large number of constituents who would have lost their job if these banks were shut down...they were bailed out) and the result was Lloyds needing a bailout about one year after the banking crisis ended in the US. Again, this was sold to the public as the result of "risky casino bankers on huge bonuses"...in reality, it was just poorly paid commercial bankers lending very large amounts of money to people who couldn't ever it pay back AND politicians then making terrible choices with other people's money to boost their chances in some byelection no-one remembers.
This attitude permeates almost everything the UK does. Schools, politics first. Healthcare, politics first. Electricity, politics first.
I genuinely do not understand how anyone can't look at the scale of political intervention into the economy in the UK and not understand why this might lead to lower growth than the US. In Scotland, the government is 60% of the economy, this higher than Communist states with no legal private sector, it is an incredible number. If you look at income distribution, after-tax income under £100k is as flat or flatter than Communist states too, again this is incredible.
What is surprising is that the UK's economy is growing so quickly. The supply-side in most sectors is almost completely gone, in some economically-significant sectors you have regulators effectively managing companies, very few workers have economically useful skills because of the strong incentives in place to acquire non-economic skills...and the economy is still growing faster than most of Europe. To be fair, almost all of that immigration of low-skilled labour into the UK which is going to be absolute time-bomb financially and the rapid growth in public-sector pay has also helped consumption (even more so, the UK is running a deficit of 5% of GDP with revenues growing 4%/year in an economy that is shrinking in per capita terms...obviously, this is not sustainable)...but growth is still way higher than reason would dictate.
Comparing this to the US is not serious in any way. You have a country that prioritises growth beyond reason and are comparing that with a country which is hostile to change beyond reason. There is no possible comparison. The decisions every government since 1997 has made have been intended to reduce growth, people happily voted for this, and are now upset that the economy is shit...why?
Maybe you can afford Universal Health Care after all...
I'm convinced that the federal government doing more and more things is the root cause if the increasing toxicity of American politics. The further removed a populace is from their representatives the less control they have and the worse they feel. Everything should always be done at the most local level that it is possible to do it. Some things have to be done at a relatively high level, but Americans have increasingly been jumping straight to "this is a job for the federal government" when very often state, or even city governments in some cases, would be perfectly capable.
However, the feds already siphon about as much tax as the populace can bear just on accomplishing what it is allowed to do, so there is basically nothing left for the states to implement these kind of measures.
You couldn't just have the states take over these responsibilities and have nothing else change. My suggestion is in fact a pretty radical change in how the US federal government works. I'm not under any illusion that this is likely to happen. The ratchet of power unfortunately only goes in one direction.
What do you mean that the countries are poorer? Are you just thinking about the gross salary people get per month, or is there something else in this calculation?
The fact that people get health care, parental leave, can freely move between countries, able to afford having a child, have emergency services that arrive relatively quick and all those things mean that a country is not poor, and the countries that don't have those, are "poorer", at least in my mind. When I think "poor country" I don't think about the GDP, but how well the citizens and residents are protected by ills.
I'd say its uncomparable directly, or very, very hard. You can say visit both places and walk around and see the general state of the country and its people, compare capitals. This is where money is spent (or not).
Not going into happiness, stress levels, depression/anxiety and meds consumption, obesity levels or longevity, that would be too easy I agree. Although this is also money related, more than anything else.
This pales in comparison to some of the elephant in the room ways most common ways to go broke, which is to say get something like a child support judgement against you (20% pretax, like 26+% post-tax in middle income brackets) or have an alimony payment (these conveniently don't generally show up in bankruptcy statistics because they are not dischargeable). Medical debt can at least be discharged in bankruptcy.
Example: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-i...
And why, in free market land, is a buyer of services and medication, not allowed to negotiate prices?
Because W Bush decided to forbid that while simultaneously forcing the fed'gov to pay for it
"we need to pay face value because big companies need the money for their R&D" was the discussion years ago IIRC. it's BS, but that was the narrative.
Adding the rest of the population to the existing public insurance system would not cost much financially, but it would be a political catastrophe for whatever party implemented it if it didn't go well.
In short, I don't think anyone seriously argues the US can't afford universal health care, but the real and perceived risk of change is seen as too great politically.
It's not surprising per se but it does put things in perspective that Texas has a bigger footprint than every country in Europe.
It's actually pretty fun and interesting the different bubbles we all live in, for better or worse.
Those people are dead. They did great things. But it's irrelevant to their standing and influence today.
https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/indians-predated-new...
https://sd2.org/bibha-chowdhuri-a-woman-of-firsts-with-no-re...
> After the war ended, Cecil Powell, a British physicist, continued the research in England using similar methods with more sensitive plates, detecting a new particle and winning him the Nobel Prize in 1950. Chowdhury and Bose’s work was acknowledged in his book, but their recognition quickly faded.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/sep/01/hidden...
You can place a state/country on top of another country and see the true size. Helps to make up for the improper sizing caused by map projections.
I use it to help my lovely dutch friends realize why I can't just bike to work. :)
The purpose of the thing is to try to put things into perspective, like "Portugal is about the size of Indiana", or "California's economy is about the size of Germany". It compares three numbers, two of which are not money!
I'm not trying to claim every American only care about money, only that when Americans compare countries, they tend to compare monetary values like GDP, gross salaries or other similar values, and your weekend hack (cool at it is) fitted that pattern I've seen before.
Again, obviously not all Americans are the same as each other, then elections wouldn't be needed for starters, and I'm sorry if my comment came off as dismissive or harsh, it really wasn't my intention, I just aimed to share a reoccurring pattern I come across.
BTW the population figure for Czechia is NaN, for some reason,
(I guess Wikipedia and the UN call it "the Czech Republic" so my update also renamed it...)
But there are many similar examples in agriculture, manufacturing, etc.
America was a major force behind post-War decolonization. It was one of our terms of the European peace.
Based on military ranking:
#5 SK, #6 UK, #7 France, #8 Japan, #9 Turkey, #10 Italy, #11 Brazil, #12 Pakistan, #14 Germany, #15 Israel, #17 Spain, #18 Australia, and if it were allowed to, #20 Ukraine.
Based on economic power: I won't even bother, only China, India, Russia aren't US allies in the top 30 or so, by GDP.
The US was a world police but it wasn't alone. Yes, it was far bigger than all its allies taken separately, but those allies could more than double its power.
What the US is doing now is a tragedy that will unfold over many decades.
[1] Based on https://www.businessinsider.com/most-powerful-militaries-202... (if you have a better ranking, please link it).
This breaks down as soon as you stop looking at abstract rankings and dive into the specific logistic realities of force projection. France and to a lesser extent the UK are reasonably capable, but there's no math that adds up to anything approaching America's capabilities.
So,
$(US) + $(ALLIES) > $(US)
$(ALLIES) - $(US) < $(ALLIES)
Tariffs (check - Smoot Hawley), American isolationism (check - America First), I guess we won't be far from the economic crisis (not checked yet - Great Depression).
At best, the US will slowly turn into Qing China. Unrivalled in its sphere of influence, stagnant and complacent. The US has always had a very strong anti-scientific undercurrent and a lot of it was kept in check by importing foreign elites wholesale (fairly sure the US public school system up to university level is nothing to write home about, on average). If the US turns against foreigners, most of the good ones will stop coming.
But Europeans definitely do not want that and up to a point, that's a good thing, yet Europe still needs a big enough force as a deterrent, and it currently does not have that.
Yes, all the European-aligned states you mention should currently be opposed to USA [or at least the fascist regime ruling it], because of the threats to Denmark/Greenland. UK, Aus should be particularly aligned against USA because of the threats to Canada (as part of the UK royalty's commonwealth).
Trusting the post-democracy, post-constitutional USA we find ourselves with is major folly. We might as well climb in bed with Russia.
Even just a few days ago congress approved $800M in funding for Ukraine.