Britain’s output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
The USA, right now, is heading into its own Suez crisis, with a de facto king attacking its democracy, and literally cannot even organise a proper birthday party at the most prestigious address in the world.
The UK has many problems we must grapple with, but I think, maybe, right now is not the time to argue from a US default position. Not least while your three vice president ghouls (Musk, Vance and Rubio) are so loudly cheering for us and all of Europe to fail.
To quote your first king, clean up your own backyard.
And Musk argues for violence, including at far-right rallies.
This is not some positive, friendly, brotherly call for us to wake up — it's an argument for white supremacy (as most recently outlined by Pete Hegseth, weekend TV anchor turned defence secretary).
Not sure what you imagine the UK is like but we literally don't have lèse majesté laws, so there is no legal basis for that to happen. It does not happen. (And no, merely saying it online isn't a basis either).
Apart from stupid comedy overreactions at the coronation protests that exasperated us all and saw significant pushback (our police lean so firmly against use of force at protests that they sometimes do silly things in the name of stopping "disruption"), we have a rich, varied, centuries-long tradition of being able to soundly criticise our monarchy.
Indeed we did so with such efficiency recently that our king actually listened and took his own brother's title, powers and roles away.
Meanwhile there are people in the USA fighting lawsuits over being falsely imprisoned for saying true things about Charlie Kirk.
It would be absurd to pretend that we don't have problems; we obviously have problems. And things are extremely bad right now, especially with our former transatlantic friends actively agitating the situation.
But internationally it has got a lot easier to see our problems with clarity in the last year and a half, and a lot easier to argue that every significant country has its difficulties.
I don't understand why he's labelled as "impeached" when the final outcome was acquitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_impeachment_of_Donald_T...
The monarchy simultaneously has zero power and all the power.
In the sense that it is the entity in whose name the government acts on behalf of the people: it's the representation of the state.
In principle, the monarch could refuse royal assent. In practice, if it did, the entire unwritten constitutional convention that preserves it would collapse.
So in practice, the monarch is the head of state in the same way that the Irish or Israeli presidencies are: it's non-executive, with relatively little indirect influence. "My government will" means "the government will". A formality.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vette...
This is somewhat like asking your girlfriend’s parents for permission to ask her to marry you. You are going to do it anyway; they cannot stop you. They do, however, have a bit more life experience than you and that discussion might be valuable, and it is literally tradition to ask; the process allows you to consider and discuss that things have lifelong consequences and more.
In the case of the late queen, prime ministers appeared to enjoy and value the opportunity to talk completely privately with someone who had more experience of the process than anyone else.
Is it eccentric, nuanced and odd, yes. Does it sometimes give the monarch a little time to digest changes to the royal finances or rattle on about tradition, or bend their PM’s ear about how an equerry was shadily wheel-clamped in a Windsor pub car park, yes. Could it be seriously corrupted by the monarch, maybe. Has it been? I kind of doubt it. Again, there are no lèse majesté laws. We can critique the process and prime ministers have.
Power is complicated. The British monarchy as representation of the state holds it in a form directed by government, but as they are people, they have the right to understand what they are doing. This is a balance struck over almost a thousand years.
Would I prefer a republic, yeah. Do I think our next king wonders how long the monarchy has in its current form, yes. But I think we will get to a republic over the next hundred years, shrinking the monarchy progressively in the way that other european countries have.
All of this nuance tends to confuse or annoy Americans and provoke romantic chest-beating about the power being vested in “we the people” etc. But I would contend that a lack of cultural understanding about the complexity of wielding power, and how it can be used against itself, is why the USA is in the situation it is in right now. Power is complicated and amoral; using it right is a matter of conventions as much as convictions.
I didn't suggest that Trump voting was the problem. Americans of literally all political persuasions have simply no idea how this country actually works. There is a level of ignorance that is often comical.
The reverse is not true in quite the same way. If you were to ask an American to name UK political figures, most cannot. Whereas our coverage of your political system is such that anyone with a passing interest in politics can _really_ get into it on US politics; it's a very asymmmetric experience that is hard to explain.
I don't share your enthusiasm in this being a good thing. In fact, this is a common problem I've noticed over the last decade in that Europeans feel like they know the US and are qualified to comment on issues by virtue of consuming movies and political media of a certain spin (like all media). You are simply consuming someone's opinion with little to no opportunity to validate it against day to day life.
But this time round in particular, it is absolutely a thing. People in Denmark, for example, have no choice but to understand at some level the internal cabinet politics of the USA. Because they need to know, when JD Vance turns up, who is he actually talking for? What does it mean if he refuses to rule something out? What real power is there in his confidence?
It's the same as needing to know, if Biden offered something, what was the likelihood of it simply being torn up by a returning Trump.
The asymmetry comes from scale: the UK and individual EU countries needed to know a lot more about the internal directions of a country six times our size, because those internal directions will very much affect us.
It is changing, because the EU is finding its collective voice this time round, whereas in Trump 1 they still had to worry that individual countries might not wish to follow a party line. Now everyone understands the stakes of not having an aligned voice, and the UK is in a position to at least sing the harmony.
If I were in a fine China shop, I would be mindful of the location of the bull running amok.
There was a blip during the Bush Jr era where I think our view of the USA fell into a sort of mixture of pity and anger, and we began to understand that there were, from our perspective, two Americas that fall either side of us; one more brash and progressive than us and one that loathed us that we saw as regressive and cruel (overly religious etc.).
Now it has gone from adoration/fascination to horror/fascination, frankly. And the urgency to understand what is happening to the USA is only accelerating, because of the cultural merger of UK/EU and US far right extremism.
During Trump 1 we would say, not all Americans are like that; we'd still be partitioning the USA into the ones we have some recognition for and those who make us feel queasy. We coped with Trump 1 the way we coped with GWB.
Nowadays, I believe you will find that people understand that it doesn't really matter if there are these two Americas; functionally we can no longer treat you as anything other than homogenous.
We cannot trust the USA to share our values or come to our aid even as we host military bases; a USA that can do nothing to stop Elon Musk agitating for violence on our streets is one we do not have positive feelings for, and a USA whose vice president actively denigrates our culture is just so out of the ordinary.
(And as a narrative quirk I think a lot of this has roots in the most simple of stories that illuminated it — that of Harry Dunn, Anne Sacoolas and diplomatic immunity. Trump and Mnuchin handled that so insultingly that it left a lasting impact; Biden had his work cut out to fix it.)
The last time the USA appeared to not be on our side in consequential issues to this extent is when Joseph Kennedy was ambassador. We are back there, now. Back in the late 1930s relationship with the USA that was profoundly distrustful.
It doesn't help that this is actually blended, fully, with growing distrust for the tech industry, which is the biggest cultural challenge of the next decade. We (only partially incorrectly) perceive tech culture's impositions on and disregard for British culture as being American impositions.
I think we accept now that this has happened and it will not be reset; we won't suddenly forget it all in 2029. But we still have to understand you.
The (US) Civil War seemed like distant history in school. But I’ve come to realize there are a lot of people that still seem to live with the prejudice from those times.
The war ended but the problems never went away. Can’t help but wonder if Reconciliation was such a good idea. One half the country might be quite happy not dealing with the other.
I also used to not understand how Protestants and Catholics could fight (Ireland). Almost seems odd both being Christian. Of course, I was extremely blind to the religious divides long existing here too.
I used to think that people on the mainland like me could never fully and instinctively understand who was who (and why) in the Troubles. But this week, the problems in Belfast, it is somehow instinctively obvious which side of the old sectarian divide the energy behind that violence is coming from, even though arguably the so-called “justification” (immigration) affects both sides of the Troubles divide more or less equally and the supposed provocation (actually more or less a pretext) happened in an area associated with the other one.
I think most people here in the UK just knew, immediately, from the tone of it.
You can often tell by something like a small Union Jack hanging by the checkout bar etc. (they seem to cherish the memories), and I like to ask them about their experience.
The consensus seems to be that it does not make sense to bear British costs of living for British wages anymore, and that the living standards have reached approximately the same level here at home.
Something very similar was said to me in 2023 by a youngish barista in Riga, Latvia.
Nowadays it is an optimistic and rich country. A few weeks ago, I walked around Chalupki, a relatively unknown small Silesian town on the border. I noticed that most of the family houses just shone with new facades and generally had the "we are fairly wealthy" look; they could have stood in Switzerland. And you could find all sorts of high-brow food in the local Zabka store, like seven types of Kombucha.
I recently came across an actual economist who has been saying the exact same thing, which he calls the Housting Theory of Everything [1]. He has written a number of papers on this doing the math and has a bunch of videos around this topic.
For example, this gap with Missouri actually goes away when you consider purchasing power [2].
Fudge himself is a capitalist but he points out what I think a lot of capitalism defenders don't know, and that is that Adam Smith hated "rentiers", saying they got unearned income by essentially hoarding land. That's a problem we have now.
His theory uses a term he calls the "rentier black hole" [3] and the premise is essentially that the returns on property are too good such that it sucks away any investment on productive ventures. Instead of building a factory in Manchester, you park your money in Knightsbridge property. And that's where all the money is going. It increases the returns and sucks away all money.
[1]: https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/the-housing-theory...
[2]: https://www.tiktok.com/@henryfudgeofficial/video/76490164617...
[3]: https://www.tiktok.com/@henryfudgeofficial/video/76404878354...
> Japan made the same discovery thirty years earlier. The hikikomori phenomenon (young men, predominantly, who withdraw from social life entirely, sometimes for decades) emerged in the 1990s, after Japan’s asset bubble burst and the lifetime employment compact dissolved. The cultural commentary at the time, both Japanese and Western, framed it as a peculiarly Japanese pathology, something about shame and conformity and the pressure-cooker school system. This was wrong. It was a structural response to the closure of the productive ladder, and it has now appeared in every developed economy that has reproduced the same structural conditions.
It's worth noting that the US fertility rate is alos below replacement levels (~1.54) but the only thing that props up our population is immigration. Japan eschews immigration as a de facto ethnostate. South Korea is further along in that crisis. China will need to find a solution too.
But there are cultural reasons here too. Japanese work culture, pay relative to work, etc.
[1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/jpn/jap...
[2]: https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/degeneracy-is-a-sy...
Fertility is on the decline, particularly in the west, although increasingly spreading, quite simply because it is socially unacceptable to have children. Society says you need to focus on your career instead. It creates TV shows, like "16 and Pregnant", designed to dissuade viewers from having children. So on and so forth. Social pressure is a powerful drug.
In fact, the pocket communities where certain religions that push a 'make babies' agenda are commonly observed, where the social pressure goes in the other direction, we find many families pumping out kids like there is no tomorrow. Social pressure works both ways, but the "having kids is cool" is not the prevailing social wind.
There are tons of cities with burgeoning artist scenes and other movements improving that city, due to the availability of extremely inexpensive space to do things. Rochester, St Louis, Baltimore, Detroit.
Making things cheap means you can take risks or spend time on activity that's directly economically unproductive but indirectly has fringe benefits for everyone around. And as more people do it, more people try to do it, with a compounding positive effect over time.
Failure is always a possibility, but historically it hasn't killed the economy, it has rebalanced the economy; seeing businesses and people reduce their concentration in a specific area as they fan out into lower cost areas. Which is a rather useful function. This is why we're not all living in one giant heap somewhere in Africa.
> “As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”
In the mid 1990s, the average house price in London was under 80k. It's now pushing 700k. Are salaries 9x? No. What is this other than stealing from the next generation? Raising house prices are nother more than a massive wealth transfer from the young and working to the old and wealthy.
but here's the bigger problem. If you have essentially a guaranteed 9% return on a highly-leveraged asset with tax advantages and government guarantees, why would you invest in a factory or a business? That's the real reason manufacturing has hollowed out in the UK.
I agree with Xi: houses are for living, not speculation [2]. We should absolutely punish rampant speculation by heavily taxing land hoarding.
[1]: https://www.prosper.org.au/geoists-in-history/adam-smith-on-...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
Because you cannot afford to join the ranks of the investment class, so what else are you going to do with your time?
You are quite right that you are not going to build your business in London, though. You are going to take your business to places where starting a new business makes sense.
For the American audience, Detroit lived what you describe. What started as a vibrant manufacturing centre turned to property investment and soon it could no longer sustain itself. The people not benefiting from those investments there didn't throw in the towel, though. They packed their bags for what we now know as Silicon Valley and started new businesses developing the transistor. The economy wasn't killed, it moved.
> We should absolutely punish rampant speculation by heavily taxing land hoarding.
The law is to the will of the people, so this can happen on a whim, but you have to convince the people that piling everyone into a giant heap is desirable. Most people don't want to live in one giant heap. A Kowloon Walled City-esq world is a thing of nightmares for the population at large. Most people want people to move around, to make use of the entire world, not all settle in one place. These economic factors are the engine that pushes people to spread out.
It's structural. A big problem is the Banks. They would rather lend for asset accumulation (rent seeking) than for production. In Canada, mortgage lending is literally zero risk as the banks are covered via CHMC against any defaults. Ultimately its the tax payer who is on the hook. Hence the massive housing-based economy.
And none of the politicians ever fix the structure because many of them are property owners.
Canada is on the same footing as Mississippi regarding GDP per capita. But if you look at the economic standard of living of the poorest income earners in Canada verses their equivalent in Mississippi, the Canadian has a better standard of living.
In the USA, the size of the pie is quite big and the wealthy get a much bigger slice of that pie than most other Western countries.
GDP is not a measure of living standards. The NHS alone puts even the poorest Brit's living standards above Mississippi.
That is to say, private care is often available in the West. It just comes with a hefty price tag.
You're right that GDP is not a measure of living standards. But neither is saying "NHS" a measure of living standards. Do you actually have a measure you could refer to in order to prove the article wrong?
For instance, if you cut preventive healthcare for younger parts of the population that will take longer to manifest.
I wish there were more modeling tools available to run what-if simulations on public data.
That being said, a relatively large proportion of US GDP is driven by healthcare, which is normally measured at cost in the UK and Europe.
But neither private insurance nor hospitals have any incentive to operate preventatively because insurance can just increase premiums and everybody happily makes more money... Some might observe how that also increases the GDP...
The USA doesn't do much of that though. It prefers medical care.
(E.g., adding a dose-dependent sin tax on food-like substances with added sugar, subsidizing real food for those on SNAP. Unpopular because who doesn't want their simple carbs?)
America does a lot of that, often quite well. It just isn’t provisioned equally, geographically or class-wise.
The only other thing I can think of that would affect state wide obesity is food security and quality. Proper healthcare would be my first pick for fixing obesity.
1/10th the population of Mississippi does not have health insurance.
55% of adults in Mississippi over 65 have lost 6 or more teeth. In the UK it is about 45%.
On the other hand, emergency medicine through the NHS is probably just about the best you can get. I cannot sing its praises highly enough.
https://www.nhs.uk/nhs-services/dentists/how-to-find-an-nhs-...
Now 600 people is a lot smaller than 60 million, I don't doubt there are people who have pulled a tooth out, but to get those sorts of figures, you'd have to count all the kids who pull out a tooth with a bit of string to get £1 from the tooth fairy.
This isn't a correct characterization of US healthcare either. No one is denied lifesaving care due to inability to pay by law. In fact 92% of Americans have some kind of health insurance. Of the ~8% who are uninsured, yes many do defer routine medical care which may lead to adverse long term effects. Its a real problem. However ~70% of the uninsured are eligible for Medicaid, subsidy, or employer insurance, so there's room to improve on getting those people signed up.
Unlike the NHS.
> However ~70% of the uninsured are eligible for Medicaid, subsidy, or employer insurance, so there's room to improve on getting those people signed up.
I’d love if our government saw “room to improve” there instead of doing the exact opposite and working overtime to reduce the number of fully insured people.
It's an eye-catcher, but obviously fallacious - the usual counter has been to point out the life expectancy difference of 10+ years.
Not that most people are particularly interested in nuance, smh
Simplistic thinking doesn’t help.
There is nothing definitively different about the US that prevents it from solving a lot of its social issues by doing the same as is done elsewhere. We know this because the social contract in the US post WW2 was quite similar to modern day Europe - e.g. 91% top marginal tax rate under Eisenhower [0].
[0] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/nov/15/bernie-san...
An even stronger case is pointing out that Japan has a lower GDP per capita than Mississippi. But walk around Japan and try to claim that it's "poorer" than even a wealthy state in the US.
Ok and then go into the average person's living quarters.
There are many non-trivial differences that make these comparisons complex; GDP is about as good as you can get.
The nice things about a small town is our edge cases aren't far from our non-edge cases so we can offer things like pickup/dropoff at home or serve them normally and not add much to routes. It was such a godsend when my mom was dying of cancer. Not sure the schedule would represent that as it is an off schedule/off published route service.
> The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.
This figure is from an article in the Times, and has no connection to official NHS figures. The Times just guessed how much it might be, and reported it as fact. Then, since The Times is a paper of record, other news outlets have run with it.
You misspelt "is the paper of Rupert Murdoch".
NHS dentists are scarce for policy reasons that are inexcusible. But private dental care here is not actually particularly expensive unless you want it to be, and it is good.
(Again, don't imagine that "private healthcare" in the UK is expensive in the way it is in the USA).
We have our problems and they are escalating in some ways, but my main issue with this article is that again US writers tend to assume that words and terminology have their US meaning and broader connotations.
Standard of living comparisons that use US concepts (car ownership, air conditioning ownership, even in the recent past comparing how many people dry their clothes outdoors, which is common American poverty indicator) just cannot capture the nuance in a way that makes sense.
As someone who has been in and out, the poverty increase in Western Europe is astonishing. Whatever metrics I will show you, will meet something like "oh yeah but metrics X doesn't mean anything", but still, 20y ago buying a car was fairly standard. Going on holidays same. Let's not talk about buying a house. Nowadays, any of the above is considered as a sign of being "privileged", while it used to be middle-class before.
https://thenationalpulse.com/2026/06/09/emergency-room-delay...
if you don't maintain per capita GDP, you will not be able to maintain living standards.
Pretty much. Mississippi does have significant issues (it's HDI [0] is significantly lower than anywhere else in the UK or US), but is comparable to peers in Metropolitan France [1] such as Normandy, Lorraine, and Picardy, as well as several regions of Italy [2]. Basically, not great but also not some third world despair of darkness.
Most likely, if a deeper subnational analysis was done of Mississippi, there would be a stark difference in HDIs between the unindustrialized Delta and industrialized North and Gulf Coast.
That said, at least it's been decades since Mississippi has seen a race riot where rioters were purposely burning black people's houses like what we saw in Belfast last night [3].
Plenty of Brits need to do some soul searching. There's a reason why even despite Trump, everyone who is eligible for an O1 tries to come to the US over London. Comparing the UK with Mississippi based on GDP per Capita is facetious, but the UK is similar to Mississippi in many other ways.
[0] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/USA+GBR/?levels=1+...
[1] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/FRA/?levels=1+4&ye...
[2] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/ITA/?levels=1+4&ye...
[3] - https://time.com/article/2026/06/10/belfast-protests-erupt-k...
The North-South divide in Italy, the FRG/GDR divide in Germany, Northeast and Southern versus Central France, and various other representations of spatial inequality exist within Europe as well.
The reality is a Parisian, Londonian, and New Yorker have much more overlap with each other than they do with their own compatriots, yet it is this class that is overrepresented in any discourse on social and traditional media.
The reality is landmass and stuff doesn't matter as much as HDI which acts as a lossy indicator of development.
>It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the lion’s share of the effects of the “Mississippi miracle” are yet another case of gaming the system. There is no miracle to behold. There is nothing special in Mississippi’s literacy reform model that should be replicated globally. It just emphasizes the obvious advice that, if you want your students to get high scores, don’t allow those students who are likely to get low scores to take the test.
Holding students back a grade is how things worked previously, it leads to students dropping out of school 20%-50% for once, 80-95% for twice. They also found that any improvement in test scores fades to below average by middle school.
If a student is failing to learn the same material 180 days in a row, why would 180 more days help? For any mentally normal child 180 days is already well more than enough.
The metrics are similar for most of western europe, which objectively destroyed its economies over the past 30 years throught "social-democracy", 50% taxes, crazy state expenditures, bureaucracy, etc.
Once you remove the outliers that are London and the Southeast (there isn't a similar subnational comparison that can be made within the US), developmental indicators between much of the US and the UK are the same.
2. After seeing the riots in Belfast last night where rioters specifically targeted and burned the homes of Black residents [1], I'd be inclined to agree that the United Kingdom does have some hallmarks of Mississippi, and in some sense is worse. We haven't had targeted race riots in the US for decades. The UK has had 3 in the last year.
[0] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/USA+GBR/?levels=1+...
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cr47x99k5n6t?post=asset%3Ab5f8...
I mean, if the US argument is, as a friend, things are not working out well and they hope for better, that's one thing.
But actually prominent Americans are agitating for violence and backing extreme right-wing parties like Restore. It's appalling and it goes beyond unfriendliness to hostility.
(And do you really need targeted race riots when you can just sign up as police and kill Black people with impunity?)
You look at every diaspora group and they have some level of success in reaching some good levels in business, politics, and culture. Even for groups that only arrived around 50 years ago they managed to become so ingrained into their communities that they pretty much can get respect.
And if you have true conviction in your beliefs you should use your primary HN account instead of a throwaway.
(It's probably also unwise to view it as being racist in the American sense - instead, there's a complex set of overlapping bigotries at play. None of them are good, but it's not simply based on skin colour. Musk and his extremist friends don't understand it either, but clearly don't give a fuck.)
It feels like just about every Brit and NIer on HN has been trying to absolve responsibility for what has become a common occurrence in the British Isles now. that to deny and absolve the very real local level organization that occurred is what irks me.
The reality is British rightwingers like Steve Hinton and Paul Marshall have also been influencing American politics just like American rightwingers have in the UK. And the UK (and Europe in general) was always a much shittier and racist experience for a BAME like me versus the US.
> It's probably also unwise to view it as being racist in the American sense
It definetly is. I have extended family who are BAME in the UK and Scandinavia, and were around during the old school BNP wave. None of this shit has changed, and acting "holier than thou" pisses us off.